The Seventh Day of Christmas
31/12/14 04:19
Regular readers, please note: I am on vacation, celebrating Christmas with my family. Over the next few days, the blog will be written daily, but published on an irregular basis. If you are used to reading it in the morning, never fear if it doesn’t appear. I’m alive and well and having a wonderful time - so wonderful that the blog takes a different place in my priorities. I’ll just be publishing at a different times of the day.
The seventh day of Christmas in the traditional Roman Calendar is a day set aside to give thanks for Pope Sylvester I. Sylvester I was pope of the church long before the Protestant Reformation, indeed before the Great Schism, and thus was pope of all of Christianity, including what would later become the Eastern and Protestant parts of the church. However, his memory is largely unheralded among Protestants. Here is the piece of church history that surrounds Sylvester I. He was Pope from 314 until his death in 335. That was a period of monumental change in the church.
The Council of Nicaea, which produced the Nicene Creed was held in 325. It might never have occurred had it not been for Pope Sylvester. Sylvester was a friend of Emperor Constantine and Constantine’s conversation to the Christian faith marked the transition for Christianity from being a small, illegal sect to becoming a mainstream religion. Prior to that time the church was largely a home-based religion, with meetings often held in secret for fear of government persecution. Christians continued to meet in synagogues, but there was always a tension between traditional Jews and Christians, especially in areas of the Roman empire where the majority of Christians came from the Gentile community.
Constantine’s conversion, however, made Christianity legal in the Empire and beyond that, it made it popular among Roman elites and soon Christianity was not only a mainstream religion, but it became closely affiliated with the Roman government. There are benefits to being a mainstream religion: more members, more financial support, and a more permanent place in history. There are also costs: less autonomy for the church, greater outside influences on the faith and practices, and even outside control of the faith itself.
Nowhere was this more clear than in the First Council of Nicaea. Constantine, thinking in the manner of an Emperor, wanted there to be a standard Christian belief to which all Christians ascribed. He demanded that a statement of faith be drawn up that would be voted upon by all of the bishops of the church and would be the norm for all belief and practice. The problem, of course, is that agreement was never at the core of the Christian faith. As one can easily tell by reading about the differences and discussions of the disciple and reading the letters of Paul, the early church was a place of different and divergent beliefs and practices, and sometimes even disagreements and infighting.
Although Constantine got what he demanded (he was used to getting what he demanded) the unanimous agreement of the bishops required defrocking the minority who refused to sign on to the creed. In fact, even with the defrocking of the dissidents, the creed continued to be an item of disagreement and controversy, and it was amended by the First Council of Constantinople in 381 into the Greek form of the creed that is known and used to this day. The Apostles’ Creed arose shortly thereafter, around 390 and has been seen by many church historians as a corrective to some of the language of the Nicene Creed. The Apostles Creed gained acceptance in the mainstream church by claiming to have originated form the 1st 12 apostles, with each of its 12 articles of faith coming from a different apostle. This clearly is an after-the-fact fabrication intended to gain the statement acceptance in the mainstream church, as the Creed clearly did not exist prior to Nicaea.
Virtually from the beginning of the Roman Church in the time of Pope Sylvester 1 and Constantine, creeds were abused and made into tests of faith. People were required to declare and sometimes even sign that they believed every point of a creed in order to be considered to be Christian, and in some cases, to escape persecution and even death for disbelief. In a very short order the church went from being an institution that was persecuted to a persecutor of those who didn’t fall in with the hierarchy of the Roman religious institution. Instead of being bold declarations of faith, creeds became weapons in a battle to enforce conformity.
In our corner of the church since the Protestant Reformation, we have asserted that statements of faith should always be used as testimonies and never as tests of faith. We affirm that the faith is beyond any set of words and indeed beyond the capacity of any individual to understand. Christianity is, for us, not a matter of a personal possession, but rather a participation in a community with a long and varied history and tradition, a global and multicultural presence and a future that stretches beyond our capacity to imagine. Christianity cannot be defined or contained in a single set of words. It is what the community believes together. It is a relationship with God, who comes to us in human form in the person of Jesus Christ.
So today, on the seventh day of Christmas, I look back at our history with mixed feelings. I do not venerate a particular person, or even know if it is appropriate to celebrate the Romanization of Christianity. That chapter of our history, however, is a part of our identity. While we can speculate on the pre-Roman church as a place of simpler (and perhaps purer) faith, such a moment has passed. We live in the time after Christianity became mainstream. We live with contemporary tensions between secular government and the lives of faithful Christians. And we see the creeds as tools for teaching the history of our faith, not as tests that might somehow determine who is and who is not a person of faith.
And, in the midst of this great line of history-making in the span of my life, there has arisen a new statement of faith. The Statement of Faith of the United Church of Christ, which grew out of the union of the Congregational-Christian and Evangelical-Reformed churches may well be, as a friend has described it, the most significant and longest lasting words to have been written in the 20th Century. It will take centuries for that to be known. What I do know is that it is an eloquent way to express our faith and when a community reads it together, it gives voice to what we share in common.
And on this day, our shared history is a journey worth studying and celebrating. The contemporary church, which has grown out of that history, is a blessing and a gift.