Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

were the changes made to the clergy. Pagan clergy had considerable privilege in Roman
society, which were now granted to Christian clerics as well. Instead of persecution,
marginalisation, and disrespect, there was prosperity, social and financial privilege and
peace. This, however, immediately invited people into the clergy who were less than
sincere about the faith. Jesus may well have warned about precisely this kind of thing:
“But a hireling, he who is not the shepherd, one who does not own the sheep, sees the
wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf catches the sheep and scatters
them. The hireling flees because he is a hireling and does not care about the sheep” (Joh.
10:12-13). Further changes also significantly changed the Christian faith, as:
the Christian Sunday was ordered placed in
the same legal position as the pagan feasts,
and provincial governors were instructed to
respect the days in memory of the martyrs and
to honour the festivals of the churches... He
[Constantine] prohibited the repair of ruined
[pagan] temples and the erection of new
images of the gods. He forbade any attempt to
force Christians to participate in non-Christian
religious ceremonies (Latourette, 1975:93).
These many privileges given to the church increasingly domesticated it via the luxuries
afforded it. Many Christian remembrances were pluralistically mixed with pagan and
state culture, which remain in Western Christianity to this day. To what extent
Christianity redeemed Roman culture, or compromised with it, is still debated. The post-
Constantine period saw the church become deeply indigenized within Roman and
eventually various other Western cultures. Where the long years of persecution had
refined the church, the years of peace and privilege that followed enabled the faithful to
begin contemplating their beliefs, which almost immediately led to “the monastic
secession, the Donatist schism, [and] the Arian heresy” (Durant, 1944:657). The peace
with larger culture was not all good for Christianity, however, which too quickly became
apathetic and lethargic, as organisations are prone to do when their reason for being
(raison d'etre) shifts, or becomes less clear.
Years later, with the collapse of the Roman Empire (c.476 AD), the Roman Catholic
Church filled the governmental void, providing necessary services and invaluable
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa