Spread of Christianity

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Spread of Christianity:

When Constantine the Great grew in power, he forced Christianity on the countries that he conquered. He ordered that all of his new subjects be baptized and go to church. Many people accepted Christ after going to church for a while. Constantine called the Council of Nicea together.

In 323 all of the bishops in the Roman Empire gathered in Nicea to debate and decide whether to teach that Jesus was only a mortal prophet or that He was God. As they gathered, thirty percent of them believed that Jesus was God, while seventy percent believed that he was a mortal man. One man who spoke at the Council was Athanasias. He spoke about Jesus and explained why He was pure God. He told the Council that Jesus was not a mortal man. By the end of his speech, forty percent of the bishops had converted to believe that Athanasias spoke the truth and Jesus was God and not man. Because of Athanasias, we believe that Jesus is fully God.

During the fourth century the bishops of larger cities began to take more control in the influence of the church than the bishops of smaller cities. The bishop of Rome took the highest power and explained his actions with the Petrine Theory. Christ had commissioned Peter to be the first bishop of Rome and Peter could send a soul to eternal condemnation or to paradise. The Petrine Theory claimed that Peter’s successors had the same power.

Gregory the Great organized the land owned by the church of Rome into regions called Papal States. He also sent missionaries to England (see Conversion of England) and appointed the archbishop of England.

Monasticism started around this time and had an extremely long-lasting effect. Monasticism is the belief that the best way to live a godly life was to leave the world and spend all of the time thinking about God only.

Saint Anthony was the first to really put monasticism into action. He gave his three hundred acres of land to the poor and left civilization to live in a desert. Saint Benedict tried to live alone with God, but he attracted followers. He set up a monastery for the monastic believers to live in. The monks worked very hard so that idleness could never tempt them. They wrote new copies of old books and kept those writings from being lost forever. The reason that we still have copies of ancient books is because the monks worked in their monasteries copying them.

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