In every church, regardless of the denomination, there is this basic premise, that our present Bible is “The Word of God”. But what does that mean? We read in Isaiah 40:8, “The word of our God shall stand for ever”. That implies that it has always existed, just as God has always existed. Since the Bible hasn’t always existed, then the Word of God must be something more than the Bible.

It has been my experience that most Christians have little to no understanding of Christian history, outside of that which their own denomination teaches. For that reason I am compelled to digress somewhat. This will help my readers understand why I’ve arrived at some of my conclusions regarding “The Word of God”.

For instance, how many Christians know that the Bible’s New Testament wasn’t gathered into one book and approved as our “New Testament” until 350 years after the death of Jesus Christ? There was a series of church/state councils from 325 A.D. (Council of Nicea) to 393 A.D. (Council of Hippo) and the stated goal for most of those councils was to arrive at an agreement regarding which scriptural books should be canonized (officially approved by the Church) and included in our Bible.

The Roman Emperor, Constantine, saw that Paganism was on the way out, and Christianity was on the way in. And after his reported vision, he aligned himself with Christianity so as to further unify the Roman Empire. To that end, Constantine called for a series of Christian Councils to resolve their differences and determine which books of the Bible would be authoritative. However, there were a large number of Christian groups by the fourth century. So Emperor Constantine chose to invite only those he believed would further his political agenda, those that were already powerful by virtue of the money, buildings and followers they had accumulated over the first three centuries.

Attendance records reveal that these councils were primarily made up of Catholic and Orthodox Church bishops. The fact that it was a Roman Emperor who arranged and subsidized these council meetings, beginning with the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., and that it was Emperor Constantine who sent out the invitations to every Catholic and Orthodox Bishop, should be proof enough that this was primarily man’s doing, not God’s. However, Church historians like to point to the fact that Emperor Constantine had a vision and considered himself Christian as proof that God was working all this out behind the scenes. On the other hand, secular historians point to the fact that Constantine refused to be baptized right up till he was on his death bed. The reason he straddled the fence is simple, he was first and foremost a politician who wanted to appease both Christian and Pagan.

Although Church history has been primarily written by a small, but powerful elite, namely the institutional Catholic and Orthodox branches of Christianity, there are surviving records that paint a much different picture of early Christianity. Even in Acts 2, we read that the earliest Church congregations were founded by those who preached love and then gathered believers into close-knit Christian communities. And Justin Martyr, an early historian and a convert to the Christian faith, wrote in 150 A. D. that such communities were common. It is evident that most of the Christians at that time, whether communitarian or not, were wary of manmade governments. Christ and his apostles warned us in scripture that “friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God”. So the truth is, a majority of early Christian groups and their followers wouldn’t have come to those 4^th century government sanctioned councils even if they’d been invited.

Those who were invited and came were all Bishops of either the Western Catholic Church or various Eastern Orthodox Church groups. In keeping with the church-state nature of those council meetings government officials and prominent pagans were also in attendance, since they also had a stake in their outcome. It’s important to note that these men, who were already predisposed to work closely with government, chose to further their agenda by disobeying the wisdom of Jesus and his apostles, as so clearly stated by James.

Prior to my researching the history of the early Church councils and their canonization of scripture, I was told in Sunday school and through Sunday sermons that it was God who brought these men together for the purpose of arriving at our present Bible. I was also told that these were mighty men of the faith whom God had entrusted with this most sacred duty, to determine exactly what was God’s word, and what was not. One website I visited seems to summarize what I was taught, “God’s providence gave us the 27 book New Testament Canon, not the church. God, not men decided the canon. This providence does not mean church leaders were inspired in their selecting the canon, only that God had his eye on the scriptures the whole time and brought about His will to form the Bible we see today!” But after doing extensive research I have no choice but to declare such a statement a lie.

All the religious leaders of the various denominations champion some form of the above statement. They feel it necessary to prove to the world that it was God who gave us our Bible and not man. I believe this is because their faith doesn’t rest on the Spirit of God in their heart, but rather it depends on the entirety of scripture having some proven lineage as the “word of God”.

Why is it that men so often embrace a lie to protect their own positions of power? In subsequent years some of them, including one of the most influential and popular Bishops, Bishop Athanasia, would use their new found power to crush all opposition. They did this by ordering the banned books of the bible burned, along with anyone who tried to preserve them. If someone tried to help a person who was being hunted down for the heresy of protecting what they believed to be the inspired word of God, they too would suffer, either having all their lands and possessions confiscated (which in those days was often a death sentence, since no one would subsequently employ them) or being tortured or burned at the stake also. The Church’s Ecclesiastical Court system was empowered and emboldened by their close ties to the Emperor. Their decisions to censor scriptures they did not canonize, then to in-prison, torture, drown, and burn at the stake those who harbored those scriptures, were decisions that the Roman authorities rubber stamped, because they invariably served the purposes of the Emperor. It is evident in the reading of the proceedings of these councils, especially when one considers the proliferation of many Christian sects during that time, that the opinions and wisdom of there fellow Christians, those outside the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, was never considered. Of course, this is entirely in keeping with the Catholic and Orthodox Churches theology, their central belief being that they are the only true Church.

How is it then, that non-Catholic Christians have so easily accepted the canon decisions of their historical enemy? The only logical and reasonable conclusion I can come to is this, that by burning all scriptures not canonized, by then forbidding the reading of the Bible by anyone other than the clergy (which the Catholic Church did for many centuries, for at least a 1000 years if I remember correctly) and by making the writing or teaching of any ideas not approved by the Catholic Church a capital crime punishable by a very public death, they were indeed successful in stamping out all trace and all memory of those other Biblical scriptures. So when the reformation came and they broke away from the Catholic Church, there was no option other than accepting the Bible as is. To further solidify the importance of this canon of “approved” scripture among new converts, the Protestant church chose to embrace the lie begun by their enemy, the Catholic Church, telling every new member that it was God, not man, who gave us the Bible as we now have it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 11:24 pm and is filed under 3Circles Church Communities, be the church, church, education, history, intentional community, spirit-centered revolution, spiritual principles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.