ACTS BIBLE
The American Church week 4 · Matthew 16:13-19
The Age of the Church, apostolic to contemporary, against the empires running above it. His own timeline graphic covers the span the History course teaches class by class.
Last week the chart ran from the Fall to now at low resolution and made one point: the contest is old and it was decided in the middle. This week takes the right-hand half of that same chart and enlarges it.
The same rule applies as last week. The History course walks these two thousand years in thirteen classes, era by era, with the people and the documents. This class is not going to compress that into an hour. What it is going to do is read the shape of the chart, because the shape is making a claim, and the claim is checkable.
Jesus asks the disciples who people say he is, and then who they say he is, and Peter answers that he is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Then comes the sentence this whole chart is drawing: on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18).1
Two things about that sentence before we use it.
The first is that Christians have disagreed for five centuries over what "this rock" means: Peter himself, or the confession Peter just made. That argument is the hinge between Rome and the Reformation and the History course handles it where it belongs.2 This class does not need it settled. Either reading gives us the same promise about what happens to the thing being built.
The second is a detail in the Greek that changes the picture. The word is pylai, gates, and gates do not attack. A gate is what a city closes when something is coming. So the promise is not that the church will survive a siege. It is that the church is doing the advancing and the gates of death will not hold.1
Now put the chart under it.
Along the top of the chart, the political arrangements run left to right with start dates and end dates: Rome, then Byzantium, then the monarchies, then, at the far right, communism and the republics.3
Every one of them has an end. That is what a bar with two edges means. Rome ran the world and then did not. Byzantium lasted another thousand years and then did not. The monarchies of Europe governed most of Christendom and now govern almost nothing. Each of them, in its own century, looked like the permanent arrangement of human affairs.
Underneath them the church bar runs the whole width without a break.
The chart claims no more than that. Not that the church was powerful, and not that it was good, but that it was still there when each host was gone.
Here is where a triumphant reading of that chart gets into trouble, and the trouble is on the chart's own markers.
The church did not merely survive those empires. It repeatedly married them.
In 313 the Edict of Milan legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire.4 That is toleration and it is a mercy after two centuries of persecution. But in 380 the Edict of Thessalonica went further and made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the state, and within a few years the machinery that had been used against Christians was available to Christians to use against others.5
Look at the chart's next marker. The Council of Nicaea, 325, was convened and presided over by Constantine, a Roman emperor who was not yet baptized, to settle a question about the deity of Christ.6 The council got the answer right. It is still right, and the 1689 Confession says so. And the way it was convened tells you that the two tracks on that chart were already fused.
The rest of the markers tell the same story from different angles. The papacy is a bar on the church track that behaves like a bar on the political one. Trent is a council called to answer a movement the state was already fighting with armies.
So the honest version of the chart is not that the church stood untouched above politics for two thousand years. It is that the church kept being offered the empire's power and kept, often enough, taking it.
And we should say why, because the reason is the premise this whole course runs on. Romans 3 says there is none righteous, no, not one, and that verse does not stop at the church door.7 The same fallen heart that makes a king dangerous makes a bishop dangerous. When week one said the founders divided power because man cannot be trusted with all of it, that was not a claim about politicians. It was a claim about men, and the church is full of them. A Christian who can see the corruption in Rome's emperors and not in Rome's councils has stopped reading his own doctrine halfway through.
The chart has a marker labeled two popes, and it is worth stopping on, because it is the hardest fact on the whole church track.
From 1378 to 1417 there were two men claiming to be pope, then for a period three, each with his own cardinals, each excommunicating the others, dividing the kingdoms of Europe between them.8 Forty years. It was ended by a council, not by any of the claimants.
The institution that claimed to be the visible unbroken church broke visibly, in public, for four decades, and no one could tell you which line was the real one at the time.
We do not raise that to score a point. We raise it because it is the clearest evidence on the chart for the thing this course keeps saying: the promise was made to the church, and the church is not identical to any institution that has carried its name.
The triumphalism is removable. The chart holds without it, and what is left is stronger than what was taken out.
The promise was never that the church would hold power. Read the sentence again. Christ said he would build it and that death would not hold it. He said nothing about it being large, respected, established or in office. Every century where the church confused the promise with power is a century the chart records as a scandal.
And the bar really is unbroken. Through the collapse of Rome, through the schism of 1054, through forty years of rival popes, through the Reformation, through the wars that followed, there was never a moment with no one confessing what Peter confessed.3 The line has been thin. The History course spends thirteen classes on how thin. It has never been cut.
The far right of the top track has a bar for communism, and that bar is the sharpest test on the chart because it is the most recent and the most deliberate.
Previous empires persecuted the church for reasons of state. The Soviet state made the elimination of religion an explicit goal and pursued it for seventy years with a whole government behind it: churches closed, clergy imprisoned and killed, atheism taught as curriculum from childhood.9
The state is gone. The church is not.
That is one bar ending while the other continues, and it happened inside the lifetime of people in this room. It is the chart's argument in a form nobody has to take on trust from a history book.
The chart is a picture of Ephesians 2. The church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone, and in him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple (Ephesians 2:19-22).10
That verse explains why the bottom bar does not break when the top ones do. A building outlasts its scaffolding because the foundation is not the scaffolding. Rome was scaffolding. So was Byzantium, so was Christendom, and so, one day, is this republic.
Which puts our four convictions in their place on this chart.
Scripture is the final authority, and it judges the church's own centuries. That is why we can look at Thessalonica and at the rival popes and say those were wrong without flinching, and why we do not need the church's past to be clean to trust its Lord.5
Christ finished the work himself. He lived the perfect life we could not live, went to the cross, and rose, and the debt was paid in full. No council added to it and no schism subtracted from it.
God chooses, and the Father draws, which is why the line was never cut. It was never being held open by us.
And salvation is his work from start to finish. We receive it; we don't author it. A chart of two thousand years is a long look at what happens when men try to author it anyway.
Next week the course leaves the charts entirely and goes into a house, which is where all of this is actually decided.
lost its love, and what Christ threatens to do about it.
size, respect or office. Which of those three do we most often confuse with the promise?
does that tell us about how God works, and what does it not license?
for how a Christian holds his citizenship in this country?
Next class: Christ in heart and home, and the eleven passages that run from the inside outward.