[W]hen Constantine began to shower the church with privileges and subsidies, he precipitated a stampede into the priesthood by the sons of the upper classes, since church offices now produced high incomes and had substantial political influence. Soon, church positions, even lowly parish pastorships, were bought and sold as investments -- higher offices often carrying enormous price tages. -- Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason, pp. 202-03. Emperor Constantines embrace of Christianity has long seemed to me to have been the beginning of the end of the church founded on the teachings and example of Jesus Christ. As Stark notes, these developments transformed the church of piety, a church that had been led by a dedicated, poorly paid, and rather ascetic clergy, who sometimes knowingly risked martyrdom, into what he calls the church of power. Eventually the church became by far the greatest landowner in Europe, the manager of hundreds of huge estates and other productive operations, and the recipient of enough income to maintain the bishops and popes in lives of luxury and splendor. A good way to corrupt any good or holy idea (or set of ideas) is to institutionalize it. Corruption may be expected to follow in short order. I am not maintaining that the church never did any good or holy thing or that the clergy were corrupt and venal in every instance. I am simply incapable of looking at the history of the church over the two thousand years of its existence and believing that this is what Jesus had in mind.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 01:05:21 +0000
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