rlogan

His highness only need issue an edict on what Christians are so that we can take note.

Mageth

What's your point with the bayonet bit? I'm not getting it.

Someone who thinks they are Christian and says they are Christian are Christian, in my book.

Roman Catholics say they are Christian. I suspect that most of them believe/think they are Christians. If you held a bayonet to their throats, they'd likely say they were Christian, while also thinking that they are Christian.

You appear to disagree that all people who think and say they are Christian are actually Christian, even though they think and say that they are Christian.

If that's true, why?

Diogenes the Cynic

Actually, I think that Sotto is saying that those forcibly converted aren't really believers. Obama is "Constantine" in his hypothetical. That's probably true for the first few generations, but over time it just becomes normal enculturation where people are brought up with it and never think to question it....especially in an extended era of theocratic rule.

sotto voce

The Romans were better with spears. Spears made sixty million people say they were Christians, when most of them knew damn well that they detested Christianity, because they had rioted against having to follow it. But they were eventually forced to adopt the New Testament and the Old, in name, despite them having no formal proof of the truth of the Bible's teaching.

So what forced sixty million people to lie in their teeth? Yes, the emperor, but maybe 2% of them, who would not give up belief in the Bible, who 'made' the emperor adopt 'Christianity'.

Though the rioters need not have bothered, because the 'Christianity' they had to follow was no different from the old paganisms. Old religion, new name.

sotto voce

That's right. The people originally forced to 'convert' could not safely tell their children that they were not Christians, especially as the priest had baptised them in water as infants. So in a few generations, the trauma was forgotten, the Bible made inaccessible, and all the world was Christian, as far as ordinary people were concerned. Any doubts were soon suppressed, if one wanted to stay alive. Of course, those who still read the Bible knew it was all phoney.

DCHindley

I didn't know they still had "Plymouth Brethren" there in the UK. The secret Baptists who have existed from the beginning of Christianity, always fighting for the truth revealed by scripture, rebaptizing the repentent back to the true faith in the face of the whiles of the Whore of Babylon, who seeks to obscure truth to the destruction of many. Thank God for John Nelson Darby and the Scofield Reference Bible! :melodramatic:

DCH:talktothehand:

mountainman

There would be some sort of distribution of responses. Say we took a sample of 321 people with bayonets to their neck, most (318) would sign on the dotted line that they were Christian, but you'd probably get a handful, maybe one or two or three who would force the issue. These people might be politically exiled (if they were lucky and the boss did not want to unnecessary set examples at this stage in the preceedings).

And after the turbulence had passed "the world groaned to find itself Arian ....." [Jerome]

sotto voce

Alternatively, they could just 'disappear'. However they were dealt with, the outcome would be 100% conformism.

What did it matter? Cyanide is as good as strychnine.

sotto voce

Even the CoE has been known to refuse infant baptism. Believe me, believers' baptism is found in the USA. Maybe, even in Ohio. Wherever that is.

mountainman

This 100% conformism was never achieved. Books had to be searched out for destruction and their preservers executed. Some heretics and some heretical books obviously made it out of the otherwise "Black Hole" of the Christian Emperors' rules (325-444 CE and onwards through the centuries). They are being dug up. People are reading them, but the penny has not yet dropped.

All went according to plan, except that the pagan historians of the fourth century were not really going to die. They were only going to sleep for some centuries. They belonged to that classical tradition in historiography for which ecclesiastical history, whatever its merits, was no substitute. Though we may have learnt to check our references from Eusebius — and this was no small gain — we are still the disciples of Herodotus and Thucydides: we still learn our history of the late empire from Ammianus Marcellinus

Pagan and Christian Historiography
in the Fourth Century A.D.
* This essay first appeared in A. Momigliano, ed.,
The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century,
The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963, pp. 79—99 (1)