Home  Articles  Christian Structure

The Theology of Structure

It was with the Roman Emperor Constantine that Christianity became a religion and that people who practiced Christianity became religious.

Prior to Constantine Christians did not name their children after people in the Bible.  They did not dress up when they met together.  Within the literature that can confidently be identified as having been written by Christians prior to Constantine there is no mention of clergy or church structure.  The earliest building that can be considered a church building is simply a fairly large house with a couple of walls knocked down to make more room.

Recall reification as the process whereby concepts become material.  Join with reification that we have learned from chaos etc that complex systems bifurcate when they are infused with new information.  We have three aphorisms about structure:

• Structure speaks louder than words.

• Structure can speak louder than the word of God.

• Structure can become the word of God.

There are three men who have influenced the structure of Christianity more than any others.  Emperor Constantine.  Abbott Suger.  Henry VIII.  The reification of their thoughts have left the Christian landscape with structures that speak louder than words.

Here is an overview of their reified thoughts:

Constantine (Fourth century)

• hijacked Christianity and made it the state religion
• imposed church buildings
• imposed professional clergy
• imposed pulpits
• imposed sermons
• imposed some state functions on church officials

Soon after Constantine, John Chrysostom, a godly man and Patriarch of Constantinople, was trained in traditional pagan rhetoric and set the standard of elegant sermons by professional clergy from church pulpits.  Other less godly clergymen, made a good living being paid for their public speaking.

In Constantine's time there was a rapid proliferation of church buildings throughout the Roman Empire.

Abbot Suger (Twelfth century)

• built the world's first Gothic cathedral in Denis, France
• Gothic architecture put into structure Plato's teaching that we spend our lives ascending to God and he used space, light and colour as components of the structure for this

In the twelfth century there was another proliferation of building as the Gothic form caught on and spread rapidly throughout Europe and into Britain.  Also in the twelfth century Thomas Aquinas formalized Christian theology around an Aristotelian structure.

Henry VIII

• In Britain the state church established the parish system as a means of assisting the state in census.  Births were not recorded but baptisms (infant baptisms) were.  Only the living were useful for an English king who wanted to raise taxes and armies.

In Henry's time there was in England a rapid proliferation of the parish church government.  This has been exported globally in a variety of denominational forms.

So we see the progression:

• The imposition of church buildings, professional clergy, pulpits and sermons by Constantine.

• The infusion of non-biblical ideology and the setting in stone of the Platonic idea of God being somewhere 'up there' and out of reach.  The ideal setting for Christianity as an art form.

• The formal integration of church organization with state politics.

Note the finer and finer scales and the feedback effect of structure.  Each of the above stages of reification and bifurcation has left a structure that speaks louder than words, not just to Christians but to those outside.

As a result, we have today Christianity as an art form, an academic subject, a good career, a platform from which to dominate.  Whatever the protestations of the preacher to the contrary, the structure of a man in a pulpit speaking to an audience in a building pointing up to God installs a non-biblical intermediary and defuses biblical Christianity.

The Christian church structure in the latter part of the twentieth century has bifurcated even more rapidly as television preachers create their own virtual empires and attempt through their frequently political rhetoric to influence the state after the manner of a state church.

Who these three men are is enlightening.  Constantine was an emperor who claimed to have seen written in the sky an instruction that he should conquer in the sign of the cross.  Can anyone seriously believe that Jesus would tell anyone to kill?  Constantine boiled his wife to death.  (Or, as one historian puts it, caused her to be asphyxiated in an overheated bath)  Suger was a powerful priest who ran the country when the king was away.  Henry was a serial adulterer and wife killer.  Are these the kind of people we should take our church structure from?

Thought experiments:

• Consider the topics of sermons you have heard and extract from them Aristotelian structure, political content and relate these as self-similar to speeches given in other contexts by leaders.
• Consider the political structure of your church or denomination and relate these as self-similar to other non-Christian organizations.
• Discuss in a group of 4 to 12 people whether our inherited structures can be harmonized with the priesthood of all believers.
• Can we chart the increasing complexity of Christian structure and relate it to the increasing complexity and incidence of global societal breakdown and violence?
• Using self-similarity, can we compare Christian religious structures with structures of other religions, of political structures, of commercial organizations, of men-only organizations, of ghetto gangs?

Research suggestion:

• Take a stop watch to church and do a time study of the content of a service.
• Do some ratios, e.g. time spent on meeting announcements against time spent on prayer or other components against total time.
• Use the stop watch during the sermon and compare time spent on politics with time spent teaching the Bible.
• Use the stop watch during the sermon and quantify the time spent on topics that have arisen from the needs of the congregation.

  Personal research

• Review the New Testament and list ten activities for Christians.

• Use your stop watch and calendar and chart your own time used for these activities.

• Do the same for your church.

• Write down your conclusions.

  Group discussion

• What really are our responsibilities as Christians?

Shift your focus   

It can help to change our focus, as it did for the girl who solved the enigma of The Bumblebee Book.  Next time you enter a church building, don't follow the structure of light, space and colour, looking upwards towards Plato's inaccessible god.  Instead, look at the church building the way a bird looks at a cage.  Like any normal bird you will want to get out.  Constantine's, Suger's, Plato's and Henry's structures are thought corrals.

It might be helpful to have a quick overview of Evangelicalism.

Home  Articles  Christian Structure