This article is part of The Gospel in History series by Woodrow Walton.
Image: The Books of Kells by way of Wikimedia Commons.

What transpired from the time of the Gothic and Vandal invasions of Eastern and Western Europe between A.D. 400 and 1452 is little different from what is occurring in our 21^st century world. We complain about the threat of ISIS and the troubles of our global society, including the troubles of the United States of America. Yet those basic troubles are the same as what was experienced for a thousand years between A.D. 400 and 1452. Christians were as troubled then as we are today, but the Church survived then and it will survive this.

As the invasions forced Christians to flee from the Mediterranean world, which included all of North Africa and the Near East, into the frontiers of northern Europe, the British Isles, the Sahel belt, the northern mountains of Africa, and the further northeastern and eastern extremities of Eurasia, so are we witnessing the extension of the Church in southern and central Africa, South America, and the Far East by way of exiles. Orthodox Christians native to western and central Asia are coming into the United States of America and are welcomed in by such organizations as Solidarity with the Persecuted Church, BarnabasAid, and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. As renewal arose from the frontiers so are we finding renewal by displacements of populations.

The Church in those years, between A.D. 400 and 1452, went through a restructuring process with both positive and negative effects upon the life of the Church. One of the most puzzling features was the relationship between the Christian community and the political order. The Roman system of government in western Europe crumbled under the Gothic tribes, the Vandals, and Lombards but the Church had the structure to withstand the onslaughts. When the Arabs spread throughout northern Africa, the churches re-located themselves in the British Isles. There were two after-effects. Since the Church had the organization it re-read Augustine’s magnum opus, De Civitate Dei (The City of God), written at the time of the Vandal Invasions of Mauritius, Lybia, and the African coast and took a triumphalist approach where the Church had a hand in influencing the political order. The Church in the East suffering from the over-reaching powers of the emperors at Constantinople saw in Augustine’s City of God, a spiritual authority apart from the political order. There were positive results from both approaches but there were negative ones as one. The West institutionalized the Church alongside that of the new political orders which took the place of Rome. Even when the Reformation took place in the 1500’s, Church and State stood side by side insuring the safety of each. Not so in Greece, Eastern Europe, and Western Asia. The Orthodox had no central structure. In each country, the Orthodox conducted their concerns through conciliar means but within the context of patriarch who had a pastoral oversight within each individual country. Rather than a pope, the patriarchs had to contend with the new political entities as best they could. Those in the Near East, Western Asia, and the West Coast of India maintained their identities but had a dhimmi status and were considered as second-class citizens within the Moslem and Indian worlds.

Charlemagne’s palace chapel was completed in 805 CE and later incorporated into the Aachen Cathedral, the oldest cathedral in northern Europe.
Image: Tobias Helfrich / Wikimedia Commons

Conundrum is a strange adjective, yet it is appropriate when one considers the state of the Christian message from AD 385/400 to 1452. The Edict of Milan (AD 313) ended the persecution of Christians and brought an era of peace for the Church. A tenuous relationship between the Christians and the ruling empire emerged. From AD 350 until 378, the year of the Battle of Adrianople, an increasing flood of invaders from Eurasia and from north of the Danube poured into the Mediterranean world. Some of the newer peoples integrated with existing populations and served in both the Roman and Byzantine armies. Some did not.

Increasingly, the Roman system destabilized and the only stability that existed was furnished by the diocesan system of the Christian Church. By the time of Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, Germanic peoples had crossed both the Danube and a frozen Rhine river. Those who crossed the Danube went southward into the Balkans and eastern Italy. Those crossing the Rhine swept westward into Gaul, the Iberian peninsula, and south into northwestern Italy all the way to Rome. Vandals and Alans crossed over the straits of Gibraltar into Northern Africa and moved westward to capture Carthage. The unsettled conditions, in large part, prompted Augustine to compose his masterful Civitate Dei (The City of God).

Further muddying the waters of Christianity was the rise of Islam from the teachings of Mohammed in the seventh century. Islam armies swarmed out of the Arabian deserts, invading Persia to the northeast, Syria to the north, Byzantine areas northwest, and west across North Africa from the Sinai to what is now Morocco, and north into southern Spain. The armies devastated churches and massacred whole populations. The massacres prompted Christian leaders in Europe to strike back against the invaders who were sweeping into the Iberian peninsula and thrusting northward into the land of the Franks. This defensive movement, since known as the Crusades, had the purpose of driving the marauding Islamic forces out of southern France, out of the western Mediterranean, and out of the Holy Land. Among the supporters was Bernard of Clairvaux, an eminent Christian monastic scholar. It was a long, drawn out effort that lasted from the eighth century into the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Crusades were, by no means, an offensive action as some scholars have interpreted them from John Julian Norwich to the present. Only recently, under the pains-taking scholarship of Rodney Stark, have the Crusades come to be seen as a defensive reaction.