The basic new of Jesus´ rules what was
brought from the Christian missionaries through all the Roman
empire was the expectation from a general-human world desaster by
the end of time. It´s law-court concerned all people, the
deads and living. It´s picture of the Saviour showed the man
sent to world, God´s son and at the same time Son of Man
whose law-court means the end of time and a total new world. So
that makes clear why Jesus was so much against the religion of law
and scholars of the priests and rabbis. That is to say that they
lived in the belief that the people would be promised evernal
salvation if they only would keep the moral laws, the right and the
rules of the downright cult.
The gospel of Jesus Christ directs out from the field
of earthly, i.d. social and politic hopes of salvation. This is the
power what gave the Christianity duration over all time. But from
the beginning brought this power an insoluble conflict with the
politic and the social might of time. So it had to collide with the
Roman empire cult and it´s tendency to adoration, had to
disappoint the Jewish hopes of the politic liberator and Saviour
and couldn´t even work binding and preserving in the state.
The big drama of the Middle Age, the dispute between the
pontificate and the regents has here it´s roots.
In the year 313 Constantin finished the period of
conflicts. He tried to put the Christianity into the Roman state.
But already at the beginning showed the tensions among the
imperial-worldly and the spiritual-episcopal authority what was
later presented more and more by the pontificate. But the emperor
felt as the highest authority in all matters of church when he
convoked the imperial council to preserve the unity of the church
in precepts and administration. Important got the bishop-council of
Nicäa in 325 where the guiding principle was overruled that
Jesus would be only similar in charakter to God. The new one was by
Athanasius: God and Jesus are identical in charakter. Nevertheless
the Aryan direction continued living in the East, especially the
German tribes which had changed to the Christianity. The quarrels
finished finally after an Aryanic setback under Constantinius (335)
and the try of a heathenish resoration under Julian Apostata (361 -
363) in favour of the Athanasianism. In the year 391 the
Christianity became the official religio.
In the Christian church the Roman technology of
administration survived the fall of the empire. If the politic
differences between Rome and Constantinopel had found it´s
spiritual-confessional equivalent the Christianity could be the
unity power. The Roman pontificate stepped in front of the East
Roman patriarchate. The background were their two different rules
of Christ´s character: the divine and the earthly like Rome
teached and the one from the anture of God from Constantinopel. The
council of Chalcedon didn´t secceed to bridge over this
contrasts. Pope Leo the Great (410 - 461) who published the Roman
claim of direction protested again the there declared equality of
rights of the popes from Constantinopel and Rome.
This interior disunion was the reason why it was later
easy for Justinian I to build an absolute regency of the emperor
over the church. That is why he is called the first representative
"Caesaropapism", a system in which the worldly and the spititual
power were united in one hand. This was first realized in the East
of the empire, later iin Russia and the newer Balcan-States.