Today marks the 1695th anniversary of the Battle of Milvian Bridge. This interests me because we just studied it in my church history class.

If you are a little rusty on your church history, it was in this battle that Constantine fought and defeated Maxentius to take control of the Western portion of the Roman Empire and march on Rome itself. He would soon after become Emperor. This battle would probably have been lost to history—one more bloody coup in a long string of bloody coups—had it not been for the remarkable vision Constantine saw the night before the battle.

As the story goes, Constantine saw a symbol used at the time for Christianity called the Chi-Rho with these words in Latin: in this sign, conquer! He apparently took it as a sign that God intended to help him, and after his victory, he began to openly endorse Christianity, dramatically halting the persecutions against Christians begun by Diocletian and Galerius.

This turn of events began a dramatic change in the religious atmosphere of the Roman Empire, eventually leading to Christianity becoming the official religion of Rome.

It was this battle that prompted me to post the G. Campbell Morgan quotation about the persecution of the church.  This turn of events changed the experience of the church.  No longer rebels and outcasts, it became politically and socially expedient to become a Christian.  The upside of Constantine’s “conversion” was that Christians no longer endured the grinding persecution they had suffered at the hands of Diocletian.  The down side was that it became much harder to tell who was really a Christian: guarding the purity of the church became very difficult.

There are lessons here for us.  We talked in class (and I see you’ve discussed in the last post) the status of the modern church in the eyes of the world.  We certainly aren’t being persecuted as the early church was before Constantine, but we also aren’t being  patronized like the church was after Constantine. Our experience is as mixed a bag as it was after Milvian Bridge.   While we are right to thank God that we don’t experience persecution, we should also not become too comfortable with our position in this culture.  We must not look so much like the world that we can’t be distinguished from the world.  We need to be able to call people from the world out of the world and into the church.

Cool historical bit: the Milvian Bridge is still standing in Rome. It is clearly visible on Google Maps.

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