The Dark Ages
The papacy grew in power, images were sanctioned in worship, East and West divided, and the Crusades began. Free churches like the Paulicians endured at the edges of the empire.
Read in Order
Oldest first. Each entry opens its page on the church-history timeline.
c. AD 600–1500 · Catholic Church · For a thousand years the Roman church ruled the West. The Bible was kept in Latin that few could read, salvation was tied to the sacraments and the priesthood, and the papacy claimed power over kings. Christ's free churches survived in the shadows, hunted as heretics.
c. AD 650–900 · Free churches · In Armenia and the eastern empire, the Paulicians refused the state church's images, relics, and priesthood and were hunted for it. Under the Empress Theodora (c. 843) great numbers were killed. Older Baptist histories count them among the free churches, though nearly everything we know comes from their persecutors, and some of the errors those sources charge them with were grave.
AD 787 · Catholic Church · The Second Council of Nicaea, a council of the state church's bishops, ruled that images of Christ, Mary, and the saints are to be venerated. Catholic and Orthodox teaching distinguishes this veneration from worship. The free churches rejected images in worship as contrary to the second commandment.
AD 1054 · Catholic Church · Papal legates laid a sentence of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia against Patriarch Michael Cerularius, who answered in kind. Long-growing differences over papal authority, the Western addition of the filioque to the Creed, and practice hardened into a lasting division between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches. It split the institutional church of the old empire into Latin and Greek halves; it was not a division of Christ's churches.
AD 1095–1291 · Catholic Church · Pope Urban II called Western knights to take Jerusalem by the sword, promising remission of their penance. Crusaders massacred Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem in 1099 and sacked Christian Constantinople in 1204, and popes later turned the crusade on the dissenters of southern France.
People and Errors of This Era
Biographies of those who shaped it, and the false teachings Christ's churches withstood.