Loyal New Testament Churches, Martyrdom, War, Constantine and Catholicism

Death is seen overall as the ultimate sacrifice of a human, when met in the name of something they believe and taken from them without protest. You surrender all tangibly known, and all too often suffer much to arrive at your demise. As a Believer, one’s eternity is secured. Because of the security, fear of death is scarce in the Christian community; yet outside of the host of saints lies a clear dismay of the reality of death. It is martyrdom at which outsiders are in awe, and believers encouraged. Within Christian Jihad the notions of death and more specifically martyrdom are addressed and expounded upon to highlight their role in the procession of Christianity and the modern day Catholic Church.
The power of the Christian religion is undeniable, as seen in chapter one. The body of believers swells and thrives amidst persecution. It was this characteristic of martyrdom that first intrigued Constantine, who proceeded to bring a marriage to church and state. Soon wars were waged against not only non-believers but against the Christians themselves, although Christianity had been declared the religion of Rome, it was not a true form of Christianity, but there were loyal New Testament Christians that remained. James Milton Carroll puts it best; “Loyal New Testament churches, by whatever name called, were hunted and hounded to the utmost limit of the new Catholic temporal power.” The reign of Constantine, removing Christ as head of the church and replacing Him with himself, gave birth to the modern day Catholic Church, amending old laws and enacting new ones. This was a clear split from the New Testament teachings of Christ, and a dark point in history only to overflow and grow to a darker Catholic religion.
In regards to the call of a Christian to war, death is the ultimate point of consideration. Is it truly just to kill pagans and send them on their way to Hell in order to defend your home front where Christ is known? We are provided with guidelines for just war in Appendix A, such as implementing peace and justice as the goal of war. So as the Bible states, there is a time for war and a time for peace, the time for war for a Christian is carefully outlined with many circumstantial guidelines.
The loyal New Testament churches and their perseverance to Biblical guidelines of the church spoke louder than any crusade or marriage of church and state. It’s commonly overlooked that there were those that remained constant to the Faith. It is their death that I found most notable, while others were giving their lives in war to be assured salvation they stood by Scripture.
Albert Barnes states;
“It has become a settled principle that nothing which is good and true can be destroyed by persecution, but that the effect ultimately is to establish more firmly, and to spread more widely, that which it was designed to overthrow. It has long since passed into a proverb that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”