The Christian Faith began in the Roman Empire that resulted from the conquests of Alexander the Great, taught by Aristotle himself, fighting on the back of his great war-horse, Bucephalos... These conquests produced the Greek Old Testment translated by Jewish Scribes and used extensively in the Jewish Diaspora at the time of Christ...
It did not birth into a friendly environment, but a hostile one... I likd to think of it as a great "Undercover Operation", beginning perhaps in the typos of the Jewish spies of the OT who were helped by the harlot... Christ Himself had to be concealed in Egypt to be kept alive, and He was always silencing the mouths of demons who wanted to identify Him to people... He was concerned about how He was being perceived, asking His disciples and Peter...
And it took over the world in 300 years under great persecutions by many rulers who killed hundreds of thousands of Christians who did not fight back... It was Constantine who brought Christianity legitimacy in the Roman Empire in the 4th century, and moved the head of the Roman Empire from Roma, Italia, to Constantinopled, where it ruled as a Christian Empire for a thousand years, and as the center of the Orthodox Christian Faith long after that...
In the US of A we are going to find out how well this Faith does outside persecutions... At least for now... Orthodoxy impacts cultures, transforming them across time... The Christianity of the West is becoming more and more impacted by the secular culture which is spawning all around it... Christian Cultures tend to have Christian Governments, and these tend to be autocratic from the beginnings... The wonderfully free government of the US is still an experiment after some 250 years, and is under attack from within by oppressive forces... Russia is a Christian Country re-emerging from horrific persecutions of Christians under Stalin [some 50 million killed variously]... It does not have a US Constitutionally limited government... It is rebuilding as a government the Churches destroyed by the government, and repopulating its monasteries and seeking to defend Christianity in its environments in nearby countries... It supports Assad because Assad in Syria protects Christian communities... Islamic countries need oppressive governments...
Arsenios
