Rome and True Religion: Lactantius and the Fusion of Power and Piety

Lactantius (c. 240–320 CE) stands at one of the most decisive turning points in Christian history. Born in North Africa and trained in rhetoric under the Roman Empire of Diocletian, he was a master of Ciceronian Latin and the classical humanist tradition. His early career as a rhetorician at Nicomedia placed him close to the imperial court just before the Great Persecution (303–311 CE). Like many converts of his generation, he straddled two worlds; the classical and the Christian.

His great work, The Divine Institutes (c. 305–320 CE), was both an apology and a political theology: the first systematic attempt to explain Christianity in Latin for an educated Roman audience, and the first to do so in the era of a Christian emperor. In Lactantius, we encounter Christianity in transition. He is the last apologist of persecution and the first theologian of empire. When he addresses Constantine as “the first of the Roman princes to repudiate errors, and to acknowledge and honour the majesty of the one and only true God” (Div. Inst. I.1), he gives voice to a new confidence; the moment when the faith of the martyrs becomes the faith of the monarch.

Yet this very moment reveals the danger. Lactantius reads Constantine’s rise as divine vindication, interpreting political success as theological truth. Where Tertullian once declared that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” Lactantius proclaims that the emperor’s victory is the triumph of God. The persecuted faith that once condemned Rome as Babylon now blesses her as the chosen vessel of Providence. In this sense, Lactantius becomes not the founder of imperial Christianity; that title belongs to Eusebius; but its herald.

To understand The Divine Institutes fully, we must hear its three voices: the classical rhetorician, the Christian apologist, and the imperial theologian.

The rhetorician is the Cicero of the early Church. Lactantius begins his work with the moral ideal of sapientia; the philosopher’s search for truth. “Men of great and distinguished talent,” he writes, “when they had entirely devoted themselves to learning, holding in contempt all actions both private and public, applied to the pursuit of investigating the truth whatever labour could be bestowed upon it” (Div. Inst. I.1). This is Rome’s old faith in reason and virtue. But Lactantius also exposes philosophy’s limit: “They did not obtain the object of their wish… because the truth, that is, the secret of the Most High God, cannot be attained by our own ability and perceptions.” In this turn from reason to revelation, Lactantius sets the tone for Latin Christianity; urbane, articulate, and steeped in classical style, yet dependent on divine illumination.

The second voice is that of the apologist. Here Lactantius continues the line of Minucius Felix and Tertullian, though with more polish and less defensiveness. He dismantles the pagan pantheon through the logic of natural theology: “There is no one who, when he raises his eyes to heaven, does not understand from the very magnitude of the objects that there is some providence… prepared by some greater intelligence” (Div. Inst. I.2–3). Paganism, he argues, is the corruption of this natural awareness of God. Monotheism alone unites reason and revelation. For the first time, Christian theology is not a defense against persecution but an attempt to shape civilization itself.

The third voice is the most revealing: the imperial theologian. When Lactantius praises Constantine’s justice and piety; “You entered upon a dominion which was salutary and desirable for all… restoring justice which had been overthrown and taken away”; his rhetoric moves from theology to politics. Constantine’s rule becomes a sign of providence. Christianity, once measured by its suffering, now measures itself by its success.

To condemn Lactantius outright would be unjust. He genuinely sought to craft a moral and philosophical system for a post-pagan world. “Neither is any religion to be undertaken without wisdom, nor any wisdom to be approved of without religion,” he wrote (Div. Inst. I.1). Divine truth, for him, fulfills reason; providence governs history; moral law mirrors the mind of the Creator. His humanism, inherited from Cicero and Seneca, becomes Christian by subordinating eloquence to truth. He was a moralist as much as a theologian; his attacks on cruelty, avarice, and idolatry reveal a humane vision that anticipates the ethical universalism of Augustine.

But his theological imagination could not resist the pull of empire. Before Constantine, Rome was for Christians “Babylon the Great,” drunk on the blood of the saints. For Tertullian and Cyprian, the empire was the persecuting beast, the world to be renounced. By Lactantius’s day, that imagery no longer fit. When persecution ended, the Church had to explain not why Rome oppressed her but why she now protected her. In that moment, Lactantius reinterpreted history itself: the empire became the vessel of salvation. “That most happy day had shone upon the world,” he writes, “in which the Most High God raised you [Constantine] to the prosperous height of power” (Div. Inst. I.1). The persecutor’s throne had become the altar of providence.

The fusion of theology and empire owes much to rhetoric. Trained in the art of imperial praise, Lactantius adopts the panegyric mode of Cicero and Pliny. His dedication to Constantine echoes the language of court orations that had long celebrated emperors as restorers of peace and justice. Eloquence, once a servant of power, becomes its sanctifier. His theology takes on the cadences of flattery. Faith becomes a virtue of the ruler, and conversion becomes an imperial act. The Church, once defined by witness, begins to speak the language of administration.

This rhetorical shift is matched by a conceptual one. Lactantius models his Divine Institutes on the Institutes of Civil Law, the Roman textbooks of jurisprudence. As lawyers codified justice, he codifies truth. Theology becomes legislation; the Church becomes the moral legislator of empire. It is here that Christian political thought is born; and also where it first goes astray. By identifying divine order with imperial order, Lactantius cannot imagine that the two might diverge.

The heart of the problem lies in his understanding of providence. For the persecuted Church, providence was the mystery that sustained endurance; the belief that God’s justice would prevail beyond history. For Lactantius, providence becomes visible in history itself, embodied in imperial fortune. In On the Deaths of the Persecutors, he reads the downfall of Diocletian and Galerius as proof of divine judgment and Constantine’s triumph as the confirmation of divine favor. God’s justice, once hidden in suffering, now appears as policy. Victory becomes revelation.

Such a theology cannot survive the collapse of empire. When Rome later fell, Augustine would rebuild what Lactantius had confused. In The City of God, Augustine distinguishes between the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena—the City of God and the City of Man. The fall of Rome, he insists, does not disprove providence; it reveals that divine order transcends worldly power. Augustine’s vision thus corrects Lactantius’s: providence is not political success but the patient unfolding of God’s will in and beyond history.

Yet Lactantius’s legacy endured. In baptizing Rome, he also sanctified her political forms. His theology of divine monarchy reintroduced the old imperial imagery under a Christian name. The emperor became the earthly image of the heavenly King, the guarantor of justice, the vicar of divine order. From this vision would grow the medieval synthesis of sacrum imperium; the Holy Roman Empire; and later, the papal claims to divine authority. The line from Constantine’s theologian to the coronation of Charlemagne and the papal tiara is not accidental; it begins with Lactantius’s fusion of faith and empire.

To read Lactantius today is to witness Christianity’s first great temptation: to confuse the kingdom of God with the order of Rome. His achievement is immense; he gave Christian thought its classical form and moral seriousness; but his danger is equally great. By identifying truth with triumph, he set the stage for centuries of confusion between moral authority and political power.

And yet his insight still challenges us. In a secular world, his insistence that “religion and wisdom cannot be separated” remains a rebuke to modern attempts to divide intellect from morality. His error was not in desiring a just civilization, but in assuming that justice could ever be secured by empire rather than by grace.

Lactantius should not be dismissed but remembered as a witness; the thinker who saw the persecuted Church step into the halls of power and mistook that entry for redemption. He shows us the moment when the faith of the martyrs began to speak the language of emperors, when Rome and the Church became indistinguishable, and when divine authority was mistaken for political legitimacy.

In reading him, we remember that Christianity’s task is not to baptize power, but to redeem it; and that the true peace of Christ is not the peace of Constantine.

True Authority: Why Scripture Stands Highest—and How It Leads Us into Living Faith

If my previous essay traced how the Church once confused political power with divine authority, this one asks the more fundamental question behind that mistake: where, finally, does religious authority reside? My answer is direct. God alone is absolute. Under God, the Bible holds the highest place among human authorities: not because it is a magical transcript that dispenses with thought, but because it is the clearest, most searching witness to the living truth that claims our conscience. Scripture doesn’t take responsibility off your shoulders; it hands it back and asks you to think. Its authority works from within, more like living guidance than a rule engine. The text may not be flawless word for word, yet it’s deeply reliable as a channel of God’s mind and will through human voices.

To say that the Bible is the highest authority means rejecting two opposite errors. One mistake is to give absolute power to the Church, as though an institution could speak with God’s voice and never be wrong. The other mistake is to make faith purely private, ruled only by our own feelings or opinions. The truth lies between these two extremes.

The Bible rises above both Church authority and personal whim because it brings us into a conversation that has shaped faith for thousands of years; the voices of apostles and prophets, psalms and letters. In those pages, we see real people struggling to understand God’s will, failing, learning, and trying again. It is through this story of wrestling and discovery that God continues to speak.

The Church was born from this witness. It grew out of the faith, hope, and truth recorded in Scripture. The Church preserves the Bible and teaches it, but it did not create it. The Word of God gave life to the Church; the Church did not give life to the Word. When any institution claims to stand above Scripture; to decide what it means apart from what it says; it forgets its own beginning. The Bible remains the wellspring of Christian truth, and every authority in the Church is true only when it serves that Word and leads people back to it.

The Reformation grasped this with new urgency. Renaissance humanism had already taught Europe to test inherited authorities; the Reformers drew that testing to the heart of religion. They did not enthrone isolated individuals as popes of their own judgment; they enthroned the text that had generated the Church’s earliest faith. They insisted that whatever must be believed for salvation is found in Scripture and must be proved from it. In doing so, they transferred the word “infallible” from pope and council to “Holy Scripture” as a whole.That change was both a victory and a challenge. It freed believers from the idea that only the Church could speak for God, but it also led some to treat the Bible as if it were a magic voice from heaven that needed no interpretation or thought. The Bible itself tells us that isn’t true. Within its pages, prophets correct their own words, psalmists question and argue with God, apostles reason with their communities, and early believers try to understand what the Spirit is saying in their moment of history. Scripture’s authority is real and central to the life of the Church, but it’s not the kind that lets us stop thinking. It’s the kind that calls us to think more deeply, honestly, and faithfully.

At the heart of every claim that some outside authority; whether the Church or the Bible itself; is completely infallible lies a basic misunderstanding. No authority can prove its own perfection without depending on the very reasoning of the person who believes it. The moment I say, “this authority cannot be wrong,” I’ve already used my own judgment to decide that. No matter how sincere my obedience, I can’t escape responsibility for that decision.

If the Church or Scripture seems to say something that troubles my conscience, I shouldn’t shut my eyes and ignore it; I should ask honestly how God wants me to see it. And if my conscience seems to clash with what God’s Word teaches, I shouldn’t simply trust my feelings; I should ask where I might be mistaken. In either case, the task of discernment still belongs to me. I can follow an authority, but I cannot hand over my moral and spiritual responsibility to it.

When people try to avoid that responsibility, they usually fall into one of two traps. Some choose blind obedience; they stop thinking for themselves and let others decide what is true. Others swing to the opposite extreme; bitter rejection of all authority. Both paths avoid the hard work of mature faith. Real faith does neither. It listens, questions, wrestles, and finally takes ownership of belief. It accepts the weight of responsibility as part of what it means to love God with both heart and mind.

This is also why the Bible’s authority stands above that of the Church. Church leaders often claim that because Scripture can be misunderstood, believers must rely on their official interpretation. But that solution only repeats the problem; it replaces one human judgment with another. Even when you choose to trust the Church, you are still making that choice yourself. You can’t hand over your ability to think and believe; that is the very power that makes faith real. The Church can preserve and teach the faith it has received, but it cannot take away your task of making that truth your own. To do so would make the Church’s voice the final court of appeal; a substitution that Scripture itself will not tolerate, since Scripture repeatedly depicts the people of God testing rulers, priests, and prophets by a higher word.

If only God’s authority is absolute, and every human understanding is limited, does that make the Bible’s authority weaker? In fact, it makes it stronger. God’s truth is perfect, but human language never is. Yet God does not avoid human weakness; He works through it. Revelation comes to us in the only form we can grasp: through human history, culture, memory, and imagination. That is not a flaw; it is the miracle of how divine truth enters human life.

The Bible isn’t a voice from heaven speaking word-for-word dictation. It’s a collection of voices; prophets, poets, and apostles; each shaped by their own time and place, yet all drawn toward the same center: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Its unity comes not from every line sounding the same, but from all its voices bearing witness to the same divine reality.

Because the Bible shows us human hands at work in sacred speech, it teaches us how to approach truth ourselves; not with fear of making mistakes, but with reverence, honesty, and courage. It reminds us that God’s light shines through human language, and that our task is to handle that light faithfully, not to pretend it removes our need to think or discern.

The Bible itself shows how divine truth works through human growth and change. The prophets sometimes correct what came before them; the books of wisdom question and expand the moral laws; Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount turns justice from revenge into reconciliation; and the apostles decide not to burden new believers with rules that earlier generations could not keep. In all this, Scripture teaches the conscience. It leads us beyond a rigid reading of words to the deeper spirit behind them; the unfolding purpose of God’s redemption.

The Bible’s differences, challenges, and even contradictions are not signs of failure. They show that revelation has entered real human history without destroying it. Like light shining through a stained-glass window, God’s truth comes to us through many colors and shapes; through the limits, voices, and struggles of human beings. The variety doesn’t weaken the light; it reveals it more beautifully.

This way of understanding Scripture guards us from two great distortions of faith. The first is bibliolatry; treating the Bible itself as God, as if divine perfection were trapped in its sentences. This demands an impossible standard of literal accuracy, one that collapses the moment history, science, or moral insight reveal contradictions. Then people are forced either to deny obvious truth in the name of religion or to lose their faith altogether when the denial can no longer hold.

The second distortion is ecclesiolatry; treating the Church as if it were the Holy Spirit itself. This turns human authority into something that claims to be beyond error. Such security can only survive by demanding ever greater obedience, until loyalty is measured by the refusal to question or even to see.

The Bible calls us away from both errors. It claims a different kind of authority; one that does not control from above but speaks to the heart from within. It persuades by awakening understanding, commands by shedding light, and binds us to God’s will by setting us free to follow it.

Because Scripture’s authority works in this inner way, it leads not to blind obedience but to living faith. Faith, in this sense, is not the surrender of the mind but the trust of the whole person; reason, conscience, and heart; given to a truth that shows itself through human words and proves itself in life. We know its power by its fruits: humility before God, love for others, courage to resist injustice, and repentance that brings renewal.

Such faith doesn’t cancel reason; it fulfills it. Reason without faith becomes cold and self-enclosed, while faith without reason sinks into superstition. The Bible holds the two together. It questions our assumptions, purifies our desires, and calls us to see ourselves and the world truthfully; in the searching light of God.

Does this mean the Magisterium has no authority? Not at all. It means that the Magisterium has a real but limited calling. The Church’s teachers can guide, preserve, and explain the faith. They can help believers read Scripture wisely, keep attention fixed on the heart of the gospel, and protect the Church from confusion and passing trends. Their duty is to serve the truth, not to own it.

The Magisterium’s authority depends entirely on how faithfully it listens; to Scripture and to the Spirit working within the Church, the body of believers. When it teaches from that posture of listening, it becomes a genuine guide to the people of God. But when it begins to speak as though its voice were the source of revelation rather than its servant, it steps beyond its purpose. No council, theologian, or pope can take the place of God’s own authority or of the Word through which God speaks.

The problem becomes deeper when the Magisterium teaches ideas that do not come from the teachings of Christ or the witness of the apostles. The notion of a celestial hierarchy; a chain of spiritual ranks mirrored on earth; entered Christian thought through the writings of the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a text later shown to be a forgery from centuries after the apostles. Thomas Aquinas built much of his theology on that source, and through him, the Church absorbed the idea that heavenly order justifies earthly hierarchy. Yet nowhere in the Gospels does Christ teach that divine power should be mirrored through ranks of authority on earth. He taught the opposite: “The greatest among you shall be your servant.”

When the Church bases its doctrines on such false foundations, its authority becomes uncertain. The same danger appears in the teaching that grace is dispensed through the sacraments as though divine life were controlled by institutional rites. The Bible speaks of grace as the free gift of God, given through faith and the Spirit, not through human administration. When the Magisterium claims the power to distribute or withhold that grace, it risks turning spiritual truth into a system of control.

True authority in the Church is humble, transparent, and accountable to Scripture. The Magisterium fulfills its calling only when it listens before it speaks; when it protects the faith rather than reshaping it, and when it remembers that its duty is to serve revelation, not to rule over it. Its role is to guard what has been given, not to invent what God has not spoken. Yet history shows how often that line has been crossed. Instead of receiving revelation humbly, the Church has sometimes rewritten it; following forged documents, altering commandments, adding dogmas, and deleting inconvenient truths from the gospel it was meant to preserve.

When the Magisterium bases its authority on such distortions, it ceases to act as the steward of divine truth and becomes instead the architect of its own system. The so-called “Donation of Constantine,” once used to justify papal supremacy, was a human fabrication, not a heavenly charter. The same can be said of the pseudo-Dionysian “celestial hierarchy,” a vision of cosmic order projected onto the Church to legitimize power from the top down. None of this came from Christ, who taught that greatness lies in servanthood, not in domination.

By claiming divine sanction for these man-made hierarchies and revisions, the Church’s leadership turned the gospel of grace into an instrument of control. When it teaches that grace is distributed through sacraments as though divine life were subject to clerical management, it replaces the free gift of God with a bureaucratic system of salvation. Such teaching does not protect revelation; it obscures it.

True authority in the Church does not come from possession of power but from fidelity to the Word that corrects all powers. The Magisterium is meant to echo Christ, not Caesar; to serve truth, not to command it. Whenever it claims prerogatives that belong only to God, whenever it adds human decrees to divine revelation, it stops being the voice of the Shepherd and becomes the echo of empire. The Church’s true greatness is not in governing souls but in helping them to hear the voice of God for themselves; the voice that liberates, enlightens, and judges all earthly authority, including its own.

People often say that believing in “Scripture alone” causes division in the Church. But division isn’t healed by giving more power to one authority; it’s healed when everyone submits more deeply to the Word of God, which stands in judgment over every authority. Yes, the Bible must be interpreted, and people can misunderstand it. But the same is true of the Magisterium. Church leaders can also be wrong if they think their interpretations are somehow protected from the human weakness that shaped the writers of Scripture themselves. The answer is not to replace one supposed infallibility with another, but to let the Bible be what it truly is; the most trustworthy human witness to God’s truth, given to all believers. It tests popes and councils just as it tests pastors and teachers, binding all of us to the same truth revealed in the cross of Christ.

Relying completely on any external source for truth; whether a book, a council, or a pope; is a mistake, not because truth doesn’t exist, but because understanding truth always requires the living, thinking, discerning human heart. No outside authority can replace the inner awakening through which a person recognizes and loves what is good. Scripture honors that inward work. It does not silence conscience; it trains it. It does not cancel discernment; it sharpens it. It does not dismiss human experience; it transforms it.

A believer, therefore, cannot say, “I have no responsibility; what the Church or the Bible says is enough.” True faith speaks differently. It says, “I have listened, thought, repented, and followed God’s commandments. I have sought truth with a humble and contrite heart, never ceasing to search, to question, and to discern.” Faith is not the end of thought but its sanctification; the lifelong work of keeping one’s heart awake to the voice of God.

For it is in that continued seeking, in the struggle to see rightly and to obey freely, that the soul is made ready for His coming. When He knocks, you will know it is Him; not because someone told you, not because an institution decreed it, but because the truth you have pursued with repentance and love now stands before you, recognized by the heart He Himself has awakened.

So what does it really mean to treat the Bible as the highest authority? It means reading it as the Church’s original foundation and lasting guide, but always remembering that it points beyond itself to the living God. It means accepting both its human and divine sides; recognizing that it was written by people in history, yet inspired by the Spirit; without fear or arrogance. It means letting Christ, who stands at the center of Scripture, shape how we understand every passage within it and every teaching outside it. It means rejecting both extremes: the rigidity that refuses to think and the relativism that refuses to believe. Instead, it calls us to the hard but freeing work of truth. Most of all, it means trusting Scripture to do what no other authority can; to not just give us information, but to change our hearts.

Only God is perfect and without error. Yet He has not left us without direction. He has given us a book that speaks through many voices but bears one message; a Church that teaches and serves under that Word; and a Spirit who continues to write that Word on our hearts. In this way, Scripture stands above every human authority because it refuses to become an idol. It never replaces God; it leads us back to Him. It draws us from the written page to the living Presence, from simply hearing to truly obeying, from the comfort of certainty to the courage of trust. And in doing so, it becomes the truest authority of all; the means by which God’s own truth reaches us, liberates us, and makes us faithful.

Peace, Happy Sabbath.