Living in a Christian World

Last week my blog discussed how St. Paul spread the Christian beliefs, this week I am going to discuss what happened after many people begun believing and following St. Paul's ideas on Christianity. "Christendom" was the term used to identify the group of Christians that had faith in Christ and followed the ways of the bible. After time this group grew to be very large, and it is categorized into three different time periods: The early Christendom, middle Christendom, and the late Christendom.

The early Christendom period was when Christianity was first introduced to the Western world during the second century. Christianity was a different belief system and many felt unsure about the ideas it contained, so therefore many were prosecuted for believing these ideas.

The middle Christendom was during the Renaissance period. During this period Christianity was brought into more aspects of everyday life, economics, social life and especially politics. The church was now considered an institution and the Byzantium Empire was becoming a member of the "Christendom". Many would unsure if the Christian beliefs of the political leaders were something that would continue into more recent generation, or if it was only popular because Christianity was still new to the world. The Byzantium empire eventually lost control over the Islam and Muslim territories, resulting in a major decline of the Byzantium empire. This event ended the middle Christendom.

During the late Christendom the Western church had control over the majority of European Christians. A true pope was identified by the splitting of the Western world into the complete control by three men that were chosen by politics. Each of these men were claiming to be the true pope. This crisis caused each state to operate on an independent level. The Western world was no longer depending on other states. These changes caused centralized monarchies to form and also the Hundred Years' War to increase in process. At the end of the war enough money was raised from taxation of the public to officially establish the English Church.

The Christendom period had several of changes, and each change led the Western world a little closer to the development of the English Church. Without these doubts and wars fought about Christianity, it would not be as strong as a religion as it is to this day. Here is a video of the artifacts, artwork, and famous cathedrals during the rise of Christianity. I find the song to also have meaning to the rise of Christianity. Many truly did view Jesus as the sun, because it was a fresh idea and the results of following Christianity were appealing and bright!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christendom