Early Church Errors Repeating?

And about secular rulers getting involved -- if you note the actions of those killed, they also included quite a bit of "let's push away the kings and nobility" -- from the Cathars onwards. The kings had a reason for supporting the status quo

One of the reasons for the success of Luther, besides the religious angle was that it did not, unlike Hus, push aside the existing princelings

Indeed princelings from the Germanic to the Hungarian, adopted this as a means to push the Germanic Emperor away

it becoming too worldly in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.

possibly and now with a humble clean-up, it seems to be changing back. The R also was disastrous for Christianity in purely logistics -- it divided Christendom right when it was facing the renewed Ottoman Empire

If, instead of focusing on Hus and then on the 30 years war, Christendom had focused on the Turks, the Balkans would have been under turkish occupation for a much shorter time

As for the demise of the nation-state, in favor of something less centralized, I don’t think that is ever going to happen, and not just because of nuclear weapons.

I actually see that happening

The nation-state is a fairly recent creation, arising only in the mid 1800s

until that point in time, say in France, only 10% spoke what we call French. The French forced "French" on Occitan, Breton etc. speakers and at the same time the English forced English on the Welsh, Cornish, Manx, Scots, Gaels, Irish etc. and the Russians forced Russian on the Poles, Baltic Germans etc. and the Germans standardised their language (Italy didn't do this centralization until later)

But this over-centralization is falling apart in Western Europe where Wales and Scotland will break away from England in some time, where Spain is falling apart (though in fairness, Spain is already a very decentralized state where each region has its own flag, president and even language/secondary language), where the Germans have a decentralized federal state, where Belgian is splitting into Walloons and Flemish

It's not so apparent in Eastern Europe, except Romania - in Poland for instance, after losing 20% of her population and being physically shifted 500 km to the west, the regional differences were mostly wiped out, but even here, the Kashubians have their own language (not a dialect) and separate identity and Łemkos and Boyks (Romanian descendent but Eastern Slavizied peoples in the forested Carpathians) see themselves as separate (which they are) from the Polish people

In Romania there is a dual sense of centralization due to the desired integration with Moldavia and decentralization where Wallach etc. want a separate identity

In Czechoslovakia, the Czechs and Slovaks moved apart even though their languages could be argued as dialects of each other and even in Czechia the Moravians see a separate identity from the Czechs (but no separatist sentiment)

In Yugoslavia - well, you know, but did you know that the language spoken by Serbs, Bosnians and Croats is basically the same? and also that the languages of Montenegro and Macedonia are, arguably, just dialects of Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian respectively?

No, the nation state is dead and free movement of people around the world is the final nail in the coffin

Thanks, i’m not sure if bethel read that

People have always had ethnic, tribal, and linguistic differences, but that doesn’t mean the nation-state is obsolete, or about to go away, even you see balkanization. How many ethnicities are there in Russia? Even after the Soviet Union fell, they’ve still managed to mostly hold that nation-state together.

In Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, we’ve had plenty of divisions, but those were mostly very artificially constructed nations to begin with. If they toppled, it just highlights the weakness of inorganically created nations imposed externally, and not nations in general.

It’s kind of pointless to sit here and try to speculate on what the fate of Christianity would have been if not for Constantine’s actions. We simply have no way of knowing what the repercussions would have been of a historical change of that magnitude. It’s the kind of things you could write sagas of speculative fiction about, but that’s all you would end up with, fiction, since it never happened.

All I can do is look at what did happen, and wonder if the Christian churches did what God wanted them to do or not. If I conclude they didn’t, then I still don’t really know what would have happened if they had instead done things more correctly. I believe that God’s hand can be seen in the spread of Christianity, and so, how can I account for what role His influence might have played under other circumstances? To me, that’s just an exercise in futility.

Not completely pointless. Christianity spread along Roman roads and with Roman governance. The Roman Empire essentially had nothing innate to combat it -- Roma took other gods like Zeus and made it's own hearth gods like Jupiter take the same characteristics. But this was a dead-end religion granting no real peace that Christianity -- or Mazdaiism or Isisism granted

The only competition to Christianity was Mithraism, a branch of Mazdaism, but an inherent threat as that was the religion of the Zoroastrian Sassanids

Note that Constantine didn't make Christianity the state religion -- that was 95 years later under Theodosius, Constantine was just the second emperor who removed the "illegal" status of Christianity.

All I can do is look at what did happen, and wonder if the Christian churches did what God wanted them to do or not. If I conclude they didn’t, then I still don’t really know what would have happened if they had instead done things more correctly. I believe that God’s hand can be seen in the spread of Christianity

Yes, God's hand was there -- logically a religion like that should not have spread. Yet, by spreading along Roman roads, with Roman governance models it spread to even the Germanics and Gaels and Slavs etc.

People have always had ethnic, tribal, and linguistic differences, but that doesn’t mean the nation-state is obsolete, or about to go away, even you see balkanization. How many ethnicities are there in Russia? Even after the Soviet Union fell, they’ve still managed to mostly hold that nation-state together.

Russia is an example of a non-nation state. Balkanisation is the example of nationalism and the rise of nation states -- in Russia you have a number of republics where theoretically (and in some places in practise) the various ehtnic groups have their own homeland within the governance of Russia

It is not for no reason that the Tsar had the title "Tsar of all the Russias"

perhaps we're using different definitions of nation-state. To me a nation state is one that is mono-ethnic (and to some extent mono-religious)

Japan is one that exists today and so is Qatar

In the 1800s the idea of the nation state arose in Europe where all the states were a hodge-podge of nationalities

The ones where it really caught on were in France, England, Germany and Russia. To a lesser extent it was in Spain, Italy and Sweden. In the multi-ethnic states of the Ottomon and Turkish Empires it caused the splits -- :)

England, France, Germany and Russia were not natural nation-states, but the one dominant nationality worked in the 1800s to eliminate the other nationalities or sub-nationalities

Yes, I mistook you, I thought you were meaning that we would descend into tribalism, or something like that. If we are talking mono-ethnic nation-states going away, then yes, I think that will eventually be true. We’re going in the opposite direction, towards amalgamation.

yes, I think we agree. The future is more of an assimilation or different groups getting along. The US is a good example of this, India is another. the EU is a bad direction of too much government.