By This Sign: AD 250 to 350 from the Decian Persecution to the Constantine era is the third volume of The Christians.

By This Sign opens with the horrors of the empire-wide Decian persecution in the mid-third century. It takes the reader through the false peace that followed, the deceptive half-century when the Christians were tolerated, then sees them suddenly engulfed by the most hideous persecution ever in the reign of the emperor Diocletian.

Yet this darkest of eras turns out to have been the eve of their greatest victory. Out of the chaos that followed Diocletian’s retirement there emerges the first emperor to become a serious Christian ally. Such was Constantine and the thrilling story of the chain of battles that led to his ascendancy is told in detail – including the Cross he describes seeing in the sky with its startling message: “By this Sign, conquer!”

This he did, but his victory created almost as many problems for the Christians as it solved. For now they were The Establishment. Where before, being Christian meant putting your life on the line, now it became a path to power, position and prestige. The result was tens of thousands of half-Christians or nominal Christians. How were these to be dealt with?

Even more pressing, the puzzling mystery of Jesus’ theology now came upon them urgently. Was he God? Was he man? Most said he was both, but then how could he be both? Christendom was now in command, but Christendom was soon bitterly divided. Constantine called the Council of Nicea to resolve the question. It produced the answer, but the answer was far from unanimous and in the coming century it would very nearly destroy the church.

Constantine was baptized as the hour of his death approached, affording the opportunity to assess this intriguing man. In a fit of rage he had executed as a traitor the son he cherished, and then discovered the young man son utterly innocent. Could anything atone for such a sin? God himself could, said the Christians, and that’s what the Council of Nicea was all about.

Foreword to By This Sign

This volume, third of a projected twelve, completes the first great era of Christianity. The three together—whose time frame runs from Pentecost to the Constantine era, a span of about three hundred years—tell how the Christians rose from their beginnings as a despised Jewish sect to become the dominant religious force in the Roman world.

Though their ascent followed Constantine’s military victory, the Christians’ triumph was in no sense a military achievement. Constantine did not bring the Christians to power. Much more assuredly, they brought him to power, for they were able to provide much of what Rome had lost, a sense of unity and purpose. However fitfully and imperfectly it was employed, that component was furnished by Jesus Christ, and Constantine’s great city of Constantinople remained a Christian bastion for the next eleven hundred years.

Rather than a triumphal march, the Christians’ rise was a path of bitter pain and suffering. Their ordeal reached its apogee in the final phase. Twice during the span of this volume—under Decius and Valerian, then some fifty years later under Diocletian, Galerius and Daia—the empire’s officialdom launched vicious campaigns of torture, slavery and execution to stamp this movement out. Because of the staggering loyalty to Christ of so many Christians, all these efforts failed. Then came Constantine, who in effect decided: If you can’t beat them, join them—which he did.

How sincerely he joined them has been debated by Christians ever since. To many in the West, he was a mere opportunist who poisoned Christianity by making it a path to wealth and power. To eastern Christians, however, he is a revered saint. We have done our best in this volume to reflect the facts as they are known. Most will conclude, we think, that it is not at all an easy question. He was a man of dire contradictions.

But they will understand also why Christians of the age preferred Constantine’s privileges to Diocletian’s executioners. Our era has come to believe in a neutral middle position called “pluralism,” in which the practice of all law-abiding religions is permitted. But that concept is scarcely a hundred years old, and already we see state authority increasingly invoked to inhibit Christian activity and the expression of Christian thought. Perhaps, therefore, a coming generation will discover that there is no middle position, that the painful choice must always lie between a Constantine and a Diocletian. Time will tell.

Ted Byfield