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Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. But the Colson Center, I'm John Stone's Tree.

On this day in the year 8E-337, the Emperor Constantine died. Now many Christians think that Constantine was perhaps the worst thing to ever happen to the church.

By making Christianity the imperial religion, the argument goes, Constantine led the church to compromise with pagan culture.

He married it to state power and he derailed the spread of the gospel. The church, many think, was better off as a persecuted minority, after all.

Didn't church father Tertullian tell us that the blood of the martyrs is the seat of the church?

One fortunately, this argument is wrong on almost every count. Under Diocletian, the Emperor, just a little before Constantine, the church suffered the worst sustained burst of persecution in the Roman era.

Christians were tortured killed at a horrifying rate. Now to be consistent, anyone that argues that Constantine's legalization of Christianity was bad for the church,

should also cheer the persecution of Christians around the world today if it is indeed true that the blood of the martyrs is the seat of the church.

Historically speaking, however, Tertullian's claim, or at least what many think he's claiming, has not always proven true.

Persecution simply does not guarantee a healthy and growing church. Once thriving Christian communities across Central Asia, for example, were persecuted out of existence by Muslim persecution.

And in our day, the church has been nearly driven out of its ancient homeland of Iraq.

Even Tertullian himself did not wish for persecution to continue. His words about the blood of the martyrs were in fact a way to argue the futility of persecution, not to endorse martyrdom as necessary for church growth.

In fact, Tertullian is the first person in history to use the phrase, freedom of religion that we know of, and to argue for it based on the Christian doctrine of the image of God.

Worship, Tertullian argued, must be voluntary, to be acceptable, coercion in religion must end, and be replaced by religious liberty.

There's also great misunderstanding about what Constantine in fact did, a long exposure to Christianity led the emperor to look on it favorably even when he was a pagan.

For example, he appointed Lactantius, a Berber Christian convert, as his son's tutor in 309. Lactantius wrote the divine institutes, and like other early Christian writers argued for religious liberty on the grounds, that worship of God was only acceptable if it was offered freely.

In 312, when fighting a rival for the title of emperor, Constantine is reported to have seen a vision of a cross with the words in this sign conquer.

He had his soldiers paint a cross on their shields, and then won the battle of Milvian Bridge. As a result, he converted to Christianity, though there's dispute about whether his conversion was genuine.

The following year, he issued the edict of Milan, using wording and reasoning taken directly from Lactantius's divine institutes.

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