A relationship between ecclesial groups—just as with families—tends not to breakdown in one decisive moment. (It’s a process, not an event.) And yet there are often watershed moments to which we can point and often a single event of great moment that shows the relationship utterly fractured. That is why one of the dates that every Anglican should know is AD 1054.
Hailed by some as the moment of the nation’s salvation, castigated by some as the beginning of Romish errors, St Gregory’s sending of Augustine to become the first archbishop of Canterbury in AD 597 surely ranks among the dates that all Anglicans should know.
Where before being a Christian could get you killed, now it could get you promoted; Constantine had, in effect, created the nominal Christian. Monasticism was, in part, a reaction against this laxity and to maintain the urgency and discipline required to hold the faith in the days of martyrdom. Rather than seeking the minimum required to acquire the title, the hermits and monastics sought to embody the maximum.
Constantine saw trouble brewing. The faith that he hoped would help cement the embattled empire was threatening to cause further rifts. Taking matters into his own hands, he called a meeting of bishops to the city of Nicaea in the year 325.
AD 70 and the destruction of the Temple thus triggered the formal break between Christianity and Judaism, and was one of the driving forces in the writing of the New Testament. In their own grappling with the laws of the Temple and the mysteries of Christ, the authors of the New Testament present their own vision of the Temple—one not built by human hands.
The great stories of the ancestral patriarchs and matriarchs were collected and woven together. The records of the early years of the kingdom of Israel and its split into Israel and Judah were updated and reworked. The words of the prophets were gathered and formed into stable collections. The songs of the Temple were collected even if there was no place left to sing them