Christianity took a two-fold detour in the fourth century. First, when the emperor Constantine became Christian and spread Christianity through the empire in order to make some peace between warring factions of Christians.
While peacemaking is a good thing, Christianity paid a severe price when it moved from being essentially a thorn in the empire's side to being a crusade in Christ's name.
New Testament scholar Dominic Crossan wonders aloud if the Nicene Creed called by Constantine was a 'nightmare.'
The 'desert fathers' movement (beginning third century) and subsequent monastic movements (beginning fourth century) both resisted the dominant imperial values of the imperial culture before and after Constantine.
The price paid by a so-called "Cristian empire" was severe on indigenous peoples, their cultures and religions especially from the time of Columbus on. "Christian empires" of the Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, or Belgian colonizers seldom qualified as something Christ-like.
The second shadow that emerged in the name of Christianity in the fourth century was that of Augustine and his cherished Neo-Platonism.
Augustine planted dualisms of body vs. soul, sexuality vs. spirituality, nature vs. grace, male vs. female alongside his notion of original sin that fashioned a dualistic Christianity that spread in Western Europe and beyond.
There were movements that resisted this dualism--Aquinas was key--but as historian Pere Chenu laments, it never really took hold in the church.
Christianity became less and less moored to Jesus and his teachings and to the original meaning of the Christ event--including the Cosmic Christ and a creation-centered mysticism.
Unmoored from the gospels, it became moored to the needs of empire-building including invoking the idea of 'redemption' (understood as redemption from original sin) as the rallying cry to conquer peoples of the earth. And preaching that one was doomed to hell if this 'redemption' was not accomplished exclusively through Christ. And feeding the Doctrine of Discovery (mercifully but belatedly buried recently by Pope Francis after five+ centuries).
The Nicene Creed, crafted by bishops under the eye of Emperor Constantine, does show important traces of the Cosmic Christ cosmology, but it astonishingly leaves out the teaching of Jesus. No mention whatsoever of 'love thy neighbor'; 'what you do to the least you do to me"; "Be you compassionate as your Father in heaven is compassionate"; the Beatitudes; or justice. One has to look elsewhere for that--maybe back to the gospels themselves?
