Tag: Pax Romana

A Historical Theological Understanding of Christ’s Death: From Hegel to Moltmann back to Maximus and Paul

Why did Jesus die? The inevitable theological response, “For our sins,” does not really explain (either sin or how Christ’s death helps) or deal with the historical circumstance of his death. Historically it is quite obvious Jesus died because of the threat he posed to both Israel and Rome, and yet this historical reality is often left out, which also leaves hanging explanation of how his death pertains to the present human predicament. However, Scripture and the early church understood the death of Christ as simultaneously pertaining to the historical outworking of what killed him.[1] Paul explains the universal appeal and answer found in the death of Christ, as the cross exposes and answers the universal predicament of sin (a death-dealing lie). Maximus the Confessor typifies the belief of the early church that Christ wielded death to defeat the enslaving grip of sin and death: “Thus the curse and death of my sin became the curse of my God, which prevented the transgression from progressing and producing the fruits of unrighteousness, but instead, in accordance with the commandment and divine righteousness, became a blessing and life without end.”[2] The death of Christ in this understanding had an immediate historical and personal impact with the historical explaining the theological.

In the modern period it is G. W. F. Hegel who returns to the historical so as to develop a practical theology, focused on the kenotic love of God poured out on the cross, providing the power to empty the self in love. Hegel sounds similar to the early church fathers, though he employs his own terminology in describing the power of Christ’s death: “The death of God is infinite negation, and God maintains himself in death, so that this process is rather a putting to death of death, a resurrection into life.”[3] Christ provides the race escape from enslavement to death. This practical historical development is most effectively taken up in the theology of Jürgen Moltmann, which I focus on below.

So, rather than leap over the historical events in explaining the theological reason for the death of Christ (as in top-down legal theories), the reason posed in history can serve as the foundation of theological explanation (bottom-up theories). In other words, rather than creating a category in the mind of God requiring the death of Christ, the human necessity due to death (religious, political, psychological, and personal) which brought about his death not only explains his death but what it accomplished. There is a theological tradition grounded in the historical necessity (Christus Victor, Recapitulation, Girardian theory, Liberation Theology, etc.), which begins with the incarnation, and there are theories which begin with the necessities of God to explain the incarnation (legal theories of atonement). I argue that theories grounded in history provide the most thorough development for understanding the reason Christ died, but also for understanding God and the world as revealed in Christ. The most obvious development of this historical understanding in the modern period is through Hegel to Moltmann, and even if one disagrees with the application of this development, Moltmann provides one of the most compelling examples giving shape to a historical theological understanding. In his key work, The Crucified God, he plots the history behind the cross to lay the ground for explaining the real-world liberation found in Christ.[4] In following his argument (in the paragraphs below), I demonstrate the return to the early Christian understanding of the cross implied in Moltmann’s practical Hegelian insight.

At a basic human and historical level, beyond theory and theology, there is little question as to why Jesus died. He was killed due to fear on the part of the Romans and Jews that he threatened their religion and their nation. He threatened the temple, the sacrifices (Roman and Jewish), the hierarchy (Roman and Jewish), and ultimately, he posed a threat to their power. From the cleansing of the temple and Jesus’ intimation of its destruction (somehow connected to him), the Jews began to plot his death. They would kill him because he threatened what was taken as essential and absolute in their religious nationalism. At his trial he was condemned as a “blasphemer,” due to his disregard of the sabbath laws and markers of clean and unclean, and it is this disregard that pertains to his understanding of God. As Moltmann argues, “With arrogant authority Jesus proclaimed God as the one who in his eschatological condescension towards lost men is free from the human observance of the prescriptions of the law, and in prevenient love shows gracious mercy towards men. By so doing, Jesus placed his preaching of God, and therefore himself, above the authority of Moses and the Torah.”[5] Jesus demonstrates God is free, through his actions on the sabbath and in his revisions and reinterpretation of the law (as in the Sermon on the Mount). What was objective and legal is made personally binding in its direct application to the human heart.

Jesus disqualified himself as a traditional rabbi, deriving authority from Moses, in that he placed himself above the law and its limits, specifically in extending grace beyond and in contradiction to the law. He forgives transgressors, he abolishes contemporary distinctions between righteous and unrighteous, devout and sinful, and religious and secular. He set himself in the place of God as judge, which did not fit expectations of the Son of Man, who in the last days would judge sinners and redeem the righteous. Jesus turned toward sinners, which was not how God was expected to establish righteousness. The Jews assumed the Messiah would shame sinners and exalt those who keep the law. “Anyone who preaches the imminent kingdom of God not as judgment, but as the gospel of the justification of sinners by grace, and demonstrates it as such through his life with sinners and tax-collectors, contradicts the hope based upon the law, is deceiving the sinners and tax-collectors and is blaspheming the God of hope.”[6]

Both John and Jesus preach “The kingdom of God is at hand,” but Jesus’ depiction of this kingdom is not one of judgment. “Rather, anticipated by the word of the gospel which Jesus preached and his living offering of himself to the poor, the sinners and the tax-collectors, it comes as the unconditional and free grace of God, by which the lost are sought out and those without rights, and the unrighteous, are accepted.”[7] Jesus is not leading a repentance movement but is offering righteousness through grace. His appeal is not to the law but to himself and he is offering forgiveness and healing on the basis of grace; not an appeal to the authority of the law or Moses but a direct appeal to God. Grace for those outside of the law, beyond the authority of Moses, was by definition against the institutions of Israel. The conflict, resulting in Jesus’ murder, was due to Jesus’ incomprehensible claims of authority in discrepancy with the law.

Rather than a kingdom for the righteous and judgment for the unrighteous, Jesus opens the kingdom to unrighteous sinners. He preaches a different image of God; not the God of conquering power but a God defined through grace. Jesus position as a carpenter from Nazareth, his association with sinners and the poor, his healing of the sick, and drawing in of the outcasts, speaks of God in a novel fashion, identified with the weak rather than the strong or those in control. “For Jesus the ‘radicalization of the Torah’ and the ‘transgression of the Torah’ basically both amount to the same thing, the freedom of God to show grace. Thus the right which he claimed to forgive sins goes beyond the Torah and reveals a new righteousness of God in judgment, which could not be expected according to the traditions of the law.”[8]

The means of refuting this poor, weak carpenter was to relegate him to the place of slaves by destroying him on a cross. The cross was to be refutation of all that he represented, and yet through the resurrection this refutation is defeated, making of the cross God’s full identification with the poor, the lowly, and abandoned. His death is the point of conflict between the god of the law and the God of grace. The cultic god, the guarantor of the law, and his representatives, would eliminate Christ’s challenge to the law by eliminating him. Sinners are destroyed outside of the city gates, outside of the kingdom, and this death identified him as a sinner.

This is made obvious in that even his disciples abandon him, as his death signifies his powerlessness before the law and its guardians. He is seemingly rejected by God, thus even his disciples reject him as the cross destroyed his claims on behalf of God. “He did not die through chance or misfortune, but died by the law as one who was ‘reckoned with transgressors’ (Luke 22.37). He was condemned as a ‘blasphemer’ by the guardians of the law and of faith. As they understood it, his death was the carrying out of the curse of the law.”[9] In this they were not entirely wrong, but the curse is demonstrably not simply objective to the law, but the law itself is accursed (deadly), and yet suspended in its being nailed to the cross. The resurrection confirms or makes this interpretation possible, as for the first time it is realized life is beyond the law, and not in and through the law. “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Ro 10:4).

Recognition that God is on the cross is not simply a message for Jews but is a message for all people; the principalities and powers, forces for death, killing and suffering, are undermined by the power of life beyond death. The kingdoms of Israel and Rome were politically and religiously united in killing Jesus as crucifixion is a Roman execution inflicted upon slaves and insurrectionists. The Pax Romana brings about peace through recognition of Caesar; the sort of peace the Jews submitted themselves to in shouting down Jesus as King. “We have no King but Caesar” was there final pledge of allegiance – politically and religiously. The kingdoms in conflict are not Roman and Jewish, but Jesus Kingdom and the kingdoms of this world.

 It is not a matter of separating out the political and religious but separating out two kinds of kingdom: the violent versus the non-violent, the coercive and militant versus the peaceable, the legal versus the loving, the rich versus the poor, law versus grace, or ultimately, Caesar versus Jesus. Loving enemies and praying for those that persecute you, is a revolution “not of this world.” “God comes not to carry out just revenge upon the evil, but to justify by grace sinners, whether they are Zealots or tax collectors, Pharisees or sinners, Jews or Samaritans, and therefore, also, whether they are Jews or Gentiles.”[10] Jesus opposes both the legalism of Israel and Rome, in promoting the kingdom of righteousness through grace. He set free from the law of vengeance and the power of death, characteristic of this world’s kingdoms. “He denied that human beings, Zealots and Romans, had the right to pass judgment and execute vengeance in their own cause: ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone’ (John 8.7).”[11] Christ reveals God is not a righteous avenger set to judge and destroy. God is a God of mercy and grace, and Jesus’ preaching sets humans free from the legalism of their gods of vengeance so as to establish His different kingdom.

This is why they kill him, as his opponents understood he was attacking their basic religious and political principles. He opposed Israel and Rome alike: “The freedom of Jesus and his proclamation of God’s law of grace affected not only the Pharisees and Zealots, but equally the cultic and political religious foundations of the Pax Romana and the archaic conceptions of righteousness held by all men.”[12]  This is demonstrated in the subsequent persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire. The Christian rejection of emperor worship was simultaneously political and religious: “By their irreligiousness they were introducing revolt into the heavenly world amongst the gods and were therefore bringing revolt into the religious and political world on earth which corresponded to those gods.”[13] Jesus and his followers alienated the anti-Roman Jews and the anti-Jewish Romans, as he challenged their ground rules. A Christianity which begins with some supposed “pure theology,” free of politics and history and aimed at a private sphere between God and self, misses both what Christ opposed and what enslaves nations, empires, and kingdoms and citizens of this world.

This understanding of the death of Christ provides a traceable, universal continuity through history to theology. It also directly connects sin with evil, which strangely tends to be separated in legal theories explaining Christ’s death. Philosophical problems of evil or the notion of radical evil (the lying possibility of evil or its representations having an ontological ground) are often dismissed from theology and thought to pertain only theoretically or philosophically.[14] Yet, it is obvious in the New Testament that the reification of death, hades, and the devil, (the power of nothingness in Hegel’s terminology) as ultimate powers, is the lie exposed by the death and resurrection of Christ. The state exercised power by presuming the absolute nature of death, and Christ overturned this satanic notion.

The presumption of the first Christians is that it is only in the death of Christ that God and world are fully revealed. The hypostatic union of the incarnation reveals God’s relation to the world, but it also reveals the deepest truth about God, that he is a “suffering God” who suffers with and for us. In Paul’s explanation, the sufferings or groanings of the cosmos are taken up into God, through the Son and the Spirit, and the Christian joins in this cosmic, intra-Trinitarian intercession into the world (Rom 8:22-26). The suffering of the Son simultaneously pertains to the identity of God and the world as the uncreated God, who is for us is, revealed in His humanity. “This mystery is for Maximus ‘the ineffable and incomprehensible union according to hypostasis of divinity and humanity’ that brings created and uncreated natures ‘into perfect identity.’ In this very identity—the one wrought in history from conception in Mary’s womb to cross to Resurrection to Ascension—every being (not just the man Jesus) ‘receives its beginning and end.’”[15] The story of God and the world are known only through the particular history revealed in Christ. “This is the mystery that circumscribes all the ages, and which reveals the grand plan of God, a super-infinite plan infinitely pre-existing the ages an infinite number of times. The essential Word of God became a messenger of this plan when He became man, and, if I may rightly say so, revealed Himself as the innermost depth of the Father’s goodness while also displaying in Himself the very goal for which creatures manifestly received the beginning of their existence.”[16]

Maximus describes the defeat of sin and the deliverance of creation as a simultaneous movement: “This mystery brings about the utter destruction of all the properties and movements contrary to nature that were introduced into nature through the primal disobedience. It also produces the perfect restoration of all the properties and movements that were previously in nature, according to which absolutely none of the principles of beings can ever be adulterated.”[17] In Maximus explanation, Christ defeated the Evil One who was holding us captive to death, and he “snatched us away” through the resurrection as he is our rest and healing and grace: “Rest, because through His brief life He abolished the law of our dire slavery to the flesh. Healing, because through His resurrection He healed us from the wound of death and corruption. Grace, because through faith He distributes adoption in the Spirit of God the Father, and the grace of divinization to each who is worthy.”[18] The deliverance from sin is a historical and practical reality, immediately addressing the human predicament, and in and through this rescue, the full reality of God is revealed.

[1] To call this sin becomes confused in modern parlance, as sin is often not connected to either the death dealing predicament that killed Christ or that which infects the human race as a murderous lie.

[2] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, trans. Maximos Constas (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press) 62.8

[3] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, trans. By R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodson and J. M. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 370.

[4] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993)

[5] Moltmann, 128.

[6] Moltmann, 129.

[7] Moltmann, 129-130.

[8] Moltmann, 132.

[9] Moltmann, 133.

[10] Moltmann, 142.

[11] Moltmann, 143.

[12] Moltmann, 143

[13] Moltmann, 144.

[14] As N. T. Wright puts it, “Theologies of the cross, of how God deals with sin through the death of Jesus, have not normally grappled with the larger problem of evil. Conversely, most people who have written about ‘the problem of evil’  within philosophical theology have not grappled sufficiently with the cross as part of both the analysis and the solution of that problem” (N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (Downers Grove: Inter Varsity Press, 2006), 77). Here is the middle way between radical evil and privation theory in that radical evil is an objective possibility as part of the lie of sin but is exposed in the cross of Christ as having no ontological ground.

[15] Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (p. 90). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

[16] Wood, 90.

[17] Maximus, 63.19.

[18] Maximus, 64.7.

The Gospel Versus Constantinian Commonsense

Resurrection marks the end of the inevitability of death and the commonsense strategies for gaining life based on death and violence. That is, nonviolence is not simply a footnote in Christian understanding but it is the recognition and realization that the death and resurrection of Christ opens up the possibility of a new reality which is no longer controlled by death. What people can know about God and humanity, apart from resurrection, turns out to be profoundly mistaken due to the very specific way that the logic of death constrains this understanding. As James Allison points out, this involves more than a mistaken understanding, but is wrong as it is actively involved in death.[1] If the fullness of the gospel necessarily involves freedom from this mistaken logic of death what are we to make of a Constantinian Christianity which betrays this core value of the gospel?

Apparently, it never occurred to anyone to challenge Constantine with the fulness of the gospel, and suggest that he sell everything, stop being the emperor, acknowledge King Jesus and lay down his sword. No one seemed to have pressed Jesus words upon him about hating his own life in order to become a true disciple. No one apparently taught Constantine about the Sermon on the Mount, turning the other cheek, going the second mile, and being a servant to all. No one explained to him that for its first three hundred years the church had so repudiated violence that Christians were not allowed to serve in the army. Perhaps the opportunity was too great and so the harder part or the core of the gospel was set aside, not just for Constantine, but for the church in general, so that a new sensibility arose and even a new way to interpret Scripture (one can turn their cheek spiritually while doing otherwise bodily, one can both love and kill their enemy, according to Augustine, as inward spirituality is not thwarted by outward violence, and attitudes are more important than acts).

 The church began to accommodate evil practices so as to achieve a greater good. Violence, power, and worldly empire became a vehicle for the gospel and what went unnoticed is that the gospel became a vehicle for violence, power, and worldly empire. The willingness to accede to the necessity of evil as a tool in bringing about righteousness brought about a new neo-platonic reading of the Bible, in which it is presumed God is establishing his Kingdom by utilizing the political power of this world. Where early Christians had recognized Rome as the evil empire, they were now part of Rome, and it seemed impossible to pose the possibility that “we ourselves have become evil.” Yet, isn’t this the required entry point into Christianity. It is not simply that we begin with recognition of personal sin and evil but recognition that our entire world – religious, political, and moral – needs to be changed up in order to enter the Kingdom of God.

For example, Saul went through all the requirements, religious and legal, so that he might arrest and bring bound to Jerusalem any who were teaching the insurrectionist religion of the Way. It was not only legally clear, but it was common sense that this new religion was dangerous both religiously and politically. This was the consensus of all the leading Jewish authorities, as is evident in their arrest and persecution of the first Christians. The first lesson of Christianity is that common sense, even that based on religious and legal conviction, is subject to common delusion. The presumption that the good guys and bad guys are easily discernible is the first challenge Christianity poses. Yet, this original challenge to commonsense was overwhelmed by the Constantinian shift.

Where we find the Bereans searching the Scriptures to test even the apostolic word (Acts 17:11), the Constantinian shift would include the notion that what is known by a shared commonsense must coincide with the Bible. It was presumed that God was now placing Christianity in a new position in regard to earthly power. Isn’t it clear that it is God’s work in history to use Rome as his instrument to propagate the gospel? It might have seemed indelicate to point out that Constantine may have been using the Christian religion for his own political purposes, and it is still apparently a sort of indelicacy to suggest that the Donatists and Arians were not simply a heretical challenge but an ethnic and political challenge to the Empire. To raise such issues endangers not simply the political decisions of Rome but the choice of the church to accede to Rome, to hold councils and make theological as well as structural decisions for the church, only as Constantine and Rome allowed.

No one needed to go to their Bible to justify the Constantinian shift and it seems not to have occurred to anyone to challenge Constantine. No one told him that if he wanted to be a Christian, he would have to undergo the same repudiation of the world as everyone else. No one thought to say, if you want to be a servant of Jesus this must be your first priority and being a politician, a warrior, and using violence are ruled out of court. No one suggested he might consider relinquishing the throne so as to serve the true King, and by not challenging Constantine the church became Constantinian. The church accommodated Constantine and not the other way round. Instead, it was presumed the evil empire had become the good empire and all any good Christian needed to do was be a good Roman. The questioning of common sense, which Christianity originally demanded, became a near impossibility and with this impossibility commonsense trumped the Bible. But this was only made possible where it was presumed there is a natural revelation, a commonsense intelligibility, which became the new frame through which the Bible was interpreted. No one needed to go to their Bible to justify abandoning nonviolence, the view held for centuries. Likewise, cooperation with state purposes was exchanged for a radically subversive relation to the state (a radical subordination which challenged the legitimacy of the state through martyrdom), such that a new ethic (neo-platonic dualism) and new epistemology (commonsense understanding – truth by consensus) displaced the fairly straightforward notion that Jesus provides an alternative knowing.

Of course, this new ethic and epistemology is actually the old way. The ethic of empire is the ethic of the city state is the ethic grounded in nature is the ethic grounded in the self. The knowledge of good and evil, natural epistemology, what we know to be obviously true, became synonymous with a totality of culture which was presumed to be biblical. Or to state it more precisely, what was biblical was presumed to fit into a totality of understanding. Jesus was inserted into an already existing understanding and interpreted accordingly, rather than founding a new understanding. This may have been so gradual and so overwhelming as to have been unconscious. For Augustine the just war tradition and Roman legal tradition constituted something like a natural understanding. He was caught up in the current of history which seemed to be, if only for a short period, the new way God was making himself known.

Retrospectively we should be able to question this “natural legacy” which has been handed down to us, not simply to reject it, but to recognize something radical happened.  For something as basic as the shift from a near complete rejection of military service for Christians to the requirement that all Roman soldiers must be Christian, and the accompanying shift from a rejection of violence to its acceptance, reflects a completely different reading strategy. It was not that suddenly it was understood that Jesus allowed for violence and military service, but commitment to Jesus’ teaching was now mitigated by stronger commitments and his teaching was relegated to a different plane or a different dimension (spiritual, future, etc.). The circumstance which could turn killing, stabbing, shooting someone in the face (in more recent terms), into work fit for a follower of Christ, clearly reflects that an entirely different epistemology is at work with a different set of overriding commitments.

To suggest that these new stronger commitments are not reflected in the focus and decisions of the early church councils, without question, is simply more Constantinianism. The church that takes the decisions of the councils as an unquestionable authority is, without reflection, accepting the commonsense approach which was assumed and which guided the councils. To equate the decision of the councils as Holy Spirit guided, as is done in mainline churches, may or may not be a swallowing of mistakes in the details but the larger question is if it is a blunder in regard to the way God works in the world. Are the councils guided by the Spirit of peace if they have relinquished a basic commitment to peace? Even should the answer be yes, isn’t it the case that certain subjects are foreclosed for debate if perceived to challenge the empire (pacifism, the role of power, the church and the sword, etc.) while other subjects will be open for debate because they may indirectly serve the purposes of empire?

Roland Bainton notes that there were no less than seven contestants for the throne which Constantine finally acquired, but part of this acquisition was at the same time through the manipulation of the empire through religion. The various candidates were utilizing policies of persecution or toleration for Christianity as a political instrument, and inevitably the Christians gravitated to their champion, Constantine. “He could the more readily be accepted by the Church because already in the popular mind a fusion was taking place between Rome and Christianity as over against the barbarian and the pagan.” In this struggle no one questioned or perhaps felt the impropriety of Christians themselves taking up arms and of the cross being inscribed on instruments of war. Constantine even counted himself a successor to the martyrs in assuming that the martyrs had commenced with their blood what he had completed with his sword. The Roman peace, the Pax Romana, was equated with Christian peace and it was assumed that the prophecy that swords would be beaten into plowshares was now fulfilled by dent of the Roman sword. “The religion of the one God and the empire of one ruler were recognized as having been made for each other” and one empire and emperor could now be added to the confession of one faith, one lord, and one baptism.  A unified empire will function around a unified religion, and isn’t it noteworthy that the enemies of the empire, even if Christian, were also deemed heretics and classified with the barbarians? Bainton notes that theological divisions fused with already existing rifts within the social structure so that in the West the Donatist controversy in northern Africa pitted the Berber and Punic against the Latin elements and in the East the Christological controversies set the Copts, Syrians, and Armenians against the Greeks.[2]

To imagine it was only theological considerations at play in the early church councils would seem to overlook the fact that the overwhelming theological consideration – ethics, the role of church and empire, the role of violence, was not up for debate. At a minimum, might one consider along with J. Denny Weaver, that the image of God that emerges from the councils, by excluding nonviolence, might have a skewed image of God. “Recall that the formula of Chalcedon proclaimed Jesus as ‘fully God and fully man.’ With awareness of the nonviolent character of the reign of God made visible in the narrative of Jesus and expressed in narrative Christus Victor, I simply ask, ‘What is there about the formulas of Nicea and Chalcedon that expresses the character of the reign of God, in particular its nonviolent character?’ ‘What is there about these formulas that can shape the church that would follow Jesus in witnessing to the reign of God in the world?’ Answer: virtually nothing.”[3] He concludes, it is only “the church which no longer specifically reflected Jesus’ teaching about nonviolence and his rejection of the sword that can proclaim Christological formulas devoid of ethics as the foundation of Christian doctrine. The abstract categories of “man” and “God” in these formulas allow the church to accommodate the sword and violence while still maintaining a confession about Christ at the center of its theology.”[4] Anselmian theology, Calvinist theology, transactional theology, substitutionary atonement, to say nothing of notions of a violent God endorsing violent Christians, would seem to be the direct result. A result not so much, perhaps, of what the councils included but of what they excluded.

This exclusion served the purpose of allowing for the return to a “natural theology” or a commonsense understanding. But as Allison points out, “The resurrection of Jesus was not a miraculous event within a pre-existing framework of understanding of God, but the event by which God recast the possibility of human understanding of God.”[5] The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus exposed this pre-existing commonsense understanding as profoundly wrong. It was and is wrong in its involvement with death and it proves itself wrong in a return and continued involvement with this death dealing logic.

[1] James Allison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes (New York: Crossroad, 1998), pages 115-119.

[2] Roland Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace: A Historical Survey and Critical Re-evaluation (Nashville: Abingdon Press,1990), 85-100.

[3] J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement, Second Edition (Kindle Locations 1592-1593). Kindle Edition.

[4] Ibid, Kindle Locations 1604-1606.

[5] Allison, op. cit.

A Different Form of the Faith: The Constantinian Shift

“The accession of Constantine terminated the pacifist period in church history.” Roland Bainton

If peace of the pacifist kind, as defined by Jesus and as taught by the church for its first 300 years, is central to the gospel, in what sense can it be said that Christianity survived the Constantinian shift? Roland Bainton traces small remnants of pacifism throughout church history, but the overwhelming sense is that the flame of the true teaching of Christ flickered only slightly, if at all, for long periods of church history. Since we are located on the other side of this shift in a period as Constantinian as any other, it may be difficult to recognize the contrast between Christianity before Constantine and the Christendom that came after. But as many are turning from the church in protest at the ugliness of the Christian religion it may be the opportune time to point out that the religion and teaching of Christ have been all but erased by the Constantinian form of the faith. Here in summary fashion is a delineation of the difference Constantinianism wrought upon the Christian faith. (While the shift brought about by the man Constantine is partly in view, the shift begins prior to his conversion and some one hundred years after his death.)

1. A different authority: Church councils came to bear a new authority which continues in both East and West. Constantine called himself the bishop of bishops and he applied his pagan assumptions about the place of priests in the empire. Not yet baptized, Constantine determined the phrasing and was the decisive voice at the Council of Nicaea in determining questions surrounding the Trinity. As John Howard Yoder points out, his primary concern in determining doctrinal issues, as with later emperors, was what was best for the empire. The presumption was that the church must speak with a unified voice on doctrinal questions and the council presumed to be that voice. The rise of the centralized leadership vested in the pope can be attributed to the unfolding of the same Constantinian logic in which there is a singular head and voice for each realm of power and this singularity is presumed to be unifying.

2. A different ethic: Where Christians refused military service prior to Constantine, subsequent to Constantine Christians were not only favored but it was required (by 436) that soldiers be Christians. There was not only an abandonment of nonviolence but there was no longer the resource in the New Testament for ethics, as this was a new situation, so there was a turn, by Ambrose and Augustine, to the Roman heritage, especially Cicero, to work out a new form of the Christian ethic for those serving Rome.

3. A different worldview: Augustine’s Neo-Platonism and the rise of Constantine would cement the duality that presumed God was using the emperor to do some things and Christians to do other things. There is the peace of Rome, the Pax Romana, and the peace of Christians, which were thought to complement one another. It is from this period that a notion like that of Robert Jeffress arises, that Jesus in not fit to be Caesar or president. Should the ruler be Christian he must employ something other than the ethic of Jesus to rule, as the world is split and Jesus’ ethics pertains to the private portion of that world. The soul/body split necessary for a violent Christianity became the norm.

4.  A different definition of Church: Under Theodosius, who became emperor in 379, an edict defined the one true Catholicism as Trinitarian believers in communion with the bishops of Rome and Alexandria. The Council of Constantinople confirmed that those who were less willing to forgive the apostate (the Donatists) or those with an alternative view of Christ (the Arians) did not have the support of the state and therefore were not part of the church. Augustine believed that the state had to force the heretics (he quotes Jesus, “Compel them to come in”), the Donatists, to comply to the edict and eventually their property was confiscated and their meetings banned. State support determines the boundaries of the church through state power.

This clear delineation of who was counted out was aggravated by the fact, that unless you were a Donatist or Arian or a barbarian, everybody was Christian (except a few Jews) no matter the level of objective commitment to Christianity. So, Augustine declared the true church was now invisible as the visible spectacle offered no hint of a subjective commitment. This leads to the notion that most people counted as Christians were not considered saved.  The church is to be found primarily among the priests, authorized by other priests, so that the sequence of ordination coming down from Jesus through the bishops and through those authorized to perform the sacraments, most clearly demonstrated the presence of God. Even priests and bishops though, may not be elect as they can be hypocrites and so the invisibility of the church is nearly complete. This means that the visible form of Christianity can be described in non-New Testament ways, as Neoplatonic dualism divides the visible and invisible realms nearly completely.

5. A different definition of state: Rome became a “Christian state” as it transitioned from the persecution of Christians to the imperial requirement of one Christian norm for all citizens. People were still free to be non-Christians but they would suffer disadvantages and they had no alternative public worship. This would have subsidiary effects on most every aspect of Christian doctrine, as being baptized and remaining in communion involved both church and state.

6.  A different understanding of church/society relations: The story is told that Pope Sylvester and Emperor Constantine agreed to split between them the realm of the empire and the realm of the church so as to work in support of one another. The practical result was that church government fell into the hands of civil government, and the one who bore the sword would determine who became a bishop.

7. A different meaning of baptism: Because of the new relationship of church and state becoming a Christian and becoming a citizen were fused, so that infant baptism (historians cannot agree upon its origins) became universal – no citizen should be left unbaptized. Neither citizenship nor church membership were voluntary.

8. A different set of rituals: To accommodate the 90 percent of the population who had not been Christian prior to Constantine pagan rituals, such as spring fertility celebrations, could be celebrated under the auspices of Passion and Easter. Christmas is usually considered to be the best example, though its origins are more obscure, of an incorporation of a pagan celebration into the church. The cult of the dead, seemingly the universal religion presuming the dead hear and answer prayer, was given a Christian flavor. These new celebrations arose with Constantine as an attempt to take in what was already being observed and celebrated.

9. A different theology: The church would undertake a reinterpretation of troublesome parts of the Bible inveighing against violence (the sermon on the Mount is for the individual acting in private) and would focus on obscure passages to illicit the possibility for violence (the cleansing of the temple, Jesus command to get a sword, etc.) and there was a relinquishing of notions of the possibility of perfection (not possible as government would always be necessary to constrain sin), and sin is inescapable and Original and thus infects all upon conception, and gradually a new meaning would be given to the death of Christ (divine satisfaction rather than Christus Victor – the implications of which were less than flattering for the emperor – Satan’s earthly representative). Augustine’s notion of the church invisible came with a new doctrine of election. He presumed about 5% of the population of Rome might be elect and saved. No one could be sure who might be included in that 5%, as God’s election is secret (we are not far from Calvin’s double predestination).

10. A different idea of history: Prior to Constantine the singular fact for Christians was their life and experience of the body of Christ, while after Constantine they would have to take it on faith that there is a church (as it is invisible). Before Constantine it was presumed that God is at work in history but it was not clear how, while after Constantine it was a fact that God governs history through Rome and the emperor. As Yoder concludes, the eschatology of the New Testament had been turned upside down.[1]

Protestantism is not going to escape the Constantinian shift, but if anything, aggravates it in its dependence upon particular princes and city states to preserve the new form of the faith. As a result, notions of just war, the role of church and state, especially with Luther’s notion that God is doing one thing with the hand of state and another with the hand of the church (clarifying Augustine’s two cities), will accentuate the problem of violence. Augustine’s Constantinian faith created a dualism that continues in Protestant notions that perfection is for another world and what counts now is the inner faith. While there is a reaction against the authority of the pope and a turn to the authority of the Bible, the Bible will be made to serve, in an unbalanced manner, as the corrective to the authority invested in pope and emperor. At the same time, the continuation of just war theory indicates that the New Testament is still relegated to a limited role: Jesus did not command or permit the sort of moral understanding entailed in the theory. Common sense, natural theology, human reason, in spite of Luther’s protests against the theologians of glory, will continue as a parallel authority.

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[1] Throughout I am following John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution (pp. 57-65). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.