On Constantinian Christianity

In his book If the Church Were Christian Philip Gulley has a brief but instructive section on the relationship between Christianity and the state, focusing on the vital issue of Christian nonviolence.  He writes:

I’m no longer surprised by my fellow Christians’ support of war.  Indeed, some of the most strident voices for military force emanate from Christian quarters.  This, I believe, is the inevitable consequence of an institution that has grown so fond of force and power that it doesn’t hesitate to recommend it to others.  Additionally, the church has so closely identified itself with the nation that it has lost its prophetic voice and witness, conferring God’s blessing to the most immoral undertakings.

It was not always so.  For the first several hundred years of the church, Christians believed the ethic of Jesus called them to love and redeem their enemies, not kill them.  But what appeared to be a blessing became their undoing.  The emperor Constantine was favorably disposed toward Christians, and they now had a stake in his rule and forsook pacifism to perpetuate their position of privilege.  So began the uneasy alliance between state and church, which exists to this day, where allegiance to the former almost always compromises the integrity of the latter.  To be an American Christian is to hold dual citizenship, forever feeling the tension between the push of country and the pull of discipleship.

Philip Gulley, If the Church Were Christian, Rediscovering the Values of Jesus, HarperOne, 2010, pp. 148-49

This brief and overly simplified statement raises an issue of vital importance to Christianity today.  It isn’t a perfect statement of the issue.  For example, I’m afraid that Gulley overstates the extent to which most American Christians feel “the tension between the push of country and the pull of discipleship.”  In my experience most of them feel no tension at all between the demands of country and the demands of faith.  And there are Christian groups, including at least to some extent my own United Church of Christ, that have not entirely lost their prophetic voice.  Nonetheless, Gulley raises an important issue, one to which Christians pay far too little attention.

That issue is the consequences of the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire by the emperor Constantine and his successors in the fourth century CE.  Gulley is absolutely correct when he says that allegiance to the state almost always compromises the integrity of the church and when he says that that compromise began with that establishment of Christianity as the official state religion of the Roman Empire.  The ways in which Christianity was changed and debased by the Constantinian compromise, the compromise with earthly values that made it possible for Christianity to become and to remain established as the official religion of the Roman Empire, are complex and multifaceted; and understanding that compromise is essential if we are to understand the issues facing Christianity today and if Christianity is to have a future.  That compromise involved at least the following issues.

First of all, the church compromised Jesus’ ethic of nonviolence by adopting the un-Christian doctrine of the just war, a doctrine developed to allow Christians to fight to defend the now supposedly Christian Roman Empire.  Beyond that, the church shifted its focus from Jesus’ project of establishing God’s reign of peace and justice in this world to getting people into heaven in the next, a shift that benefited the ruling powers of the world that the church now served by diverting the attention of the poor and oppressed off of their plight in this life onto some kind of hope for some other life.  It abandoned Jesus’ revolutionary ethic of inclusion, justice, and peace that time and time again stood the ways and expectations of the world on their heads.  In doing so the church became the ultraconservative prop of the existing power structures rather than a prophetic voice of God’s justice and peace.  It changed from a movement of the people organized into house churches into an institutional structure that, in its Roman Catholic form, mimics that of the Roman Empire, with an Emperor-Pope at the top, a Curia-Senate below him, and regional administrators called bishops answerable not to the people but to the central government in Rome.  It even took on the pomp and splendor of the Roman Empire, spurning the poverty, simplicity, and humility of the way of Jesus in favor of all the trappings of wealth and power that it learned from the Roman imperial government.  It is difficult to imagine anything farther from the way of Jesus than the imperial pomp and ceremony of the Vatican. 

The Orthodox Churches are guilty of many of the same vices.  Perhaps even more than in the west they threw their lot in with the worldly governments of the places in which they operated.  The Russian Orthodox Church, for example, was, during the Imperial period, a primary buttress of autocracy, that oppressive form of governance that distorted Russian life for centuries and made possible (if not inevitable) the abomination that was Soviet Communism.  The Protestant Reformation in the west addressed some of these non-Christian adaptations to empire, but certainly not all of them.  Most Protestant churches other than the historic peace churches (Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren etc.) have drunk the Cool-Ade of just war theory every bit as much as their Catholic and Orthodox sisters.  They too have seen their primary objective as getting people into heaven rather than building the Realm of God on earth.  In Europe they too made their bed with the ruling authorities; and they were only too happy to throw their support and, as they supposed, God’s blessing to the imperial schemes of secular governments, becoming in the process themselves instruments of cultural and religious imperialism.

It is no wonder that so many sensitive and discerning people today leave the Christian church or never have anything to do with it in the first place.  The salvation of Christianity, if one is possible at all, lies not in contemporary styles of worship and warehouse churches that do everything they can not to look like churches, for those are superficial changes that repackage to old, compromised Christianity in a worldly shell that is itself only more compromise with the culture of the world.  Christianity’s salvation, if one is possible at all, lies in reclaiming the way of Jesus, the way of assertive, creative, nonviolent resistance to evil, the way of justice, the way of inclusion, the way of compassion, the way of grace.  In a world addicted to power and violence that way of Jesus is needed now more than ever.  That way (which many follow and advocate outside of Christianity, for while it is Jesus' way it is not exclusively Jesus' way) may even be humanity’s only hope of saving itself from itself, as John Dominic Crossan contends.  The Christian church is a compromised messenger of that way, compromised by all of the concessions it has made to empire in order to maintain a position of privilege and power; but it is the only messenger of that way that we Christians have.  The future of Christianity, if it has one, lies in its pre-Constantinian past.  Not in slavish imitation of that past, which after all occurred in a cultural-linguistic world so different from ours as to be almost beyond comprehension to modern people, but in reclaiming the values of Jesus and proclaiming them to our world.  Proclaiming them in ways that speak to our world without watering them down to placate the world.  Proclaiming them in ways that give people today hope for this life and for this world and the courage to work to make that hope a reality.  Let’s get on with it.