Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

by Peter J. Leithart

  At the same time, Constantine welcomed into his city another city, a truly just city, a city of the final sacrifice that ends sacrifice. He may have believed he was erecting a new civic cult, a new and more effective priestly college, a patriotic religious institution that would secure the pax Dei for Rome as the earlier cults guaranteed the pax deorum. If that is what he expected, he was wrong, because the church is not a cult but a polis. And despite its very real peccability and fallibility, it is Christ's city, his body, and therefore a city that cannot finally be co-opted. This or that communion of the church may become a synagogue of Satan; the Spirit may leave a church with a screech of Ichabod. But if the Spirit leaves one house desolate, he finds another.

  The church did not "fall" in the fourth century. It is more resilient than that. The church, instead, was recognized and honored, precisely as the true city. By eliminating the civic sacrifice that founded Rome and protecting and promoting the Eucharistic civitas, Constantine was, in effect if not in intent, acknowledging the church's superiority as a community of justice and peace. He was acknowledging, whether he recognized it fully or not, that the church was the model that he and all other emperors should strive to imitate.

  This is the "Christianization" achieved by Constantine, Rome baptized. This was the eschatological establishment, not of secular civilization, but of the desacrificial civilization.

  MODEL CITY

  Once the ecclesial city is welcomed, acknowledged, honored by the earthly city, it is time for it to get to work. That is the story of the medieval world, as Christian civilization grew from the seed of Constantine's desacrificialization (and consequent decivilization) of Rome and his acknowledgment of the church and its King. As the medieval Christians saw it, the ecclesial city is called to serve, advise, judge, lead, set an example for the earthly city, so that the earthly city can begin to bear some resemblance, in a proximate desacrificial fashion, to the just city. Constantine welcomed the church, and he and his successors had to accept the consequence: they would be taught the politics of Jesus. Rome was baptized out from under the stoicheia into a world beyond sacrifice, and after baptizing the church begins to "teach all that Jesus has commanded" (Matthew 28:18-20).

  As noted above, unlike earlier modern forms of anti-Constantinianism, Yoder's critique is not premised on a dichotomy of power and religion, or politics and religion. Yoder says the opposite. The dualism he prefers is church-world, rather than church-state or religion-politics,53 and that is because the church is a polity, the only true polity, because it is the only polity that does justice in worshiping God. Precisely because it is already political, it is a betrayal for the church to attach itself to and find its identity in an existing worldly power structure. Precisely because the church is always a political power in itself, it does not need to find the stockpile of worldly weapons before it carries out its mission. On all this Yoder is correct.

  He is also correct in refusing the nature-grace dichotomy54 on which so much traditional political theology has been based. That has often been the undergirding structure for just war responses to pacifism: coercion has no place in the church because the church is an institution of grace, but the state, being a natural institution, operates with other weapons. Naturegrace can find expression in a moral man-immoral society dualism: "do good to those who abuse you" and "give to those who ask" are principles of personal, not political, ethics, but in public life there are no constraints on how much we may terrorize terrorists to keep them far from our borders. Or it can take the form of a sacred-secular dichotomy, in which the secular is considered a sphere impervious to, and resolutely protected against, intrusions of sacred or spiritual life.

  Yoder rejects all of these options and insists instead that Jesus taught a social ethic. The church is a polity, and thus any ethical or political system that minimizes or marginalizes Jesus and his teaching hardly counts as Christian.55 Here again I think Yoder is correct. If there is going to be a Christian politics, it is going to have to be an evangelical Christian politics, one that places Jesus, his cross and his resurrection at the center. It will not do to dismiss the Sermon on the Mount with a wave of the hand ("that's for personal life, not political life"). If a Christian political theol ogy cannot justify war, coercive punishment and judgment evangelically, it cannot justify them convincingly.

  It may seem, then, that Yoder has finally won the day. Perhaps he lost the historical argument but wins the theological one. If Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount are central to Christian political theology, does that not mean Yoder is correct that the only Christian politics is the politics of the church? Does that not mean that Christian politics must be nonviolent, noncoercive, nonresistant, pacifist? Does that mean that Constantine did in fact betray Jesus when he welcomed the church and set down his sacrificial knife but refused to sheath his sword?

  The answer to those questions, I believe, is no. What I can say in this brief space is inadequate, but I must say something.

  TEACHING HANDS TO FIGHT

  I do not find Yoder's claims that Jesus was a pacifist convincing, but I do agree with his insistence that questions about war and peace be answered not by blinkered examination of specific texts but by attention to the full sweep of biblical history. What is the Bible about?

  That question can be answered in a variety of ways, but one important answer to the question is this: the Bible is from beginning to end a story of war.56 Yahweh, the Creator and the God of Israel, is a "man of war" (Exodus 15:3), who threatens to make war against Amalek until that notoriously vicious nation is destroyed (Exodus 17:16). He sends Joshua into Canaan to conquer the land, and his Angel, the second person of the Trinity, is the captain of a host who leads Israel in conquest (Joshua 5:13-15). Yahweh has his own armor (Isaiah 59), in which he arms himself for battle.

  From the beginning, this Creator made men to participate in and prosecute his wars. His goal in history is to train hands to fight. Adam was formed and placed in Eden's garden with instructions to perform a priestly service that was also quasi-military. He was to "dress and guard" the garden (Genesis 2:15). He was to keep intruders from the garden of God and, eventually, from his bride, Eve. When the serpent tempted Eve, Adam had his first opportunity to carry out his duty as garden watchman. He was "with her" (Genesis 3:8), but instead of crushing the head of the ser pent, he stood watching and doing nothing. Adam's fall was a renunciation of war, a capitulation to the enemy, a failure to defend his bride and to take up the war of Yahweh.

  Eye for eye, tooth for tooth: so goes the pattern of biblical justice. Adam refused to carry out his role as guardian of the garden, and so he was dismissed from his post. He did not want to guard, so he got what he wanted. This pattern is also evident in the symbolism of the tree of knowledge. In Scripture, "knowledge of good and evil" refers to the judicial discernment and authority of a king (see 1 Kings 3:9). Adam was formed as a king-intraining, and combat with the serpent was his first test. Had he passed the test, he would presumably have been given the fruit of the tree of knowledge and ascended to share in the rule of his heavenly Father, the human king beside the High King. Eye for eye again: because Adam refused to act as a king, he was cut off from the royal tree. In place of Adam, Yahweh set cherubim at the gate of the garden, armed with flaming swords (Genesis 3:24). Yahweh removed the sword, as it were, from Adam's hand and gave it to angels.

  That was never intended as a permanent arrangement. When he confronted Adam and Eve in the garden, Yahweh promised that he would send another human, a "last man" to overcome the sin of the first man, who would do what Adam refused to do, "crush the serpent's head" while suffering a bruise upon his heel (Genesis 3:15). This is famed as the first messianic prophecy of Scripture, but its content is too often ignored: it is a promise of a warrior-savior, a conqueror. That is nearly the last vision of Jesus we see in Scripture as well, the rider on a white horse who "judges and wages war" in righteousness, who is armed with a "sharp sword" that comes from his mouth, who "smites
the nations" and rules them with a rod of iron, whose eyes are flames of fire (Revelation 19:11-18).

  The first covenant, the covenant with angels, was a childhood covenant. Swords are sharp, and fire burns, and so long as human beings were in their minority, the Lord restricted access to dangerous implements.57 Yet even in childhood, some men, and some women, were given authority by the Lord to wield the sword and to play with fire. Priests were vested with armor (Exodus 28), given swords and fire to slaughter animals to offer to God. They were new Adams in the new garden of the temple. Outside the temple in the land, Yahweh chose men and women to carry out coercive, deadly acts of justice-Moses, Phinehas, Joshua, Jael, Samson, David and so on. Yoder thinks he can close debate when he says that the God of Israel was incarnate in the form of Abraham and not of Constantine.58 That does not close the debate at all: Abraham too bore a sword, at the head of a small army of 318 fighting men (Genesis 14).59 The issue also looks very different if we substitute David for Constantine in Yoder's formula; do we really want to polarize Jesus and the king whose dynasty he revives and perpetuates?

  With the coming of the conquering Seed of the Woman, the sword and fire of angels are given back to a man, to Jesus. In union with her husband and head, the church is a warrior bride, called to carry out his wars in and with him. Yahweh's armor is distributed to us (compare Isaiah 59 and Ephesians 6). We are priests and kings by his blood, anointed for priestly and royal service by baptism, baptized into armor, baptized for battle. In fact, we receive weapons even more powerful than the weapons of a Samson or a David. We have the Spirit of the risen and exalted Jesus, the Last Adam who has eaten from the tree of knowledge, and our weapons are not fleshly but Spiritual, powerful for demolishing fortresses and destroying speculations raised up against the knowledge of God (2 Corinthians 10:3-6). Our armor is righteousness, truth, faith, salvation, the Word of God and the gospel of peace.

  To this point, if they can get past the militant rhetoric I have adopted (which is simply the biblical rhetoric), pacifists might well agree with much of what I have said. After all, I have sketched a history that involves a transition from the iron sword and fire that Joshua used to slaughter Canaanites and burn Jericho to the sword and fire of the Spirit and the Word that Jesus uses to overwhelm his enemies and, as often as not, to remake them into allies. For several reasons, however, mine is not a pacifist narrative. First, unless one follows an almost Marcionite contrast of Old and New, the Old Testament remains normative for Christians. Though it is normative in a new covenant context, it is impossible to escape the fact that Yahweh carried out his wars through an Israel armed with swords, spears and smooth stones. That is part of our story, preserved "for our instruction." Second, the New Testament does not endorse anything like a Marcionite view of Old Testament wars. To the writer of Hebrews, Old Testament heroes were models of faith not only in their endurance of persecution but also in being "mighty in war" and putting "armies to flight" (Hebrews 11:34). Nor were the earliest Christians pacifists. Stephen-Christlike, full of the Spirit, the first martyr-thought that Moses' killing the Egyptian was an act of just vengeance to protect the oppressed, the beginning of the liberation of Israel from captivity (Acts 7:23-24), and the Jews did not stone him for saying that.60

  Third, Yoder makes the important point that even in the Old Testament Israel relied on Yahweh to fight for it. That is true, but the story I have sketched is one of increasing responsibility on the part of human beings. When we were children, Yahweh our Father intervened to save us from bullies. Now that we have reached maturity in Jesus, we share more fully in those wars. This is precisely why we are allowed to use spiritual weapons: through his death and resurrection, Jesus has made us capable of putting these most powerful of weapons to right uses. The point is that the story of Scripture is not a story of increasing passivity but of increasing participation in the activity of the ever-active God. We are being raised as kings to fight alongside our elder Brother in service to our Father. Finally, we might make an argument from greater to lesser: if the Lord lets Christians wield the most powerful of spiritual weapons, does he not expect us to be able to handle lesser weapons? If he has handed us a broadsword, does he not assume we know how to use a penknife?

  I am painting with a broad brush, and it seems I have left a blank at the center of the panorama: What of Jesus? Does he not teach us to turn the other cheek? Does he not tell Peter to put his sword back in his sheath? Does he not go to the cross, like a lamb to slaughter, and just in this way win his great victory? Are we not supposed to follow him? Doesn't any attempt to "contexualize" Jesus, even if the context is the rest of the Bible, amount to displacing him from the center of our politics? If we are to embody the politics of Jesus, does that not mean renunciation of the sword and embrace of the cross?

  This is surely the most powerful pacifist line of argument. One might answer by questioning the specific applicability of certain texts. Is "turn the other cheek" a rebuke of self-defense or the defense of others? Is Jesus' instruction to Peter the law for all Christians in all places and times? Is there something unique about Jesus' death that demands his unresisting passivity? More globally, are pacifists not short-circuiting, and relieving too quickly, the apparent tensions on the surface of the text?

  Though I believe those questions are legitimate and detailed exegesis is essential, that kind of questioning can seem like another avenue to avoid the hard teachings of Jesus. Augustine's handling of these questions encourages us in the right direction. He does not silence the teaching of Jesus by burying it under Old Testament narratives of battle, but neither does he detach Jesus and his teaching from their canonical setting. Instead, he attempts to take the whole of Scripture into account and to infuse everything with the light that comes uniquely through the Word made flesh. Augustine, as we have seen, was skeptical about the capacity of civil rulers to achieve justice and conscious of the limits of war. Yet he understood that war was at times the only or the best way to achieve the Christian aim of peace. "One does not pursue peace in order to wage war; he wages war to achieve peace," and even in the conduct of war, the warrior and commander aim to defeat enemies so that "you can bring them the benefits of peace.."6'

  ALL THAT JESUS COMMANDS

  If we reject pacifism, do we still have a politics of Jesus? We do. Yoder rightly stresses that Jesus embodied a politics and is, in his teaching and example, the ground for Christian social ethics.62 Strangely, he also says that post-Constantinian Christians had to reach for Cicero to come up with an ethic for officials and rulers, since Jesus offered little guidance on the subject (not expecting his followers ever to be in charge). Yoder's pacifism blinds him and keeps him from seeing that the whole of Jesus' teaching and activity is abundantly instructive to rulers. Welcomed into the city of man, the Eucharistic city models and teaches rulers to rule like Jesus.

  • "Turn the other cheek" gives instruction not about self-defense but about honor and shame. To slap someone on the right cheek, you have to slap back-handed, and a back-handed slap expresses contempt, not threat.63 Is this relevant to political ethics? Of course. The Roman Empire was built on a system of honor, insult and retaliation. Before Rome, Thucydides knew that wars arose from "fear, honor, and interest." Remove retaliation and defense of honor from international politics, and a fair number of the world's wars would have been prevented. There would have been a lot of slapping but not nearly so much shooting.

  • The Eucharistic city would teach rulers to agree with their adversaries quickly, to defuse domestic and international disputes before they explode.

  • What if rulers were instructed not to look at a woman lustfully? That would also prevent some wars, keep presidents busy with papers and things at their desks, protect state secrets, save money and divisive scandals. The church would insist that rulers be faithful to their wives and not put them away for expediency or a page girl (or boy).

  • The church would insist on honesty and truth telling, urging rulers to speak the
truth even when it is painful.

  • The church would insist that a ruler not do alms or pray or fast or do any other good things to be seen by others, especially by others with cameras-a rule that would revolutionize modern politics.

  • Rulers would be instructed to love enemies and do good to all. Obama would be seeking the best for the Republican Party, Ms. Anonymous Republican would be doing her best to serve the president. A ruler would have to stand firm against the antics of tyrants, not out of hatred but out of love, to prevent the tyrant from doing great evil to himself and others. If the tyrant attacked, the ruler would have to defend his people out of love for them and out of love for his enemy.64 Punishments would be acts of love for the victims, the public and the punished, just as a father disciplines his son in love. The church would insist that the ruler not use his legitimate powers of force for unjust ends, on pain of excommunication.

  • The church would urge rulers not to lose sleep over budget shortfalls or stock market declines, and exhort them instead to store up treasure in heaven by acts of mercy and justice.

  • The church would urge rulers to beware their own blind spots and remove logs from their eyes so they can see rightly in order to judge.

  • The church would remind a ruler that she will face a Judge who will inquire what she had done for the homeless, the weak, the sick, the imprisoned, the hungry.

  • At the extreme, a ruler might place himself on a cross, sacrifice his political future and his reputation, for the sake of righteousness. In certain kinds of polities, he would be the first soldier, the first to fly against the enemy, because being the leader means you get to die first.65 In great extremity, he might follow Jeremiah's example and submit to conquest, defeat, deportation-endure a national crucifixion to preserve a people for future rebirth.