The church would have these, and many more things, to teach the rulers in their desacrificial political order. The ruler would get an earful of the politics of Jesus.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD, AGAIN
The alternative story I have been telling has gotten us from the gospel, through Constantine, into the Middle Ages. It can provide a practical Christian politics that is recognizably a politics of Jesus. Can it get us to modernity? What happens to sacrifice and the city in the modern age?
Modern politics is the renunciation of both poles of the Constantinian settlement. Modern politics is apostasy from the fourth-century baptism.
Modern states, first, do not welcome the church, as true city, into their midst. They are happy to welcome the church if it agrees to moderate its claims, if it agrees to reduce itself to religion, or private piety, or aesthetical liturgy, or mystical piety. Modern states are happy to be Diocletian, supporting the priesthoods as a department of the empire. The modern state will not, however, welcome a competitor. It will not kiss the Son as the King of a different city, and it will not honor the Queen unless she is a floozy." All modern states, totalitarian and democratic, renounce the Constantinian system; that is what makes them modern states. There are differences, and important ones. Totalitarian states attack the sacrificial city of the church, seeking to turn it into Diocletian's sacrifice of Christians. Democratic states more or less peacefully marginalize the church, and the Christians of democratic states too often cheer them on. For all their differences, totalitarian and democratic systems are secretly united in their anti-Constantinianism.
Second, because the modern state refuses to welcome the church as city, as model city, as teacher and judge, the modern state reasserts its status as the restored sacrificial state. This means that there must be blood. Medieval life was rough and brutish in plenty of ways and had its share of blood. But believing that the Eucharistic blood of Jesus founded the true city provided a brake on bloodshed. Bishops imposed the peace and truce of God, and monks and others continuously modeled Christ before kings. Modern states have no brakes. Modern nations thus get resacralized because they are resacrificialized,b7 they demand the "ultimate sacrifice" (pro patria mori), they expel citizens of the wrong color or nationality or reli gion. In modernity, the "Constantinianism" that Yoder deplores becomes a horrific reality, as the church has too often wedded itself to power.
This is the origin of nihilistic politics. Nihilistic modern politics is not the product of Scotism or nominalism or any other system of ideas. Nihilistic politics is the product of the history of Western politics, from Constantine's desacrificialization of Western politics back to modernity's re- sacrificialization. Nihilistic politics arises when the modern state reassumes the role of sacrificer but then realizes there are no more gods to receive the sacrifice-no more gods but itself. And there can be no more goats and bulls, since animal sacrifice is cruel and inhumane. Yet there is blood, more blood than ever, more blood than any ancient tyranny would have thought possible, and all of it human. To put it back into the biblical framework developed above: modern nations have in certain respects returned to the stoicheia, apostatized from the new order beyond sacrifice. Alternately, we might say that modern nations are post-Christian; they benefit from the new covenant privilege of handling the sword and the fire but refuse to listen to Jesus when he tells them how to avoid cutting or burning themselves.
CONCLUSION
In the end it all comes round to baptism, specifically to infant baptism. Rome was baptized in the fourth century. Eusebian hopes notwithstanding, it was not instantly transformed into the kingdom of heaven. It did not immediately become the city of God on earth. Baptism never does that. It is not meant to. Baptism sets a new trajectory, initiates a new beginning, but every beginning is the beginning of something. Through Constantine, Rome was baptized into a world without animal sacrifice and officially recognized the true sacrificial city, the one community that does offer a foretaste of the final kingdom. Christian Rome was in its infancy, but that was hardly surprising. All baptisms are infant baptisms.
Yoder is famed for his patience, but in dismissing Constantine and the world he left behind, his patience failed. For Yoder, Rome was not radically Christian, Rome's adherence to the faith was infantile, and because of that, he reasons, it was not Christian at all but apostate. He failed, as Augustine said against Pelagius, to give due weight to "the interim, the interval between the remission of sins which takes place in baptism, and the permanently established sinless state in the kingdom that is to come, this middle time [tempus hoc medium] of prayer, while [we] must pray, `Forgive us our sins.'" He failed to acknowledge that all-Constantine, Rome, ourselves-stand in medial time, and yet are no less Christian for that.61
What can we expect in this middle time? Not much, Yoder thinks. He says that the project of Christianizing the state is doomed. The time when that could happen has long ago passed away. If he is right, we are facing nothing short of apocalypse. I believe that here too Yoder is wrong, and that we can escape apocalypse. But this can only happen on certain conditions: only through reevangelization, only through the revival of a purified Constantinianism, only by the formation of a Christically centered politics, only through fresh public confession that Jesus' city is the model city, his blood the only expiating blood, his sacrifice the sacrifice that ends sacrifice. An apocalypse can be averted only if modern civilization, like Rome, humbles itself and is willing to come forward to be baptized.
ANCIENT SOURCES
I have relied a great deal in this study on secondary literature. Much of the primary literature I have examined is available on the Web, and unless otherwise noted I have used these translations. Unless otherwise noted below, I have used the translations of patristic sources available at
In the footnotes I have usually cited ancient sources with an abbreviated title, unless the title is only a word or two long. In the list below, if the full title is longer, I supply it in parentheses.
Athanasius. Defense (Defense of the Nicene Definition).
On the Synods.
Augustine. City of God.
Basil. Epistles.
Cicero. De domo (De domo sua). Trans. N. H. Watts. Loeb Classical Library 158. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1923.
CJ (Codex Justianus).
CTh (Codex Theodosianus).
Cyprian. Ad Donatum.
Dio Cassius. Roman History. Trans. Earnest Cary. Available at
Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Roman Antiquities. Trans. Earnest Cary. Available at
Eusebius. Church History (The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine).
. Life (Life of Constantine). Trans. Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall. Oxford: Clarendon, 1999.
Oration (Oration in Praise of Constantine).
Eutropius. Breviarium (Abridgement of Roman History). Trans. John Selby Watson. Available at
Herodian. Roman Histories. Trans. Edward C. Echols. Available at
Historia Augusta. Selections available at
Julian. Caesares. Trans. W. C. Wright. Available at
Justin. Dialogue with Trypho.
FirstApology.
Lactantius. Death (Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died).
. Divine Institutes.
Livy. From the Foundation of the City. Available at
Optatus. Against the Donatists. Trans. and ed. Mark Edwards. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998.
Origen. Contra Celsum.
Ovid. Ars amatoria. Trans. J. Lewis May. Available at
Rufinus. Church History. Trans. Eusebius, with additional material to 395.
Seneca. Epistles. Trans. Richard M. Gumere. Available at
On Providence. Trans. William Bell Langsdorf. Available at
Socrates. Ecclesiastical History.
Sozomen. Ecclesiastical History.
Sulpicius Severus. Vita Martini.
Tacitus. Agricola.
Tertullian. Ad scapulum.
Apology.
De corona militis.
De spectaculis.
On Idolatry.
On the Dress of Virgins.
Theodoret. Ecclesiastical History.
Zosimus. New History. English translation available at
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