Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
Page 46
"Yoder, Priestly Kingdom, 136.
12Ibid.
13Ibid., pp. 137, 139.
"John Howard Yoder, The Politics ofJesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), chap. 8.
15Yoder, Priestly Kingdom, pp. 136-37.
161bid., p.141.
17 Carter, Politics ofthe Cross, p. 172. Carter summarizes Yoder's eschatological critique of Constantinianism under eight points: (1) the emperor takes the place of Christ, and people submit to his demands regardless of Jesus' commands to the contrary; (2) instead of a dual already/ not yet eschatology, Constantinianism says that the eschaton has arrived in the person of the ruler; (3) Constantinianism either denies that the powers are fallen or adjusts to the powers, cooperates and compromises with them, and calls it "realism"; (4) the kingdom is identified with the empire or nation, with a human institution or construction; (5) the church becomes part of culture and an aspect of society; (6) as a result, the church is no longer the sign of the kingdom to the world but instead conforms to the world; (7) the meaning of history is carried by the powerful and not by the weak, suffering church; and (8) the state becomes the bearer of God's purposes in history, instead of simply an institution providing order for the church to carry out its mission.
"Charles Mayo Collier, "A Nonviolent Augustinianism? History and Politics in the Theologies of St. Augustine and John Howard Yoder" (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2008).
"Quoted in ibid., pp. 157-58.
20Though Collier tells me that "nothing could be further from the truth," both of those answers leave me suspicious that time has been forgotten. What Yoder identifies as Constantinianism is clearly a historical entity, shifting and changing; it is a protean heresy. But the "community that Jesus creates," the faithful community, is still in the apostolic age. Its contours never change; its minority status never changes; its relation to the world never changes, even though the world is clearly changing; the demands on it never change, no matter what cultural setting it finds itself in. Yoder seems to say this quite clearly toward the end of The Politics of Jesus: "What medieval Christendom ... has in common with post-Enlightenment progressivism is precisely the assumption that history has moved us past the time ofprimitive Christianity, and therefore out from under the relevance of the apostolic witness" about the meaning of history (quoted in ibid., p. 140, n. 160; emphasis added). Surely the apostolic witness is of highest relevance, but just as surely, "history has moved us past the time of primitive Christianity." Yoder appears to freeze time in the first century; the church of the apostolic and immediate postapostolic age-the church of which we can find virtually no historical record-is the unsurpassable church just as Jesus on the cross is the unsurpassable Jesus.
21Or, I should say, they go together only on Anabapist/pacifist grounds. From that angle, the church must fall as soon as it permits its members to bear arms without protest or sanction. If the pacifist position cannot be sustained, however, then the two elements of Yoder's thesis are separable. I address the pacifist issue, all too briefly, below. Yoder uses the language of "fall" in Priestly Kingdom, p. 209, n. 1; The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, ed. Michael G. Cartwright and Peter Ochs (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), throughout; Royal Priesthood, p. 58; and many other places.
"Wedded together, the two cannot help but imply that the mainstream church has been "apostate" for nearly seventeen hundred years. In John Howard Yoder, For the Nations: Essays Public andEvangelical (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), pp. 70-71, he claims that Western thinkers have been in the grip of "univocality" from Eusebius to Hegel. That is a long time to be in the grip of anything. Such sweeping historical claims should rouse nearly everyone's internal skeptic.
23Sider, "To See History Doxologically," p. 136.
24Ibid., p. 145; Timothy D. Barnes, "Constantine, Athanasius and the Christian Church," in Constantine: History, Historiography and Legend, ed. Samuel Lieu and Dominic Montserrat (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 9.
25Michael J. Hollerich, "Religion and Politics in the Writings of Eusebius: Reassessing the First `Court Theologian,'" Church History 59, no. 3 (1990): 3.
"Sider, "To See History Doxologically," p. 157.
27"Legend" is Yoder's own term; he also uses "larger than life" to describe both the Constantinian and the Jeremian shift (Yoder, For the Nations, p. 8; quoted in Sider, "To See History Doxologically," p. 144). "Narrative trope" and "transcendental" are from Sider, "To See History Doxologically," pp. 165-67. By the latter term, he emphasizes that Constantinianism "prescribes the form of knowledge that would constitute and govern empirico-historical investigation" and thus sets the "criteria by which we know what counts as history" (p. 165).
28The term is Sider's, "To See History Doxologically," p. 153.
"Yoder, Jewish-Christian Schism, p. 44; for a thorough and illuminating discussion of these themes in Yoder, see Sider, "To See History Doxologically," chap. 3. As a heuristic device, imagining along with historical actors that "it could have been otherwise" is an essential tool of research, but as Arthur Danto says, historical narrative always involves reading earlier events in the light of later, episodes in the light of the denouement. In addition to the reasons below, I believe Yoder's basic use of"Constantinianism" is a significant violation of his claim that history should be treated as "open," since Constantine clearly did not intend Constantinianism as Yoder means it; further, Yoder reads much of subsequent church history as a series of variations on the Constantinian settlement and arguably reads back later concerns into the fourth century, again violating his principle of "open" history. See Peter J. Leithart, Deep Exegesis: The Mystery ofReading Scripture (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2009), chap. 2, for detailed discussion of the hermeneutical import of this point.
3oRobert L. Wilken, The Myth of Christian Beginnings (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), chap. 3, points out that Eusebius focused on purity of doctrine rather than purity of practice or witness. That is a major difference from Yoder. See also R. A. Markus, The End ofAncient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), which speaks of the church's effort after Constantine to create identity boundaries.
"Nigel Goring Wright, Disavowing Constantine: Mission, Church and the Social Order in the Theologies of John Howard Yoder and Jurgen Moltmann, Paternoster Theological Monographs (2000; reprint, Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2006), p. 61. Collier, "Nonviolent Augustinianism," pp. 71-72, makes the point that through the introduction of Constantinianism the tradition became divided, so that there is no easy appeal to tradition. A "Trojan horse" entered the church and unleashed wily Ulysses on an unsuspecting city. What is intriguing about Collier's point is that he claims that the Trojan horse entered the "tradition's consensus" concerning Jesus, violence and the powers. So there was an undivided tradition prior to Constantine! My point is that this is just as simplistic as later appeals to a post-Constantinian tradition.
"Perhaps one could find "Yoderian" local communities in the first three centuries. That would qualify, but not undermine, my point. Unless the church as a whole was Yoderian, the myth of a Constantinian fall will not work.
"Yoder, Priestly Kingdom, p. 144.
37Yoder, Royal Priesthood, p. 60.
"Yoder, Priestly Kingdom, p. 141.
'Yoder, Royal Priesthood, p. 58.
"Yoder, Priestly Kingdom, p. 144.
36Ibid., pp. 143-44.
39The tension is more pronounced in Stanley Hauerwas, who combines anti-Constantinianism, which depends on a fourth-century "fall," with antimodernity, which is typically allied with nostalgia for medieval premodernity.
40For a small sampling, see Yoder, Royal Priesthood, pp. 56, 57, 58, 246.
41On powers and principalities, see G. B. Caird, Principalities and Powers: A Study in Pauline Theology (1956; reprint, Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2003); Yoder, Politics of jesur Hendrik Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, trans. John H. Yoder (Scottdale, Penn.: Herald, 1977).
42More so because, as I think, these secti
ons of Paul's letter correlate in a chiastic structure that covers chapters 3-4.
430n impurity in Greek religion, see Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); on sacrifice in the Greek world, see Maria-Zoe Pe- troupoulou, Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Religion, Judaism and Christianity, 100 BC to AD 200 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); on Roman sacrifice see George Heyman, The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), and John Scheid, Quandfaire, c'est croire: Les rites sacrificiels des Romains (Aubier, 2005).
"Yoder, Royal Priesthood, p. 64.
45R.A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
46The phrase "end of sacrifice" comes from the brilliantly suggestive Guy G. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Among other things, Stroumsa gives Judaism a central role in the "religious transformation of late antiquity" that the book traces, specifically arguing that the fall of the temple made Judaism the first nonsacrificial religion in history. As Christians inherited that nonsacrificial Judaism, they transformed the meaning of religion. Origen and Celsus were speaking past one another; they were not merely talking about two religions, two species within a genus, but two genera. I have two reservations about Stroumsa: first, his claim that Christians were innovative in tying religion to truth may be overstated (see Clifford Ando, The Matter ofthe Gods: Religion and the Roman Empire [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008]); second, he minimizes the continuing role of ritual, and specifically sacrifice, in the Christian church.
47Stroumsa, End ofSacrifice, pp. 62-63.
41 See Heyman, Power of Sacrifice; Scheid, Quandfaire.
'Augustine City of God 10.4-6. "Proinde verum sacrificium est omne opus, quo agitur, ut sancta societate inhaereamus Deo, relatum scilicet ad ilium finem boni, quo veraciter beati esse pos- simus."
50Ibid., 10.6.
51Ibid.
52See Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
s3Thanks to Charlie Collier for highlighting the point.
To my knowledge, he never states the issue in precisely these terms.
55This is not to say that Jesus' teachings should be isolated from the rest of Scripture. I believe that Scripture as a whole is the standard for Christian ethics and politics. But Jesus' example and teaching occupy the center of that ethics. He comes to "fulfill," not destroy, the Law and Prophets, to bring the law to its fullest expression. To follow Jesus is to do what the Law always aimed at.
56I am picking up one threat from James Jordan's triple summary of the story arcs of biblical narrative: Scripture is about maturation, about redemptive history and about holy war.
57I owe this to my colleague Toby Sumpter. Please note: this is a charming way to put it, but it is not merely charming. It is a profound theological point.
"John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism (1971; reprint, Scottdale, Penn.: Herald, 2003), p. 119.
s90ne of my favorite paintings in the Hermitage is a ceiling fresco of armored Abraham, taking off his helmet to receive bread and wine from Melchizedek. Abraham the warrior was at the table.
60This is distinct from the question whether a purely noncoercive ethic is possible or desirable. If I intercept a child who is about to step in front of oncoming traffic, I exercise coercion, but the coercion is, on almost any account, an act of love, not of violence. The vagueness of "violence" is a significant problem here. Milbank argues that evil is violence, violence evil, but insists, rightly in my view, that not all coercive action is violence. I command my children to clean up and I spank them if they defy me. That, I believe, is a coercive right that I as a parent can exercise over my children. It is not an act of violence or child abuse.
61Augustine, Letter 189, quoted in Louis J. Swift, The Early Fathers on War and Military Service, Message of the Fathers of the Church 19 (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1983), pp. 114-15.
62Yoder, Politics of Jesus.
"David E. Garland, Reading Matthew: A Literary and Theological Commentary on the First Gospel (Macon, Ga.: Smyth and Heiwys, 1999).
64This does not revert to a Kantian intentionalist ethic. Intentions so inhere in actions that a different intention changes the action itself. I spank my child out of love, and that can be a legitimate exercise of coercive force; a molester might perform exactly the same bodily movement in order to excite his perverted sexual tastes. The distinction between these is not that the "same" act is done with different intentions; different acts are being done, which is why we have two different words-discipline and abuse.
"Thanks to my colleague Toby Sumpter for this memorable phrase.
66William T. Cavanaugh, "A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State," Modern Theology 11, no. 4 (1995); Torture and Eucharist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
"See Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europefrom the French Revolution to the Great War (London. Burleigh, 2005), and Sacred Causes (New York: Harper, 2007).
68Augustine Degestis Pelagii 12.28; quoted in Markus, Saeculum, p. 54.