Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (45 page)

To put the question the other way round: Why does Yoder not identify the heresy as "Eusebian"? That would be more accurate, though, as I have argued, not entirely fair to the maligned bishop of Caesarea. "Eusebian," though, is too specific; Eusebius's views were too obviously eccentric, too quickly corrected (by Augustine especially). Eusebius is too obscure. One cannot construct grand schemes of history on the foundation of Eusebius. Ultimately, I again suspect that Yoder employs the rhetoric he does because he is reading church history through the framework provided by Anabaptist protest since the sixteenth century.

In sum: Yoder's narrative of the church's fall comes under his own judgment as "Constantinian." We should abandon it, if for nothing else than for Yoderian reasons.

THE GOOD MIDDLE AGES

His narrative of the "fall of the church" fails for a second major reason, again one internal to Yoder's own work. Though at times Yoder seems to claim that, apart from a few pockets of radical faithfulness, the church has been in a state of "apostasy" since the fourth century,33
he generously acknowledges in several places that the medieval synthesis was superior at least to later nationalist Protestantism. He warns that "the risk of caricature is great" when discussing the Middle Ages and observes that "significant elements of the otherness [of the church] in structure as in piety" remained during those centuries. The church's consciousness of being distinct from the world was "more than vestigial," manifested in "the higher level of morality asked of the clergy, the international character of the hierarchy, the visibility of the hierarchy in opposition to the princes, the gradual moral education of the barbarians into monogamy and legality, foreign missions, apocalypticism and mysticism," which "preserved an awareness, however distorted and polluted, of the strangeness of God's
people in a rebellious world."34
The medieval church's "hierarchy had a power base and a self-definition" that, importantly, gave the church enough distance to criticize rulers, call them to repentance, demand justice and place limits like "the rules of chivalry, the Peace of God" on the lusts and ambitions of princes.31
Over the centuries, the scope of the church's "chaplaincy" steadily reduced, and as a result the church's commitment to catholicity steadily evaporated.36
Throughout the Middle Ages, however, the original conviction that the church is the center of history remained "half alive."37
In the atrophied Constantinianism of American civil religion, by contrast, the nation is so closely identified with God's purposes that the church is reduced to being a cheerleader for the world's last superpower.

It is, again, rhetorically odd that Yoder insists on describing what he opposes as "Constantinian" when it comes to its most developed form after the Reformation. The oddity is especially startling in one passage where he moves from an observation about the "depth of the great reversal" that began in the second to fourth centuries to an assessment of the Renaissance and Reformation, thus leaving the whole of the Middle Ages hidden in the white space between two successive sentences. In part, he moves from the fourth to the sixteenth century because he is trying to show that the Constantinian consciousness remains in place "even as the situations which brought it forth no longer obtain."38
But that does not smooth out the bump or fill in the abyss of a millennium. In this passage he gives no examples of the Constantinian consciousness during the time when the "situations which brought it forth" did obtain. That is, from this section of Yoder's writing we have specific evidence of "Constantinianism" only after the circumstances that created it have disappeared. His relative endorsement of the medieval period makes it clear that he thinks the church in the Middle Ages fought off the worst effects of Constantinianism. One would think, though, that if the Constantinian consciousness is correlated to a particular social and political situation, namely, one in which Christians are in power and try to control history, then the Middle Ages would display a significant degree of corruption. Can he account for the "good" Middle Ages?

Yoder might say that Constantinianism was slowly seeping into European Christianity throughout the medieval period and finally burst out in its more virulent forms when the Catholic Church fractured. That solution runs up against a basic historical objection. Despite the efforts of the Reformers to purify the corpus Christianorum, Reformation "Constantinianism" was not a development of the medieval system but a destruction of it. Nationalist Protestantism begins to rise, further, in the period when Lorenzo Valla was exposing the Donation of Constantine as a fraud, when Anabaptists were attacking Constantine as the betrayer of Christ, when even some Lutherans found something to hate in Constantine. Overt anti-Constantinianism begins to rise at the same time that Yoder says Constantinianism is entering its new modern phase.

It is to his credit that Yoder acknowledges the achievements of the Middle Ages. Earlier Anabaptists rarely did but dismissed the whole period as corruption and apostasy. But Yoder has a problem: his thesis of the "fall of the church" cannot account for the period that immediately followed the shift itself. His historical paradigm breaks apart on the shoals of the medieval period.39

Yoder's assault on "Constantinianism" is not merely about the theological meaning of the first Christian empire. Since he insists on wedding his prophetic critique of compromise and confusion with an Anabaptist "fall of the church" narrative, however, it is partly about the theological meaning of Constantine and his age. Since his thesis fails both historically and, as measured against his own account, methodologically, an alternative account is needed. That account must accomplish several things. To pass muster as a historical thesis, it must at least take seriously the major (if not exactly epochal) shift that took place when Constantine converted, it must be able to explain how the good Middle Ages arose from the rubble of a Christian empire, and it must provide an accurate account of what Constantine actually did. For my purposes, it will be serendipitous if it also provides some modest defense of Constantine's role in Western history. Below, I can only give the barest schematic outline of this alternative.

ROME BAPTIZED

When Yoder uses the word baptism in connection with Roman, Germanic or any other culture, he uses it derisively. The church "merely baptized" this or that cultural norm, institution, value.40
How, on Yoder's terms, could a culture or nation ever be baptized in anything but a superficial, and hence hypocritical, sense? By contrast, I mean the word seriously, though metaphorically. Not everyone in Rome was baptized in 312 or 324; Constantine himself was not baptized until he was on his deathbed. By using baptized to describe what happened, I want to capture, first, the fact that something happened, some border was crossed; second, that this something made the Roman Empire "Christian" in some important respects; and, third, that this something was, like every baptism, only a beginning. It was, like every baptism, an infant baptism.

Let me begin where Yoder does, with eschatology. According to Galatians 4, when the Father sent his Son and Spirit into the world, they came to deliver the Jews ("we," v. 3) from childhood, which Paul characterizes as a state of slavery under the "elementary things of the world" (stoicheia tou kosmou). Identifying those "elementary principles" is difficult. Within the context of Galatians 4, bondage to the stoicheia is tied somehow to slavery to the "not-gods" (Galatians 4:8), and this and other considerations have led some to conclude that the stoicheia are identical with the powers and principalities that Paul elsewhere says governed human beings in their minori- ty.4'
That may be; Israel too was governed by angels (cf. Galatians 3:19). But the similarity of Galatians 4:3 to Galatians 3:23 is more suggestive.42
Bondage under the stoicheia correlates to being under the custody of the schoolmaster Torah, and this linkage in Galatians seems to fit another New Testament use of stoicheia, Hebrews 6:1-2. Bondage under the stoicheia, I submit, refers to the life of Israel under the dietary, sacrificial and purity regulations imposed by Torah. That is the bondage from which Jews are delivered in the great exodus led by the Son and the Spirit-pillar; that is the highly regulated childhood that Israel outgrew in the fullness of time.

Paul is not talking only about Jews, however. "We" were in bondage until the One who came born under the Torah; but "you" (vv. 6, 8) who did not know God have also been liberated by receiving the Son and Spirit. Paul radically flattens out the difference between Jew and Gentile. Unlike in Romans, here he does not say that all are under "sin" but rather that all are in bondage to the stoicheia. For Gentiles as much as Jews, this bondage meant adherence to animal sacrifice, the keeping of days, the avoidance of contamination.
43

Yoder insists, rightly, that the victory over the powers was won on A.D. 29/30, not in 312.44
Incarnation and Pentecost are Paul's coordinates in Galatians 4. Yet though Jesus defeated the powers on the cross and liberated "us" and "you" from the stoicheia through the Spirit, something happens when that victory is proclaimed and accepted by people who are still in their childhood. Church history is not an empty parenthesis between the cross and the eschaton. The proclamation of repentance to all nations is part of the promised fulfillment, part of the evangel itself (Luke 24). Jesus won on the cross and in the resurrection, but the reality of that victory breaks through when the Spirit comes in the preaching of the gospel and the response of faith (e.g., Acts 2 and 10-11). The victory over the powers and the liberation from the stoicheia happened once for all in the first century, but Constantine learned of it in the fourth. For him as an individual, liberation from the stoicheia did not happen until three centuries after the cross. That was when the news of Jesus' triumph came to him, and when it came to him, he was swept up in it.

What happens when one is liberated from bondage to the stoicheia? If I am right about the stoicheia themselves, freedom from their bondage would mean liberation from structures organized by distinctions of holy-profane and clean-unclean, from worries about unclean foods, from distinctions between impure Gentiles and pure Jews, from the fear of contagion. Above all, liberation from the stoicheia will be evident in the end of sacrifice. The great sign of Constantine's personal deliverance from stoicheia was his abandonment of childish things, that is, his renunciation of sacrifice.

CITY OF SACRIFICE

According to R. A. Markus45
and others, Augustine offered an "eschatological" defense of the secular, and especially of secular politics. By insisting that the perfected city is the city of the future and that the perfect peace is the peace of the kingdom, Augustine relativized the proximate peace and justice of the earthly city. Earthly republics were no longer of ultimate concern and could no longer demand ultimate sacrifice. That may have something to it as a theoretical model, and I will return to Augustine in a moment. But I am more interested in how that Augustinian insight works out in the cultural and political world that Constantine bequeathed to the West.

What Constantine established was surely not secular polity, if secular is used in the modern sense of an autonomous sphere of social life, impervious to God's action, free from religious guidance, vigorously protected from divine interventions of any and all sorts. His policies did not secularize Rome in that sense. He adopted religious policies, favored the church and gave the church a significant role in the "secular" life of the empire. Bishops dispensed justice, mediated disputes, built hospitals and hostels, fed the hungry. On modern (at least modern American) grounds, Constantine regularly disdained the boundary between sacred and secular.

When he died, Constantine did not leave behind a "secular" Roman political order, but he did leave behind something other than he inherited. He left behind a political order that had been "desacrificed." The end of sacrifice announced by the gospel was effected in the actual history of Rome, during the reign of Constantine Augustus. Just as that was the moment of his personal liberation from the stoicheia, so it was the deliverance of Rome from its childhood.

This is the "baptism" that I refer to, a moment in history, or a period of history, when a people, nation or empire receives the gospel of the victory of Jesus and is blown by the Spirit from the world of sacrifice, purity,
temples, and sacred space and is transferred into a new religio-socio-polit- ical world. It is a baptism out of the world of the stoicheia, which, at least for Gentiles, involved the worship of "not-gods," into a world without sacrifice, a world after the end of sacrifice.46
Before the fourth century, the world had already seen such a baptism: "it was the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem ... that activated the slow-overly slow-transformation of religion to which we owe, among other things, European culture." With the fall of the temple, the Jews "offered the example of a society that had succeeded in conserving its ethnic and religious identity, even after the destruction of the only temple where daily sacrifices could be offered." Such a "sudden disappearance of sacrifices in a community represents a deep transformation of the very structures of its religious life."47
The waves from that baptism in Jerusalem eventually reached the Roman Empire. After the fourth century, many other civilizations were baptized in the same way, until by the high Middle Ages the European continent was baptized to the four points of the compass. Baptisms have continued since and will continue until the nations are made disciples. That, after all, is Jesus' commission to his church (Matthew 28:18-20).

Constantine began to eliminate sacrifice from Roman life, and this was no mean achievement. Roman sacrifice was at the center of Roman civilization. It was the chief religious act by which Romans communicated and communed with the gods, keeping the gods happy so Romans could be happy. Sacrifice disclosed the secrets of the future, as the haruspex read the entrails of a slaughtered animal. Sacrifice was essential to Roman politics. Senatorial decisions were sealed with sacrifice, and so too imperial decrees. Soldiers sacrificed to the gods to win their favor before they went to
slaughtering enemies in battle in order to restore the offended honor of the Roman imperium. It was not only good politics; it was also cathartic. Roman citizens, at least during times of persecution, were required to manifest their submission and devotion to gods, to the emperor and to Rome by acts of sacrifice. By sacrificing for or to the emperor, they acknowledged him as Lord, Savior, Deliverer, even, at times, as God. Christians refused because they knew there was another King, another world Emperor, who filled that role, and Romans tried to suppress this Christian rebellion by sacrificing Christians. Sacrifice was essential to Roman society, as humiliores were devoted to the comfort of honestiores. Sacrificial slaughter in the arena was one of the empire's chief entertainments.48