Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (46 page)

Through Constantine, Rome was baptized, and sacrifice in all these senses either came to an end or began to. Constantine stopped the slaughter of Christians. He refused to sacrifice at the Capitol during his triumph in 312. He ended sacrifice for officers of his empire, thus opening imperial administration to Christians, and eventually outlawed sacrifice entirely. He closed a few temples where sacrifices were being offered, though he permitted various forms of divination to continue. He stopped the gladiatorial combats and gave legal support to humiliores who wanted access to the judicial system so that they would not be chewed up by the system. Torture continued, and despite Constantine's decree, sacrifice persisted throughout the empire. Constantine himself fought imperial wars, but his savagery was not celebrated as the honor-wars of previous emperors had been. With Constantine, the Roman Empire became officially a desacrificial polity. If he did not entirely expunge sacrifice, Constantine displaced sacrifice from the center of Roman life, pushed it to the margins and into dark corners. Constantine's reign marked the beginning of the end of sacrifice. He took away the smoky food of the not-gods (Galatians 4:8), and the demons began to atrophy.

To this extent, Constantine's polity has remained in place until the present. A desacrificed civilization has become so commonplace that we think it is the natural order of things. We are horrified when we hear that some bizarre Wiccan cult has performed a sacrifice in a wood nearby; we sense that this portends ghoulish assaults on our ordered world. If a session of the Senate or Supreme Court opened with sacrifice, talk radio would be abuzz for months and we might have marches in the streets. Historically speaking, though, we are the aberrations. For millennia every empire, every city, every nation and tribe was organized around sacrifice. Every polity has been a sacrificial polity. We are not, and we have Constantine to thank for that.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

That is only one side of the story, however; because there will be blood. Every ancient city was a sacrificial center, ever since Cain slaughtered his brother before setting up the walls of Enoch, the city named for his son. Rome, in mythology if not in fact, was built over the blood of Remus, the blood of Dido and Turnus, the blood of the many thousands trampled beneath the lusty domination of Rome. Negatively, Constantine created and left a desacrificed city. Positively, he recognized and welcomed the church into his realm, to the center of the Roman Empire. There was blood there too, but it was the blood of Jesus that announced the end of bloodshed. The church too was a sacrificial city, the true city of sacrifice, the city of final sacrifice, which in its Eucharistic liturgy of sacrifice announced the end of animal sacrifice and the initiation of a new sacrificial order.

Even before we reflect on this theologically, we should make some effort to grasp the earth-quaking significance of Constantine's decision. Every city is sacrificial, but Constantine eliminated sacrifice in his own city and welcomed a different sacrificial city into Rome. For a fourthcentury Roman, eliminating sacrifice from the city was as much as to say, "My city is no longer a city." For a fourth-century Roman, acknowledging the church's bloodless sacrifice as the sacrifice was as much as to say, "The church is the true city here." When Constantine began to end sacrifice, he began to end Rome as he knew it, for he initiated the end of Rome's sacrificial lifeblood and established that Rome's life now depended on its adherence to another civic center, the church.

For Augustine, the Eucharist not only announces the end of sacrifice but also ritually embodies a sacrificial movement that encompasses the entire life of the church. The church is a priesthood not only at the table on the Lord's Day but in its life together. Sacrifice, Augustine said, is any
work by which we seek to adhere to God in holy society with him.49
What God above all desires is mercy, and so the highest sacrifice is the work of compassion done in order to adhere to God. When a group lives out this sacrifice, it is not only continuously joined to the society of the transcendently sociable triune God but also united together in that union with God. The whole city becomes a universale sacrificium through Christ, the priest who offers himself, and offers us in him:

Since, therefore, true sacrifices are works of mercy to ourselves or others, done with a reference to God, and since works of mercy have no other object than the relief of distress or the conferring of happiness, and since there is no happiness apart from that good of which it is said, It is good for me to be very near to God, it follows that the whole redeemed city, that is to say, the congregation or community of the saints, is offered to God as our sacrifice through the great High Priest, who offered Himself to God in His passion for us, that we might be members of this glorious head, according to the form of a servant.50

Christ's is the founding sacrifice of the new city, the eschatological city. But that sacrifice is perpetuated by the body in mutual love and service. Hoc est sacrificium Christianorum: multi unum corpus in Christo-this is the sacrifice of Christians, we who are many are one body in Christ.51

By virtue of this sacrifice, the church does justice.52
The just city, Augustine famously argued, is the city that does justice to all, above all to God. Only the city that renders God his due, which is the true sacrifice of the one body united in peace and love, only that city is truly just. When the Roman world passed through its "baptism" from bondage to the stoicheia, Constantine eliminated sacrifices to the gods in the earthly city and thereby renounced any claim that the Roman city was a just city. A city without justice, Augustine insisted, is no city at all, so by eliminating sacrifice Constantine was admitting that Rome had become decivilized.

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).