Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (47 page)

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.

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.