Anti-anti-Constantinianism

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:46 pm by Peter Leithart

Anti-anti-Constantinianism 2017-09-06T22:46:30+06:00 Peter Leithart

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Phillip Gray scores some points against Yoder and Hauerwas in a 2008 article in Politics and Religion . He suggests, for example, that the category of “Constantinian” is too clunky to capture the differences among Christian thinkers. Various positions on church and state existed in the early church, including “Tertullian/Donatist separatism, the Eusebian acceptance of the prince as God’s vicar on Earth, the more nuanced position of St. Ambrose, and finally the two cities notion of St. Augustine.” Gray argues that, “of these three positions, along with that of St. Augustine, the only one that would seem ‘Constantinian’ would be that of Eusebius. However, for Yoder and Hauerwas, Eusebius, St. Ambrose, and St. Augustine would be Constantinians.”

Along similar lines, anti-Constantinianism implies a radical discontinuity in the church’s history: “If most churches have been Constantinian from 312 CE until the present, then few communities of true Christians could have existed.” Given the emphasis that Yoder and Hauerwas place on the church, “wWithout the true communities, by implication, there could be no true Christians.” This is rooted in their conception of the church, which Gray labels “Donatist.” He quotes Hauerwas saying, “Assessing the truthfulness of religious convictions cannot be separated from the truthfulness of the persons who make those claims,” and argues, “With the community focus of Hauerwas, there is an underpinning idea of purity connected with faith. While the Donatists focused on the purity of the individual, Hauerwas seems to change this to the purity of the community. Purity is the equation of truth, and remains so. In combining this notion of purity with a social ethic, what past groups count as ‘true’ Christians become limited and problematic.”

As a result, “except for the spontaneous growth of more orthodox groups, like the Franciscans (heretical or otherwise) and the Anabaptists, it would appear that the Christian ‘story’ is of Christ’s true church existing during the persecutions of Rome, followed by the abandonment of the church by God to Constantinianism for over 1200 years until the Reformation/Anabaptist appearance, culminating in God’s continued negligence of the church until the present ‘post-Constantinian’ era. How exactly Hauerwas can explain this story, or Yoder explicate the millennium gap between true Christian communities, is unclear.”

Even if this is an exaggerated summary of their views of church history, the significant discontinuity within the church’s history undermines Yoder’s and Hauerwas’s communitarianism. In a footnote, Gray explains, “The lack of continuity makes their notion of Christian community problematic. It is unclear how the non-violent community persists throughout history. Presumably, the ‘true’ Christianity could only be transmitted through time by these pure, non-conforming communities. But historically, it is hard to make this argument: given the examples presented by Yoder, these pure communities exist for a short time, only to be crushed by the Constantinian forces in the world, leaving the world bereft of ‘true’ Christian communities for hundreds of years, until yet another spontaneous community arises, starting the process over again. Either the Kingdom of God is not in the world immanently, but only sporadically, or there is some constant ‘true’ Christian community that has managed to exist throughout the Constantinian era and transmit itself to various movements without ever having been detected by religious or secular historians. It is unclear in the writings of Yoder and Hauerwas which of these options is more correct.”

Gray also questions whether Yoder can sustain his vision of a publicly involved yet non-violent Christian community. To sustain this dual position, Yoder argues that the “sword” in Scripture refers not to military but to police authority. He claims, the Roman sword was “more a symbol of authority than a weapon” and thus signifies “the way a given government exercises dominion over its subjects by appeal to violence, not the execution of capital offenders or the waging of hostilities against other nations.” Thus, “the state has no general authorization to use the sword independently of its commission to hold violence to a minimum.”

Citing O’Donovan, Gray points out that the Romans “knew of no civil order that was not maintained by soldiers.” This, Gray argues, makes it impossible for Yoder to straddle the divide between church and world as he’d like: “On the one hand, Yoder argues that the Christian community must be non-violent and non-conformist. On the other hand, he states that the church cannot be separated from the world, but must rather be a witness to it. This straddling relation of the church toward engagement with and difference from the world is possible under his erroneous exegesis, but if the distinction is unviable, it would appear that the church has only the choice of separatism. If, in the historical context of the Scriptures, the ‘sword’ meant the full force of the state, it appears that no element of it, juridical or otherwise, can be accepted by the Christian community. The necessary result, then, would be for the church to return to the catacombs, waiting in preparation for the next Diocletian persecution or for the End Times. Indeed, if the criticism of Yoder’s notion of force is sound, the only form of state that may potentially be acceptable would be the type of voluntary government proposed by Nozick, a type of state not likely to appear in the foreseeable future. Otherwise, any interaction the Christian community had with the state would lead to, by its nature, a temptation toward the Constantinian heresy.”

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