Beginning Saturday, I’ll be auditing an online Church History Survey course offered by the Central/Southern Illinois Synod, ELCA. In addition to our assigned readings by Justo L. González listed below, we’re assigned to write a one-page reflection paper on what we read. The prompt says: “While preparing your reflection paper consider the following questions: ‘What new insights have I gained about this event; How has it impacted the world I live in and my church; and what can I do with this information to shape my ministry among God’s people?’”
Reflection. This week’s readings centered around the late Roman or Byzantine Emperor Constantine and the fourth-century councils and creeds that set a unified doctrine for the early Christian church. While much of it was already familiar to me, González gave me a new appreciation for what a canny politician Constantine was. And his explanation of the Arian heresy gave me a new way of thinking about some important aspects of the Holy Trinity.
Constantine and the creeds are linked, of course, because the emperor called the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) that adopted the Nicean Creed still recited in Christian churches today. I’d already read books like Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea by Geza Hermes, which chronicles the evolution from Jesus of Nazareth’s ethical teaching to complex Byzantine dogma that seems, well, Byzantine to this 21st-century reader. Another Jewish author, Rabbi Harold Kushner, writes, in To Life! A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking, of a transition from the religion of Jesus to a religion about Jesus (I’ve blogged about it HERE).
Anyway, I knew that church and state were inseparably linked under Constantine, to the lasting detriment (imho) of both. Roger Williams, who in 1644 first proposed a “wall of separation” between the two, famously said:
[W]hen they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wildernes of the world, God hathe ever broke down the wall it selfe, removed the Candlestick, &c. and made his Garden a Wildernesse.
I don’t know exactly what he meant by the “Candlestick, &c,” but Williams says it was Constantine who first opened the gap (I’ve blogged about it HERE and HERE). His biographer, John M. Berry, says Williams “was saying that mixing church and state corrupted the church, that when one mixes religion and politics, one gets politics.”
Williams wasn’t exactly wrong about that, on either count.
In 312 CE Constantine defeated a rival at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge after seeing a Christian symbol in the sky (a Chi-Rho, or perhaps, as some historians have speculated, a sun dog) and ordering it painted on his soldiers’ shields. He
So by today’s standards, Constantine was pretty transactional about his beliefs. But González cautions us he was sincere about them.
“For him,” says González, “the Christian God was a very powerful being who would support him as long as he favored the faithful. Therefore, when Constantine enacted laws in favor of Christianity, and when he had churches built, what he sought was not the goodwill of Christians, but rather the goodwill of their God” (SOC 1:139).
Constantine was also a shrewd politician, adept not just with the intrigue, mayhem, assassinations and military campaigns that usually marked the transfer of power in the Roman Empire. He seems to have had a flair for what today we might call public relations or messaging. “In the year 324 an imperial edict ordered all soldiers to worship the Supreme God on the first day of the week,” says González by way of example. “This was the day on which Christians gathered to celebrate the Resurrection of their Lord. But it was also the day of the Unconquered Sun, and therefore pagans saw no reason to oppose such an edict” (SOC 1:139-40). So the change went smoothly.
And it lasted. González notes that “it has even been suggested that throughout most of its history the church has lived in [a] Constantinian era” (SOC 1:131, italics in the original). Probably true, and something to remember as we go to church, or call up a livestreamed service, on the day of the unconquered sun. (We call it Sunday in English.) Also with us today: Constantine exempted the church from paying taxes.
Constantine also had a role to play in getting Christian theologians on the same page. As González reminds us, Christianity in the early years was “ill-defined — to the point that it would probably be better to speak of ‘Christianities’ in the plural” (SOC 1:69), and the second and third centuries saw concerted efforts to stamp out various Gnostic, Marcionite and other heresies. This led to the Council of Nicaea, called by Constantine in 325, and a later council at Constantinople (named for Constantine) at which the Arian heresy was stamped out in 381.
When I was a kid, all of this stuff went over my head. When we recited the Nicene Creed in church, I’d cross my fingers when we got to the part about believing in “one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God; Begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God; Begotten, not made; Being of one substance with the Father.” I didn’t know what any of that meant, and I sure didn’t want to get caught lying about it. Especially in church.
Later, I read about the fourth-century heresies as a history major in college. I still didn’t understand them, but at least I recognized their historical importance. Somewhere along the line, I came across one of the fourth-century Cappadocian Fathers named Gregory of Nyssa. I learned from reading González that he had a lot to do with getting the Nicene Creed into final shape at the Council of Constantinople in 381 (SOC 1:213-14). But I first knew of him from a quote of his1 about the controversy over the Arian heresy in Constantanople:
The whole city is full of it, the squares, the market places, the cross-roads, the alleyways; old-clothes men, money changers, food sellers: they are all busy arguing. If you ask someone to give you change, he philosophizes about the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you inquire about the price of a loaf [of bread], you are told by way of reply that the Father is greater and the Son inferior; if you ask ‘Is my bath ready?’ the attendant answers that the Son was made out of nothing.
(I love this quote, and I blogged about it HERE and HERE.)
I can’t say that González straightened out the fourth-century heresies in my mind, but he did manage to relate them to a theological issue that’s important to me. I’ve always loved the first chapter of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. […] And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1-3, 1:14, NRSVUE). We hear it read at the Christmas Eve service every year in my parish, and it’s become as much a part of me as singing “Silent Night” by candlelight.
So I was surprised to read in González that figuring out the nature of the Word was one of the things that got ironed out in the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople. González says the issue was raised early, when the bishop of Alexandria and Arius, a noted presbyter in that city, debated it the nature of the Word:
Although the points debated were many, the main issue at stake was whether the Logos, the Word of God, was coeternal with God. […] Alexander [the bishop] held that the Word existed eternally with the Father; Arius argued that the Word was not coeternal with the Father. Although this may seem like a very fine point, what was ultimately at stake was the divinity of the Word. (SOC 1:184)
Up to this point, the discussions I’ve read of the Arian heresy center on Christology, i.e. the nature of Christ, and the meaning of certain Greek words — homoousios (meaning the “same substance”) and homoiousios (“of a similar substance”) — in various creeds. Not only Greek to me, but fourth-century Koine Greek! I can’t claim that González explains it all to my satisfaction, but at least by relating it to the Word of God, he gives me something to think about.
Today? Among the questions in the prompt, this one stands out: ‘What new insights have I gained about this event; How has it impacted the world I live in and my church? Since God speaks to me through scripture, González’ discussion of the preexisting Word in the Nicene Creed helps me sort out what I think about the Trinity. I’d better ‘fess up here; I still relate to it through the first chapter of John, and I suspect I’m responding to the poetry, not the theology. Once an English major, always an English major, I guess. But it’s nice to get validation for it in the creed. Not to mention getting a new way of thinking about the creeds that don’t involve parsing 1,700-year-old theological jargon.
In fact I’ve been journaling about the creeds lately, taking Luther’s Small Catechism as my jumping-off point — “I believe that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to Him, but instead the Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel […] just as he calls, gathers, enlightens, and makes holy the whole Christian church on earth.” (I’m still wrestling with it, but when I’m finished I’ll link to it HERE.) So reading up on Constantine, Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople is nothing if not timely.
Timely in another way, and not because it has impacted my faith, is González’ discussion of what a shrewd politician Constantine was and how lasting his impact has been. In another of his books, Church History: An Essential Guide, he says in many ways we’re still living with the Roman Empire, even though in the West it ended for all practical purposes with the sack of Rome in 410 CE, a century after Constantine. Says González:
[…] in the East the empire continued for another thousand years. But even in the West the ideal of a Christian empire did not disappear. Repeatedly in the course of the history of the church we will see attempts to restore the Roman Empire and — and even more importantly — we will see that until very recent times church and state have continued to collaborate in ways patterned after the times of Constantine and his successors. (CHEG 39)
González was writing in 1996, before white Christian nationalism came roaring up as a potent force in the Republican Party. I’m not sure the Constantinian era is quite as over and done with as he thought it is.
Only time will tell whether politicians like US House Speaker Mike Johnson and US Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., who famously proclaimed she is “tired of this church and state junk,” succeed in collaborating with the church in ways patterned after the times of Constantine and his imperial successors. But if they take us where they seem to be headed — and where Roger Williams warned of in 1644 — it won’t be without precedent.
Notes:
1 González assigns the quote to another of the Cappadocian Fathers: “That the debate profoundly touched people’s lives is indicated in Gregory of Nazianus’s comment, that one could not even get one’s shoes repaired without getting into a discussion regarding whether the Son was homoousios or homiousios to the Father” (SOC 1:217). He’s right that it touched people’s lives, but I double-checked the quote in Fordham University’s Internet Medieval Sourcebook, and it’s from Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Divinity of the Son and the Spirit (August 383). The version I quoted is attributed to The Orthodox Church by Kallistos Ware. An alternate translation has: “If in this city you ask a shopkeeper for change, he will argue with you about whether the Son is begotten or unbegotten. If you inquire about the quality of the bread, the baker will answer, “The Father is greater, the Son is less.” And if you ask the bath attendant to draw your bath, he will tell you that the Son was created ex nihilo. I don’t know what to call this evil, dementia, madness or something epidemic disease of this kind; it produces a derangement of reasoning.”
See Gregory of Nyssa (335-c.395): Popular Discussion of Theology in the Streets of Constantinople, from On the Divinity of the Son and the Spirit (August 383), Internet History Sourcebook, Fordham University https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/GregoryNyssa-theologyintheStreetsofConstantinople.asp.
Textbooks:
- Justo L. González, Church History: An Essential Guide. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996. (CHEG)
- Justo L. González, Story of Christianity: Volume 1, The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation. Revised and Updated. New York: HarperOne, 2010. (SOC1)
- Justo L. González, The Story of Christianity: Volume 2, The Reformation to the Present Day. Revised and Updated. New York: HarperOne, 2010. (SOC2)
[Uplinked Jan. 20, 2024]
Ordinary Time 