Assessing the "Constantinian Shift": A Defense of the Theological Question

Assessing the “Constantinian Shift”: A Defense of the Theological Question Jordan Daniel Wood Presented at “For the Good of the Many”: Constantine and the Edict of Milan on Its 1700 th Anniversary St. Louis, September 20, 2013 INTRODUCTION: NO ENDURING CITY In an article published this past month entitled “No Enduring City,” David Hart argues that, as we survey the ruins of Christendom, our assessments of it would do well to retain a “little prudent providentialism.”1 Belief in the mysterious workings of God through the inherent ambiguities and contradictions of human history, especially the history of the Church, keeps us from “indulging either in sanctimonious denunciations of ‘Constantinianism’ or in triumphalist apostrophes to the spiritual greatness of ‘Christian’ culture, in either case reducing the very concept of grace to an empty cipher.”2 It was the persuasive beauty of the Form of Christ in history that first led to the triumph of Christ over Caesar (along with all the positive ripples that ensued), and it was this same Form, whose Cross exposed all the “delusions and deceits” of human power structures, that inevitably led to the dissolution of this always-tenuous accommodation.3 Providence thus frees us to appreciate the blessings and repudiate the curses of Constantine’s legacy. I am in agreement with Hart’s cautionary assessment, and yet I think the most basic question of “Constantinianism” remains largely unaddressed. It is this question that I wish to identify and defend as a valid and pressing concern for modern Christian theology. This short essay has two movements. First, I expound the charge of “Constantinianism” in its most potent iteration – that of David Bentley Hart, “No Enduring City,” First Things (August/September 2013): 46. Ibid. 3 Ibid., 50. Others, including Duane Friesen and Eric Voegelin, have also spoken of the irrepressible “non-imperialistic impulses” in the Christian Canon and Tradition, which not only produced a variety of “alternative cultural” visions, but may have contributed to the collapse of Christendom from within. See Thomas Heilke, “Yoder’s Idea of Constantinianism: An Analytical Framework Toward Conversation,” in A Mind Patient and Untamed: Assessing John Howard Yoder’s Contributions to Theology, Ethics, and Peacemaking. Edited by Ben C. Olleburger and Gayle Gerber Koontz (Telford: Cascade, 2004) 102. 1 2 1 the late Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder – as well as its common criticisms. Second, I highlight what most critics of Yoder’s position fail to appreciate – that his criticism of “Constantinianism” is, at its most fundamental level, not ecclesiological or eschatological, but properly theological. That is, Yoder rejects even the most complex forms of “Constantinianism” because he rejects all Christian participation in violence and coercion. Insofar as Christ is the true Form of both God and humanity, Christian ethics must assume the same form as divine being. The question non-Constantinian theologies raise, then, is the question of the relation between Christian ontology and Christian ethics as it pertains to peace and violence. Before concluding, I notice in passing how current trends in modern theology, particularly those of Radical Orthodoxy, intensify the significance of this question and the need for Christian theologians to address it. I. YODERIAN “CONSTANTINIANISM” AND ITS DISCONTENTS Yoder’s Concept of “Constantinianism” Yoder often portrayed the fundamental problem of the “Constantinian shift” as “a deep shift in the relation of church and world.”4 From the beginning, then, Yoder’s primary concern is partially historical and primarily ecclesiological. “Our concern is not with Constantine the man,” says Yoder, Nor do we suggest that the year 311 represented an immediate reversal without preparation or unfolding…. Nonetheless, the medieval legend which made of Constantine the symbol of an epochal shift was realistic: he stands for a new era in the history of Christianity.5 Much of Yoder’s assessment focuses on the ecclesiological and eschatological impact of the Constantinian shift, which assumed definite sociological formations (or deformations, if it suits you). Formerly a persecuted, voluntary, apparently insignificant community, the Church now enjoyed not just relief from punishment, but eventually, putative favor. The swell of its ranks undermined 4 John Howard Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources of Western Social Ethics,” in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics Gospel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984): 135. 5 Ibid. Cf. also John Howard Yoder, “The Otherness of the Church,” in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical. Edited by Michael G. Cartwright (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1998) 57. 2 conversion as a voluntary assumption of a precarious way of life and indicated more a de facto or compulsory acceptance of the privileged life of the Christian community in the Christian Empire.6 The distinctive visibility of the Church thus gradually recedes as “the two visible realities, church and world, were fused.”7 This “new” social situation precipitated fundamental shifts in Christian ethical thinking: the transition from pre-Constantinian, messianic “minority” ethics to post-Constantinian, establishment “power” ethics. The transition from early Christian pacifism to later Christian embrace of soldiering as a proper Christian duty concretely epitomes the kind of moral shift tacit in every form of “Constantinianism.”8 The shift did not merely present an ecclesiological challenge, but constituted a “heretical eschatology.”9 The earliest Christians proclaimed that the life, death, and resurrection of Christ already established Jesus as Lord over all of history, over all cosmic powers, though the “world” in its rebellion had not yet confessed and embraced this reality. The precise form of Christ’s lordship – kenosis – yields two important observations: [1] the primary meaning of history does not lie in the ostensible “powers” of this age – e.g. the emperor and his empire – but in the Church, Christ’s Body, which participates in His rule through His kenosis;10 [2] the way Christ’s lordship will eventually be fully achieved in the cosmos is mysterious and, precisely because of its kenotic form, The emphasis on voluntariness is found in John Howard Yoder, “The Disavowal of Constantine: An Alternative Perspective on Interfaith Dialogue,” in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical. Edited by Michael G. Cartwright (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1998) 245. Cf. also Heilke 105-6, and Paul Martens, The Heterodox Yoder (Eugene: Cascade, 2012) 31-4. 7 Yoder, “The Otherness of the Church,” 57. So Yoder sees Augustine’s postulation of an “invisible church” as merely the symptomatic and systematic outworking of the fundamental Church-world fusion effected by the Constantinian shift. Cf. “The Constantinian Sources,” 136. 8 Ibid. It is fashionable to criticize Yoder for oversimplifying the prevalence and pervasiveness of pacifism amongst the early Christians; see, e.g., Peter J. Leithart, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (Downers Grove: InterVaristy Press Academic, 2010) ch.12. It should be acknowledged that, however oversimplified he was wont to be, Yoder was aware that there were Christians in the Roman military as early as the late second century; cf. John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution. Edited by Theodore J. Koontz and Andy AlexisBaker (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009) 49. The simple fact remains that prior to the fourth century there is not one Christian writing that defends or supports Christian participation in the military, and some that explicitly denounce it (The New Testament, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen, etc.). 9 Chris Carter, The Politics of the Cross: The Theology and Social Ethics of John Howard Yoder (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001) 155. 10 E.g., “The Otherness of the Church,” 56, and John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster. 2nd edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994) ch.12. 6 3 uncontrollable. This Christo-centric, apocalyptic eschatology is reversed in Constantinianism.11 As Yoder puts it: Before Constantine, one knew as a fact of everyday experience that there was a believing Christian community but one had to ‘take it on faith’ that God was governing history. After Constantine, one had to believe without seeing that there was a community of believers, within the larger nominally Christian mass, but one knew for a fact that God was in control of history.12 Thus the interruption of the Kingdom of God in history through Christ’s particular history, which is the arrival of the New Age that coexists with the Old, is effectively tempered and rendered invisible in the Constantinian shift. Yoder’s charge that “Constantinianism” fuses the two Ages is not the simple accusation that future hope is resolved into present reality,13 but that the New Age is somehow presently in our control. Even if the New Age is acknowledged by Constantinians to be “not yet,” they still think that the immanent and visible socio-political structures of the Old Age are able to be harnessed to guide history toward the fullness of the New Age. Hence “effectiveness” in realizing good ends becomes a primary criterion in Christian ethical thinking.14 But only God can bring about the New Age, unexpectedly, without calculation, as is evident in Jesus’ explicit rejection of Satan’s offer to give him the “kingdoms of the earth” (Luke 3-4) and in his parables of the Kingdom (Mark 4). Thus “Constantinianism” is not just an eschatological heresy, but a recapitulation of the original sin of “seizing godlikeness.”15 Nathan R. Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Eugene: Cascade, 2009) 9. See Kerr’s (7) fuller explanation: “Constantinianism most fundamentally names a certain orientation toward the political meaning of history which is rooted in a heretical eschatology based upon a misconception of the relation of Christ to history. Most importantly, Constantinianism proceeds as if what happened in the cross, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus had not profoundly altered history, and it provides for the church a way of acting politically in history which is not entirely determined by the lordship of Jesus Christ.” Cf. also Carter 157-64 for Yoder’s view that “Constantinianism” reverses New Testament eschatology, though Kerr’s analysis of Yoder’s notion of the “Lordship of Christ over history” as a kenotic and apocalyptic refusal to direct history in a teleological (Hegelian) manner towards its true telos (though it has one) is a much deeper reading of Yoder. 12 Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources,” 137. 13 Though some of his early statements make it seem that way. Cf. n.19. 14 Ibid., 140. Cf. Kerr 9. 15 Ibid., 145. See The Politics of Jesus, 24-7 for Yoder’s exegesis of Luke’s temptation account. 11 4 Discontents The most common criticism of Yoder’s “Constantinianism” is that it rests upon, or at least implies, a misleading and oversimplified historical narration of the events of the fourth century – indeed, perhaps of most of Christian history! Whether it be the notion that pre-Constantine Christians were nearly uniform in their pacifism while post-Constantine Christians were uncritical statists, or that the Constantinian fusion of Church and state spelled the end of the Church’s ability to take up a distinctly Christian, critical distance from Empire, Yoder’s history cannot be trusted.16 In his book Defending Constantine, Peter Leithart spends most of the time challenging Yoder’s interpretation of Constantine and his contemporary supporters, claiming that Yoder’s theology is “deeply bound up with an account of Christian history. If he got history wrong, that sets a question mark over his theology.”17 Furthermore – and this criticism comes chiefly from sympathizers – insofar as Yoder’s critique of “Constantinianism” entails the facile relegation of over a millennium of Christian history, along with its dogmatic achievements and metaphysical formulations, it is “an impoverishing concept.”18 No one can deny the presence of these trends in Yoder. He sometimes glosses over the distinctively critical edge of an Athanasius against Constantius II or an Ambrose against Theodosius.19 His work may even betray a tendency to reduce the value of classic Christian beliefs to E.g. Leithart 180: “Yoder regularly places Eusebius and Augustine together as chief representatives of Constantinian theology, but Augustine wrote City of God as an antidote to Eusebianism.” 17 Leithart 254. 18 Heilke 115. See Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources,” 141. So A. James Reimer, “Theological Orthodoxy and Jewish Christianity: A Personal Tribute to John Howard Yoder,” in The Wisdom of the Cross: Essays in Honor of John Howard Yoder. Edited by Stanley Hauerwas, Chris K. Huebner, Harry J. Huebner, and Mark Thiessen Nation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) 435: “My quarrel with Yoder in that article is not so much his strong emphasis on the gospel as a historical-political-ethical message, but the virtual eclipse of what I call the sacramental, mystical, cultic, metaphysical, and ontological dimensions. This historicist, anti-metaphysical orientation makes Yoder’s thought less critical of our age than he intends it to be – it in fact buys into modern historicism.” 19 For instance, Yoder claims in an early work: “With Augustine, the Reformers identified the millennium with the Christianization of the Roman Empire,” in “The Prophetic Dissent of the Anabaptists,” in The Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision: A Sixtieth Anniversary Tribute to Harold S. Bender. Edited by Guy F. Herschberger (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1957) 101. For Athanasius, cf. Leithart 184-5, and for Ambrose, Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the 16 5 “just another form of ethics or series of practices,” as Paul Martens argues. 20 But is Yoder’s conception and charge of “Constantinianism” obviously inseparable from the particularities of his historical narrations? Are critics like Leithart right to focus so completely on Yoder’s history rather than his theology?21 Did Yoder himself similarly emphasize history in his account of “Constantinianism”? It seems not. For starters, Yoder’s history is more nuanced and flexible than one might think, and so his theological critique is not beholden to a particular version of Christian history. He conceives of the fusion of Church and world as neither constant nor complete, claiming, for example, that “the church in the Middle Ages retained a more than vestigial consciousness of its distinctness.” He even evokes “the visibility of the hierarchy in opposition to the princes” as a prime example of such distinctness.22 Indeed, far from envisioning the 1200-year interval between the Edict of Milan and the Radical Reformation as a time of total captivity, he actually sees the postReformation churches as much more culpable of “Constantinianism” than the late antique or medieval Church (i.e. Christendom).23 On one occasion, he even discourages any “systematic pessimism” regarding the historical fourth-century shift, calling denial of the possibility of faithfulness after Constantine “equivalent to denying the rhetoric of Christian belief in providence,” roots of political theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 199-201. However, Martens 22, n.7: “it is also helpful to recognize that as Yoder matures, these sorts of generalizations become less frequent and more qualified.” 20 Martens, The Heterodox Yoder, 147. 21 Leithart knows that a purely historical correction of Yoder’s misleading representations does not “refute” his critique of “Constantinianism” (188, n.80), and promises to deal with the “theological” side of his charge in the final chapter. He even claims: “My main interest in this project has been theological” (306). Yet, by the end of chapter 11, he admits: “I examine some of the theological and ethical concerns in the final chapter, though even there it will be impossible for me to deal fully with Yoder’s concerns, especially the issue of pacifism” (254, n.74; my emphasis). But as I will argue and as Leithart himself seems to sense, the “the issue of pacifism” is the doorway to Yoder’s most fundamental challenge! Leithart calls it the presupposition (“Without pacifist assumptions, much of Yoder’s edifice crumbles”) and “leading symptom” of the church’s more fundamental (ecclesiological and eschatological) apostasy (256, n.4). Yet he fails entirely to address the fundamental theological root of Yoder’s pacifism: the nonviolence of God. 22 Yoder, “The Otherness of the Church,” 58. 23 Ibid., 59. 6 much like Hart in his recent article.24 Such historical openness suggests that Yoder’s concern with “Constantinianism” may not be as reliant upon a comprehensive “Fall narrative” as it sometimes appears. Moreover, though critics and commentators alike assume that the theological edge of Yoder’s critique of “Constantinianism” is ecclesiological and eschatological, one must recognize that such dimensions are inseparable from Yoder’s Christology.25 For Yoder, the Church is what it is because it is Christ’s Body, and the New Age comes only in Christ’s Form, because – and this is the crucial point – Christ is how God acts within history to manifest history’s purpose. In other words, the historical Christ is also God with us.26 So when Yoder characterizes the structural error of “Constantinianism” with this assertion – “What the churches accepted in the Constantinian shift is what Jesus had rejected, seizing godlikeness, moving in hoc signo from Golgotha to the battlefield” – he is not merely claiming that “Constantinianism” tempts Christians to disobey the commands of Jesus, but that it tempts them to renounce their destiny to be like God.27 24 Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources,” 147. Yoder specifies: “Caesar would be perfectly free (for a while) to bring to bear upon the exercise of his office the ordinary meaning of the Christian faith.” And further, with the inherent risks (e.g. of being killed, losing power, asking people to suffer, which “a ruler accepts anyway”): “there could have been in some times and in some places the possibility that good could be done, that creative social alternatives could be discovered, that problems could be solved, enemies loved and justice fostered” (146). 25 Carter 177. Even Heilke’s sympathetic account of Yoder’s idea of “Constantinianism” is too limited: “[Yoder’s] critique, on the basis of which he outlines the alternative community of faith, is sociological, anthropological, and ecclesiological, with a political critique implied” (104). Yet he seems to qualify this near the end of his study, asserting that there are actually three levels to Yoder’s critique – pragmatic, theological, and ethical. The latter level gets more to the point, in that it concerns “a particular way of being community, of relating to outsiders, of conducting one’s affairs, of displaying moral excellence, of showing what God is like” (109, my emphasis). 26 Yoder, Christian Attitudes, 61: “This is the level at which the shift matters most: how does God work in history?”; cf. also Kerr 11. 27 Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources,” 145. 7 II. THE THEOLOGICAL QUESTION Divine Nonviolence as the Root of Yoder’s Non-Constantinian Theology “The most fundamental question raised by Yoder,” Craig Carter observes, “is that of the character of the God revealed in Jesus Christ.”28 This is the cornerstone of Yoder’s stalwart defense of Christian pacifism. He states while commenting on the Sermon on the Mount: We do not, ultimately, love our neighbor because Jesus told us to. We love our neighbor because God is like that. It is not because Jesus told us to that we love even beyond the limits of reason and justice, even to the point of refusing to kill and being willing to suffer – but because God is like that too.29 Again, “Obedience means not keeping verbally enshrined rules, but reflecting the character of the love of God.”30 The ethical criterion par excellence in “Constantinianism,” effectiveness, is negated precisely by Christ’s particular Form, God’s definitive act in history to realize the goals of history: That Christian pacifism which has a theological basis in the character of God and the work of Jesus Christ is one in which the calculating link between our obedience and ultimate efficacy has been broken, since the triumph of God comes through resurrection and not through effective sovereignty or assured survival. 31 The root of Yoder’s pacifism is therefore also the root of his conceptualization and rejection of “Constantinianism,” namely, that Christ is the perfect image of God’s being. This was the case from the earliest days of his career, as an unpublished 1956 essay shows, entitled “The Wrath of God and the Love of God”: Christ’s obedience is “conformity to the nature of God. The reason Jesus had to die to save man, is that God is that way.”32 Carter 177. John Howard Yoder, “The Political Axioms of the Sermon on the Mount,” in The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1971) 51. Similarly: “As the parallel statements in verse 45 and Luke 6 make clear, we are asked to ‘resemble God’ just at this one point: not in His omnipotence or His eternity or His impeccability, but simply in the undiscriminating or unconditional character of His love” (47). 30 Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 238. 31 Ibid., 239. Cf. also John Howard Yoder, The Christian Witness to the State (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1964) 49; Yoder, The Original Revolution, 39; John Howard Yoder, “Living the Disarmed Life: What Is Our Crosses?” Sojourners 6 (May 1977): 17; and John Howard Yoder, The War of the Lamb: The Ethics of Nonviolence and Peacemaking. Edited by Glen Stassen and Mark Thiessen Nation (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009) 180. 32 John Howard Yoder, “The Wrath of God and the Love of God,” essay presented at the 1956 Historic Peace Churches and International Fellowship of Reconciliation Conference, in England. See Martens 30, n.32 and 153 for details. 28 29 8 Yoder believes, with Church Fathers like St. Irenaeus, the author of the Epistle to Diognetus, and Origen, that Christ has revealed God to be nonviolent,33 and that this is determinative for Christian assessments of violence. One might say that for Yoder, “Constantinianism” is most fundamentally a critique of Christian participation in the forms of existence that do not correspond to the Form of God’s own existence, and so violent and coercive forms, which do not correspond to God’s Form, Christ, are inappropriate for the Christian. “Constantinianism” is thus a theological critique of coercive power itself, and so whether one oversimplifies the historical “Constantinian shift” as a total fusion of Church and world or sees it more responsibly as critical tolerance of restricted forms of violent coercion for good ends, this is a shift that still falls squarely under Yoder’s theological critique. It matters not if the Church itself wielded Constantine’s sword or if they allowed it to be deployed within the confines of the distinct Church – for these are but degrees of the same capitulation of the Cross to the sword. No amount of problematizing of historical generalizations will ever address Yoder’s fundamental concern; for such arguments could just as well serve to demonstrate the spaciousness of the Constantinian cage rather than its absence. 34 Irenaeus, A.H. 4.37.1: “For violence is not done by God, but a good will is [toward us] is always present with Him” (Vis enim a Deo non fit, sed bona sententia adest illi semper); cf. also A.H. 3.pref., 4.37.4, and esp. 5.1.1, the latter being an explicitly Christological account; Ep ad Diognetus 7.3-5: “But perhaps he sent him, as one might suppose, to rule by tyranny, fear, and terror? Certainly not! On the contrary, he sent him in gentleness and meekness, as a king might send his son who is a king; he sent him as God; he sent him as a human to humans. When he sent him, he did so as one who saves by persuasion, not compulsion, for compulsion is no attribute of God [w`j sw,zwn e;pemyen( w`j pei,qwn( ouv biazo,menoj\ bi,a ga.r ouv pro,sesti tw/| qew|]/ . When he sent him, he did so as one calling, not pursing; when he sent him, he did so as one loving, not judging”; from Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007) 706-7; Origen, Princ 1.2.10, inter alia. 34 Leithart 316 thinks that where Yoder “fails…is in showing that this heresy actually deserves the name Constantinian, and therefore that this heresy has characterized the mainstream church for the better part of its history.” Leithart’s criticism fails in two ways: [1] it is inaccurate to say Yoder’s charge entails that this is a heresy that has “characterized the mainstream church for the better part of its history,” at least not if this means “most of the Church.” Yoder thinks that most medieval Christians were pacifist, non-clerics, etc., and therefore that part of the Church (which is most of the Church) would not be “Constantinian.” Thus, one cannot so simply equate the observation that Constantinianism has been present for most of the Church’s history with the accusation that it characterizes most of the Church itself. [2] the most fundamental challenge is not ecclesiological, but properly theological. 33 9 Ambiguity in Radical Orthodoxy I wish to evoke, rather briefly, the work of two major modern theologians in order to identify and promote the fundamental question posed by non-Constantinian theologies: that of John Milbank and David Hart. This may seem an odd evocation, given the explicitly metaphysical concerns of their projects and Yoder’s explicitly non-systematic approach to theology. Yet their interests converge in perhaps unexpected ways. In Theology and Social Theory Milbank argues that the Christian “counter-ontology” is an “ontology of peace” over and against postmodern “ontologies violence” (ch.10), one that affirms “peace as a primary reality” and denies “an always preceding violence.”35 Yet he also defends the Augustinian capitulation to the tragic necessity of coercive punishment for “pedagogical” or pastoral purposes.36 At the same time, however, he faults Augustine for failing to realize that such “pedagogic” coercion “partially violates” Augustine’s own ontology, which sees the imperium as, in its structure, violent and sinful and therefore a privation of being. For “any act of coercion,” says Milbank, retains a purely arbitrary and therefore violent element, and so cannot be ontologically linked to God. Indeed, John Scotus Eriugena would later demonstrate in his “improvement of Augustine’s ontology” that the only true “punishment” is “self-inflicted” punishment, the “deleterious effect of sin itself upon nature.”37And yet, even though Milbank claims that the Church is nothing other than a “social ontology” which is grounded in the general, counter-ontology of Christianity, it must nevertheless accept “the tragic necessity of ‘alien’, external punishment,” i.e. prudential violence and coercion.38 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) 429. Ibid., 424. 37 Ibid., 426. 38 Ibid., 428-9. 35 36 10 Ambiguity intensifies in Hart’s magisterial work, The Beauty of the Infinite.39 Hart’s entire project, likewise posed against postmodern ontologies of violence,40 aims to demonstrate the uniqueness of Christian metaphysics in relation to its evangel of peace, which, because it corresponds to a metaphysics that depicts the infinite as interminable form, rightly deploys an embodied rhetoric of persuasion that is not violent. For every form, distance, difference, and determination has already been comprehended and surpassed in the infinite determination of the Three Persons and in the Eternal Form of God, Christ. The truth proclaimed by the Church is therefore an aesthetic appeal whose persuasion is fittingly the beauty of that infinite Form itself. Moreover, the distance of rhetoric – between herald and hearer – is primordially a form of peace, for its suasion is not a forceful closure of the gap, but a traversal of it, since the Christian infinite contains the possibility of every distance.41 But, and this is crucial for Hart, the eternal Form of God is nothing other than the Form of Christ as He appeared in history. A rhetoric that is not also a faithful permutation of the visible, historical, beautiful Form of Christ is not properly Christian or true. “The earliest confession of Christian faith,” says Hart, “ – ku,rioj vIhsou/j – meant nothing less radical than that Christ’s peace, having suffered upon the cross the decisive rejection of the powers of this world, had been raised up by God as the true form of human existence.” Thus, “only if the form of Christ can be lived out in the community of the church is the confession of the church true; only if Christ can be practiced is Jesus Lord.”42 Christ’s Form, which can and must be embodied in Christ’s Body, the Church, exposes every kind of violence – whether the chaotic irruptions of Dionysius or the prudential order of Apollo – as alien to the contours of being, as deformations of the manifold Form of peace. But, as Augustine David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). Ibid., 35-7. 41 Ibid., 442. 42 Ibid., 1. Thus Hart rejects the “Christian Realism” of Reinhold Niebuhr, also a frequent foil of Yoder (341). 39 40 11 saw, these varieties of violence are the very bases of civil politics. “For Christian thought,” Hart avers, “the pattern of sin, endlessly repeated, is to take creation not as gift but as a violence…an aboriginal strife that must be governed; for to take violence as inescapable is to make of violence a moral and a civic duty.”43 And yet, in the turn of a phrase, Hart seems to undermine the force of his entire argument exactly by taking violence as inescapable in the triumph of Christ’s Form on earth: “Where the justice of the kingdom is not present, and cannot be made present without any exercise of force, the selfadoring inaction of those who would meet the reality of, say, black smoke billowing from the chimneys of death camps with songs of protest is simply violence by other means, and does not speak of God’s kingdom, and does not grant its practitioners the privilege of viewing themselves as more faithful members of Christ’s body than those who struggle against evil in the world of flesh and blood where evil works.”44 Apart from the fact that Hart, in the one place he does address “pacifism” at all, caricatures it as passive in form and puritan in motivation, he never explains how the postulation of the necessity of Christian participation in some violence is not itself a violation of the theological ontology he so carefully constructs. If the advent of God’s Kingdom is the advent of God Himself, how could it be necessary for Him to violate His own nature in order to realize His Kingdom? If the Christian infinite traverses every distance – even the depths of Hell45 – whence this tragic distance that must now be forcibly closed rather than inscrutably traversed? The ambiguity in both Milbank and Hart sharpen the fundamental question raised by Yoder’s disavowal of “Constantinianism”: given that the Form of Christ has revealed that God is nonviolent, what is the precise relationship Ibid., 346. Ibid., 341, my emphasis. 45 Ibid., 334. 43 44 12 between Christian ontology and Christian ethics, particularly as it pertains to Christian participation in or support of violence? CONCLUSION: AN ENDURING CHALLENGE To return to Constantine, one could cast the question in hermeneutical terms. NonConstantinian theologies need not deny the historical complexity of the Constantinian shift and its iterations throughout history. They need not even deny that Constantine really beheld the Christian Cross radiating its message on the horizon, on the eve of that fateful battle in 312 CE. They need only contest Constantine’s interpretation of it. For the chief question raised by non-Constantinian theologies such as Yoder’s is this: what if evn tou,tw| ni,ka (“by this [sign], conquer!”) did not mean “use the Cross to slay your enemies,” but rather “slay” your enemies in (en) the way of the Cross?46 This would not have been the first time this message had been proclaimed with such words, for as the Apostle testified: “He triumphed over them in the Cross” (qriambeu,saj auvtou.j evn auvtw|/; Col 2.15). 46 Eusebius, Life of Constantine 1.28-32. 13