“No bishop, no King,” James VI of Scotland and I of England famously stated in his controversy with the Presbyterians. But his statement could just as easily be reversed. Without a King, or perhaps better, without a Caesar, would we have bishops? Would we have sees? In asking these questions, one learns that in so many ways, the Reformation mirrored the climate of Late Antiquity and the early Church.

Without the Roman Empire, would Christendom ever have been? The question goes beyond mere politics or church government. The imperial church granted us the creeds and unified the liturgy (with certain notable exceptions which themselves display socio-political lines). It gave us the legacy, the narrative, by which we now teach our children who they are. And this is both a blessing and a burden.

Peter Heather, in his The Fall of the Roman Empire, describes the way in which the Christian Church came to enjoy its role as a public institution. He notes, “After Constantine’s public adoption of Christianity, the long-standing claims about the relation of the state to the deity were quickly, and surprisingly easily, reworked” (123).

Rather than a clash, there is a coalescence.

Heather will go on to refute many of the claims of Edward Gibbon, those that assert Christianity had a violent effect upon the empire. This will also contradict the lesser known claims, though important to my ecclesiastical community, of R J Rushdoony in his The Foundations of Social Order. (It really is a terrible book. Perhaps one day I will take the time to refute some of its claims myself, but for now I will simply say that it could hardly be farther from the actual way history unfolded.)

Heather describes the instillation of Christianity as a social institution quite succinctly, and I will quote some of his best lines. Heather writes:

At the top end of Roman society, the adoption of Christianity thus made no difference to the age-old contention that the Empire was God’s vehicle in the world…

This ideological vision implied, of course, that the emperor, as God’s chosen representative on earth, should wield great religious authority within Christianity. As early as the 310s, within a year of the declaration of his new Christian allegiance, bishops from North Africa appealed to Constantine to settle a dispute that was raging among them. This established a pattern for the rest of the century: emperors were now intimately involved in both the settlement of Church disputes and the much more mundane business of the new religion’s administration. To settle disputes, emperors called councils, giving bishops the right to use the privileged travel system, the cursus publicus, in order to attend. Even more impressively, emperors helped set the agendas to be discussed, their officials orchestrated the proceedings, and state machinery was used to enforce the decisions reached. More generally, they made religious law for the Church– Book 16 of the Theodosian Code is entirely concerned with such matters– and influenced appointments to top ecclesiastical positions.

The Christian Church hierarchy also came to mirror the Empire’s administrative and social structures. Episcopal dioceses reflected the boundaries of city territories (some even preserve them to this day, long after they have lost all other meaning). Further up the sale, the bishops of provincial capitals were turned into metropolitan archbishops, enjoying powers of intervention in the new, subordinate sees. Under Constantine’s Christian successors, the previously obscure Bishop of Constantinople was elevated into a Patriarch on a par with the Bishop of Rome– because Constantinople was the ‘new Rome.’ Very quickly, too, local Christian communities lost the power to elect their own bishops. From the 370s onwards, bishops were increasingly drawn from the landowning classes, and controlled episcopal successions by discussions among themselves. With the Church now so much a part of the state– bishops had even been given administrative roles within it, such as running small-claims courts– to become a Christian bishop was not to drop out of public life but to find a new avenue into it. If the Christianization of Roman society is a massively important topic, an equally important, and somewhat less studied one, is the Romanization of Christianity. The adoption of the new religion was no one-way street, but a process of mutual adaptation that reinforced the ideological claims of emperor and state.[1]

This imperial character of the early church can hardly be overstated. This is how we came to have the “ecumenical councils.” This is why some councils won out over others. This is how there could develop “Eastern” and “Western” branches of the Church, and this civil character of ecclesiastical organization is also how there could come to be “Byzantine” Christianity or “Frankish” Catholicism.

The early Christians were able to merge with the empire for a number of reasons.  They understood the civic order to have an abiding noahide validity.  Jesus had come, not just as a Jewish savior, but as a savior that extended salvation to the Gentiles and, in thus doing, he inherited the best of the Gentile legacy for the Church.  Texts such as Jeremiah 29:4-7 were also foundational for the early Christian social thought:

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Two contemporary works which defend the role of Christians as Christians in the civic arena are Christopher Bryan’s Render to Caesar and Bruce Winter’s Seek the Welfare of the City.  Both of these are helpful refutations of the modified-Anabaptist position reflected in Yoder, Hauerwas, and even many supposedly Protestant theologians of our day.

Back in the old world, Augustine of Hippo states his case plainly on the matter:

This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognizing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace.  It therefore is so far from rescinding and abolishing these diversities, that it even preserves and adopts them, so long only as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God is thus introduced.[2]

Not only was a political synthesis with Rome allowable, for Augustine it was desirable.  It was a part of the larger Christian mandate to both pray for one’s leaders and to actively support the civic welfare, maintaining earthly peace.  The Emperor was also to protect and extend true worship, and so keeping on his good side was paramount.  With certain exceptions along the way, this became the patristic view of civic participation.

Late Antiquity scholar Peter Brown also notes the mutual interdependence of crown and miter. Just before the fall of the Western Empire, Symmachus extolled Rome’s ancient paganism as the source of its greatness, pointing to the newer religions, chiefly Christianity, as the reason for Rome’s more recent decline. Rather than simply deny the myth of eternal Rome, however, the early Christians tended to put their own spin on the legend. Brown writes:

The majority of lay Christians were content to stand Symmachus on his head. Rome, they replied, was of course a Holy City, and the Roman empire enjoyed special divine protection: but this was because the bodies of the Apostles, Peter and Paul, rested on the Vatican Hill. The ideology of the late fourth-century popes, and the cult of St. Peter in western Europe, owe much to conscious rivalry with pagan exponents of the myth of Rome. Symmachus paradoxically, was an unwitting architect of the medieval papacy.[3]

This pairing of Caesar and Christ worked for good and for ill. When Constantine, dressed as an angel, called the Council of Nicaea, it was to defend the deity of Jesus Christ. It was to form what we know recognize as catholic Christianity. Subsequent political competitions, however, would be less noble. Brown points to Chalcedon as one such low point:

Compared with these ancient Christian centres, Constantinople, only recently weaned from a military, Latin past, was a colourless newcomer. But to be a ‘Ruling City’ it had to lead the empire in doctrine also. The emperors hastily forced it to the fore. At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the emperor Marcian took advantage of a trend in Greek opinion and of the support of Leo, the bishop of Rome, to humble the patriarch of Alexandria, and so to secure the position of Constantinople as the leading Christian city of the empire. The settlement arrived at in Chalcedon did violence to some of the deepest currents in Greek Christian thought of the time. The equilibrium of eastern Christianity was brutally upset. For the next two centuries, the emperors faced the uphill task of restoring the balance, sometimes by palliating, sometimes by by-passing ‘the accursed council’, without going back for a moment on the initiative which their ‘Ruling City’ had won at Chalcedon.[4]

Now, Chalcedon was certainly not “just” political. To say that would be to misunderstand both religion and politics in the antique world. And as it happens, the writers here at Basilica, along with our respective churches and ecclesiastical traditions, all receive Chalcedon as doctrine true to the word of God. Such does not undo the realities of Chalcedon’s context, though, nor can it deny the subsequent (nationalistic) schisms which the council produced.

Chalcedon would not be the last theological council to engage in imperial disputes. The second council of Nicaea is perhaps the most glaring, as it centered on the family feuds of the Emperor Irene. 2nd Nicaea rejected its immediate Byzantine predecessor in Constantinople (754) and was itself promptly rejected by Charlemagne’s Frankish church. Peter Brown again has an invaluable treatment of the iconoclastic controversy which can be found here.

None of this is meant to pull the rug out from Christendom. Actually, my larger intent is quite the opposite, as my previous posting should display. It is, however, essential that one have a clear understanding of the dialectic between the two swords, in all aspects. Mythology can only leave an inheritance of agnosticism.  And if we are to be, as Jeremiah, seeking the welfare of the city, even a city that has taken us captive, ought we not to expect certain challenges and apparent contradictions on the way?  Which is more important: participating, albeit at times “impurely” or purely sitting it all out?

History has contemporary applications, it would seem. If Christianity sprouted only through its engrafting into the empire, how viable an option is it today to assume a total schism between church and states? What sort of gratitude is on display when “conservative” Christians despise civil rule? And what sort of socially minded Christians deny the very institution which gave the keys of the city to those who were held the keys of the kingdom?

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[1] The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians. (Oxford: 2006), p 125-126

[2] City of God 19.17

[3] The World of Late Antiquity. (W. W. Norton and Compnay: 1989), p 121-122

[4] ibid 144