![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/55\/2011\/05\/leithart1.jpg\" "\\"leithart\\"")
<\/a>Constantine was what Andy Crouch calls a culture-maker.\u00a0 The question is whether he was building a good culture which distilled Christian values, or somehow distorted\u00a0 Christian values.\u00a0 Besides all his church building exercises, there were also Constantine\u2019s legislative initiative, one of the earliest being tax exemption for clergy (yeah!).\u00a0\u00a0 Constantine said this would protect them from harassment by heretics.<\/p>\nOne of the problems in evaluating Constantine and the impact of his reign is that edicts and promulgations by Emperors didn\u2019t function in the same way that laws do today.\u00a0 By this I mean that provincial governors tended to take such things as moral exhortations or good rules of thumb, and they were honored in the breech sometimes as much as in the observance.\u00a0\u00a0 When it came to sacrifices,\u00a0 Constantine did specifically prohibit his provincial governors from offering pagan sacrifices at official functions, and the specific reason for this was so Christians could be civil servants without violating their consciences.\u00a0\u00a0 Here is one place where Eusebius has over-egged the pudding. Constantine did not prohibit all sacrifices under all situations or occasions or in all pagan temples in the Empire.\u00a0 He did make clear that he found such sacrifices abhorrent, but the so-called Edict of Milan was his real view, and so he tried to persuade out of existence these practices, not legally bring the hammer down in every conceivable place and circumstance.\u00a0\u00a0 Constantine knew in any case that his vigorous anti-pagan legislation would not necessarily be vigorously enforced in various provinces anyway.\u00a0 It was a question of how much change could be implemented without violating conscience, and how quickly.<\/p>\n
What about Constantine and the Jews?\u00a0 Were his policies a change towards anti-Semitism?\u00a0 In fact Roman law long before Constantine had basically prohibited Jews from proselytizing for their faith.\u00a0 For example they had been prohibited from circumcising converts unless they were slaves.\u00a0\u00a0 Constantine did not change this law, but what he did do was give rabbis and other Jewish leaders the same tax exemption as clergy, and under Constantine, for the first time since Hadrian\u2019s rule,\u00a0 Jews were allowed to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.\u00a0 Furthermore,\u00a0 Constantine left the Jewish patriarch in Constantinople alone, and allowed him to judge religious issues within his own community, but not only religious issues, also civil issues.\u00a0 The same privilege would be extended to Christians as they built up church law and canon law.\u00a0\u00a0 It is true of course he threatened Jews who harassed converts to Christianity and strengthened rules against circumcising non-Jews.\u00a0\u00a0 Constantine does not appear to have been as anti-Semitic as many of his predecessors in the Emperor\u2019s chair, but there is clearly some prejudice in evidence in his life and work.<\/p>\n
One of the central charges sometimes made by Anabaptists against Constantine is that he was responsible for the de-Judaizing of Christianity by merging the Christian faith with the Roman Empire.\u00a0 The truth is far otherwise.\u00a0 Christianity was overwhelmingly Gentile in character long before Constantine.\u00a0 Indeed, it may even have had a majority of Gentile members by the end of the first century A.D.\u00a0 On this blog in earlier posts\u00a0 I have criticized at length Luke Johnson\u2019s recent tome Among the Gentiles <\/em>for offering the exaggerated opposite thesis, namely that Christianity was a Gentile religion basically almost from day one.\u00a0 This also is not quite accurate.<\/p>\nThe claim of Yoder in his recent book The Jewish Christian Schism Revisited (<\/em>Eerdmans 2003)\u00a0 is that it was the merging of Christianity with the power of the Empire that de-Judaized Christianity.\u00a0 Thus Christians abandoned the specifics of Jewish law, which were now played off against the Gospel.\u00a0 They abandoned Jewish universalism for the pseudo-universalism of Greek culture and Roman\u00a0 power, and of course when they picked up the sword they left behind the Jewish pacifism of Jesus.\u00a0 Thus even the Judaism the West has known since Constantine is a product of Christianity and specifically of the Constantinian apostasy which has gone on until the present in various quarters.<\/p>\nAs Leithart points out this is mostly false for a whole series of historical reasons, not least of which is that it ignores the re-Judaizing of Christianity that took place after Constantine where ministers became priests, the Lord\u2019s Supper became a sacrifice modeled on the OT and basilicas began to be seen as old style Temples. And the theological underpinning for such hermeneutical moves is already evident in Augustine,\u00a0 whose pro-Jewish theology and protection of Jews from persecution should be noted.\u00a0 It is hard indeed to examine medieval Orthodox or Catholic praxis and religion and not think it was more heavily indebted to Judaism than to earliest Christianity.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The OT hermeneutic and way of reading even the NT did not disappear with Constantine.\u00a0 If anything, it became more widespread in Christendom.<\/p>\n
On the issue of pacifism, it does seem to be true that there were less Christian pacifists than before the time of Constantine, but it was not because Constantine dictated such a change.\u00a0\u00a0 It is not the Jewishness of Christianity that is suddenly left behind with Constantine, it is the clandestined and underground character of the faith that is left behind.\u00a0 Nor can we even say Christianity lost its minority status with Constantine. Definitely not.\u00a0 Even the most liberal estimates suggest that by 337 when Constantine died,\u00a0 no more than say 25% max of the Empire was Christian.\u00a0\u00a0 What was left behind was that Christianity was a persecuted minority.\u00a0\u00a0 And there is the rub.<\/p>\n
Yoder would have it that when Christianity loses its beleaguered underdog status it loses something essential, it loses for example its counter-cultural element.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But Christianity was never intended to be counter cultural in the full sense of that term.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Counter-cultural is simply reaction to the dominant culture.\u00a0 As Andy Crouch reminds us,\u00a0 Christianity at heart is about building its own positive culture,\u00a0 and rightly or wrongly that is what Constantine was trying to do. \u00a0\u00a0 There is a difference between building culture and transforming culture and rejecting culture and to some degree Christianity was about all three of these things from the start. \u00a0 It was however only the anti-Christian elements of the culture that was rejected by the earliest Christians such as Paul.\u00a0 By contrast, Paul says in Phil. 4 that Christians should sift the culture not simply have an allergic reaction to it.\u00a0 Whatever was noble or honorable or comported with the Gospel in the culture should be affirmed.<\/p>\n
Think on these things<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Constantine was what Andy Crouch calls a culture-maker.\u00a0 The question is whether he was building a good culture which distilled Christian values, or somehow distorted\u00a0 Christian values.\u00a0 Besides all his church building exercises, there were also Constantine\u2019s legislative initiative, one of the earliest being tax exemption for clergy (yeah!).\u00a0\u00a0 Constantine said this would protect them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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