SAYING YES TO CHRISTIANITY, AND NO TO CHRISTENDOM

Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it.

Soren Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, 1850

I.

Here's the rub. Great numbers of professing Christians have been living for approximately 1700 years, no longer as strangers and pilgrims, but as native and baptized inhabitants of "Christendom." Christendom is not Christianity.

And so the time has come for me to give some definition to this word "Christendom." Christendom, as I've already suggested in passing, is to be sharply distinguished from Christianity as a faith and the church as an institution. "Christendom" is specifically a political term. It is that historical merging of an institutional church with the government of a state, the alignment of religion with politics, and the alliance of clergy with ruling powers to share in those powers. "Christendom" has an identifiable birth some three centuries after the time of Jesus. Not only is there a gap in principles between the kingdom of God, as preached by Christ, and Christendom, but there is a substantial gap in time as well. Christendom had its beginnings with events that transpired in early-fourth-century Rome, which became in consequence the legacy of Christian Europe and, in time, its colonies throughout the world (including, of course, America).

We might call this situation the "Constantinian Privilege," after the Roman emperor Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus, better known to history as Constantine "the Great." In the fateful year 312, Constantine became the empire's single reigning Caesar in the decisive battle of the Milvian Bridge. According to legend, he had seen a miraculous vision that led him to accept the superiority of the Christian faith, and under the "sign" of Christ (was it a cross? or, perhaps, the Chi Rho — i.e., XP — the first two Greek letters in Christos?), he brought his forces to Rome and overcame Maxentius, the rival claimant to the throne. The result was that the new emperor granted legitimacy and even primacy to the formerly persecuted church. In 380 the emperor Theodosius "the Great" went even further than Constantine had done, and named the Catholic Church the only legitimate religion of the empire. With these incremental steps by the reigning powers, the church went from outlawed and persecuted (and internally divided) sect, to privileged religion, to (tragically) persecutors of imperial religion in the space of only a few decades. The first execution for heresy took place in 385 in Trier with the execution of the ascetic and preacher Priscillian and six others. And it is precisely here that one can most sharply see the crucial difference between Jesus' concept of God's kingdom and the compromised character of Christendom.

Nevertheless, even when one acknowledges that history is more often shades of gray than clearly distinguished black and white, by no means was it entirely an unmitigated disaster either for the Western world or for the church itself that Christianity became the dominant faith. Most obvious of all, the church could emerge from the horrors of persecution. And, as for Roman society, only the most "evangelistic" of secularists could possibly claim with any credibility that there were no lasting benefits for it and for Western culture in general through this surprising event. It may seem odd to us to hear that one striking result was that charity and compassion were now placed high among the virtues in Roman society, a status they hadn't enjoyed hitherto, but that was one undoubted consequence; and the practical results of this development in public moral awareness — hospitals, orphanages, distribution of food and clothing to the poor, improvements in the treatment of prisoners, and so forth — were even acknowledged by the new faith's pagan critics. All of this has been well-documented and ably defended, and it doesn't require repetition here.

It may be too much to claim in our skeptical modern age that this moment in history was miraculous, but miraculous it surely looked to the eyes of numerous Christians at the time. For many, it seemed the fulfillment in history of the promise that "the kingdom of the world [would] become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ" (cf. Rev. 11:15). Such a merging of, on the one hand, belief in divine predestination working through history, with, on the other, the goals of a this-worldly empire bent on conquest, proved a potent mix at the time. It still is a potent mix.

But, before all this, things had been drastically different. During the first three centuries of the movement's history, before Constantine, the followers of Jesus had looked upon themselves as outsiders living within the worldly societies they occupied. Part of the ethos of being a Christian had been, in fact, learning to identify oneself with a radically different "kingdom" (or, "empire") than the Roman and Asian realms he or she inhabited physically. For example, before the advent of the "Constantinian Privilege," a baptized person had been customarily expected to forgo serving in the military or as a public magistrate. To serve the ideals of the kingdom that Jesus had proclaimed put one in a position of not participating fully in the affairs of the earthly kingdom one inhabited. A Christian's public involvement was limited in his or her old this-worldly society by the governing principles of a transcendent new citizenship, by the laws of a different realm.

So, two sets of principles had been involved — those of a kingdom that conquered and ruled through might, and those of a kingdom that restrained violent passions in favor of persuasive compassion, humility, and service to all human beings, regardless of earthly borders, status, or caste. We should be absolutely clear about this right at the outset: this truly made for an uncomfortable position for those pre-Constantinian, pre-Christendom Christians to adopt, and not all those wishing to follow Jesus did it equally well. The invitation to take up the cross unequivocally meant in that early Christian context that you really could die for the sake of this kingdom, and, if it should come to that, it would likely be your own people who hated, imprisoned, and destroyed you in the process.

Think for a moment of the opprobrium with which an American in today's climate might, conceivably, be met if he states that he cannot in good conscience "support the troops" in, say, Afghanistan — not as individuals, but in their capacity as carrying on America's "war on terror" on foreign soil. Kick that up a few notches, and you have some idea of what it meant for Roman Christians to refuse to serve as Roman soldiers or magistrates — to refuse, in other words, to promote the empire's agenda of warfare, or to enact...