Talking with Bird

Talking with Bird, as in Mike Bird.

American or Australian, many Christians vote their conscience. Others do more than vote: they are engaged. Others are even more than engaged: they are activists. Others more than that: they run for office. Some even get elected and spend their energies in public service.

Photo by Fabio Fistarol on Unsplash

Mike Bird, in a recent post called the “Constantinian Conundrum,” offered this summary of the Anglican/Church of England approach to engagement:

For a long time, the Anglican church was effectively the chaplain to the British empire, which meant it was in a sense a Constantinian arrangement, i.e., an official marriage between empire and the church. In England, to this very day, the crown, through the prime minister and his/her advising committee, appoints bishops in the Church of England. It was arrangements such as this that the Anabaptists and American puritans rallied against in their quest for the separation of church and state.

Mike then affirms a separation of church and state. Then speaks of the importance of speaking from the margins with a prophetic voice, and then he steps out behind the quiet lecture rostrum with a more emphatic observation:

Sounds great! However, there is a slight problem with the “prophet from the margins” view of the church.

What happens when you speak truth to power … and the power listens?

What happens when the political powers want a Christian vision of care for the poor, healthcare, welfare, protecting the vulnerable, or redistribution of surplus wealth?

Surely the purpose of speaking truth to power is to make the powers-that-be act Christianly in their governance! Yet seeking that influence is itself a form of Constantinization, fraught with risks and temptations, turning prophecy into a political platform, or requires trying to impose Christian values on people who are not Christians.

In effect, some degree of Constantization is desirable and inevitable if the church wants to influence the surrounding culture and see that influence carried over into public policy or even into law.

No matter how Anabaptist you are, no matter how much you might roll your eyes at the Anglican set up, as long as you want Government to do what is right according to Christian values, then the church-state divide is always going to get a bit blurry.

But is influentialism Constantinian? I say Wait just a minute.

Mike has kindly asked me to engage his statements and he will be responding to me.

We might plot, like Mike, self-conscious Christian folks on a spectrum from Engaged to Disengaged. If we take, at one end, Anabaptism as a term for radical separation of church and state and move toward total engagement with the term Constantinian, we could say in the middle are the Kuyperians and the Niebuhrians. In the middle of the muddle is nothing less than a big group of people who have a non-theoretical engagement. Please don’t quibble with the terms as our point today is not to discuss the engagement today of Anabaptists nor the distinction between (true) Kuyperians from (true) Niebuhrians in their own quests of influentialism. I want to sketch merely that there is a spectrum. H. Richard Niebuhr sketched it in these terms:

Christ against culture: the Anabaptist tradition.

Christ of culture: natural law and cultural Protestantism.

Christ above culture: Aquinas and the Roman Catholic Church

Christ and culture in paradox: Martin Luther and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Christ transforming culture: Calvin, Edwards, Barth.

In Kingdom Conspiracy I said this:

I speak from experience for the moment. The Christ-transforming-culture approach, and it is fair to call it the Reformed or Calvinist approach, has ruled the American church both on the Right and the Left for its entire history.

I want also to define what “Constantinian” means though I’m unaware of anything like an official definition. In Kingdom Conspiracy I wrote something like this:

any attempt to get the government or state to legislate what Christians believe and therefore to enforce Christian beliefs through the law is to one degree or another Constantinian. Soft or hard it is still the Constantinian temptation. Let’s name names: both Jim Wallis and Ralph Reed operate on the basis of a Constantinian blending of church and state. Both want Washington DC to enact their brand of Christian virtue. Whenever church and state get connected the word kingdom quickly takes on the sense that it is the socio-political and church government of a given city, state or country.

Luther and Calvin formed a new kind of state-church relation, one marked by a different theology, but neither broke entirely free of the Constantinian blending of church and state and the use of the state to enforce Christian beliefs. But the Anabaptists broke completely free from the state church and created, without using such terms, a wall of separation between church and state fired by the principle of freedom of conscience.

Now hear this: both Australia (as I understand it) and the USA are anabaptist in their church-state relations. They both affirm a separation of church and state. Neither by constitution can be (truly) Constantinian.

Yet, if one reads Eusebius’ Life of Constantine one might well draw significant parallels between that “Christian” empire and the sycophantic treatment of President Trump by those who are in the Christian nationalism camp.

Something else: the best term for the more original version of Anglicanism/Church of England in its relation to the King or Queen or to Parliament is Erastianism, not Constantinianism. Erastianism more or less lets the government issue some of the parameters of religious behaviors but Erastianism is a more peaceable treaty of respect (most of the time) than one finds in Constantinianism. With Constantine we have a full marriage of the two.

I also said this:

There was no voice more respected in the 20th Century among conservative evangelicals than Carl Henry’s, and perhaps no one who gave more thought to the Christian and society than Henry, yet he observed that many were too aggressive and getting things backward. It is worth quoting him as a good reminder. It begins with the important observation that Christians have hope and have a vision. He says,

Christians have biblical reason for seeking a predominantly regenerate society.

That aim, however, he says doesn’t mean what many think it might mean. He asks some piercing questions:

But do they … have reason also to legislate all scriptural principles upon public institutions including government and schools? Even if they should become the majority, would it be wise to do so?

He presses even further with this:

Will not Christians be disillusioned and in fact discredited if by political means they seek to achieve goals that the Church should ideally advance by preaching and evangelism?

Then he makes a jarring observation that ought to be stirred deeply into the soup of American Christianity:

Despite all the media tumult over [the] Moral Majority and the high public visibility of its leader, its extensive solicitation of funds during a six-year political crusade – claiming to speak for six million households – has not achieved passage of a single major piece of legislation cherished by the conservative right.

Precisely the point that James Davison Hunter would make nearly three decades later when he observed that evangelicals do not have sufficient political power to achieve their aims and maybe ought to re-think their entire approach into what he calls “faithful witness.”

         Randy Balmer, one of America’s finest historians of evangelicalism, after years of studying the relationship of evangelicals and politics concludes on a similar note in his God in the White House:

My reading of American religious history is that religion always functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power. Once you identify the faith with a particular candidate or party or with the quest for political influence, ultimately it is the faith that suffers.

Amen, and again I say Amen.

So, to Mike Bird I would say this: To call “Constantinian” the common approach of evangelicals to public engagement overstates. I do believe many have a “total control” approach and attitude in their politics, but I don’t believe they have thought through it enough to be any more than an unrecognized Constantinian temptation. Most are some kind of civic republicans engaged in society for the common good with more (today) than a progressive sensibility that we can make the world a better place. For some it would be more Christian or Judeo-Christian while for others it would be more a secularized version. But complete marriage – church backed by state, state backed by church – no, I don’t think that’s on the offing in either the USA or Australia.

I don’t think it is Constantinian to vote or to be an activist. A Constantinian wants total control. It is totalitarian. Some are tempted but they aren’t thinking through it.