Strangers and Pilgrims Once More

Being Disciples of Jesus in a Post-Christendom World

Addison Hodges Hart

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781467440455
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

In this book Addison Hodges Hart articulates some crucial questions for contemporary Christians: What sort of church must we become in today's post-Christendom world, where we can no longer count on society to support Christian ideals? What can we salvage from our Christendom past that is of real value, and what can we properly leave behind? How do we become "strangers and pilgrims" once more, after being "at home" in Christendom for so long?Summoning readers to wise and faithful discipleship in our post-Christendom age, Hart suggests both how Christ's disciples can say "yes" to much that was preserved during the age of Christendom and why they should say "no" to some of the cherished accretions of that passing epoch.

one

Saying Yes to Christianity,
and No to Christendom

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

Søren 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.1

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).2 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 its laws (including the death penalty) in the name of Caesar, to say nothing of their refusal to take part in the state’s sanctioned religion.

We see something of the weight of this on Christians’ daily lives in 1 Corinthians 10, when Paul writes to the church in Corinth that they are not to participate in local feasts in the pagan temples there. For members of society to absent themselves from such gatherings was surely demanding and awkward, since much that was of social significance occurred in the temples. These pagan religious centers were more than meeting houses — although Paul stresses the religious aspect above all (“You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons” — 1 Cor. 10:21). They were also the place for social interaction, legal transactions, the striking of bargains, family gatherings, and more. To keep apart from these sites of sacrifice, society, and commerce at the time of Paul’s writing was costly for one’s civic reputation, if nothing else. Not long after the composition of this epistle, however, a Christian standing apart from the social norm in such a manner could find himself or herself — during the sporadic local and, eventually, empire-­wide persecutions — denounced, arrested, tried, tortured, and put to death.

Becoming a follower of Jesus took one decisively outside the Roman kingdom’s most firmly held beliefs about itself. Jesus’ concept of the “kingdom of heaven” gave the disciple an altered vision of what a “kingdom” was in the mind of God. It called upon the disciple to renounce violence, including state-­sponsored and thus religiously “sanctified” violence, and to see all human beings — Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, males and females (cf. Gal. 3:28) — as God’s beloved creatures, dignified by virtue of their being made in his image and redeemed by his Son. No Christian had permission by Christ to shed blood, even at the behest of Caesar himself. Christianity upset the old order of male domination, elevating women to equal status with men, and children (along with slaves) to eminence as models of discipleship. It included the poor alongside the rich in its ranks. It called for parity of material goods among its members and congregations. In short, it was strikingly at odds with what the word “kingdom” (i.e., “empire”) meant according to contemporary Roman usage.

All this changed with the advent of the “Constantinian Privilege.” Jesus’ model of God’s kingdom was co-­opted by the Roman meaning of “kingdom,” and — although Christ’s principles had a transforming impact on Roman society — the ideal of the “kingdom,” as Jesus himself had taught it, became inverted. Caesar assumed the role of Christ’s earthly vicar (instead of — as formerly — one falsely called “lord”), imperial Roman wars were fought under the sign of the cross (an absurd use of this previously stark symbol of defiance against Roman brutality), and — when the church had reached its apex as the sole Roman religion — it was expected that pagan Romans would follow their emperor’s example and be baptized into the imperial church. To be Roman was to be Christian. To be a Roman Christian was to serve the empire faithfully: to believe as the empire believed, to fight the empire’s wars, to adjudicate — if one held the post of a Roman Christian magistrate (formerly a contradiction) — the laws of the empire, even to the point of condemning prisoners to torture and death (and — most ironic, after the year 385 — one of the charges that might call for execution was “heresy” from the prevailing Christian “orthodoxy”). And so forth.

This was, as noted above, “Christendom,” an amalgam of what had formerly been separate and, in first principles, originally at odds. It’s not my intention here to engage in history and trace “Christendom” as a concept down through the ages, neither in its divisions into Latin West and Greek/Slavonic East, and later — in the West — into Catholicism and Protestantism, nor to discuss the relationship of Christendom to other forms of Christianity (to the Oriental churches, for example, which were deemed heterodox by the Roman-­Byzantine imperial church),3 nor to examine Christendom’s dealings with Judaism within its domains, nor its conflicts with its great theocratic rival in the south and east, Islam. It’s enough here to say only that the Christendom model has been with us right down to the present century. It is still the paradigm and pattern — consciously or not — of most, if not all, of the churches in the modern age, be they Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. For most Christians today, the classical Christendom model — which embraces everything from the idea of a professionally schooled clergy to the architectural layouts of church buildings to the influence that particular established churches wield in a nation’s politics and social mores, and more — is the given “shape” of what we mean by “church.” We have lived with this for so long that another approach is almost inconceivable to us. Wherever there is a state church (for instance, the Lutheran Church in Norway or the Church of England), there we still see Christendom, albeit in contemporary cultural dress, weakened and weakening; and wherever there is a church with special influence in a nation, as is the case in most “Catholic” and many “Orthodox” countries, there is Christendom as well. To be sure, in the United States we find a strange, anomalous sort of Christendom — a kind that has no single federal-­ or state-­sanctioned church or any particular church with special influence. But America’s odd version of it is still visibly a form of Christendom, even though it is erected upon a concept of church-­state separation.

II.

While acknowledging that this model has endured into the present, at the same time it also appears that Christendom is dying. In its place, at least in Europe and America, a new ethos has been evolving and has all but supplanted the old. There are numerous indications that a new, stridently non-­Christian ethos is overtaking and supplanting the old, waning Christendom of the West. Examples are plentiful. Here are just a few.

The Rise of Atheistic/Anti-­religionist Scientism

Instead of a dogmatic religion, we are witnessing the rise of a dogmatic faith in science, which some have called “scientism.” In short, it is the idea that the only genuine form of “knowledge” is empirical scientific knowledge, the only viable philosophy is that which is based on a strictly materialist view of reality (in the words of the Catholic Encyclopedia, “a philosophical system which regards matter as the only reality in the world, [and] which undertakes to explain every event in the universe as resulting from the conditions and activity of matter”), and the only ethics is that which presumes these first two premises. Any idea that doesn’t fit into this frankly fundamentalist creed — even if it should come from respected scientists who don’t hold to the notion that philosophical materialism is the only basis for a sound epistemology — is viewed as a sort of heresy. Scientism is the elevation of a single discipline for acquiring data (the empirical scientific method) over other disciplines of inquiry. It inflates one useful methodology into an infallible authority in all matters, forgetting that “science” as generally understood is what scientists do and not an oracle or an intangible entity.

Now, “knowledge” has long been defined as “justifiable belief” — and it has always been assumed that the stress is on “belief,” a word that means the same as “trust.” Many forms of knowledge — some empirical, some intuitive, some traditional, some aesthetic, and so on — have always been considered legitimate foundations for this belief or that. “Belief” or “trust,” it should hardly need be noted, implies that there is always room for additional knowledge, and therefore reconsideration of data, in virtually every field of learning.

As for the meaning of the word “justifiable” in the traditional definition of knowledge above, advocates of scientism would have that understood in quite narrow terms indeed — terms solely derived ...