Seeking What Is Right

The Old Testament and the Good Life

Iain Provan

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781481312905
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The question of the good life—what it looks like for people and societies to be well ordered and flourishing—has universal significance, but its proposed solutions are just as far reaching. At the core of this concern is the nature of the good itself: what is "right"? We must attend to this ethical dilemma before we can begin to envision a life lived to the fullest.

With Seeking What Is Right, Iain Provan invites us to consider how Scripture—the Old Testament in particular—can aid us in this quest. In rooting the definition of the good in God's special revelation, Provan moves beyond the constraints of family, tribe, culture, state, or nature. When we read ourselves into the story of Scripture, we learn a formative ethic that speaks directly to our humanity. Provan delves into Western Christian history to demonstrate the various ways this has been done: how our forebears identified with the narrative of God's people, Israel, and how they applied the Old Testament to their particular times and concerns. This serves as a foundation upon which modern Christians can assess their decisions as people who read the whole biblical story "from the beginning" in our time.

Provan challenges us to grapple with ethical issues dominating our contemporary culture as a people in exile, a people formed by disciplines steeped in the patterns and teachings of Scripture. To come alongside ancient Israel in its own experiences of exile, to listen with Israel to the utterances of a holy God, is to approach a true picture of the good life that illuminates all facets of human existence. Provan helps us understand how we should and should not read Scripture in arriving at these conclusions, clarifying for the faithful Christian what the limits of the search for "what is right" look like.

II

Explorations

4

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Constantine as Biblical Hero

Finding in the New Testament no pattern of a Christian polity, [the Christian] will turn for it to the portrayal of the People of God in the Old Testament.1

S. L. Greenslade

On July 25, 306 AD, in York, England, Constantine, the son of a “senior” Roman emperor (titled “Augustus”), was himself proclaimed “Augustus” by his dead father’s army.2 Some years later (in 312), he marched on Italy and confronted a rival emperor, Maxentius, at the site of the old Milvian Bridge over the Tiber River in Rome. This battle, on October 28, 312, resulted in Maxentius’ death and Constantine’s supremacy over the western half of the Roman Empire. Since in what follows there will be many references to “the West” and “the East” in this empire, as well as to the “Western” and “Eastern” Church, it is wise to pause to offer an explanation. “East” refers to everything east of a notional line that runs between Greece and Italy and down through Roman North Africa, such that Egypt (e.g., Alexandria) and Syria (e.g., Antioch) are in the East while modern Tunisia and Algeria (e.g., the locations of ancient Carthage and Hippo) are in the West. Rome itself is in the West, therefore, while Constantinople (as it will shortly become) is in the East.

In the aftermath of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine met his brother-in-law Licinius in Milan (313), and they agreed to divide the entire Empire between them. It was an unstable arrangement, however, fluctuating between war and uneasy peace, and Constantine finally defeated Licinius in battle (324) and had him executed (325). He took as his first name “Victor” and ruled a unified realm until his death on May 22, 337.

The Christianization of the Empire

The story of Constantine told briefly in this way does not yet suggest its monumental significance for the history of the Christian Church—and for Christian reading of the Bible in relation to individual and community ethics, as well as to affairs of state. We must add some detail.

First, who was the man who arrived at the gates of Rome in 312 to fight Maxentius? He was the son of parents who had raised him to venerate a single great god—as various emperors before him, in the third century, had done.3 As Peter Leithart explains, “The paganism of the third and fourth century was increasingly monotheistic, or at least henotheistic (believing in a chief, though not exclusive, high God).”4 In Constantine’s case, this god was Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun), identified with the sun god Apollo, who had allegedly appeared to Constantine in a vision in 310.5 However, he had already been influenced by a Christian scholar, Lactantius, who had been tutor to Constantine’s son Crispus at the imperial court since the same year—and Christians had for some time equated the sun with Christ, the Light of the World.6 Lactantius was in the process of writing his Divine Institutes, in which he argued that monotheism had been the original religion of Rome before being replaced by the false idea of many gods and that “only through Christianity is true wisdom attainable.”7 It was for this reason, he proposed, that the Roman state should protect religious freedom (and specifically Christian freedom)—something that Constantine’s father had already done. Lactantius now suggested that Constantine, if he wished his reign to flourish, should do the same.

Toleration of Religion

This helps to explain the agreement made by Constantine and Licinius in Milan in AD 313 concerning imperial policy toward religion. Its effect was to allow Christians, along with everyone else, the liberty, prospectively, to follow whichever kind of religion they thought best—to worship Divinity as they saw fit. Retrospectively, all the church property seized during the earlier persecution of Christians under the emperor Diocletian (who had died in 311) was to be returned. The aim of the policy was to generate divine favor, on the one hand, and public tranquility, on the other. Nothing should any longer be done that risked the anger of God. The legal and social framework that subsequently emerged in pursuit of the protection of these new Christian rights helped to change forever the nature of the Church’s relationship with the Roman Empire, and indeed its successors in both the East and the West. The rights of other citizens were already protected by “powerful patrons who might interpret [for them] both existing law and new laws.”8 Now Christian clergy—exempted from “compulsory public services so that they, like the priests of other religions, might devote their energies solely to the propagation of faith and to prayer”9—became such “patrons” of the Church. Bishops were authorized, among other things, to hear legal cases and to free slaves within their domains. Roman religion had always essentially been an affair of the state, and so it remained. But whereas Christians during the preceding three hundred years had frequently been persecuted as “traitors” to this state, they now found themselves absorbed fully into it by an emperor who was anxious above all to avoid any offence against Heaven that might adversely affect his rule.

Constantine the Christian

Constantine did not just tolerate the Christians, however. At some point, still uncertain to scholars, he began to identify as one. Looking back on his life, he emphasized the events surrounding his victory at the Milvian Bridge as a turning point; this was the moment when he understood the Christian God as the sovereign Lord who brings victory and came to grasp his own role as the vehicle of this God’s will.10 Yet the fact remains that the name taken by Constantine after the battle, “Invictus,” refers directly to his previous patron Sol Invictus. Furthermore, the triumphal arch erected in Rome in 315 to celebrate the victory identified this same god as the one responsible for it, and Constantine’s coinage throughout the intervening period also continued to reflect this same patronage.11 It is only later that Sol begins to disappear from the coinage, as Constantine begins publicly to recognize Christ12—not least in his adoption (perhaps around 320) of the labarum, a military standard that displayed the “Chi-Rho” Christian symbol.13 By the year of Constantine’s victory over Licinius (325) he had replaced “Invictus” with a new name, “Victor,” which more clearly indicated his new faith.14 He was also presiding over the famous Council of Nicea, which sought to restore unity to a Christian Church riven by the Arian heresy and in succeeding generations came to set the standard for orthodox Christian belief (“Nicene orthodoxy”).15 Later, on his deathbed, Constantine was baptized as a Christian (337).

Only a few decades later, the emperor Theodosius I (ruled 379–395) made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman state (380). Constantine had not been interested in effecting “the triumph of Christianity throughout his lands . . . [and so] he allowed worship to continue in all its forms.”16 He was, in a certain sense, a pluralist—if we mean by this that he was generally unwilling to use state power to suppress forms of religion of which he increasingly disapproved.17 Theodosius certainly did not share these qualms: he closed down pagan temples all across the empire. In his own eyes this was a decision vindicated by his subsequent victory in 394 over the usurper Flavius Eugenius, who had enlisted pagan support in his bid to control the Western Empire. Like Constantine, Theodosius simply assumed in the old Roman way that victory in battle was a sure sign of the favor of one’s chosen god(s)—an idea with a lot of mileage ahead of it in the story of Church and State that we have now begun to tell.

The death of Eugenius dashed any remaining pagan hope that the Christianization of the empire might be halted and perhaps reversed. After Theodosius I, indeed, the Christianized Empire became increasingly intolerant of “Jews, pagans, and heretics”—the standard “triple pattern” that quickly emerges in Roman legal statutes of the fifth and sixth centuries when their authors are referring to the enemies of true religion (i.e., Nicene orthodoxy).18 By the time we get to the first year of Justinian’s reign (527) we find a law being announced whereby “it shall be possible for all to perceive [in social consequences] . . . that even what pertains to the human advantages is withheld from those who do not worship God rightfully.” This law goes on to clarify that “[w]e call heretic everyone who is not devoted to the Catholic Church and to our orthodox and holy Faith.”19 Here was an emperor determined to remove “all traces of pagan philosophy and practice” from his empire—and to gain “total mastery” of his realm along Christian lines.20 The religion that under Constantine had looked for toleration had quickly become, in gaining control of the empire, intolerant.

The Fate of the Jews

It is important to attend to one of the targets of Christian intolerance in particular—not least because we shall be returning to their story in a focused way later in the book. The life of Jews in the preceding pagan Roman Empire had not generally been harsh. Its emperors had been inclined on the whole to tolerate what they typically saw as a foreign religion that was certainly inferior to their own but nevertheless possessed longstanding legal status in the Roman world—even in spite of the fact that Jews (perversely) would not worship the Roman gods. “It is right and just,” affirmed the emperor Claudius (41–54), “that the Jews should preserve their ancestral customs without any hindrance in the entire world ruled by us”—such as the Sabbath, for example (which we shall discuss in chapter 10).21 There had been notable exceptions to the tolerant emperors, of course, such as Domitian (81–96), but there had also been notable friends to the Jewish community. Perhaps the most surprising of these was the bloodthirsty, tyrannical Caracalla (211–217), whose Constitutio Antoniniana (212) had given the Jews Roman civil rights. Alexander Severus (222–235), who had a synagogue in Rome named after him, was another, and so was the Christian-persecuting Diocletian (284–305).

The point is not that there had been widespread philosemitism (i.e., positive attitudes toward Jews) among pagans in the Roman Empire prior to the Christian conversion of Constantine, but only that the levels of antisemitism had not been high. All minority religious groups within the majority religious culture were of course in principle vulnerable to suspicion and attack, and where there was not “[t]he active good will, or at least the acquiescence” of the majority toward a minority, serious trouble could evidently follow.22 It happens, however, that it was Christians rather than Jews, in the main, who had hitherto endured most of the trouble.

Forbidden by No Law

All of this began to change in some ways with the conversion of Constantine, and then markedly with the creation of the Christian empire under Theodosius I. The negativity that many Christians had previously harbored toward Jews and Judaism—illustrated by my comments on “Judaizing” in chapter 2—now began to take political shape.23 Augustine would shortly provide a highly influential summary of the theology behind the politics (especially in his treatise Against the Jews), restating and expanding what some of the preceding Church Fathers had already said. To wit: the Jews had rejected Christ and were responsible for his death, resulting in the loss of the Jerusalem temple, their scattering throughout the world, and their loss of status as the chosen people. They were the enemies of the Church, and Christians must be protected from them. They would be saved in the end, however, and in the meantime should be tolerated as servants in Christian society, not least “because they bore witness to the origins of Christianity and thus vouched for its truth.”24 Theodosius’ own policy toward the Jews was considerably friendlier than that of some of the Christian bishops in the Empire who already held such views, and he made it his business to remind all Christians that even now “the sect of the Jews [was] forbidden by no law.”25 The direction in which the general culture was moving is however indicated, first, by the very fact that the emperor felt it necessary to forbid the Christian burning of synagogues and, secondly, by the intense pressure on Jews to convert to Christianity, which “at times degenerated into anti-Jewish riots, persecutions, and conversions by force.”26

A further indication of the gradually worsening situation of the Jews within Christendom is that the attacks on synagogues by Christian mobs during the reign of Theodosius II (408–450) “became so frequent . . . that most of [his] imperial edicts were concerned with this problem.”27 That he, too, defended Jewish rights is significant, but so is that fact that during his reign it was “forbidden to build new synagogues or to enlarge those already in existence.”28 As Peter Shafer notes, “The overall deterioration in the situation brought about by the violent actions of the Church was now effectively condoned, at least in law.”29

Permitted to Live

So it is that in the centuries immediately following the fifth century we find a situation in which, officially, the Jews remained a legally protected minority in Christendom, benefiting still from their previous status under pagan Roman law. For example, at the end of the sixth century in the West Pope Gregory the Great (reigned 590–604) still maintained that “as [the Hebrews] are permitted to live by the Roman laws, justice allows that they should manage their affairs as they see fit.”30 They had a legitimate place in Christian society. However, if the Jews were indeed “perm...