Religion, Authority, and the State

From Constantine to the Contemporary World

Leo D. Lefebure

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137599896
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137599902
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Christianity
• Index: Social Sciences

In commemoration of Constantine's grant of freedom of religion to Christians, this wide-ranging volume examines the ambiguous legacy of this emperor in relation to the present world, discussing the perennial challenges of relations between religions and governments. The authors examine the new global ecumenical movement inspired by Pentecostals, the role of religion in the Irish Easter rebellion against the British, and the relation between religious freedom and government in the United States. Other essays debate the relation of Islam to the violence in Nigeria, the place of the family in church-state relations in the Philippines, the role of confessional identity in the political struggles in the Balkans, and the construction of Slavophile identity in nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox political theology. The volume also investigates the contrast between written constitutions and actual practice in the relations between governments and religions in Australia, Indonesia, and Egypt.  The case studies and surveys illuminate both specific contexts and also widespread currents in religion-state relations across the world.  

Part I
International Perspectives

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Leo D. Lefebure (ed.)Religion, Authority, and the StatePathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue10.1057/978-1-137-59990-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Specters of a New Ecumenism: In Search of a Church “Out of Joint”

Dale T. Irvin¹

(1)

New York Theological Seminary, New York, NY, USA

End Abstract

The Hauntings

“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” Thus reads the opening line of the Communist Manifesto that was published in 1848. “All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter” Marx and Engels continued. Pope and Tzar, conservatives and radicals—all have taken up the fight against communism, proving that the movement, which was still without the organizing structures of a party, had power. It was time for communists to organize a party and publish their views precisely in order to advance the power of the communist movement effectively, they argued; hence the publication of their Manifesto in 1848 and the eventual organization of the First International in 1864 in London.

Those opening lines were revisited by Jacques Derrida in 1993 in his plenary address delivered over the course of two evenings at a conference titled “Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective” held at the University of California, Riverside. Taking his cue from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Derrida opened the lecture with an analysis of the logic of haunting, or hauntology as he termed it. We live with ghosts, he said, which are beings of ungraspable visibility, or tangible intangibility. ¹ They are of the same order as the “non-sensuous sensuous” character of exchange-value that Marx wrote about in Das Capital. A specter is not an image or an icon, but something else, Derrida argued. It is event, both repetition and first thing, or repetition and last thing, exemplifying the opposition of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be.” ² We may seek to conjure them and we may seek to exorcise them, but we cannot in either case diminish them. We must in the end learn to live with specters, to talk with specters, to be with specters, says Derrida. “And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.” ³

It was not the ghost of Marx so much as the ghosts of Marx—plural—that interested Derrida. There were in fact several specters or ghosts of Marx or Marxism, and not all of them were equally to be welcomed or embraced, said Derrida. One had to accept their plurality as given, even as one determined which one to talk about or with. The politics of memory, inheritance, and generations was not simply given. The living, or those who occupy the space between life and death, have a role to play here, he said. There are decisions to make, one might say. There is an ethical bent to their exercise. Describing his reason for turning to Hamlet and specters, Derrida wrote:

In proposing this title, Specters of Marx, I was initially thinking of all the forms of a certain haunting obsession that seems to me to organize the dominant influence on discourse today. At a time when a new world disorder is attempting to install its neo-capitalism and neo-liberalism, no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of Marx’s ghosts. Hegemony still organizes the repression and thus the confirmation of a haunting. Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony. ⁴

Hegemony organizes the repression and thus it organizes the confirmation of the haunting, says Derrida. But this in turn suggests that the haunting is both a result and an expression of the failure of repression to be total. The haunting, in other words, has a counter-hegemonic bent. The pluralization of the haunting takes the counter-hegemonic bent even further down the road. There are other ghosts one needs to be in conversation with, or to talk about. That is in fact Derrida’s intention as he pronounces (one is tempted to say “conjures” or “invokes”) a new International, which he discerns to be at hand. This new International links “affinity, suffering, and hope,” he says. But it is not the typical linkage of dominant organizations and structures. Rather, it is a weakly organized linkage, more suited to shadows and specters than the typical organizing mechanisms of canons, rules, and laws.

It is an untimely link, without status, without title, and without name, barely public even if not clandestine, without contract, “out of joint,” without coordination, without party, without country, without national community (International before, across, and beyond any national determination), without co-citizenship, without common belonging to a class. The name of new International is given here to what calls to the friendship of an alliance without institution among those who, even if they no longer believe or never believed in the socialist-Marxist International, in the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the messiano-eschatological role of the universal union of the proletarians of all lands, continue to be inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx or of Marxism (they now know that there is more than one) and in order to ally themselves, in a new, concrete, and real way, even if this alliance no longer takes the form of a party or of a worker’s international, but rather of a kind of counter-conjuration, in the (theoretical and practical) critique of the state of international law, the concepts of State and nation, and so forth: in order to renew this critique, and especially to radicalize it. ⁵

The haunting in the end does not dismiss the old and replace it with a new. Attending to its pluralized presence is instead part of a larger strategy of fostering new alliances that radicalize and renew the old.

Specters of the Ecumenical Movement

A specter haunts the Ecumenical Movement of the twentieth century. It is not the specter of communism, Marxism, or a new International, although it shares with them much in terms of their political nature. It is a specter that is closely bound to the word “ecumenical,” a word that was saturated with meaning long before the twentieth century. Norman Goodall in his introduction to the Ecumenical Movement in 1961 noted that the word “does not trip lightly from English lips.” ⁶ It is better in Latin (oecumenicus) or Greek (oikoumenē).

Barbara Rossing, in her essay “(Re)claiming Oikoumenē?” traces the history of the word for us from its initial Greek usage through its meaning in early Christian experience. ⁷ The term originally meant that portion of the earth in which human beings built dwelling places or households (oikos). Greek geographers had initially used it to name the portion of the earth that was inhabited by human beings, whether they were Greek-speaking or persons the Greeks considered barbarians. The term was taken over by the Romans but given much stronger political connotations. Roman emperors came to see themselves as the legitimate rulers of all the earth. Whether or not their actual power extended to such, they came to equate the oikoumenē with their empire. ⁸

The New Testament writers who use the term retain its political connotations, although there is considerable ambiguity in places regarding the relationship between the oikoumenē and the Roman Empire. ⁹ Matthew remembers Jesus saying that this euaggelion or “good news” of the kingdom will be proclaimed en holē tē oikoumenē, in the whole of the oikoumenē, as a witness pasin tois ethnesin, to all the nations (Matthew 24:14–15) did not accept the Roman imperial claim to have the authority to rule over all the nations. In Matthew’s book, it is the Risen Christ who makes that claim. The writer certainly knew there were nations or peoples not yet subjugated to Roman imperial law. His book opens with the witness of a representative group of them in the form of priests from the east, presumably from Persia, and thus from beyond the reach of Roman imperial law, magoi apo anatolōn who had come to worship the newborn Christ. A similar wider horizon seems to be in view in Luke 4:5, where diabolos takes Jesus up into a high mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the oikoumenē in an instant of time. Luke’s wider horizons are also in view in the opening pages of Acts, even though by the end of the book they have narrowed back down to the horizons of the Roman Empire, and to Paul’s intentions as a Roman citizen (according to Luke) to appear before the emperor in Rome. Paul himself uses the term several times in his letters, but without necessarily reducing it to the orbis romanus. The book of Revelation expresses less hesitation to reduce the political extent of the oikoumenē to Rome on the other hand. Each of the three times that the term is used (Revelation 3:10, 12:9, and 16:14), it is referring critically to the Roman Empire.

From the middle of the first century Christianity was judged to be an illicit religion under Roman imperial law. Although persecution was sporadic and local, imperial rulers beginning with Nero regarded followers of the religion to be punishable by death. At the same time, a considerable number of Christians in the Mediterranean world began to formulate their understanding of Christian teachings in ways that accommodated the Roman imperial worldview. They did so in part to try to convince imperial rulers that Christians were not as much of a threat to the empire as they might seem to be, given that the Messiah whom they worshipped had been executed for political crimes against the Roman state. It was also a matter of Christians making their home in Greco-Roman society. Whatever was the reason, by the second century Christians were appropriating the rhetoric of empire and making a case for their place within it. ¹⁰ The wider horizons of the ends of the earth were still in view, at least in places. One finds them in the works of Bardaisan toward the end of the second century, for instance, in his Book of the Laws of the Nations. Within the Roman Empire, however, numerous Christians were making their peace with imperial life. One sees it in the manner in which Paul of Samosata, for instance, modeled his throne along the lines of a regional imperial authority in the years he served as bishop of Antioch from 260 to 268. One sees it as well in the fact that the other bishops in the region eventually appealed to the emperor himself in Rome in trying to unseat Paul of Samosata. There are many other signs scattered throughout the history pointing to the manner in which Christians were making themselves at home intellectually and politically within the empire.

It is critical at this point to see that Christianity through the fourth century even in the Roman Empire was a diverse affair. The majority of Christians belonged to churches that identified themselves to be part of a dominant catholic party or wing. A second-century ideological opponent of the Christian movement, Celsus, called it “the great church” (Origen, Contra Celsus, 5.59) populated by “the great multitude of believers” (CC, 1.1). Those within this wing or party preferred to call themselves catholic by the end of the second century. They traced their identity back to Jesus through the succession of his 12 apostles, thus giving rise to the claim to be apostolic as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. International Perspectives
• 2. Africa and Asia
• 3. The United States of America
• 4. Europe
• Backmatter