One more comment on modernity’s whipping boy, Constantine. One of the central problems with many pomos is that they write turgid philosophy in praise of narrative, but they don’t understand story, and the same goes for their frothy popularizers. As a result, they are the ideal audience for hair-raising melodramatic cliff-hangers. Constantine is converted and hordes of unwashed pagans scramble into the Church, still pursuing the main chance. Audiences drilled in the tenets of modernity go white in the face, and slap both cheeks with open palms. “Oh, no!” they cry, not realizing that this is just the end of Act One. The locomotive is not really going to run over the virginal heroine.
We really need to look at the history of Christendom as a story, and moreover as a story we are still in the middle of. The problem with Constantine was that he was the first pagan emperor to submit to Christ, and it should not surprise us in the least that he did it very badly. And as Chesterton admonished us, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” But compared to what had been going on before him, the conversion of Constantine was a glorious improvement. All the friends of God in the audience of this particular melodrama threw their popcorn into the air in jubilation. But still, it was a glorious event at the end of Act One, and the narratival machinery still had quite a bit more grinding away to do. So I myself went back to the lobby and got another big bag of popcorn for what’s coming up. I am quite looking forward to it.
But one poster at Boar’s Head counters this way, “If constantinian christianity is the Reformed model of the future, Lord make us all Lutherans.” The problem here is that we are looking at plot points as though they were axioms from Euclid. The conversion of Constantine was a turn in the story; prior to this point Christians were being tortured to death for purposes of public entertainment. It was not bad to quit that, and not bad to do so because Jesus was acknowledged as Lord of the nations of men. We need to stop looking at every century in history as though they all occupied the last century before the eschaton. History is a story. In the unfolding of that story, lots of grimy things are done by professing Christians. The response of concerned Christians must not be an abandonment of the story for the sake of abstract ideas (that never get dirty). We need to persist in understanding, telling, and living the story.
So do, let’s, have this discussion. I am a jet-fuel postmillenialist (believing as I do that God loves the world, but Christians differ on this point), and am fully convinced that the story is a comedy (in the sense of the gospel of Luke, not Seinfeld). So let us debate Constantine, and what kind of plot point that actually was. We should not become alarmed if the debate becomes robust. After all, as the philosopher once put it, we are all God’s screechers.