Christianity: The Durable Establishment

According to many Christians and non-Christians, some time after World War II the world and the Church of Christ entered the post-Constantinian or even the post-Christian age. Even though, as one Asian churchman pointed out at the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism, the majority of the world’s people is still in its pre-Christian age, having never heard the Gospel in any effective way, most American and European Christians are so Western-oriented that they fail to realize that most of the world, far from having outgrown the Gospel, has never even really found out what it is.

It would be wrong, therefore, to take the problem of secularization in the West and generalize about it for the whole world. Nevertheless, to the extent that we live in Western countries, in countries that are or were nominally Christian, that belong to what is loosely called “Christendom,” we should ask ourselves what it means to talk of a “post-Constantinian age” and of the disestablishment of Christianity or the secularization of civilization.

Christianity made its debut as a living faith at one of the great turning points of the ancient world, just as Rome was definitely changing from a republic to an empire (Augustus Caesar ruled from 29 B.C. to A.D. 14; the actual title of his successors was “augustus,” after the first Roman with imperial power). Christendom, or “established Christianity,” did not appear until three hundred years later, when another emperor, Constantine the Great (306–337), began to tolerate the Church and then joined it himself. This was also a historic moment for Rome, for it was Constantine who founded the second imperial capital of Constantinople and thus—despite his own wishes—formalized the splitting-up of the empire.

From having been “exiles of the dispersion,” as St. Peter called them (1 Pet. 1:1), the Christians became government officials; apart from the short reign of Julian the Apostate (361–363), even the emperors themselves were church members. Under Constantine’s predecessor, the ruthless and energetic Diocletian (284–305), a systematic persecution had seemed at the point of crushing the Church. A few short years later, the Church was enjoying not merely peace but privilege and power.

Peace and prosperity brought new problems, problems so persistent—sixteen centuries have passed since Constantine—that many churchmen seem happy to think we are now in the post-Constantinian age. What were these problems?

First, there was a flood of new “converts,” people rushing to follow the example of Constantine by accepting Christianity. Certainly many were interested more in the favor of the emperor than in the grace of God, though of course many others experienced genuine and lasting conversion. How many people today are members of Christian churches for no better reason than that one of their ancestors, decades or even centuries ago, thought it politically or socially useful to become a Christian? The disillusionment of so many Christians from young churches on their first visit to “Christian” Europe, or America is part of the bitter legacy of those millions who followed Constantine and other rulers into the Church for the sake of convenience, not conscience.

Second, the Church paid—and is still paying—a heavy price in integrity and in credibility for the power and prestige that Constantine and his successors gave it. From then on, right up to the present, the Church has found itself obligated to support the government, even to the extent of giving tacit assent or outright approval to governmental wrongdoing. That some outstanding church leaders, such as Ambrose of Milan and John Chrysostom of Constantinople, had the courage to defy emperors does not alter the fact that over the centuries the Church has regularly supported governments in power. Of course, Christianity is not responsible for Germany’s concentration camps or the American atomic raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nevertheless, the fact that “Christian” nations did these things, and that the churches of those nations kept on enjoying government favors while they were being done, certainly makes the task of the Christian apologist more difficult.

Now the Church apparently is being eased out of its old position of prestige and influence within the governing circles of Western nations. This is what is meant by becoming post-Constantinian, and a number of churchmen tell us it is a good thing. The modern Church should give up its secular privileges and powers, and Christians should again become “exiles of the dispersion.”

The Persistent Establishment

The strange thing is that membership in the “Establishment” is not so easy to drop. From Constantine onward, the Church has been taken into the circle of those who control secular power simply because the Church, quite apart from its spiritual worth, also represents a tangible secular power structure. Regardless of what they believe about God, political leaders take existing power structures into account. Even Stalin, who scoffed that the pope had no army divisions, recognized the Russian Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union because it could support him in his struggle to unite Russia against Nazi Germany.

Strange as it seems, Christianity or the Christian churches have remained a part of the Establishment even in many Communist countries. This is not because the Communists have taken pity on the Church, but because they find it more useful and less dangerous tó make use of existing Christian structures and to profit by their support than to drive them into direct opposition by outright persecution. Thus it happens that in several Communist countries the state pays the salary of the clergy. The churches, even though disdained and badly treated, thus have a certain “stake” in the Establishment and a certain influence on it. They pay for these favors by keeping religious opposition to Communism quiet at home and by promoting their governments’ policies on the ecumenical and diplomatic fronts. The anti-American speeches made by delegates from the Soviet Union at Uppsala were part of the dues their churches pay to belong, even in a subordinate and menial way, to the Establishment in the U. S. S. R.

Of course no churchman in a Communist country would dare to oppose his own government, for to do so would threaten not only his own existence but that of his church. But what about those churchmen in Western countries who have openly opposed their governments? Have they not given up their membership in the Establishment for the humbler, harder, and more honest post of exiled prophets crying in the wilderness? What about men like Robert McAfee Brown and William Sloane Coffin, who have vehemently opposed United States policies, in Coffin’s case even to the point of incurring a jail sentence?

To answer this question, we must again ask ourselves what constitutes the Establishment. In a monolithic, totalitarian state, there is a monolithic Establishment, but in a pluralistic society like ours, the Establishment too has many facets. On the one hand, it does take courage for prominent churchmen to speak out against official government policies. On the other hand, people like Professor Brown and Chaplain Coffin are speaking not for the disinherited members of our society but for a significant segment of the intellectual and financial elite. Stanford and Yale Universities are not exactly refuges for the underprivileged or for those who have and expect no voice in the councils of the mighty of our land. By continuing, up to the present writing, to lend moral support to Chaplain Coffin, even after his sentencing to jail, Yale President Kingman Brewster is not merely making a gallant defense of academic freedom; he is also demonstrating that the segment of the American Establishment that he represents considers itself strong enough to endure a test of strength with the officialdom of the United States government.

With all due respect for the moral integrity that may lie behind the decisions taken by Professor Brown, Chaplain Coffin, and others, we should realize clearly that their challenge to the current ruling authorities does not constitute a renunciation of political power for themselves of membership in the Establishment, made in order to be able to speak prophetically for change. Just as the Establishment is not necessarily conservative of any particular principles, but only of its own power, churches do not need to espouse so-called conservative political positions in order to remain part of it.

What is happening in the West then, as church leaders turn against traditional concepts of the open, democratic society and cast their weight behind “revolutionary” solutions to current problems, is not that the Church is stepping out of the Establishment. It is rather that the Establishment is moving, and the church leaders—at least those who do not want to lose their membership—are moving with it. Thus when Professor Brown of Stanford denounced U. S. policy in Viet Nam at the World Council of Churches Assembly in Uppsala, he was not—as he clearly stated—surrendering his claim to speak in the councils of the United States: he was specifically appealing to the international body to throw its support behind his own push to be heard there.

A Prophetic Role For The Church?

We are confronted, then, with a situation which church leaders, while adopting a posture of challenging society and its structures and of exercising a prophetic ministry, are in effect still playing party games within one durable Establishment. Just as the political standard-bearers of two programs for changed directions in American society—i.e., the New Frontier and the Great Society had themselves been prominent in its Establishment for decades, so the religious radicals come from the Establishment and go into the Establishment. Consider the positions of honor and the emoluments enjoyed by Bishop Robinson, Bishop Pike, Professor Harvey Cox, Professor Thomas Altizer—they hardly qualify as “voices crying in the wilderness”!

Being part of the Establishment, political, economic, social, and intellectual, is a liability for the Church and its message. To the extent that the Church (or the churches) shares in the power and privilege the world can offer, it must appear in some sense compromised, and its message loses credibility in the sight of the powerless and underprivileged. But the Church cannot break free of this entanglement with worldly power by playing off one faction against another, by betting on one program, policy, or party rather than another. As long as it is in the world, the Church can hardly escape some kind of Establishment ties. As long as it attracts people and their loyalty, it will build up a kind of political, social weight that will qualify it in some way to join in the mechanism of political and social power. God does not require the Church to shun every link with the Establishment. To do so, it would have to follow the radical example of the Desert Fathers or of the Anabaptists—and society proved able to domesticate even its monks and its Mennonites within a generation or two.

Integrity, credibility, and a prophetic ministry for the Church will not come from renouncing all ties with the secular Establishment. The slogan that the Church should go into the world and serve the world, renouncing its special status, its “clericalism,” its other-worldliness, is simply another technique for integrating it more effectively, as an existing power structure, into the greater power structure of secular society and government.

The Church can never free itself from entanglement with the body politic any more than the individual Christian can free himself from his body, but it can rise above this entanglement. It can do so if and only if it possesses something that comes from beyond the temporal horizon, something that is not just a part of the interplay of social, economic, and demographic factors. It is the inestimable privilege of the Church of Christ that it does possess such a thing: the Word, which comes from the mouth of God.

The more complex and chaotic the current social and political situation becomes, the more it demands radical solutions from the church. But such radical solutions must come from the radix, the root, which is the eternal and authoritative Word of God. Solutions that come from the branches of the human contemporary situation, the entanglements, the symptoms, can never be genuinely radical and can never be prophetic.

This is the error that was made so often at Uppsala, and it is one reason why the World Council’s attempts to speak to the world fell on deaf ears. The Old Testament prophets were not prophets merely because they spoke out: even the Saturday Evening Post did that. They were prophets because they spoke mippî YHWH—out of the mouth of the Lord. They spoke the words of the One who stands beyond the temporal horizon, the One who is competent to judge and to redeem man and his manifold Establishments.

The church cannot get out of the human Establishment. We have seen that it takes a revolution even more radical than that of Soviet Communism to exclude the Church completely. But it must not merge into the Establishment. It must not, in other words, accept this world’s criteria for solving this world’s problems.

By claiming to speak for man in a fully human situation, the Church is in effect speaking for no one but itself and its own status in the Establishment. By so doing it perverts its own heritage, which is precisely the Word spoken by the Eternal, and it misunderstands what it means to be fully human, namely, to be responsible to God and to trust him.

What this means, in concrete terms, is the exact opposite of the slogan of certain ecumenists, “Follow the world’s agenda.” It must be, “Follow God’s agenda!” That means, for individual Christians and for churches, within the ever-present Establishment in human society, to speak God’s Word more clearly, more distinctly, and less compromisingly than ever before. The Church—and not only the Church but also the world—has need of witnesses, not to man and his dreams, but to God and his reality. Such a course will not be easy. It may involve rejection by the whole Establishment, as it did for St. John Chrysostom, and not rejection by a part and adulation by another part, as so often happens to our religious “radicals” today. But that is a different thing from rejecting the Establishment, or from playing off one portion of it against another.

Persecution cannot destroy the Church, but becoming established can domesticate it to the world. Establishment is not something one can avoid by taking sides with current “outs,” for it is always their goal to become the “ins.” Entanglement with the Establishment cannot be escaped, but servitude to it can be: by a deeper, more conscious, and more obedient subjection to the Word of God. In human society, the Establishment has many shapes and faces, and one can be found in it and paying one’s full dues even when one is protesting against it most vehemently. It is not the loudness of our protest that guarantees our spiritual freedom but the clarity with which we hear the voice of God speaking in Scripture and the obedience with which we heed him.

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