The Democrats (and a large chunk of moderates, apparently) believed Obama could save us from the problems of the Bush years. The more libertarian wing of the Republican party looks to Ron Paul. So many people labor under the delusion that who is president really matters worth a damn regarding the fundamental course of US policy, its role in the world, and the possibility of justice in this fragmented society.
It doesn’t.
It doesn’t matter who occupies the office, the office itself is embedded within a fundamentally unjust system that served from the VERY BEGINNING to take the power of government out of the hands of the people governed. Even if someone were a perfect candidate with entirely honorable intentions and brilliant policy beliefs, s/he would not be able to reverse the fundamental deficiencies of the American government that are not simply the result of our having stepped away from the Constitution over time – they are encoded in it. S/he would have to operate according to the same logic (the myth of virtuous America as the beacon of light and freedom to the world) as people like Bush, Obama, McCain, the Clintons, etc., even if s/he advocated different policies for pursuing it. I see no reason why we should support any candidate for office in that idolatrous, unjust system.
The words of Walter Wink are instructive here:
[T]he spirit of empire… perpetuates itself through a succession of rulers and… was so powerful, in the case of Rome, that it was able to sustain the madness of three emperors in one century (Caligula, Nero, Domitian). Nor can we leave aside all forms of institutional idolatry, whereby religion, commerce, education, and state make their own well-being and survival the final criteria of morality, and by which they justify the liquidation of prophets, the persecution of deviants, and the ostracism of opponents.…
So formidable a phalanx of hostility demands spiritual weaponry, for it is clear that we contend not against human beings as such (“blood and flesh”) but against the legitimations, seats of authority, hierarchical systems, ideological justifications, and punitive sanctions which their human incumbents exercise and which transcend these incumbents in both time and power. It is the suprahuman dimension of power in institutions and the cosmos which must be fought, not the human agent. [This is the important part!] For the institution will guarantee the replacement of this person with another virtually the same, who despite personal preferences will replicate decisions made by a whole string of predecessors because that is what the institution requires for its survival. — from Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament, 85-6.
Since the Constantinian shift, the church seems to have largely operated according to the logic of the world, with the goal being to take over the powers and principalities (ostensibly running them in a “more humane” fashion), leaving the ultimate goal of the reconciliation of all things and people to God for some projected-future point, rather than something to which the church is to strive in the world according to the logic of Christ the crucified king. We started looking forward to going away to be at home where God is, rather than preparing the world to become God’s home when Christ returns. We stopped looking to Christ to save us, and made peace on earth the work of empire, rather than of the church.
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I of course largely agree with you hear. Though, I am ever coming more and more to question the whole “Constantinian shift” view point. And in fact what you in broad bush strokes seem to see as indicative of the Constantinian shift does not explain the churches acceptance of Christian Emperors and Empire. Rather it is in fact the sense that the Church and Christ would have a very real this worldly effect that even allowed for any sort of acceptance of the Christianizing of the Empire and accepting Constantine’s expressed desire (dubious and problematic as we may now find it) to submit himself and the Roman Empire to Christ and the Church. It was in fact the more neo-platonic other worldly Christians, believers in a pure church that rejected the possibility that the Empire could be transformed by Christ in this world. Or so it seems to me the more I look into these matters. It also seems to me that the belief in the “Constintinian shift” is an unquestioned dogma of a particular form of modernist and post-modernist Christianity.
Granted eventually in the midst of the formation of Christendom ,made possible by Constantine and his successors, a purely non-physical postmortem view of salvation arose, and became lodged in various Victorian versions of Christian faith, now lodged mainly in fundamentalist (Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox) interpretations of Christian faith. Though we do well to recognize that these interpretations of the Christian faith had their place in pre-Constantinian Christianity as well.
The shift that happened is that it was believed by many in the Church that Christ had triumphed in the “conversion” of Constantine, which then lead to certain interpretations of violence etc. that lead to a reformist view of change, rather than radical overturning. But I would challenge any expectation of aradical overturning as something the Chruch could achieve in this world. Rather it seems to me the expectation of the church and the expectation we should have is that we are to witness to the inevitable coming of this radical overturning and that it goes so to the root of things that it can only be achieved by the complete and total replacement of this world and its system by the world that is to come the Kingdom of God. Now the failure of understanding this orthodox teaching of the Church has been to interpret the other world as something other than appearing in God’s creation. But this fails to truly affirm that whether visible or invisible all that exists is God’s creation and God seeks to renew all God’s creation.
Given this I think while regrettable and something we need to recover from, it was not a departure from true Christian faith that allowed the Church to accept Constantine’s conversion, rather it was a profound faith in the possibility of Christ to bring all things under his feat in history, including the Emperor of Rome. Granted to much was believed about this, but this was a mistake of correct belief not of unfaithfulness to Christ. It is regrettable because it did lead to unfaithfulness. A warning to us radical Christians I think, that we all are susceptible to blindness even as we are seeking to be the most faithful to Christ.
To be sure, “Constantinianism” is a loaded and disputed term. I think there’s been a tendency to see it as being an event that occurred with one particular event or series of events in short proximity (Constantine’s edict of toleration, presiding at the Nicene Council, things of that sort). It probably isn’t entirely fair to call it “Constantinianism” either, because if any particular emperor had the greatest effect on the process it was probably Theodosius. So perhaps it’s useful for me to clarify what I mean by “Constantinianism” and “Constantinian shift.” I refer more to a particular kind of eschatological deficiency than a continuum of historical events. I do think there is a marked series of events that can be used to measure a shift in the overall consciousness of the church, but what I call “Constantinianism” was present long before these events took place – it’s the mindset Jesus criticized among the Zealots, the Roman affiliation of power, politics, and divine favor, and more. “Constantinianism” is probably more a synonym for how I use the term “empire” than anything else, but since I’ve been spending so much time with Anabaptists lately I’ve adopted the term – and with regards to the history of the church it can still be useful to associate it with certain historical people and events.
That said, yes the history is definitely extremely complex. The more I study the more difficult it is to identify any particular event that marks “THE Constantinian shift.” I think we’re on a pretty similar page there.
However, the situation I describe is part of the fallout of that shift, even if it’s not an accurate description of its cause. The identification of God’s purposes with the ascension of Constantine had the effect of pushing the “final” realization of God’s kingdom from out of this realm into a future realm, the eventual result of which was its gnosticizing and disembodiment. Augustine’s Civitas Dei is crucially important in this development. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough in describing that the two phenomena are linked, which may have led to the misunderstanding that I’m saying they are the same thing. Again, I think we’re probably pretty close on that one.
Also, Constantinian-style triumphalism is still alive and well – just hop over to Twitter.com and search for conservative Christians’ reactions to today’s special election in Massachusetts. The two phenomena are intertwined.
Due to this and some other comments I got on Facebook, I’ll probably do another post soon on what exactly I mean by “Constantinianism” and how it relates to escapist eschatology – I really see both escapism and over-realized eschatology as two sides of the same coin, and that coin was flipped by the Constantinian shift, if I can extend the metaphor to the point where it gets painful to stretch that far.