Caesar and the Lamb

Early Christian Attitudes on War and Military Service

Kalantzis

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781621894483
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Through the available patristic writings Caesar and the Lamb focuses on the attitudes of the earliest Christians on war and military service. Kalantzis not only provides the reader with many new translations of pre-Constantinian texts, he also tells the story of the struggle of the earliest Church, the communities of Christ at the margins of power and society, to bear witness to the nations that enveloped them as they transformed the dominant narratives of citizenship, loyalty, freedom, power, and control.Although Kalantzis examines writings on war and military service in the first three centuries of the Christian Church in an organized manner, the ways earliest Christians thought of themselves and the state are not presented here through the lens of antiquarian curiosity. With theological sensitivity and historical acumen this companion leads the reader into the world in which Christianity arose and asks questions of the past that help us understand the early character of the Christian faith with the hope that such an enterprise will also help us evaluate its expression in our own time.

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A Witness to the Nations: The Power of Narratives

Christianity is not one of the great things of history; it is history which is one of the great things of Christianity.

—Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith

Good history is irreducibly a moral affair.

—Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past?

Why This Book?

History is the stories we tell of our common past. Through stories we make sense of the world and gain a better understanding of who we are. As such, narratives are character formative: they help us define ourselves. The hearing and telling of stories, therefore, “is itself a way of answering questions about what we’re really talking about.”1

The idea behind this book is to focus on the attitudes of the earliest Christians on war and military service and tell the story of the struggle of the earliest Church, the communities of Christ at the margins of power and society, to bear witness to the nations that enveloped them as they transformed the dominant narratives of citizenship and loyalty, freedom, power, and control.

Even though this book examines the available patristic writings on war and military service in the first three centuries of the Christian Church in an organized manner, the ways earliest Christians thought of themselves and the state are not presented here through the lens of antiquarian curiosity. Following Rowan Williams’s advice, my aim is to see if we can recognize in their worries concerns that are still worth worrying about. For I am convinced that “if we do find such recognition, we shall have found something of a common identity.”2 Together with the reader, then, I want to think our way into the world into which Christianity arose and ask questions of the past that may help us understand the genotype of the Christian faith with the hope that such an enterprise will also help us evaluate its expression in our own time.

We must expect to be surprised by the past; but we must also expect to be questioned by it, for it is our past. As Christians we claim that because of Jesus Christ, the familiar world has been broken apart and made new. We claim to stand in historical continuity with the work of God through time and space; we claim that the reality of the earliest Christians is both different from us and part of us. Rowan Williams insists that, “good history is irreducibly a moral affair . . . At the very least in persuading us to put some distance between ourselves and ourselves, between our imagination and what we habitually take for granted.”3 Williams concludes:

For the Christian involved in church history, the sense of recognition, of anxieties in common, becomes a reinforcement of belief in the Church itself as a society whose roots are in something more than historical process as usually understood . . . As Christian students, . . . we shall always be haunted by [the question]: to what call is all this a response—faithful, unfaithful, uncomprehending, transfiguring? Can we acknowledge it as our call too? And more to the point, can we see that our immersion in the ways in which they responded becomes part of the way we actually hear the call ourselves in more and more diverse and more and more complete ways.4

My goal, therefore, is as much theological as it is historical. I aim to read the history of the earliest Church in a way that is theologically sensitive while still doing good history at the same time: for good theology does not come from bad history.

So, how do we do good history? How are we to engage the arguments, lives, passions, questions, practices, and witness of people who are so different than us? In answering these questions we are bound to make judgments. David Bentley Hart tells us how not to do it. Hart begins his essay, “The Mirror of the Infinite: Gregory of Nyssa on the Vestigia Trinitatis,” by reminding us that for the most part, “in our weaker moments, [we] prefer synopsis to precision [and] find in it a convenient implement for arranging our accounts of . . . history into simple taxonomies, under tidily discrete divisions.”5 That is not history at its best.

Doing history well means that we pay particular attention to differences between what Justo González calls the “innocent readings” of history and “responsible remembrance.”6 Innocent readings of history are a selective forgetfulness, a heuristic devise for our own agendas and power struggles. Responsible remembrance, on the other hand, sets us free from “the crippling imprisonment of what we can grasp and take for granted, the ultimate trivialising of our identity.”7 Responsible remembrance leads to responsible action.

Doing history well means that we are willing to engage the strangeness of the past, its language and customs that are unfamiliar to us, and neither see in it the present in fancy dress nor dismiss it as a wholly “foreign country,” incomprehensible and distant, shrouded in savagery or ignorance. To do history well we have to find a balance between difference and continuity. As we look at the world of the Christians of the first three centuries we recognize that that world is not obvious to us, their concerns do not seem native to the world we think we inhabit. For the most part, we do not face the beasts of the arena, or the magistrate’s knock at the door of our churches demanding the surrender of our sacred books and objects, on penalty of death. Can their concerns be ours?

A Scholarly Consensus?

The literature on the topic of early Christian attitudes on war and military service is vast and scholarly discussions have undergone polyvalent shifts in the span of the last century.8 A decade apart, David Hunter9 and Alan Kreider10 have provided excellent summaries of these shifts in the scholarly consensus and have shown that for the most part of the twentieth century, beginning with Adolf Harnack’s Militia Christi, first published in German in 1905 (an English translation was published in 1981),11 Cecil John Cadoux’s Early Christian Attitudes to War (1919),12 and Jean-Michel Hornus’s It is Not Lawful for Me to Fight (first published in French in 1960),13 a broad consensus was formed around a tripartite agreement. The first part was that the earliest Christians renounced war and military service out of an aversion to bloodshed; second, by the end of the second century (and certainly by the end of the third), the increased militarism of the Roman state, the numerous inducements for enlistment, and active recruitment from the more Christianized eastern frontiers, meant that some Christians began to find military service an acceptable option, despite the teaching of Christian writers. The third point of consensus was that by the end of the fourth century, in the Constantinian era, “‘a just war ethic’ had developed (largely the work of Ambrose and Augustine), which met the need for a Christian accommodation to a changed political and social situation.”14 Harnack’s Militia Christi has been at the core of this consensus. In his work Harnack suggests that the church of the first three centuries objected to the military profession because of an inherent rejection of war and killing, the idolatrous practices of the army (including the worship of the emperor, the cult of the military standards, and the religious character of the military oath, the sacramentum), and a weariness of the moral behavior of soldiers.15 Among the other writers, some argue that the Church abandoned its pacifist roots in the fourth century during the detrimental and long-lasting compromise of the “Constantinian shift” (e.g., Bainton, Cadoux, Hornus, Yoder), while others saw this as a necessary, even positive, adaptation to the developing conditions of an expanding Church: an ecclesiastical realism of short...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: A Witness to the Nations: The Power of Narratives
• Chapter 2: Ab Urbe Condita: Narratives of Power
• Chapter 3: There Will (Not) Be Blood!
• Chapter 4: General Introduction to the Texts
• Chapter 5: The Earliest Sources
• Chapter 6: Tertullian (ca. 160–ca. 220 CE)
• Chapter 7: Origen of Alexandria (ca. 184/5–ca. 253/4 CE)
• Chapter 8: Cyprian of Carthage (ca. 202–258 CE)
• Chapter 9: Acts of the Military Martyrs (ca. 260–303 CE)
• Chapter 10: Arnobius of Sicca (ca. 253–ca. 330 CE)
• Chapter 11: Lactantius (ca. 240–ca. 320 CE)
• Chapter 12: Church Order Documents and Conciliar Canons
• Chapter 13: Epilogue
• Select Bibliography