What do we do with power?
The church and the empire — a new tension
The church has been preparing for persecution for three hundred years. It has not been preparing for this.
In the decade after the Edict of Milan, the church finds itself in an entirely new situation. It has buildings funded by the emperor. Its bishops receive salaries from the imperial treasury. Constantine settles disputes between quarreling bishops, exempts clergy from taxation, uses state resources to resolve theological controversies.
The bishops who had been hiding in catacombs are now invited to dine at the imperial table. The faith for which their predecessors were executed is now the faith the emperor promotes.
Not everyone is comfortable. Donatus, the rigorist bishop in North Africa, watches Constantine intervene in his dispute with the mainstream church and loses badly. He coins what becomes a famous question: What has the emperor to do with the church?
Eusebius writes rapturously about the new situation. He sees Constantine as a new Moses, a new David, the fulfillment of prophecy. He thinks the millennium has arrived.
Lactantius, who lived through the persecutions and saw what power did to those who wielded it against the church, is more cautious.
Athanasius, who will spend seventeen years in exile under Constantine and his sons, learns the hard answer to Donatus's question: more than we wanted, and less than the emperor thinks.
The church has survived the lions. Now it must learn to survive the palace.
“What has the emperor to do with the church?”
— Donatus of Carthage, c. 316 AD
“Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, then my servants would fight, that I wouldn't be delivered to the Jews. But now my kingdom is not from here.”
Donatus's question has no clean answer. The emperor has always had something to do with the church — either persecuting it or patronizing it, and both have costs.
The prosperity of the church under Constantine is the beginning of a long and difficult education in the dangers of success. The church that is favored by power must constantly ask whether it is prophetically free enough to speak truth to that power when required — as Ambrose will demonstrate to Theodosius, as Chrysostom will demonstrate to Eudoxia, as Thomas Becket will demonstrate to Henry II.
The test of the church's faithfulness is not how it behaves under persecution. That test is clear and its passing is visible. The harder test is how it behaves when the emperor is building it basilicas and inviting its bishops to dinner.
How does your community relate to the powers that benefit it? Are you free enough to bite the hand that feeds you when faithfulness requires it?