The emperor's deathbed baptism
Constantine baptized before death
Constantine the Great dies on the feast of Pentecost, 337 AD, in a villa outside Nicomedia. He is sixty-five years old and has ruled the Roman empire for over thirty years, longer than almost any emperor before him.
He is baptized on his deathbed, only days before he dies.
This fact has puzzled and disturbed Christians in every century since. The man who funded the Council of Nicaea, who built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, who wrote letters addressing bishops as his brothers, who presided over the most important theological council in church history — he waited until he was dying to be baptized.
The most common explanation from his contemporaries is practical: baptism, in the early church, was understood to wash away all prior sin. Some Christians deliberately delayed it to ensure maximum coverage. This was not an obscure strategy — it was common enough that later theologians like Ambrose of Milan preached against it forcefully.
But there may be more. Constantine spent his reign executing rivals, including members of his own family. He had his eldest son Crispus and his wife Fausta killed in the same year, for reasons that remain historically murky. A man who ordered the deaths of his own wife and son may have had specific reasons to want the water to come last.
He is buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, the city he built and named for himself, surrounded by the symbolic sarcophagi of the twelve apostles.
He wanted to be remembered as the thirteenth apostle.
History has never been entirely sure what to do with him.
“I had hoped to receive this privilege at the Jordan River, in imitation of our Savior. But God who knows what is best has seen fit to grant it to me here.”
— Constantine, on his deathbed baptism, as reported by Eusebius, 337 AD
“He said to Jesus, Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom. He said to him, Most assuredly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
Constantine is the most consequential person in church history who was not himself a clear, uncomplicated model of Christian faithfulness.
He did enormous good for the church. He also did things that are very hard to square with the faith he promoted. He held the church together at Nicaea and undermined it with Arianism in the same decade.
The church has never resolved what to do with powerful benefactors who are also deeply compromised people. It tends to swing between canonizing them and condemning them, when the truth usually requires holding both at once.
Grace is not a performance review. It is not earned by the ratio of good decisions to bad ones. It is available on a deathbed in Nicomedia to an emperor who waited until the last possible moment.
What does that say about grace? What does it say about the cost of waiting?