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Discipleship in America: Subversive Math and Neo-Monasticism

Submitted by Mark Van Steenwyk on March 4, 2006 – 8:25 pmView Comments
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From Alan Jacobs:

All too often Christians think even of faithfulness as a
means to an end, that end being (usually) something
called "church growth." We think so because in our culture
goals are always products: quantifiable goods that,
because they are quantifiable, can be produced by
techniques. Thus our true ancestor is Charles
Finney, the 19th-century evangelist who
believed that his evangelistic techniques were
fully scientific…Obedience, not results, must be our watchword,
and in one sense all I have to say is this: be obedient to
Christ today.

What would happen if we focused on obedience today, without regard for its effectiveness?  I know that some may reject this sort of logic.  After all, some would say, reaching the world is part of our call to faithfulness.  But when our central goal is reaching the many, and we’ve lost sight of who we really are, what are we really drawing the many into? 

The church needs to be cruciformed before we add more to our numbers.  Our equations need crosses, not plus signs.

And this is why myself and the folks at Missio Dei are embracing a monastic understanding of the faith.  The word "church" received and unholy baptism through Constantinianism.  It received a second unholy baptism through Americanism.  We don’t want to be separtists, but we want to live out a radical life to remind the Church of who it is:

?…the restoration of the church will surely come only from a
new monasticism which has nothing in common with the old but a complete
lack of compromise in a life lived in accordance with the Sermon on the
Mount in the discipleship of Christ. I think it is time to gather
people together to do this…?

-Dietrich         Bonhoeffer

Extract of a letter written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to his brother Karl-Friedrick on the 14th of January, 1935.

 

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About Mark Van Steenwyk

Mark Van Steenwyk is a member of Missio Dei. He is a speaker, writer, educator, and grassroots organizer. With the support of the Central Plains Mennonite Conference, he travels to radical and intentional communities around the country to help network and offer support.

  • Yes, I think you are right Brandon. We should refer to it as the "Shift into Christendom".
  • What about the idea of Christendom? I'd argue that Charlemagne was probably as "bad" a figure as Constantine was in terms of solidifying this synthesis.

    Constantine paved the path with the Edict of Milan in 313 for the state to stop persecuting the Christians, but it took a few generations before Christianity became the state religion and that's why I especially dislike Theodosius and the Theodosian Codes which formed the bedrock of the church-state relationship all the way up until the 20th century.

    I really dislike Charlemagne because his baptism in 800 marked the true beginning of "Christendom" with the Holy Roman Empire (which was non of the three nomers).

    If you're going to use a term, I think that Christendom helps, but you have to recognize the path it took to get there.
  • Excellent! That wraps both of the "unholy" baptisms into one!
  • How about 700 Clubinization or "the Robertson shift"?
  • I feel like we're dancing in a circle here, Chris. You may object to the use of the word...but not everyone out there uses it in the way you are objecting to. You should try to offer a different term and get it circulating, rather than saying that the term is bad, since many who use the term don't use it in a way to critique Constantine per se.
  • I understand the phenomenon that you're talking about. The Church became politically powerful over time. That's easy enough to agree on. I just object to that phenomenon being called "Constantinianism," because it clearly places the blame on Constantine. People who use that term aren't just casually picking on Constantine for the sake of an example, they're pointing to him as the archetype of the "unholy baptism" of the Church. That's why I said don't pick on Constantine. The Church was granted freedom of religion before Constantine (by Galerius), and they lost their favored status after Constantine died (under Julian). They grew in power politically as their own entity, not because they had some consistent, tightly knit relationship with the Roman Empire.
  • I think you are correct in your understanding of the 'shift' that occured in the 4th century, and I would say during the Reformation, and to a lesser extent in America. In each case the link between state and church was in many respects indistinguishable (though that is probably not a reality anymore in America, and in fact I believe American Christians falsely think that they have more power and influence over the direction of this country than they actually do). Thus it is even more vital that we distinguish ourselves from the surrounding culture.

    I met a Benedictine nun a few months ago, and she was talking about one of the results of Vatican II being that the doors to the monastic life were opened to all believers. Though I am not a Catholic, I believe the significance she saw in that is important because it shows that the monastic life is not just for a select group of men and women, but it is for all believers. Therefore, I applaud what you are calling for, and have taken some practices that I have discovered from the monastics and put them into practice in my own life.
  • I don't think I'm saying any of that. What I AM saying is that during late antiquity and the early middle ages, the way people thought about church shifted, especially in regards to its relationship with the State. This is what what is meant by the Constantinian Shift. I understand that anabaptists have blamed Constantine for this. Recent thinkers who have been influenced by anabaptist thinking are much more nuanced than that...though they still talk of a Constantinian shift, they merely point to Constantine as an example of a case in which the line between Church and State was blurred.

    So the "baptism" I'm talking about is a sort of shifting into a new relationship with the state. This changed the self-understanding of the Church--what "church" meant became different, gradually. And it changed as American ideas filtered into the church as well.

    Do you disagree with my understanding of things or what I'm arguing?
  • I wasn't objecting to your use of the word Constantinianism, I was objecting to the idea that the word "church" received some sort of horrible, twisted meaning from what Constantine did. That's why I say, don't be so hard on Constantine. The Church thrived under him, even if it entered the political arena in a way that is distasteful to us as 21st century Christians looking for reform in America. If you want to talk about the "Constantinian shift," I think that's a late medieval construction by Anabaptists who still believed that Constantine had been converted to Christianity and had made it the official religion of the Roman Empire, when in reality he made it a favored religion, and was baptized on his death bed.
  • I don't believe it is shoddy history at all. I think you are hearing the word "constantinian" differently than the way I am using it, which is by no means my own private useage; the word is being used today to refer to a gradual shifting into a certain way of understading the church/state relationship. Constantine, for obvious reasons, is a sort of symbolic figure for that shift. Some folks may blame Constantine and say that before Constantine things were good, and after him things were bad. I'm not one of them.
  • "The word "church" received an unholy baptism through Constantinianism."

    Sorry, I just have to object to this phrase as shoddy history. Don't be so hard on Constantine.
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