22nd May, 2006

JIM REIHER

Dan Brown promotes the view that the Roman Emperor Constantine was not a Christian at all, remained a pagan all his life, got baptised when he was “on his deathbed, too weak to protest” and was politically astute enough (“a very good businessman”) to hitch his political wagon to the soon-to-be dominant world religion: Christianity. Christians had apparently grown “exponentially” by Constantine’s time, and he was a shrewd politician who used that faith to cement the social and religious fabric of Rome and reject paganism in the process.

This is terribly simplistic. One of the great debates in Roman history is how genuine Constantine’s faith in Jesus was. The critics who say he was not a Christian repeat some of Brown’s comments and add other reasons:
• As a “Christian Emperor” he had people put to death who might oppose his power;
• He did not make his children get baptised (and those children did not intervene to stop the Senate declaring Constantine to be a god, after Constantine’s death);
• He kept a pagan title - Pontifex Maximus - as one of his many titles as Emperor;
• During the early years of his leadership, he carried out the duties of Pontifex Maximus of the traditional pagan cult and restored pagan temples;
• He used pagan as well as Christian rites when dedicating Constantinople;
• He used pagan magic formulas to protect crops and heal disease;
• He did not change pagan symbols on coins for over a decade or more in power; and,
• When finally baptised, he was baptised by an Arian priest (not an orthodox one).

Brown could have used lots more arguments than he did, but it does not surprise me that he limited his argument to the most commonly repeated criticisms. Brown is a lecturer in english and creative writing, after all, not history or archaeology. (That is significant, by the way. His credentials are not in either area that he speculates with and leans so heavily on.)

But there is more to Constantine than this short list of negatives. Great God-fearing leaders in the Bible like King David killed off threats to his throne and recommended that his successor Solomon do the same. All Christian leaders do some very non-Christian things at time: they are not perfect examples of Jesus! (None of us are.) Being the wise leader of a multicultural and multi-religious empire will require that leader to accommodate all persons and not show partiality in affairs of state - even while that person holds personal convictions about one of the state’s many religions. Tony Blair and John Howard face that same challenge in our day. Does it make them non-Christians because they honour and respect Muslims publicly? Or that they don’t pull down Muslim mosques and Hindu temples? Or that tax concessions can go the way of all religions and not just Christianity? Of course not.

By Constantine’s time, it was also expected that after baptism you would not sin again, and so, as a leader of the Roman Empire, it is quite natural for him to put off baptism until his deathbed. Being baptised by an Arian was also no big deal then: half the bishops of the empire were Arians and they were not weeded out until a long time after Constantine. The Arian bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia (not Eusebius the historian) was a personal friend of Constantine and had his ear theologically at various times during his life. It is no surprise that this bishop baptised the Emperor.

It is also important to consider that there were not vast number of Christians at the time Constantine become one. They did not make up the majority of the Roman Empire but, more likely, about 10 per cent of the empire's population. And most of that 10 per cent were not upper class people. They were more from the lower end of society’s spectrum. There had been massive persecution just before Constantine came to power. It had been the worst persecution ever (under Diocleatian and Galarius, the co-emperors before Constantine). Constantine’s mother was a Christian, and that must have had some influence on him. He felt, for example, that his success in the final military battle that won him power was due to the God of his mother - the God of the Cross.

Constantine embraced the “religion of the cross” because of various factors, but it seems unlikely that one was because the numbers of Christians was large, or because it was politically clever to do so. It was actually politically dangerous to be in the minority, particularly a minority made up mostly of powerless or uninfluential people. As one commentator writes: “some of his staunchest opponents of this policy (Christianising the Empire) were in Rome, particularly in the Senate, where the old aristocracy bemoaned the eclipse of their ancient gods and privileges.”

Was Constantine a Christian or a political opportunist? Probably both to varying degrees. I see him as a relatively immature Christian with a lot of secular power. Not the greatest combination, and in many ways it did hurt the church. But that seems to have been the nature of his situation.

Jim Reiher (BA (double major in history), BA in Theology, Dip Ed. MA in Theology (Hons)) is a full time lecturer for Tabor College Victoria, lecturing in church history and New Testament; and also has speciality interest areas in women’s ministry, creative ministry, and the New Age movement. His views are not necessarily those of other Tabor faculty members or of Tabor College.