"What If?": Constantine and the Problem of Counter-Factual Consciousness

Currently bouncing in my backseat is Ian Kershaw’s Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-1941, which details a series of decisions made beginning with England’s decision not to sue for peace with the Nazis and finishing with the decision that results in the Wansee Conference of January 1942. Along with a fascinating discussion of the decision making processes of the democracies and the dictatorships, Kershaw finishes each chapter with a brief foray into counter-factual history: What if Hitler had decided not to invade the Soviet Union? What if Churchill’s War Cabinet decided to seek terms from the Nazis? While addressing such questions, Kershaw does so only tentatively, and without projecting the results of other options outside of the briefest of timeframes. He, in fact, raises the problem of counter-factual history within the introductory chapter of the book. He writes:

This is not counter-factual or virtual history of the type which makes an intellectual guessing game of looking into some distant future and projecting what might have happened had some event not taken place. There are always too many variables in play to make this a fruitful line of enquiry, however fascinating the speculation. Nevertheless, it could fairly be claimed that historians implicitly operate with short term counter-factuals in terms of alternatives to immediate important occurrences or developments. Otherwise, they are unable fully to ascertain the significance of what actually did take place. So the alternatives discussed here are not advanced as long-term projections or musings on ‘what ifs’, but as realistic short term, but different, possible outcomes to what was in fact decided. Putting it another way, assessing the options behind a particular decision helps to clarify why, exactly, the actual decision was taken. (Fateful Choices, p. 6)

While counter-factual history is often quite enjoyable to entertain, Kershaw’s comments are well-taken. The historian who opines that if the British had been victorious at the American Revolution, then our forces would have come into World War I more quickly to more completely defeat the Germans, and thus preclude the rise of Hitler is playing with too many variables to have any credibility.

I raise this because it seems that a certain strand of contemporary theological thought is grounded in a counter-factual historical consciousness that wants to ask “what if the church had not capitulated to Constantine and the beginning of ‘Christendom’?” Or perhaps it is better stated, since the interlocutors have such a vested interest in the issue “Only if the church had not capitulated!” The result is a wistful and romantic longing for a church history that never occurred, and forces the theologian to posit a fall from ecclesiological grace from which we must recover. (I hope to write more on the thought of an ecclesiastical fall in another post.) Evidence of such thinking is to be found in theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas and Emerging Church writer Alan Hirsch. (Hirsch, who’s The Forgotten Ways I am also reading, does it with a superficial reading of church history.)

But while I am not an historian, I do find myself asking if the early Christians who did accept first the cessation of imperial Roman hostility to Christianity in the Edict of Milan, followed by the conversion of Constantine and the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the empire under Theodosius (not Constantine!) in 392, might have made other decisions at that time. Are we not anachronistically projecting back an American understanding of the separation of church and state that would have made little sense to those early Christians? Are we suggesting that in 313 when Rome begins to tolerate the exercise of the Faith that the church would respectfully refuse such toleration in favor of continued martyrdom? Do we expect that they would read the Lord’s call to make disciples of all nations in a modern American fashion that they would preach to individuals from many ethnicities, or rather they would understand the term “nation” in a more political sense? Would they not see the conversion of the empire in a positive light?

Alan Hirsch cites Rodney Stark to the effect that Constantine “destroyed [Christianity’s] most attractive and dynamic aspects” (The Forgotten Ways, p. 60). Yet, can we imagine with any coherence an alternate history? Yes, of course Christians did not always respond the most faithfully to the warp and woof of historical change. But God also seems to have responded by raising up reformers and movements to recall the church to its vocation: Benedict, Francis, Dante, Catherine, Thomas More, and the like.

My challenge is that we might get over our counter-factual historical consciousness and look at our heritage neither dismissively as would Hauerwas and Hirsch, nor romantically, but realistically, learning from our errors while still seeing evidence of the Lord of history leading his people in season and out of season.