An amazing blog post about a heretofore completely unexamined topic: the death of Constantinan Christianity

Yesterday's post got me thinking. When was the last time a Protestant theologian appeared on the cover of Time magazine? The answer is Martin Luther, on March 24, 1967. Heh.

There's been plenty of popes on the cover since then, but not all recent popes could be called intellectuals. And there have been plenty of Protestant religious leaders on the cover of Time since then, including Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart and Rick Warren, but I am going to go out on a limb and say that none of these men are intellectuals.

Now I suppose that the RO analysis of this long absence would be along the lines of, "Great! It's about time the Church's best and brightest quit whoring for secular accolades. Let's hope that the next generation of best and brightest Christians takes it to the next level and gets tortured to death at Gitmo. Like Origen and Irenaeus. Then we'll be cooking with gas!"

Like I said in yesterday's post, setting out to get your mug on Time magazine may entail a certain psychological imbalance that inevitably results in sexual or financial misconduct, or substance abuse. Maybe it's for their own good that today's Protestant intellectuals toil in obscurity.

There is, however, another consideration. Perhaps the fact that a dead German theologian appearing on the cover of Time less than a year after the infamous Death of God cover signals the death of top-shelf Protestant thought. Maybe our long absence is less due to disentangling ourselves from the world, and more due to the fact that our intellectual output isn't all that impressive. Into the vacuum has stepped religious leaders with ecclesiastical and political heft.

Put differently, "the death of Constantinianism" really means the death of high level Protestant intellectual engagement with the secular. In practical terms, it means that the face of public Christianity is not Niebuhr, Barth and Tillich, but Warren, Robertson and Swaggart. I can't see how this state of affairs is as full of wondrous opportunities as the RO luminaries say it is.

Comments

[Camassia]

Reading about Billy Graham last summer certainly made me realize how different things were in the '50s and '60s. I honestly didn't know that Niebuhr was on the cover of Time, or that Episcopalian and Catholic bishops had their own TV shows, or that churchgoing was *positively* correlated with education level back then.

At the same time, it's interesting to think that Jeremiah Wright, indirectly, belongs to the same denomination as Niebuhr. And that practically everybody in America now must know who Gene Robinson is. Neither of them is what I'd call a theologian, but they are probably two of the most recognized mainline Protestant clerics in America, oddly enough.

[Jonathan Marlowe]

The ironic thing is, Time did do a feature on a theologian in the past decade, and his name was Stanley Hauerwas.

[Marvin]

Yeah, but he didn't make the cover. Sigh.

[Eric Lee]

I hate to be "that guy" who keeps pointing stuff like this out, but, there's no need to label the other voice in this post as 'RO' when both times you invoke it you are (to my mind) quite actively talking about Stanley Hauerwas (the first in tone/sentiment and in the latter case, explicitly linking to his co-authored book). I only point this out because while Hauerwas accurately represents the 'RO' voice you're critiquing here, those who more closely identify with the RO sensibility (like myself) would not make such a sharp divide about secularism like he would. Secularism is always critiqued (in its underlying logic) but simultaneously it is (or at least should be) always pointed out that secularism itself would not be possible without Christianity so there is always some underlying sense of its porosity/'porousness' with Christian culture itself. People within secular cultures still talk about forgiveness, mercy, and reconciliation, for instance, and one could actually talk with a 'non-religious' person in effort to think through what these things actually mean without having to resort to, on the one hand, a natural law-based discourse, and on the other hand, overwhelming them with one's entire Christian metanarrative and ontology, etc. (I'm taking this from an interview with John Milbank and Simon Oliver in the Radical Orthodoxy Reader, p. 45). In that light, actual RO types encourage political activity (although I don't really agree with, say, the particular 'Red Toryism' of Phillip Blond here in England as much as I personally like the guy).

I guess I just point this out to note one particular sharp difference between through-and-through RO and the position of Hauerwas. Of course, some might say RO goes too far in the other direction, but that's another conversation. And of course, Hauerwas himself has a blurb on the back of the Radical Orthodoxy Reader, but it's obviously written with a kind of admiring 'distance' because there's plenty he doesn't agree with.

That being said, I agree with the main thrust of this post!

[Pastor Mack]

This is an information age (to be differentiated from an age of wisdom), and though the evangelical leaders are not intellectuals, they aren't stupid. Evangelicals owned the first privately held satellite dish (Pat Robertson). Perhaps they were so worried about the ability to communicate that they failed to think through if they should communicate what they had.

This is why I fail to see why we should celebrate the Reformation. Christianity is in chaos; Protestantism in particular. Radical orthodoxy? New monasticism? Why not actual orthodoxy and real monasticism?

But to agree with Eric, Stanley is not an RO. He's his own wacky combination of things.

Of course it is unfortunate that we don't have real theologians as the public face of protestantism. It would be nice if our bishops were more public, but then, we might get John Shelby Spong. But what about someone like Rob Bell? He's a public evangelical (though not really an intellectual) of whom I am not ashamed.

Also worth thinking about: should we accept the term 'Constantinian'? It assumes a sharp division in Christian history that those of the anabaptist mindset love, but I'm not sure the church's fate after Constantine was sealed in the way that the Yoderians assume.