In The Origins of Christendom in the West Alan Kreider has written an interesting essay on what it meant to convert before and after Constantine. Prior to its legalization, Christianity was a rather exclusive club. You couldn't just join up. Other Christians had to vouch for you at the beginning of an arduous and lengthy membership process (up to three years!)
The initial focus was almost exclusively on morality and ethics. As the time drew near for baptism, the focus changed to doctrine--the mysteries of the Incarnation and Resurrection that were the underpinnings of Christian practice. Finally, after a season of intense study and extended fasting, you were presented for baptism in the wee hours of Easter Sunday morning. It was a cathartic experience: the cold, naked, hungry, exhausted convert was doused with water, and remade.
And it wasn't just the physical drama--although I'm sure that helped. Now you were cut off from society at large, unable to be a soldier, a gladiator, or an actor, and unable to participate in the patriotic duties of revering the Emperor.
It's unclear whether Constantine's conversion to Christianity was the cause or the effect of Christendom. Paganism was a spent force long before Constantine had his vision, the last new pagan temple being constructed around 285. The Emperor didn't embrace Christianity until a generation later--finally going where a great many of his subjects had gone before.
But as the religion became tolerated and then favored by the State, the ethics/doctrine balance in the new Christian curricula was turned on its head. Now, as Christianity was the ideological glue that held the Empire together, you had to get clear on the ideology first. Morals would come later. And both would come after baptism, not before.
So by the time you get to Caesarius, a 6th century cleric in Gaul, he's preaching conversion to the already baptized, which now means abandoning a lifestyle of nominal Christianity, often mixed in with elements of Roman or Frankish paganism, and entering a monastery.
Krieder writes,
Recent studies of missiology recognize that the Christian message must be inserted into a cultural framework... If the assimilation is done thoughtlessly or too quickly, the result is "syncretism"--a bad thing; if it is done properly, the result is "a truly critical symbiosis"--a good thing. For the latter to happen, there needs to be a second stage which Hans-Dietrich Kahl has called innerkirchliche Nacharbeit (intra-ecclesial follow-up work) of catchism and life formation. In the Europe of the 6th to 8th centuries this second stage never materialized. In Merovingian Gaul there was virtually no catechesis; the councils of the period were tediously interested in church property and episcopal rights, but they showed no interest in encouraging the priests to teach the people. Nor is there a record of a "formal, ecclesiastical post-baptismal catechesis for children."
Now we're getting somewhere.
A lot of people see the cure for what ails the post-Christendom church as a new, antagonistic attitude toward state and culture. That's a bit off. The modern state is both larger and smaller than the Roman Empire, but by no means analogous. It's larger in terms of its intrusion into the economy and society, but smaller in terms of the religious and ideological devotion it demands. The Pax Americana is not the Pax Romana, and the United States of America is by no means the whore of Babylon, although she is in need of repentance.
And there's no warrant in the lean, mean, pre-Constantinian chuch for picking a fight with liberalism, for as I've already argued, the most creative thinkers of that period plundered the reigning ideology of Neo-Platonism. They did not shun it.
But there does seem to be some valid analogies between our situation and that of early Christendom--the failure to do the "intra-ecclesial follow up work." We have sort of banked on cultural familiarity with the names and events of the gospel to educate our children, and socialize the newcomers on Sunday morning. In the mainline Church, this has meant many and various calls for "justice and peace" on the assumption that everyone knows what that means and where it comes from. But without a disciplined and sustained process of Christian education, people don't.
Now we might want to cut the first bureaucrats of Christendom some slack. Civil society was collapsing. Wars raged. New people were turning up in what was left of the cities and all over the countryside. In the chaos, some preoccupation with property rights was understandable.
The same thing is true in a lot of corners of our culture. In inner city ghettos and dying Appalachain towns, a minister is going to be hard-pressed to craft the perfect Sunday School lesson when there are so many social service needs, and he or she might be the only community leader who's both smart and compassionate enough to give a damn about hungry kids, and get them fed.
Still, I think that the way forward is for the Church to celebrate those aspects of culture that are good (the gender, racial and individual equity that is the bedrock of liberal ideals) while working harder and harder to teach its faithful what the good life truly is: forgiveness, fidelity, generosity. And this teaching needs to happen on the front end: prior to confirmation for children, and prior to baptism, or a transfer-of-letter for adults.
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