Losing Our Way

I proclaim it every Sunday. Somewhere between the sermon and the prayers of the people, the congregation stands to recite the Nicene Creed.

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again…

I’m sure you know the rest of it.

If you attend a liturgical church, you’ve probably said these words a thousand times. I believe most of it, and even the parts that make me squirm aren’t troubling enough to make a fuss about. I’m not interested in deconstructing the Nicene Creed. I’m consumed with what it meant to call yourself a Christian before there were creeds, or clergy, or even a canon.

The further I flee religious fundamentalism, the more fascinated I am with the historical Jesus and the community of people who knew him personally, or were only one or two degrees removed from those who did. What did these first Christians think the Jesus movement was all about? What did faith mean in the first two centuries after his death? When did followers become believers, and when did disciples become people who think all the right doctrines about Jesus while living in opposition to everything Jesus ever taught? When did apprenticeship become assent?

I’ll tell you. October 27th, 312.

On that fateful day 1,714 years ago, Emperor Constantine had a vision. Fighting for control of the Roman Empire with his rival Maxentius, Constantine saw the sign of the cross in the sky. Interpreting this portent as divine favor, Constantine went on to win the battle and subsequently adopted Christianity as his personal religion. For the first time in history, a globally powerful politician converted to Christianity. And his “conversion” changed everything. Well, it didn’t change him of course, but Christianity has never been the same.

Suddenly, Christianity had something it had never had before: imperial power. With it came the temptation the Church would succumb to for the next two thousand years—to exchange the way of Jesus for the ways of empire. Almost overnight, Christians moved up from the catacombs and into the Senate, where the persecuted became the persecutors. Once a marginalized and brutalized community of political and cultural misfits, Christians were now the privileged and the powerful. Instead of resisting the ways and means of empire, they wanted to Make Rome Great Again. Christians suddenly found themselves bearing arms for the very empire that killed their king. Following the way of Jesus was reduced to innocuous beliefs about Jesus. The people once known for defending the rights of women, socialistic economic practices, universal nonviolence, and radical justice were converted to the cruelty and callousness that is imperial Christianity.

Constantine was one of the first, and hardly the last, to enlist Christianity in service of empire.

The most sinister aspect of imperial Christianity isn’t that the crucified became the crucifiers; it’s that proximity to power changed what it meant to call yourself a Christian. A movement born from modeling your life around a homeless Palestinian prophet who healed the sick, defended the weak, and spoke truth to power morphed into an institution increasingly preoccupied with defining Jesus rather than following him. And sadly, it only got worse.

In 325, Constantine called the Council of Nicaea to settle a theological dispute over who Jesus was in relation to God. Was Jesus fully divine and eternal, or was the Son created by the Father? For the first time, the question of what Christians should believe about Jesus was being settled by imperial, and politically motivated men.

By 380 and the Edit of Thessalonica, Emperor Theodosius made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, marking Christianity as an imperial institution. The domestication and subjugation of the Jesus movement was complete.

It’s one thing to describe this conversion. It’s another to see it staring right at you. Several years ago I visited York Minster in the north of England, near the site Constantine was crowned emperor in 306.

In the cathedral grounds is a statue of Constantine seated in military dress, casually holding the pommel of a broken sword whose blade forms a cross. On the base of the statue are the words, “Constantine by this sign I conquer.” The symbolism is difficult to miss. What struck me as I gazed up at the statue was just how smug Constantine is depicted. He has the same pompous look every politician since him has had when they are cavalierly using Christianity to legitimize their power. He isn’t kneeling beneath the weight of the cross, he is basking in the glory of conquering with it. Our sign of self-emptying love was now a badge of power. Christianity didn’t convert the empire. The empire converted Christianity.

And with it, our faith was turned upside down.

The Way was now a creed. Faith was right belief. Resisting the status quo was now treason. Christianity was suddenly a chaplain to empire, blessing the very powers Jesus had warned his followers to resist. Gone was the nonviolent Jesus, and in his place was the warrior for Jesus. An entire spiritual movement was fundamentally reshaped. Perhaps there is no better way to see the magnitude of that transformation than to place two of the most revered texts in Christian history side by side: the Nicene Creed and the Sermon on the Mount. One emerged from a gathering of bishops convened under the authority of an emperor; the other came from the lips of Jesus. One asks us to affirm what we believe about Jesus; the other asks us to embody what Jesus taught.