This week an historical reflection about Christianity and power.

In the fourth century, Christianity emerged as an accepted and welcomed part of the Roman Empire. But, as the Christian religion, with strong Roman Empire support, developed a more defined institutional structure, a major paradigm shift was underway.

As happened back then, and still happens today, people and institutional leaders sometimes neither see nor understand the long-term implications of what they are getting into.

Before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge north of Rome in 312 CE, according to the early Christian historian Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260/265 – 339 CE), Constantine had a vision of a cross-shaped symbol formed from light above the sun at midday. Attached to it there was a text “By this conquer.”

Constantine’s vision, about which there are numerous historical questions, was interpreted as a promise of victory if the Chi Rho, the first two letters of Christ’s name in Greek, was painted on the soldiers’ shields. Eusebius reported that, fighting under the insignia of Christ, Constantine’s troops defeated Constantine’s fellow emperor Maxentius (c. 283 – 312) who drowned in the river Tiber.

Following the battle and the defeat and death of Maxentius, Constantine became the undisputed emperor in the West. Maxentius’ head was cut off and then triumphantly carried through the streets of Rome. Constantine’s victory over his rival, set the precedence for Christianity to resort to violence whenever necessary to achieve its goals.

Constantine converted to Christianity but was not baptized until shortly before his death in 337. Historians wonder if he really became a Christian or very pragmatically used the growing Christian religion to tie together his unsteady empire.

Constantine was certainly pragmatic and hoped to unify his Roman Empire by promoting just one religion for all. In 313 he issued the Edict of Milan, making Christianity one of the legally recognized religions in the Roman Empire. Then in 325 Constantine convened a council of all Christian bishops in Nicaea (now İznik, Turkey). The bishops formulated the Nicene Creed – still used today — and demanded that all Christians accept it. For Constantine it was another step in unifying his empire.

Although Constantine died in 337, it was forty-three years after his death that his dream was realized with the 380 Edict of Thessalonica, which declared Nicene Christianity to be the ONLY legitimate religion for the Roman Empire. The result was that Church and State were becoming one. — Church leaders became imperial leaders in power, influence, courtly attire, and imperial protocol. Constantine had already made bishops administrators and civil judges in the Roman legal system.

Curiously, the Nicene Creed of 325 said nothing about what Jesus had taught, beyond the idea that God is Father. It said nothing about loving one another, nothing about compassion, or forgiveness, nothing about helping the poor and needy, and nothing about renouncing violence.

Post-Constantine church leaders forgot or simply ignored the ethical focus of the historic Jesus. Jesus did not overpower people, and Jesus taught by example not dogmatic decree.

Look at Luke 10:25-37: “Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ He answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’

But wanting to justify himself, the lawyer then asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’”

A contemporary thought: If fidelity to Christian doctrine is the sign of an authentic Christian, rather than correct Christian conduct, some very strangely behaving people today carry the label “Christian.” They can say “God sent me” but continue oppressing the poor, denigrating women, mishandling immigrant children, and destroying the environment. When “Christian” leaders ignore the ethic of Jesus, they become strange proclaimers of his Gospel.

Writing about the clash of Christianities, more than a hundred tears ago, Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895), the U.S. American social reformer, abolitionist, and writer, said it very well: “Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference — so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked.”

We need genuine Christian leaders but not self-protective and self-promoting power bosses. The Christian community is a community of men and women living and acting in the Spirit of Christ. They are a life-giving community of acceptance, concern, and care.

Throughout the coming months, I hope we can better appreciate the full picture of what it means to be a Christian. I hope we can become better informed, more collaborative in our decision-making, and more courageous in our critical words and constructive actions.

• Jack

Dr. John A. Dick – Historical Theologian

Current Research Focus: Religion and Values in U.S. Society

 

This week, on Saturday, we will have the 80th anniversary of the WWII Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945). There, 8,407 U.S. soldiers lost their lives, 46,170 were wounded and 20,905 declared missing. There were also an estimated 103,900 German casualties.

Next week, on Monday, we will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Auschwitz concentration camp liberation.

On 27 January 1945, Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in occupied Poland was liberated by the Soviet Red Army. Historians estimate that more than a million people were “exterminated” in Auschwitz during the less than 5 years of its existence. The majority, around 1 million people, were Jewish. Although most of the prisoners had been killed, about 7,000 had been left behind. The date is now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But another commemoration, about which one does not hear much these days, is the 80th anniversary of the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 – 1945).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor, theologian, and anti-Nazi dissident who was a key founding member of the Confessing Church, which arose in opposition to German government-sponsored efforts to unify all the Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi German Evangelical Church

When I was a seminary student in Detroit, Michigan, one of my professors introduced me to Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, first published in 1951. It was a mind-opening experience, for a very pious seminarian. The book was compiled by Bonhoeffer’s good friend, the German theologian and pastor, Eberhard Bethge (1909 – 2000). It is based on letters and papers that Bonhoeffer had written and received during his imprisonment at Tegel Prison, north of Berlin.

Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel Prison for 1½ years. Later, he was moved to Flossenbürg concentration camp, near the German border with what was then Czechoslovakia. At Flossenbürg, on April 9, 1945, Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging.

One year before the Nazis executed him, Bonhoeffer had written to Bethge: “What is bothering me incessantly is the question about what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today.”

Bonhoeffer felt that the time had come for a “religionless Christianity,” because so much institutional religion seemed so alien to the Gospel. Today, I would say he was writing about the problem “churchianity.”

“During the last year or so,” Bonhoeffer continued, “I have come to know and understand more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. The Christian is not a homo religiosus, but simply a human person as Jesus was a human person…I am still discovering, right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith….By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes, failures, and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God. That, I think, is faith. And that is how one becomes a human and a Christian.”

We do not know how Bonhoeffer would have developed these ideas. I wish he could have lived longer. Ironically, he was executed just two weeks before soldiers from the United States 90th and 97th Infantry Divisions liberated the Flossenbürg camp. And a month before the unconditional surrender of the remaining German armed forces on May 8, 1945, ending World War II in Europe.

History does not repeat itself, but some historic mistakes are often ignored and repeated.

We can indeed learn a few lessons from the Bonhoeffer era as we see abuses of power and the betrayals of leadership in our own days — inside and outside of the church.

Bonhoeffer was alarmed that so many Christian church leaders (Protestant and Catholic) openly supported Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945). He was even more alarmed that so many Christian men and women tacitly supported the inhumane Nazi regime through their own silence and inaction.

Adolf Hitler was baptized as a Catholic but was not at all a Christian believer. He and his Nazi party promoted “Positive Christianity,” a movement which rejected most traditional Christian doctrines. His involvement in “Positive Christianity” was driven by opportunism and a pragmatic recognition of the political importance of the Christian churches. It was promoted as well by Nazi Party condemnation of criticism from a “lying press” during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

In Hitler’s “Positive Christianity” and his exaggerated self-pride, Hitler and his Nazi zealots saw the Führer as the herald of a new revelation. He proclaimed Jesus as an “Aryan fighter” who struggled against “the power and pretensions of the corrupt Pharisees.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897 – 1945), Reich Minister of Propaganda for Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, wrote in April 1941, in his diary, that although Hitler was a powerful opponent of the Vatican and Christianity, “…he forbids me to leave the church, for tactical reasons.” In his memoirs, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments Albert Speer (1905 – 1981) wrote that Hitler “…conceived of the church as an instrument that could be useful to him.”

For further reading and reflection, I recommend a book by Doris L. Bergen: Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Bergen’s work contributes to current scholarly inquiry into the behavior of Christian clergy during the Nazi era. How did Christian clergy respond to the persecution of Jews and individuals with disabilities? Bergen shows that the military chaplains were indifferent to their suffering. The desire to avoid opposing Nazi policy prevailed among military chaplains just as it did among most civilian clergy.  

History does not repeat itself, but some historic mistakes are often ignored and repeated….

Jack

Dr. John A. Dick – Historical Theologian

Current Research Focus: Religion and Values in U.S. Society

 

Thinking about next Monday’s U.S. presidential inauguration – which this year ironically coincides with Martin Luther King Jr. Day – I have been collecting my thoughts about authoritarian leaders and their followers.

Last week, on Friday January 10^th, the president-elect, in a court decision in Manhattan, received an unconditional discharge of his sentence, which formalizes his status as a felon and makes him the very first person in U.S. history to carry that distinction into the White House. 

The sentencing resulted from Mr. Trump’s conviction on charges of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his first campaign. Once the jury convicted Mr. Trump on all 34 felony counts, he had fought to avoid the spectacle of a sentencing, but the Supreme Court rejected his effort to block it.

 

Over the years I have had a number of encounters — and a few conflicts — with authoritarian leaders and followers, in ecclesiastical settings but in academia as well. What I learned, early on, is that authoritarian followers are highly submissive to authoritarian leaders and aggressively insist that everyone should behave as dictated by the authority. They are fearful about a changing world and a changing society which they neither understand nor want to understand. They would rather turn the clock back to some imagined golden era because it makes them feel safe and comfortable.

Authoritarian leaders are coercive and dictatorial. What they want to implement is hardly democratic and quite often tyrannical. They become even more sinister, when they begin to proclaim their message in the name of Christianity. Then, in reality their authoritarianism becomes an anti-Christian virus. That anti-Christian virus is very real today.

The Authoritarian Personality:

(1) In their self-righteous efforts to re-shape society in their own image and likeness, authoritarians feel empowered and compelled to isolate, to humiliate, and to persecute.

(2) If an authoritarian leader has a narcissistic personality disorder, he or she may come across as conceited, boastful, or pretentious. That person belittles or looks down on people he or she perceives as inferior.

(3) Authoritarian followers need to conform and belong to their barrel-vision-group. Loyalty to their group ranks among their highest virtues. Members of the group who question group leaders or group beliefs are quickly seen as traitors.

(4) All authoritarians go through life with impaired reasoning. Their thinking is sloppy, and they are slaves to a ferocious dogmatism that blinds them to evidence and logic. As Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945) said, “What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.”

(5) Authoritarians are surprisingly uninformed about the things they say they believe in. Deep, deep down inside, many have secret doubts about their own core beliefs. In somewhat the same way that some publicly outspoken critics of homosexuality, are often unwilling to acknowledge their own same-sex inclinations and actions.

Change is Necessary and Possible:

Today we need to be well-informed and critical-thinking observers who are willing to courageously collaborate with others as effective change agents.

(1) We need to have a clear and correct vision of reality. Dialogue is important here because it must be a shared vision. We listen, we see, and we explore together. And we build and we re-build together.

(2) We need to be courageous and persistent but patient as well. Change does not happen overnight. Many people get frustrated when change does not happen fast enough. The danger is that they lose sight of the vision as something that can really be achieved. Effective change agents need to help people see that every step forward is a step closer to the goal.

(3) We need to show that we are about more than just nice-sounding rhetoric. Effective change agents need credibility. If one wants to create change, one must not only be able to articulate what that change would look like but show it to others.

(4) We must build strong relationships built on trust. All the points above, mean nothing if one does not have solid relationships with collaborators. People will not want to grow and change if they do not trust the person who is pushing for change.

(5) And finally: We must not allow ourselves to become and act like the authoritarians. Nonviolent civil resistance is far more successful in creating broad-based change than violent campaigns. Empathy and compassion are Christ-like. Hatred and denigration of other people are tokens of the anti-Christ.

For further reading, I recommend: The Age of The Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy around the World – by Gideon Rachman.

And I conclude this reflection with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. – “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

Jack

 

Dr. John A. Dick – Historical Theologian

Current Focus: Religion and Values in U.S. Society

Email: jadleuven@gmail.com

 

 

 

On December 23, 2024, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan said in an interview that President-elect Trump “takes his Christian faith seriously.”

Cardinal Dolan’s remark prompts me to begin my 2025 Another Voice reflections, with two brief observations about religion: first, that there has always been healthy as well as unhealthy religion. Secondly, that all religions, including Christianity, go through a 4-stage evolution that often gets repeated more than once. As the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886 – 1968) so often said: Ecclesia semper reformanda est (Latin for “the Church must always be reformed.”

 

Healthy and unhealthy religion:

Healthy religion is not about using and manipulating people. The historic Jesus did not exercise power over people but empowered them to build bridges between people, promoting mutual respect and support for all people. Unhealthy religion builds walls and creates barriers separating people into qualitative classes. It relies on prejudice, ignorance, and false information, as it promotes hatred and cruelty through racism, misogyny, and homophobia.

Healthy Christianity is about searching, asking questions, and collaborative religious exploration, as people reflect on the Divine Presence in their lives.

 

All religions go through a 4-stage evolution.

In stage one, they begin with an energetic, charismatic, and loosely structured foundation phase, in which faith communities develop where people live in the spirit of the founder. In the history of Christianity, we see this first stage in the early Christian communities, characterized by creativity. Men as well as women presided at Eucharistic celebrations and women and men were leaders in early Christian communities. The historical Jesus did not ordain anyone because ordination did not exist in his lifetime.

 

The second stage arrives when the original disciples begin to die-off and people become concerned about passing-on their faith heritage to the next generation. In stage two, beliefs are written down, sacred scriptures (like Paul’s letters and the Four Gospels) take a set form, and specific rituals, like baptism and the Lord’s Supper, are more uniformly established.

Ordination is created by the Christian community not to pass on “sacramental power” but as a quality control procedure – to ensure that the leaders were qualified and trustworthy.

 

Stage three arrives, often many years later. Religious shortsightedness gradually sets in and the institution and its leaders become the focus.

Doctrinal statements, rituals, and church structures that once pointed to the Sacred and sustained people now become, in stage three, narrow restraints and barriers to growth and life.  

The church which once pointed to God now begins to point more to institutional leaders. People start being evaluated more in terms of obedience to ecclesiastical authority and unquestioned acceptance of authoritarian teaching.

Richard Rohr (b. 1943), U.S. Franciscan priest and writer on spirituality, has often described what happens to Christianity in stage three: “We morph into “Churchianity” more than any genuine transformative Christianity.”

 

Then, when enough people see what is happening, we move into stage four: reformation.

Today’s reformation involves all Christian traditions, not just the Roman Catholic tradition. In the current reformation, we need to move from a talked-about religion to a practice-based religion—with the focus on how we live and grow in our relationship with the Divine and with each other.

In our reformation work in 2025, all Christian churches need to focus on: a better understanding of Scripture and Christian history, and a genuine involvement and concern about issues such as human suffering, healing, poverty, environmentalism, social justice, inclusivity, care for the outsider, and political oppression. We need to form critically-observing reform groups, who see, judge, and then act. Big issues await us.

My warmest regards as we move ahead.

Jack

 

Dr. John Alonzo Dick — Historical Theologian

Email: jadleuven@gmail.com