What is the Monastic Ideal? Part 1

These are some thoughts I shared at the Emergence Retreat, on Day Two, and some things I thought about during my entire trip.

1 peter 4:12 "do not be surprised at the fiery trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happenning to you."

It is versus like this that cause many to believe suffering integral to the Christian faith - that when it exists in situations where suffering is not present, something central to it all is missing.

Early church and Constantine:

What the early church soon discovered was that the conditions of persecution were purifying to the faith. It was purifying in the following ways:

i. Community. The early church had an outside pressure to develop a tight-knit community and a strong support system. Obviously, this was not always the case (see Galations or Corinthians), but generally it was true, and comparatively, with the secular world, it was very true.

ii. Sacrifice / personal and corporate. The early Christians had a heightened sense of sacrifice. It seemed standard that before accepting the Christian life, one gave serious thought to the sacrifices that, at that time, would come with that decision. Becoming a Christian truly meant giving up your life as you knew it, and at times, no longer valuing it above all else.

iii. Conditions of isolation / being set apart through fire. They were truly anathama. In other words, the Christians were not exclusive by choice, but through the strangness of their message, the odity of it in the Roman landscape, and the anger brought upon them by their moral stand and montheistic belief, they were indeed "different" in the world. Their movement was not closely related to traditional Roman society, or any of the cultures in the outer Provinces. It was very different, and ran, by philosophy, in a very different manor than any other institution it found itself surrounded by. What a novel idea for us modern Christians, no? A church that doesn't operate based on the same philosophies as the institutions around it?

I know that we in general have an impression that presecution in the early church was constant and huge, very dramatic. But that was not usually the case. It was more sporadic, flaring up at times and various places, growing in intensity and then dissipating. The general policy of the authorities was not to seek out Christians, hunting them through the streets. It was rather to prosecute the accused, when a fellow citizen brought forward their names. Therefore, if your neighbor had something agains't you, say a business dispute, and he knew you were a practicing Christian that would never, by the way, fail to confess it, he could solve the dispute very easily by denouncing you to the authorities as a Christian. It was only then that you would find yourself in the arena, getting eaten by a lion. This was generally the case from the time of the Emporor Trajan, all the way up to Constantine.

The verdict is still out on Constantine, and I think it always will be. People really don't know, exactly, what the makeup of his motives were. Here are the main points of his life, that you can find in many church history books:


- influenced by christian women in his family
- involved in civil war for leadership where outcome questionable
- claimed he had a dream of Christ, a commissioning of sorts to leadership
- won his war, became Emporer, and made great strides in the emancipation of Christians in his realm
- began to favor Christians, seek the councel of Bishops in important cities (and give a little councel of his own)


But he was a tricky fellow to pin down:

Why was he doing it? It is a major debate, even to this day. Was his conversion to Christianity genuine, or was he a political opportunist who could see that Christianity's wildfire expansion would soon overtake the Empire anyway? And this question is at the source of the original monastic reaction to the new church that emerged out of the darkness of persecution and stigma.

There is a politician of our day in a very similar questionable position when it comes to politics and Christianity: George Bush. The same question can be applied: Is he genuinely believing and following the faith? Or is he doing it because in the US right now, the religious right has been building its power base politically, over the past few decades, and now it is time to cash in? He did, after all, narrowly win the last election on a platform of very personal Evangelical Christian language. I think he has one thing in common with Constantine: Both the personal and the political motivations are so well mixed together, even they cannot unwind the two themsleves. In other words, they don't even know what their motivations are. All we can then do is take a look at the result of their rule . . . . .