How is creation to be restored and how will peace – in all its manifestations and consequences – be effected within it and between it and God? Roger Mitchell understands the gospel way of doing this as a ‘kenotic gift’, a giving away by God of himself and his power for the good of creation. But it is the opposite of this that he sees in the church as it was subsumed by the ‘imperial sovereignty’ of the Roman Empire in the fourth century.

Supreme power

He defines sovereignty as the expression of the rule of a sovereign – that rule being supreme and with hierarchy at the heart of its outworking. For example, in pre-parliamentary days the monarch of Great Britain was the supreme ruler of these islands and its overseas territories. The monarch was in full control of all the decision making process and by exercising this power was in full control of his/her empire. The monarch was, therefore, sovereign. This principle, argues Mitchell, infected the church with the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine in 312 C.E. to the extent that the means of ensuring peace and the restoration of creation was transferred from the gospel way (kenotic gift) to using sovereign power by church and state working in tandem. Peace was not to be effected by the giving away of power any longer but by being concentrated in the hands of the few and being used against the many.

Theological shift

The church, therefore, became a partner in the empire’s use of sovereign power. But it wasn’t just that church practice changed in this process; church belief – its theology – was also changed. Maybe in order to justify this unrivalled sovereign power, God himself was invested with imperial sovereignty. (More on this in a later post.) If Mitchel is correct in this then it will not do just to change church practice and structure; we must also ask some difficult questions about what we believe about God and his character. For in the quest to legitimise the imperial principle in church life the early medieval theologians created a god in their own image – a creation that may well have survived down the ages to our own day.

Defaulting to hierarchy

In the closing section of his introduction Roger Mitchell sketches some of the reform movements that have challenged this imperial power within church – groups such as the Anabaptists in the later Protestant Reformation. However, in the sketching of these movements he makes this sobering comment – ‘Even the most radical alternatives have tended to default to the machinations of sovereign power.’ This isn’t just a historical problem, I would suggest, but one we possibly see being outplayed today in Wales and no doubt other nations.

This post forms a series on Roger Mitchell’s book Church, Gospel & Empire. See previous post here.


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