‘How is it that the best of
church experience in both traditional and radical expressions tends to relapse
to hierarchical domination and control?’ This is Roger Hadon Mitchell’s
chilling question in his introduction to his newly published PhD thesis, Church, Gospel & Empire (Eugene, OR,
2011.) It isn’t the only question posed but for the purpose of this blog it is
possibly the most important.
And it includes within it
some vital clues as to how Roger Mitchell intends to answer his own question.
The phrase ‘hierarchical domination and control’ is a key to understanding how
he sees the weak point that has made the church so ineffective in its original
calling. While others have sought to explain this weakness as a shift ‘from the
religious to the secular’, Mitchel sees it as a shift from ‘the egalitarian to
the hierarchical’, a shift that saw the church stop being a servant within
creation to being a vehicle of dominance.
Mitchell, of course, isn’t
the only theologian to have made this argument. The Anabaptist and Mennonite
traditions of today – and of the 16th and 17th centuries
– also interpret church history in this way, and like them Mitchell has
concluded that the point at which the church was infected was during the
so-called ‘Constantinian shift’ when the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine was
converted to Christianity in 312 C.E. and eventually made his new faith the
faith of the Empire. And just as an email can carry a virus into the heart of
your computer, so the Constantinian shift contaminated the church with
principles that are far from Christ-like.
On the back cover one of
Mitchell’s recommenders says, ‘This is a disturbing book. To reach the end is
to discover that Mitchell has brought you to a crossroads and that business as
usual is no longer an option for the twenty-first-century church’. I arrived as
those crossroads some time back after reading another post-Christendom writer,
Stuart Murray Williams. But in Mitchell’s book we will be taken even deeper
into the theological tangle that the church found herself in after the fourth
century.
More on Roger Mitchell’s
thesis next week.
