Rethinking Constantine

Rethinking Constantine
Author: Edward L. Smither
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2014-02-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1620321882

What happens to the church when the emperor becomes a Christian? Seventeen hundred years after Constantine's victory at Milvian Bridge, scholars and students of history continue to debate the life and impact of the Roman emperor who converted to faith in the Christian God and gave peace to the church. This book joins that conversation and examines afresh the historical sources that inform our picture of Constantine, the theological developments that occurred in the wake of his rise to power, and aspects of Constantine's legacy that have shaped church history.

The Life and Legacy of Constantine

The Life and Legacy of Constantine
Author: M. Shane Bjornlie
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2016-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317025652

The transformation from the classical period to the medieval has long been associated with the rise of Christianity. This association has deeply influenced the way that modern audiences imagine the separation of the classical world from its medieval and early modern successors. The role played in this transformation by Constantine as the first Christian ruler of the Roman Empire has also profoundly shaped the manner in which we frame Late Antiquity and successive periods as distinctively Christian. The modern demarcation of the post-classical period is often inseparable from the reign of Constantine. The attention given to Constantine as a liminal figure in this historical transformation is understandable. Constantine’s support of Christianity provided the religion with unprecedented public respectability and public expressions of that support opened previously unimagined channels of social, political and economic influence to Christians and non-Christians alike. The exact nature of Constantine’s involvement or intervention has been the subject of continuous and densely argued debate. Interpretations of the motives and sincerity of his conversion to Christianity have characterized, with various results, explanations of everything from the religious culture of the late Roman state to the dynamics of ecclesiastical politics. What receives less-frequent attention is the fact that our modern appreciation of Constantine as a pivotal historical figure is itself a direct result of the manner in which Constantine’s memory was constructed by the human imagination over the course of centuries. This volume offers a series of snapshots of moments in that process from the fourth to the sixteenth century.

Power and Rhetoric in the Ecclesiastical Correspondence of Constantine the Great

Power and Rhetoric in the Ecclesiastical Correspondence of Constantine the Great
Author: Andrew J. Pottenger
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2022-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000799867

This volume closely examines patterns of rhetoric in surviving correspondence by the Roman emperor Constantine on conflicts among Christians that occurred during his reign, primarily the ‘Donatist schism’ and ‘Arian controversy’. Commonly remembered as the ‘first Christian emperor’ of the Roman Empire, Constantine’s rule sealed a momentous alliance between church and state for more than a millennium. His well-known involvement with Christianity led him to engage with two major disputes that divided his Christian subjects: the ‘Donatist schism’ centred from the emperor's perspective on determining the rightful bishop of Carthage, and the so-called ‘Arian controversy’, a theological conflict about the proper understanding of the Son's divine nature in relation to that of the Father. This book examines a number of letters associated with Constantine that directly address both of these disagreements, exploring his point of view and motivations to better understand how and why this emperor applied his power to internal church divisions. Based on close analysis of prominent themes and their functions in the rhetoric of his correspondence, Pottenger argues that three ‘doctrines of power’ served to inform and direct Constantine’s use of power as he engaged with these problems of schism and heresy. Power and Rhetoric in the Ecclesiastical Correspondence of Constantine the Great is of interest to students and scholars of early Christianity and the history of the later Roman Empire.

The Age of Constantine the Great (1949)

The Age of Constantine the Great (1949)
Author: Jacob Burckhardt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2018-12-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429870213

Republished in 1949, Jacob Burckhardt’s brilliant study, first published in Germany in 1852, has survived all its critics and presents today perhaps a more intelligible and a more valid picture of events, their nexus, and their relevance than any later study. This English version is apt to the moment. No epoch of remote history can be so relevant to modern interests as the period of transition between the ancient and the medieval world, when a familiar order of things visibly died and was supplanted by a new. Other transitions become apparent only in retrospect; that of the age of Constantine, like our own, was patent to contemporaries. Old institutions, in the sphere of culture as of government, had grown senile; economic balances were altered; peoples hitherto on the peripheries of civilization demanded attention, and a new and revolutionary social doctrine with an enormous emotional appeal was spread abroad by men with a religious zeal for a new and authoritarian cosmopolitanism and with a religious certainty that their end justified their means. For us, contemporary developments have made the analogy inescapable, but Jacob Burckhardt’s insight led him to a singularly clear apprehension of the meaning of the transition almost a century ago, and the analogy implicit in his book is the more impressive as it was unpremeditated.

Constantine Revisited

Constantine Revisited
Author: John D. Roth
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2013-06-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1621897540

This collection of essays continues a long and venerable debate in the history of the Christian church regarding the legacy of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great. For some, Constantine's conversion to Christianity early in the fourth century set in motion a process that made the church subservient to the civil authority of the state, brought a definitive end to pacifism as a central teaching of the early church, and redefined the character of Christian catechesis and missions. In 2010, Peter J. Leithart published a widely read polemic, Defending Constantine, that vigorously refuted this interpretation. In its place, Leithart offered a thoroughgoing rehabilitation of Constantine and his legacy, while directing a rhetorical fusillade against the pacifist theology and ethics of the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder. The essays gathered here in response to Leithart reflect the insights of eleven leading theologians, historians, and ethicists from a wide range of theological traditions. They engage one of the most contentious issues in Christian church history in irenic fashion and at the highest level of scholarship. In so doing, they help ensure that the "Constantinian Debate" will continue to be lively, substantive, and consequential.

Constantine the Great

Constantine the Great
Author: G. P. Baker
Publisher: Cooper Square Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2001-08-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1461732085

Roman Emperor Constantine is one of the most momentous figures in the history of Christianity, a ruler whose conversion turned the cult of Jesus into a world religion. Classical scholar Baker tells of the changing Roman world in which Constantine rose to power—an empire where feudalism was replacing the old senatorial government and the lands of the empire were split into two regions. It was also a place where customs from the East were replacing the old Roman values, preparing the way for the Byzantine Empire. Baker describes Constantine's unique conversion (which apparently did not prevent him from sacrificing to idols), his wars to control first the Roman army and then the Germans and the lands of Asia Minor, and finally the founding of Constantinople and the establishment of the monarchial system that dominated Europe for over a thousand years.

Constantine versus Christ

Constantine versus Christ
Author: Alistair Kee
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2016-08-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 149829572X

The subject of this book is politics and religion, the relationship between Constantine and Christianity. Something happened in the reign of the Emperor Constantine that transformed both politics and religion in Europe, and anyone who seeks to understand modern Christianity must analyze this transformation and its consequences. The reign of Constantine is remembered as the victory of Christianity over the Roman Empire; the subtitle of the book indicates a more ominous assessment: "the triumph of ideology." Through a careful analysis of the sources, Dr. Kee argues that Constantine was not in fact a Christian and that the sign in which he conquered was not the cross of Christ but a political symbol of his own making. However, that is only the beginning of the story. For Constantine, religion was part of an imperial strategy, and the second part of this book shows just what that strategy was. Here is the development which marks a transition to a further stage, the way in which by using Christianity for his own ends, Constantine trans­formed it into something completely different. Constantine, Dr. Kee argues, along with his biographer and panegyrist Eusebius, succeeded in replacing the norms of Christ and the early church with the norms of imperial ideology. Why it has been previously thought that Constantine was a Christian is not because what he believed was Christian, but because what he believed came to be called Christian. And that represents "the triumph of ideology."

Constantine: Religious Faith and Imperial Policy

Constantine: Religious Faith and Imperial Policy
Author: A. Edward Siecienski
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2017-01-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351976117

Constantine: Religious Faith and Imperial Policy brings together some of the English-speaking world’s leading Constantinian scholars for an interdisciplinary study of the life and legacy of the first Christian emperor. For many, he remains a "sign of contradiction" (Luke 2:34) whose life and legacy generate intense debate. He was the first Christian emperor, protector of the Church, and eventually remembered as "equal to the apostles" for bringing about the Christianization of the Empire. Yet there is another side to Constantine’s legacy, one that was often neglected by his Christian hagiographers. Some modern scholars have questioned the orthodoxy of the so-called model Christian emperor, while others have doubted the sincerity of his Christian commitment, viewing his embrace of the faith as merely a means to a political end. Drawing together papers presented at the 2013 symposium at Stockton University commemorating the 1700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan, this volume examines the very questions that have for so long occupied historians, classicists, and theologians. The papers in this volume prove once again that Constantine is not so much a figure from the remote past, but an individual whose legacy continues to shape our present.

Constantine and the Divine Mind

Constantine and the Divine Mind
Author: Kegan A. Chandler
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2019-12-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1532689942

Constantine's conversion to Christianity marks one of the most significant turning points in the epic of Western civilization. It is also one of history's most controversial and hotly-debated episodes. Why did Constantine join a persecuted sect? When did he convert? And what kind of Christian did he ultimately become? Such questions have perennially challenged historians, but modern scholarship has opened a new door towards understanding the fourth century's most famous and mysterious convert. In Constantine and the Divine Mind, Chandler offers a new portrait of Constantine as a deeply religious man on a quest to restore what he believed was once the original religion of mankind: monotheism. By tracing this theological quest and important historical trends in Roman paganism, Chandler illuminates the process by which Constantine embraced Christianity, and how the reasons for that embrace continued to manifest in his religious policies. In this we discover not only Constantine's personal religious journey, but the reason why Christianity was first developed into a world power.