"Defending Constantine;" Book Reviewed by Andrew Lohr

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
by Peter J. Leithart (Ph.D. Cambridge, pastor and college professor in Moscow Idaho, homeschooling father of nine, friend of mine at James B. Jordan's Biblical Horizons conferences)
IVP Academic (InterVarsity Press), Downers Grove IL, www.ivpress.com
published A.D. 2010

N. T. Wright endorses this book; to some of us, need I say more?

Constantine was the first Roman emperor to become a Christian. To some he's "Saint Constantine the Great." To others he's not. "Constantine's Sword," a recent bestseller, criticized him, and so did a Mennonite mainstream professor named John Howard Yoder. Dr Leithart, while willing to criticize Constantine occasionally, defends him.

So if you're interested in Constantine, or in Rome's change from pagan to Christian, I highly recommend this book. If, like me, you pick up a variety of books that look interesting, this is one that wasn't hard to read, that pulls together quite a bit of information--there are footnotes at the foot of most pages, and 24 pages of bibliography (2 primary, 22 secondary) without comments on the sources--and that works on a topic interesting in itself and relevant to current affairs, to religion in public life. It's not going to set new standards for well written, or for scholarship, or for how we should live, but it's well above average in all those ways; a book that won't waste your time, if you have time for this sort of book. The preface will tell you what Dr Leithart is up to; a glance at one of the earlier, more biographical chapters and one of the more theological last chapters should give you a pretty good idea whether or not you want to read it all.

It probably does set the current standard for its side of its field: scholarly, readable defense of Constantine from a trans-evangelical perspective. (By "trans-evangelical" I mean Dr Leithart (1) is an evangelical Christian (2) who gives serious Christian respect to brothers outside the evangelical box. He was ordained in the PCA but he's a Kingdom man, not just a PCA man. By "probably" I mean I don't know what competition he has, e.g. from Eastern Orthodox Constantine scholars.)

In A.D. 306, when the Roman empire had been peacefully divided into four semi-united pieces, Constantine inherited Britain and Gaul (France) from his father. In A.D. 312 he declared himself a Christian. By A.D. 325, after on-and-off civil wars, he ruled the whole empire, and called the "Council of Nicea" (a.k.a. "The First Ecumenical [whole-church] council") to try to settle the Arian controversy. (Arius claimed God the Son was a 2nd-rank God, not eternal, inferior to God the Father; bluntly, that Jesus was a god but was not God. The council, and I agree with it, affirmed that Jesus is God; see my tract "Jesus Christ is like a thigh bone.") Constantine didn't get baptized until just before he died, in A.D. 337.

Secular historians blame Constantine for cruelty; Yoder, a pacifist Christian, says that when church merged with state the state ran the church. Leithart goes into historical details, admitting that Constantine sometimes blew his stack and that some Christians flattered rulers, but a fair number of bishops throughout church history stood up to rulers who were doing wrong, and Constantine showed great amounts of mercy; for example, he was the first Roman ruler to outlaw rape (!) Without knowing details from the other side, I get the impression Leithart does a pretty good job of showing that Constantine did a pretty good job.

Leithart also puts Constantine into the context of his times: for example, the church had just come out of the fiercest Roman persecution ever, and how could we not be hugely grateful to an emperor who stopped the persecution and kissed the eyes of a bishop who had been blinded for Christ? (Answer: "Hallowed be Thy name"--when we really remember how great God is, we do indeed thank Him for all his blessings, but we keep them in perspective and do not make them, or the lack of them, into idols. This may also give more scope for a Christian to not just improve upon his times with the materials at hand but to improve the materials, to challenge his times and to seriously change them, as Paul and William Wilberforce, and above all Jesus, did; though every man lives in his times.)

How could it have been a better book? It does not bog down in words I don't know, but "apotropaic" (to ward off evil) and one or two more I did have to look up. If Dr Leithart chooses, like Bill Buckley of blessed memory, to use such rare words (I don't recall such from other Leithart books I've read), I wish he'd put definitions handy, especially in a book with footnotes. For a book that does come closer to setting a standard both for excellent writing and for historical scholarship when previous historians need straightening out, Theodore Roosevelt's book "The Naval War of 1812" sets an outstanding example: a story well told, with discussion of controversy along the way, including discussion of mistakes and of sources. Leithart's book, though well above average, is more choppily written, and the way he sometimes (not always) quotes his sources looks to me more like prooftexting on a point he wants to consider settled than like transparent consideration of the matter before us.

Four stars out of five. To quote further from N.T. Wright's back-cover blurb, "Peter Leithart...forces us to face the question of what Constantine's settlement actually was, and meant. Few will agree with everything he says. All will benefit enormously from this challenge..."

7 December A.D. 2010