Here: Generous Orthodoxy ThinkTank: What is Constantinianism? Steve Bush starts an exchange on:

What is Constantinianism?

JKA Smith offers some thoughts, and many join in. This conversation is dealing with a lot of stuff that is important to me. I have found myself being a little concerned about this very question (ie What is Constantinianism? and What is not?) This conversation has helped me in what has been an anxious journey for me, I have found it difficult to articulate my concerns about how this is “applied” and/or “aimed” at particular Christians (such as Wallis), who have themselves been instrumental, for many folks, in helping them to recognize or even know what Constantinianism is. The way in which we “witness” to the state is obviously at issue here. Bonhoefer spoke/wrote of the “void” into which the world is in constant danger of slipping.

(I had been in the past few months referring to this “void” as “chaos”, which explains why I was having trouble finding it in searches. The section in the below Continue Reading includes some of this that I found in Hauerwas’ Performing the Faith)

The below are some quotes from the Chapter Bonhoeffer on Truth and Politics, which is from the website of the Center of Theological Inquiry

I suspect most of us think there to be a great distance between the sign in the greengrocer’s window and the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Yet I think Bonhoeffer rightly saw that the Christian acceptance that truth does not matter in such small matters prepared the ground for the terrible lie that was Hitler. In order to expose the small as well as the big lies a community must exist that has learned to speak truthfully to one another. That community, moreover, must know that to speak truthfully to one another requires the time granted through the work of forgiveness. Such patient timefulness is a gift from the God the community believes has given us all the time we need to care for the words we speak to one another.44 Any politics absent such a people quite literally is doomed to live lies that are the breeding ground of violence.45 Bonhoeffer believed that the church is the sign God has placed in the windows of the world to make possible a truthful politics.

Bonhoeffer saw clearly that “the void” becomes possible as the alternative to Christianity. In the extraordinary story he tells in the section of the Ethics, “Inheritance and Decay,” he rightly suggests that “it was only from the soil of the German Reformation that there could spring a Nietzsche.” (p. 28) In a manner that anticipates recent “post-modern” doubts about reason, Bonhoeffer notes that “contempt for the age of rationalism is a suspicious sign of failure to feel the need for truthfulness. If intellectual honesty is not the last word that is to be said about things, and if intellectual clarity is often achieved at the expense of insight into reality, this can still never again exempt us from the inner obligation to make clean and honest use of reason.” (p. 34) Finally he notes, “Luther’s great discovery of the freedom of the Christian man and the Catholic heresy of the essential good in man combined to produce the deification of man. But, rightly understood, the deification of man is the proclamation of nihilism.” p. 39. For Bonhoeffer’s explicit use of the language of “the void,” see p. 44 of the Ethics.

I do not think Bonhoeffer believes that every word we use must gain its immediate intelligibility from Christ. As Rowan Williams suggests, the truth to which Christological dogmas gesture is not so much a concern with rationality or comprehensive elucidation of all that is, but more with the “need to preserve the possibility of the kind of encounter with the truth-telling Christ that stands at the source of the Church’s identity.” 35 The threat to truth for Christians comes not from the difficulty of developing an unproblematic correspondence theory of truth, but rather from the lies that speak to us disguised as truth. Those are the lies Bonhoeffer rightly feared made possible the rise of Hitler and the ongoing lies necessary to sustain Hitler in power. The failure of the church to oppose Hitler was but the outcome of the failure of Christians to speak the truth to one another and to the world.

Some may find the account I have given of Bonhoeffer’s understanding of truth and politics troubling. The implications of Bonhoeffer’s understanding of truthfulness for politics could even suggest he favored a theocracy. Even though I do not share the general presumption that theocracy is a “bad idea,” 36 Bonhoeffer remained far too Lutheran to entertain a theocratic alternative. For example, in his essay “The Church and the New Order in Europe,” written in 1941 in response to William Paton’s The Church and the New Order, Bonhoeffer observes that there is a new recognition that the political order also is under the Lordship of Christ. The political order, therefore, cannot be considered a domain which lives on its own terms apart from God’s plan. “The commandments of God indicate the limits which dare not be transgressed, if Christ is Lord. And the Church is to remind the world of these limits.” 37 Accordingly the Church cannot and should not try to develop a detailed plan for post war reconstruction. Rather the church should remind the nations of the reality the commandments entail if the new order is to be a “true order.”

few things are more important than us holding ourselves as well as being held by the church to speak the truth. As odd as it may sound, given the accommodated character of the church in liberal societies, if the church does not itself preach the Gospel truthfully then politically we condemn ourselves and those to whom we are pledged to witness to what Bonhoeffer called “the void.” 46 A sobering observation, but one that at least directs those of us who count ourselves Christian to the task God has given us, that is, to be a people capable of speaking truthfully to ourselves, to our brother and sisters in Christ, and to the world.47