(268)S11E7/7 The False Prophet of Government: The Donation of Constantine
I just wanted to let you all know to stick around after the ending credits at the end of this episode because I'm going to do something a little bit different than I usually do. There's just a piece that I want to talk a little bit about that didn't really fit in with the flow of the episode proper, and so I'm going to just deal with a few things after, the ending music and stuff. So make sure you, you stick around for that. Welcome back to the Fourth Way Podcast. The Coronation of a King.
Derek Kreider:Psalm 2. Hear the word of the Lord. Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against the lord and against his anointed saying, let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us. He who sits in the heavens laughs.
Derek Kreider:The lord holds them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath and terrify them in his fury, saying, as for me, I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill. I will tell of the decree, the Lord said to me. You are my son. Today I have begotten you.
Derek Kreider:Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. Now therefore, oh, kings, be wise. Be warned, oh, rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling.
Derek Kreider:Kiss the son, lest he be angry, and you perish in his way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him. The word of the Lord. Kiss the sun. Those are weighty words to heed as the consequence of not kissing the sun, as presented in these verses, is to perish.
Derek Kreider:Yet these verses also remind me of an infamous kiss, which Bob Dylan talks a little bit about towards the end of his song, with God on our side. Dylan says, quote, through many a dark hour, I've been thinking about this, that Jesus Christ was betrayed by a kiss. But I can't think for you. You'll have to decide whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side. End quote.
Derek Kreider:Judas Iscariot kissed the son on his coron coronation day, in fact, the day that the son was to ascend to his father to be seated at the father's right hand, The day the religious leaders were going to see him lifted up in glory. Judas kissed the son, yet he was damned, the son of perdition. Kiss the son and be blessed. Kiss the son and be damned. Understanding this distinction of kisses is going to be vital for us as we evaluate our own spiritual journeys, and it's the focus of what we're going to be dealing with in our false prophet episode here today.
Derek Kreider:While the church has always proclaimed that it is kissing the sun, how has the church in history kissed the sun with its lips and been damned for doing it? If you're only going to know one event from early church history, then, personally, I think that it ought to be the rise of Emperor Constantine to power. The rise of Constantine is interpreted by Christians in a variety of ways, both good and bad. But everyone acknowledges that the rise of Constantine marked an important shift. It's important because with Constantine, persecution against Christians not only ceased for the most part, but Christianity actually began to receive acknowledgment and benefits from the state within a generation or 2 of Constantine's rise.
Derek Kreider:I mean, that all sounds really good for Christianity, though. Right? If you don't have to endure persecution, it might be a little easier to convince pagans to convert. If you have a nicer space to worship than someone's small house, that's probably pretty appealing. If you get kickbacks from the state and then have more money to spend on the poor, that's really pragmatic.
Derek Kreider:In theory, all of those things can be really good, it seems. But one of the problems is that the ramifications don't stop there with those hypothetically good things. Instead of being satisfied with peace and comfort, times of ease and power often lead to a desire for more control and influence. If you're able to wrest power from the pagans, then perhaps you can force people into the church and force them to have their children baptized there. Now for especially a lot of Protestants that might not seem like all that big of a deal.
Derek Kreider:Like, you know, to have your kids forcefully baptized, like, of course, that that infringes on your rights and stuff, but whoop dee doo. Right? They they spritz a little water on your kids. Who cares? Well, I mean, that's it's actually a really big deal.
Derek Kreider:And just as a, an example from here in Romania, just a few years ago, I was on an airplane and I was sitting next to this Romanian guy and, you know, we started talking and I tell him what I do. And he's like, oh, I'm Orthodox. I'm like, cool. That's awesome. We kept on talking and talking and, and this guy ends up saying, I'm an atheist.
Derek Kreider:Like, what? You just said you're Orthodox. Explain this to me. He's like, well, of course, I'm Orthodox. Like, my my parents had me baptized in the Orthodox church.
Derek Kreider:I said, but you're an atheist. He's like, well, yeah, I don't believe that, but you're Orthodox. Yeah. It's like, okay. So let me wrap my mind around this.
Derek Kreider:You can't help that you were spritzed with water, but apparently that's like a really big deal to you. Like that, that creates some identity for you. But like now that you know the truth, what you think is the truth, if you would have kids, you're not going to baptize them. Right? Because you don't believe that anymore.
Derek Kreider:He's like, well, of course I would. I'm Orthodox. So like this, this idea that you can force people to be baptized is, is a really big deal. Because in the United States, we, we can't grasp that, like religion for us is this individual choice and this, intellectual ascent. But for a lot of people around the world, it's more of a social identity.
Derek Kreider:Like, if if you're baptized even against your will, like, as a as a baby, you have there's no volition involved on your part. Nevertheless, that makes your identity kind of set in stone. And so this was a big deal to forcefully baptize people and, kind of force them into the church that way. But, you know, beyond all that, beyond forced baptisms and conversions, if you're able to control legislation through the state, then you can also end up writing Christian morality into law and making society more moral and just. Right?
Derek Kreider:So, I mean, you can force conversions, force baptism, force morality. Like, I mean, Christians have got a lot of power at this point after Constantine. And if you have the power of the sword behind you, you can also do another thing. You can shut up those Christian sects that you view as heretical, and you can prevent them from competing with your preferred brand of Christianity. I mean, the Orthodox brand.
Derek Kreider:Right? Of course, this is all exactly what happened. With the rise of Constantine, there was a rapid decline in the quality of Christians, not just from the bottom up, but from the top down. Religious leaders started persecuting each other and quickly began to seek the sacralization of Christianity in society. And with the priesthood becoming quite lucrative, there began to be all kinds of really messed up leaders, bishops, and popes.
Derek Kreider:So while there are a lot of Christians who look back on the rise of Constantine as a good thing for the church because it marked the beginning of Christendom as a force to be reckoned with. It marked the beginning of great prestige and influence for the church in the world. But on the other hand, others like myself, we see this rise of Constantine as a time which led to a whole lot of corruption and change in values and teachings of the church, like the dismissal of having a skeptical eye towards wealth or the dismissal of nonviolence. Post Constantinian Christianity became less about living the ideal of Christ and more about living in a reality which called for compromise and pragmatism to accomplish one's own definition of the perceived good. Influence and power were good because they accomplished Christ's goals for conversion and discipleship.
Derek Kreider:It forced people into the church and it made them conform. How could foregoing such power ever be excused? We had to grasp at that power, didn't we? We had to embrace it. The dismissal of secular politics then became the unpardonable sin for Christians and living the ideal of Christ merely an ineffective idea, hardly anyone countanced anymore other than maybe the ascetics, the monks who kind of lived out in the desert away from reality.
Derek Kreider:If you actually read the teachings of Jesus, they deal with a whole lot of renunciation. Give up your home, your mother, your father, deny yourself, renounce all things. Conversely, James shows us that the pursuit of desires, which is what a failure to renunciate leads to, results in terrible things. And James says, quote, where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members you lust and do not have?
Derek Kreider:You murder and covet and cannot obtain? End quote. Now, if we apply this to post Constantinian Christians, to the the shift that happened here, it's really easy to see what happened to the church or what played out. After persecution, there was calm. After wants, there was plenty.
Derek Kreider:After powerlessness, there was power. After voicelessness, there was influence. Now these things aren't necessarily bad, but they do have a tendency to lead to the desire for either more of those things or the desire to maintain those things at all costs. It's these desires to protect and to attain which lead to injustices, to wars, and to violence. The Post Constantinian Church became an aggressive and repressive church rather than a loving church.
Derek Kreider:Of course, these are broad strokes here, and you can find beautiful streams of church history along with magnificent heroes of the faith throughout Christendom. A great book that I'd recommend that digs into this kind of thing, is kind of a starter is called Bullies and Saints. I highly recommend it, as just an overview for this topic. But suffice it to say for now that the Post Constantinian shift is a real thing, and it's important, however it is you want to interpret its overall impact on the world or on Christian teaching. It's a a moment of church history that you should be aware of.
Derek Kreider:Following the rise of Christendom, or as I would define it, the church married to the state, this this marriage relationship being intertwined. The rest of church history is filled with those who would seek to control the levers of government, because government and religion on Christendom are essentially 1 in the same thing. I mean, they function in tandem. Now we could focus on any number of so called Christian actions. Events like the Crusades are probably one of the first that come to most people's minds, related to this topic.
Derek Kreider:Now, a war called to gain lands and plunder to defend God's honor, or any other number of noble and ignoble reasons that you want to ascribe to something like the Crusades. But it seems that there's always someone who's going to try to justify even the most unchristian of acts like a lot of the Crusades ended up being, and it's kind of cherry picking to go after the Crusades. So rather than look at the false prophet of religion by exploring something like the crusades, I'm going to come kind of through the back door in this episode by looking at some less well known acts in Church history and, acts that I think might be pretty unanimously acknowledged as unchristian acts because these acts are founded on clear falsehoods. So by coming through the back door and finding a point of agreement with Christendom sorts of Christians, I think that might be helpful in illuminating the other power mongering acts of the Aristianized post Constantinian church. Hopefully, it it, sort of like, you know, Nathan when he goes to David, and he he gives him that analogy of the the sheep.
Derek Kreider:That's that narrative. And David's like, oh, that that guy who killed that poor man's sheep is horrible. And then Nathan's like, you are that man. I think it's sort of like that here, where you might think, okay. The Crusades, I can excuse those.
Derek Kreider:I can say that those are actually really good things because we we defended justice and all that stuff. Okay. Great. But if I can show you this other aspect of Christendom and how things really work behind the scenes, and you see what power mongers really were, then when you look at the crusades and you see the people behind them and the things going on, you might be able to be a little bit more objective about something like, the crusades and the other aspects of Church history that are pretty gross. So let's dive into the episode proper.
Derek Kreider:The first document that I want to discuss is called The Donation of Constantine, and there really isn't that much to the story of the document. Nevertheless, it is a document which has had some significant influence in medieval church history. It's a document which purports to be from the 300 around the time of Constantine or due during the time of Constantine, but due to some anachronistic language, experts actually date the donation of Constantine as having been written around 7:50. Now while we don't know exactly why the document was forged or for whom it was forged or by whom it was forged, we are able to see the impact of some of its claims and and some of the probable intentions. Now, the document seemed to serve a number of purposes, 2 of which are in view for this episode.
Derek Kreider:First, the donation of Constantine claimed that emperor Constantine donated lands, basically, Western Europe to the church via Pope Sylvester. So the document, if believed to be genuine, gave the church significant political authority over Europe as the head of government essentially ceded lands to the church. Did the church own these lands and and and had political influence then? 2nd, because the document claimed to be so early, it ended up giving primacy to the Western Church and the seat of Rome over the Eastern Church in Constantinople. In summary, this forged document gave the church both external political power in the realm of secular politics and internal power in providing a claim to supremacy over other political, religious regions of the church.
Derek Kreider:Now do you remember when Jesus talked about power in the Gospels? He said, quote, you know that the rulers of the Gentiles lorded over them and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, whoever wants to be first must be your slave. Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as ransom for many.
Derek Kreider:Yeah. Well, this whole Christendom thing is not that. It's the exact opposite of of those words Jesus said. It's a vying for power in order to lord it over others, and that's exactly what the Donation of Constantine sought to do. It sought to gain power over others through manipulation and, I mean, straight up falsehood.
Derek Kreider:Interestingly, the birth date of the Donation of Constantine is thought to be just a few decades before the birth or rebirth, I suppose, of the Holy Roman Empire. In 800 CE, Charlemagne was crowned as Holy Roman Emperor, which added power not only to Charlemagne, but also to the Western Roman Church. Of course, this led to all kinds of civil wars and buyings for power, and the western church sacked their own brothers and sisters in Constantinople only 400 years later during one of their crusades, a crusade for God, though. And all of this was held up, if not, at least in part, by the donation of Constantine, definitely by the same spirit of supremacy that forged it. Another famous document of myth that was circulated in medieval Europe, created about 3 to 4 centuries after the donation, was a document called The Marvels of Rome.
Derek Kreider:I actually haven't read the whole document, because it's long, it's boring, and the script is, is really weird. I'll link it in the show notes so you can see for yourself, but they essentially write their S's as F's. So you have to kind of like when you see an f, sometimes translate it into an s, but only sometimes because sometimes the s's are s's. So it's really hard to try to read, but the gist that I've gotten from reading through the documents and from looking through portions of it is basically that it's an origin story for Rome. Yeah.
Derek Kreider:So there's the Romulus and Remus origin story, but that's a secular story. It's not gonna really do for Christendom. The Marvels of Rome takes that secular myth and it tries to actually end up tying Christianity into it. You get something to the extent of, like, Noah and his family. They just after they disembark from the ark, they decide to build their home on one of the 7 hills at Rome.
Derek Kreider:Then, like, Romulus or one of the Roman heroes or something like that ends up building a wall around his hill as well as around Noah's hill, which ends up incorporating Noah, you know, the patriarchal family into the founding of Rome. I guess, I don't know if Romulus and Remus were on the ark too, or like, if it wasn't a global flood, I have no idea what all the theology was behind that. But like, this is a legitimate document, not a legitimate document, but a document that, legitimately existed. But it was so weird and like to us, it's clearly fabricated, but, you know, people bought into this kind of stuff back then. So this mythological document is created to influence popular thinking as to the supremacy of Rome and to provide the Christian faith and the Catholic church with political power.
Derek Kreider:Because if if Noah is a part of the original founding of Rome, I mean, that's pretty cool. Right? Like, then Rome is way better than Constantinople for sure. So Christianity ends up being fused with the state. Religion and the state go together.
Derek Kreider:That's Christendom. It might seem really stupid to us today that people would buy into myths of founding patriarchs and the unique greatness of a nation's origin story, whether these medieval Christians must have been so naive and ignorant to not see through the propaganda of religion so clearly inserted into a mythical origin story. We're so much smarter now. We're past that kind of thing. But medieval Christians did fall for it, and such propaganda was created exactly because it was credible with so many people.
Derek Kreider:Fortunately, lies which linger long enough almost always get exposed, and the donation of Constantine's forgery was eventually brought into the light. Now that didn't happen until, like, 700 years after the forgery began its circulation, but it was eventually exposed. This guy named Lorenzo Valla, a Latin genius, took a good look at the donation and recognized it as a clear forgery. This Valla guy was pretty ballsy too because he was also exposing the idea of indulgences at a good 50 years before Luther. And he was also looking at the notion of penance, something he thought was a bad Latin translation of Jerome's sloppy one.
Derek Kreider:And Valle was looking at this concept of penance more as what we'd consider repentance, you know, the Protestant version. So for all of these exposings of the church of the day, Valla eventually became known as Luther's precursor. I'm not sure exactly how much interaction, if any, Luther had with Valla's work, but you can certainly see that some of Luther's major critiques and skepticism about the church ran in the same vein as Vala's. In some way then, this guy who was willing to call out overreaches of power and to critique some of the pillars that Christendom was built on may have had a hand in what would become the reformation. Ah, the reformation.
Derek Kreider:We Protestants love that word. A time in church history where true Christians recognize the false prophet of a power hungry and institutionalized church when we renounced the deviation from Jesus' way and brought back true Christianity to the world? Maybe a little bit. I mean, there were some really corrupt aspects of the Roman Catholic Church. Don't get me wrong.
Derek Kreider:You know, the time of the reformation was was really good, and some of the reforms were really big and really important. But you don't have to dig too deeply into the Protestant Reformation to see that it contained the same spirit of power as the earlier iteration of Christendom it replaced. Heretic burnings, drowning and murdering those who were considered rebaptizers, witch hunts, confiscating Catholic properties, you name it. The Protestant Reformation was of the same spirit as the Christendom which came before it, in part because it sought survival and prestige rather than martyrdom, power rather than witness. It joined with the powers of the state for protection and favor with the princes and rulers.
Derek Kreider:And therefore, the church had to pay homage to them and to capitulate to them. The church had to kiss their sons over the son, lest their sons became angry. Protestants who were friends and co laborers with Anabaptists just years before became caught up in the fervor of executing and persecuting anyone who didn't believe exactly as they did. In fact, the famous Westminster Confession of 16/47, a very important Protestant documents, especially in in the circles that I run-in, declared the following after having a century to think about how the reformation was developing. The Westminster Confession of 16/47 wrote this about the civil magistrate.
Derek Kreider:Quote, the civil magistrate may not assume to himself the administration of the word and the sacraments or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Yet he hath authority, and it is his duty to take order that unity and peace be preserved in the church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed, all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed, and all the ordinances of God duly settled, administered, and observed. For the better affecting whereof, he hath power to call synods, to be present at them, and to provide that whatsoever is transacted in them be according to the mind of God. So the Westminster Divines essentially gave the government the ability to keep the church pure. And how does the state do that?
Derek Kreider:Pray tell? Through the sword. Post Reformation Protestantism ran on this type of thinking. Documents like the Westminster Confession, while not forged documents, became the new donation of Constantine in the marvels of Rome. Documents created by divines, documents viewed as being of a nearly holy origin and part of a continuing holy endeavor.
Derek Kreider:Documents which propped up a Christendom whose heart was power and whose fuel was violent coercion, rather than a document like the gospel of Jesus declaring good news and love. That was until there was yet another new birth. A group of persecuted and bedraggled, meek and lowly Christians, set out across the ocean to seek a new land where they could live in harmony with natives and other fellow travelers, not forcing their views on anyone, not burning people as witches, not trying to grasp at the levers of government, but seeking a new land of freedom for all. These Christians built such a society carrying the good news from sea to shining sea, making converts only of those who are willing as they traverse the rugged landscape of the new promised land. Of course, this is only a slight exaggeration of, the version of what a lot of American Christians believe, and we don't have the space or interest to have a whole history lesson here to kind of go through all that.
Derek Kreider:Just suffice it to say that American Christendom maintained the same spirit as the old forms of Christendom, merely disguised the spirit anew. And there are a lot of ways that the spirit was disguised in in the new world. It was disguised within the founding documents of the nation, proclaiming freedom for all while binding so many in chains. But it was also disguised in one of the very same documents used as an origin story for the previous iteration of Christendom, the Westminster Confession. Yes.
Derek Kreider:Indeed, when the spirit of manifest destiny spoke to the new nation, the United States, the spirit of God just so happened to speak anew to his people. Coincidentally, the spirit spoke in 17/88 as the new American Constitution was in the middle of its ratification process. And what did the spirit tell his people? It told them to revise the old confession written by the divines in a manner, which just so happens to fit with a new form of government that was in their interest to prop up. And now where there once stood a call for the political leaders to keep the church pure through the sword, it was charged in an amendment to declare that a sword should never be used by the magistrate to compel on grounds of religion or against infidelity.
Derek Kreider:Now, at first blush, this revision indeed seems like great progress. Like the Spirit of God had finally overturned the Spirit of Power that had been ever present in Christendom. But if you've listened to this season, or at least the False Prophet episodes, y'all know that this wasn't the case with the great American experiment. Power was still the spirit at the helm of this great venture and Christendom, the spirit's willing vessel. The centuries that followed the American Revolution were filled with a plethora of evils on a scale unimaginable.
Derek Kreider:Most of which were done by self proclaimed Christians in God's name for so called good. But the spirit of power is hard for many of us in the west to see now because rather than manifesting itself in the concentrated form of 1 monarch or one dictator, the spirit of power in the west tends to mask itself by its diffusion of power among the masses. The government of the United States and other governments like it allow the sword to be masked by the masses. If a king enacts a genocide, blame the king, but if a whole people consent to genocide via their representatives, who's to blame? Well, I mean, I voted for the other party, so I'm not responsible.
Derek Kreider:Right? When everyone is to blame, nobody's to blame just as we briefly discussed in our Haiti episode when dealing with the notion of, Gustave Le Bon and his work, the crowd. You know, this is the diffusion of responsibility, and it is a powerful disguise for the spirit of power. If the King issues an edict against all Jews or atheists, that's persecution of religion. If a government of the people, by the people, and for the people allow for the enslavement of some people or for Indian removal or for the forced schooling of native American children in the white man's ways.
Derek Kreider:This isn't persecution. Right? It's the will of the people. It's majority decision. I mean, we all agreed to it, but when self proclaimed Christians have largely run the government and when self proclaimed Christians seek to control the government to force their will to on others, What is the will of the people but the purported will of the Christian God?
Derek Kreider:Legislation bears the sword against particular groups of people without ever naming those groups. And regardless of what our origin story or documents say, Christians of Christendom still seek to bear the sword, and we still do. Millions of the enslaved cry out for justice. Millions of Haitians cry out for justice. Millions of Native Americans cry out for justice.
Derek Kreider:Millions of war dead across the globe cry out for justice. And the list goes on. The will of the people, the will of Christians at the helm of government are responsible for these injustices. If we are a Christian nation, as many on the right would have us to believe, then all these injustices have inarguably been done in God's name. And if we're not a Christian nation, if the Empire is Babylon, the city of man, why are so many Christians seeking the helm of power as the Gentiles always do?
Derek Kreider:This is Christendom and great evils and injustices, murders and lies. These are just par for the course. Because Christendom seeks temporal salvation and comfort and control through steering the helm of power rather than donning the helm of salvation, which is eternal life, both a full life now and a resurrected life to come, this is what we have. We Americans, of course, don't like to hear all this because we are moderns and because many of us have grown up indoctrinated with our founding myths, indoctrinated both by the state and by the church. It's really hard for us to see how the American experiment is built on just as much myth as the ancient empires were.
Derek Kreider:It just doesn't appear like myth to us because we think that what we believe is believable and not like a belief in those silly gods of old. I mean, how is something objective, like a founding constitution? Like I could actually hold it in my hands if I was allowed to. I can go see it. And how is that anything close to a mythical story about gods or Romulus and Remus or anything like that?
Derek Kreider:Now, one is just a set of interesting and weird stories, ancient stories, which shouldn't confer authority onto a government. But the other is a gathering together of wills to consolidate their assent to certain truths and principles, and it's put in a tangible physical document. The 2 just seem categorically different. Right? I think Hannah Arndt, in her book On Revolution, uncovers some helpful insights in regard to the mythical nature of our American origin story.
Derek Kreider:The founding myths aren't mythical in the sense that we actually did create founding documents, and we did base those on certain principles. Right. That's true. But the meaning and values that we infer into the founding is mythical. And while Arndt doesn't seem to, she does actually wax poetic about the founding of the United States at times, I do think that she also sees certain aspects in a realistic light, like the idea and importance of founding mythology.
Derek Kreider:So what she says here is really insightful, and I I wanna quote her at length. So here's what she says, quote, the word religion must be understood in its original Roman sense, and the piety of the founders would then consist in binding themselves back to a beginning as Roman pietas consisted in being bound back to the beginning of Roman history, the foundation of the eternal city. Arndt then goes on to talk about how Americans have worshiped the Constitution, and then she continues. And since it was in this respect that the American Revolution was most conspicuously different from all other revolutions, which were to follow, one was tempted to conclude that it was the authority that, that the act of foundation carried in itself rather than the belief in an eternal legislator or the promise of reward and the threats of punishment in a future state, or even the doubtful self evidence of the truths enumerated in the preamble to the declaration of independence that assured the stability for the New Republic, end quote. And this is really very important, for you to understand, and I I recommend going back and checking out the whole section in Arendt's book.
Derek Kreider:I think it's about 2 thirds of the way through. It's just a a really lengthy section of of high quality insights here. But what I think Arendt highlights is that while we look at the founding as being grounded in things like self evident truths or in an all seeing creator that endows those truths or rights or whatever, What the founding really rested on and continues to rest on in distinction to other prior revolutions is a constitution that functions as an origin story. It was the origin story that bound the nation together and still binds it together. Just compare the American revolution to the French one, which we talked a little bit about.
Derek Kreider:Now, the French revolution had a lot of force behind it, but as Arndt points out, strength is just what each individual has on their own. Power is something altogether different than strength. Power is the joining together of individual strengths to become a unit that ends up being power. So with the French revolution, you had a lot of individuals who are all clamoring for themselves as individuals or factions. It was a cacophony of disorganized and uncohesive voices.
Derek Kreider:There wasn't an origin story, which bound them together. Yeah. They, they created some documents and stuff, but there were, there were just so many factions and, it ended up being much more individualistic than, a cohesive group origin story. And that's, primarily the point of origin stories, isn't it? To be cohesive, to make, to be like social glue and Arendt, aren't unpacks this elsewhere when she says, quote, power comes into being only if and when men join themselves together for the purpose of action, and it will disappear when, for whatever reason, they disperse and desert one another.
Derek Kreider:Hence, binding and promising, combining and covenanting are the means by which power is kept in existence. Where and when men succeed in keeping intact the power which sprang up between them during the course of any particular act or deed, they are already in the process of foundation of constituting a stable world worldly structure to house, as it were, their combined power of action. So the city of Rome has lasted for millennia, and its Empire survived for nearly half a millennium. How was it that those who were alive 100 of years after the city was founded were able to be a cohesive enough group to conquer lands and create a vast empire? Because they held to an origin story, not only in worshiping the same gods, but in having the same founding story of their city and their empire.
Derek Kreider:This function is really no different than the American Constitution. Sure. There's verbal content to the document of the constitution. And unlike the gods, the founders actually existed. But brute facts and mere words are not what really binds in the constitution.
Derek Kreider:A commitment that a bunch of old dead white dudes made a few 100 years ago has no bearing on me because I didn't agree to it. It's not my promise. Lysander Spooner, in his famous work, no treason, makes this exact point. And Thomas Jefferson, likewise, understood the unintelligibility of asking the future generation to consent to a promise that they never made, which is why Jefferson said, quote, every constitution then and every law naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right, end of quote.
Derek Kreider:Why should it lapse every 19 years? Because that gives the next generation the option to renew the constitution or to change it since they never agreed to the old one in the first place. They were just born into a country, that lives under these promises that some people made a long time ago? Why should they be held accountable for that? So if I don't want to uphold the promises that a bunch of antiquated dead guys made to each other, why ought I to be bound?
Derek Kreider:I'm really not, other than by the force of the many who buy into the origin story. And, I mean, you can even see this, like, look at the military. They, what do they have to do? They have to take an oath to the constitution, to the origin story, being bound to promises that they never made. They're made to re up those those promises and to protect that constitution, to buy into it.
Derek Kreider:And I think they even have to do this, like, every time they promote and stuff. But, like those promises, those oaths that Jesus forbade, like, those are really important. And we just don't understand that in our culture today, even though it's still ever present. So belief in the, in the founding belief in and worship of the constitution binds many together even today in the religion of state. And they enforce the constitution of these promises religiously, and that's really what it is.
Derek Kreider:Arndt points out, like, it is religion when you're bound to an origin story, because the belief is about far more than just words on paper. Right? It's it is about origins. That buying into origins is vital to keep the system going because if enough people refuse to buy into the myth that they're bound to another's promises, then the power dissipates. Right?
Derek Kreider:The difference between strength and power, right, that combined power dissipates when the promises are broken and the system crumbles. And I think that's part of what we're seeing today in the United States, at least, the system crumbling because people are recognizing that they shouldn't be bound to these, to this, to an origin story. It's mythology. So don't at all scoff at myth and origin stories. Such binding societal glue hasn't disappeared in the modern age.
Derek Kreider:Origin stories, as Arndt tells us, constitute religion. And even in a secular age like this one, we are still very religious. As we look back through history, it's a lot easier to see the myths that those in the past were blind to. Myths like the Donation of Constantine or the Marvels of Rome, or myths like the Holy Benevolence and Insight of the Westminster Divines, or the founding fathers, to elevate any myth to a revered origin story is to lose the ability to discern history and to judge according to merits. It's to lose objectivity for the sake of preserving power because that's what origin stories give you.
Derek Kreider:They give you power consolidated by a story that a group holds in common of a pristine past, an over overcoming of, opposition, rising above circumstances, or any other number of things that, an origin story can give you. For true Christians, however, we must remember our true origin story. In the beginning was the Word, the Son of God. We started this episode by looking at Psalm 2 and the Coronation of the King, the Coronation of God's Son. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish.
Derek Kreider:But we also took a look at Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed the son and king with the very kiss that was demanded of him as homage. Christendom has claimed to kiss the son for as long as it's been around. Constantine claimed to kiss the sun while doing great evils. Augustine and others claimed to kiss the sun while persecuting fellow Christians and forcing conversions. Those who forged and used the donation of Constantine to further the power of the church in the political sphere to an outright lie, claimed to kiss the sun while fomenting civil wars and power grabs.
Derek Kreider:Those who wrote the Westminster Confession claimed to kiss the sun while fostering tortures and executions of dissenters by the state. Those who rewrote the Westminster and the founding documents of the US claimed to kiss the sun while enslaving others and committing genocide on behalf of God's provision of a new Israel, an Israel inhabited by a bunch of disposable savages. And modern nationalists claim to kiss the sun while throwing morality to the side for the love of power and seeming effectiveness. The question I have for Christendom then isn't, have you kissed the sun? The question is rather in what manner have you kissed him?
Derek Kreider:Have you kissed the son with homage as a disciple, or have you kissed the son as Judas, a betrayer? But I suppose that this question is largely irrelevant because questions don't work too well on those enthralled with Christendom, on those wrapped up with the idea of the consolidation of power at any cost. It's an irrelevant question because, as Bob Dylan said, you never ask questions when God's on your side. That's all for now. So peace, And because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.
Derek Kreider:This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to nonviolence and Kingdom Living. Thank you for sticking around for the post show kind of addendum that I'm adding here. I wanted to just say a few important things that I thought would go better here as opposed to making a bunch of caveats in the middle of an episode and kind of ruining the flow and the sequence. I want to say that I, some of, some of the things that I talk about.
Derek Kreider:So I talk a lot about the United States. And in this episode, I talked about the Westminster Confession, and those are 2 things that I am thankful for. I am thankful for the opportunities that I had growing up in the United States, and I'm thankful for, the freedoms that I do have in the United States. And there are a lot of things that I am thankful for. And, when I critique the United States, it is not because I think there is no good, but it's because, I believe in internal critique.
Derek Kreider:I believe in pointing out our flaws, and problems and things that we need to correct. And especially because people in my group just don't do that. And so it's a huge blind spot. Nevertheless, I don't want critique to come across as my inability to recognize anything that I've received, or or that is good that comes from it. So I wanted to make that clear.
Derek Kreider:But, also, along with the Westminster Confession, like, I agree with the, vast majority of the Westminster Confession. Like, be people in my, my denomination, we kind of that's kind of like our our guide to figure out, okay, are you Presbyterian? Right? And and so we go by that. And everybody takes, you know, 1 or almost everybody takes, like, 1 or 2 exceptions.
Derek Kreider:I think, like, one of them is, Sabbath. I don't think you're supposed to have fun. I mean, like, play on the Sabbath or something. So a lot of people take, take exception to that. I think another one is like the Westminster says that you shouldn't have any images of Jesus.
Derek Kreider:So like no coloring pages for your kids, no things like that. But it even there's a part in there where it says, and you shouldn't even picture Christ, Jesus in your head. So, like you're reading the gospels and it says, Jesus said, like, can't, can't think of Jesus. Right? A lot of people take exceptions to kind of those kinds of things.
Derek Kreider:So, the vast majority of the Westminster Confession, I would agree with, and I think, you know, it's great. What I am critiquing here, and same thing with the constitution, you know, just talking about the US and, and things like there's some really respectable things about what was done in that constitution. But my critique in this episode is about what's behind those documents. And what's behind those documents is, more powerful than what's contained in those documents, because it's this origin story. It's this thing that binds people together that you can't really put your finger on.
Derek Kreider:It's this glue that's in the story, not in the written words of the document. That is really where the power is. And that's what I was trying to point out here. So hopefully, people have stuck around to listen to this addendum so that they can maybe understand what I was trying to get at and not think that, I can't recognize any good whatsoever in either the US or the Westminster or or something like that. You know, the Donation of Constantine, the Marvels of Rome, like those things are are forgeries and like solely myth.
Derek Kreider:So those, in my mind, are pure myth and don't have any value, or something like the Westminster Confession or the, US Constitution do have a value to them for good, but there's this, this mythology that's hidden behind it that people don't understand and don't see. And that's what we were trying to get at. And just as, one other aside, I mean, part of what I've tried to do this season is, is go into a bit of various historical events, usually in the true conspiracy section. But there really is just so much history that you need to be aware of and, and filter through that helps you to understand things a little bit better. You know, for for me, when I first came across this change in the Westminster that just coincidentally happened as the constitution was being drafted up, You know, the spirit of god just happened to speak and change his mind on on government, the a government that that fit with, whatever the government was at the time and place.
Derek Kreider:Right? That just kind of gave me a more skeptical eye as I looked through history. And, you know, as you look through history, you can see that we, we build up the Puritans and pilgrims as as, these people that it, you know, maybe they're not the opposite, but it it's not nearly what we make it out to be. So for example, a lot of people are like, well, the, the, the pilgrims were just, or the Puritans were persecuted and they, they fled persecution. It's like, well, a lot of them came from Holland where there wasn't persecution.
Derek Kreider:Like they had been living there for like 10 years. And, and then they came over here for economic reasons. So, yeah, sure. They initially fled because of persecution, but it wasn't some dream to come and make this, you know, this this perfect land where everybody could be religiously free. In fact, a great, great example to point this out is now you go to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I think it was, and, you've got this guy, Roger Williams, who's there.
Derek Kreider:And he's saying, hey guys, you know what? We're we're kind of taking advantage of, of the Native Americans here. We're not really buying their land fairly. Don't you think we should do that? So he does things like that.
Derek Kreider:And then he, he, criticizes the king for some, King James for, some arrogant claims that he's making and, and stuff like that. And, and they're like, alright, Williams, you're out of here. And so they kick him out of the colony. So he goes to Rhode Island and in Rhode Island, he's, he's like, no, we're, we're going to separate this church and state, like all what they're doing in Massachusetts, the Puritans, like, it's, it's pretty terrible or maybe not horrendous, but like, it's, it's not good at all. And so in, in like the middle of his career there in Rhode Island, Rhode Island becomes in like 6 16 fifties, like 1652 or something.
Derek Kreider:They become the first state in the United States, the first colony to outlaw slavery. And now when when, the parts of Rhode Island ended up coming together later, they ended up overruling that, but at least under Williams, Williams' direction, as long as he had significant influence, they they outlawed slavery. And he fought for fair dealings with the Native Americans, similarly to somebody else who wasn't a Puritan, didn't have Puritan connections at all. You know, William Penn and the Quakers in Pennsylvania had really good relationships overall with the Native Americans because they they treated them peacefully and, and like human beings overall overall. And while the constitution was writing slavery into it, the Quakers were freeing their slaves and paying them back pay for for everything.
Derek Kreider:So when you start to understand these these themes, right, Christendom is generally not very good, and its spirit persists. So it it it, you can trace it from Constantine, you know, all the way up through, through the United States. And it comes through the Puritans in parts who are are trying to control, religion and the states together and use the power of the sword. Whereas you've got overall people like Williams, who I think was okay with the sword in general. But you've got people like like Williams who are more separatists from the state, like separating religion and state, and the Quakers who are not in this, in the stream of Christendom, or at least are starting to dissociate themselves from Christendom, like Williams.
Derek Kreider:And you see that they're the ones who end up making, humanitarian reforms, like not enslaving people and, like, paying people for their property instead of committing genocide. And, I I just think there there are lots of common themes that you can find there. But what we do is we we paint the Puritans as, you know, these these terribly persecuted people, when when they're really not all that persecuted. And then in 20 years later, you know, at 16/20, Mayflower leaves 20 years later or so, you've got what, Cromwell, who comes to power and does some pretty terrible, horrendous things, when, when he gets the sword. So it's like, oh, persecution is so bad, so terrible, but what, what does that group do as soon as they get power?
Derek Kreider:They persecute. Right? They persecute in big ways, executions, burnings, all that stuff, or, you know, in the United States, it was at least a little bit more tempered and maybe they burned some witches, some or, killed witches at some point. But, you know, they would banish people and, and, they would still use the power of the sword to a certain extent. And so I think it's important to see those themes and to understand, how origins play a part in that and how the spirit of power runs throughout Christendom wherever, it it's it manifests itself.
Derek Kreider:Alright. Hopefully, that addendum was worth your extra time and made some sense, but that's it. Hope you enjoyed the episode.
