The Dream of God by Verna J. Dozier

Author:Verna J. Dozier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781596280298
Publisher: Church Publishing Inc.
Published: 2017-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

When the kindness of Constantine

gave Holy Church endowments,

in lands and leases, lordships and servants,

The Romans heard an angel cry

on high above them,

“This day dos ecclesiae has drunk venom

And all who have Peter’s power

are poisoned forever.”

To which Barbara Tuchman in A Distant Mirror adds her comment: “By Constantine’s gift, Christianity was both officially established and fatally compromised.”6 I think she puts it well. I hear in Tuchman’s prose and Langland’s poetry what I think is the effect of the third fall. The people of God, the church, is God’s third attempt to create a community chosen to witness to the world what life under the sovereignty of God is like.

All these images—the sovereignty of God, the reign of God, the kingdom of God—are theological symbols for a possibility to be realized, a possibility never realized. It is realized eschatology: the kingdom is here, the kingdom is still to come. It is a faith statement about the dream of God.

The church is first of all a people called to live out that statement, not an institution. I believe that in the choice for Constantine, the institutional church rejected the call to be God’s people.

There are three speeches in Dorothy Sayers’s Emperor Constantine that foreshadow the church’s accommodation to the culture as only the artist can—and they are particularly telling, since it was an artist who was interested in putting the best face on the whole affair. In the first of those speeches, Constantine’s sister says to his wife:

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