Modernity

Fr dear Fr: If Jesus asked Peter to drop his sword at the Arrest scene at the Garden of Gethsemane, and this is interpreted by modern commentators as a gesture toward Christian Quakeriste Pacifism, then why did Constantine the Great unfurl a Christian banner at the battles against pagan Roman armies after the Milvian Bridge campaign of 312 AD? Are we all sitting ducks and missing something quite fundamental here?

Yes, the scene at which Jesus asks Peter to put down his sword after striking out at one of the High Priest servants, is often misinterpreted as a grande and timely and deliberate gesture of Jesus toward the later problems to Christian theologians of Quietism and Pietism and Fideism and then Quakeriste Christian Pacifism of the white feather movement of the First World War. It is not quite what it seems to Modernity driven audiences in the contemporary world for which Quietism and Quakerism are one and the same and united in a common cause against Traditional Momentum and Antifa style movements for social reform inside Christianity. Because, whatever about modernity driven misinterpretations of the public historical revelation, at the time there simply was no Pacifist Gospel in the mind of either Jesus or Peter since they were all armed, and not just for self-defence either, an old preoccupation of the Q-Christians. Quietism and Pietism are an attendant problem for Christians in modern Hindustani cultures, as I had occasion to mention in a long talk about the problems of Quietism and Pietism in the Interpretation of Christian Human Rights Law to Christian theology students in Bangalore not long ago. Anyway, whatever about modern misinterpretations of the actual Gospel, by 312 there was no doubt in the mind of the new emperor Constantine the Great - Constantinus Maximus - that Christian armies would have to be a part of the future and not a thing ofsome lost Jewish past. In 299 there might have been one or two Christian legions scattered abroad in the far distant islands maybe amid a sea of pagan Roman legions of the time, but by 399 this ratio had been fully reversed, now most legions were Christian legions and there were only a few pagan ones left. So a huge transition had taken place certainly in the private revelations of Christ and Christianity to Constantine, and this change would not have taken place, if there was any doubt in the mind of the emperor and the new legions that there had been a Quakeriste Pacifist Gospel in the early years of the Christian New Testament period - another modernity driven misinterpretation. Simply out of the question. The victory over Maxentius that day in 312 proved the point as far as Constantine and the new legions were concerned - Christ and his kingdom, Christ and his empire, were here to stay, pagan legions or no pagan legions. Period. CRF.