Romanitas

21 Nov 21 - Rome

Fr dear Fr: Is there any truth in the theory now current among populists that when the two Roman empires were baptized, the Church catholique embraced what Jesus had rejected?

This is a leading question of the Winter from a young enthusiast called AW based around Hadrian's Wall most of the summertime, and this theory has found its way into some specialist books of late too, though it for long had its defenders among the lutheran and baptist clergy who held the opinion that Constantine ruined Christianity when he and his citizens converted en masse in their thousands - for a long time a popular thesis in the old heady days of such opinions in the poorly thought-out 1970s, before the emperor apparent promulgated two codes of law in the old roman tongue, the western and the eastern codexes. More recently the old comments of the churlish clergy have now attained something of a thesis becoming more and more populist among populist catholic commentators in this past 2 or 3 years, not all of them emanating by any means from baptist seminaries in Deep South Bible Belt America.

Personally, I first heard this theory in some form on the streets of Dublin some years ago, when two student-clerics called Bolesy and Breffni first ran into it while dialoguing in apologetics with some mormons on the streets of Dublin preaching their version of the gospel. When the two boys explained who they were and what they were, seminarians from one of the several seminaries around Dublin at that time, the 2 mormon boys invited themselves up to the seminary to hold a public debate about the theory above, and on the day of the debate some 2 weeks later, we were surprised to see that 2 boys had metamorphosed into 4 very pretty girls from the mormons who established themselves on the podium of the stage very quickly - surprise surprise but nice. Maybe too quickly, as neither paint nor powder is sometimes sufficient in such debates, if one might cite an old song about diamonds and Galway shawls. They concluded their various speeches by advancing the old mormon thesis, namely that the Christ did establish the Catholic religion, but that the human church of the apostles very quickly gave in to Greek philosophy and thus corrupted the simple original of the Hebrew faith of Jesus, this occurring around the 5th Century. So that is where we first heard such a thesis. The responses of the boys at the seminary depended on their own evaluation of the threat from the 4 mormon girls, their undoubted skills, their flowery oratory which was very charming, and also on the status of the Greek philosophy that the apostles and the early popes ran into especially under Clement of Rome, reported in the book Empire Baptized by Wes Howard-Brook and his wife at the seminary union.

Clement of Rome is the first of the early popes to advance the thesis that God gave certain divine gifts to the Greeks and these were expressed in their philosophy, one can read the quotes on page 129 of the Howard-Brook book above. The central thesis of the book, much like the thesis of the 4 mormon girls above at the seminary that day, expressed a preference for a USA style separationism between church and state and the predominance of NGO status for the churches, what is called the Courtney-Murray thesis at the time of the 1965 council in Rome, and this theory advances the similar idea from the baptists and the union theological seminaries that a radical division even opposition always exists between the gospel and the state, between Jesus and Rome, between Jesus even and the apostles, and that the message of Jesus of general inclusivity toward the marginalised is the reason for this division from the state, as pointed out in Howard-Brook's comments on Luke 9 in which Jesus rebukes the apostles for keeping the kids away, rebukes the apostles for keeping the tax collectors away, and rebukes the apostles for keeping the exorcists away too, so some tension there between the divine Jesus and the human church in the early weeks and months of the public ministry of the messiah, Adonai, all readable at page 171 of the book. But, but, but; the thesis of the American USA protestant seminary system is flawed, how so? There is a little petite fact that Howard Brook and his peers even within the old catholic fold, all of the Courtney-Murrays in the Separationist USA Model of church passes over without significant comment:

- Jesus was friendly with the centurion whose servant he healed;

- Nowhere in all of Israel had Jesus found faith like this;

- When Jesus appeared before Pontius Pilate, they spoke as equals;

- Jesus did not decry Pilate or challenge his legitimate authority as a Roman, he was friendly;

- When Pilate asks Jesus if he is a king, Jesus admits that he is, he is truthful with Pilate;

- Jesus pays Pilate and the romans the supreme courtesy of public honesty and truth;

- Since Jesus reminds Pilate that he is on the side of truth, that he was born for the truth;

- When Pilate reminds Jesus that his own people handed him over, Jesus responds by describing the kingdom over which he is a king, so Jesus acts like what the Romans used to call a Rex Socius, to put it in Indiana terms.

All  of these facts seriously infirm the baptist thesis and the mormon thesis too, revealing them to be more examples of an americanisation of the gospel that is not really deep down supported by the actual historical gospel of the Roman-friendly Jesus. The rest is history. The Christian gospel of the messiah Adonai was not corrupted by interaction with the great ancient civilisations of Athens and Latium, rather it practised a degree of osmosis and renewed and transformed them into the divine gifts of grace that they evinced in some of their aspects. This is not corruption, this is inter-culturation, as Dr Egan calls the phenomenon with his own stylised theological expression. Not all of us are Courtney-Murrays. That remains clear.