Paul and Christendom

Perriman’s subtitle is “Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom.” The before and after are important. If Paul’s gospel in Romans is an announcement about God’s wrath against the oikoumene and the vindication of those who trust Jesus, then it is fulfilled in the overturning of Roman order. Perriman bites the bullet and suggests that Paul’s gospel is fulfilled in Christendom. In a passing comment on Daniel 7, he writes, “I wonder whether it is really too fanciful to suggest that the apocalyptically conceived hope, reconfigured by Jesus’s identification of himself and his followers with the figure like a son of man who comes on the clouds of heaven, found fulfillment in the victory of Christ over the gods, represented historically – and therefore, of course, ambiguously – by Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as the religion of the empire.”

More fully later:

“The legitimization of Christianity by Constantine and its appropriation for imperial service cannot simply be dismissed as an aberration or irrelevancy – and in certain important respects must be seen as the proper fulfillment of eschatological expectations articulated in the New Testament, not least in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Just as the Jewish monarchy became a localized symbol for the kingship and kingdom of God, so in its imperial dimensions Christendom became a symbol for the global sovereignty of the one Creator God. Just as the land of Israel, in which the family of Abraham would be blessed, made fruitful, and would multiply, represented God’s new creation in microcosm, so Christendom imagined that it might embody, on an imperial and potentially global scale, the eschatological reality of a new humanity in Christ, transcending the ingrained distinctions of the oikoumene between Jew and Greek, Scythian and barbarian, slave and free, male and female. The narratives of Scripture were quickly translated into the potent idioms of Greek rationalism. A prophetic yearning for justice and peace was institutionalized in the political and legal structure of the empire. Most importantly, the gods of the ancient world were ousted, the rulers and authorities in the heavens were disarmed, and – in the non-idealized sense that must, in the first place, be given to biblical prophecy – every knee came to bow and every tongue confessed that Jesus, the faithful one, the anti-Caesar, was Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Perriman’s non-idealist interpretation of Romans implies that we are not able to simply read off the future of our post-Christendom world from the text of the New Testament. Yet, Romans shows that, just as God judged and vindicated Himself against the oikoumene , He will not remain silent in the face of a “global culture that has defied the Creator.” Perriman observes, “It is too early to guess what that new paradigm might look like, but we are certainly beginning, consciously and unconsciously, to re-imagine the place of the church in the world in keeping with the promise to Abraham, in the light of the hope that all things will be made new.”