For a long time representatives of the Radical Reformation(s) and their heirs have cited the conversion of Constantine i to Christianity in the fourth century as a, if not the, mark of the Church's fall into apostasy. Characteristically, scholars and churchpersons who invented the tradition of Constantine's conversion as proof that Christians go cheap for power have disagreed about precise dates and mechanisms by which the Church fell into ruin. But many of them, from Pilgram Marpeck in the sixteenth century to John Howard Yoder in the twentieth, spoke of Constantine the man in unabashedly negative terms and criticised any ecclesiology in which the Church plays a legitimating role in governmental power as ‘Constantinian’. Recently, ‘Constantinianism’ has been deployed as an epithet by theologians and social critics like Stanley Hauerwas and Cornel West to characterise contemporary (particularly American) Christianity. West, for his part, has suggested that the ‘terrible’ Constantinian ‘merger of church and state has been behind so many of the church's worst violations of Christian love and justice – from the barbaric crusades against Jews and Muslims, to the horrors of the Inquisition and the ugly bigotry against women, people of color, and gays and lesbians’.Footnote ¹

Are these heirs of the Radical Reformers responsible in their characterisations of Constantine? Is ‘Constantinianism’ an appropriate way to portray contemporary Church–State alliances? Peter Leithart thinks not. In Defending Constantine Leithart combines a historical overview of Constantine i's career and legacy with a clear contemporary theological agenda. By Leithart's own admission, the historiography involved in the book is in service to the contemporary theological agenda, which is comprised primarily by a polemic against anti-Constantinianism, represented by John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas and ‘their increasing tribe’. Leithart claims that Yoder misrepresented or misunderstood the history of the fourth century in many respects, thus ‘distort[ing] his entire reading of church history, which is a hinge of his theological project’ (p. 11), a claim around which the rhetoric of the book revolves. If, Leithart suggests, the history of Christianity that Yoder and his colleagues represent can be shown to be mistaken, then the grounds for their theological perspectives – Leithart's main target is their pacifist ecclesiologies – will have been eroded sufficiently to warrant rejection. While the philosophy of history involved in this sort of argument certainly deserves interrogation, my main questions about Defending Constantine have to do with the extent to which the theological and polemical cart drives the historical horse, pulls it along and eventually unhitches itself to roll off on its own.

At a basic level, Leithart's historiography follows suit of a number of other historians to whom he is heavily indebted, for instance T. D. Barnes and H. A. Drake, each of whom have helped to make Constantine's life and politics accessible to contemporary audiences, and, in so doing, presented what Elizabeth Clark called a ‘ “kinder, gentler” Constantine’ in her review of Drake's Constantine and the bishops: the politics of intolerance (Baltimore 2000).Footnote ² Both Barnes and Drake have used contemporary metaphors or analogies in order to heighten the accessibility of their studies of Constantine; in doing so, however, they made careful disclaimers about the dangers attendant on (inevitable) anachronism; I am reminded of Drake's protestations to the effect of ‘this is a sketch; this is only a sketch’ in the preface to his book.

Leithart, by contrast, revels in anachronism at various points throughout his book, even while he promises a ‘fairly detailed, fairly popular, and fairly fair account of Constantine's life and work’ (p. 10). In a pivotal chapter, ‘The end of sacrifice’, he compares Constantine's policies of religious toleration with John Locke's and claims that ‘Constantine's position is certainly more politically and theologically coherent than that offered by many early modern defenders of religious toleration’ (p. 141) because ‘it is more honest’ (p. 144). This is an astonishing act of historical telescoping that Leithart does not subject to scrutiny. Instead, his criteria for political and theological coherence are here, as elsewhere in the book, contemporary and transhistorical; they are decidedly not based in accounts of what made for political or theological coherence in the fourth or seventeenth centuries, and they are certainly not based in a detailed historical assessment of the massive differences between each of these milieus and the other or each of these milieus and Leithart's own.

This last observation brings me to my main set of concerns with Defending Constantine, namely, with the way that history is invoked as an appropriate vehicle for theological polemic. In another recent review of Leithart, Alan Kreider notes that Leithart's historical critique of Yoder and others issues a theological challenge: ‘ “If [Yoder] got Christian history wrong”, Leithart comments, “that sets a question mark over his theology”… Of course, that challenge can go the other way. Is Leithart influenced by his presuppositions? Does he get history right? If so, or if not, what does that say about his theology?’Footnote ³ Kreider is right to suggest that the connection between history and theology is the terrain on which the debate about Leithart's analysis of Constantine and critique of anti-Constantinianism needs to be conducted. But the idea that if one gets history ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ one's theology will be correspondingly ‘good’ or ‘bad’ seems to me a problem that wrecks the entire conversation. Historical method is not a reliable theological prophylaxis, a point that historians, in the main, as well as many biblical critics, have made repeatedly.Footnote ⁴ And yet Leithart and many of his anti-Constantinian counterparts (though emphatically not Yoder) continue to do theology in a way that uncritically invokes the idea of history as the means for settling theological disputes. Consequently, what we have in Defending Constantine is not so much a debate about Constantine or his legacy, as it is a sobering signal that theology's tumultuous relationship to history, far from having been resolved by neo-historicism or post-liberalism, remains deeply in crisis.