Rhetoric Race and Religion
In the first third of the 300s, as the Roman emperor Constantine legalized Christianity and then became its patron, Pope Sylvester, the bishop of Rome from 314-335, had a dream. He understood it to mean, “Now is poison poured into the church.”
I owe my awareness of Sylvester’s dream to a lecture by Douglas John Hall, one of the most important theologians of our time. Delivered at Emmanuel College in the University of Toronto in October of this year, its title was “The Future of the Church.” The story, Hall notes, is a later Christian legend. Sylvester may never have had such a dream. But it reflects a realization on the part of whoever created the legend and those who repeated it that something poisonous began to happen to Christianity when it became allied with dominant culture.
The image of a poisoned church, a poisoned Christianity, is striking. It refers to what might be called “the cultural captivity of the church” – namely, Christianity co-opted by and conformed to the conventions of culture, which most often have been about dominance, power, and wealth.
The conformity of Christianity with the values of dominant culture in much of its history since the 300s and into the present is obvious. When slavery was a cultural convention, most Christians accepted it – in the United States, as recently as 150 years ago, even in the North. So long as patriarchy was a cultural convention, most Christians were patriarchal as well. Indeed, it was less than 50 years ago that most mainline denominations began to ordain women.
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