What should Constantine or the Church have done?

prodromos said:

I recall Christ taking a whip to people in the temple courtyard.

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'"It is written," he said to them, "'My house will be called a house of prayer,' but you are making it 'a den of robbers".

Jesus didn't go uninvited into other people's houses with a whip.

Ignatius the Kiwi said:

Do you mean Church in the sense of the Clergy or Church in the sense of everyone part of her? If the former I agree clergy shouldn't wield the sword or military force or at the very least there should be reservations about it. The Idea of the Knights of Malta defending that Island against the Ottomans isn't all that offensive to me.

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I mean the Church in the sense of the Body of Christ and any of her parts operating in the name of Christ.

If in the sense of the latter, everyone part of the Church lay and clerical, I must disagree. The laity are under no obligation to live as pacifists and indeed if you have been put into the position of power within a country or political order it is your duty to wield the sword. Even if that results in death or physical harm. A country cannot run otherwise and Paul was explicit on the point that God has arranged the civil authorities to wield the sword in the pursuit of justice. If Paul tolerated that of Pagans, why should we oppose Christians having that power?

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It's true that in this fallen world of the tooth and claw, earthly kings must use the sword to maintain their wealth, power, and civic order.

And, yet, Jesus has still told the truth that "All who live by the sword will die by the sword," because every earthly nation will inevitably fall.

Ignatius the Kiwi said:

Do you do anything at all to try and prevent this?

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Family is not political or a matter of sides so the husband would stand against anyone regardless of side. You try to make it about an enemy but that is a delusion. The poor people of the ages knew they were just as likely to be pillaged for food or have their women taken by their own countrymen, let alone an enemy. Only those with something to lose like position, wealth or power takes sides and claims authourity. The rest fall victim to ALL sides.

Ignatius the Kiwi said:

Do you do anything to stop this Islamic raider? He will not talk, he will not concede, he will fight until he dies. What do you do?

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Same thing I would do with a home team raider.

Or maybe it all just comes under the law of cause and effect

Ignatius the Kiwi said:

appropriate for someone not a Christian.

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Don't you mean for someone not wanting to play the games of man (even if they use religion made in their own image)?

Ignatius the Kiwi said:

but it is a betrayal of the family of God.

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As I said, The world of man is not of the Kingdom. The division is between the two, so yes if I am not of the world of man then I have betrayed man and this world built in our image, but I have not betrayed the kingdom of God. His will be done, not ours.

Luke 16:15 And he said unto them, Ye are they which justify yourselves before men; but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God.

Ignatius the Kiwi said:

Your suggestion is basically one of pacifism and I would argue that if Christianity had embraced such an outlook it never could have achieved the position in Roman society it did, nor the position it did in later centuries in Europe and the rest of the world.

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I explicitly said:
"It's true that in this fallen world of the tooth and claw, earthly kings must use the sword to maintain their wealth, power, and civic order."

That's not pacifism.

But Christianity did not achieve the position in Roman society that it did by members of the Body of Christ taking up a sword in the name of Jesus, but by being imminently loving as Jesus is loving, and this was written about even by the Roman officials who persecuted them.

Ignatius the Kiwi said:

you are not willing to do anything to help build it up or defend it.

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You assume what man has built is of the Kingdom but it is not. It mirrors what man has always built and has done. The Beatitudes or Jesus' two commandments are a better road map for what God expects of us. Who cares what the religious institution wants. It serves only itself in the same way other institutions do and expects us to defend it ahead of the word of God. Hah!.

Ignatius the Kiwi said:

will actively work with those who hate the faith?

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I don't hate the faith. I reject those within who are of the world and wish to play the games of man. GN

hedrick said:

Yes, if the Church had been more broad minded, the Reformation probably wouldn’t have been necessary.

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Actually the reverse is true, given that Renaissance Humanism and before it, Scholastic theology were innovations tolerated in the Roman Catholic Church which to this day are frowned upon amongst the Eastern, Oriental and Syro-Chaldean East Syriac Christians. The Renaissance, interpreted in both the broader context of church history as well as the more narrow categories supplied by the “Magisterial Reformers” (Hus, Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, Zwingli, Melancthon, Boucher, Knox and friends), we see an attempt by those churches driven to the point of schism by pre-Tridentine corruption to roll back the clock and reform the church to a state more authentically representative of the apostolic faith, hence the surprise on the part of the Lutheran theologians when the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople considered certain Lutheran doctrinal positions to be erroneous.

So the reverse is really true: the Reformers sought to turn back the clock; in the process some may have inadvertently developed new theological and liturgiological interpretations, but the intent was clearly a twofold desire to get away from the corruption that was pervasive before the Counter Reformation and to step back into an era not entirely lost to memory when the Roman Church still had an interest in vernacular liturgy and communion in both kinds, among other things. One can clearly see that Rome, which under the rule of primates such as St. Celestine, was the most conservative and absolutely traditional of the Orthodox churches, becoming increasingly open to new theological approaches and changes in liturgical praxis (for instance, Scholastic theology, Anselmian soteriology, the use of Aristotelian logic by the Schoolmen, a proliferation of interesting new models of monasticism which never appeared in the Eastern churches, like canons regular and especially the Mendicant Orders, going to communion in one species, eliminating monotone chanting of the liturgy in the Low Mass, and before that, in the solemn mass, after St. Ambrose introduced it in Milan, the introduction of the Filioque, and many other things).

I further propose that the more “open minded” churches among the mainline Protestant denominations have in recent years opened themselves up to schism. There have been schisms in the Presbyterian, Anglican/Episcopalian, Lutheran and Congregational denominations, some of which happened before the 1950s (see the break between the CCCC and the other Congregationalist churches a decade before the Reformed-Congregational merger which gave us the modern UCC, and also another more traditional denomination, which now represents the moderate side of the Congregational movement. And of course there is the tragedy of the impending schism in the UMC, which should not happen - the church voted for the Traditional Plan at the last general conference and should focus on implementing that even if it means firing some disobedient clergy and disfellowshipping some parish-level leaders for contumacy (although I suspect that if Methodist conference bishops have the same authority as diocesan and archdiocesan bishops elsewhere, that could be difficult). And the motto of the more liberal UMC parishes was “Open hearts, open minds, open doors,” which sounds lovely, like my former denomination’s famous “Comma” ad campaign, but which is really a clever platitude intended to silence internal dissent to counter-scriptural change and innovation not intended, like that of the Magisterial Reformers, to revert actual and imagined RC innovations, but rather, to engage in such innovation, like the Roman church, in response to external secular pressure.

Ignatius the Kiwi said:

I said you would work with those who hate the faith. Which to me shows indifference on your part, a complete neglect of basic allegiances that we should have in this life. There is an easy choice for any decent Christian to make between the Reds and the Whites during the Russian revolution. The Whites. Perhaps you're ignorant, perhaps you don't know about the Holodomor or Stalin's purges or the Soviet persecution of the Church. In fact, maybe you even approve of the latter.

But it's an inexcusable kind of ignorance and it's especially inexcusable to say you would work with the Reds.

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I agree. That said, I do think the “Sergianists” as ROCOR called the Moscow Patriarchate at the time did act correctly on the approach of WWII; the participation of the church in supporting the defense of the former Russian Empire, now the USSR, against the Nazis, and before that, their expression of loyalty to the new regime, while clearly a difficult decision to have to make, could well have saved Christianity in the USSR from extermination, and also helped ensure the elimination of the Rennovationists.