Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (64 page)

57I owe this to my colleague Toby Sumpter. Please note: this is a charming way to put it, but it is not merely charming. It is a profound theological point.

"John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism (1971; reprint, Scottdale, Penn.: Herald, 2003), p. 119.

s90ne of my favorite paintings in the Hermitage is a ceiling fresco of armored Abraham, taking off his helmet to receive bread and wine from Melchizedek. Abraham the warrior was at the table.

60This is distinct from the question whether a purely noncoercive ethic is possible or desirable. If I intercept a child who is about to step in front of oncoming traffic, I exercise coercion, but the coercion is, on almost any account, an act of love, not of violence. The vagueness of "violence" is a significant problem here. Milbank argues that evil is violence, violence evil, but insists, rightly in my view, that not all coercive action is violence. I command my children to clean up and I spank them if they defy me. That, I believe, is a coercive right that I as a parent can exercise over my children. It is not an act of violence or child abuse.

61Augustine, Letter 189, quoted in Louis J. Swift, The Early Fathers on War and Military Service, Message of the Fathers of the Church 19 (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1983), pp. 114-15.

62Yoder, Politics of Jesus.

"David E. Garland, Reading Matthew: A Literary and Theological Commentary on the First Gospel (Macon, Ga.: Smyth and Heiwys, 1999).

64This does not revert to a Kantian intentionalist ethic. Intentions so inhere in actions that a different intention changes the action itself. I spank my child out of love, and that can be a legitimate exercise of coercive force; a molester might perform exactly the same bodily movement in order to excite his perverted sexual tastes. The distinction between these is not that the "same" act is done with different intentions; different acts are being done, which is why we have two different words-discipline and abuse.

"Thanks to my colleague Toby Sumpter for this memorable phrase.

66William T. Cavanaugh, "A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State," Modern Theology 11, no. 4 (1995); Torture and Eucharist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

"See Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europefrom the French Revolution to the Great War (London. Burleigh, 2005), and Sacred Causes (New York: Harper, 2007).

68Augustine Degestis Pelagii 12.28; quoted in Markus, Saeculum, p. 54.