The End of Christendom

O'Donovan on the end of Christendom:

"The Gentile mission had two frontiers, social and political. The church demanded the obedience of society, and it demanded the obedience of society’s rulers. 'Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising' (Isa. 60:3). The parallel in that text is complementary, not synonymous; the horizons of its two members are different. For while the nations gather to the rising of Zion the bring gold and frankincense and to proclaim Yhwh's praise (v. 6), their kings come only to be led in triumphal procession. Communities are incorporated into Yhwh's Kingdom; rulers merely resign their pretensions. Yet these are two aspects of one conquest; the submission of the rulers is not an end in itself, but a moment in the gathering of many societies into one. And so the first and last frontier of the Gentile mission is the social frontier. The conversion of Constantine, with all that followed from it, was only an intermediate frontier which developed from the effective mission of the church to society and led back to it. The drama of the Kingdom will not end with the rulers, but with the song of the innumerable multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language (Rev. 7:9f.).
In this sense at least, then, the goal of Christendom is 'After Christendom'. Since Christendom has, on our account, to do with the submission of rulers, it prepares the way for something beyond itself, the replacement of the rulers by the Christ. But the hope of such a fulfilment can lose its eschatological character, and be turned to support historicist ideologies which find the dawning of the Kingdom within late-modern secularism. Christendom has ended, we say - but in what sense of the word 'end'? Has it fulfilled itself in the transition from the rule of the kings to the rule of the Christ, or has it simple been eclipsed by the vicissitudes of mission, perhaps to return in another form or, if not to return, to provide a standing remainder of the political frontier which mission must always address? For the historicist conception directs the church to a social mission without a political aspect to it. The moment for the conversion of political agency is, in its view, past.


I take it as beyond dispute that Christendom has in fact ended, in the minimal sense of the verb at least. Our contemporaries no longer think that the rulers of the earth owe service to the rule of Christ. To say this much, of course, is not by any means to give an exhaustive description of the way things stand in Europe and America today. By written law or convention states continue to acknowledge the church's mission...Perhaps there are a few places in the world where the church never receives encouragement from government, though this may happen more usually on an occasional government-to-synod basis than on a constitutional state-to-church basis. Yet all this is, at best, a qualification to a prevailing ethos which demands that we accept the end of Christendom. The ethos is usually expressed in terms of a doctrine of 'separation of church and state', an uncommunicative formula, to be sure, since those words assert nothing that could have perturbed the most traditional apologist for dual jurisdiction in Christendom. The intent of this doctrine, however, in its modern context, is to deny at least one element in the Christendom idea: that the state should offer deliberate assistance to the church's mission. The development of the modern doctrine was associated with the sceptical conviction of the Enlightenment that religious questions were not open to public arbitration.


The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting the 'establishment' and protecting the 'free exercise' of religion, is the paradigm assertion of this doctrine, and so can usefully be taken as the symbolic end of Christendom. There are, of course, many other events which could compete for that role. From the same period one might choose the French Revolution; from a much later one even the 1914-18 war suggests itself. But the American enactment is peculiarly suitable, since it propounds a doctrine meant to replace the church-state relations which Christendom had maintained, it was formulated largely by Christians who thought they had the interests of the church's mission at heart, and it was argued for, as it still is, on ostensibly theological grounds. But it also bears the marks of the Age of Revolution, reflecting a conception of society constituted from below by its own internal dynamics; government does not form society, but put itself at its disposal. The evangelical Christians who helped shape the new doctrine wished to deny government the right to interfere. In the name of King Jesus they proposed to instruct princes that they were dispensable to the Holy Spirit's work, and to send them to the spectators' seats. But what might simply have been a radicalised announcement of Christ's common cause with anti-Trinitarian heterodoxy which was permeated by rationalist conceptions of action and providence. So it ended up promoting a concept of the state's role from which Christology was excluded, that of a state freed from all responsibility to recognise God's self-disclosure in history."

- Oliver O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations, pp. 243-245, 1996.

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