BY TRUDY J. MORGAN-COLE

CAN'T REMEMBER WHEN I FIRST HEARD the name of the Roman emperor Constantine, but I'm sure it was in church and I'm sure I was very young. Along with most lifelong Seventh-day Adventists, I learned early on that Constantine was the "bad guy" in the big switch from Sabbath to Sunday, proclaiming the "Venerable Day of the Sun" as the day on which all should worship. Of course, Constantine didn't invent Sunday worship--he legitimized a practice the church had drifted into the past two centuries as it struggled to assimilate pagan converts and dissociate itself from Judaism. Still, for most Adventists Constantine's name is indissolubly linked with that fatal error.

It wasn't until much more recently that I began to reflect on the other changes that followed Constantine's conversion. The story goes that in A.D. 312 Constantine, needing to win a battle against his brother-in-law, prayed for divine help and saw a vision of a cross in the sky. He sent his troops into battle under the sign of the Christian cross, and won. Deciding that Christianity was a religion for winners, Constantine reversed nearly 300 years of Roman persecution of Christians and made Christianity the state religion.

For the first 300 years of its existence the early church was far from perfect. It struggled with heresy; it accommodated to pagan customs. Indeed, some say one of Constantine's main goals in legitimizing Christianity was to unite the Christian factions that were constantly bickering with one another.

But despite its shortcomings the faith fueled by the blood of the martyrs was far closer to the faith of Jesus than what we have seen in many centuries since. At least three important values of the early church began to crumble about the same time Christianity became a state religion.

1. Nonviolence
In the first three centuries Christians, like Jesus Himself, were firmly opposed to violence of any kind. They had followed Jesus' example of nonviolent, "turn the other cheek"

(see Matt. 5:39; Luke 6:29)* civil disobedience in resisting the "divine" authority of the Roman emperors, and they suffered for it. Christian men were urged neither to serve in the army nor to use violence as a means of solving problems.

With Constantine's conversion, Christianity was suddenly allied to Roman military power. In A.D. 303 it was illegal for a soldier in the Roman army to be a Christian; by 416 it was mandatory for a soldier to be a Christian.¹ The "cross" that Constantine's army carried as a standard was a spear with a transverse bar across it.² Ironically, the symbol of Jesus' death as an innocent victim of oppression was transformed into the weapons of the oppressor. The church took up the sword, and with rare exceptions has seldom laid it down since.

Christianity spread rapidly in the years between Jesus' death and the conversion of Constantine, but it spread through preaching and loving example. Only when Christianity became the state church of Rome did the travesty of forced conversions at swordpoint begin. Religious liberty and respect for individual freedom were casualties of Constantine's victory.

2. Materialism
When Jesus threw the moneychangers out of the Temple, His action could be understood on many levels, but at least one of its meanings was that materialism and the marketplace have no place in the house of God. Today, in a world where multinational corporations and the consumer mentality have saturated every aspect of our society, I wonder: What "temples" would Jesus cleanse if He arrived on the scene? Certainly, ever since the time of Constantine, Christian churches have amassed power and wealth to a degree that would have seemed very strange to the first followers of the One who had "nowhere to lay his head" (Matt. 8:20).

3. Inclusiveness
Jesus' ministry was one of radical love, acceptance, and inclusion, and the early church continued that. In Jesus' eyes social distinctions didn't matter. A poor man, a woman, a child, a disabled person--all were as valuable to God as a healthy, wealthy, powerful man. In the New Testament we see evidence that the early church worked hard at maintaining this equality: "They shared everything they had . . . [so that] there were no needy persons among them" (Acts 4:32-34). Church leaders struggled to make sure this continued in spite of people's natural desire to exclude and look down on others (James 2:1-9; 1 Cor. 11:17-22). Pagans are said to have commented, "See how these Christians love one another!" and Christianity was notable in the Roman world for allowing women and slaves not only to worship as equals with free men, but to hold leadership roles. But as Christianity became wedded to state power, the church grew more and more hierarchical, erasing the memory of Jesus' radical message of love. Equality and acceptance were further casualties of Constantine's rule.

Whose Kingdom?
Jesus came to proclaim and inaugurate God's kingdom, to show us what God is like and what life in His kingdom is like. It wasn't an easy vision. About the same time Jesus was born, Jewish revolutionaries rebelled against Rome's imperial might, crying, "We have no king but God!" But the gospel of John also records the Jews as rejecting Jesus' claim to kingship with the words "We have no king but Caesar!"

That scene makes it painfully clear that when we really get a glimpse of what God's rulership is like, as exemplified in the life of Jesus, many of us run from it in panic. We scurry away from God's kingship to that of worldly rulers, whose system and rules we understand.

Theologian Walter Wink, whose book Engaging the Powers is thought-provoking reading for any Christian, consistently translates the phrase "the world" in the New Testament as "the domination system." The world's system, Wink argues, is one in which the rich dominate the poor, men dominate women, and the powerful dominate the weak. Jesus introduced a radically new and different system, and invited us to live as citizens of that new kingdom.

Though God's rule will never be fully realized until the earth is made new, all of us who accept Jesus accept the invitation to live by His kingdom's values. This was what the early church tried to do, but the conversion of Constantine was a major setback for God's kingdom and a victory for the domination system. When the church accepted violence, state control of religion, and secular power structures, it turned aside from Jesus' example as surely as when it mandated the "Venerable Day of the Sun" in place of God's Sabbath.

As a people who have always rejected Constantine's innovative decision to legislate Sunday worship for God's followers, I believe Seventh-day Adventists should also take a stand against the rest of Constantine's innovations.

A Symbol of Lordship
In fact, the two concepts--Sabbath worship and God's kingship--are inextricably linked. For Seventh-day Adventists, our Sabbath worship can function as a powerful reminder of whom we worship, and Who our King is. Sabbath can remind us to live according to the values of God's kingdom on the remaining six days of the week.

Worship is about whom you follow, whose values you accept. One day would not be intrinsically more sacred than another unless God had designated it so. When we accept His arbitrary choice of one day out of seven for worship, we hold up a symbol that says, "We follow God as our king, not Constantine or any other worldly emperor." But a symbol points to greater realities beyond. As Adventists, have we placed our greatest emphasis on the symbol, Sabbath worship, without drawing attention to the reality to which the symbol points--the values of God's kingdom?

The Seventh-day Adventist Church, as the early Christian church, has traditionally adopted a posture of nonviolence and noncombatancy. In our war-torn era, though the official church holds to that position, individual Adventists often question it, putting national loyalties ahead of allegiance to Jesus, who told us to "love our enemies." We have done a wonderful job of espousing the cause of religious freedom, yet many of us privately interpret this as "freedom for those who think and believe like me" while acting out intolerance toward those we perceive as "different." Our church began as a poor, egalitarian movement, much like the early Christian church, but as we have grown in size, structure and power, have we too moved toward Constantine's kingdom, toward the domination system of power and materialism?

When we honor God's Sabbath, we have a wonderful opportunity not only to acknowledge God's rulership but to celebrate the values of His kingdom.

Sabbath sets us free from the bonds of materialism. The traditional Adventist disapproval of buying and selling on Sabbath is not just petty legalism, but a chance to declare our freedom from the consumer society. The social activist group Adbusters promotes an annual Buy Nothing Day. Its purpose is to take a stand against consumerism and materialism.³ When I first saw "Buy-Nothing Day" advertised, I laughed. I celebrate a weekly Buy Nothing Day, and rejoice that for 24 hours I am not a "consumer," but a human child of God.

In the same way, Sabbath calls us out of the workplace, out of the marketplace, out of the world's domination system, and invites us to lay down our power structures, our violent solutions to problems, our class and cultural divisions, and come together equally as sinners and seekers. The tragedy is that too often we step out of the workplace on Friday evening and step into church on Sabbath morning, and finding there another arena of power struggles, class and cultural divisions, and angry, combative approaches to disagreement.

If this is our Sabbath experience, then our churches are living in Constantine's kingdom, not Jesus'--even if we are worshiping on the seventh day. For Jesus, Sabbath was the day to heal, to relieve suffering, to reach out to those cast out by society (Matt. 12:9-11; Luke 13:10-16; Luke 14:15). It was the kind of day God envisioned when He used Isaiah's prophetic words to tell His people:

"Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter--when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?" (Isa. 58:6, 7).

If we truly want to declare our allegiance to God's kingdom, then we must lay down the Roman sword and take up Jesus' cross--His symbol of nonviolence, humility, service, and peacemaking--and follow Him in finding new and creative ways to live His love in this power-hungry, violent, materialistic age. As we strive to do this, the Sabbath can be a weekly reminder of whom we worship, of whose kingdom we live in. Sabbath gives us the opportunity to step aside from the domination system, aside from Constantine's empire, and remind ourselves that we live by a different set of values, and bow the knee to another Lord.

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* All Bible verses are from the New International Version.

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¹ Emmanuel Charles C. McCarthy, "Christian Nonviolence: The Great Failure, The Only Hope," in Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992).
² James Carroll, Constantine's Sword (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).
³ http://adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd.

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Trudy Morgan-Cole is a freelance writer in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada.