RELIGIOUS IDENTITY AND POLITICAL IDENTITY

From the time of Constantine's adoption of worship of the Christian God the question of the relationship between Church and state was one that Christians had to confront. Should the Church and the Christian community be subject to the authority and rule of the emperor and be part of the politeia of the Roman empire? The archetypal formulation of a solution to this question is Eusebius of Caesarea's notion of Christian imperium and of the emperor as God's image or representative on earth. In this formulation the emperor could ultimately be leader of both the empire and the Church and so there is seen to be no real contradiction between being a Christian and being a citizen and subject of the empire. For a long time it was assumed that Eusebius' model was shared by all Christians but in recent years this view has been questioned. Chrysostom could reject secular rule as valid or relevant to Christians because heaven was their true politeia; he, as other Christians had done before him, used the metaphor of citizenship to describe what it meant to be Christian. In so doing, he presented Christianity in a way that was familiar to Greeks but that also sought to transform their notion of citizenship from an earthly one in an earthly politeia to citizenship in a heavenly politeia.