In response to my post of yesterday, one interlocutor suggested that I should have been more clear and said that the fourth-century church wasn't focused upon liberation. I'll be honest: I didn't address that fact, because it seems to go without saying. The reality is that the ancient church was not able to conceptualize liberation in the way that we moderns do, because they weren't us moderns. In particular, they were limited in their ability to conceptualize a world without hierarchy. We see this come out in the discourse around the kingdom of God. The ancient church could not really conceptualize a world without rulers, but it could conceptualize a world ruled by an infinitely benevolent king. Likewise, they could not really conceptualize a world without slavery, but they conceptualize a world of benevolent slave-owners. It could not really conceptualize a world without gender hierarchy, but it could conceptualize a world of benevolent husbands. This has to do with what Lonergan calls "the level of our time": we are all constrained by the limits of the time and place in which we operate. For the most part, even the most "egalitarian" of early Christians were unable to think beyond a benevolent hierarchy and towards the radical elimination of hierarchy altogether.
The implications have to be dealt with carefully. On the one hand, there is the reactionary impulse, which says that since the ancient church could not think beyond hierarchy it follows that Christian thought around wealth, gender, etc., is necessarily hierarchical. Oh, reactionaries will usually limit this in explicit terms to statements about gender, but they don't really fool us: we all know that they also ultimately affirm as good hierarchy in terms of class, race, etc. Insofar as this keeps Christians from coming up even to the moral level of their time—a level that today seeks to recognize without qualification that all persons are equal in dignity—this is fundamentally sub-Christian because it is even more crucially sub-human. On the other hand there is the radical impulse, which tries to turn the ancient church into liberationists avant la lettre. This tries to say that, sure, the ancient church couldn't be fully committed to modern notions of liberation, but they were as committed as possible and thus they should be lauded as forerunners of the revolution. This fails to recognize the ways in which their inability to see beyond hierarchy in many ways served to reaffirm hierarchy, often with tragic results. We must avoid the reactionary and radical impulses alike, and affirm that the ancient church is what they've always been: imperfect people, products of their time, who sometimes helped advance the good in history and sometimes retarded its progress.
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