Martyrs, Bishops, and Emperors | Prof. Thomas Clemmons

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4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2022

⏱️ 54 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on June 13, 2022 at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. as part of The Civitas Dei Summer Fellowship: "The City of God in Modernity: Culture and Ecclesiology." For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Thomas Clemmons, a native of South Florida, is assistant professor of theology in Church History at the Catholic University of America. Dr. Clemmons joined the STRS faculty in 2016 after completing his Ph.D. in the History of Christianity from Notre Dame, where he focused on Latin Patristics, early medieval theology, and Augustine. He also holds an M.A. in Early Christianity from Notre Dame and an M.T.S. from Vanderbilt. Dr. Clemmons’s teaching and research interest focus on Latin Patristics, Augustine, particularly his thought through the Confessions and his anti-Manichaean works, Late Antiquity, especially in North Africa, and the medieval reception of Augustine.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:04.0	For more talks like this, visit us at Tamistic Institute.org.
0:08.0	The topic of these talks in general, and my own in particular, works within the common framework of church and state.
0:18.0	I do not mean that I intend to approach the matter in a straightforward way, or that the subject of the church and the state, or even church versus the state, is a clear framing for us.
0:27.6	Yet I do not want to approach this topic directly, i.e. the two swords of authority or the hegemony of the state over the multiplicity of religions, hence a kind of entrenched pluralism
0:39.1	under imperial homogeneity.
0:42.3	It is not that our times are so different from the later Roman Empire, though in many ways they certainly
0:47.0	are, but rather that the mere circumscription of the topics of the church and the state
0:52.3	betrays our familiarity with what exactly the state
0:55.5	and or the church means. And more importantly, it may not offer to us insight into what is entailed.
1:03.0	Instead, I want to begin with some of the scriptural passages that are most frequently and rightly
1:08.1	drawn upon to wrestle out a biblical or more properly early Christian understanding of the place of the state and its relationship to the church.
1:16.6	Some of these are well known. When Christ says, quote, give to Caesar what is Caesar's in Mark 1217,
1:24.6	and when Christ says to pilot, quote, my kingdom is not of this world, if my kingdom were,
1:29.6	one which belonged to this world, my servants would be fighting, to prevent my falling into the hands of the Jews,
1:35.3	but no, my kingdom does not take its origin here, end quote, from John 1836.
1:41.8	These statements appear to set off a contrast between the Roman state and Christ's kingdom.
1:47.0	Even more, when Christ says that his kingdom does not belong to this world or is not of this world,
1:53.0	it raises the image of the quote, otherworldliness of Christianity,
1:58.0	an otherworldliness that presumes that this life and thus this world is not for the Christian.
2:04.6	An otherworldliness that is at times taken to couple with the conception of the individual
2:10.6	or even the modern fractured notion of the existential self.
	...

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