Two Kinds of Discipleship

This is an excerpt from the Craig Carter’s book, Rethinking Christ and Culture: a post Christendom perspective (a response writing to Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture) which the Church History class has been reading this semester. The final chapter presents a comparison/contrast of several aspects of Christian lifestyle as understood from the point of Constantine as the proponent of Christendom and Jesus as the author of Christianity. This final comparison caught my interest and Carter’s presentation is, in my opinion, a very accurate depiction of perspectives within the American church today. What do you think?

Two Kinds of Discipleship

Finally, we need to consider that there are two different kinds of discipleship, depending on whether one follows Jesus or Constantine. To follow Constantine, the primary issue relates to being a good and loyal citizen of the state. To be a good Roman is to be a good Christian [or to be a good American is to be a good Christian, eh?]. One simply lives up to one’s birth.

But in order to be a good follower of Jesus Christ, one has to make a deliberate choice to acknowledge Jesus as Lord. To be a good Christian is to be something less than totally devoted to serving the state and obeying the political authorities, for one’s obedience to the state must always take a second place to one’s baptism [that is, one’s Rebirth], something that is possible only in the power of the Holy Spirit.

The kind of church we need is one that facilitates such discipleship and takes it up into its very heart, rather than rejecting it or marginalizing it, as the Constantinian church does. In the Constantinian, a devotion to Jesus Christ that leads to literal and serious discipleship is possible, but it is channeled in the so-called religious life, where it does not threaten the so-called secular life lived by most people. The life of discipleship is seen as heroic, worthy of admiration by all, but not possible for all. Those who call the entire church to the path of discipleship are rejected as fanatics and persecuted in Christendom.

Carter, Craig A.Rethinking Christ and Culture...Brazos Press, Grand Rapids: 2006, p. 211 [emphases mine]