Useful Idiots revisited

William Weinrich, formerly patristics professor at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and currently serving as Rector of the Luther Academy, the seminary for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia in Riga, Latvia, offers some important correctives to my claims about the absence of debate about Christianizing the empire in the fourth century:

“Perhaps not a ‘raging debate,’ but there is evidence of serious reflection about the relation of church to
empire/state. The development on this issue of John Chrysostom is a case in point. He begins, like many others, with the view that the empire and emperor is the image on earth of the kingdom of Christ. But then he redraws this idea and thinks that the monk and monastery is the image. But finally in his homily on Ephesians 5 says that husband and wife is a ‘little church.’ In this way, and significantly, Chrysostom says that
the family is the ecclesial image of the kingdom, not the emperor. Also, much of the history of monasticism entailed the idea that the earthly power of the empire/state was not of the substance as was the church.
And then, of course, there is Ambrose and Augustine, whose ‘City of God’ cut entirely the umbilical cord between church and empire.”