The Ambrose Option: Toward human flourishing, Christian calling and the common good
How do we understand the preconditions for human flourishing? What should a well-ordered society and public justice look like? Let’s consider a story, a true story, a Christian story.
With the Edict of Milan (313) the practice of Christianity ceased to be illegal. This became known as the “Constantinian settlement.” [1] The empire continued thereafter, albeit with a new aroma of tolerance, liberty, including religious liberty, furnished by the budding public application of Christian precepts societally.
70 years later (383), another emperor, Theodosius, permitted immigration in the empire’s Eastern region — this policy of welcoming aliens and strangers also derives from Christian precepts rooted in the Old Testament and now being applied to Roman society.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
A few years later in 387 a cleric from Milan performed a now common and routine “religious, spiritual, and heavenly” ritual of initiation: baptizing a disciple named Augustine. That’s what clerics do and supposedly only do: spiritual and “other worldly” good ... again, supposedly, at least according to dualistic sacred/secular assumptions.
In 390 the empire experienced an uprising in the East, specifically involving the immigrants in the city of Thessaloniki. This riot resulted in the death of a Roman military officer. Full stop.
When the news reached Empower Theodosius’s ear, he immediately sent troops to quell the riot and in the process sent a message by indiscriminately slaughtering about 7,000 immigrants: Men, women, and children. The message conveyed? Don’t mess with Rome.
However, that baptizing cleric who had discharged his “spiritual” duty by preaching and performing the sacraments, learned of these killings. What did he do? Was he satisfied by doing his “higher calling” of conducting spiritual rituals? Hardly. Instead, he confronted Emperor Theodosius to his face.[2] This cleric, Bishop Ambrose, possessed the moral clarity, moral conviction, and moral courage to engage the temporal in the public square for public justice and the common good. He rejected the dualistic fable that his Christian calling confined him to only doing supposedly otherworldly “eternal” tasks in “spiritual heavenly” spaces involving rituals, preaching, and other “church stuff.” Instead, without hesitating or flinching he informed the great emperor that as a Christian man, taking one innocent life violates the Lord’s law; how much more does taking 7,000 innocent lives compound his sin? Ambrose then barred the emperor from the eucharist until he repented. And Theodosius did so, by God’s grace seven months later.
Here’s the key point: Ambrose’s action was not optional, outside, or beyond his vocation as Bishop, but rather cohered with and expressed it. What he believed (theology) and how he acted (ethics) correlated. The lesson here is plain and negates all dualistic formulae: Religious conviction should actuate and generate public religious exercise for the common good.[3] This incident supplies a big hint about how ordered liberty should look. There must be public and civic space — aka liberty — for the faith to be proclaimed and practiced, including its moral precepts beyond the church’s doors.
A rightly formed Christian, like Ambrose, will reject any dualism that pits law against Gospel, sacred against secular, nature against grace, clergy against laity, et al. Dualism at best privatizes the faith and over time will at worst subject society to increasing injustice. Neither is an option for ordered liberty.
This Ambrose Option illustrates a course of conduct that reflects Christian calling, protects human flourishing, and promotes the common good for all while avoiding the invocation of and reliance upon an overreaching Leviathan State.[4] In fact, the State comprised the problem here. Classical Liberalism “incarnates” these precepts at many points.
This Christian conception of the public sphere, as this incident illustrates, provides the foundation for ordered liberty. That foundation in particular, establishes that 1. no ruler is above God’s law; 2. arbitrarily destroying humans made in God’s image and likeness — irrespective of tribe, clan, citizenship, et al. — manifests injustice, and therefore 3. the State, and thus its positive law, have roles as well as limits/boundaries. This is a crucial recognition as Benjamin Wiker explains:
"By recognizing a moral code that stood above all merely human laws and judged them, the Christian Roman civil law instilled in the minds of the converted the profoundly revolutionary truth that the sovereign’s will is only law insofar as it conforms to God’s revealed moral law — and no farther."[5]
Notably, Ambrose did not invent or improvise his actions. Rather, he applied the developing Christian practice of public justice based on God’s universal moral standards. Glimpses of this began emerging soon after Christ’s Ascension. For example, perhaps the earliest non-inspired Christian writing, The Didache (AD 90?), conjoins religious conviction with religious exercise, including retraining murder, abortion, adultery, et al.[6] Church father (and lawyer) Tertullian coined the term and advocated for “religious liberty.”[7] Gregory of Nyssa preached boldly against a predominant social evil: chattel slavery.[8] Emperor Justinian’s Christian-based legal code protected conscience and religious liberty among both pagans and Jews.[9]
These Christian predicates and examples point the way toward human flourishing, showing that it is best achieved – and protected – by ordered liberty. This liberty recognizes 1. a knowable law above the positive law, which provides standards for evaluating all assertions of coercive power; 2. the inherent dignity of every human person, which provides the basis for equal treatment under the law; 3. the key roles of civil society, which provides community and the predicate and agents for informed subsidiary and sphere sovereignty; and recognized the legitimacy — and limits — of the State. This is the Ambrose Option and it shows the way forward for our conflicted times, privately, socially, and publicly.
[1] Peter J. Leithart, Defending Constantine, The Twight of an Empire and the Dawning of Christendom, (2010)
[2] This is not unlike John the Baptist confronting King Herod for violating another creational norm: Marriage. Matt. 14:1-4. To assert that the Faith has nothing to do with the political – politicians and/or policies – is to ignore not only the implications of Christ’s Lordship, but also wide swaths of Scripture’s narrative. See also, Jeffery J. Ventrella, Law & Public Policy – Not a Gospel Issue? (2019)
[3] I call this the “Ambrose Option.”
[4] A Leviathan “savior State” cannot comport with Christ’s Lordship. If Christ is the omnipotent King, the State cannot rightly act as such.
[5] Benjamin Wiker, Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2013), 70. Compare this to the contemporary coziness to State power being advocated today on the political Right by Catholic Integralists, Protestant “retrievalists”, as well as advocates for “National Conservatism” and so-called “Christian Nationalism.”
[6] The early Christians engaged the culture by exposing evil, opposing evil, and eventually, foreclosing evil.
[7] Robert Louis Wilkin, Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom, (2019)
[8] https://www.placefortruth.org/blog/gregory-of-nyssa-a-lone-voice-against-slavery
[9] Robert Louis Wilkin, Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom, (2019)
Dr. Jeffery J. Ventrella serves as senior counsel and senior vice president of academic affairs and training at Alliance Defending Freedom. Since joining ADF in 2000, he has designed the curriculum for a number of ADF training programs, including the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a unique training and professional development program for law students. He also helps design ADF International’s Areté Academy Europe, Asia, and Latin America, which provide training for exceptional international advocates and cultural leaders who are on a path to future leadership in a variety of disciplines.
His book The Cathedral Builder: Pursuing Cultural Beauty (2007) is part of the Blackstone Legal Fellowship’s Core Curriculum Project, which he also edits. He is the author of numerous monographs and has contributed to or edited nine books. Ventrella received a bachelor’s degree in music education degree, magna cum laude, from the University of Northern Colorado, where he specialized in trumpet performance. He holds a doctorate in church and state studies from Whitefield Theological Seminary and earned his juris doctorate from the University of California Hastings College of the Law. He has practiced law since 1985 and is a member of the state bar of Idaho. He is also admitted to practice before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, and the U.S. Supreme Court.
