Pathos, Pathos, Pathos: A Book Review of "Voting about God in Early Church Councils" by Ramsay MacMullen
The following book review is by the Rev. Paul Schulz, pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church, Mallard, IA and Zion, Ayrshire, IA. Rev. Schulz graduated from Concordia Lutheran Theological Seminary in St. Catharines, Ontario with the M.Div. in 2017.
With District Convention season largely behind us, and with our 2026 LCMS National Convention looming ahead, those who weary of our internal disputes might find some historical perspective from Ramsay MacMullen’s Voting About God in Early Church Councils (2006). MacMullen (1928–2022) served as a history professor at Yale. The American Historical Association awarded him for his great contributions to scholarship and called him “the greatest historian of the Roman Empire alive today." His special areas of interest involved the social history of the Roman world, in particular the transition from paganism to Christianity.
MacMullen’s other works on Roman history and the Church’s place in that history make for good additions to any library. His inclusion of a great number of lists, maps, quotations, and diagrams serve as great fodder for any “average bishop,” hoping to teach those under his care about the reality of the Church’s history, her decisions about doctrine, and how we should or should not deal with false teachers among us.
MacMullen’s focus in this work is not on the doctrinal processes and decrees of the Church councils. Instead, he draws out what attending a council might have been like for an “average Christian bishop.” You will not find here a story of heroic defenders of orthodoxy. Those stories can be found in countless other books. As MacMullen puts it, “Rather, I focus on those persons who made up the great mass of any council, by no means superhuman. Many were not in the least prominent...To look up to the past never suited me, any more than looking down on it.”[1] MacMullen is especially not writing as a theologian. Whether or not the reader might agree with MacMullen’s approach, he readily admits that this work is a rough sketch, or as he describes it “a pointillist portrait of a composite engaged in composite events.” MacMullen divides his study of the reality of the early councils into four sections. “Looking into the mind of those council participants who are my subject, I find four shaping elements: a democratic, a cognitive, a “supernaturalist,” and a violent.”[2] These four factors or elements mark the chapter divisions.
MacMullen’s chapter on “The democratic element” is an enlightening read for those confused or on the fence as to whether Christian pastors and laypeople ought to influence local and regional politics. MacMullen includes example after example of faithful laypeople and preachers raising their voices in unison in order to protect the practice of orthodoxy in their areas. Christians in these early times were not afraid to make their choices for bishops publicly known to the political powers who had authority to exile or retain the bishops. Beyond the civil practice of voting to voice their preference, this interaction with civil authorities became the model of early church council voting, not unlike the overlap between our American political system and our LCMS polity involving “voters’ meetings.” For us, the result of the vote is often the final authority. In contrast, the purpose of the vote in the Roman model was a way of appealing to the authority of the emperor or bishop in order to influence his final decision. In the Roman model, the bishop or local governor was not expected to be bound by the emotions and whims of the crowd in quite the same way that democracies function today. This is something to be pondered in our own denomination as the cultural crises of the world continue to amplify the panic and anxiety of the American population.
Central to understanding and learning from these early Romanesque church councils for MacMullen is the acta—the record of exactly what everyone said at each council. These are not the equivalent of our convention resolutions, but rather of the discussions that happen in the crafting of these resolutions. As our convention structures do not allow for sufficient discussion and argument on matters of the day, the podcasts, blogs, and other media used to influence the convention voting and cultural direction of the synod could be considered part of the acta of our time. It was in the acta that the quoted positions of both heretical and orthodox bishops were recorded and refuted. While we do not record the acta of our meetings as these councils did, we do have our conventions livestreamed and publicly available. In this way, even when great confessions of the truth are made and yet rejected by our own church, we can still know what was confessed.
As MacMullen continues in the next chapter to “the cognitive element”, his position as a secular scholar uninterested in defending orthodoxy becomes quite clear. As he describes the scholarly needs of those who participated in the councils, he is quite focused on the individual limitations and “personal experiences” of those who spoke. He counts himself among those who see Constantine as rather uninterested in theology and largely ignorant of the importance of the particularities of Trinitarian doctrine: “For my purposes it matters not which side of the argument here is right or wrong. Rather what counts is the quality of it, the level of sophistication — this, the cognitive element which one could expect to find in the minds of any ordinary bishop.”[3]
MacMullen provides many examples of Christian preachers and bishops who taught the primacy of the spiritual battle of the faith. MacMullen’s prose seems dismissive of these ideas, but the book is still useful as he includes many direct quotations and anecdotes that a preacher can easily steal for sermon illustrations or Bible class. He portrays Anthony of Egypt as a hero of a growing “anti-intellectualism,” betraying his own modernist view of true knowledge and his low view of simple Christian piety and prayer.
MacMullen also provides direct evidence of the varying levels of theological acumen of council participants by listing a series of questions found in the various acta of the councils. While MacMullen sees these questions as proof in his eyes that many bishops were not all that theologically capable, a parish pastor could do worse than taking this list of questions and covering them in sermons or Bible class. Most of the questions are Christological in nature and are answered directly by our own Lutheran Confessions. In spite of his rather low view of the mental capacity of lower level bishops and his especially low view of the cognitive level of the hoi polloi, MacMullen accurately diagnoses a reality recognized by every ancient rhetorician: The decisions of the masses are rarely made on logic or the ethos of the speaker. The ancient rhetorical dictum applies in every age: the three keys to effective rhetoric are pathos, pathos, and pathos — emotion, emotion, and emotion. “Ancient historians understood better than modern that people in fact do things of the very slightest or greatest importance...out of their feelings, not out of calculation. Action is the outcome of the affect or emotional colors in which an idea is wrapped, not out of the cognitive content of it.”[4]
Next, “the ’supernaturalist’ element.” MacMullen’s use of quotation marks as he discusses the “supernaturalist” element will cause the ears of any Christian reader to perk up. MacMullen: “My term supernaturalist therefore designates the tendency to reach beyond nature — beyond the material world — in any attempt to explain our experiences.”[5] MacMullen tries to address the acknowledgement of spiritual forces at work in everyday life without himself taking a position — a decision that is quite impossible. His “objective” skepticism bleeds through his words. He makes the claim that Roman thought pushed divine interaction in human matters off to the side, and that the Roman world did not see fit to blame any evil on the gods. In his view, it was Christianity that made supernatural interaction with the world central, with his short explanation describing some sort of Good/Evil or God/Satan dualism — a claim that could be defended as orthodox or Manichean, though MacMullen declines to clarify exactly what he means.
For MacMullen, the “supernaturalist” view of the Christian life comes mostly from the ascetic monks for whom piety and devotion were primary. “This development in the church constitutes a second reason to include the ascetics of the later empire in my pages: not only did they exert influence on the religious views of ordinary bishops, but they might be ordinary bishops themselves – a few, indeed, extraordinary.” What the faithful pastor finds in MacMullen’s low view of religious piety is the proof that very pious, faithful, and confessing people can have very influential voices in Church decisions because of their piety and confession, not in spite of such things.
MacMullen’s chapter on “the violent element” begins by giving a rough estimate of the amount of those killed because of “credal differences: not less than twenty-five thousand deaths...All those who died met their end irregularly as targets of fury, not of legal action.”[6] MacMullen’s portrayal is a picture of a rise in “religious violence.” The fervent agreements or disagreements of the crowds could at various points grow to great action in favor of or in opposition to the preaching of local bishops. Even the bishops themselves participated in the carrying of words into physical actions. “Chrysostom recommends, no doubt to applause, that his listeners should not hesitate to give a good punch in the face to the misbelievers...[The bishops] occasionally join as combatants in the riots they have aroused or which they have certainly directed and sustained. Their clergy have been seen...beating and stabbing each other in the cause of Bassianus at Antioch.”[7]
The second half of MacMullen’s work gets more to the point and into the evidence of what the councils were like. It is this section which is most helpful for expanding our historical view. At every council, the entire acta of every preceding council — the record of everything said by everyone — was read in its entirety. Clergy who had spoken at previous councils would interrupt the reading of the specific minutes and contend any misquotations. After any given council, every side who cared and could afford it would have their own acta recorded for personal defense. The various acta did not always agree. Opponents were accused under the name of the arch-heretic whose ideas they were seen to be promoting, such as “Nestorian” or “Arian.” We even see an example from Chalcedon of the same Bible passages used then being used today in order to diminish doctrinal disagreements and cover up heresy. MacMullen uses the example of Carosus, who spoke reverently about Eutyches. This caused a great uproar. He was called upon to instead curse the heretical teacher. Carosus appeals to Holy Scripture, refusing to curse Eutyches under the protection of Matthew 7: “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Despite promoting a heretic, Carosus exclaimed that he was in full agreement with the Council of Nicaea and was not promoting heterodox teaching. He was “united in doctrine and practice,” in his own view, though the opposing side clearly disagreed.
MacMullen’s portrait is a good one to consider as we approach LCMS Convention 2026. He quotes Rowan Williams to the effect that, in examining church councils, both the theological and the political elements must be fully accounted for in order to understand the words and actions of the council and its attendees. To these two things, MacMullen adds the power of ordinary bishops and their force when they come together in defense of orthodoxy and right practice. “How different the course and outcome of church history might have been, in the period of my study, had the church’s intellectual heroes been a little less heroic, had they more often deferred to those of their colleagues who were a little less intellectual!” If we are reading the room of the late 20th and early 21st century LCMS correctly, MacMullen’s position would no doubt be accused of sounding like “clericalism” or “sacerdotalism.” It is left to the reader to discern for themselves if this heroic defense of orthodoxy and orthopraxis by our “average bishops” is something to be promoted or viewed with suspicion and derision.
Overall, MacMullen’s thoroughly modern view of politics and of the supernatural colors quite a bit of his analysis of the church councils, their politics, and their attendees. His modernist attempt to reconstruct a supposed “average bishop” fails, as he acknowledges. That said, his book is worthy of a place on the shelf of any interested “average bishop,” who seeks to learn more about how exactly the decisions of our shared history were made. Perhaps the historical realities and results of taking risks — as well as understanding the immense power of disciplined emotions — in the early years of the Christian faith will spur some among us onward in making valiant efforts and taking personal risks to promote true Lutheran teaching and practice. After all, our synodical council-convention is filled with just such “average bishops” and “average lay people.”
[1]MacMullen, viii
[2]MacMullen, viii
[3]MacMullen, 29
[4]MacMullen, 40
[5]MacMullen, 46
[6]MacMullen, 56
[7]MacMullen, 63