The story of the Son of man as it is told by Daniel encompasses 1) judgment on disloyal and rebellious Israel; 2) the suffering of the righteous against whom the pagan ruler makes war; 3) and the defeat and destruction of the pagan oppressor. Jesus only really makes use of (and places himself at the centre of) the first two parts of this story: judgment on Jerusalem and the suffering of his followers as they proclaim the good news of God’s salvation first in Israel and then in the Greek-Roman world. Paul and John, from a stand-point in the midst of pagan society, also conceive of the third part of the story: the defeat of the pagan power that opposed the church. That pagan power was Rome, represented supremely by the emperor. That ideology collapsed in the fourth century. To my mind that is a clear enough historical fulfilment of the New Testament conviction that Rome would not triumph over the church.

I’m re-reading Stuart Murray’s Post-Christendom at the moment. The following statement captures both the ambiguities and ironies of the transition to Christendom following centuries of Roman persecution and the pervasive sense of triumph:

This was a time of rapid, exciting and unsettling transition. Very few church leaders objected to Constantine’s championing of the church and the favours he bestowed on it. Not all were as uncritically effusive about Constantine as Eusebius, but almost all assumed this was God’s doing and represented the triumph of the gospel over the Empire after centuries of marginality, struggle and opposition. (37-38)

My argument is simply that this specific ‘observable’, historical and enormously important ‘triumph’ is prefigured in the New Testament in the motif of the coming of the Son of man to be vindicated over his enemies and in the passages that speak of judgment on the pagan oppressor. The fact that Christendom became as oppressive as Rome is beyond the purview of the New Testament.