The question of whether Christians could serve as Roman soldiers was contested throughout the pre-Constantinian period. Tertullian's De Corona (c. 211 AD) is the sharpest early statement against it: he points to the absence of any patriarch, prophet, apostle, or bishop who wore the military crown, arguing that military symbols were bound up with pagan religion. Augustine, writing after Constantine, reframed the question: Christ's command to turn the other cheek, he argued, required an inward disposition of non-retaliation rather than a prohibition on bodily military service, allowing Christians to fight under legitimate authority. Chrysostom's homilies on Matthew also engaged the question of Christian victory and suffering, framing true conquest as endurance rather than force. The First Council of Nicaea (325 AD) addressed soldiers who had lapsed in persecution, indicating that Christian military service was by then an established reality.
"What patriarch, what prophet, what Levite, or priest, or ruler, or at a later period what apostle, or preacher of the gospel, or bishop, do you ever find the wearer of a crown?" — Tertullian's argument from the silence of all biblical and apostolic precedent against Christian adoption of military symbols tied to pagan religion.
"What is here required is not a bodily action, but an inward disposition" — Augustine's reinterpretation of Christ's non-resistance commands as governing the heart rather than prohibiting military service, the pivotal move that enabled post-Constantinian Christian soldiers.
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