Anti-Climacus

I often take issue with Daniel Larison on... practically everything. But he's right about the clumsy references to Constantine in the Evangelical Manifesto (first post, on whether Constantine oppressed dissenting religious opinions, here; second, on Evangelical defensiveness, here). From the second post:

Related to the previous post, this is an attitude in the manifesto that strikes me as far more troubling and obnoxious than any perceived defensiveness. No Christians today trace their heritage to Constantine (nor have any Christians at any other time done this). Indeed, the implicit claim is that there are Christians who do trace their heritage to Constantine, and so are actually schismatics who supposedly reject Christ and prefer Constantine. (It is an old polemical move to identify oneself with Christ and others with another individual to demonstrate the sectarian, rather than catholic, nature of the opposition.)

For reasons that might be obvious, I encounter anti-Constantinianism with some frequency, and there are few theological positions that aggravate me more. I try to avoid conversations on these topics whenever possible. A few months ago, I found myself at someone's birthday dinner; one person at the table asked if anyone could recommend a good book covering Christian ethics with respect to war. The gentleman sitting to my right said he considered John Howard Yoder to be the definitive source on this question. I was unable to repress my usual derisive snort, which then led into a long conversation on the merits of the pre-Constantinian church.

As an evangelical protestant, I have the usual reluctance to bring out arguments relying too much on authority, but on this question, I follow the historical interpretation of, among others, Grotius, C.S. Lewis, and Reinhold Niebuhr: the nigh-unitary voice of all Christian writers throughout history indicates that war may permissibly be fought under some conditions. A strictly pacifist view is, at best, a minority opinion that opposes the tenets of most major denominations (Lewis' position), or else an important witness to the church as a whole, but not to be confused with a tenable Christian approach to politics (Neibuhr's). The history of these writers is one of the signal worldly accomplishments of Christianity: without Augustine, Lactantius, Aquinas, Vitoria, etc etc, political ethics would not be developed as it is today.

Unfortunately, as my interlocutor was only too happy to remind me, every one of those came after Constantine, and thus is to be held suspect. He told me I could have my Augustine: he'd rather be on the same side as Christ and Paul.

What exactly do you say to that?