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The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)
Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)
The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
There has been a huge response to my post on “Too catholic to be Catholic” earlier this week, and I can’t hope to respond to everything. Given what I’ve seen of some of the responses, though, it will be helpful for me to clarify and elaborate briefly the biblical framework I assume for thinking through the problem of the divided church. That framework is taken largely from the history of the divided kingdom of Israel as it’s recorded in 1-2 Kings.
The theological history of 1-2 Kings gives an overall model for thinking about a church that is genuinely divided; it explains how I can describe Catholics and Orthodox as brothers and sisters while at the same time accusing them of liturgical idolatry; in the end, 1-2 Kings (with some parallels from 1-2 Chronicles) gives hope that the division of the church is not permanent, and that we will all one day share a great Passover, such as there never was in Israel (2 Kings 23:22).
Let me elaborate these points.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, May 24, 2012 at 5:53 am
My friends tell me that my name has been invoked in various web skirmishes concerning Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism, sometimes by people, including friends, who claim that I nurtured them along in their departure from the Protestant world. My friends also hinted that it would be good for me to say again why I’m not heading to Rome or Constantinople or Moscow (Russia!), nor encouraging anyone to do so. Everything I say below I’ve said before in various venues – on this blog, in First Things, in conference presentations. But it might be useful to put down my reasons fairly concisely in one place, so here tis.
One of the major themes of my academic and pastoral life, and one of the passions of my heart, has been to participate in the healing of the divided church. I have written and taught a great deal on ecclesiology; I participate in various joint Protestant-Catholic-Orthodox ventures (Touchstone, First Things, Center for Catholic-Evangelical Dialog). I consider many Catholics and Orthodox friends as co-belligerents in various causes, and I think of Catholicism and Orthodoxy as allies on a wide range of issues, not only in the culture wars but in theology and church life.
This isn’t just a theological niche for me. It’s a product of a deep conviction about the nature of the church. I still remember the pain I felt when I first understood (with James Dunn’s help) what Paul was on about in Galatians 2, when he attacked Peter for withdrawing from table fellowship. The division of the church, especially since the Reformation, has largely been a story of horror and tragedy, with the occasional act of faithful separation thrown in. I regard the division of the church as one of the great evils of the modern world, which has seen more than its share of evils (many of which are, I believe, quite closely related to the division of the church). What more horrific sight can we imagine than to see Christ again crucified? Christ is not divided. I think our main response to this half-millennium of Western division, and millennium-plus of East-West division should be deep mourning and repentance.
My Protestantism, my reformed catholicity, isn’t at all in conflict with that passion for church unity. There is no tension at all. On the contrary, it’sbecause I am so passionate to see the church reunited that I, not grudgingly but cheerfully, stay where I am. My summary reason for staying put is simple: I’m too catholic to become Catholic or Orthodox.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, May 21, 2012 at 12:12 pm
Griffiths (Song of Songs (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible)
This, he says, gives us “theological understanding of the Song’s treatment of the parts of the body.” On this understanding, the Song’s treatment of the body cannot be understood as “a monovalent allegorical code.” Since “any member of the body may have multiple beauties and uses and may share with those other members, and if the beauties exhibited by any member can be account for only by appeal to the relations they bear to the beauties of other members, then there can be no such code.” Simply put: “To kiss any single member of the beloved’s body is to kiss all of her cause she is fully present in each, each being constituted by its relation to all.”
Griffiths goes on to make some Catholic applications of the principle, using it to justify communion in one kind. I disagree, strongly. But that doesn’t undermine the truth of Griffiths’ basic paradigm here.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, May 19, 2012 at 5:45 am
As Young notes (In Procession Before the World: Martyrdom As Public Liturgy in Early Christianity (The Pere Marquette Lecture in Theology, 2001)
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, April 14, 2012 at 10:38 am
In her 2001 Pere Marquette Lecture Robin Darling Young (In Procession Before the World: Martyrdom As Public Liturgy in Early Christianity (The Pere Marquette Lecture in Theology, 2001), pp. 1-2
Christians, Young argues, didn’t stumble into martyrdoms; they trained for them: “early Christian communities trained for their own, quasi-eucharistic sacrifice of martyrdom and expected it; they did this by imitating examples from life or from literary works; they scrutinized their own behavior for conformity to traditional expectations; they envisioned themselves to be fighting a cosmic battle upon which hinged the salvation of the world and their own participation in the heavenly court and temple.”
Romans didn’t see it coming: “Of all this battle and sacrifice, of all their training and would-be imitation of the warrior-Messiah, the Roman civil servants had no clue.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, April 14, 2012 at 10:36 am
In his God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics (Challenges in Contemporary Theology)
It seems there is not enough of anything:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, March 31, 2012 at 7:49 am
Bavinck (Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume
Given this complexity, “the Reformers warned against absolutism and arbitrary separation” and began to make “an important distinction . . . between a ‘true’ and a ‘pure’ church, with the former not understood in any exclusive sense but as a description of an array of churches that upheld the fundamental articles of Christian faith while differing from each other in degrees of purity. ’False church’ became the term for the hierarchical power or superstition or unbelief that set itself up in local churches and accorded itself more authority than the Word of God.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, March 23, 2012 at 11:17 am
Gregory VII won his battle, but lost the war. Joseph Strayer (On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton Classic Editions)
Gregory’s reformed ended up solidifying a political nature/grace duality, separated the sphere of love from the sphere of justice.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, December 26, 2011 at 5:53 pm
It’s often noted, but during this Advent the point struck home with particular force: John begins his gospel with the incarnational gospel that the “Word became flesh and tabernacled (skenoo) among us.” God the Word descends from heaven to pitch His tent with men.
But that incarnational descent is not, in a sense, completed unti the revelation of the bride. The same verb (skenoo) appears again in Revelation 21:3: “Behold the tent of God with men, and he will tabernacle with them.” But this describes not the descent of the Son but of the Bride (v. 1).
God’s residence with humanity doesn’t reach its end until the Spirit-filled Bride descends from heaven. The church is not so much a “continuing incarnation” as a “completion of the incarnation.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 5:43 am
Figgis notes that all the great questions of political theory from the late middle ages to Locke and beyond were first formulated with reference to the church: “Whatever we may think now, there is no doubt that such words as king, republic, aristocracy, and the maxims of the civil law, were then regarded as applicable to the concerns and constitution of the Church.” Comparison of Locke to Gerson shows “how great is the debt of the politicians to the ecclesiastics.”
One of they key contributions of the conciliarist debates was the universalization of political theory: “The arguments fro constitutional government were stripped of all elements of that provincialism, which might have clung to them for long, had they been concerned only with the internal arrangements of the national State. The theory of a mixed or limited monarchy was set forth in a way which enabled it to become classical.”
The shift with modern political theory, of course, is the abstraction of this universal theory of politics from any actual catholic political body. Modern political thought is left with the tension between universal ideal theories and the actual traditions and structures of particular nations. By what alchemy of abstraction does an argument for the supremacy of the Council over the Pope in the catholic church become a general argument for constitutionalism?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, December 5, 2011 at 5:34 pm
Figgis again, speaking of the theory of the conciliarist movement: “Speculation on the possible power of the Council, as the true depositary of sovereignty within the Church, drove the thinkers to treat the Church definitely as one of a class, political societies. If it cannot be said that the thought was new, that the Church was a political society, it was certainly developed by a situation which compelled men to consider its constitution. Moreover since the constitution of the Church, whatever it may be, is undeniably Divine, universal principles of politics could be discovered by a mere generalisation from ecclesiastical government.”
Specifically, if the church was a political society, and a perfect one, it cannot “be without the means of purging itself, and may consequently remove even a Pope, if his administration be merely in destructionem instead of inaedificationem, and thus opposed to the end of the Church, the salvation of souls.”
The entire section in Figgis aims to show that “dangerous theories of the rights of the people first became prevalent with the Conciliar movement,” which in Figgis’s view makes “the decree of the Council of Constance asserting its superiority to the Pope” simply “the most revolutionary official document in the history of the world.” In the end, though, the failure of Conciliarism had the opposite effect: It was one of the conditions for the possibility of the Reformation that split the church and “the triumph of the Pope over the Council is the beginning of the triumph of centralised bureaucracy throughout the civilised world.”
In the end, this combination of ideas had evil consequences: If the church is the perfect divine society and a model of all others, and if the Pope is the absolute supreme head of the perfect society, well, then, Louis XIV.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, December 5, 2011 at 4:59 pm
Dumont argues that the Gelasian “two powers” theory is often misread. The theory is not a simple hierarchy, the state subordinated to the church, but a “hierarchical complementarity.” Priests are indeed superior to kings, but they are “subordinate to the king in mundane matters that regard the public order” and thus are “inferior only on an inferior level.” By the Gelasian theory, “if the Church is in the Empire with respect to worldly matters, the Empire is in the Church regarding things divine.”
Things are quire different with Stephen II and Leo III. By the ninth century, the complementary hierarchy has been replaced with Papal assertions concerning their supreme political power, their sovereignty in mundane worldly matters: “the Popes have, through a historical choice, canceled Gelaius’ logical formula . . . For Gelasius’ hierarchical dyarchy is substituted a monarchy of unprecedented type, a spiritual monarchy.” The two powers differ “not in their nature but only in degree” and the “field is unified, so that we may speak of spiritual and temporal ‘powers.’”
The intention is to assert the superiority of the Pope and the church, but the effect is more ambiguous, and in some respects the opposite:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 2:19 pm
No discussion of Yoder would be complete without yet another review of the question of pacifism. But this is no tangent from the present discussion. God calls kings to inhabit His city. He promises that they will respond. When they do, do they remain kings? Can they be disciples of Jesus while exercising worldly power? Here I pose again both of my questions: What if they ask? What if they listen? Must we, as Yoder claims, tell them to lay down the sword?
Once again, history first. Mark charges that I played a nasty and blatant rhetorical trick by loading Yoder and his followers with an unbearable burden of proof. This only appears to be a rhetorical ploy because Mark isolates the argument about pacifism and ignores the larger question I was examining. I spent several chapters of my book testing several of Yoder’s historical claims about the discontinuity between the early church and the Constantinian church. Everyone acknowledges that the church especially in her relation to the empire changed in the fourth century. I wanted to know if the change was of a magnitude to justify Yoder’s talk about a “fall,” about “apostasy,” about an all but universal embrace of “heresy,” the heresy of Constantinianism. I examined three issues: the church’s attitude toward the Roman empire, Christian views on war and violence, and the church’s understanding of Christian mission. The issue was not the pacifism of the early church per se, but the shape of the church’s first millennium of history.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 5:01 am
The following two posts excerpt from my response to Mark Thiessen Nation and Vigen Guroian, who critiqued my Defending Constantine at a session at the recent AAR national meeting in San Francisco.
My response can be summed up with two questions, one for Vigen and one for Mark. To Vigen, my question is “What if they ask?” And to Mark, my question is, “What if they listen?” The force of these questions will become clear as I go. Let me begin with Mark, in more familiar Western territory.
Mark informs me that I don’t believe what I say I believe when I say I believe that Israel and the church are poleis. (Strangely, this is not the first time this year I’ve been told I don’t believe what I think I believe.) At first my disbelief in a political ecclesiology “seems clear” to Mark, but then he wraps it more hesitantly in a “perhaps” and an “it appears that.” Mark goes to the extreme of telling me what I believe because he can see no other explanation for my attempt to unite a (professed) belief in the inherent sociality of the church with support of Constantine and Christendom. I must believe that Israel becomes a genuine polis only when she conforms to the pattern of the surrounding nations, and that the church reaches its “full flowering” as a political reality only with the conversion of Constantine. I must believe the church becomes political only when “one of us” takes control and rules in the “normal way.” For “Why else is it logical to [Leithart] to move from what he has said in the first 120 pages of Against Christianity to Constantine and the beginnings of Christendom, which apparently is to him the logical flowering of everything he has been saying?”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 4:57 am
Twice in the opening question of the Summa, Thomas justifies some institution or practice in the church with a reference to the need for saving truth to be communicated to the uneducated many.
Are sacred doctrine, and revelation, necessary? Yes, and partly because “the truth of God such as reason could discover would be known by a few,” an elite with the leisure and training to pursue philosophical contemplation.
Should Scripture use metaphors? Yes, Thomas answers, and partly so that “even the simple who are unable by themselves to grasp intellectual things may be able to understand it.”
Two reflections: First, this ain’t Aristotelian. Second, Thomas, an advocate for the plebs!
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, November 18, 2011 at 11:50 am
In a 2009 article responding to Richard Hays’s pacifist reading of the New Testament (Studies in Christian Ethics), Nigel Biggar argues that Hays’s Anabaptist reading of Romans 13 is “incoherent.” Hays argues that while the use of force in punishment is ordained of God, “that is not the role of believers.”
Biggar responds: “If God has ordained the use of the sword to punish wrongdoers (and thereby defend innocents), then that is something that should be done. If needs to be done and it is right to do. Why should Christians be exempt from doing what is necessary and right?”
To the Anabaptist argument that the special calling of Christians is to embody the “alternative society so completely governed by God as to lack need of the sword.” If this were God’s intent, Biggar observes, one wonders how Romans 13 got into the NT in the first place. And then he adds,
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 1:11 pm
Make allowances for Schmemann’s settled anti-Western bias, but there is still a lot to be said for his account of the rise of secularism in the West. Its roots lie in the abandonment of the eschatological character of early Christianity: “It replaced the tension, essential in the early Church, between the ‘now’ and the ‘to come,’ between the ‘old’ and the ‘new,’ with an orderly, stable, and essentially extra-temporal distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural,’ between ‘nature’ and ‘grace’; and then, in order to assure God’s total transcendence, it viewed grace itself not as God’s very presence but as a created ‘medium.’”
As a result, “Eschatology . . . became exclusively ‘futuristic,’ the Kingdom of God a reality only ‘to come’ but not to be experienced now as the new life in the Holy Spirit, as real anticipation of the new creation. Within this new theological framework, ‘this world’ ceased to be experienced as passage, as ‘end’ to be transfigured into ‘beginning,’ as the reality where the Kingdom of God is ‘at hand.’ It acquired a stability, almost a self-sufficiency, a meaning of its own, guaranteed to be sure by God (causa prima, analogia entis [Schmemann the Barthian!]), yet at the same time an autonomous object of knowledge and understanding. For all its ‘other-worldliness,’ the Latin medieval synthesis was based on the alienation of Christian thought from its eschatological source, or to put it more bluntly on its own ‘secularization.’” Before secularization in the narrow sense, “the ‘world’ in the West was secularized by Christian thought itself.”
Schmemann’s focus is on medieval Christianity, and his analysis holds best there. Eschatology was recovered by the Reformation, but over the centuries the Reformation became “re-Westernized,” and today the secularizing nature/grace scheme is seen as the essence of Protestantism.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 4:42 pm
In his The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 4:09 pm
Schmemann (Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy and the West
As he puts it, “the one and absolute condition for [the church's surrender] was the acceptance by the empire of the faith of the Church, i.e., of the same ultimate vision of God, world and history; and this we call Truth. . . . As long as the empire placed itself under Christ’s judgement and in the perspective, essential for the Church, of the Kingdom of God, the Church saw no reason to claim any ‘juridical’ independence from it and, in fact, gladly put the reigns of ecclesiastical government and policy in the hands of the emperor. In his care for the Church, in the empire’s function as the Church’s earthly ‘habitation,’ the Church indeed saw the essential vocation of the Christian empire, the very ‘note’ of it being Christian.”
Yet, paradoxically, the church’s surrender was also, in the long run, the church’s victory:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 3:55 pm
1 Corinthians 3:9-10a: We are god’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building. According to the grace of God which was given to me, as a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another is building on it.
Paul sees himself as a builder of God’s house, equipped by God’s grace to lay the foundation of the church, which is Christ. He is a craftsman and carpenter, God’s architect and God’s artist, a tentmaker, a wise Bezalel, who received skill from the Spirit to build the tabernacle. What kind of wisdom is this?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, November 13, 2011 at 7:11 am
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