[Editor’s Introduction: what follows is an excerpt of Peter Leithart’s Against Christianity.[1] In this excerpt, Leithart disputes John Howard Yoder on the issue of Christendom—a cultural Christianity where society adopts Christian values but many people disingenuously profess to be Christian.
1. Peter J. Leithart, Against Christianity (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2003), 144–149.
Yoder is arguing against Christendom (also called Constantinianism).[2] He sees Christendom as inconsistent with the Christian call to serve others, and he accuses Christendom of focusing instead on the wielding of power, which he sees as inconsistent with Christianity.
2. Yoder’s argument can be found in John Howard Yoder “The Constantinian Sources of Western Social Ethics,” chap. 7 of The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Leithart’s summary of Yoder can be found immediately preceding the following excerpt in Against Christianity, 141–144.
Yoder believes that prior to Constantine’s conversion (312 AD), the Sermon on the Mount formed the ethic for all Christians, regardless of vocation. After Constantine, Yoder argues, secular concerns overrode the basic ethic of Jesus for most Christians. Only the religious dimensions of one’s life were to be ruled by the Sermon on the Mount; one’s secular career would be governed by society’s expectations for those roles. Thus, only those with specifically religious callings were expected to live by the teachings of Jesus in every aspect of life. Ordinary Christians could live by Jesus’s teaching in their private religious life, but in public life they would be governed by the secular ethic of their vocation.
In particular, Yoder is bothered by the way in which Christians became involved in the affairs of government and began to ‘Christianize’ society after Constantine. As society became more influenced by Christianity, the church’s focus shifted to the advancement of Christendom (that is, a Christian social and political order) than the spread of the gospel. Christians began to exercise lordship in social and political spheres, which Yoder argues is antithetical to Jesus’s ethic of servanthood. In other words, the church began to embrace an ethic of power in the public sphere, while reserving Jesus’s ethic of love for the private sphere. Eventually, the ethic of power came to hold sway as the only Christian ethic, and the advance of the gospel was subjugated to the increase of Roman political influence.
The solution, Yoder argues, is for the church to abandon Christendom and its associated “ethic of power” (that is, the attempt to influence society and government in Christian directions) and instead return to an ethic of pure self-sacrificial love in both public and private spheres. Leithart responds to Yoder’s thinking in the excerpt below.]
~~~~~~~
Even if Yoder’s historical claims are entirely justified (and many of them are), he has not proven that “Christendom” or “Christian civilization” as such was a mistake. . . . Some of Yoder’s arguments are seriously flawed. For instance, does the New Testament highlight the Sermon on the Mount, or the teaching of Jesus in general, as the Alpha and Omega of Christian ethics?
Historically, this is a dubious claim. The teaching of Jesus was an intervention in the history of Israel, which was a history of debate and dialogue concerning the demands of Torah. Jesus did not start de novo, propounding a completely new Torah; instead, He propounded a reading of Torah.
And Torah contains guidelines for the godly use of power that are not contradicted by Jesus’ teachings on Torah. Yet, my argument is not so much against Yoder himself as against the “systematic pessimism” that he identifies and does not altogether escape. Yoder’s faithful Constantine would have produced a very different world from the one the real Constantine produced, and Yoder’s vision of a Christian politics differs radically from mine (for starters, he was a pacifist, and I am not). But Yoder seems to agree that a Christian politics, outside the polity of the Church, is a real-world possibility. Those who deny this possibility, the pessimists, have assumed Christianity, and therefore are still modernists, despite their fulminations against modernity. Consider: Yoder says, “If kenosis is the shape of god’s own self-sending, then any strategy of Lordship, like that of the kings of this world, is not only a strategic mistake likely to backfire but a denial of gospel substance.”[3] If we leave things here (which Yoder himself does not quite do), we are left with a dilemma and even heresy.
3. The Priestly Kingdom, 145.
Heresy first: Yoder assumes that “Lordship” always and everywhere must be the Lordship of the “kings of this world.” This cannot be the case, for the ultimate Lordship is exercised, as Yoder would have remembered if he had extended his quotation a few verses further in Philippians 2, precisely by the self-emptying Son. Equating “Lordship” with “worldly Lordship” is Christological (and theological) heresy. Who is Lord, anyway?
Second, the dilemma, unfolded in several stages: To say that Lordship always and everywhere is worldly is to say that the governance of cities and nations and empires is impervious to the influence of the gospel. Worldly politics is the only game currently in town; even worse, it is the only possible game in town.
To say that worldly politics is the only game in town is to suggest that the political world is autonomous and secular—fundamentally, necessarily, and unchangeably so. This is modernism, and, on Yoder’s terms, “Constantinian.” This rests on the assumption that power cannot be exercised in a Christlike fashion, and that is precisely the assumption of the most naive defenders of Constantine—namely, that Constantine’s unchristian political actions are to be excused because he is a politician, and everyone knows that politicians are above the rules that govern the rest of us. Rejecting Constantine lands the pessimist, paradoxically, among the “Constantinians.”
Finally, the corollary is that the Church does not really have much to say to worldly powers, at least nothing that can be effective. The Church might have some effective word for its members, some pious advice for the private life of the ruler, but has no words of power to speak to power. This is Christianity, the assumption that the Bible addresses only the private and personal rejection of “Constantinian” privatization lands the pessimists, paradoxically, with the privatizers.
In the end, this systematic pessimism is simply a disbelief that the gospel describes the way things really are. For if the gospel describes the way things really are, it describes the way politics really is, and that should make it clear politics is not the autonomous secular sphere imagined by modern politicians. It should make clear that politics can be shaped to the gospel and that the kingdoms of this world have and will, more and more, become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ.
A Parable About Stanley
Once there was a prophet named Stanley. The prophet Stanley was a bold and faithful man who stood with granite face against the powers of the age.
“you cannot do that s—t,” he would say, as he stood before the king. “you are going to end up in f——g h—l, and your people are going to hate you.”
One day, the king began to listen and to see the wisdom of Stanley’s words. When Stanley told him that the weak must be protected from the vicious strong, the king took steps to protect the weak. When Stanley told him that Jesus was Lord, the king bowed his knee. When Stanley told him that religious freedom is a subtle temptation, the king took heed.
And the king made a proclamation, that all in his kingdom should wear sackcloth and ashes and repent of their sins, even to the least beast of burden.
And Stanley went out from the city and made a shelter and sat under it and refused to speak again to the king.
And Stanley said, “Lord, please take my life from me, for death is better to me than life. I am a d—n prophet, not a f——g chaplain.”
And the Lord said, “Do you have good reason to be angry?”
As for the king, he was greatly confounded and confused, and knew not what to do; for he had done all that Stanley had asked.
This parable ends with questions, not a moral: Will the king always refuse to listen? Says who? And, when the king begins to listen, must the Church fall silent, so as to avoid becoming a chaplain? To keep her integrity, must the Church refuse to succeed?
The Political Church
So long as the Church preaches the gospel and functions as a properly “political” reality, a polity of her own, the kings of the earth have a problem on their hands. Some Haman will notice that there is a people in the empire who do not live according to the laws of the Medes, and reports will come from the colonies that there are men attacking the decrees of Caesar and proclaiming another King. As soon as the Church appears, it becomes clear to any alert politician that worldly politics is no longer the only game in town. The introduction of the Church into any city means that the city has a challenger within its walls. This necessarily forces political change, ultimately of constitutional dimensions.
Suppose the king recognizes the Church as a counterweight to his own authority, or even, however grudgingly, as a prophetic voice. In that case, we are dashing off to Christendom, even if we run most of the way alongside Yoder and Hauerwas.
Suppose the king tries to suppress the Church legally or through extralegal violence. In that case, a clash is unavoidable, one that kings have had difficulty winning. Besides, suppressing the Church is itself a constitutional decision, a decision that the king will not accept the Church as a counter-kingdom alongside his own kingdom. That is a statement about the character of the political order, which clarifies its claim to monopoly of authority and which sounds like a claim to a monopoly of worship. Should the king suppress the Church, he shows his true colors, and it becomes obvious that his regime is implicitly totalitarian.
Suppose the king is a liberal who tries to police the boundaries of the Church, telling the Church where it can and cannot speak, what it can and cannot do. In that case too, a clash is inevitable and, again, kings have a hard time winning such battles. Besides, once the king decides to police the boundaries of the Church, he is again making claims of a constitutional order about the extent of his power.
On the other hand, if the Church appears preaching Christianity, the king is entirely capable of stealing the rhetoric and story and ideas of the Church to buttress his power. Every Constantine can find an amateur Eusebius who will use numerology to prove that his kingdom is the fulfillment of Israel’s prophetic hope. Or, political powers may simply force Christianity into the private sphere—shoving ideas back into the brain and Christianity back into the churches. Churches in the grip of Christianity will hardly blink when the liberal king tells them that they have to confine themselves to thinking pious thoughts.
~~~~~~~
[Editor’s Conclusion: The gospel ethic of Jesus is inherently political. While the Kingdom of God is emphatically not to be identified with any of the kingdoms of this world, the two will always be related to one another in this age. The church must either declare the reign of another King or capitulate to the powers that be. If the church faithfully proclaims the reign of Jesus, the rulers of the world will either seek to suppress the church’s declaration, grudgingly acknowledge it, or submit to it. In any case, the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world will have a political dimension which Christians ought not to shy away from.
Those who identify the church with the powers that be will become pawns for a game between secular rulers, but those who attempt to avoid any political implications of Christianity will abandon their witness and restrict themselves to a privatized, non-evangelistic piety. A faithful church will maintain a clear distinction between itself and the government, but will always seek to exhort rulers, authorities, powers, and principalities to bow the knee to King Jesus in every area of life—even those in the public sphere.]
