Yoder, Augustine and Christendom: What is the Real Politics of Jesus?

I continue to ponder the implications of Peter Leithart's brilliant answer to John Howard Yoder in his Defending Constantine: The Twilight of Empire and the End of Sacrifice. I am trying to think through the question of why Yoder advocates a minority church and pacifism for all disciples as the core of that minority church and why he rejects all of Christendom as "Constantinian" and thus heretical.

The problem I have with Yoder at this point is that as Yoder's influence grows and spreads among left-wing Evangelicals and liberal Protestants alike, the theology that emerges from those who are influenced by him is, all too often, individualistic and privatized. For example, many (most) of those influenced by Yoder are acquiescing in the redefinition of marriage by the State.

Now, the Evangelical Left, which is influenced by Yoder, will jump all over me at this point and angrily deny my charge on the basis that they have embraced a socialist ideology which they see as communal. In their account, it is the conservative Evangelicals who are buying into modernity by accepting the marginalized place the church is afforded in late modernity. They are different because they proclaim peace and justice and concern for the poor expressed in welfare statism or democratic socialism.

But what if socialism and the liberal democratic state are simply parodies of true community? What if, as Alasdair MacIntrye recognized, they mask a deep individualism at their roots which is more modern than Christian? Suppose we apply an Augustinian analysis to the modern welfare state. Should we not conclude that the modern state is - precisely to the extent that it privatizes Christianity - deeply idolatrous and pagan?

In the light of these musings, listen to Stanley Hauerwas' comments on Defending Constantine.

Leithart does not think his disavowal of pacifism means he has to reject Yoder's contention that Jesus has a politics. In order to defend his own understanding of the politics of Jesus, he introduces a theme I can only hope he will develop in the future: his defense of Constantine turns on his claim that as a Christian, Constantine ended the Roman sacrificial system. Accordingly Constantine "desacrificed" the Roman political order because he understood that Jesus was the end of sacrifice. The church, for Augustine, is the embodiment of Christ's sacrifice, and this creates a new political reality necessary to keep the state appropriately modest.

It seems to me that what Leithart sometimes calls the "desacrificing" of the Empire, and other times the "baptism" of the Empire, could also be called the "conversion of the Empire." But misunderstanding lurks at every turn here. This "conversion" is the renouncing of idolatry by the Empire, not the turning of the Roman State into the Church. When the State becomes a Church we have a deformation of Christendom. Rather, what happens when the Roman State ceases sacrificing to the gods is that it becomes secular (i.e. belonging to this age between the two comings of Christ, destined to pass away at the end of the age).

Implicit in the ceasing of sacrifice is the recognition of the Church as an alternative polity, a community which proclaims the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ as the call to worship the True God alone through the sacrifice of Christ and therefore to cease from sacrificing to the gods. Yet, in recognizing the Lordship of Christ, the State does not become a Christian State in the sense of the Church taking over the State; instead the State recognizes the existence and legitimacy of an alien polity within its territory - the Church. The Church is the embodiment of true religion so the State no longer has to be religion in and of itself. It is Christian precisely by being secular.

The Church is the node at which Christendom connects to Divine Revelation and therefore its preaching of God's will has authority for all within Christendom including rulers. But rulers still rule according to prudence and are justified in making space within Christendom for dissenters (Jews, pagans, Muslims, atheists). This is where tolerance came from historically. The Church proclaims moral truth; rulers practice statecraft. We have two sources of authority in society, not just one. Neither the Church leaders or the political leaders are all-powerful.

The problem with Yoder is that his view of conversion is all or nothing. For him, either Constantine becomes a pacifist or he remains pagan. The conversion of the state, for Yoder, can only mean a theocracy and he, quite understandably, cannot imagine a violent theocracy being a proper witness to Jesus Christ in this world. (It is significant that separated Anabaptist communities have quite often become Constantinian mini-Christendoms.).

Yoder failed to recognize that for a state to be converted might look different from what it would mean for an individual to be converted. We as individuals are not converted to secularism, but to Christian discipleship. For you or me, to become a Christian means to worship God through Christ. But for the state to be converted means for it to cease sacrifice and not presume to worship at all. Why? Because it recognizes that worship happens in the Church and that the State is not the Church.

Yoder has to dismiss all Christendom as Constantinian and evil because he does not recognize that there are three, rather than two, ways for the State to be the State. The State can either be a pagan idolatrous State or a Theocratic, Church-dominated State, but it can also be a modest, limited government that recognizes that it is not ultimate or Divinely sanctioned in and of itself. It can recognize its limits precisely by doing what Constantine did: that is, by ending sacrifice and recognizing the truth of the Gospel and the role of the Church as a polity distinct from the State with its own proper role to play in Christendom.

Such a State will not presume to re-define marriage by fiat, nor will it authorize the killing of the pre-born, the young, the sick, the elderly or the handicapped. It will not require its citizens to be practicing Christians, but it will encourage them to be such. It will give many advantages to the Church, make holidays conform to the Christian calendar and seek to promote marriage and the family as the foundations of a healthy society. It will be open to civil society and avoid totalitarian tendencies to meddle in the lives of individuals to the extent compatible with law and order. It is appropriate to call such a State "Christian" so long as you know what that means. You know what it means if you can give an account of why a "Christian" State must be secular and give individuals the freedom to believe or not.

It is my conviction that Yoder's theology plays into the hands of late modern, Statism by not calling the State to the conversion that is proper to the state. Because of this error, Yoder can only imagine a minority Church ever existing and thus he equates Christendom with unfaithfulness. Meanwhile, the State is left free to proceed on the path to its own divinization. Just as the Roman Emperors gradually began to accept worship, so the late modern State gradually assumes Divine prerogatives.

To hold, as Yoder does, that the State cannot be converted without becoming pacifist and thus committing suicide, is to determine ahead of time what God's Spirit is allowed and not allowed to do in history. If Kenya, for example, goes from being 9% Christian in 1900 to being 91% Christian in 2000, (which it did), then we have Christendom like it or not. A true Christian political theology must allow for such a possibility and have something constructive to say to Christian politicians in Kenya. What is has to say is the true politics of Jesus, but ironically we need to look to the Augustinian tradition rather than the Anabaptist tradition for help in spelling out that politics.

Defending Constantine by Peter Leithart: A Brief Review

The title "Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom" should have been "Defending Constantine from John Howard Yoder." This is not meant, I hasten to add, as a put-down. This is a splendid book and by far the most substantial response to Yoder's The Politics of Jesus to date.

Yoder's theology is interwoven with history in intriguing and rich ways and Leithart's work displays a similar inter-weaving of history with theology that take both seriously while recognizing that, in the end, it is the theology that matters crucially.

Some may have been surprised by Stanley Hauerwas' extremely positive review of this book recently in The Christian Century, but Hauerwas is right to discern in Leithart a worthy opponent and a very attentive reader of Yoder. I want to offer three points on which I think Leithart is right in this book and Yoder is wrong and then ask the question of whether Leithart's critique of Yoder is fatal to Yoder's version of the politics of Jesus, and in particular to Yoder's call for all Christians in all times and all places to embrace pacifism. In conclusion, I will return to the issue with which Hauerwas ends his review: the question of contemporary liberal democracies as sacrificial states due to their lack of openness to the Church as a "model city."

First, it should be recognized that Leithart has demonstrated the failure of Yoder's historical argument for the "fall of the Church" in the fourth century from a pacifist community to a chaplaincy status vis a vis the Roman state. Clearly, the Church got in bed with Rome and no one can deny that abuses, failures and shameful incidents followed in due course. Leithart has no interest in denying such facts of history. But Leithart raises two questions: (1) has Yoder demonstrated that the early church (pre-fourth century) was pacifist and (2) was the influence of pagan society on the Church a one-way street or did the Church actually change Rome as well as being partially corrupted herself?

I do not think that any fair-minded reader of Liethart's scholarly, historical research interspersed with his close reading of Yoder's writings will fail to conclude that Yoder did not prove that the early Church had a pristine, pre-Constantinian, purely pacifist character which it then was able to lose in its rush to embrace Constantine's offer of Imperial wealth, prestiege and power. It could not fall from a height it had never attained.

The evidence for Christian participation in war and violence is mixed all through the first three centuries and Yoder's method, upon encountering evidence of Christian's serving in the army or other evidence of Christian non-pacifism, is simply to interpret it as "creeping Constantinianism," that is, as Constantinianism before Constantine. This is an exceedingly weak rationalization, trading as it does on the assumption that where the sources are silent they would all, if known, reveal a pacifist church from which the examples of Christians serving in the army in the known sources are deviations.

Now, Leithart recognizes that the historical argument cannot be decisive. Even if the early Christians were not pacifist, perhaps they should have been. But to the extent that Yoder delegitimizes the post-Constantinian Church so easily and thoroughly, this means that his argument from history is not valid. We will see how easily the fall of the Church narrative leads Yoder to dismiss Augustine in due course.

Secondly, Leithart easily demonstrates how horribly unfair Yoder was toward Augustine and how Yoder's failure to wrestle with Augustine's philosophy of history undermines much of the force of Yoder's criticism of Christendom. Yoder makes no distinction between Eusebius and Augustine, even though it was Augustine, more than anyone else, who enabled the Church to extricate itself from the shallow, over-realized political theology of Eusebius. Leithart even makes the point that Eusebius himself was more nuanced than he is often given credit for being.

But Yoder's failure to come to grips with Augustine, combined with the failed "fall of the Church narrative," is what sinks his understanding of Constantinianism. Yoder simply did not have Augustine's robust and differentiated eschatology and so fell into the same trap as Eusebius. Just as Eusebius viewed the conversion of Constantine and the Christianization of the Roman Empire as the dawning of the kingdom of God, Yoder viewed the same events as the fall of the Church. Both overstated what was happening. The one who kept his head and worked out a view of history in which both state and Church are necessary and neither can do without the other during this time between the first and second comings of Christ was Augustine. In so doing, Augustine laid the foundation for Christendom - not the unmitigated disaster of racism, violence, persecution, colonialization, exploitation, greed etc. imagined by so many - but the attempt to fashion a society in which the vast majority of people, including the rulers, confess Christ as Lord. For Augustine, the Church contains both true believers and hypocrites and the State can be either demonic or restrained and sometimes fluctuates wildly between the extremes. This sounds like Western history.

Thirdly, Leithart's explanation of in what sense Constantine "Christianized" the Roman Empire is suggestive and insightful. He says that Rome was "baptized" by Constantine's initiative in halting pagan sacrifice; in so doing Constantine "desacrificed" the Roman empire (pp. 326ff). The death of Christ means the end of sacrifice and Constantine implemented that in the Roman world. Hauerwas appreciates this insight and writes:

Leithart seems to be of two minds about the implications of this for understanding our current political alternatives. He observes that America is not a sacrificial polity and that "we have Constantine to thank for that," but he also claims that because the modern state, now shaped by the nihilism of modern politics, refuses to welcome the church as the model city necessary for judgment, it has again become a sacrificial state. Yoder could not have said it better. In fact, in some of Yoder's last work he sounded very much like Leithart on sacrifice as he sought to remind us that one of the realities that sacrifice names is war.

Hauerwas nicely captures Liethart's ambivalence at this point. Quite rightly, Leithart wants to say something positive about modern Western society. Insofar as it remains Christendom - or, at least, what comes after Christendom - it is "desacrificed" and this is a good thing. However, Leithart's cryptic comments about "the nihilism of modern politics" point to a reality that we have to consider. (One hopes Leithart will spell out his political theology in more detail in future writings.) Hauerwas is right to name war as one of the sacrifices made in the modern state and as one of its pagan features.

But, to say "war" is too abstract. Here I suspect Leithart would push back and remind us, in an Augustinian fashion, of the ambiguities of why people fight. For a Christian to participate in war is not always to participate in pagan sacrifice. This is the heart of the disagreement between Leithart and Augustine, on the one side, and Yoder and Hauerwas, on the other.

I suggest that if we really want to point to a clear and unambiguous example of the "resacrificing" of modern, Western, liberal democracies, we should point to the clearly sacrificial practice of abortion in the name of the sexual revolution. Our daily sacrifices to the god Pleasure condemn our societies as pagan and unbelieving. Maybe another Constantine would not be such a bad thing.

Does this book constitute a comprehensive and final answer to Yoder's call for the Church to embrace pacifism as its essential posture in this world? My reading of Augustine over the past five years has convinced me that it is time to move on from Yoder's version of the politics of Jesus and be much less hasty in dismissing Christendom as I, like many others, have been. In truth, the only reason Leithart's book did not convince me of the absoluteness of pacifism as the essence of the Church's witness is that I had already been convinced by Augustine. But I predict that Leithart's book will lead many to re-consider their "Yoderian" position and ponder the possibility of a politics of Jesus that moves beyond doctrinaire pacifism.