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Peter Leithart, Against Christianity, Canon Press, 2003, 143 pages

Unlike the Good News for Modern Man, Peter Leithart’s book Against Christianity doesn’t have any pictures in it. But outside the window of this Columbia coffee house there are pictures aplenty to illustrate what’s going on inside Leithart’s book. A team of construction workers is making all sorts of racket remodeling the historic, brick building across the street. They are stirring up dust and annoying the once-comfortable patrons who sip their Sinless Pastry gourmet coffee. The sound of power-tools boring a hole in brick has muffled the sound of the Soggy Bottom Boys singing "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow." Despite the commotion, the reward is in sight. The coffee shop patrons will once again tap their toes to the sound of a smooth baritone. The building’s tenants will soon have new windows where once they had only walls.

Keep that picture in mind. Against Christianity is a ripsaw, a crowbar, a jackhammer. Leithart’s book cuts through the facade of "Christianity," aiming to let in some gospel light. Similar in form to Pascal’s Pensees and Hammarskjold’s Markings, similar in mood to Kierkegaard’s Attack upon Christendom, Leithart’s small book sets its drill bit firmly into the brick of some wrong-headed notions that obscure the Church’s identity and mission. Much of the work, then, is aimed at negation. The early chapter titles read "Against Christianity," "Against Theology," "Against Sacraments," "Against Ethics." Scary titles indeed. At first glance one fears Peter Leithart is a new pen name for Bishop Spong or the Danish Lutheran pastor who denied the existence of God but affirmed a desire to keep getting paid by his church. But Leithart is Leithart, a Presbyterian minister working within the orthodox, confessional tradition. He is not a companion to the renegade hobbyists and their power tools. His wall-knocking and noise-making are aimed at increasing the property value of the Church and the Gospel. When the work is done, here is some of what you will find:

• Against a merely privatized faith for pious individuals, Leithart asserts the social character of the gospel. He writes, "salvation must take a social form, and the church is that social form of salvation. . . . The Church is salvation" (32).
  
  
• Against a Christianity confined exclusively to the head and the heart, Leithart asserts the public and externalized nature of the church (36-38).
  
  
• Against theology as an abstract system of timeless doctrines and truths which keep the things to be believed both clean and safe, Leithart asserts the storied, historicized message of the Bible as God’s Word to the real world of our human experience (46-47).
  
  
• Against a naive conflation of the kingdom of Jesus and the kingdom of America, Leithart asserts the "need to disentangle the American story from the Christian story and to insist on the preeminence of the later" (64).
  
  
• Against viewing worship as an escape from the real stuff of the world, Leithart argues that worship is the real world. Worship is history class, language class, political science class and psychology class. In the Church’s worship we are narrating God’s historic acts, naming the world in the grammar of the Bible, denouncing and dethroning false political rivals and giving words to our human experience (65-67).
  
  
• Against the constant push to contextualize the gospel in the world, Leithart argues that the world should be contextualized in the story of the gospel.
  
  
• Against the modern aversion to ritual and festivity, Leithart asserts the value of a liturgical choreography which trains the soul by "posture and movement" (82) and keeping of festivals (baptism and the Lord’s Supper) which ritualize the new story of Jesus (86-94).
  
  
• Against the historians’ disdain for the Constantinian project, Leithart argues that "forming Christian culture in the wider society is inherent to the Church’s mission" (125).
  
  
• Against an unthinking concession to the reigning mythology of the separation of church and state, Leithart asserts a counter-claim: being the Church is itself political activism. The Church is a body politic, a civil society, an assertion of the way things ought to be (136-139).

The book can be read in one sitting easily enough. But it will likely bring you back for more. There is too much good stuff in here to leave it at one read. It will also send you elsewhere, to the other writers and thinkers who show up as Leithart’s literary dinner guests: Wright, Hauerwas, Yoder, Clapp. I highly recommend the book. Each chapter opens up a window to some fresh proposals for understanding who we are as the Church and what it means to live out the Gospel in the power of the Spirit.

-- TLT (December 11, 2003)