Quotables & Recommendation

During all that free time I have, I've been reading a provocative little book titled "Against Christianity," a volume by Peter J. Leithart which I highly recommend. While it sounds heretical, the book actually decries the heresy that is modern Christianity and calls for a return to the all-encompassing counter-cultural revolution that is the Biblical gospel. Written in the style of early philosophical works, "Against Christianity" is a compilation of short essays and comments that approach the subject from a variety of angles.

Leithart's main theses (though I highly recommend that you read the book yourself, lest my brief summary does an injustice to his work) exhort believers to view their religion as a culture that involves habits, rituals, and practices that train us in worship as a way of life. He points out that cultures inherently possess language, symbols and rites that define them, or that at least characterize the culture in their expression - such as our singing the National Anthem as Americans. Singing the song doesn't make us American, but it does evoke certain emotions and encourage certain actions that remind us that we are American. And these functions of American ritual cannot be separated from "our instruction in American history, our memories of life in America, the stated goals and aspirations of the American experiment." So too do Christian language, symbols, and rituals arise out of our instruction and shared lives as Christians.

So, modern "Christianity" as a paranthetical aspect of life, or as a "system of beliefs" that we hold in private, is not Scriptural Christian-ness at all. Religion must not, indeed can not, be separated from culture, and so as Christians we must embrace our faith as the pervasive, life-changing culture that it is.

All of that to say, here are a few of my favorite quotes from the book so far:

"The gospel is the story of the Church as well as the story of Jesus. Following the apostolic example, the fathers saw the brides and harlots of the Old Testament history as the Church under various guises, and thus they could view Old Testament history as the story of Yahweh's stormy betrothal with His headstrong bride, fulfilled now in the Father's arranged marriage of His Son to the Spirit-prepared Church." (p. 57, on typological interpretation of the Old Testament)

"The Psalms, Calvin said, are a virtual textbook of the human soul, the central text in biblical psychology. As such, the Psalms give expression to all the experiences of the Christian life; they give words to our pains, joys, afflictions, despair, and by giving language to our experience they bring those experiences under description, make them knowable as our Father's loving care for us...prayer is not a "quiet time" but a time of wrestling and passion. Contemporary hymnology, by contrast, gives us words for a small segment of our experience, the happy, fluffy, light experiences of life. If we are trained in prayer by contemporary praise choruses, when we face the pains and tests of life, we will lack the vocabulary to name them." (p. 67, on worship as psychology class)

"[T]he redemptive-historical move that the New Testament announces is not from ritual to non-ritual, from Old Covenant economy of signs to a New Covenant economy beyond signs. The movement instead is from rituals and signs of distance and exclusion (the temple veil, cutting of the flesh, sacrificial smoke ascending to heaven, laws of cleanliness) to signs and rituals of inclusion and incorporation (the rent veil, the common baptismal bath, the common meal). Rituals are as essential to the New Covenant order as to the Old; they are simply different rituals." (p. 80, on the importance of rituals).

Leithart writes extensively and interestingly on the importance of rituals. He comments on contemporary society's de-emphasis of ritual, on modern man's pride at being liberated from rites and symbolic acts because he is intellectual and "beyond" the need for ritual. But Leithart points out that a culture without ritual is no culture at all; the modern city of man is the anti-city. We have no symbols and rituals that connect us with one another, that create true community. We have gatherings of people for the purpose of "manufactured spectacle", events that garner a superficial emotionality in order to help people feel connected for a brief moment - think of sports stadiums, movie theaters, the like. But as Leithart says, "[t]he result is the anti-city, a mass of people with no communal center or identity."

This is a fascinating read, and one I recommend that you pick up. Leithart's provocative critique of contemporary Christianity (and modernity in general) inspires a thoughtful reflection on all aspects of Biblical faith.