time is it?” and “In what cosmos do we actually live?”23 The answer to those questions is revealed by the sacrifices of a people who think it necessary to legitimate their existence.
Leithart on Sacrifice
In his book Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom, Peter Leithart develops a helpful critique of Yoder’s politics. His critique is helpful because Leithart’s criticisms, I hope to show, help us better appreciate the significance of Yoder’s eschatology. I need to be clear. I am not particularly concerned with Leithart’s defense of Constantine’s integrity as a Christian. As Leithart recognizes, Yoder’s critique of Constantinianism has little stake in questions surrounding the authenticity of Constantine’s “conversion.” Much more interesting is Leithart’s suggestion that Yoder failed to appreciate how Christianity fundamentally transformed Rome by Constantine’s outlawing of sacrifice.
That Constantine outlawed sacrifice, a law he enforced haphazardly according to Leithart, was significant because sacrifice was thought to be essential to Roman social and political life. That sacrifice was considered essential to a good politics was an unquestioned assumption in the ancient world. For example, Leithart calls attention to Celsus’s contention that religion had to do with culture and political traditions, with support of the city or state, and was expressed primarily through the act of offering sacrifices.24
Leithart develops a strong case that sacrifice was at the center of Roman life. It was so because Romans assumed sacrifice was the chief religious act that allowed them to communicate with the gods and to keep the gods happy. Moreover, sacrifice disclosed the secrets of the future when the entrails of slaughtered animals were read. Political decisions by the senate were determined by sacrifices, as were imperial decrees. Soldiers sacrificed to the gods prior to battle with the hope of insuring their success. Particularly important were the sacrifices made to or for the emperor to acknowledge him as Lord, Savior, or Deliverer. Because Christians believed there was another King, they refused to sacrifice to the emperor, which invited the Romans to sacrifice Christians not only for entertainment but also for the good of the Empire.25
One of the reasons Christianity proved to be so offensive to Romans, according to Leithart, was that it could not be a civic religion in the Roman sense because it was a religion without sacrifice.26 That is why, Leithart argues, we should not miss the significance that after Constantine’s triumph and establishing himself as Caesar, he refused to enter the Capitolium and sacrifice, as was required, to Jupiter. After his defeat of Maxentius, Constantine made clear that a new political theology was being established, that is, one without sacrifice.27
Through his refusal to sacrifice to the pagan gods Constantine gave political expression to Christ’s triumph over the “elementary things of this world.” History is not a tale told by idiots, because we see how our freedom from bondage, liberation from structures determined by distinctions between the holy and profane, clean and unclean, Jew and Gentile, has now gained political expression through Constantine’s renunciation of sacrifice. Constantine “secularized” political life by showing that the state would no longer be the agent of salvation (pp. 325-27). By bringing an end to sacrifice, Constantine brought an end to Rome, because now Rome depended on a more determinative civic polity, that is, the church.
By recognizing the church’s superiority to Rome, Constantine acknowledged that the sacrifice of Christ, the blood of Jesus, is the end of bloodshed. “The church too was a sacrificial city, the true city of final sacrifice, which in the Eucharistic liturgy of sacrifice announced the end of animal sacrifice and the initiation of a new sacrificial order” (p. 329). The rest, so to speak, is history. Constantine’s refusal to sacrifice, his welcoming of the church as the true polis, created a non-sacrificial politics that became the norm even after the demise of Rome. Leithart celebrates this achievement, noting that “for millennia every empire, every city, every nation and tribe was organized around sacrifice. Every polity has been a sacrificial polity. We are not, and we have Constantine to thank for that” (p. 329).
It is not clear who Leithart thinks the “we” refers to in the last sentence. He has a brief account of Augustine’s understanding of Christ’s sacrifice now embodied in the Eucharist to suggest that any polity that acknowledges the church at least has the potential to be more just. So the church did not “fall” with the Constantinian settlement; rather, with that settlement a politics was begun that in all its variety can be thought to be Christian. The Middle Ages, in particular, are a model of the kind of political arrangement between church and state that Constantine made possible.
But, according to Leithart, Constantine’s achievement has been lost in modernity. Modern states do not welcome the church as the true city because they are willing to recognize only a church that reduces itself to a religion or private piety. This is as true of totalitarian states as it is of democratic ones, for both forms of the modern state are “secretly united in their anti-Constantinianism” (p. 340). As a result, the modern state has reasserted its status as a sacrificial state so that it might be resacralized through the shedding of blood. Interestingly, this resacralization of the state is an expression of a nihilistic politics just to the extent that such states become ends in themselves, because there are no gods to receive the sacrifices the state asks of its members (pp. 340-41).
Therefore the modern state in its refusal to welcome the church as teacher and judge has reasserted its status as a sacrificial state. It has done so, moreover, with a vengeance. The medieval world was bloody, but the “Eucharistic blood of Jesus founded the true city,” which meant there was a brake on bloodshed. Modern nations know no limits, attempting as they must to be resacralized. That states now can “demand the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ ” means, according to Leithart, that in modernity “the ‘Constantinianism’ Yoder deplores becomes a horrific reality, as the church has too often wedded itself to power” (pp. 340-41).
This last remark, suggesting as it does how similar Leithart’s position is to Yoder’s ecclesiology, is why I find Leithart’s criticism of Yoder so interesting. Like Yoder, Leithart thinks the church is the only true polity. Leithart, for example, seems to think Augustine is right to maintain that the church displays for the world what true justice is because true justice is first and foremost giving back to God what God has given us through the sacrifice of the Son. Leithart recognizes that Yoder is quite close to Augustine in that he assumes that the justice of a social order begins in the recognition that the church is a more determinative reality than the state. That the church is so, moreover, means that the church betrays herself and the world when she identifies with the power structures of the world.
Leithart is a Calvinist. He therefore says that “if there is going to be a Christian politics, it is going to have to be an evangelical Christian politics, one that places Jesus, his cross and his resurrection at the center” (p. 332). Yoder would not disagree as long as we remember that such a politics can only be found in the church. Leithart, I suspect, thinks that to be a mistake because he assumes that theocracy should always, at least in principle, be thought to be a possibility.
He also thinks Yoder is wrong about nonviolence. He acknowledges, however, that the most powerful argument for nonviolence is Yoder’s contention that the cross makes nonviolence an unavoidable stance for Christians. For it was at the cross that Jesus’ lordship was established, making clear that the one who is King refuses to save coercively. Leithart acknowledges the power of this reading of Jesus’ death but suggests that more “detailed exegesis” is required — although finally the matter cannot be determined by examination of specific texts but only by “attention to the full sweep of biblical history” (p. 333). Yet “a full sweep of biblical history” is exactly what Yoder
