Leithart, like Yoder, wants to read history doxologically, but I am not convinced that he is right to suggest that all politics after Constantine were non-sacrificial. That, however, is a topic for another time. More helpful for the argument I am trying to make is Leithart’s contention that there has been an attempt to resacralize the state in modernity. By exploring that contention I hope to show that Yoder’s understanding of what it means for Christ to be Lord is no less a challenge to the world in which we find ourselves than it was to Rome.
The End of Sacrifice
These last remarks indicate that I think Yoder, though often criticized for tempting Christians to withdraw from politics, is the most political of theologians. For as Leithart suggests, Yoder challenges some of the deepest presuppositions of modern political reality, that is, that only the state has the right to ask that we make sacrifices that are life-changing. The problem with that presupposition is that the state that is legitimated by such sacrifices is not and cannot be acknowledged to be one that requires sacrifice. The sacrifices called for to legitimate the state are hidden even from those who sacrifice and are sacrificed, because it is assumed that whatever anyone does they are acting as free individuals.
Paul Kahn, for example, argues in his book Putting Liberalism in Its Place that the liberal story of the birth of the modern state as an act of reason and free choice in which sacrifice is no longer necessary is a profound illusion.28 It is an illusion of great power, however, because the presumption that a politics can be founded in reason between self-interested free individuals has become such a determinative story that it creates its own reality. But Kahn argues that a politics so conceived cannot give an account of the body and, in particular, the experience of love that constitutes any politics. As a result, how liberal societies determine life and death remains out of sight in liberal theory.29
Kahn, however, observes that the political only properly begins at the point where anyone can imagine sacrificing one’s life or killing others to maintain the state. Thus the general presumption that “the modern state has fully arrived not when it defends me against violence, but when it conscripts me into the armed force.”30 The legitimacy of claims to authority by the modern state depends, therefore, on the sacrifices we are asked to make on its behalf. Kahn argues that such sacrifices are best understood as acts of love. Sacrifice is an act of love constituting the very character of politics just to the extent that sacrifice is “linked to the reciprocal possibility of infliction of injury.”31
That is why war is so crucial for the legitimization of the modern state. The capacity of the nation-state to sacrifice its citizens in war was the great discovery, Kahn argues, of the nineteenth century. That discovery began with Napoleon’s armies, shaped as they were by the popular enthusiasm of the Revolution. The fullest expression of that development is to be found in the American Civil War, in which democratic armies, based on mass conscription, confronted one another. As the result of these developments, the conception of citizenship and political participation broadened, which meant so did the conception of the reach of military service. “The people’s state is supported by people’s armies.”32
A liberal state is therefore no less dependent on sacrifice for legitimacy than the states of the past. In this respect, Western politics is but the expression of the faith of Western religious practices — that is, only by being willing to die does one participate in the sacred. Liberal societies are therefore exemplifications of sacrificial politics just to the extent that the violent destruction of the self is “necessary for the realization of the transcendent character of the sovereign.”33
Sacrifice and sovereignty are therefore linked in the politics of the state. For sacrifice transforms the finite self in order to express the infinite value of the sovereign. Sovereignty is brought into existence through the sacrificial destruction of the body. “The subject, or bearer, of sovereignty in the West has moved from God to monarch to the people. The point, however, is always the same. The sovereign is the source of meaning: it is not a means to any end apart from itself. It reveals itself in the act of sacrifice.”34
Kahn’s account of the relation of sovereignty and the state, a relation that depends on a memorialization of a chain of martyrs to the founding moment in which the state was born, is controversial, drawing as it does on the work of Carl Schmitt.35 However, I cannot help but think Kahn’s analysis of the relation of sovereignty and sacrifice helps to illumine, and is illuminated by, Leithart’s engagement of Yoder’s apocalyptic politics. Kahn confirms Leithart’s contention that the modern state has recovered the centrality of sacrifice for sustaining its legitimacy. What is new about such states, however, is the inability to make those sacrifices constitutive of the theory that informs their self-understanding.
By appealing to Yoder in order to illumine Martyn’s understanding of apocalyptic, I hope I have shown how Martyn’s reading of Galatians should be understood to be an instance of insightful exegesis. Martyn’s reading has immediate political implications, calling into question all sacrifices whose end is not determined by the one sacrifice that is the end of all worldly sacrifices. From such a perspective, the question of Christian participation in war turns out to be a question not restricted to “the ethics of war”; instead, it is a question of how Christians can at once say “Jesus is Lord,” the end of all sacrifices, and yet continue to participate in the sacrifice of war.36
1. Douglas Harink, Paul among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology beyond Christendom and Modernity (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2003), p. 147.
2. J. Louis Martyn, “The Apocalyptic Gospel in Galatians,” Interpretation 54, no. 3 (July 2000): 246.
3. J. Louis Martyn, Galatians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 22.
4. Martyn, Galatians, p. 102.
5. John Howard Yoder, The Christian Witness to the State (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 2002), pp. 8-9.
6. Douglas Harink, “Partakers of the Divine Apocalypse: Hermeneutics, History, and Human Agency after Martyn” (unpublished paper, 2010), p. 24.
7. As far as I can tell, Martyn never enters into conversation with Yoder’s work.
8. Harink, “Partakers of the Divine Apocalypse,” p. 29.
9. Peter Leithart, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2010).
10. John Howard Yoder, “To Serve Our God and to Rule the World,” in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, ed. Michael Cartwright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 130.
