Peter Leithart meant to be provocative in his Against Christianity, but the provocation is the “make you think” kind, and not the bomb-throwing kind. But when you tease out the ramifications of what he is saying, what you have on paper sure looks like it ought to be the bomb-throwing kind, but it still isn’t. Because it makes you think.
For example, he clearly labels “Christianity” as a heresy (p. 137), and then he goes on to identify this more closely. “Baptist and Anabaptist advocates of the ‘voluntary church’ are the ones whose baptismal theology is a theology of conformity with the values of the world — because Baptist theology is Christianity” (pp. 138-139). So there you have it: Christianity is a heresy, and Baptist ecclesiology is Christianity.
But this is a serious book, and so before someone charges off accusing Leithart of atheism or high presby-sectarianism, his objection to Christianity is an objection, not to the Christ part of the word, but to the –ity part of the word. The Christian faith once delivered is not an ism for ideologues. God has intervened in the history of the world to save that world through the death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. That ultimate redemption must not, cannot, be dragged down to earth to become a subset in the history of “ideas.”
I am confident that Peter did not mean that Baptist theology is heretical in the same sense that Sabellianism and Arianism are. The heresy involved is more like gnosticism, the kind of thing that produces assumptions that can and do get into everything, even orthodoxy. And when they get into everything, the result is a different kind of havoc than is caused by the JWs, who advance their very specific false doctrine. The problem that results is more general, diffuse, hard to pin down, and ultimately confusing. And this confusion is why when the (very occasional) Christian preacher declares that Christ is Lord all things in heaven and on earth, and that His Lordship must be acknowledged everywhere and by everyone, and that it in fact will be, such a man is met by baffled stares and hostile glares from Christians. “Are you saying that Jesus is Lord outside my heart?” Well, yes.
The gospel is not a propositional formula designed simply to get our little rear ends into heaven. When God showed the gospel to Abraham (which he believed), it came in the form of a promise of universal salvation. In you all the nations of the earth will be blessed. So shall your descendants be. God promised the world to Abraham, and Abraham believed Him. That was what was credited to him as righteousness. In contrast to this, if we drag the gospel promises down into the world, we have turned the faith into a sect, into an ism. But the gospel is for the world. The gospel outranks the world.
Modernity is a governing idol — a principality — and as such, it will topple and fall. In the history of the world to come, that space will eventually be occupied by Christ and His gospel. But we don’t know when that time will come. Modernity might be the principality that falls before Christ, or it might fall before other idols, and those idols will be the ones that are thrown down by the gospel.
If we are talking about modernity at this governing level (and we should be), then any number of things could be postmodern. If fundamentalist Muslims took over the world and imposed Sharia law, that would be postmodern. If Martians invaded and herded us all into kennels, that would be postmodern too. If the Great Commission is fulfilled, and all the nations of men stream to Christ, as the prophets declare they will, then that would be postmodern.
But almost no one uses postmodern in this simple, chronological sense. What is called postmodern is actually modernity on speed. And because virtually all emergent, postmodern Christians reject the idea of a global Christendom (and reject, as well, the idea of anything else replacing modernity as governor), it shows that their commitment to modernity as governing arche is still abiding and deep. To them I commend, again, Peter Leithart’s magnificent book, Against Christianity.