Review: Between Babel and Beast

Leithart, Peter J. Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical Perspective (Theopolitical Visions). Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012.

Reviewed by Matthew Claridge

The term “political theology” may come across as puzzling if not heretical to some evangelicals. We’ve been trained (formally, though not often in practice) to separate the two for some time; its part of our American heritage and history with the “wall of separation” doctrine. But a growing number of theologians are attempting to breach that wall, or at least transform it in a semi-permeable membrane. Indeed, its difficult to categorize these newer brands “political theology” as anything akin to the Berlin Wall type dualism represented in the Yoderian Anabaptist strain or to the “tear down this wall” proposals of the theonomists and Christian reconstructionists. No, an entirely different strategy and model appears to be developing.

Peter Leithart is at the fore-front of this newer brand of political theology. There have been other trail-blazers: N.T. Wright, Oliver O’Donovan, and Richard Horsely to name a few. But Leithart is building on and moving on from these sources to forge his own way. This could not have been clearer than in his 2010 publication, Defending Constantine. In a remarkable departure from the academic consensus, Peter Leithart works mightily to defend a concept long since consigned to the intellectual and political dust-bin: Christendom. As he says in his introduction, “Between Babel and Beast is a book-length footnote to that earlier book[ Defending Constantine].” (x) Here, Leithart wants to expand on his previous book by more precisely and systematically defining the concept of “empire.”

Leithart has three goals for Babel and Beast. We’ve already mentioned the first. His second goal is to complicate our assumptions regarding “empire” as typically understood in recent biblical studies. From a biblical point of view, “empire” is not always a negative concept. Rather, there is a continuum between helpful and dreadful human empires which exist alongside God’s own imperial project through the ages, i.e., the church. This is where Leithart breaks ranks with many in the “anti-imperial” camp that envision the church in constant conflict with the “powers that be.” Leithart views “empire” as ultimately a positive concept when properly understood. Different occasions call for different responses to the political order. Hence, Leithart provides a typology of human empires as either cherubic protectors, totalizing Babels, or ferocious beasts.

How do we tell the difference between these three forms of empire? The answer is simple: how they treat the imperium of God, the church. If the empire protects and recognizes (to its own chagrin) the ultimate authority of the church, it falls generally within a Cherubic mode. Examples are Cyrus’ Persia and Constantine. If the empire marginalizes the church and promotes itself as “God’s gift to world” then it falls victim to Babelic illusions of grandeur. Here Leithart offers America as an example. If the empire gorges on the flesh of the saints, it has become a ravenous beast that will eventually grow fat, sleek, and inebriated on the blood of the church. The drunken collapse of such empires is only a matter of time. Leithart uses the example of late imperial Rome, but I suspect the USSR, Nazi Germany, and other vicious regimes would fit this type as well.

The first half of his book is dedicated to demonstrating this typology from the biblical meta-narrative. Leithart takes us on a grand tour of the entire redemptive story-line, from Genesis to Revelation through the lens of “kingdom” or “empire.” It’s a conscientiously Augustinian approach, modeling the City of God. This section, covering three chapters, contains much remarkable and insightful material, all the more so—unlike Augustine’s effort—for how much ground he’s able to cover in 52 pages.

For his third goal, Leithart is very clear that the church—as a rival imperium—is called to challenge, rebuke, and if need be oppose the empires of the world when they slip into a Babelic or beastly mode. In the second half of the book, Leithart attempts to do just this.  He systematically dismantles the American meta-narrative which he labels “Americanism.”  His definition of this heresy is as follows: “Americanism often sounds like Christianity, but it is not. For Americanism, the American nation takes the place of the church as the sacred community. Americanists read the bible looking for types and shadows of America, and view the constitutional order as the novus ordo saeclorum, an eschatological form of social and political order. In Americanism, America is the world’s future visible already in the present.” (xii) America, as such, is effectively a tower of Babel consolidating all power, nations, and resources around its banner. Americanists feel compelled to evangelize the world with its own superior mythology and political order. This shroud of benevolence, however, masks the primal instinct of self-preservation. It’s been said that Marxism created a “secular” eschatology; Leithart wants us to also admit that Americanism is just another kind of “secular” eschatology. In this way, Leithart seeks to take a prophetic stance against “empire” with the best of the “anti-imperialist” writers out there today.

So where does this leave the church? In what sense is the church also an “empire”? Typically, “empire” is associated with fairly negative ideas: coercion, colonization, exploitation, war-mongering, meta-narratives, etc. Is the church any different than this? Here Leithart introduces an eye-popping distinction built off the insights of thinkers such as Rene Girard. Leithart notes that all babelic empires are sealed in blood: “sacrifice founds and continuous sacrifice perpetuates the …Babelic order” (7). He blames the Civil War for creating a nation of “martyrs for the religion of America” (78). To die for America suddenly became a sacred duty. It’s a theme Leithart traces through Babel, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Rome. But God’s imperium is founded on a different kind of violence: “the fulfilled Israel of the church, by contrast, was founded by the victim not the victimizer … Its ritual center was not a repetitive round of bloody sacrifices, but the memorialization of the sacrifice-ending sacrifice of Jesus, celebrated with wine rather than blood.” (40) This sacrifice “brought an end to holy war, the sacrificial prosecution of war, the legitimation of imperial regeneration through violence.” (ibid.)

Much, much more could be said in fleshing out Leithart’s argument in this book. It’s too sophisticated, subtle, and informed a work to be easily or glibly dismissed. Nonetheless, some evaluation is in order. I will first interact with the first half of the book dedicated to developing his biblical typology and then move on to his historical critique of the American Experiment.

In terms of exegetical epiphanies, the experience of reading Leithart is right up there with reading Geerhardus Vos. The insights and connections Leithart uncovers as he makes his way through the canon is truly remarkable. This ability to “open eyes to see wondrous things out of the law” is a Leithart trademark. Without Leithart’s commentaries on 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings, I would have continued shunning that corner of Scripture as a laundry list of dry morality tales. Leithart is certainly a big-picture thinker who connects the dots of Scripture in a way that reveals a da Vinci rather than a Donald duck.

But I wonder if he always connects those dots in correct sequence or if he’s missed some along the way. In terms of a “coherence test for truth,” Leithart’s biblical worldview is compelling. Whether it passes an objective correspondence with the biblical record is another question. There are several exegetical points to quibble over throughout the book. However, the interpretive move with the most far-reaching consequences is his notion of “Israel-in-Empire … [the] geopolitical system that the New Testament describes as the [gk. oikoumene, eng. ‘economy’].” (23) He sees this as a distinct dispensation in God’s plan spanning between the Babylonian captivity and the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. The empires from Babylon to Rome served a sacred function as “temples” harboring and protecting Israel. Once Herod’s temple fell that arrangement ceased, and no earthly empire is permitted any longer to serve in a similar sacred symbiotic relationship with the “people of God.” Backing up this argument is a strong preterist interpretation of Revelation as is evident in Leithart’s terminus ad quem of AD 70.

Connecting the dots in Revelation in a selective way can yield a preterist reading, but there are dots left unaccounted for. No matter how it’s spun, I find it impossible to identify the “coming of the Son of Man with power” exclusively with the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. His suggestion that the martyrdom of the saints by the Roman Beast and Jewish Harlot is, from heaven’s perspective, simply Christ’s harvest of the saints at (or during?) His Coming misconstrues the text of Rev. 14 and particularly v. 19 (cf. pg. 45-6). Furthermore, Paul’s understanding of the Parousia—which is often built off the language of the Olivet Discourse—is strongly futurist and very difficult to square with a preterist reading (cf. 1Thess. 5; 2Thess. 2; 1Cor. 15).

Apocalyptic language in the NT cannot be endlessly metaphorical. There may be several foreshadows of the man of lawlessness (Antiochus Epiphanes, Nero, Fall of Jerusalem) and of the coming of the Son of Man (transfiguration, ascension, Pentecost), but these point ultimately to a final instantiation when such metaphor gives way to reality. If we do not embrace the final hope of “supernatural intervention” in world history, we may go the way of Hegelian Idealism in which God’s working in the world is purely an immanent process of becoming.

Moving on to the second section of Leithart’s book, greater problems of application arise. There are a number of complicating factors to note here. I find myself agreeing with much of Leithart’s critique of Americanist pretensions. He aptly exposes the long-standing myth that America’s global presence is a reluctant one. Manifest destiny has been flowing in the veins of America since its conception. It is difficult to argue with Leithart that much of this “missional” mindset has been driven by a gradual co-opting of the church’s own spiritual mission. Christ’s church is no longer the final hope for the world, America and its republican, free-trade values are. Nonetheless, I have a few problems with Leithart’s construal.

First, Leithart makes a very serious non sequitur in explaining how secular America overtook the church’s spiritual mission. He locates the moment when the church surrendered its “imperial claims”  to the controversy surrounding the Half-way Covenant of the 1660’s. Leithart summarizes the point of debate: “was the church, like the community, an intergenerational project, or did the church require a discontinuous outpouring of converting grace in every generation? Beneath these was the more subtle question of the public weight of the church: Was the church viewed as an independent imperium to itself, as a private voluntary association, or as the nation at prayer?” (pg. 77) America eventually embraced the latter definition. The church became a voluntary association which requires “a discontinuous outpouring of converting grace in every generation.” For Leithart, this was a disaster which had the effect of subjugating the church to the demands of the nation: “churches reduced to voluntary societies or cheerleaders of republicanism had few resources to resist overheated war fever [speaking of the Civil War]. They did not have the critical distance or independence to say no.” (80) The privitization of the church effectively meant its marginalization as a force to be reckoned with by the state.

This cannot be the whole story, or even most of it, since Leithart’s ecclesiology is simply unbiblical. As one of the chief proponents of the Auburn Avenue Theology, or Federal Vision, Leithart’s move here is predictable. The center of his theology is a sacramental ecclesiology. In that sense, it has a very strong proto-Catholic undertone. Everything turns on how the Eucharist is understood and received. It is so important that it displaces the gospel. This is most clearly seen in his paedo-communion beliefs, expressed elsewhere, in which very young children ought to be welcomed at the table regardless of a profession of faith. In this book, Leithart proceeds to attach political significance to this framework. The church, then, is not simply an embassy of the emperor across the sea, but his colony planted by conquest and political overthrow. Frankly, this sounds a bit like an over-realized eschatology. I will come back to that in a moment.

Now here’s where the non sequitur comes in. I do not think it was the voluntarism of the American church that created the problem of “privatization,” as much as it was the weakening of the soteriological bearings of the churches. In other words, it was compromises with soteriology not ecclesiology that paved the primrose path to a national, secular eschatology. There are other factors that Leithart leaves out of his account, namely, the rise of Enlightenment Rationalism, Unitarianism, the New England Theology, Common Sense Realism, etc. that first of all diluted the heritage of Reformed soteriology and eventually spilled over into radical departures in anthropology and epistemology. Indeed, one could argue that every theological loci was eventually spoiled by these flies in the ointment. It is precisely because the church lost its vision as a discontinuous regenerate community created by God’s action standing apart and in radical distinction to the Kingdoms of this world that initiated the compromises Leithart bemoans.

This critique is further reinforced by a second major area of concern. Leithart’s book is certainly prophetic in tone, but like the Old Testament prophets it is rather ambiguous about how to move forward. In some ways this is understandable and cannot be held against Leithart. We’ve got to clear the air before we can proceed with any sense of where we are going. Nonetheless, there is an aspect of this omission that makes Leithart’s entire case disingenuous. By failing to provide his readers with his own ideal blueprint for the church’s “imperial” role in world society, it protects him from the possibility that his critiques might actually turn back on his own head.

Leithart is a postmillennialist of some stripe. For him the resurrection of a new and improved Christendom is the final hope of the world in this age. But if this is his hope, it leads me to wonder whether his attacks on the early American Puritans is entirely fair. Leithart chides the Puritans and individuals like Jonathan Edwards for their high hopes for America. They were precursors of the nationalist zeal that developed later. Yet it seems to me, granted the postmillenial leanings of that very era, the Puritans had some justification for those high hopes. Can we fault Edwards and the Puritans for hoping that America would be the catalyst for ushering in the global dominance of the church? Doesn’t Christendom have to start somewhere, in some place, with some definable people group?

Indeed, Leithart looks back to Medieval Christendom as a model in which all nations and people were united in a common brotherhood around and in the church. Yet, this Christendom, like all worldly institutions, needed a capital, a clearly defined executive power, and a means of economic self-sufficiency. The city of Rome was the definable center of that system. Far from being an international, global church it became a vast and sprawling ponzi scheme. Furthermore, Medieval Christendom became imperceptibly but definitively a European project if not, in many cases, a Roman-Italian one. I cannot envision how Leithart will avoid something similar, certainly not until the possibility of sin is removed in the resurrection.

To be honest, I have not read Leithart’s Defending Constantine. Perhaps he provides more direction there. Doubtless, we haven’t heard the last of Peter Leithart and in the years ahead he will flesh out in more detail exactly what he has in mind. While I do have some very serious concerns about the interpretive grid Leithart is using, Babel and Beast is nonetheless a fabulous and thought-provoking read. His writing style is effortless, at times playful, and rich in metaphor. The labor involved in producing a book of this sort is truly monumental, as the task of integration and the making of broad but powerful generalizations of intellectual history always are. In that sense, it comes within earshot of achieving the same sweeping vision of Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. It is certainly a milestone book in the area of “political theology” to which I will return often to evaluate, ruminate, and enjoy.

Matthew Claridge (M.Div. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Th.M.  Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is an editor with Credo Magazine and the senior pastor of Mt. Idaho Baptist church in Grangeville, Idaho. He is married to Cassandra and has three children.