Ecclesiocentric
Postliberalism:
Will It Play in
Peoria (or Portland, or in Protestantism)?
Hell Shall Not
Prevail:
Essays on
Ecclesiocentric Postliberalism
James R. Rogers
and Peter J. Leithart, eds.
Athanasius Press. 176
pages $16.95
In July 2024 I was listening to a FIRST
THINGS podcast where Mark Bauerlein interviewed James R. Rogers about his recently
released book Hell
Shall Not Prevail: Essays on Ecclesiocentric Postliberalism. I purchased
Rogers’s book and began to explore its content.
James R. Rogers and Peter J. Leithart are the co-editors
of, as well as contributors to, a collection of essays about the little
understood or little appreciated centrality of the church in the current
American context. The seven essays are
written by six scholars of several disciplines. Rogers contributed two essays
and an introduction, Leithart the foreword and an essay. The offerings in this
volume assert the centrality and social nature of the church “in an age and
culture that dismiss or trivialize, or are even hostile to, the church and
church life,” according to Rogers.
The essays in this book present and examine a spectrum of
philosophical, historical, moral, economic, social, political, and theological
issues affecting some Christian enclaves whose developments have ignored, abandoned,
or misunderstood the church’s uniqueness. In other words, the event at
Pentecost was not a one-time gathering of disciples of Christ in baptism by the
Holy Spirit. It was the beginning of something new, but in continuity with all
of God’s historical work of salvation prior.
The genesis for this book follows from the formation of
the Civitas group, a symposium sponsored by Peter Leithart and the Theopolis
Institute. Two years before the publication of this volume several members of
the group met frequently (and secretly according to the first episode of the Civitas
podcast) to discuss the current political and religious situation in the United
States. The approaches taken by its six authors to the centrality of the church
and its apparent cultural insignificance vary.
Rogers’s introduction presents the theme of the book,
identifies the authors of the essays and expresses his own view that “The
Church Is My Polis, the Church Is My Ethos, the Church Is My Oikos.”
The common individualistic notion of “it’s just God and me” is challenged by citing
social, political and corporate understandings of the church as the body of salvation,
perhaps difficult to digest or accept by many American evangelicals: that is
one problem. Another is that although each author is Protestant, he is “Roman Catholic
sounding” in his ecclesiocentrism. Rogers writes that some Protestants possess a
level of indifference toward the centrality of the visible church as contrasted
with that of their Roman and Eastern ecclesial siblings. Leithart suggests that
“Catholic integralists are ecclesiocentric, but the ecclesia they hope will
dominate public life excludes the majority of Christians.”
American evangelicals, it is asserted, are more American
than Christian, more individualistic than social. If there is an order to civil
living for Protestants it would be that the culture overrides religion except
on Sundays. Tocqueville’s prescient observation in his Democracy
in America has come to fruition and is now lived out in American
culture and not without a persistent restlessness.
The articles therein submit selective evidence for the
development of the current American religious temperament. This project of the
Civitas group will be a hard sell to many Protestant bodies, at least in an
indeterminant short run.
Peter J. Leithart in his essay writes how the church has
been trivialized or undercut historically. Citing works of Thomas Hobbes and
John Locke, both, though taking different approaches to the “problem of the
church” in their day, result in the same: the domestication of the church.
Gary L. Young offers (“The Church Builds the World”),
Andrew K. Bobo cites Tocqueville in (“Liberalism and the Restlessness of the
American Soul”), and Ben Peterson argues that ecclesiocentric political theory
provides a robust basis for religious tolerance and liberty in (“Beyond
Liberalisms and Illiberalisms of Fear: Ecclesiocentrism, Tolerance, and Liberty”).
Philosophy professor David Reiter, in his article “Can
Liberalism Provide an Adequate Secular Justification for Respect for Persons?”
analyzes Kantian ethics and its principle of respect for persons (RFP); John
Stuart Mills’s liberty principle (MLP); and John Rawls’s theory of justice
(TOJ). Each attempts to provide secular justifications for freedom and liberty.
With argument and summary syllogisms Reiter draws attention to the inadequacies
of those theories and offers the biblical imago Dei as the only
foundation respecting and guaranteeing the freedom and dignity of persons.
James R. Rogers writes the concluding chapter (“The
Common Good in Ecclesiocentric Economic and Social Thought”).
What has all the above to do with postliberalism? Rogers
limited himself to identifying six concepts of a plausible range of 22 to 57
forms of liberalism, one of which is “ontological individualism,” the denial of
the existence of any truly corporate person or body. In the prolonged death of
liberalism several competing definitions of postliberalism float in the
ephemera, none of which has yet to capture the zeitgeist. Leithart suggests
that any definition of postliberalism containing principles of [non-classical] liberalism
is heretical ecclesiology.
Ecclesiocentric Postliberalism’s aim is the “reformation”
of the American cultural church, a reorientation to the church’s social and
political centrality. Though Protestant evangelicals might chill at the thought
of “social salvation,” the “true character of the church as a political
society” is taught by Anglican theologian Oliver
O’Donovan. How many denominations (or individuals) would accept Henri
de Lubac’s assertion that individual salvation is contingent upon the
social salvation of a people? Even though Rogers writes that there is nothing extra-biblical
in this book, this effort will be a “hard sell.”
Given the pervasive historical and secular attacks on the
church, one can understand why many American Christians tune out when religious
and political discussions ensue. But where will this call for renewal of the
understanding of the uniqueness of Christ’s church play out? Preaching and
teaching in local congregations is a beginning. Perhaps such an approach might
be a “Peoria.”
Worth E. “Woody” Norman, Jr. is a priest at the
Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd in Pelham, Alabama in the Jurisdiction of
the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy (JAFC) of the Anglican Church in North America
(ACNA).
