BOOK REVIEW: Hell Shall Not Prevail - Essays on Ecclesiocentric Postliberalism

 

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).