The Lust for Leadership

Peter Leithart commenting on Diotrephes in III John 1:9-10 in his book From Behind the Veil. 

Though the specific situation of Gaius' church is not replicated in every church, the threat of prideful members and leaders like Diotrephes is a perpetual threat. John instructs churches of all times to pay attention and watch out for men in the church who lust for leadership. Watch out for the ambitious man. Watch out for men who refuse to bow to authority, take advice and counsel, resist necessary rebukes and exhortations. Watch out for the men and women in the church who fill the church with gossip and evil words about the leaders in the church. Watch out for people John says, who refuse to receive brothers, who close themselves off from Christians who are not part of the in group. Watch out for these Judaizing tendencies. 

 This is all the product of pride, of wishing to be first, and it destroys the fellowship of the church. This is evil conduct of the most serious nature. If we are going to be judged by how we treat the "least of these my brothers," then we had better be very careful to avoid pride, ambition, gossip, slander, evil words, and resistance to counsel. We ought instead to be cultivating humility, service, edifying speech, and submission to the authority of those set over us. 

Two Types of Fear

Pastor Leithart commenting on I John 4:18, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love”

“John is not contradicting the rest of Scripture when he says that perfect love dispels fear.  He assumes, with the rest of Scripture, that here are different sorts of fear.  We have a right fear of God if we are awed by his power and majesty.  We have a right fear of God if our fear of God draws us close to him. We have a right fear of God when we honor him as our Maker, Lord, and Savior.  John is talking about a cowering fear, the fear that God is out to get us, the anxious worry that we will not stand in judgment.  Johns is talking about the fear of Adam, the fear that came from a bad conscience and drove Adam to hide in the garden. This kind of fear is driven out by the love that God has shown us…fear moves us, and the difference between right and wrong fear is the direction it moves us. Adam feared God, and hid in the garden. Wrong fear drives us away from God’s presence.  Right fear draws us closer, in awed fascination and quaking love toward the God who is a consuming fire.” (From Beyond the Veil, p. 157-158)

What Does the First Amendment Prohibit?

Pastor Leithart commenting on I John 4:1, “ Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God”

“We live in a dazzling carnival of religious options. You can find a hundred and one varieties of Christianity, anything to suit your taste-classical Christianity, country Christianity, crunchy Christianity, be-bop Christianity and hip-hop Christianity. And that’s not even to mention the hundreds of NRMs-New Religious Movements-invented every year in this country. Our culture wants to persuade us to just accept it all: let a thousand flowers bloom. Celebrate the diversity and richness and variety of the American religious life. Above all, make no judgments. Don’t examine, test, judge.  That is the main thing the first Amendment prohibits, which, freely paraphrased, says, “Thou shalt not test the spirits.” 

Open God's Ears by Opening Your Own

“When our hearts are assured by God, we have confidence in prayer. We can ask whatever we want because we keep his commandments and live in a way please to God [I John 3:22].   John is not talking about ‘works righteousness,’ as if we could coerce God into doing us favors by our good works.  But he does say there is a causal connection between effective prayer and obedience: ‘whatever we ask we receive from Him, because [hoti] we keep His commandments.’ If you prayers are not being answered, examine yourself. Ask if you are walking in obedience. If you want God to open his ear to you, open your ears to him.” (Peter Leithart, From Beyond the Veil, p. 127)

Do You Act Like an Alien?

“Unfortunately the modern church has too often tried hard to avoid being strange. Modern Christians have adjusted to the world’s standards.  We don’t want to sound unscientific, so we find ways to reinterpret Genesis 1 so it fits with current scientific theory.  We don’t want to look odd, so we conform our fashion sense to that of the world, without considering whether or not God has something to say about our clothing. We don’t want to be uncool, so our tastes become identical to the world.  This makes things a lot easier.  There’s no conflict between the church and the world when the church imitates the world. We don’t seem alien and strange, as if we have come from another planet, but we are acting against our nature: we are children of God, children of the resurrection, but we behave the same as the children of the devil, as if we were still in the same old, dead flesh as everyone else.” (Peter Leithart, From Beyond the Veil, p. 115)”

You Still Need Teachers

Peter Leithart commenting on I John 2:27, “His anointing teaches you all things.”

“Christians have sometimes taken John’s statement out of this context and concluded they don’t need any human guidance or instruction. Even Christians who do not renounce teachers in principle act as if they don’t need any help, as if they the can survive and flourish in the Christian life without any instruction from anyone. The rebellious child who refuses to listen to his parents; the husband who won’t take counsel about how to deal with a troubled marriage; the young man with credit card debt who keeps trying to solve the problem without getting help: refusal to hear instruction is not a sign of spirituality, but a sign of arrogance, and a sure prescription for failure. Teachers are God’s gift to the church; we can’t prosper if we are contemptuous of God’s gifts.” (From Beyond the Veil, p. 104)

Seeing God

Peter Leithart notes that many Christians see God the Father as this cold, harsh, angry God who needs to be appeased by the kind, loving Jesus.  However, this separates what the Scriptures have joined together. In the Bible, Jesus is God. There are not two gods, one angry, one loving. There is one God. He is love. This love is seen as the Father sends the Son, the Son dies for his people, and the Spirit is poured out so that the people might love each other.

"You want to know what God is like, really? Take a look at the gospel. If you have seen Jesus, if you have seen him in the  manger, seen him tempted in the wilderness, seen  him passionately fighting the Pharisees who oppress his people, freely offering himself on the cross, powerfully rising again from the dead-when you have seen all this, you have seen God who is love.   Jesus did all of this out of his love for us, and because his Father sent him out of love. You want to see the love of God, read about Jesus. For whoever has seen Jesus has seen the Father."  (From Behind the Veil, p. 151)

A Profession of Faith is Not Enough

"Being in the light that is the life of the New Covenant requires more than a profession of faith. Several times John contrasts what people say with what is actually the case (I John 1:6-7, 2:10). We do not have fellowship with Christ merely by saying we have fellowship with him. We must not only say we have fellowship with Light, we must actually walk in the light, especially by living in fellowship and love with our brothers in the church." (Peter Liethart, From Behind the Veil, p. 52)

Maybe It Wouldn't Have Been So Great

How many of us have thought, if only I had been able to walk with Jesus to see his risen body, then I wouldn't have to trust in anything but my own eyes.  Dr. Leithart effectively counters this argument in his commentary on I John. 

"We often think fondly of how wonderful it would have been to be alive in Palestine when Jesus was around.  We would not have to believe on the testimony of anyone else. We could have seen all those miracles with our own eyes.  We would not have to hear about people handling Jesus; we could have touched him with our own hands.  We could have sat with him at a meal.  But being there was not a guarantee of being a disciple.  Many saw the miracles and either denied them, or found some alternative explanation for them, or hated Jesus for stirring the pot. Many people touched Jesus only to lay hands on him to arrest and kill him.  Had we been there,we might well have been in the crowd clamoring to lynch him." (Peter Leithart, Behind the Veil, p. 42)

Unity is Bloody

"We moderns think unity is easy. We only have to sit down and talk and everyone will rise from the conference table filled with the glow of love and peace.  The Bible knows this is a delusion.  Unity is costly, achieved only by the anguish of crucifixion.  Unity seems easy for us only because of the blood of Jesus, and the blood of many martyrs since."  (Peter Leithart, Behind the Veil, p. 34-35)

Peter Leithart on Political Theology

Here is an interview Peter Leithart did with the Society for the Advancement of Eccelsial Theology.  I have not heard of this particular group before. However, the interview is very helpful. Dr. Leithart makes the simple point that the entire Christian life is political because we serve a King and live in a Kingdom that is not of this world. I especially enjoyed the phrase "Christians never have limited political capital."  I have reprinted the interview in full below.  It can be difficult in places, but I think you can get the main point. 

1. For those who are not familiar with your work, can you describe your contribution to the question of how the individual Christian and the Church relates to the State?

PL:  I have addressed church-state questions in many of my books, though obliquely rather than directly.  I have explored those themes in various books – The Kingdom and the Power, Against Christianity, and more recently my historical study, Defending Constantine, where I address church-state relations more directly.

But I am convinced that political concerns are inherent in theology.  Political theology is not some specialized branch of theology, but a dimension of all theology.  Politics is not simply about passing this legislation or electing that candidate.  Politics addresses questions about the distribution of power, and more broadly questions about the shape and future of a group.  Theology cannot help but address those questions, and do it all the time.  The Bible certainly deals with political questions like this.

So, even when I am not doing political theology, I am doing political theology.  Let me given a couple of examples of what I mean.  Ecclesiology has been a major focus of my work, and, as I see it, that bumps directly up against political questions.  The intimate connection between ecclesiology and politics has been obscured in modernity because the church has been marginalized and has allowed itself to be transformed into a sociologically invisible and politically innocuous religious group.  Scripture, by contrast, treats the church as a political entity in itself, each individual congregation as an outpost of the heavenly empire of a heavenly Emperor.   That means that the church and its claims about Jesus, sin, and salvation are political claims, necessarily.  I’ve also written a lot on sacramental theology, and I have had the same concerns in view.  Sacraments ritualize and represent the kind of community that the church is and aspires to be, and that again means that the sacraments inevitably have a political dimension.  I think in fact that the eclipse of sacramental consciousness and sacramental theology is one of the great political tragedies of the past several centuries of church history.  The Eucharist has been privatized and individualized, and that means it lacks the political edge – as the table of the kurios, the Lord – that it has in the New Testament.  How many wars among Christian nations would have been avoided if our sense of community had been shaped by being table fellows with one another?

2.  Richard Mouw and Carl F. H. Henry have suggested that the Church’s role is not coterminous with the responsibility possessed by individual believers.  Do you agree or disagree?

PL:  Yes, I think that is fairly obvious.  An individual believer might be a judge who sentences someone to prison or to death; the church as an institution can never do that. As always, though, the devil is in the details.  I don’t take that distinction to imply that the church as an institution has only an “indirect” political role, that it can never intervene in political affairs as the church.  Over the centuries, the church as an institution, or representatives of the church, have addressed political issues directly, without overstepping the bounds of churchly authority.  Ambrose rebukes Theodosius and denies him communion because of a rash and bloody military episode. During the middle ages, the church disciplined nobles who defied the truce and peace of God. I think it’s entirely proper for the church to speak as church to political injustices.

Worship as Politics

"Worship is Political Science 101. In every worship service, the Christian ekklesia is renewed in her unique story and language,  her unique political experience and vocation.  Every worship service is a challenge to Caesar because every Lord's Day we bow to a Man on the throne of heave, to whom even great Caesar must bow...Every Lord's Day, the Church is reconstituted as a polity whose obedience is owed to Christ, and we are taught to name Jesus as King of kings and Lord of lords." (Peter Leithart, Against Christianity, p. 67)

Defending Constantine

Defending Constantine by Peter J. Leithart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An very good book that challenges much modern thinking on the relationship between politics and the church. It starts slow, as he covers the historical time frame leading up to Constantine appearing on the scene. But the book picks up steam from there. I like that he used John Howard Yoder as a foil. Yoder is a good opponent who provides some solid critiques of just war theory. By using someone as accomplished as Yoder, Leithart's arguments are strengthened. The final chapter is the best I have read on applying the Sermon on the Mount to politics and giving a biblical view of empire. One of the best books I have read on political theology.

View all my reviews

Leithart: All Theology is Political

Peter Leithart is a man I greatly respect, even when I disagree with him, which is not often. Here is a wonderful interview where he lays out how he thinks the Church should intersect the world, particularly politics. What I liked about this interview is the practical suggestions Leithart gives. He can be long on theory, short on practice. But here he gives many excellent ideas as to how a local pastor can see the church as a political body. The interview is well worth your time. Note especially the strong stance he takes against abortion and sodomy and the fact that he believes all men, including rulers, should be called upon to submit to Jesus as Lord.

Links to Leithart

I enjoy Peter Leithart's blog. A lot of his stuff is over my head. He reads books far above my pay grade. But he does a lot of work in particular books of the Bible. Right now he is working through Zechariah. All his biblical work is helpful, often tying together various parts of the Scripture. Here are a couple of posts he did recently. The first is his sermon notes on parenting in the Spirit. The second is an observation on the effect of Barbie on young girls. Both of these are worth your time.

Easter Homily

Here is great homily by Pastor Leithart on the Resurrection of Christ and our life being hid in Him. I really enjoyed it and hope you will too.

Peter Leithart on Fasting

Here is a copy of Peter Leithart's blog post on fasting. He properly places the reason for fasting not on hating the body or material things, but rather on loving creation enough to fast so others can have more. It is a good and proper corrective to much of the gnostic philosophy pushed by Christians who promote fasting.

"For many throughout church history, fasting is bound up with hostility to matter and the body. We refrain from bodily pleasures of food and drink to train our souls in disembodied life.

That’s not biblical. The biblical fast, as Isaiah 58 puts it, is to share food with the hungry and clothing with the naked. The true fast gives good things away to those who don’t have them.

Biblical fasting, then, assumes the goodness of material things, and the propriety of pleasure. After all, if good and drink and clothing are evil, why would we want to share them? Isaiah’s fast assumes that creation is so good that we want everyone to have a piece of it."