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The End of Sacrifice: An Apocalyptic Politics

Martyn and Yoder on Apocalyptic

John Howard Yoder, as Douglas Harink has suggested, would have found Lou Martyn’s account of Paul’s apocalyptic gospel supportive of his reading of Paul.1 Like Martyn, Yoder did not think Paul’s “gospel” to be first and foremost about us. Rather, as Martyn suggests, Paul’s gospel is centered on “God’s liberating invasion of the cosmos. Christ’s love enacted in the cross has the power to change the world because it is embodied in the new community of mutual service.”2 Thus Yoder and Martyn, in quite similar ways, contend that Paul understood that in the cross and resurrection of Christ a new creation has been enacted, bringing an end to the old age and inaugurating a new time characterized by the reign of God as King.3

Sometimes when I am reading Martyn I almost forget I am reading him and think instead that I am reading Yoder. Many of Martyn’s sentences could have just as easily come from Yoder. For example, commenting on Paul’s view that God had dispatched the Spirit of Christ into the believers’ hearts to make them soldiers for Christ, Martyn writes: “The martial, cosmic dimension of Paul’s apocalyptic applies, then, to the church and for that reason Paul can speak of the church itself both as God’s new creation and as the apocalyptic community called to the front trenches in God’s apocalyptic war against the powers of the present evil age.”4 Yoder, who emphasized the significance of the principalities and powers for understanding what it means to live at the same time in two times, could have easily written that sentence.5

More, much more, could be done to show how Yoder anticipated Martyn’s apocalyptic reading of Paul (and John), but, as interesting as that exercise would be, it is not the main purpose of this essay. I only call attention to their similar views on apocalyptic to suggest that Yoder can provide a politics that Martyn’s account lacks. Douglas Harink observes that the focal concern of Martyn’s later work has been that of divine and human agency. As a result, Martyn has not given attention to the political aspects of Paul’s thought.6 By contrast, Yoder’s thought is political all the way down, and so it is my contention that Martyn’s case would be stronger if he had read Yoder.7 But such a statement is hardly helpful, so to move from a more constructive place I will reframe my argument by suggesting that for contemporary readers Martyn’s work can be tested and complemented by reading him in conversation with Yoder.

Before turning to Yoder, however, I want to call attention to Harink’s suggestions about how Martyn’s work might be developed politically. For Harink quite rightly observes that there is a politics, a politics that is perhaps underdeveloped, in Martyn’s understanding of the three-­actor moral drama that constitutes Paul’s understanding of the human situation. Besides divine and human agency, there also exist anti-­God powers whose agency is apparent in their ability to deceive and enslave. Harink suggests that in most accounts of Christian ethics the role of these powers, particularly as corporate agents, is ignored, which often means that the church as a political entity and agent is also lost.

Harink argues that, just to the extent that Martyn develops an account of the church as a corporate agent capable of countering the powers by fulfilling the law of Christ, he has begun to make explicit the politics inherent in Paul’s apocalyptic gospel. What Martyn has not done, according to Harink, is suggest how this newly created agent called the church enacts this political witness among the nations. Harink thinks the way forward is to develop an account of how the messianic community even now participates in the Kingdom of God in a manner that avoids the “wreckage of worldly political history.” Accordingly, this cruciform community will not be caught up in “locating those points of worldly-­political leverage from which it might launch the next ‘conservative’ effort to keep things as they are, or the next ‘progressive’ movement in order to ‘advance toward’ or ‘bring about’ the Kingdom of God or at least a ‘higher’ stage of history.”8

That certainly seems right to me, but surely more needs to be said about what kind of politics the church represents amid the “wreckage of worldly political history.” In an attempt to develop the “more,” I want to direct attention to the significance of sacrifice as a central political reality. I may well test the patience of my readers in the development of this theme because I cannot deny that the argument I try to make is anything but straightforward. I begin by suggesting that Yoder’s account of apocalyptic that emphasizes the lordship of Christ is different from Martyn’s account in important ways. The significance of Yoder’s understanding of the crucified one as Lord, I will suggest, is best seen in light of Peter Leithart’s criticism of Yoder in Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom.9 For Leithart rightly contends that the heart of the political revolution that the church represented was to be “the end of sacrifice.” In what follows I will try to show how the issue of sacrifice remains relevant to our current political realities.

Yoder on Christ the King

In his presidential address to the Society of Christian Ethics in 1988, “To Serve Our God and to Rule the World,” John Howard Yoder took as his text Revelation 5:7-10. He explained that the Apocalypse was not his theme for that occasion, but the text from Revelation was crucial for what Yoder argued to be the main task of Christian ethics, that is, “to see history doxologically.” To see history doxologically, according to Yoder, does not mean that Christians should try to usurp the emperor’s throne or to pastor Caesar prophetically, but rather “to persevere in celebrating the Lamb’s lordship and in building the community shaped by that celebration.”10 Christians see history doxologically because they are convinced that they participate in God’s rule of the cosmos.

Yoder observes, however, that apocalypse is only one of many modes of discourse the believing community uses to discern what such a rule entails. But apocalyptic language is particularly appropriate to express what it means for God to be praised as the ruler of the world. That Yoder associates apocalyptic discourse with claims of God’s rule of God’s creation suggests a subtle but quite important difference from Martyn’s account of apocalyptic. For in spite of the similarities between Martyn’s and Yoder’s accounts of apocalyptic, Yoder’s stress on the lordship of Jesus Christ means that the political character of the Kingdom of God is evident from the beginning. To see Jesus “sitting at the right hand of the Father” not only indicates Jesus’ role in the cosmic victory, in which he is put in charge of history by becoming sovereign over the principalities and powers; that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father is also a declaration of his rule of the world.11

This way of stating the significance of apocalyptic allows Yoder to avoid Martyn’s language of “invasion” and intervention. Of course, Yoder does not disavow God’s agency, but he observes that what was novel about the Christian understanding of God’s “intervention” was that the God who “intervenes” in Christ is the one God whose “intervention” is not unusual because that is the way God works. According to Yoder, what was unique about New Testament eschatology is that, instead of several gods using the world as their playground, the Christians maintained that there is one God who uses the world as the theater of divinely purposeful action. The God who is the Father of Jesus Christ has always wanted to gather a people to operate in fellowship with God and with one another. History has an end, and we are it.12

Everything Yoder writes is informed by his conviction that Jesus is “sitting at the right hand of the Father,” but perhaps his most concentrated account of what it means for Jesus to be so enthroned he developed in his course in Christian doctrine, which was published after his death as Preface to Theology: Christology and Theological Method. In Preface to Theology Yoder develops his Christology in terms of the threefold office of prophet, priest, and king. I suspect he thought that by doing so he was staying closer to the language of the Bible and, just as important, the people of Israel. Yoder suggests, therefore, that when Jesus says, “I am the king, but the servant kind of king,” he fulfills the hope of the Jews who had learned through bitter experience that earthly kings are, to say the least, a mixed blessing.13

If, as Yoder maintains, the lordship of Christ is at the heart of apocalyptic, then the political implications are immediate. Indeed, that way of putting the matter is misleading. It is not a matter of working out the “implications”; rather, the politics of apocalyptic simply is the existence of a people who refuse to acknowledge the claims of worldly rulers to be kings.14 Moreover, because the one who is Lord has triumphed on the cross, his followers refuse to use the violence of earthly rulers to achieve what are allegedly good ends.

Nonviolence is obviously a central commitment defining the kind of politics Yoder thinks is required to acknowledge the lordship of Christ, but it is equally important that nonviolence not be isolated as the defining feature of apocalyptic politics. Nonviolence is but one aspect of the conviction that history is determined not by kings and empires, but by the church. Nonviolence is therefore but an expression of a more determinative ecclesiology. The church’s first duty to the societies in which she finds herself is, therefore, the same duty she has to her Lord. That means the church’s witness to the lordship of the Crucified One cannot let “local obligations” to one state lead her to treat those in another state as an enemy. Any attempt, for example, “to justify war for the individual Christian citizen, after it has been judged incompatible with the ministry of the church, is a refusal to be honest with the absolute priority of church over state in the plan of God.”15

Though often accused of being apolitical, Yoder makes the extraordinary claim that the church knows better than the state what the state is to be and do. The church may well be a moral stimulus to help a society and state to be better, but the church does not exist to enable the work of the alleged “wider” society. Rather, “it is for the sake of the church’s own work that society continues to function.”16 The meaning of history is to be found in the existence of the church.

Apocalyptic politics is based on the confidence that God uses the power structures of this world in spite of themselves for God’s purposes. Christ carries out the purposes of the One who is sovereign by ruling over the rebellious structures of the universe.17 That rule is hidden but made visible through the servant church. The place of the church in the history of the universe is the place where Christ’s lordship is operative. This is where it is clear that he rules, as well as the kind of rule he exercises. He is the suffering servant whose rule is decisively revealed on a cross. The church makes history not through domination but through being the servant of a crucified Lord.18

That the gospel is to be preached to the ends of the world is why time does not stop. What it means for Christ to be King is that he rules over history to give the church time to preach the gospel. Yoder is quite well aware that strong metaphysical claims are correlative of this understanding of the role of the church. That God gives the church time to witness to the lordship of Christ means that God is not timeless. That does not mean God is not eternal, but rather eternity is not not temporal; eternity is atemporal. Put differently, God is “more temporal than we are, who is ahead of us and behind us, before us and after us, above us in several directions, and who has more of the character of timeliness and meaningfulness in movement rather than less.”19

Metaphysics is often thought to be apolitical, but for Yoder these claims about the way the world is are constitutive of the position he takes in The Politics of Jesus. Yoder’s view of God’s timefulness expresses his contention that “the cross and not the sword, suffering and not brute power determine the meaning of history. The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience (John 13:10). The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification of the use of violence and other kinds of power in every human conflict. The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but cross and resurrection.”20 This relation between cross and resurrection, moreover, is the most determinative mode of seeing history doxologically.

Yoder’s well-­known criticisms of the Constantinian settlement are but the expression of this understanding of the eschatological character of the gospel. The fundamental problem that beset the church when Constantine became a member, a problem Yoder recognizes was beginning well before Constantine, was how becoming established changed the self-­understanding of the church. Under the influence of Constantinianism the church no longer understood herself to live simultaneously in two times. Eschatology had now become an ideal relegated to the future rather than a reality that transforms the character of time.

As a result, the church no longer thinks she is standing in the obedient line of the true prophets, witnessing to the reality of God’s kingdom. Rather, the church now has a vested interest in the present order, tempting her to use cultic means to legitimize that order.21 Consequently, it is now assumed that everyone is Christian, so that Christian ethics no longer is the exploration of what makes us faithful disciples, but rather is an attempt to develop an ethic that is workable for all of society. For it is now assumed that the church exists to serve society, and as a result the apocalyptic presumption that society exists to serve the church is lost.

Yoder’s understanding of Constantinianism is nuanced and complex, but hopefully I have said enough to suggest how Yoder’s emphasis on the lordship of Christ for determining the apocalyptic imagination is a politics.22 It is a politics, moreover, that I should like to think is compatible with Martyn’s understanding of Paul’s apocalyptic gospel in Galatians. For Martyn, like Yoder, thinks no questions are more important for determining the politics of apocalyptic than “What time is it?” and “In what cosmos do we actually live?”23 The answer to those questions is revealed by the sacrifices of a people who think it necessary to legitimate their existence.

Leithart on Sacrifice

In his book Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom, Peter Leithart develops a helpful critique of Yoder’s politics. His critique is helpful because Leithart’s criticisms, I hope to show, help us better appreciate the significance of Yoder’s eschatology. I need to be clear. I am not particularly concerned with Leithart’s defense of Constantine’s integrity as a Christian. As Leithart recognizes, Yoder’s critique of Constantinianism has little stake in questions surrounding the authenticity of Constantine’s “conversion.” Much more interesting is Leithart’s suggestion that Yoder failed to appreciate how Christianity fundamentally transformed Rome by Constantine’s outlawing of sacrifice.

That Constantine outlawed sacrifice, a law he enforced haphazardly according to Leithart, was significant because sacrifice was thought to be essential to Roman social and political life. That sacrifice was considered essential to a good politics was an unquestioned assumption in the ancient world. For example, Leithart calls attention to Celsus’s contention that religion had to do with culture and political traditions, with support of the city or state, and was expressed primarily through the act of offering sacrifices.24

Leithart develops a strong case that sacrifice was at the center of Roman life. It was so because Romans assumed sacrifice was the chief religious act that allowed them to communicate with the gods and to keep the gods happy. Moreover, sacrifice disclosed the secrets of the future when the entrails of slaughtered animals were read. Political decisions by the senate were determined by sacrifices, as were imperial decrees. Soldiers sacrificed to the gods prior to battle with the hope of insuring their success. Particularly important were the sacrifices made to or for the emperor to acknowledge him as Lord, Savior, or Deliverer. Because Christians believed there was another King, they refused to sacrifice to the emperor, which invited the Romans to sacrifice Christians not only for entertainment but also for the good of the Empire.25

One of the reasons Christianity proved to be so offensive to Romans, according to Leithart, was that it could not be a civic religion in the Roman sense because it was a religion without sacrifice.26 That is why, Leithart argues, we should not miss the significance that after Constantine’s triumph and establishing himself as Caesar, he refused to enter the Capitolium and sacrifice, as was required, to Jupiter. After his defeat of Maxentius, Constantine made clear that a new political theology was being established, that is, one without sacrifice.27

Through his refusal to sacrifice to the pagan gods Constantine gave political expression to Christ’s triumph over the “elementary things of this world.” History is not a tale told by idiots, because we see how our freedom from bondage, liberation from structures determined by distinctions between the holy and profane, clean and unclean, Jew and Gentile, has now gained political expression through Constantine’s renunciation of sacrifice. Constantine “secularized” political life by showing that the state would no longer be the agent of salvation (pp. 325-27). By bringing an end to sacrifice, Constantine brought an end to Rome, because now Rome depended on a more determinative civic polity, that is, the church.

By recognizing the church’s superiority to Rome, Constantine acknowledged that the sacrifice of Christ, the blood of Jesus, is the end of bloodshed. “The church too was a sacrificial city, the true city of final sacrifice, which in the Eucharistic liturgy of sacrifice announced the end of animal sacrifice and the initiation of a new sacrificial order” (p. 329). The rest, so to speak, is history. Constantine’s refusal to sacrifice, his welcoming of the church as the true polis, created a non-­sacrificial politics that became the norm even after the demise of Rome. Leithart celebrates this achievement, noting that “for millennia every empire, every city, every nation and tribe was organized around sacrifice. Every polity has been a sacrificial polity. We are not, and we have Constantine to thank for that” (p. 329).

It is not clear who Leithart thinks the “we” refers to in the last sentence. He has a brief account of Augustine’s understanding of Christ’s sacrifice now embodied in the Eucharist to suggest that any polity that acknowledges the church at least has the potential to be more just. So the church did not “fall” with the Constantinian settlement; rather, with that settlement a politics was begun that in all its variety can be thought to be Christian. The Middle Ages, in particular, are a model of the kind of political arrangement between church and state that Constantine made possible.

But, according to Leithart, Constantine’s achievement has been lost in modernity. Modern states do not welcome the church as the true city because they are willing to recognize only a church that reduces itself to a religion or private piety. This is as true of totalitarian states as it is of democratic ones, for both forms of the modern state are “secretly united in their anti-­Constantinianism” (p. 340). As a result, the modern state has reasserted its status as a sacrificial state so that it might be resacralized through the shedding of blood. Interestingly, this resacralization of the state is an expression of a nihilistic politics just to the extent that such states become ends in themselves, because there are no gods to receive the sacrifices the state asks of its members (pp. 340-41).

Therefore the modern state in its refusal to welcome the church as teacher and judge has reasserted its status as a sacrificial state. It has done so, moreover, with a vengeance. The medieval world was bloody, but the “Eucharistic blood of Jesus founded the true city,” which meant there was a brake on bloodshed. Modern nations know no limits, attempting as they must to be resacralized. That states now can “demand the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ ” means, according to Leithart, that in modernity “the ‘Constantinianism’ Yoder deplores becomes a horrific reality, as the church has too often wedded itself to power” (pp. 340-41).

This last remark, suggesting as it does how similar Leithart’s position is to Yoder’s ecclesiology, is why I find Leithart’s criticism of Yoder so interesting. Like Yoder, Leithart thinks the church is the only true polity. Leithart, for example, seems to think Augustine is right to maintain that the church displays for the world what true justice is because true justice is first and foremost giving back to God what God has given us through the sacrifice of the Son. Leithart recognizes that Yoder is quite close to Augustine in that he assumes that the justice of a social order begins in the recognition that the church is a more determinative reality than the state. That the church is so, moreover, means that the church betrays herself and the world when she identifies with the power structures of the world.

Leithart is a Calvinist. He therefore says that “if there is going to be a Christian politics, it is going to have to be an evangelical Christian politics, one that places Jesus, his cross and his resurrection at the center” (p. 332). Yoder would not disagree as long as we remember that such a politics can only be found in the church. Leithart, I suspect, thinks that to be a mistake because he assumes that theocracy should always, at least in principle, be thought to be a possibility.

He also thinks Yoder is wrong about nonviolence. He acknowledges, however, that the most powerful argument for nonviolence is Yoder’s contention that the cross makes nonviolence an unavoidable stance for Christians. For it was at the cross that Jesus’ lordship was established, making clear that the one who is King refuses to save coercively. Leithart acknowledges the power of this reading of Jesus’ death but suggests that more “detailed exegesis” is required — although finally the matter cannot be determined by examination of specific texts but only by “attention to the full sweep of biblical history” (p. 333). Yet “a full sweep of biblical history” is exactly what Yoder has given with his reading of the apocalyptic character of the gospel.

Leithart, like Yoder, wants to read history doxologically, but I am not convinced that he is right to suggest that all politics after Constantine were non-­sacrificial. That, however, is a topic for another time. More helpful for the argument I am trying to make is Leithart’s contention that there has been an attempt to resacralize the state in modernity. By exploring that contention I hope to show that Yoder’s understanding of what it means for Christ to be Lord is no less a challenge to the world in which we find ourselves than it was to Rome.

The End of Sacrifice

These last remarks indicate that I think Yoder, though often criticized for tempting Christians to withdraw from politics, is the most political of theologians. For as Leithart suggests, Yoder challenges some of the deepest presuppositions of modern political reality, that is, that only the state has the right to ask that we make sacrifices that are life-­changing. The problem with that presupposition is that the state that is legitimated by such sacrifices is not and cannot be acknowledged to be one that requires sacrifice. The sacrifices called for to legitimate the state are hidden even from those who sacrifice and are sacrificed, because it is assumed that whatever anyone does they are acting as free individuals.

Paul Kahn, for example, argues in his book Putting Liberalism in Its Place that the liberal story of the birth of the modern state as an act of reason and free choice in which sacrifice is no longer necessary is a profound illusion.28 It is an illusion of great power, however, because the presumption that a politics can be founded in reason between self-­interested free individuals has become such a determinative story that it creates its own reality. But Kahn argues that a politics so conceived cannot give an account of the body and, in particular, the experience of love that constitutes any politics. As a result, how liberal societies determine life and death remains out of sight in liberal theory.29

Kahn, however, observes that the political only properly begins at the point where anyone can imagine sacrificing one’s life or killing others to maintain the state. Thus the general presumption that “the modern state has fully arrived not when it defends me against violence, but when it conscripts me into the armed force.”30 The legitimacy of claims to authority by the modern state depends, therefore, on the sacrifices we are asked to make on its behalf. Kahn argues that such sacrifices are best understood as acts of love. Sacrifice is an act of love constituting the very character of politics just to the extent that sacrifice is “linked to the reciprocal possibility of infliction of injury.”31

That is why war is so crucial for the legitimization of the modern state. The capacity of the nation-­state to sacrifice its citizens in war was the great discovery, Kahn argues, of the nineteenth century. That discovery began with Napoleon’s armies, shaped as they were by the popular enthusiasm of the Revolution. The fullest expression of that development is to be found in the American Civil War, in which democratic armies, based on mass conscription, confronted one another. As the result of these developments, the conception of citizenship and political participation broadened, which meant so did the conception of the reach of military service. “The people’s state is supported by people’s armies.”32

A liberal state is therefore no less dependent on sacrifice for legitimacy than the states of the past. In this respect, Western politics is but the expression of the faith of Western religious practices — that is, only by being willing to die does one participate in the sacred. Liberal societies are therefore exemplifications of sacrificial politics just to the extent that the violent destruction of the self is “necessary for the realization of the transcendent character of the sovereign.”33

Sacrifice and sovereignty are therefore linked in the politics of the state. For sacrifice transforms the finite self in order to express the infinite value of the sovereign. Sovereignty is brought into existence through the sacrificial destruction of the body. “The subject, or bearer, of sovereignty in the West has moved from God to monarch to the people. The point, however, is always the same. The sovereign is the source of meaning: it is not a means to any end apart from itself. It reveals itself in the act of sacrifice.”34

Kahn’s account of the relation of sovereignty and the state, a relation that depends on a memorialization of a chain of martyrs to the founding moment in which the state was born, is controversial, drawing as it does on the work of Carl Schmitt.35 However, I cannot help but think Kahn’s analysis of the relation of sovereignty and sacrifice helps to illumine, and is illuminated by, Leithart’s engagement of Yoder’s apocalyptic politics. Kahn confirms Leithart’s contention that the modern state has recovered the centrality of sacrifice for sustaining its legitimacy. What is new about such states, however, is the inability to make those sacrifices constitutive of the theory that informs their self-­understanding.

By appealing to Yoder in order to illumine Martyn’s understanding of apocalyptic, I hope I have shown how Martyn’s reading of Galatians should be understood to be an instance of insightful exegesis. Martyn’s reading has immediate political implications, calling into question all sacrifices whose end is not determined by the one sacrifice that is the end of all worldly sacrifices. From such a perspective, the question of Christian participation in war turns out to be a question not restricted to “the ethics of war”; instead, it is a question of how Christians can at once say “Jesus is Lord,” the end of all sacrifices, and yet continue to participate in the sacrifice of war.36

1. Douglas Harink, Paul among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology beyond Christendom and Modernity (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2003), p. 147.

2. J. Louis Martyn, “The Apocalyptic Gospel in Galatians,” Interpretation 54, no. 3 (July 2000): 246.

3. J. Louis Martyn, Galatians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 22.

4. Martyn, Galatians, p. 102.

5. John Howard Yoder, The Christian Witness to the State (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 2002), pp. 8-9.

6. Douglas Harink, “Partakers of the Divine Apocalypse: Hermeneutics, History, and Human Agency after Martyn” (unpublished paper, 2010), p. 24.

7. As far as I can tell, Martyn never enters into conversation with Yoder’s work.

8. Harink, “Partakers of the Divine Apocalypse,” p. 29.

9. Peter Leithart, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2010).

10. John Howard Yoder, “To Serve Our God and to Rule the World,” in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, ed. Michael Cartwright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 130.

11. Yoder, “To Serve Our God and to Rule the World,” pp. 132-33.

12. John Howard Yoder, Preface to Theology: Christology and Theological Method, with an introduction by Stanley Hauerwas and Alex Sider (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2002), p. 256.

13. Yoder, Preface to Theology, p. 245.

14. Anathea Portier-­Young’s account of the beginnings of apocalyptic literature supports Yoder’s claim that the kingship of God necessitates a literature of resistance to empire. For empires exercise power over the world not only by force but also through propaganda and ideology. “Empire manipulated and co-­opted hegemonic social institutions to express and reinforce its values and cosmologies. Resisting imperial domination required challenging not only the physical means of coercion, but also empire’s claims about knowledge and the world. The first apocalypses did precisely this.” Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), p. xxii.

15. John Howard Yoder, The Christian Witness to the State (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1992), p. 17.

16. Yoder, The Christian Witness to the State, p. 13.

17. Yoder, Preface to Theology, p. 247.

18. Yoder, Preface to Theology, p. 248.

19. Yoder, Preface to Theology, p. 276.

20. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 232.

21. John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism, with a foreword by Mark Thiessen Nation (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 2003), p. 65.

22. For both the best analysis and the best criticism of Yoder’s account of Constantianism see Alex Sider, To See History Doxologically: History and Holiness in John Howard Yoder’s Ecclesiology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), pp. 97-132.

23. Martyn, Galatians, p. 104.

24. Leithart, Defending Constantine, p. 40.

25. Leithart, Defending Constantine, pp. 327-28.

26. Leithart, Defending Constantine, p. 40. Leithart’s assertion that Christianity is a religion without sacrifice is overstated. Later in the book he qualifies that claim. He may be right that Christianity could not supply the kind of sacrifice that sustained the civic culture of Rome, but sacrifice remained at the heart of Christian worship. Leithart refers a number of times to Guy Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Later Antiquity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). I think Stroumsa gets it right when he observes that in some aspects “early Christianity represents a transformation of Judaism that opens new horizons, but it seems in other ways to mark a conservative return to Israel’s sacrificial system. While the rabbis gathered in Yavneh in 70 succeeded in transforming Judaism — without admitting doing so, and perhaps also without admitting it completely to themselves — into a non-­sacrificial religion, Christianity defined itself precisely as a religion centered on sacrifice, even if it was a reinterpreted sacrifice. The Christian anamnesis was the reactivation of the sacrifice of the Son of God, performed by the priests” (p. 72). Stroumsa argues that the Christian sacrifice was not a blood sacrifice as were the sacrifices of Rome.

27. Leithart, Defending Constantine, pp. 66-67. Hereafter, page references to Defending Constantine will appear in parentheses in the text.

28. Paul Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 93-94.

29. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place, p. 21.

30. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place, p. 240.

31. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place, p. 234.

32. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place, p. 263.

33. Paul Kahn, Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), p. 184.

34. Kahn, Sacred Violence, p. 144.

35. Kahn discusses Schmitt’s views in his recent book Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Kahn is quite critical of some aspects of Schmitt’s work, but his fundamental understanding of modern political life owes much to Schmitt.

36. For the development of this way of putting the matter see my War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2011).