In Part I, Leithart sets up the problem the Bible presents. When he writes about the Old Testament, the priesthood, the temple, and the fast times in Israel, he is unparalleled in insight (I thank God for it). The key issue is how to understand the creation of man, the Garden, Adam's destiny, and his fall. Leithart (with parallels to Irenaeus) argues man was created good, but immature. Man had the image of God, but this image was brought to fulfillment viz. growing into man's priestly vocation and radiating with glory. Leithart sees the process of Adam's maturation as flesh (the original good, but imperfect, status) becomes spirit. The former is fleeting, dependent, and temporary, the beginning set towards an end. Adam, as yet a child, was not yet ready to join God's council. Leithart doesn't mention it, but there's a sense where man's work was a recapitulation of God's creative labor. As God created, man was to do so as well. If the Heavens and Earth function as God's macrocosmic temple, man's destiny to cultivate Eden, spread it, and build a microcosmic temple (perhaps cultivating the Garden so it was ready to receive the heavenly city?) to live in cosmic harmony.
Yet when Adam took from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he seized at his birthright immaturely. God cursed Adam and all of creation for snatching at divine wisdom prematurely., Guarding Eden with flaming cherubim, and casting Adam and Eve out, God turned humanity over to the hard road. The problem was now sinful flesh, which was flesh-for-itself, a glorying in immaturity as maturity, a perfection of the imperfect. It's the meaning of 666, a parody of the divine project. Flesh for itself, turning inward, turned weakness into strength. The frailty, limitation, and impotency of flesh was now to become vaulted through a functional vampirism. Flesh lived off other flesh in a bid for divine mastery. Leithart spends time talking about how phallo-centrism (dominant in the Mediterranean world) was a manifestation of glorying in the flesh. Asserting man's virility and strength only covers over man's weakness, the way glorifying a hero with a statue reflects his frailty and passing away. The frenzy of conquest and consumption reflects an implicit awareness that time is short. Babel is, thus, a vulgar attempt to penetrate Heaven, in both a socio-political and sexual sense. As Leithart repeats again and again, God's work now appears as a war against flesh, against cults of phallus and fertility, and yet for the purpose of saving His creation. It is through sinful flesh that all flesh will be redeemed, and yet redemption involves the destruction of flesh. The original temporary sense of flesh now, under wrath, appears in conflict and struggle. Flesh does not merely give way to spirit, but must be put to death and burnt upon the altar.
Here, Leithart understands the sacrifice system of the temple, circumcision, and numerous other aspects of Torah's regulation of society, as a war against flesh. All of these actions were pedagogy, and effective in a sense that they intended to put flesh to death (sometimes literally). Circumcision was the wound inflicted upon man's source of strength and generative capability. Israel was intended to bless the nations, but also was intended to remain ever at war against the nations' gods. These idols were manifestations of what St. Paul refers to as the elements of the world (hence the title of the book). The elements don't refer to physical qualities (e.g. atoms, molecules, periodic elements), but to the social cosmos (Leithart keeps the natural and social as part of the same spectrum) ordered around the valorization of flesh. Bent in on itself, social orders are arraigned for self-aggrandizement, conquest, and exploitation.
The key to Israel's victory is the promise of flesh into spirit is through the sacrifice system. The basic procedure is in the animal's death, division, and burning. Animals throughout the Scripture highlight man in symbolic fashion. Israel's priesthood blessed and invested the animal with representation for the nation. The animal dies, the fate of all flesh, it is separated, and then it is burned into a cloud of smoke before the Lord. Israel too was to suffer division in its move towards spiritualization. I think Leithart fumbles on this point, trying to highlight how Israel's division was not like the divisiveness of the pagans, who obsessed with ritual purity and cleanliness to protect superior flesh. I'll come back to it more later, but for now let's say that division is a distinctive move in Israel's overcoming the curse. Then, the kicker, the animal turns into smoke. The Spirit comes as a cloud, and the smoke of sacrifice is a process of spiritualization. The animal literally becomes spirit in burning. The smoke passes before the Tabernacle, which was engraved with two cherubic warriors. For Leithart, the animal passes back through the fiery gate of Eden. The sacrifice is what Leithart calls "anti-sarkic pedagogy", an instruction in the path Israel must take to eventually reach maturation.
I'm not worried whether Leithart gets all the details right about the cult. The major point is that the flesh-for-itself builds itself into satanic imperium, which God obliterates through warfare, and yet this battle takes place in the world of flesh. Weak and frail flesh huddles together and mystifies its weakness in its swagger as strong and everlasting. God's people (and their Law) emphasize the weakness of flesh, and, in so doing, becomes a conduit for infinite divine power. It is the circumcised Abraham who gets a son through Sarah. For St. Paul, this was nothing less than a resurrection of the dead. Flesh perishes, and yet God can transfigure it through a raised body of spirit. Lest one think Leithart is giving a gnostic spin, we should note that Scripture refers to Jesus, the second Adam, as a life-giving spirit.Physical reality is not about composition (made from one 'stuff' or another), but arrangement. A new world order (The Age to Come) will usher in a new cosmic arrangement of things. Mortality will be clothed with immortality, etc.
When Leithart shifts into Part II, sadly, the work stalls out. Leithart highlights how Israel had turned Torah into a fleshly device, but there's not much as to why this was all a part of the plan. And it's not clear how Jesus, as the final destroyer of the elements of this world, has actually done anything. Leithart likes to say that good theology involves good sociology. He is certainly an advocate for the role of the Church in the life of the Christian. But his postmillenialism leaves him blind and groping, because his theory fails to map onto anything recognizable in history (throwing his idea of what God plans into an indeterminable future). Christ wins an ultimate victory, opening the world for transformation. Through the Church (Christ's body) the nations become disciplined, transformed before the cross, and baptized. And yet the expectation, from Part II on wards, is that Christ "did" something which fulfilled the old order. And yet history testifies that churches have backslid as terribly (if not more so) than Israel. What's going on here?
It's here that Leithart's whole project falls apart pretty quickly. He plays pretty fast and loose with church history to reconstruct his schema. Leithart notes what he calls "Galatianism", a relapse of Christians under the rule of the elements, turning Christianity into a worldly cult of flesh. But Leithart mainly targets the modern era for this syncretism, where Galatianism is in the ascendant. He hopes that the modern period will crumble, and that the Church would be ready to pick up the pieces. In the meantime, Christians are called to fidelity. And yet, again, how did this happen? Isn't Galatianism simply another instance of God's war against flesh being turned in on itself? What exactly did the coming of the Christ do for the People of God? These questions keep haunting the narrative.
Leithart doesn't give any specific examples of a Christian society in Part IV, though he makes references to his book on Constantine (Defending Constantine). The reason he is vague is, I suspect, that there are hardly any examples of what Leithart envisions. There are a few blips. He lightly praises the Middle Ages and 16th century Scotland and Geneva. But he doesn't spend too much time on them because their beauty only appears if you squint. The Renaissance was born from serious concerns and failures within Medieval Christendom. With the imperial papacy hitting its stride, the Holy Roman Empire consolidating Europe, and the fusion of the two into a highly unstable Christian Empire, things were incredibly difficult for the faithful. Hence Renaissance men damned the "modern" and turned back to the ancients (whether Christians or pagans). Similarly, 16th Scotland was a world fraught with compromise, near civil-war (agitation between Protestants and the Franco-Scot royalty), and intrigue. Similarly, Geneva saw Calvin constantly frustrated in his efforts, constantly harangued by the oligarchic city council. On top of that, there was the burning of Servetus. Unless Leithart advocates a return to a society that issues the death penalty for heretical dogma, then it's hard to see how this society provides any model. Hence, one must skate on thin ice and squint. All in all, Leithart's postmillenial vision has to escape off from history into the future. He'd do better if he believed in some kind of process theology or something. There's little in the actual history of the Church that looks like what Leithart expects.
However, what if the suffering and death of Christ is precisely the way for the Church? What if the victory is in a cruciform people? If Part I doesn't lead to a postmilennial victorious society (a Constantine and everything after), where does it go? Leaning on the work of Ephraim Radner, I would argue the cruciformity of Christ should shape our view of Church history. Galatianism is an offscouring of this phenomenon (though its existed in every age, pace Leithart's criticism of modernity). But if one would expect the Church to look like Christ, one would see suffering faithfulness as the witness to divine work. One would see martyrs as the sowers of the Word, whose blood plants the roots of the church. Thus the Christian (individually and in his/her church) fills up on the sufferings of Christ, as the Apostle Paul put it. To defeat the curse is to go through it. Mortification leads to sanctification, dying is the way to living. And the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ who He gave to the Church, will conform people into this image, whether they like it or not.
Like Job, the Christian (as part of the royal priesthood) matures through suffering. The only way to take a seat at the divine council is to become a spirit, to overcome the means of the flesh. Thus the way of vulnerability leads to invulnerability (rather than the fleshly quest for invulnerability only ending in death). To walk in the light of God, not enthralling oneself to Mammon or the Powers that Be, is the way to real life. It means telling the truth at any cost. It means blessing enemies. It means taking your own cross as a witness to the one who bore the sins of the world, pardoning them and dumping them into the abyss. It means lending without the expectation of return, because God gives generously and in excess. But this way of life will be met with opposition. In learning to die (figuratively and literally) we learn to live. The shift from Old to New is the shift to the full scope of battle. As Israel fulfilled Adam's vocation in his Christ, so too do the little Christs pursue the same, whose lives are musical echoes rippling across the cosmos.
I wish Leithart would have pursued this vision than the typical postmillenial nonsense. But perhaps the incoherence beyond Part I, accidentally, shows how empty this account really is. There's a better way to understand how Christians are no longer under the elemental powers of this world.
Re Ephraim Radner, figural exegesi and the cruciform shape of redemptive history, Michael Ramsey interprets the disheveled condition of Christendom in the 1930s (including his own Church of England) as a charism of participation in the sufferings of Christ. He reaches that conclusion for the sake of his ecclesiology, where Scripture, Creed, Sacraments and Episcopate are integral to the vocation of Christ's mystical body recapitulating the pattern of his own life for the salvation of the world. It is through these organs that the Church lives out or "expresses" the gospel. Hence, even the tragedy of schism is to be regarded as providentially vocational. You may read it in Ramsey's "The Gospel and the Catholic Church."
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