The catastrophic effects of these divisions rippled out into European culture, society, and politics. They’re rippling still. Worse, the fragmentation of the Church undermined the evangelical aims of the Reformers. By its sibling feuds, the Reformation quenched the very Spirit it had unleashed.
Protestants were not solely responsible for the division of the Church. Catholic intransigence and treachery silenced prophetic voices and delayed and prevented the deep self-examination the Church needed. Yet Protestants were responsible, especially for the divisions within the Reformation’s own ranks.
Quenched the Spirit, eh? Which spirit? Peter Leithart, like most Christians of the contemporary period, doesn't grasp the essentially divisive nature of the coming of the Spirit, as if the prophets were put to death for preaching the unity of the faith in the bond of peace. The prophets critiqued the household of God, calling it to repentance and revealing its sins, often at the cost of their lives.
It is a fetish of our utopian age to exclude this point of view in favor of a preoccupation with unity. But it's still disturbing that churchmen seem caught up in it, even at this late hour in the ridiculous history of ecumenism. They'll do anything it seems not to face the fact that in the Bible the idea is a development of its later literature, emphasized in the Fourth Gospel (especially John 10 and 17) and the Pauline Ephesian letter (chapter 4), neither of which can be reconciled with the Synoptic tradition nor the early genuine letters of Paul without doing a little violence to reason. Even the Passion narratives have been reworked from this point of view of the later "church", which is the first concrete expression of Christianity's decadence. Robust preoccupation with "the Other" from the original period of the Spirit gave way to the crabbed self-reflection and identity "politics" of Christian, Jew, church, synagogue, Greek, barbarian, male, female, slave, free, and Roman citizen.
Jesus the eschatological prophet, on the other hand, never imagined a "church", let alone this long, drawn out history betwixt heaven and hell. He did not imagine "identities". Those who do the will of God are my mother, sisters and brothers, he said. Many are called. Few are chosen. Narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life. Few are they who find it. Repent while you still can. The reign of God is nigh. Come follow me.
What a polarizing fellow.
"All his ways are judgment" (Deut. 32:4).
"All his ways are judgment" (Deut. 32:4).
Protestants shouldn't apologize for it.
