Approaching the End. Stanley Hauerwas

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).

Witness

      With Charles Pinches

      Beginning Explorations

      Christians are people expected to bear witness to what makes them Christian. Indeed, to connect witness to Christianity is commonplace. But as with many theological commonplaces, we can miss the significance of the grammar of a faith that demands that Christians witness to what they believe. The complexity of these matters is evident by the way the grammar of the last sentence betrays our contention about witness. Christians do not witness to what they believe, but what they believe must be a witness. Why should the God Christians worship require witnesses?

      In fact, believer and non-­believer alike often assume that any god worth believing in should not depend on witnesses to be made known. So if the God of Israel who raised Jesus from the dead requires witnesses, then this suggests that what Christians believe about this God must be false. Yet we will argue that if the God we worship as Trinity, and worship is the right word, could be known without witnesses, that would indicate that such a God, the Christian one, actually does not exist. No doubt this is a strong claim to which we cannot do full justice in what follows; yet we hope to say enough to suggest why the claim matters and what might be some of its important theological implications.

      One robust metaphysical point that relates to the connection between witness and truth is simply that all that is, the vast expanse of creation in all its complexities and intricacies, did not have to be. And of course, we are part of this “all.” We are created, contingent beings that did not have to be. Only God exists by necessity, as Christians (along with certain others) claim. But Christians believe further that the God that exists by necessity is known only through contingent creatures. “Witness” names the truth that the only way we can know the character of the world, the only way we know ourselves, the only way we know God is by one person telling another.1

      We believe an exploration of the relation between God, truth, and witness2 is appropriate in an essay that seeks to honor Fergus Kerr. We hope it helps illumine his work, in particular his understanding of Thomas. As Kerr observes in After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism, Thomas thought arguments for God’s existence were necessary not so as to convince hypothetically open-­minded atheists, or even to persuade “fools,” but rather “to deepen and enhance the mystery of the hidden God. . . . Far from being an exercise in rationalistic apologetics, the purpose of arguing for God’s existence is to protect God’s transcendence.”3

      Kerr develops this extremely important point by noting that Thomas’s arguments for God’s existence are expressions of his understanding of God’s simplicity. Divine simplicity makes clear that we cannot know what God is; rather, we can only reason to God from the existence of the world that did not have to be. Indeed, from this perspective, arguments for God’s existence are actually a way to resist idolatry, presuming as they do that those things about which we do have knowledge — that is, that which exists but requires no explanation — are best known as “effects.” According to Kerr, the notion that all that is testifies as “effect” expresses that all that is is created. In short, all that is witnesses to God by acknowledging that all that is is created.

      Kerr thinks rightly that his understanding of the character of Thomas’s “proofs” expresses his