What a title!

I recently was at McKay's Used Bookstore in Chattanooga, and ran across this title from an author I read regularly in Touchstone Magazine, Peter Leithart:
Against Christianity.

"Against Christianity"?  What an interesting title from a PCA ordained minister and senior fellow of theology and literature at New St. Andrew's College.  So, of course, and compulsively, I bought it.

It is not written in a typical manner.  It is comprised of 5 chapters

1. Against Christianity
2. Against Theology
3. Against Sacraments
4. Against Ethics
5. For Constantine

And you know that he is being provocative with a chapter titled "For Constantine".  Those chapter titles just make me smile, because I know this is going to be interesting.  And it is.  Not only are the titles interesting, but the layout of the chapters is.  Not so much a running script, as short, choppy snippets of thoughts: sometimes a sentence, sometimes several paragraphs.

From the Preface

"This book is theological bricolage and lurches at many points toward a form of theological haiku.  I have come to think, however that this is all for the good, for the effect I hope for is the effect of haiku.  At its best, haiku glances at the familiar from an awkward angle; it presents what we normally approach straight-on from the side or underneath or inside out and helps us to see it, in a flash, as something wholly new."

And from Chapter 1

"Christianity is biblical religion disemboweled and emasculated by (voluntary) intellectualization and/or privatization.

"Christianity is not merely a haphazard embrace of the values and practices of the modern world. Worldliness in that sense has plagued the Church since Corinth and will be a temptation to the end of time.  Christianity is institutionalized worldliness, worldliness accepted in principle, worldliness not at the margins but at the center, worldliness built into the foundation.

"Christianity is worldliness that has become so much our second nature that we call it piety."

Well, he is obviously being intentionally provocative. It reminds me of the title that some of my friends have been reading lately, "Pagan Christianity", though obviously it won't follow the same lines with a chapter entitled "For Constantine".  Or maybe it will, from an oblique angle.

But!  I am not going to read this right now...I'm reading "Third Ways"!  I only picked it up to skim it!

By the way, here is a haiku I just picked up by googling "haiku" in order to understand what PL was alluding to in his preface.

the morning paper

harbinger of good and ill

--I step over it

-by Dave McCroskey