The 2024 U.S. election season proved a time of revelation for the Church. A remarkable and worrying number of pastors and self-professed Christians on social media did nothing but debate politics, demonizing those who expressed doubts about how to vote and scoffing at those who expressed the shocking idea that political behavior cannot be casually carved out as a pre-religious realm to which basics of Christian character and ethics do not apply. The moral decrepitude, not to say theological downgrade, that such online cosplaying presented, both on the hard right and the progressive left, was a sad testimony to the triumph of the immanent over the transcendent.
And that raises the obvious question: In the age of so many immanent imperatives, how can Christians in general, and church leaders in particular, realign their priorities with those of the New Testament, where Paul calls for a focus on “things above,” Peter calls us pilgrims and sojourners, and the cross transforms suffering and contradiction into the pathway to glory? The answer: through Christian worship, which requires us to raise our eyes heavenward. Worship is where we reconsecrate our humanity each week, and where this world is put in its place.
Khaled Anatolios’s new book Feasts for the Kingdom offers a masterclass on how to keep our minds focused on the eternal, and is thus especially needed in our media-saturated age. Anatolios, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, is a scholar of the fourth century. He has written historical-theological studies on both Athanasius and the debates surrounding the rise to dominance of Nicene Christianity. A Melkite priest, he is not only a historian but also a theologian and a pastor. In these latter fields his concern is to address the challenge set forth by Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann, namely that the rule of believing and the rule of praising should be one and the same. In other words, liturgy and theology should be integrated. Indeed, they must be for both to be true; any separation of the two leads only to a perversion of both. This can be a challenge to Protestants, especially the Reformed and the evangelicals. While eastern Christianity has an acute understanding that worship is where heaven and earth meet, we Protestants often pay lip service to that, but then have services that resemble rock concerts and TED talks, with a few hymns scattered throughout—not so much paradise proleptically realized as repeatedly postponed.
Anatolios’s work is helpful here. His impressive Deification through the Cross is his elaborate doctrinal contribution to the integration of theology and liturgy, but is a large, dense, technical tome. Feasts for the Kingdom, a marvelous collection of homilies, brings his vision within the purview of laypeople and non-specialists. It builds upon the Nicene Trinitarianism he has explored in scholarly depth but does so in a manner that brings out in sharp relief how it provides the foundation, content, and goal of Christian existence.
The homilies follow the liturgical calendar of the eastern Church, and so cover the great acts of redemption that surround the incarnate person and work of Jesus Christ. They are not expository in the manner of many Protestant sermons but are instead thematic and dogmatic. The underlying theology is profound and refreshing, and they tend to focus on the flesh of Christ as leading us to the very heart of God as communion of three persons. That is the Christian’s destiny: to be brought into that communion.
While the homiletic style and the references to the liturgy may be alien to many Protestants, what is clear is that Anatolios’s theology passes one of the most important tests: It preaches in a powerful and memorable way. Take, for example, his comment on the joy of Christ: “The joy that Jesus set before himself as he endured suffering for our sake was the joy of our salvation, the joy of saving us from suffering and death. This was the joy that sustained Jesus throughout his sufferings.”
The work of the eternal, unchanging God, manifest in the flesh of Christ, touches us at our points of deepest need. Indeed, Anatolios’s commentary on the effect of Christ’s work on death itself is, on its own, worth the price of the book: “We who have been raised up with Christ and made alive together with Christ know that death is no longer our master but our servant, who has been commissioned to lead us to the risen Lord. It is simply not realistic, my brothers and sisters in Christ, for those of us who have been raised up with Christ through his life-giving death, to fear death.” That is intensely practical theology grounded in the most profound doctrine of the Trinitarian God. Yet it is preached simply in a manner that anyone can grasp. I quoted that in the pulpit last Sunday. I can assure readers that, yes, that preaches. And it does so because the tragedy of the immanent is only resolved when set in the context of the transcendent.
It is no surprise, then, that in a homily preached in 2020, “Voting in Christ: Evangelical Counsel before a Federal Election,” Anatolios completely avoids the modern Christian temptation to bury Christ under the tyranny of urgent political questions. Instead, he points his congregation to the fact that Christ has already won his kingdom and that the Church’s task is to spread the good news of that victory “with patience and kindness . . . never rejoicing in wrongdoing, always rejoicing in the truth . . . hoping all things even for the sake of those who hope for our demise; enduring all things while interceding for those who cannot endure us.”
Amen. Thus speaks a man whose theology is worship and whose worship is theology. Thus speaks a man who is focused, as Paul commands, on the things that are above. This is a book for our times both as an example of how to deploy the profoundest Trinitarian theology in an ordinary congregation, and as demonstration of what the Christian’s priority should always be: God become flesh in the person of Christ Jesus.
Carl Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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