Is Peter Leithart dishonest, or just not all that bright?

Peter Leithart has responded to the responses to his blog post Too Catholic to be Catholic; maybe mine was one of them, I don’t know.

                                                                    

He closed that piece with speculations about what some potential future unity in the church might look like. And he opened this response with “Given what I’ve seen of some of the responses, though, it will be helpful for me to clarify and elaborate briefly the biblical framework I assume for thinking through the problem of the divided church.  That framework is taken largely from the history of the divided kingdom of Israel as it’s recorded in 1-2 Kings”.

It does seem fair to make some comparisons between “the divided church of today” and the divided nation of Israel in 1 and 2 Kings. He says:

The theological history of 1-2 Kings gives an overall model for thinking about a church that is genuinely divided; it explains how I can describe Catholics and Orthodox as brothers and sisters while at the same time accusing them of liturgical idolatry; in the end, 1-2 Kings (with some parallels from 1-2 Chronicles) gives hope that the division of the church is not permanent, and that we will all one day share a great Passover, such as there never was in Israel (2 Kings 23:22).

But one thinks that Leithart spends too much time with non-Protestants, given that his definition of the word “church” seems to be shaped by theirs:

The idea is common on all sides of the divided church that there is in fact no divided church.  Some Protestants unchurch Catholics and Orthodox; on this view, Protestants constitute the only true, pure church, [the WCF certainly does not say this] and therefore the line that divides Protestants from Catholics and Orthodox is not a line that runs through the middle of the church.  It’s instead a line that runs between church (Protestants) and non-church (everybody else).  There are forms of the same idea in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy, though since Vatican II the Catholic church has acknowledged that while the church subsists in Catholicism, “many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure” (Lumen Gentium, 8) and has famously recognized that some outside the Catholic church are “brothers,” albeit separated ones.

While he notes that the Vatican II version is “altogether too sanguine a view”, “from the perspective of 1-2 Kings”, he still suggests that “If my church is the only church, then there’s no tragic division within Christendom, no rent in the fabric, to tearing of Christ’s body.  1-2 Kings gives us no such comfort: Christ has been divided in our divisions”.

Two things at this point. Christ is NOT divided. And to see some kind of “line” that Leithart posits is NOT a historically Protestant way of understanding “what the church is”. [To be sure, there is a “dividing line” between truth and untruth, but that continuum is a whole separate category from what is “church” and what is “unchurch”.]

WCF 25 says:

The catholic or universal Church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the head thereof; and is the spouse, the body, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all”…. This catholic Church hath been sometimes more, sometimes less, visible. And particular Churches, which are members thereof, are more or less pure, according as the doctrine of the gospel is taught and embraced, ordinances administered, and public worship performed more or less purely in them.

There is no line, and “we” are not the ones who determine who is “church” and what is “unchurched”. The important thing to keep in mind is, to quote a verse, it is Christ who builds the church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it, as WCF 25:5 says:

 The purest Churches under heaven are subject both to mixture and error: and some have so degenerated as to become apparently no Churches of Christ. Nevertheless, there shall be always a Church on earth, to worship God according to his will.

It is altogether too “Catholic” to think that there is somehow a line that runs somewhere, and that’s what determines what is “church” and what is “unchurch”. Leithart is someone who should understand what the WCF says, and if he is going to continue to try to remain in the PCA, given his sensitivities, he ought to at least pay some lip service to this definition of “church”. But instead, he just makes a huge concession to the “Cathodox” view of what the church is. 

Is he doing this on purpose? Or is he just not capable of making this kind of distinction?