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. 

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.

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