Ben

John Howard Yoder is a different person to me now that I have finished reading A Mind Patient and Untamed: Assessing John Howard Yoder’s Contributions to Theology, Ethics, and Peacemaking. The accusations against Yoder’s theology come in all shapes and sizes. Yet, for every jab at him, another theologian defends Yoder in rebuttal. The main topics in this book are Yoder’s postmodernism, similarities and differences to Hauerwas, and the notion of Constantinianism and whether the free church is an extension of Jewish Diaspora social patterns of exile.

Paul Doerksen in his essay, “Share the House: Yoder and Hauerwas Among the Nations,” exposes two tensions between the two theologians. Hauerwas often states that more intensive church discipline is needed to combat the fragmentation of contemporary society. He explicitly thinks all church members must be trained in tradition before they can see as Christians rightly see. While Yoder might agree, he places more emphasis on the voluntarism of the free church as a noncoercive body of people, which plays a significant role in his nonviolent evangelical epistemology. At this point, Yoder gets criticized a lot for being quintessentially modern, presupposing the Rosseau theory of social contract. In other words, being a member of church looks too much like being the member of any liberal social club. Behind the debate is Yoder’s valid fear of the church becoming a cultural enclave through the socialization of cradle children rather than evangelism to strangers.

Another disagreement between Yoder and Hauerwas is how they relate worship to ethics. For Yoder, worship creates the collective consciousness needed to perform obedience in daily lives. Worship Christ as Lord unsettles and disrupts the deceptive disobedience of other gods—there’s an inherent connection between worship and morality. Yet, some criticize that this is a reduction of worship to social ethics. Hauerwas think’s Yoder conception of worship is too “intellectual” and “instrumental,” also “aesthetically thin.” For Hauerwas, worship and ethics are inseparable, but more in a liturgical sense. “Liturgy is social work,” he states. Concretely this difference or worship theology amounts to Yoder’s low church vs. Hauerwas’ high church.

In A Mind Patient and Untamed, the most contentious argument advanced by Yoder is his belief that the Old Testament narratives of Jewish exile served a normative role in rabbinic and synagogue-based Judaism. Since the prophet Jeremiah, the Jews have accepted not being in charge of history, and even not being in charge of themselves through rulers, and the cases that don’t fit this description, like Ezra/Nehemiah or the Maccabees in their efforts at restoring theocracy, are recognized deviations that are repented of. John Miller and James Reimer accuse Yoder of Marcionite selective reading here, but Duane Friesen defends Yoder, and later in the book we see the ulterior motives of Reimer and Miller to create a more positive theology of God-ordained law, which would not be consistent with Yoder’s exile theology.

Yet Douglas Harink, a postliberal biblical scholar, provides the most troubling critique of Yoder on this topic. However, Harink is always slow to criticize because he wants to praise Yoder abundantly for rescuing theology away from Protestant individualism, for correcting misinterpretations of justification and explaining the apocalyptic mind of Paul. Yet, Harink is uncomfortable with merely valuing the Jewish exile as a form of life. Harink thinks Paul argues in Romans 9-11 for God’s non-superceded election of Jews, even non-messianic ones. While Yoder points us in the right direction in healing the Jewish-Christian schism, he never touches Paul’s theological defense, which puts Yoder in a potential spot for allegations of supercessionism. Yet, Harink thinks Yoder might have presupposed Romans 9-11. Either way, Harink bases ecclesiology on election whereas Yoder bases the church on ethics.

Yoder often felt free enough to make arguments from an non-Christian standpoint. For him this was an exercise of patience and serious respect for non-believers or believers from other traditions. The primacy of life convinced him to argue from another viewpoint if it could help save lives. As he engaged the Just War tradition, so he did with the debate on capital punishment. Some of his anti-death penalty arguments are secular and more deist than Christian sounding–he actually quotes our nation’s founding fathers to make an occasional point. He attacks the death penalty in two main ways: 1) the fallibility of penal institutions - to take someone’s life is an irrevocable action, unreasonably so since approximately 5% of the executed are probably innocent. The death penalty rests on the assumption that the judicial system is infallible and omniscient, which has been proven wrong over and over again. Thomas Jefferson once said, “Until the infallibility of human judgement shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.” Furthermore, the institution discriminates against the “poor and friendless.” Any person with money or connections can alleviate the sentence. Statistics also expose the racist determination of the penalty, when blacks get put on death row but whites who commit the exact same crime do not. 2) Yoder vehemently critiques the notion of deterrence. To Yoder, deterrence is a myth to cover up either emotional vengeance or retributive justice or social scapegoating. Murder is typically not a reason-based crime yet deterrence against murder would require a reasoning process of the perpetrator (political cartoon). If the death penalty was founded on deterrence, than executions logically would be publicized more and more frightening to generate fear/intimidation of citizens not to transgress. Even if deterrence worked, it would still be immoral, as any Kantian could argue: it uses people as a means not an end. Likewise, Yoder never determines right vs. wrong based on social utility or short-term effectiveness, but from the theological ethics of biblical narrative.

I’ve always wondered what Yoder thought about the abundance of imago dei allusions in theology. This is the first time I have ever encountered him making the same allusions in argument, calling imago dei a “deep spiritual principle.” Being created in the image of God means two things for Yoder: 1) that humans are capable of fellowship, an interpretation that orients our divinity upon relationships in a this-worldly way and implies that reconciliation must occur in this life alone (although I think I disagree with this point). 2) that life belongs to God. In the Old Testament, breath and blood are sacred, even in animals. Any blood spillage affects the cosmic order and very strict ceremonial law guided a people on how to restore that order. Blood belongs to God i.e. human life is not self-owned but God’s.

Yoder critically dislikes when people refer to an “eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” as if it were a description of divine justice in the Old Testament which later changed. Actually, the etymological origin for that phrase was not Hebraic and not Mosaic, but from background cultures which valued it for its poetic symmetry describing the reality of human vengeance happening everywhere; it’s an esthetic statement, not a moral or civil imperative. The poetic line does not really fit with the general pattern of Mosaic law in limiting the violence and chaos of the Hebrews apart their wider surroundings. Law-codes should not be seen as a timeless propositional moral truth, but rather as helpful markers along a trajectory towards justice. The concessions of Mosaic law, like the allowance of divorce, is still an improvement from much of the socially accepted promiscuous polygamy of the time. Jesus Christ, as the fulfillment of the law, completed the trajectory as the ultimate revelation of justice, which is conceptually inseparable from God’s character of suffering love (agape). So whereas divorced was conceded then, now it is unjustifiable. This pattern follows for much of Hebrew moral and civil law.

To understand the mythic and ancient origins of the death sentence as a social function, Yoder searches for an answer on why blood is sacred and why sacrifice is a divinely-ordained institution in the Old Testament. He appropriates the thought of Rene Girard on these topics, using words like “mimesis” or “scapegoat mechanism” or “sacral violence,” which are straight from Girard’s dictionary. Why does Yoder look to Girard for help in understanding these cultural mysteries? Because “he represents the most serious effort in contemporary cultural studies to make sense of a basic social fact: namely, the way in which society’s viability is thought to demand that the quasi-universal appetite for violent retaliation must be at the same time both validated and buffered, both satisfied and diverted, both acknowledged and denied.” “The anthropologist philosopher Rene Girard claims to have discovered that there is, in fact, a special set, of forces at work, which lead a society to hide from itself the real causes for the bloodshed on which people believe the survival of their culture depends. A society deceives itself–through its bards and playwrights, priests and sages–about the primeval vengefulness lying at the base of social order.” I offer these quotes at length to prove Yoder’s dependence on Girard (Yoder is among many theologians using Girard today, including Walter Wink and William Placer) and also introduce the complexity of this philosopher’s thought. The psychological drives of humans as a species, our insatiable wants (mimesis) and short-tempered anger, lead to out-of-control violence. In the threat of destruction, violence is poured out on an arbitrary scapegoat, dissociating other feisty prior antagonisms to restore peace, at least this is how moderns understand tribal dynamics. Members of the ancient culture thought the gods were wrathful and that the order of the universe depended on their continuance of rituals and sacrifices (sacral violence). Blood is sacred because it reminds a tribe of the real threat of violence that would destroy them and consume them, if the gods were not satisfied by their sacrifices, which translates anthropologically to say, the awe of the sacred comes from religion’s closely tied symbolism with the abyss of chaos that would engulf us without social institutions. Girard quite cunningly applies this insight to modern judicial systems to expose how scapegoat mechanisms are re-defined but still function in contemporary society, as with capital punishment. Even Girard confesses that the narrative of Christ exposes the mythical deception of religion to justify violence.

That is, if you have the right theory of atonement. Yoder doesn’t articulate his nonviolent atonement as extensively as J. Denny Weaver does, but they are on the same page. Yoder pokes at the legal substitution atonement that was invented in the 10th century (Anselm), which replaced expiation with propitiation, a vertical sort of divine violence. In contra, Yoder writes, “A divine moral order demanding that one evil be paid for by another evil does not exist.” Instead, Christ suffered under the scapegoat mechanism of Judaism and the Roman Empire in order to expose the sacral violence, unmask the so-called justice of the legal powers. By being completely innocent, Christ put shame to the system and eliminated its operations “once for all.” Christ was our scapegoat, a lowly humiliated victim, who shocked the world by reversing the equation: by his resurrection he was the ruler of all the systems and thus re-defined and reveal what true divine justice looks like (suffering agape). Christ’s atonement is nonviolent because it puts an end to sacral violence and the expiating ceremonies by finishing the trajectory of biblical history. “The cross has wiped away the moral and ceremonial basis of capital punishment,” writes Yoder, and “if we take more seriously the original cultural rootedness of the death penalty in primitive rituals of retaliation, we must also acknowledge, in the light of the Cross, our unworthiness to kill even the guilty.” This atonement orthodoxy is much more in line with Jesus’ life and teachings, like the Sermon on the Mount. Following Jesus means loving your enemies and forgiving without limit. Now we have finally summarized why a Christian cannot support the death penalty.

As a student of Yoder’s, I find the death penalty a helpful case study that gives his theology of the church and state more concreteness, especially on this topic of Christian witness. Yoder unambiguously encourages Christians to publicly and politically help persuade society to disavow the death penalty. The silence of the church is conformity to the cultural vengeance that crucified Christ. Now I understand exactly what Yoder means when he self-describes his Anabaptist theology as “For the Nations.” If Christ is Lord over all powers, then there are no norms other than his revelation, meaning no contradictory norms for the fallen state. A Christian stance against capital punishment should be translatable in the moral language of judicial systems (which at least in America is quasi-Christian anyway so our job is easier). Yoder doesn’t back down from Western humanism, but rather subverts it, claiming that God was the first humanist when he created us in His image. Individual liberty and rights is a historical development that has arose from the leavening of the Christian conscience.

The only passage in the New Testament that explicitly engages the death penalty is John 8, when the Pharisees trap Jesus by bringing an adulterer to him as a potential stoning victim. Jesus’ replied let the sinless throw the first stone, implicitly striking down the authority of human institutions to lethally punish. Yoder knows the potential pitfall of criticism at this point, that if you followed the conclusions against legal violence, since no ruler is sinless, the logical conclusions would led to an endorsement of anarchy. At least this is where your reasoning leads if you fail to see the eschatological distinction between the church and the world. Defending himself against the accusation of implied anarchy, Yoder writes, “To carry to logical conclusions would mean the presence of that kingdom. Yet, that consistent application would demand faith.” Hauerwas once made a similar point, that actually Anabaptists should long for Christendom, or the day when everyone worships Christ and all of society operates on the law of agape, but this cannot happen coercively against structured unbelief and personal disbelief. Yoder describes anarchy as “the creature of the mental urge to carry things to their logical conclusions, an urge which is out of place in a fallen world.” Christians are not obligated to construct a viable alternative for the entire mechanisms of society just because we criticize specific fallen violent practices of our government. Throughout his writings, Yoder encourages Christians to advocate with their governmental representatives on one issues at a time, based on the situational structural sins most blaring in their context. At the end of Yoder’s essay on capital punishment, he advocates a four-step plan: educate yourself, spread the word in public, support an anti-death penalty stance for your church, and write your legislators.

The title “For the Nations” came from a semantic quibble Yoder held with Hauerwas who wrote “Against the Nations” on nuclear warfare. In the context of that debate, Hauerwas fears the influence of political liberal language upon Christianity because it takes the cross out of the Gospel and relies on human agency to improve the world. Obviously Yoder would affirm Hauerwas here, so the difference between the two theologians is not that great. But in a last effort to dispel the myth of sectarianism once and for all, Yoder stresses the positive role the free church has upon society and why nations need the church. First, Yoder follows Barth’s theology of putting the church first. The church as polis is what the nations will one day be. Secular international politics today are a weak pale perversion of eschatological politics.

So in what way is Yoder’s church “for the nations?” Yoder would say the church helps the nations by witnessing to the nations, teaching the nations, even evangelizing the nations, which he sums up as “the paradigmatic public role of God’s people.” The church is a social experiment of virtue, it’s the only institution that is created for a selfless purpose, it embodies the social processes of the new kingdom that can be translated into good politics for the nations now. The often quoted Body Politics of Yoder (communion, baptism, binding and loosing, multiplicity of gifts, and open meetings) can be appropriated by governments in programs of welfare, democratic operations, and international peacemaking diplomacy. It’s not enough for the church to be a prophetic voice that critiques institutions, which is the furthest many theologians go in describing the church’s role as a public advocate, like a side-kick whose only influence is offering wise words to the hero, so the nation-state does its real business, maybe with the church as a supportive chaplain proffering spiritual resources. No, the church is the star-player, not the side-kick. Yoder’s famous maxim is, “the medium IS the message,” the Jubilee-process of the church IS the gospel, or also cleverly worded: “What God is doing in the world IS How God is doing it,” which is the calling together of a worshiping heterogeneous people.

Unambiguously the church should work to serve and improve society in general. But we must do it in the way of Christ, not in the ways of the world, accumulating enough power and money from the topdown first in order to anything good. In “For the Nations” Yoder enters the controversial discernment dilemma by Anabaptists of the racial revolution movements, especially under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. How does a nonresistant pacifist react to the conflict-pressured resistance strategies of liberation movements fighting against oppression? Before I explain the reasoning, I will describe the answer: nonviolent resistance (a.k.a. civil disobedience) is not diametrically opposed to nonresistant pacifism as much as the accusation of sectarianism would make Anabaptist seems. Yoder thinks its clear that especially white Mennonite should have participated in the creativity of the civil rights movement (many did), working towards equality for blacks—not because we have an ideal utopian vision for government, nor because we think the Social Gospel promotes the upward progression of a more fair and equitable humanity, but because we are very holistic about the missions of the church on caring for the poor and marginalized; we are a loving people. Furthermore we are translating our inter-ethnic baptismal inclusiveness into the egalitarian destiny of the world.

The key distinction to make is, who hands will bring about that “egalitarian destiny?” Political liberalists and Marxists alike would say, humans of course, and for that matter they lack alike in radical originality. In contrast, the church knows that the only salvation, the only Messiah is Christ and He alone can usher in the eschatological consummation. It’s so hard to disentangle the American dream from the Christian realistic hope. For heuristic help, Yoder likes to say Christians should be fundamentally pessimistic on human agency, but fundamentally optimistic on divine agency.

Harry Huebner would call Yoder’s reasoning ‘resurrection logic.’ Christian work in the world is not consequentially based; we don’t fight for social justice to control the direction of history; we don’t want the driver’s seat. The cross renounces possessing “handles on history.” The cross is obedience until death, the work of agape, the suffering servanthood (sidenote: Yoder repeatedly claims that suffering servanthood is not a denunciation of power, but an embrace of a different form of power). Discipleship aims at that way of interacting with others, which is at odds with a coercive pragmatism. The missions of the church are significant not for their instrumentality, but for their signification of the kingdom of God. We are not successful and we are not strong, but when we signify, God’s strength will bless, will resurrect the cross-bearers. Yoder describes the cross-resurrection relation as the grains of the universe, an idea that Hauerwas and Huebner pick up on.

Returning to the racial revolution, our resistance is not a social tactic, as Gandhi and King are often interpreted (rightly many times). When such effectiveness preempts obedience, than suffering doesn’t make sense unless is brings about beneficial results. This is a distortion of the cross, in fact, it is not a cross but a pragmatic calculation. The cross is an intentional willingness to suffer for the other without expecting any return. To King’s credit, his many epiphanies along the way revealed the same, that he might die, that he needed to take up his cross vulnerably and confront the dark powers of injustice. More scholarship confirms that King was not an optimist, indeed the whole history of the blacks is belittled if their success is seen as a fruit of their optimism rather than their divine hope and obedience from knowing that God will redeem the oppressed. King and Gandhi’s whole cosmology echoes of the cross-resurrection grains. They could not separate means from ends, which is a theological conviction on the law of the universe and the nature of peace. They both knew the shape of the universe is such that to return good for evil is ultimately effective, whether or not it works. No wonder Hauerwas says Barth is the best natural theologian, which is a joke and profound truth at the same time.

Reconciling the Church with the Popular Arts (minus the footnotes, so don't accuse me of plagiarism).

Nothing disintegrates the identity of the Church more than our inability to distinguish between friend or foe. Too confidently has the Church put its trust in the hands of politicians, corporations, and religious figureheads, while conversely too quick to label sitcoms, controversial films, and provoking artists as enemies to be avoid and denounced as "secular." Rooted in our deafness to ostensive outsiders, the Christian estrangement from the popular artists makes us miss the wisdom of critics who see the crimes of our institutions better than us or insiders in disguise who know the faith better than we do. Why would we listen, when we got the capital-T Truth, revealed from God above? we jam our fingers in our ears, and wield the weapon of revelation like we own it, becoming not only inhospitable, but hostile to strangers, ignorant of our own self-deception. But if Christ hides in the semblance of a stranger, then we are damnably too quick to dismiss. Rather than labeling, accusing, or pointing fingers, the Church would do better to discover the witness already present within the popular arts. Revelation is not patented by Christians, not owned as property, but has some surprises up its sleeve that we may find only if we are willing to listen and discern, thus beginning the reconciliation process.

Three main frustrations generate Church inhospitality to the popular arts. One, spiritualism convicts some streams of Christianity to avoid the popular arts out of the fear they might be tainted by worldly immoralities. This dysfunctional type of church-culture relation keeps Christians in pious enclaves, sticking to the salvific security of worship albums, only interacting with the world from a judgmental approach. Yet, there is some validity to their concerns because much of the music on radios and scenes from TV dehumanizes contagiously and is not worth watching. The onus for reconciliation cannot entirely be placed on the Church's shoulders. Popular artists will half to meet us half-way.

The second source of inhospitality comes from the Enlightenment’s after-effects. Modernity determined truth by examining how well propositional claims corresponded with the external world, leading to positivistic, scientific or phenomenological, metaphysical worldviews. These theories on the nature of truth allow art and fiction as expressive entertainment but not much more. Such flat conceptions of truth hamper our discernment of popular arts because of the suspicion that fiction can never be true, which must be debunked before we can listen with open ears. The Church can look to postmodern theories of art for our rehabilitation from realism that made us blind to the truth of myth.

The last source of inhospitality comes from activist streams of Christianity which question the utility of art. Anxiety about effective justice movements pressures art into serving functional social purposes, or else it is deemed worthless. Christian activists are quick to denounce the popular arts as a corrupting elite privilege. As a post-Marxist Mennonite who wants to motivate the Church past dogmatism to orthopraxy, I unfortunately relate to the worldview that sets up a non-crossable divide between aesthetics and ethics. I often ask “Is any song worth singing if it doesn’t help?” a line from a song by Wilco . Jeff Tweedy and other writers of Wilco will offer startling insight I will discuss on how to open our ears to hear as we overcome that reductive dichotomy.

Any framework for ecclesial discernment of culture must be eschatological. Discernment is the process of distinguishing art that can be located within the rebelliousness of fallen humanity from art that aligns with the story of the Church and our hope for the kingdom. Most artists, including Christian, appear on both sides, often (un)intentionally emitting cries of bondage in their lyrics or films, with the occasional crack of revelation that appears in the form of enactment upon imaginative hope, which comes like a divine light in the midst of darkness.

First we must talk of the darkness. Wilco’ song “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” demands our attention for its relevance as a social commentary upon the popular arts industry. My best interpretation (possibly wrong), sees the lyrics as an expression of Jeff Tweedy’s disdain for the performers who care nothing about the audience other than getting their money through music sales and glamorized publicity. These performers are nicknamed spiders for “spinning out webs of deductions and melodies” completely away from the problems of the world, “on a private beach in Michigan.” Their “singing” or production of music isn’t art, more like crude advertising to trap consumers, or flies to complete the metaphor. Tweedy labels the result as a “recent rash of kidsmoke,” too immature and too “telescopic,” or narrow-minded to see how they're wasting the poetic potential of their endowments. Instead of substance or depth, these performers “fool” us with “kisses” that “miss”; in other words, the industry’s ability to manipulate us with pleasurable images and sounds weaves a web of deception around those foolish enough to get addicted. Frustrated at the shallow showy pretense, Tweedy taunts them: “why can’t they say what they want / why can’t they just say what they need.” Why do the spiders deny their own authenticity, sell their souls, and distort the vocation of an artist by contaminating their work with dishonesty by not being true to the stories that shape their lives and identities?

Like Tweedy, sometimes the Church will find trash in its search for truth. Artists that deny their stories, their values, faith and doubts, and experiences they have been through, are worthless unless granted a very generous interpretation. But unless the Church wants to be violent, we must take seriously the context of the lyrics. Any discerning attempt to justify mushy romantic pop songs as possibly re-interpretable as Jesus worship songs will not do us any good. Discernment requires discrimination, not an overly zealous Christian appropriation of every source lacking any serious hermeneutic effort. Our time would be better spent analyzing the recurrent myth of redemptive romance and examining its idolatries and influence upon Christian youth who buy into the destined by God soul-mate fantasy. Eschatological orientation exposes these myths as false.

At the end of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" the crack of revelation bursts through the lyrics:

I'll be in my bed / You can be the stone
That raises from the dead / And carries us all home
There's no blood on my hands / I just do as I am told

The lyrics allude to the resurrection of Christ and the hope for the consummation of his heavenly kingdom. Tweedy introduces a ray of eschatology in judgment against the performers described earlier who hide on their "private beaches," so myopic that they stay in "bed" and miss the work of redemption, thus miss the true vocation of an artist. These spiders deny their sins, denying the blood on their hands, denying their complicity with fallenness and instead blaming powers higher up for the darkness. It's as though the crucifiers of Jesus, which includes everyone of us, cannot confess the evil of our own hands. Of course, we can't force or unreasonably expect unbelieving artists, or any unbeliever, who follows other idolatries, to articulate the universality of sin and the ultimate sovereignty of Christ over the powers. That wouldn't be reconciliation but ignorance. Instead the Church must double its vigilante in discernment of friend or foe. Friends sing of creation, fall, redemption (many times unintentionally). Foes deny that story completely and often deny the necessity of having a story, an especially nihilistic illusion.

My discussion thus far has been using an apocalyptic band, Wilco, to critique other popular artists . However, the Church, the other main character of reconciliation, deserves just as much, if not more of a rebuking. The Church cannot discern truth in art without first being true ourselves . The Enlightenment view of knowledge as the accumulating observations from a detached neutral examiner was mistaken. Truth is not a possession; its not about pinpointing accurate correspondence with reality; truth cannot be “accumulated” as an encyclopedia . Probably fed up with Christian scholastics and their giant theological systems, Tweedy sings, “Theologians, they don’t know nothing, about my soul.” Similarly, Polanyi, one of the first postmodern philosophers, dismissed the encyclopedic theory of truth, instead proposed the metaphor of truth as training on how to perform a skill well . For Christians that means truth is being trained by the Church in the skills of discipleship, which only make sense in the context of biblical narrative that remembers Abraham and foresees the victory of Christ, the hope that empowers our obedience.

The Church’s ability to discern the popular arts depends on its prior skill of seeing the world right. Only an eschatological body of people can see and recognize God's truth in art. No one should be given more credit for reconciling the Church with the popular arts, than David Dark in his book Everyday Apocalypse . He bridges the chasm between ethics and aesthetics by displaying the apocalyptic nature of art. His biblical partially-realized eschatology believes the rebellious structures of sin that characterize the old aeon are slipping away under the eschatological invasion of the new kingdom of God, best described as “shalom” (14). Yet, humanity’s sinfulness keeps us in bondage to the deceiving lies fed to us by the fallen powers, or “spiders." Often Christians are too blind or too bored to remember our shattering hope that exposes the darkness and rebukes deception. Luckily, artists often do the job for us in their insightful imaginative songs and stories. Any art that awakens us, re-opens our blind eyes to the truth, may be called apocalyptic:

Apocalyptic cracks the pavement of the status quo. It irritates and disrupts the feverishly defended norms of whatever culture it engages...In this sense apocalyptic is the place where the future pushes into the present. It’s the breaking in of another dimension, a new wine of which our old wineskins are unprepared (12).

Apocalyptic won’t flatter or privilege the powerful or congratulate us for our sincere intentions, but it will illumine what is dark. It will passionately expose. It will make us see (13).

For the apocalyptic mind, there isn’t a secular molecule in the universe, no matter outside the scope of its coming kingdom, no nook or cranny exempt from the redemption it announces (15).

The error of my activist theology was the invention of an ugly ditch between theology and the humanities. But the ostensive distinction between Christian description of the world and Christian moral prescription melts when we think eschatologically. Narrative theology doesn't see theological ethics and storied aesthetics as mutually exclusive, but rather inseparably dependent because how you see or hear the world leads into how you act . We discern the popular arts so that they may shock us out of our deceptions. The shocking power of the resurrection, ultimate reality, lurks in unexpected places, and when the Church recognizes the crack of revelation in the popular arts, we’ll discover unexpected friends aiding our witness.

David Dark writes that apocalyptic art "[questions] the given “reality” of the day....it has a way of unmasking fictions we inhabit" (15). Sometimes, the foresight of art is more real than the “reality” defined by the wider world, even more real than the Church remembers and needs reminding of . If we are ever to be reconciled to the popular arts, we must be open to the possibility of being judged rightly by stories that have more imagination then us, in fact, our survival as a hopeful people depends upon it. Only when we are helped to see into the future and envision the inexorable truth of apocalypse, will we have the courage to “go on” in ethical obedience despite great suffering and the illusion of meaninglessness . Holistic truth is any art that shares with us this storied meaningfulness that gives the Church community the courage to "go on" in faithfulness and truthfulness . I conclude with the textual incarnation of such apocalyptic beauty through the words of Bob Dylan, confident that the reader will interpret the ship symbol eschatologically:

Oh the fishes will laugh
As they swim out of the path
And the seagulls they'll be smiling.
And the rocks on the sand
Will proudly stand,
The hour that the ship comes in.

After reading through his book “When War is Unjust,” and some of his related articles like “Just-War Tradition: Is It Credible?” and “The Credibility of Ecclesiastical Teaching on the Morality of War,” I’m convinced Yoder understands the Just-War tradition better than Just-War theorists themselves. But why would an ecclesial sectarian pacifist care so much about a humanitarian cosmopolitan war morality? He states the reasons himself: it’s his ecumenical mission, which means taking seriously other people’s Christian beliefs. He wants to show them the moral integrity of their own tradition and hold them accountable to it, even for such pragmatic reasons as convincing military personal to kill less people in battle (he taught a JROTC class at Notre Dame on Just-War perspectives). Nothing gives me respect for Yoder’s witness more than his “ecumenical patience” as Mark Thiesen Nation calls it, his willingness to give mainstream tradition the benefit of the doubt and use their language with/against them. Yoder presented nothing in these writings like a full-blown attack tearing down the Just-War theory, which he was quite capable of—these writings are not “biblical or pastoral” but a different territory for him.

Furthermore, Yoder and Hauerwas convince me that the Just-War tradition and church pacifism are not that radically different. They both start from the presumption that violence is bad and needs to be restrained out of love for the neighbor and the enemy. Also, through their reasoning, they converge at the ends again by both rejecting indiscriminate disproportionate war. What is the difference then? Many people point to methodology: pacifism is deontologically based on the absolute principles of not taking life, while the just-war tradition is a casuistry of teleological calculations. Having read Yoder’s Nevertheless earlier, I know he wouldn’t quite agree, because his pacifism is not principle-based and he thinks most all methods are subsumed by biblical argument. What are the methods of the Just-War tradition? It’s a set of changing theories based on common sense (like war is not good) and common language (like discrimination, immunity, and proportion key words). Mainly its components can be broken down in three categories: 1) discerning legitimacy of authorities, 2) discerning if cause is just, and 3) making sure means of warfare are fair. It’s empirical for its conclusions depend on substantial evidence, knowable facts, and sounds prediction.

Yoder blatantly prefers the Just-War tradition over its threatening alternatives. While holy wars root their causes in transcendent claims and revelation, Just-War requires sober human measurement and finite political values. Crusades send their martyrs to heaven and kill like their enemy is Corban. Just-war must be a last resort, have probable success, and always respect for the adversary, thus it also differs from a Machiavellian political realism that throws away morality because there’s no time for it when war is hell. Do what you have to do, for nationalistic interest, which is also a position recapitulated by Reinhold Neibuhr. Hauerwas evaluates political realism to be incompatible with Just-War because it holds no presumption against violence in the first place (“Can A Pacifist Think About War?”). Lastly, Just-war is a far better alternative than the “Rambo” racist and xenophobic excessive killing that so characterizes our wars today.

Some sarcasm does shine through in between the lines, Yoder’s doubts of the tradition’s credibility—mainly because the criteria has never once truly been applied in all of church history to produce a negative judgment on war. Without this negation, Just-war slides into a divine sanction for the threatening types of warfare mentioned above. But is it any surprise that the Just-war tradition is too weak to critique powerful militarism, when psychologically, we’re not prepared for selective conscientious objection (which isn’t even legally accepted by the government), nor are we institutionally prepared to work with creative nonviolent alternatives with as much thought and resources that we spend in the hostile culture of war? Furthermore, churches tend to only bring up this dead-horse system after the events that lead to war have already begun. War is accepted by our government, and then the churches do a post-facto analysis to see if it breaks the rules or not (nicked schoolyard morality by Hauerwas), which is totally not how the Just-War tradition was supposed to work. And politicians and soldiers simply wouldn’t listen to a church accusing them today with a negative judgment; they would find a new church. Perhaps the Just-War tradition is useless now with the fall of Christendom and decline of churchly authority. Mostly its language is just used by an intellectual elite, or the president, as political leverage for their agenda upon people that don’t care about the Gospel. The common people are not mature enough for the subtleties of the Just-War language; they just appropriate it crudely for their public triumphalism that hates the enemy and demands quick victory, any means necessary. One of the best comments Hauerwas makes, is how fundamentally the same all wars are with terrorism, a subverting distinction that clearly makes America the worst terrorists. He does retain the vast distinction between warfare and police functions as different types of coercion, only gives credit to Just-war when it stays in its place as an international police code.

The Just-War tradition in the medieval ages is almost unrecognizable to the tradition today. At first few citizens participated, unlike every citizen being dubbed a combatant today. The church bishops were peacemakers who set truce times and off-limits zones. Justification for war was always still considered sinful and required mourning forgiveness. The Protest Reformation weakened the restraint of the tradition significantly by fixing it in their creedal documents and cohorting with nationalist princes during the Thirty Years War. The doctrine of necessity justified breaking rules of warfare for higher effectiveness in beating the enemy into submission as fast as possible. Today, Christians often look to WWII as evidence of a just cause despite the fact the warfare methods implemented then completely disregarded the legitimate standards of a just-war, especially the nuclear bombing of Japan, which for the public crossed a psychological threshold. The Just-War tradition is outdated for dealing with new types of warfare, like low-intensity nuclear tensions and constant guerrilla warfare.

I’ve never seen Yoder use the slippery slope argument except in this literature as an indictment against “rubbery discrimination.” Warfare logic sees the enemy as evil and thus inhumane; it blames others: “they did it first.” The doctrine of double effect (lesser evil argument) soon points to pre-emptive strikes as the best defense. And why do we care about Iraq so much, but not Sudan? (a question I’m sure Yoder would ask them). Yoder asks many other hard questions that need to be answered before we can give credit to the Just-War tradition: how do you get the facts in democratic disinformation? How can pluralism ever agree upon shared criteria? How does one calculate proportionality, comparing current evils with less hypothetical evils? Especially when abstract causes like freedom and justice are invoked? Is there internal consistency with in bello infraction leading to ad bellum illegitimacy? Yet, Yoder only ever hints that he thinks the Just-War tradition is hogwash, he never directly says it. But one of the reasons he says he cares so much about the Just-War tradition is that it might just all need a prophetic denouncement as deception.

I’m cautious before explaining my convictions on ethics because of the tendency we Westerners have to think propositionally, systematically, and for the elite. It’s always hard to simply describe ethics without trying to justify ourselves with deeper explanations on why we are right. This tendency towards theory, even on ethical topics, is ironically unethical when the search for certain foundations, even religious ones, becomes proof for universal claims which should be universally accepted by everyone. Postmodernity has helped us see the coercion and exclusion inherent in that approach, especially when it leads to violence in fundamentalist religious groups that have their corner on Truth.

If to be human is to make sense of the world and life through stories that give meaning and are social reinforced through language and behavior, morality is a given, an already basic quality of being human, rather than a project that needs to be imposed in order to defend our souls from nihilism. All cultures have social norms, expectations on what conduct is considered useful and what actions are deemed deviant. These mores are evolving and changing, but they are already there, even if arbitrarily conditioned, before any philosophical endeavors. For instance, it is moral to drive on the right side of the street, and deviant to drive on the wrong side or backwards down a one-way lane or through a red light. Such a driver would be honked at (negative reinforcement), maybe even pulled over by law enforcers. There’s nothing universal about these traffic expectations—they are really quite dependent on signs, symbols, words, and the transmission of meaning through driver’s education and family training. So it is with all life and language: morality is a fundamental socialized human trait, and relative on the cultural level. Ethics is already given by culture, like the ethical egoism that runs the world through capitalistic global markets. It is moral and legal for a CEO to care for nothing more than making a profit for his/her stockholders.

But for me, it is very unethical to care about short-term money gain more than long range environment or native cultural concerns. So, how have I jumped from description to prescription? Especially when it means imposing an alternative set of values (the poor and the environment) over against the dominant social expectations of the wider world (or at least against the American way of life)? It is only because I have been told by a community of people (the Church) to think differently, to make sense of life differently, and to live within a different symbolic world than unbelievers. This symbolic world might also be called a Christian worldview, and it enables living as new humanity in the way of peace as Jesus taught and as we study biblically while striving to witness to the kingdom of God. From this communal perspective, we interpret the (over)consumerism and (rampant)militarism as rebellious resistance against our victorious Lord. My ethics (and hopefully other Christians too) are Christocentric and eschatological in that the church must discern what is fallen of the old aeon that has no ultimate future, compared to the new invasion of shalom in accordance with the eschaton, or destination of all creation. So, I reject much of a capitalistic philosophy, even though it is a morality, it is the world’s morality, the world as I defined as structured unbelief. As I said in class, the difference between belief and unbelief is everything. Yet, the Church’s relation to the world is not one of total rejection, but discriminating disaffirmation or affirmation. This is no simple typology, but a dynamic witness with a multiplicity of stances to our surrounding culture that saturates us.

Obviously then ethics won’t ever be an a priori determination of how to decide what to do in situations before they happen. If we are trying to be faithful to Christ in an endlessly changing culture, the unpredictable new scenarios will always require fresh communal discernment, not theoretical manipulation by an individual, but the dialogue among diverse people that uses all the resources of their tradition and sacred texts to find imaginative hermeneutical bridges. I have already distanced myself from many other common ethical approaches and their assumptions that a system be universal, or ethics tolerable for the power-holders or calculative enough for fringe case hypotheticals. Against Kantian ethics, I say one must embrace their particularity rather than placing great confidence in the accessibility of rationality and duty to all humans. Against Constantianism, which is the label for when the church was institutionally wedded with the state, I say Christian ethics should not be reversed to endorse oppressive wealth and violence so that kings or Commander in Chiefs can be included (this is liking stripping Christian ethics of any thing Christian; it’s Christian ethics without Jesus, so not Christian at all). Against quandary-ism or conundrum-based ethics, I say ethics is the substance of daily living and identity, not about gray controversies that induce generalizations (principles) from peculiar compromises.

John Howard Yoder calls this peculiar ethical reasoning punctiliarism because it ignores the traditional narratives that give us our perception of reality, it is often divorced from a discerning community, and it is superficial for sticking on the human place, rather than looking to the character of God. Through biblical stories, Christian know the attributes of God as incarnated in Jesus. Since we cannot see the Father except through the Son, we hold the primacy of Christ above any other lesser moral claims upon us. Nothing tells us more about God’s character than that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son to die for us in order that we may live with him. Also known as agape, this love suffers to let evil free to be evil. In divine patience, and in hope for the consummate kingdom, which is assured but not yet seen, this love empowers us to be nonresistant, or obedient unto death. Mimicking this love is obedience, and it means following the way of Jesus for ecclesial discipleship, characterized by reconciliation and redemption.

Utilitarianism is wrong to connect greatest happiness to the agency of humans instead of to divine agency. The greatest happiness for the greatest number is the wholeness of shalom. Typically, consequentialist reason means finding the lesser evils among many, but this discernment is always dependent on the time-length of your paradigm. The corporation effectively makes short-term happiness, but in the long run its damaging externalities are actually quite ineffective. Efficiency is utterly dependent on time-range. Consumerism and militarism are only a “lesser evil” in the blindest of shortest paradigms. If our time-range is ultimate, then the pacifism of sects is not to be insulted as irresponsible but it is truly the most effective of all in the final perspective of eschatological living, which trusts God to bring about the kingdom, not humanity.

Behavioralism or hard-determinism is a particular perception of the world that reduces all happenings to cause and effect. While soft-determinism accurately sees the significance of socialization and genetics, hard-determinism is scientific triumphalism, which requires knowledge to be verifiable and predictable based on past probability. The problem with statistically probability is it has no way of processing utterly unique historical events like the incarnation and the resurrection. Yet the power of the resurrection which frees us from all divisive determinisms is part and parcel of Christian daily obedience. My ethics are apocalyptic in order break through the coercive assumptions of scientism that have been accepted as common sense or normal and leave no place for divine-agency.

Divine-agency is biblical though divine command is not. Divine command is legalism at it’s finest, and it reduces the upside-down kingdom to information to be appropriated and acted upon dutifully. It fails to ask why Paul reasoned as he did, why Jesus said the things he did because it is typically anti-intellectual/theological, at least incapable of integrating scholarly mind with faith. In contrast, Christians do not obey because such are the demands of discipleship; we obey because of the abundance and wealth of love that follows conversion into the new humanity, the symbolic world that gives us meaning. Furthermore, if we are taking the bible seriously, we must follow its instructions on communal discernment for deciding ethical matters (I like to say inerrancy doesn’t take the bible seriously enough).

The body of Christ is a radical congregationalism of equality. There is no hierarchy of power, just different gifts all building up the community. The least are valued the most in this body that celebrates diversity, poverty, single-ness, and encourages everyone to speak, and everyone to listen. The community discerns together whether to reject/affirm/transform various cultural objects, and they make decisions empowered by the Spirit. Consider the witness of churches that only let members buy fair-trade coffee as a good example of what I’m talking about. To one extent, there is no right or wrong until the Church gathers and discerns. Yet, the canonized apostolic witness always is held in tension with the Church, ready to judge it as unfaithful (although hopefully the theologians would protect the congregation).

Members genuinely care for one another, care enough to hold the other accountable for their actions. When one is baptized, it means they commit to lifelong relationship with that congregation and vow to participate in conflict mediation according to the binding-and-loosing model Jesus recommended. It is crucially important to resolve dissentions within the Church (including denominational divisions) so that we can witness to the unity of Christ. Ecumenism is a moral imperative, a biblical demand for us to refuse to cease talking to one another about ethics, especially when we judge our brother and sister as unfaithful and disobedient, like Mennonites would judge an active soldier. The intent is always reconciliation of the apostate, not exclusion (despite the banning-fest of early Anabaptists). All members are to be conformed in imitation of Christ, to bear and bloom in the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, and peace. Ethics for an individual are impossible, even a theoretical absurdity. Virtues much be seen in their corporate context, that they are enabled by solidarity.

Hermeneutics is a neverending task, and an extemely important one. Doctrines rise and fall with the translations of passages, in some cases. The hardest misinterpretation for us to move beyond today is the Lutheran individualistic reading of Paul. For example, most translations link baptism to becoming a new creature in 2 Corinthians 5:7, but this is error. Baptism doesn't transform the individual, but initiates a new creation, not creature. When you are baptised, you enter a whole new world/humanity of transcending human divisions. People don't catch this when they read the Bible as a treatise on inwardness, and there's some major dangers of this inner salvation Gospel: 1) it offers for little ethical guidance on how to live socially (because its all about an ontological conversion), 2) it undermines the accountability of the church to bind and loose, or even preach, 3) it denies scholarship from other critical disciplines, because this inward new birth cannot be verified with much empirical probability (and when different subjects talk about the same thing, whether spiritual or psychological, there should be coherence between them), and lastly 4) this new birth associates too strongly with youth, health, and beauty (he nicknames this the Campus Crusade Syndrome).

A theme ubiquitous in Yoder's writing is the prior-ness of community before individuality. In one sense this is a common sense philosophical statement these days in recognition of the corporate nature to all of life, in social constructions. But this is also a theological statement that puts individuality in its proper place (and it still does have a devotional place, though Yoder never talks about it). Yoder: "The prerequisite for personal change is a new context into which people enter." Yes, all individuals make existential choices, but the Christian frame of references see that inwardness in regards to will a people commit to the Church or not. Will the individual have faith to follow Jesus and join the counter-resistance even though it might require giving up some things you like. These decision are always in the larger context of church membership. The kingdom of God is political, not subjective.

Yoder's argument for biblical authority isn't so much an argument as an observation. Not only does he believe in the prior-ness of community, but he also emphasizes the reading texts and taking them seriously before debating about theories of inerrancy. Typical arguments for biblical authority tend to require justifying, propositional explaination, and more explaining that gets further and further lost in methodology and the pressures to make a foundation somewhere. Yoder frowns unkindly on doctrines that make the Bible a metaphysical document, which leads to establishing a total unchanging system of "true" propositions that generally serve the political interests of the status quo. What's "true," is not some mystical cognitive insight on ontology, but rather "truth" is the "historical judgements on a statement's compatibility with life directions and value insights and narrative memories of community." In other words, we study texts to get at our communal memory which gives our community the very same identity as the past community of our historical origins (the early church). Yoder is simply describing the role of sacred texts in general in founding a historical community.

But the Christian scriptures are a lot different from other sacred texts. The Bible tells a story about particular people and places and wants us to accept that story as our own. If we do that, we enter a new symbolic world that re-defines power and the cross and the future. This symbolic world is not to be confused with solipsism, because the Christian conviction is that the way we see the world is the way it really is, "objectively." This is why Yoder can claim Christian ethics is not provincial (because our vision is the truth), nor is Christian ethics generalizable, because it doesn't make sense unless you except the symbolic world (which is passed through tradition, embedded in our preaching, teaching, hymns, and liturgy). This is also why the gospel is epistemologically nonviolent...But anyway, we depend on these texts to remember the story, and the way these texts remember the story "is the reality it remembers." This is a different way of doing history in contrast to modern criticism that searches for behind the text hidden clues or the real historical Jesus. The way the gospel writers wrote the story, is the necessary theological rendition for understanding the identity of Christ and our subsequent identity as the church (you're not doing history, you're doing theology). The epistles and books that made it in the canon provide the breadth of apostolic witness that judges the faithfulness of the future church.

Let me explain this a different way. If you have faith that Jesus is the Messiah, he is normative for ethics (this is a faith-based nonfoundation). To learn about His identity we must continually communally study the written documents that record his life and the development of the movement of his followers, to learn about the person Jesus. The Bible as a storage of memory gives us a window into what the authority of the Lord of lords looks like. And when the church takes the Bible seriously, we will be surprised when these texts expose us as followers of other authorities other than Christ, which will happened to every Christian community if they seriously see hermenuetics as a neverending process. Yoder defines Scripture "functionally as witness to/from a norming past that can stand in judgement upon later betrayals of their story." The prescriptions and descriptions of Jesus that have been preserved through the Bible are texts that made it into the canon for a reason, they passed a criterion of accountability. These are the texts that give norms to us in order to keep the Church faithful. Many times in Church history, our actions and doctrines have been oppressive and selfish, and the content of the canon judges them as unfaithful. This accountability to scriptures does not fit with a High Tridentine Catholic theology that sets up two channels of revelation, the scripture and the church, and gives the church power to claim what revelation is and isn't. "The development of a selection of writings, recognized as authoritative by the churches, constitutes the final proof delivered by the church herself that the church does not claim final authority but rather subjects herself to the witness of the apostolic age." This is why the canon is closed, because the Bible judges tradition as right or wrong, the tradition doesn't judge the Bible as right or wrong. Yoder loves the metaphor of pruning. Much of traditional church developments are organic and bear fruit as witnessing to Christ, while some organice development becomes heretical and needs to be pruned. And so the church, as the bible describes, is a unique diversity-within-unity movement throughout history, with limits of tolerable deviance from apostolic norms (there's diversity because this is a multi-vocal canon, not a propositional coherent totality). This isn't putting a High Protestant miraculous self-interpreting Bible above the Church, because Yoder's theology clearly depends upon this ecclesial community of hernmenuetics.

In many ways, biblical authority is not a doctrine, but a question, a question that can only be answered post-fact, after observing if a community is truly taking Jesus as Lord or not. If that community is not, that community does not have biblical authority, and it makes no sense to talk about the authority of a the bible metaphysically in a vacuum apart from its interpreting community.

With postmodernism’s recent refutation of violent binary oppositions, it’s amazing that in 1954, John Howard Yoder was already talking about a “duality without dualism.” He must have a had a good sense that dualistic thinking typically leads to oppressive exclusion, so he need to show why the distinction between the church vs. the world was different, that the relationship between the orders of providence and redemption is not inherently violent. To that aim, first, theologians need to stop speaking in metaphysical levels as if spiritual Christians were of a higher essence then unbelievers. God did not create two separate realms, one for his followers and one for the pagans. Instead, what separates the church vs. the world is solely of human origin, sin–the difference is of “personal posture” Do humans respond in faith to Christ’s invitation and church evangelism, or not? Or as Yoder writes in “On Earth Peace,” God says “Yes,” to everyone, it’s man that chooses to say “yes” or “no” in return. Thus indeed, Christ is the “master of history” and all powers are subject to him, but some of them refuse to acknowledge so, a.k.a the world, or “structured unbelief.” However, though the church and the world are distinct, they are nevertheless one humanity, a duality without dualism.

Yoder believes in the “absolute priority of the church over the state.” God allows to state to continue its violent existence for one reason: that church evangelism may go on. Evangelism, defined as the calling together of God’s beloved community of shalom, is the purpose of history. God tolerates/channels/orders the violence/vengeance of the powers without morally approving it. An ethical question that arises when these axioms are accepted: what is the relation between the church and state, specifically, how to Christians witness to the state, or even, can Christians be politicians/police (though Yoder abhors this last legalistic question)? If disciples of Christ are called to suffering servitude, how then do they interact among the “Gentiles with lords that ruler over others.” The problems presupposes the state is synonymous with the “sword” (or guns for us moderns) that protects and gets into boundary conflicts. Otherwise, working in welfare programs, or wilderness reserves, or other nonviolent services employed by the modern nation-state, is not problematic for Christians (in that situation, the question is, will this employment be the best way that I can follow Christ or are there more important missional jobs to be done).

Neither of the two traditional doctrines of the state are biblical accurate: 1) Luther’s positivism deduces divine ordination for the state from the natural revelation of creation as opposed to Christ. 2) Much of the debate about the “legitimacy” of a state sets up liberal-political (platonic?) ideals that if broken would justify revolution (by juxtaposing the state of Romans 13 with the out-of-control tyranny of Revelations 13). In contrast, Yoder thinks the state of Romans 13 and Revelations 13 are the same state, and Paul exhorts us to be subject to it. The catch is, subjection does not imply obedience; it could also imply disobedience, then accepting the consequent legal punishment. No state is divinely ordained, and no state is biblical authorized–states are like a sinking ship under invasion of the new eschatological kingdom. There is no doctrine of the state because the state has no “ontological dignity.”

What does Yoder mean when he says the “church precedes the state epistemologically and axiologically”? It means we, the church, know why the state exists better than it does, and the church is the true polis that state politics are only a pale perversion of. The positive side of the Christian witness to the state focuses on embodying a virtuous social order that spreads moral values and processes through the society (kind of like a conscience), e.g. egalitarianism, fraternal admonition, and in general, service and listening. The other side of the Christian witness is more complex: how can Christians judge the government and tell it to behave better, especially needed when the fallen powers overstep their boundaries with more violence and religious blasphemy. But it’s hard to speak about holding the state accountable when we can’t expect it to be nonresistant since it doesn’t have faith and since it lacks its own set of norms (this is another example of the duality without dualism, there’s only the one norm of love for all humanity, which the Christian understands as taking up your cross, which the statesman understands as political suicide, financial irrationality, and unrealistic irrelevance). Nevertheless, Christians want the state to move closer to that goal and norm of redemption, and we can use any constitutionally language to critique the state though there’s nothing unique about that–a Christian critique of injustice, if talking to (stranger) statesmen, can sound like and appropriate the best contemporary social critique from non-Christian writers. Yoder also calls this process middle axioms, including our request that the state listen to minorities, keep the peace, speak with honesty, and not use religious legitimation language. Christians don’t ask the state to commit the “lesser evil.” We ask the state to implement the “least evil” operations, so yes, Christians tell their nation to cease fight, avoid war, and find peaceful creative alternatives–even the best social critiques expose international war as always being ineffective in the long-run.

Can Christians vote without supporting the violence of their state? Can a Christian be a senator? The answer to both those questions is “yes.” In the United States, a voter is merely communicating which of two oligarchies is preferable. Even a senator who is frank about his nonresistance can be involved with legislation without supporting the sword-function of the state. There’s a big difference between witnessing communication vs. guilty agent involvement.

Surprisingly, this is the first book I’ve read by Yoder in which he significantly addresses the individuality of faith. If we’re concerned about taming the powers and communicating to our government, the best way is to make relationships with our rulers and evangelize to them. Counter to the deterministic sociological philosophies, we must care for and treat our politicians as person, our pastoral work. And like any nonbeliever, we will ask them to live by faith, not only to live according to their moral principles, but to have faith that what looks like a risk to them, is the way of Christ. Perhaps, this calling will convince some to abandon their posts to do more important things, or maybe could experience a conversion and then creatively serve humanity by agape and nonresistance while keeping their position.

How does one go about solving ethical conundrums in general? Typically higher principles are appealed to and constructed that give a systematic framework for piecing together practical implications. Depending on your school of thought, you might argue that deontological laws are better than teleological consequences or case-by-case casuistry. To make such a claim however, one must back up philosophically to establish firm foundations. This is nicknamed by John Howard Yoder, “the flight to methodology,” when thinkers get so preoccupied with non-particular method that they never get around to the content. Is there a way of doing ethics intellectually without losing the ethics?

Why should we even pick from one ethical method, whether rule, consequence, virtue, or narrative based? In “Walk and Word,” Yoder thinks it’s a mistake to narrowly commit yourself to one type, not too mention, it would be abiblical (the bible contains a multiplicity of styles) and counterproductive to communities of discernment. Sometimes scholarly theologians need to remind themselves that the laity, the polis they are trying to protect, all use different methods of reasoning; furthermore, all people use more than one kind of reasoning. Even Augustine argued against lying deontologically, but argued against killing teleologically.

All methods must be evaluated on how they “contribute to a community’s fidelity.” This isn’t a retreat to a higher principle, but a simple realization that the helter-skelter moral language of a community is “prior to all possible methodological distillations.” An individual ethicist locked in a room full of books is simply not doing ethics when s/he is separated from a community. When a community gathers to discuss, disagree, dialogue, and discern moral situations, it embodies ethical methodology. The biblical process of open meetings is not only good procedural theology, but it’s a space for moral discourse to be empowered by the Holy Spirit, thus, the medium of ethical questioning is good news in itself. Surely the Quakers have witnessed to the necessity of facilitating ecumenical, divinely-inspired, inclusive gatherings and the impact they have on the people’s morality and social justice.

Why not blend moral methods to make a stronger case motivating a community’s faithfulness? For example, why was Martin Luther King Jr. a nonviolent resister? Was it just because he thought it was a divine law? In addition to sensing the coherence of nonviolence with the love of Christ, King also believe in the power of nonviolence as a tool of social pressure to bring about change (teleological). King also believed in disciplining a community to be of virtue and peace. With multiple reasonings, King and his church commit to the morality of nonviolence. Now we can understand why Yoder argues, form must follow function, that is, methodology is mostly a posteriori elucidation upon the church’s witness to the kingdom of God.

Discussion in the classroom on this dilemma was difficult because everyone was thinking on different wavelengths, with different methodological assumptions and different ethical values. For some it’s a simple matter of text-proofing, quoting various verses for paying taxes. This is kind of a naïve biblical legalism for not dealing with hermeneutics (which I will deal with) or theology by not asking why the author reasoned as he did. For others that support war tax resistance, it’s a matter of simple social justice, stopping the violent injustice of the government. The implicit assumptions in this position can be just as questionable: the government should hold a pacifist ideology (determined from our Christian reasoning), the same morality and conclusions should apply to the decision-making of politicians as of Christians, and the nation-state is the locus of history’s progression towards justice. Theologically, all of these assumptions are wrong, and yet neither am I supporting a two-kingdom ethic that argues for violence for the nation but not for the church.

I cannot be understood if we assume that cultural relativism is just another ethical system to choose from, as Bumper Sticker Ethics says. Relativism means knowing the tradition of my community is particular, embodies a different narrative, and only knows how to do ethics for members (Christian ethics are for Christians – “the obedience of faith makes no sense apart from the context of faith” writes Yoder). Under the moral language of democracy, we can tell politicians to be more just, but we cannot tell him to be more Christian. God’s plans are for the church to be the nonviolent bearer of the meaning of history, and the state serves a secondary purpose of preserving peace and order for our work (it’s “outside the perfection of Christ”). If the state resists that vocation, it is illegitimate e.g. when the U.S. spends half its budget on militarism, wars with massive killing.

When Jesus and Paul referred to paying taxes in Rome, Rome was a very different thing from the modern nation-state. It was practically “the whole world” and had established provisional peace (with notable exceptions on the barbarian border). “The government of Rome was not spending more than half of its resources on preparations to destroy the rest of the world” (Yoder). Furthermore, Paul offers no blanket submissive statement, but tells us to discriminate what we owe Caesar, including taxes. So as the church today, we can discern whether our superpower nation needs to be tamed or not, and some vocal Mennonites think we should resist its militarism via war tax resistance, and I agree. The church tames fallen powers by subverting their own language against them, by denouncing evil being done to our neighbors, and by disobeying illegitimate authorities rebelling against the lordship of Christ. In our understanding, we are holding the state accountable to “duty under God.”

Nevertheless: Varieties of religious pacifism, by John Howard Yoder could be interpreted a number of different ways. Yes, the most careful delineation between peace positions ever published, but Yoder would be upset if it isn’t taken as more than taxonomy. There are 29 different pacifisms, and each one represents a different way of doing ethics, a different methodology perhaps based on effectiveness, or isolationist integrity, or absolute principles, or personal piety. My favorite chapter from the book was the very last, “Lessons we have learned.” I bet Yoder has experienced the same frustration in peace/war discussions as I have: “mostly people are not really discussing war, they are talking past each other out of logically incompatible prior assumptions about whether and how one can think morally at all.” Yoder argues that any ethical system from the just-war casuistry to Asian spirituality to Kantian ethics to sectarian cults, “if taken seriously and as more than self-justification, can lead to one kind of pacifism or another.” Yoder closes every chapter with a bite-you-in-the-butt clincher about why any critique against this version of pacifism would be better placed arguing against war. Truly war is more ineffective than nonviolent, more provincial than the Amish, more utopian than the purists, more irrational than conscience-driven moralists, with a worse message of hate than any prophetic indictment.

Only when speaking specifically to Mennonites, does Yoder get noticeably pissed off at those who irrationally avoid pacifism by distinguishing themselves from others who have arrived at the same anti-war commitment but on different grounds of moral reasoning. Yoder is a die-hard ecumenicist who cares more about ethical substance than anything, and it would be arrogant to disowned other traditions that have the right ethics without the “right” moral reasoning. Yoder firmly roots himself in the pacifism of the messianic community, the only one that would fall apart without Jesus, yet he concedes that even his position is one among many that should be respected on their own terms. Does not this seem to go against Yoder’s sharp Christocentric ecumenism? I consider myself in the same camp as Yoder, messianic community pacifism, yet I’m convinced the following situation is conceivable: Yoder would reproach me for my unfaithfulness (say my economic violence), but he would not reproach a Catholic activist who works toward a cosmopolitan peace. Here’s the point: it’s not the ethical mode of reasoning that determines faithfulness, but participation in an alternative social order. (I will post a comment further expanding on this idea)

If everyone thinks differently, no agreement would ever be possible, not everyone can fit on the same train of logic. Then how come the Quakers always seem to reach unanimous conclusion on huge ethical decisions? Now we can understand why Yoder points towards the Friends Church in an appendix at the end of Nevertheless. They are an historic church witness to the realization that you don’t have to be likeminded clones to be empowered by the Holy Spirit. The best one-phrase summary of Yoder’s ecumenism is, the refusal to cease open dialogue. So Mennonites that are too righteously concerned about their Christocentric eschatological dualism to listen and affirm others are sinning against the Holy Spirit.

The main thrust of the Priestly Kingdom argues for restitutionist perspective, working to restore the church of today back to a pre-fallen state, in other words, Yoder calls other Christians to repent and live faithfully. Yoder knows this argument easily takes hits from critics for being nostalgically ahistorical, pessimistic about the indefectibility of the church, and arrogant for calling majorities within the Christendom establishment disobedient to God’s commandments, which is tantamount to pointing your finger at millions of nominal Christians throughout time and calling them apostates.

We cannot understand Yoder’s defense without understanding his relativistic historiography, which actually takes the organic growth of history more seriously than systematic moderns who cling on to the myth of progress. Through their rational apologetics, those moderns are still trying to coerce outsiders to believe in the truth. In the process, they change the good news into nothing new, since it should be universally understood. And, they make the good news bad, by adopting a forceful evangelical procedure instead of a nonresistant method of invitation. If the human is not free to not believe, than God is not agape. Modernism was embarrassed by particularity and the contingency of thought, but their reaction to this awareness was doubly embarrassing. They tied the question for certitude with the impossible quest to strip away all particularities, and the result was always a system pushed upon others by the claims of being universal and accessible. So instead of having to be told the truth by a tradition with the knowing of Christ’s work being mediated ecclesiastically, you were considered heretical instead for not innately knowing it already. This is also known as the epistemology of the establishment, same ethics is for everyone, whether church member or pagan state ruler. In other words, civil religion is abiblical because it lacks the New Testament dualism between the church and the world a.k.a. Constanianism, Yoder’s lifelong nemesis that flips the upside-down kingdom right side up, the right side of “realism.”

The only philosophical universal Yoder embraces is that everything is particular-bound, and without particular communities that embody narratives, universal statements would be meaningless, hence why Yoder frequently states universal and particulars are not mutually exclusive but mutually inextricable. “Christ is Lord” is incoherent apart from a church that worships (Yoder always defines worship in terms of cultivation of a counter-consciousness). Theologically, we must be a minority if we are to worship the right God instead of the infinite inconceivable god or the boyfriend god. Modern’s philosophical aporias and the church’s infidelity both have their roots wrapped up in ‘established religion.’ This is what modernism misses, that faith runs all the way down, no foundation can escape its basis on flimsy familiar faith. While theocracy entitles all citizens to be Christians without obedience, Yoder maintains, “the obedience of faith does not make sense apart from the context of faith.” Only when we confess to have the faith of a minority of voluntary membership, can we remember that obedience means not killing others. There is an inherent connection between the free church and pacifism, vs. the established churchly institution and violence, as well as wealth, social stratification and other reversals against the suffering servanthood of Christ.

Discursive: the first time I ever heard about the danger of worshipping creation rather than the creation was from a conservative being cautious about environmentalism. Little did he, or I at the time, realize that “worshipping creation,” has very little to do with appreciating nature, and more to do with finding sources of ethics other than the implications of Christ’s lordship. If we protect our nation by killing other people, we are worshipping creation because we have submitted to a consequentialist reasoning that operates on very different values than obedience to God unto death, as Paul describes Christ on the cross. The best bet we have on which nations are favorable in God’s eyes, is how they treat their outsiders.

Anyway, to be a restitutionist means to call the church fallen in the hope of starting a new movement of faithfulness. Yoder appeals to scripture as a judge over unfaithfulness, and he thinks its critical to use history in this way, taking the normative points of incarnation (like the primitivism of the pre-Constantine church) and evaluating non-normative history under that rubric. Any history can be normative if it instantiates the social order of the kingdom, like the many unpredictable small reformations throughout church history have witnessed to. It almost sounds like Yoder would proclaim his loyalty to any body of the Church that performs a radical turn-around, disciplining of morality, and reinvigoration of congregationalism (because he sure don’t proclaim it to Mennonites). The church isn’t just fallen because it believes the wrong things, it’s fallen because it no longer organizes the biblical social processes that mark it with its identity, like missional interethnic inclusiveness, economic sharing, charismatic empowerment, open discernment, and of course, binding and loosing.

I cannot finish my synopsis of the Priestly Kingdom without one last point. Yoder must get sick of people labeling him as an irresponsible sectarian, because much of his material in these essays argues for the societal effectiveness of a faithful minority that does not compromise with idolatries of cost/benefit analysis. “A minority may do for society what the conscience does for an individual.” The disestablished church has much more creative freedom to experiment with different social patterns, to try to embody new visions that may eventually be appropriated by the government (like service programs have been). When the church lives paradigmatically of the kingdom, moral social process can leaven throughout society, e.g. the historic connection between Christian congregational meetings and town meetings. Additionally, voices of dissention keep awareness of issues alive and prophetic criticism can make a difference in a government that claims to be ‘of the people.’ In fact, just like Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King Jr., we can use the ‘people’ language of the government against its hypocrisy. Since all rulers morally legitimize themselves as benefactors, we can use their own claims to hold them accountable to ‘justice.’ Yoder states, “Of all the forms of oligarchy, democracy is the least oppressive, since it provides the strongest language of justification and therefore of critique which the subjects may use to mitigate its oppressiveness.” After all, all governmental political language is a weak resemblance of the true politics of the church, and that is what Barth’s principle of analogy means.

The most startling tension I find between Yoder and Hauerwas (and Nation) is how evangelism and church socialization fit. I get the impression that the implication of tradition, community narratives, and liturgy-centered theology is indoctrination, cultivating church education so that the stories that give our life meaning may be the right stories. For one, I worry about the arrogance this would require of the elites and intellectual theologians of a church and the necessary accumulation of power. Even John Howard Yoder articulates the problem: mini-Constantinian establishments that maintain "distinctive sectarian identity...not by effective evangelism but by migration and the cultivation of ethnic distinctiveness." Does church membership increase because more progeny enter Sunday School or because of communal invitations to strangers and sojourners? I never thought I would say this, but I think Derrida offers the best methods of evangelism (as well as Miroslav Volf's appropriation of postmodern philosophers). Just like Yoder distances himself from the Mennonite denomination in the Introduction in The Priestly Kingdom, so Derrida encourages difference within itself instead of incubating identity. John Caputo explains Derrida to value "community without community," because the walls that are constructed necessarily from socialization interfere without openness and welcoming the other to come. It is not enough to say the church body has a missions/outreach subdivision; if Derrida is correct, by definition the core posture of church if having a messianic structure will be missional. Yoder feels strongly enough about this point to tie Jewish history to a free-church paradigm by examples of Israel's evangelical nature towards strangers and marginalized rather than the traditional interpretation of Israel as a theocratic enclave. Yoder distances himself from Mennonites because the only reason he likes Mennonites is their origins from the radical reformation vision of restitutionism. Yoder is not faithful to Anabaptist per se, but faithful to restoration movements that save us from apostasy.

Of course, Yoder means something very different when he uses the word evangelism than the meanings Christian majorities associate with it as conversion unto eternal salvation. For Yoder, evangelism is salvation in the sense that when you join the church, you join the new humanity. So he can say things like the purpose of history is church evangelism, because his definition is shalom oriented. If, as Yoder believes, the church precedes the world epistemologically and axiologically, then evangelism is an eschatological venture, when strangers are incorporated into the body of Christ.

God is a slaughtered Lamb. Please don't talk about God in any other way. Please don't make philosophical foundations about its existence. Please don't refer to Him like you would a boyfriend (which was a good conversation today). Thanks to Camp I have finally pieced together a missing link of my systematic theology. Quite geniusly Camp entitles a chapter: "Worship," with the subtitle, "Why Disciples Follow Their Enemies," because the two events are inextricable. This is a connection that I first could not understand. All I know is J. Denny Weaver has a good point when he asks how so many Christians can worship Jesus and build a personal relationship with him, without ever following him to the cross or participating in his death and resurrection. Camp conceptualizes worship into two themes: 1) ultimate allegiance - this mostly means not worshipping other false gods, like Mammom. 2) praising the biblical God, which means entering the Christian narrative through hymns and litanies, living in that symbolic world, thus coming to understand who exactly God is. For me, I find the question, "who is God," inseperably related to the question, "what kind of people are we to be." In a sense, all ethics is rooted in ontology, as John Howard Yoder refers to the agapeic nonresistance of God revealed by Jesus Christ. That's what this is all about, loving others like God loves.

At least this is the social-ethical construal of worship. I am by no means trying to conflate the two concepts of worship and ethics. No doubt, worship is singing on Sunday, is reading Psalms, is hearing scriptural stories, is participating in litanies. I'm fine with worship being emotional, as long as by our worship the very grains of the universe are being opened up to us. Those grains are praise for God's loving and blessing (us with the gift of freedom), the slaughtered Lamb that triumphs over the dragon beast, and the cruciform church that waves the banner of victory.

Jesus Christ and the nation are competing claims on our lives. Both demand our allegiance and we have to choose which one will be our guiding authority. At stake is faithfulness and our membership in a church, instead of a status quo supporting, state buttressing religious institution. Of course most Christians in conversation "would immediately respond that our first allegiance is undoubtedly to the kingdom of God. But our debates often appear to assume that the fundamental identity, the primary lens through which we must make decisions about how to act in our world, is that of the nation-state." I love the epithet Camp coined: the "Christendom cataract," to describe the distorting perspective Constantianism had on Christians perceiving life and discipleship. Too many false assumptions are unquestioned: 1) the end justifies the means, 2) the way of Christ is not relevant to this-worldly concerns, 3) "it is our task to be in control, to run the world, to make things turn out right." 4) The people that shape history are those with the most power, so if you want to make a difference, work the system top-down. This is the militaristic historiography (way of selecting narratives from the past more than others) inculcated on the every child's mind at school and at Sunday school too. The questions you need to memorize in order to pass the history is exam is typically about key battles, revolutions, national leaders, etc. I blame my football coaches since they taught us this biased violent version of history. John Howard Yoder is fond of saying, the way you interpret the past opens the future avenues you will take. The most important task of the church today is to steal history from those damn high school textbooks, and tell the stories of centuries from the true vantage light of the slaughtered Lamb who reigns over all (aka. to see "history doxologically"). We steal via our worship, our teaching, our preaching, our spreading the Good News, and all the other social processes of the church. We will create a peace chuch historiography in order to be faithful to the authority of Christ, rather stumbling around chaotically with our Christendom cataract with a historiography handed down from the powers to deceive us.

There is nothing more dangerous than state leaders using God language. Sorry Bush.

I'm reading Mere Discipleship by Lee Camp, a book that "draws on the work of John Howard Yoder," as Stanely Hauerwas endorses. I think of it as a more basic primer to Yoderian theology, more accesible with more fluid illustrations to make points (unlike Yoder himself who never told stories). I'm actually really enjoying the book, I find it refreshing to hear a fresh representation of the same thought that has occupied my life this past summer. Camp does a good job at spelling out the assumptions of Constantinianism and why every Christian should be concerned about it, why every Christian should understand what the fall of the church means and how it happened and what theological convictions restore us to faithfulness. In this train of thought comes one of my favorite arguments about why Christianity is not a religion. Or as Stringfellow would say, it's actually irreligious; it deconstructs all the sacerdotal idolatries we unthinking slip into as rich violent pagans. Religion likes to dichotomize sacredness vs. profane, clergy vs. layman, Christian vs. secular, while Christianity disarms all supernatural constructions. The Eucharist celebrates the naturalness of swallowing food and burping and laughing with friends. Religion likes to make a long gnostic ladder to reach God, steps of penance, or moral legalism, while Christianity celebrates Christ who jumped off the ladder into the messy humanness. Religion ingrains us with cycles and holidays, following harvests and the stars, while Christianity is a missionary journey on the run. Religion emphasis proper doctrine, while Christianity is about a Way of Living (of course doctrine and ethics are two sides of the same coin, as Camp likes to say). Religion suffers from easily being compartmentalized, whether into Sunday morning bag, or a box that you only pull out for decisive self-sanctioning help on moral issues, i.e. only some aspects of life need reflection on the implications of the Lordship of Christ. Christianity proclaims Christ as Lord to mean ultimate authority on every aspect of life, every corner of the world. There are no spheres labeled religious. Everything must be examined in judgement, not just sexuality and personal piety, but the global market, rapid militarization and the war on terror, American civil religion, and postmodern philosophy. As Camp writes, Christianity is all or nothing.

According to John Howard Yoder, Luther's reading of Paul is especially mistaken. The individualist existentialist interpreation has blinded us to the social dimensions of justification. I decided to read Romans myself to discover if I could find Paul's politics in what is usually taken as a systematic defense of personal faith against any good works. While at first I too struggle to lose my existentialist mentality, quickly I realize that "faith" for Paul is not just believing in God or Jesus. When describing Abraham, "faith" is "hoping against hope" and "being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised." For Abraham, faith in God was obeying God, even to kill his only descendant who was to establish a great lineage. Obedience required trust that God would keep his promises, and since God is the agent of blessing and providing, Abraham did not need to protect himself or seize the promises for himself.

God is the mover of history, not we. When we try to move history to protect or bless, no matter how effective we are, we fail to trust God. Thus John Howard Yoder intimately connects trust in God with pacifism. Why take up arms to protect thy country, thy plan, when God's purposes are inevitable with or without our efforts to succeed. The only effort required of us is to obey and let God be God. I see how Constantianism is apostasy for Yoder, while the faithful minority that "hopes against hope" is the true proclaimer of the resurrection.

Gerald Schlabach investigates for a more basic pattern of sin. Beyond Constantianisn, he says the Deuteronomic temptation is a more adequate typology for understanding apostasy of God's people. But I think John Howard Yoder would say the issue at stake concerning both faithless institutions is trust in God. Even Jeremiah (ch. 17) singles out this basic distinction. The mortal who trust in himself is cursed, while the mortal who trusts in God has true life.

Neither trust or faith, as inseperable as they are, can be considered in isolation as a type of belief. Since they are connected to obedience, they are the roots of ethics. However, I'm confused then about the relation between trust, fear, and love. Some say "fear of God" is the source of obedience (Mark Nation recently mentioned this to me), some say love of God is the source. I suspect the three tied together are an irresistable stronghold and fortitude for discipleship.

One more note on my reading of Romans. 4:24-25: "Jesus our Lord, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification." Paul connects the cross with the culpability of human fallenness, while resurrection leads to our justification. Does not Luther/Anselm have it backwards then, that the cross justifies us by satisfying our death debt? Because it is the resurrection that gives us the promise of Christ's victory over the cosmos, that gives us trust in God, that invites us into the new humanity that walks in the resurrection of obedience, and that is justification, why we are friends of God now instead of God's enemies.

Currently I am also reading Kent Reames dissertation: Histories of Reason and Revelation: With Alasdair MacIntyre and John Howard Yoder into Historicist Theology and Ethics. To sum it up, Reames creates two parallel typologies based on methodological starting points: reason or revelation. Yet, theologians on each side think rationally. Much hostility exists between the parties because the reasonists (Gustafson, Ogden, Cobb) suspect the confessionalists (Yoder, Hauerwas) to be anti-science, anti-culture, and sectarian. I of course side with the confessionalists who suspect the reasonists of melting the NT distinction between the church and the world, thus generalizing specific Christian claims unto unbelieving people and institutions, creating all sorts of distortions. Reames then compares MacIntyre and Yoder as case studies of theologians who narrow the gap between the schools significantly by embracing historicism totally. Both MacIntyre and Yoder have solutions to defend reason and revelation against the relativizing effects of historiography; both give authority to rootedness in particular communities of tradition, from within which, universal claims can be made.

I found the chapter on MacIntyre especially enlightening as to why contemporary theology/philosophy gives so much credit to stories. As the reasoning goes, to be human is to make sense of the world. Intelligibility only comes through larger stories bestowing meaning upon our narratives. Every human action is embodied narrative, unless we are unthinking animals. Most stories are given to us by tradition, thus the community-depedency emphasis of most theology today, why Hauerwas also yells at us Christians for making boring the best "damn" story there is, God's convenantal relationship with humanity. I love the Aristotlian theory on virtues, mostly because through that perspective on sanctification, I see hope for myself in becoming a good person. I'm so far away, but at least I have a teleology, right?