Skip to content
Categories:

The buried body

Years ago when I first read Alan Lewis’s magisterial Between Cross and Resurrection I remember thinking that the section on ecclesiology was kind of thin. Re-reading it now I can’t imagine being more wrong. The book is so breathtakingly alive with insight into the nature and mission of the church in the world; indeed I’m somewhat flabbergasted with how I missed it before.

“Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” The story of cross and grave, as we have been attempting to hear and think it and to ask about its living out, tells of a contradiction between God and the world, a conflict in which evil triumphs over good, death extinguishes life, and the creatures annihilate their Maker. But the contradiction is not absolute, not is the conflict finally resolved in favor of negation. For there flourishes even more grace beyond the great magnitude of evil, a divine fertility beyond the barrenness of the demonic; and and out of the mutual opposition of the world and its Creator, there sounds a final and decisive Yes to the creatures, powerful, living and redemptive, which promises them freedom and fullness within the expansive embrace of God’s own history and life. To this triumphal Easter Yes, which never cancels bud does transcend God’s judgmental No to the world on the cross and the world’s destructive No to God in the grave, ecclesiology must clearly correspond.

So then, just as the mutual hostility between the world and God which reigns on Easter Saturday is not the final state of their relations, but yields to affirmation, renewal, and redemption for precisely those who secured the death of the living God, likewise the protest of the church, God’s chosen, living people, against the sinful, corrupt, and frequently demonic world, cannot be the final word of the Christian community to those around it. Prophetic judgment upon the world and holy separation from it must actively promote and witness to the experiential impact on the world of the greater abundance yet of God’s resurrecting grace beyond the increase of its own hostility, foolishness, and brokenness. Whatever opposition the holy church properly directs to the unrighteousness and injustice of its alien, surrounding culture, that resistance itself expresses obedience to the church’s calling to be truly catholic, immersed in solidarity and presence in the seemingly godless and godforsaken world. And equally that catholic presence is not a supine, quiescent, inert companionship which does nothing creatively for the world in which Christians are quietly embedded. The church’s critical posture toward the world is not ultimately negative, nor is its hidden presence in the world quite passive. Rather, we must reaffirm that the Easter Saturday church, Christ’s buried body, is in essence and identity for the world, and that that identity is realized not just attitudinally or spiritually, but by way of active engagements with and infiltrations of the world. Such actions are not designed to supplant or masquerade as God’s own redemptive work; but certainly, through the Spirit of Christ, they are to provide a humble yet energetic and credible instrumentality for that divine transforming of the world which shall constitute the final kingdom. In that renewal of heaven and earth, the dynamic, eschatological favor of God’s grace toward the world which rejected, crucified, and buried God’s own Son, the church as Christ’s buried but resurrected body cannot but be involved, as servant and participant. (p. 384-85)

Posted in Alan Lewis, Ecclesiology, Quotations.

1 comment

By Halden – August 10, 2010

Between me and all others

Emotional, self-centered love cannot tolerate the dissolution of a community that has become false, even for the sake of genuine community. And such self-centered love cannot love an enemy, that is to say, one who seriously and stubbornly resists it. Both spring from the same source: emotional love is by its very nature desire, desire for self-centered community. As long as it can possibly satisfy this desire, it will not give it up, even for the sake of truth, even for the sake of genuine love for others. But emotional, self-centered love is at an end when it can no longer expect its desire to be fulfilled, namely, in the face of an enemy. There it turns into hatred, contempt, and slander. . . Self-centered love makes itself an end in itself. It turns itself into an achievement, an idol it worships to which it must subject everything. It cares for, cultivates, and loves itself and nothing else in the world. Spiritual love, however, comes from Jesus Christ; it serves him alone. It knows that it has no direct access to other persons. Christ stand between me and all others. I do not know in advance what love of others means on the basis of a general idea of love that grows out of my emotional desires. All this may instead be hatred and the worst kind of selfishness in the eyes of Christ. Only Christ in his Word tells me what love is. Contrary to all my own opinions and convictions, Jesus Christ will tell me what love for my brothers and sisters really looks like. Therefore spiritual love is bound to Christ alone. Where Christ tells me to maintain community for the sake of love, I desire to maintain it. Where the truth of Christ orders me to dissolve a community for the sake of love,. I will dissolve it, despite all the protests of my self-centered love. Because spiritual love does not desire but rather serves, it loves an enemy as a brother of sister. It originates neither in the brother of sister nor in the enemy, but in Christ and his word. Self-centered, emotional love can never comprehend spiritual love, for spiritual love is from above. It is something completely strange, new, and incomprehensible to all earthly love.

~ Dietrch Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 43.

Posted in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Quotations.

17 comments

By Halden – July 29, 2010

Anabaptists and Ecumenism

I mentioned earlier Rowan Williams’ charitable comments about the Anabaptist/Mennonite stream of the Christian faith, and the important contribution it bears for the rest of Christianity as a whole. While I appreciate Williams’ comment greatly, the occasion — not the comment itself — reminded me of what I think is a common problem in the way in which Anabaptism tends to be “appreciated” in certain ecumenical circles (like the Ekklesia Project, for example).

It goes something like this: Anabaptism is important and helpful because, out of all the streams of the Christian tradition, it is the one that can teach us about how important it is to be pacifists. Thus, we the way that the Anabaptist witness is appropriated is generally by Catholic or mainline Protestant Christians embracing pacifism while remaining unchanged in regard to other theological distinctives. A good example of this is the Mennonite-Catholic dialogue group, Bridgefolk, which describes itself as “a movement of sacramentally-minded Mennonites and peace-minded Roman Catholics who come together to celebrate each other’s traditions, explore each other’s practices, and honor each other’s contribution to the mission of Christ’s Church.”

Note the way this is set up: Mennonites have got peace and Catholics have got sacramentalism. Let’s slap the two together for extra ecumenical awesomeness! The Bridgefolk self-description goes on: “Together we seek better ways to embody a commitment to both traditions. We seek to make Anabaptist-Mennonite practices of discipleship, peaceableness, and lay participation more accessible to Roman Catholics, and to bring the spiritual, liturgical, and sacramental practices of the Catholic tradition to Anabaptists.” Again the mode of ecumenism at work here is clear: Mennonites have some good stuff to say about “discipleship” and “peaceableness” while Catholicism has got it figured out when it comes to “spiritual, liturgical, and sacramental practices.” All we need to do is appropriate these lovely elements and, viola! we have the perfect new instantiation of the Christian faith!

Now, to be sure I appreciate the way in which the contributions of the Anabaptist tradition to nonviolence and peacemaking are being appreciated by other elements of Christianity. I am truly thankful for this and I’m sure a lot of good comes out of groups like Bridgefolk. However, I think this sort of “reception” of Anabaptism is often a way of not actually taking Anabaptism seriously. The Anabaptist tradition is not, first of all, about “nonviolence” but rather about the nature of discipleship, the church, the world and the meaning of Christ’s Lordship. You can’t divorce Anabaptist’s theology of peace from their commitment to things like believer’s baptism, voluntary church membership, congregationalism, the rejection of clericalism, and yes, opposition to certain understandings of sacramentalism. To do so is to fail to take the tradition with any real seriousness. The same is true for Anabaptists and Mennonites who quickly latch on to quasi-Catholic enthusiasm about sacramental theology. (Indeed, most of what I’m saying here applies, vice-versa, to free churchers who think they can appropriate whatever elements of Catholicism they find compelling, a similarly-common tendency.)

The only point I really want to make here is that the assumption of some sort of easy give-and-take between the free churches and the establishment churches (Catholic or Protestant) is profoundly misguided. The Anabaptist tradition isn’t just “there” to provide mainline churches with a handy theological pacifism any more than the magisterial traditions are there to give free churches a nice way to think sacramentally. The divisions are much deeper, much more real, and indeed must more theological than such sorts of ecclectic ecumenism of convenience tends to acknowledge.

Posted in Anabaptist Theology, Ecumenism.

56 comments

By Halden – July 28, 2010

The disciples’ missional calling

John Howard Yoder often referred Matt 20:25/Mark 10:42/Luke 22:25 which speaks of the difference between the domination of the powers and the mode of power-in-servanthood that Jesus calls his disciples to embody:

When Jesus said to His disciples, “In the world, kings lord it over their subjects . . . Not so with you”; He was not beckoning His followers to a legalistic withdrawal from society out of concern for moral purity. Rather, His call was to an active missionary presence within society, a source of healing and creativity because it would take the pattern of His own suffering servanthood. . . . The call to those who know Him as Lord ad who confess Him as such is not to follow the fallen world in the kind of self-concern which He must overrule, but to follow Him in the self-giving way of love by which all the nations will one day be judged. (The Original Revolution, 174, 75)

What is striking about Yoder’s reception of this scriptural imperative is the way in which he recognizes that the calling to the community of disciples to manifest a distinctive way of life is not out of concern for cultic purity or their own secure establishment in blessedness, but rather out of concern for mission to the world in the mode of self-giving service. Surely Yoder is right that the calling of discipleship could never be a call to any sort of “self-concern,” whether individualistically or corporately conceived. Rather “the self-giving way of love” must always be be directed towards the world in a mode of “active missionary presence.”

After all, who could be the object of “the self-giving way of love” other than the world if we confess that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19)? Not surprisingly this is another section of the New Testament to which Yoder consistently returned.

Posted in John Howard Yoder, Mission.

No comments

By Halden – July 28, 2010

Nuking fish in a barrel

Dave Horstkoetter has a send-up of blowhard and all around terrible human being, Glenn Beck, and his comments about James Cone and black liberation theology at The Other Journal. Check it out.

Posted in Black Theology, Links.

37 comments

By Halden – July 23, 2010

Anglicans and Anabaptists

Another interesting comment from Rowan Williams’ recent address focuses on the importance of the Anabaptist/Mennonite churches:

One other crucial focus today is, of course, the act of reconciliation with Christians of the Mennonite/Anabaptist tradition.  It is in relation to this tradition that all the ‘historic’ confessional churches have perhaps most to repent, given the commitment of the Mennonite communities to non-violence.  For these churches to receive the penitence of our communities is a particularly grace-filled acknowledgement that they still believe in the Body of Christ that they have need of us; and we have good reason to see how much need we have of them, as we look at a world in which centuries of Christian collusion with violence has left so much unchallenged in the practices of power.  Neither family of believers will be simply capitulating to the other; no-one is saying we should forget our history or abandon our confession.  But in the global Christian community in which we are called to feed one another, to make one another human by the exchange of Christ’s good news, we can still be grateful for each other’s difference and pray to be fed by it.

This strikes me as one of the few (I can’t think of any others, actually) occasions where I’ve heard someone of such high ecclesiastical office from one of the magisterial traditions take the Free Churches and their vital contributions to Christianity with some amount of non-patronizing seriousness. And for that, I am quite appreciative.

Posted in Anglicanism, Ecumenism, Quotations, Rowan Williams.

14 comments

By Halden – July 22, 2010

Bread for the world

Rowan Williams’ keynote address to the Lutheran World Federation Assembly is available online. Some deeply stirring remarks about prayer, the Lord’s Supper and the nature of the church are to be found there:

The Lord’s Supper is bread for the world – not simply in virtue of the sacramental bread that is literally shared and consumed, but because it is the sign of a humanity set free for mutual gift and service.  The Church’s mission in God’s world is inseparably bound up with the reality of the common life around Christ’s table, the life of what a great Anglican scholar called homo eucharisticus, the new ‘species’ of humanity that is created and sustained by the Eucharistic gathering and its food and drink.  Here is proclaimed the possibility of reconciled life and the imperative of living so as to nourish the humanity of others.  There is no transforming Eucharistic life if it is not fleshed out in justice and generosity, no proper veneration for the sacramental Body and Blood that is not correspondingly fleshed out in veneration for the neighbour.

If, then, we are called to feed the world – recalling Jesus’ brisk instruction to his disciples to give the multitudes something to eat (Mark 6.37) – the challenge is to become a community that nourishes humanity, a humanity on the one hand open and undefended, on the other creatively engaged with making the neighbour more human.  ‘Give us our daily bread’ must also be a prayer that we may be transformed into homo eucharisticus, that we may become a nourishing Body.  Our internal church debates might look a little different if in each case we asked how this or that issue relates to two fundamental things – our recognition that we need one another for our own nourishment and our readiness to offer all we have and are for the feeding, material and spiritual, of a hungry world.

As things are, we are liable to fall into a variety of traps.  We may conduct our interchurch quarrels in a spirit that sends out a clear message of unwillingness to live with the other and be fed by them.  We may consume our time and energy in what we like to think of as service to the needy, while ignoring our own need and poverty, especially our need of silence and receptivity to God.  We may imagine that by faithfully performing the liturgy we embody the reality of the Kingdom, whether or not we are being transformed into a community of mutual nourishment.  We may focus so closely on the rights of human persons that we lose sight of their beauty and dignity, the beauty and dignity that help to feed us. The list could go on.  But the point is that the intimate connection between our mission and the prayer for our daily bread impacts at so many levels on the life of discipleship that the range of possible areas of failure is correspondingly broad.

The worst reaction to this would be simple anxiety.  The best is to recognise that our vulnerability to failure is itself a reminder of our basic hunger, our need for each other.  The bread of truth is also the bread of honesty about ourselves, and a church that is genuinely growing up into Christ will be one that is prepared to hear its judgement on these and other matters with patience and gratitude.  So when we pray for our daily bread, we pray too for awareness of our failure, and – hard as this always is – for the grace to hear the truth about it from one another, and also from the wider world.  For God can also act to nourish our humanity by the challenges and questions and rebukes that the rest of the human race puts to the Church.

Posted in Quotations, Rowan Williams.

1 comment

By Halden – July 22, 2010

Blogging as theological discourse

Ok, I’m back. After a week in Chicago for EP and then another week vacationing in California with the always-dangerous Andrew Kooy, I am back. Stay tuned to the Valdenkor blog for some forthcoming recountings of the culinary chronicles of Andrew and myself from the past week.

In the meantime, here is a segment from the conclusion to the presentation I gave with Jana Bennett at EP on “blogging as theological discourse”:

So, in conclusion if I were to venture some guesses about how we might best go about this open-ended and uncertain work of “seeing how this will work”, I would offer four guidelines, which I offer no less to myself than to others:

  1. Blogging as a mode of faithful discourse must be open to critique, re-formation, and revision in light of the voices of others. Blogging, by its very nature is open and participatory towards a variety of discursive voices. Moreover, blogging tends to generate a variety of discussions outside of the medium of blogs themselves.
  2. Blogging generates a multi-level discussion. It is precisely in attending to these discussions with care for the voice of the other and allowing them to shape future discussions and explorations of the themes discussed that we blog faithfully. In short, blogging must be shaped by the conversation it generates if it is to be truly fruitful.
  3. Blogging as a mode of faithful discourse must embrace its open-ended and fundamentally itinerant nature. Blogging, if it attempts to accomplish the work of books and journal articles, will simply be a poor exercise. Blogging’s piecemeal, fragmentary, and dynamic nature must be embraced, and precisely so, be discovered as a mode of open and unpredictable discourse. It is a dialogical space for pilgrims, wayfarers, and strangers who are enabled in this space to discover unexpected conversations about the call of God on our lives. In this sort of itinerant space we have the opportunity to allow ourselves to be known, in all our facileness, haste, and vulnerability, and to simply be conversationally present without pretension to over-importance, establishment, or self-validation. This, at least, is what I believe theological blogging must aspire to be.
  4. Blogging as a mode of faithful discourse ought always to be shaped and birthed from a life of lived prayer in the context of the church in its mission to the world. Blogging, at its best should arise from reflection on the concrete life of the church for and in the world, and, precisely as such, it must be grounded in prayer, that is, in the cry for the kingdom which gives the church its shape, life, and calling. To seek any form of faithful theological discussion outside of a common life of prayer for the coming of the Triune God to transfigure, renew, and interrupt us, is to engage in false and futile pursuits. This is not a pious gloss. Prayer is essential for good conversation about God. This applies to blogging no less than to any other mode of theological conversation. Perhaps more so.Blogging as a mode of faithful discourse must, by the Spirit, learn proper patience in the midst of the immediacy of response that blogging tends to generate. Haste is perhaps the greatest temptation of blogging. Only by being given over to patience, the fruit of the Spirit which takes shape in our life together under Christ’s lordship, can we pursue this sort of discussion in a truly fruitful manner.

The discussion in the workshop was, I think, quite good, especially in that it allowed a number of folks who have been involved in the online discussions on this blog to engage in face-to-face conversation about the whole dynamic of theological discussion in the medium of blogs.

Posted in Blogging, Doing Theology.

18 comments

By Halden – July 19, 2010

Off to the Ekklesia Project

Well, I’m taking off this morning for Chicago to attend this year’s gathering of the Ekklesia Project, where I’ll actually be presenting at a workshop on . . . you guessed it: theology and blogging. I hope to see many of you guys in Chicago, and if I have internet access, maybe I’ll even do a little live blogging play-by-play for you for the plenary papers. Maybe . . .

Posted in Blogging, Miscellaneous.

12 comments

By Halden – July 5, 2010

The perfect steak

I got sick of all the incorrect and terrible articles buzzing around the interwebs on how to grill steak, so I’ve set the matter to rights. Check it out.

Posted in Awesomeness, Food.

17 comments

By Halden – July 1, 2010

Religious righteousness

If for some reason you have never read through Karl Barth’s The Word of God and the Word of Man, you have one task before you. And don’t just read “The Strange New World Within the Bible,” as awesome as that essay is, and neglect all the others. They are all as deeply moving and relevant today as they ever were. Perhaps more so.

Religious righteousness! There seem[s] to be no surer means of rescuing us from the alarm cry of conscience than religion and Christianity. Religion gives us the chance, beside and above the vexations of business, politics, and private and social life, to celebrate solemn hours of devotion—to take flight to Christianity as to an eternally green island in the gray sea of the everyday. There comes over us a wonderful sense of safety and security from the unrighteousness whose might we everywhere feel. It is a wonderful illusion, if we can comfort ourselves with it, that in our Europe—in the midst of capitalism, prostitution, the housing problem, alcoholism, tax evasion, and militarism—the church’s preaching, the church’s morality, and the “religious life” go on their uninterrupted way. . . . A wonderful illusion, but an illusion, a self-deception! We should above all be honest and ask ourselves far more frankly what we really gain from religion. Cui bono? What is the use of all the preaching, baptizing, confirming, bell-ringing, and organ-playing, of all the religious moods and modes, . . . the efforts enliven church singing, the unspeakably tame and stupid monthly church papers, and whatever else may belong to the equipment of modern ecclesiasticism? Will something different eventuate from all this in our relation to the righteousness of God? Are we even expecting something different from it? Are not we hoping by our very activity to conceal in the most subtle way  the fact that the critical event that ought to happen has not yet done so and probably never will? Are we not, with our religious righteousness, acting “as if”—in order not to have to deal with reality? Is not our religious righteousness a product of our pride and our despair, a tower of Babel, at which the devil laughs more loudly than at all the others?

~ Karl Barth, “The Righteousness of God,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, 19-20.

Posted in Karl Barth, Quotations.

4 comments

By Halden – June 30, 2010

Best. Review. Ever.

Its been a while since I’ve indulged in something linking to a movie review, but this is just too damn good to pass up. Drew McWeeny’s review of the latest Twilight schlock is just utterly fantastic:

Here’s where I have a problem.  I don’t care if they get married or not, because in this film, “get married” is just code for “now we can do it.”  Their marriage isn’t about building something together or creating a family.  Their marriage isn’t about time they’ve spent together and time they want to spend together.  It’s all hormonal.  It’s all impulse.  Bella Swan is defined as a character purely by who she wants to sleep with, and I don’t care if she actually consummates the act or not.  This movie is driven from start to finish by the real estate between her legs, and if that sounds blunt or harsh, good.  I want it to sound ugly, because I think it is ugly.  Deeply ugly.  She’s the weakest, most dependent lead in a film that I can imagine.  There is nothing interesting about Bella aside from her desire for these two boys.  It is a narcissistic teenage fantasy taken to a disturbing depth.  Nothing in the world of these movies matters beyond the resolution of whether or not Bella is going to bone Edward.  And when.  And how.  And whether she’s going to bone Jacob as well.

There is talk of love, but there is nothing like love in these movies.  These are not stories about love.  They are stories about infatuation, temporary teenage madness.  And, hey, man… I may be ancient at this point, but I remember what it’s like when you’re a teenager and everything feels so important, and I’ve seen films that get that frenzy just right and they still manage to feature real character work and stories that are interesting and actual events.  You can make a great movie about the rush of teenage love.  You can use it as a backdrop for all sorts of stories.  But for that to be the thing that holds us as an audience, we have to believe that there’s something behind it.  I have yet to see anything in any of these movies that would connect these characters beyond narrative convenience.

Bella doesn’t love these men because of things they have done together.  Instead, everything they do together is because they “love” Bella.  It’s a pissing contest.  And both of the guys are just as poorly defined and as grotesque as Bella in what they represent.  Edward is her “dream man,” and as depicted in the films, he’s basically a control freak who treats her like an object to possess.  He lies to her.  He manipulates her.  He is unable to tolerate her interacting with anyone else.  Ladies… if you have a chance to marry a man who acts like Edward while you’re dating, do it.  And then you can look forward to broken bones and mysterious bruises and a slow and methodical separation from friends and family until you exist only for him.  Which is obviously what you’re looking for, right?  Ooooh, romantic.

Or if Edward’s love isn’t the right kind for you, then maybe you can get lucky and earn yourself a Jacob.  A guy who is hot enough that he knows you will love him, and if you don’t, then it’s just a matter of time.  After all, look at his abs.  He doesn’t offer anything more substantial than Edward in terms of emotion or support, but he does have those abs.  He’s also got body heat, so obviously he is a better choice for Bella.  He has one scene where he actually tells her that he has not imprinted on her as a mate, as is the way with his kind, but that doesn’t matter.  We’re still supposed to believe that this is important, that this struggle over this pathetic, empty dishrag means something.

I love women.  I love all sorts of women.  And because I love real women, actual flesh and blood human being that happen to have a slightly different arrangement of chromosomes than I do, I despise these movies.  I hate them for what they offer up as a value system.  I hate them because there are girls who mistake their own chemical response to the male leads in the movie as an actual affection for the story that’s being told.  They invest on the surface level, and in the meantime, there is this poisonous cancer, this vile insidious message that’s being sold to them underneath.  I hate these movies because they tell girls that this is their value in the world.  Who you bang defines you.  You are worth your vagina and nothing more.  You are who your man is.  That is all.

I just want to point out that this is the first time that the categories of “awesomeness” and “Things that make you want to gouge your eyes out with your pinky, shove scalding hot pokers in your ears, and repeatedly slam the door of a 1950s-vintage, American-made sedan on your head” have become unified in one post.

H/T: Brad E.

Posted in Awesomeness, Gender, Movies, Romance, Things that make you want to gouge your eyes out with your pinky, shove scalding hot pokers in your ears, and repeatedly slam the door of a 1950s-vintage, American-made sedan on your head.

13 comments

By Halden – June 29, 2010

Prayer and action

Our church has been fighting during these years only for its own self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself. It has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the world. So the words we used before must lose their power, be silenced, and we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings. All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action. . . . It is not for us to predict the day—but the day will come—when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed. It will be in a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious language. but liberating and redeeming like Jesus’s language, so that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power—the language of a new righteousness and truth, a language proclaiming that God makes peace with humankind and that God’s kingdom is drawing near. “They shall fear and tremble because of all the good and all the prosperity I provide for them” (Jer. 33:9). Until then, the Christian cause will be a quiet and hidden one, but there will be people who pray and do justice and wait for God’s own time.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Thoughts on the Day of Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge,” in Letters and Papers from Prison, 145:389-90.

Posted in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mission, Quotations.

5 comments

By Halden – June 28, 2010

Freedom toward humanity

If the prose is any gauge, it would have been quite enjoyable to listen to Ernst Käsemann preach:

Entering upon discipleship, who knows what lies ahead? Each day keeps us in suspense, so that boredom does not emerge. Discipleship does not merely involve our own salvation. This too must be learned, since Christians, no less than others, incline to circle everlastingly about themselves, to incessantly feel their pulse and that of their friends, to regard their own navel as the center of the world, and to forget that our God is not only concerned with the salvation of pious people. He creates his kingdom on earth, and it does not grow where religious and brave citizens stay by themselves. Advent breaks into a demonized world in which humanity continually retreats before barbarism, in which so-called factual constraints drive us into the war of all against all—for example, in the capitalist economy, where thousands of children die daily of hunger because the haves rake in power and money and harness all of us with our desires and duties to their wagons. God’s salvation embraces the godless as well as the pious, counts the poor, abandoned, oppressed, despised, and dying dearer than the strong, satisfied, and self-secure. God’s Advent stands as sign that humans must become more humane instead of competing with their Creator and outdoing one another.

In following Jesus, not only apostles fish for people but all the disciples whom the Christ forms after his image and calls to his mission, where over the wastes and the graves he wakens the community of those who become joyful companions of the needy, bearers of salvation. Only the one who is active in the service of freedom is free, a messenger and witness to the glorious freedom of the children of God. Freedom in and toward humanity is God’s will for his people and the meaning of every Christian life. God became man in order to capture humans for his glorious freedom. His servants are not to become divine. Through his Spirit they must become more human to bring freedom to a world racked by tyrants. Their service is not needed for heaven, but for the earth, which for the majority of its inhabitants has become a hell from which there is no escape. (On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene, 323-24.)

Posted in Discipleship, New Testament, Quotations.

1 comment

By Halden – June 25, 2010

Yoder’s Warsaw Lectures

In the last year, several books by John Howard Yoder have been posthumously published, all concerned in various ways with the issue of nonviolence. The biggest of these is, of course, Yoder’s Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution. The most anticipated, however, may well have been The War of the Lamb. Less heralded is the most recently published of the three, Nonviolence: A Brief History. However, I would perhaps recommend Nonviolence even more highly than The War of the Lamb.

There are several reasons for this. First of all, Nonviolence and The War of the Lamb have significant overlap—in terms of subject matter, actual content, and size/approachability. They both contain the same chapters—“From the Wars of Joshua to Jewish Pacifism” and “The Science of Conflict”—which to my mind is indicative of how closely tied the books are, yet also how different they are, editorially speaking. It’s the editorial difference that leads me to commend Nonviolence over The War of the Lamb.

My concern is that the editors of The War of the Lamb seem to have taken too many liberties in their work of crafting the book form of these essays. Comparing the shared chapters between the two volumes is quite revealing. In Nonviolence, for example, there are a total of 6 footnotes in “From the Wars of Joshua to Jewish Pacifism,” all of which the editors make clear in their introduction are their own addition to the text. In The War of the Lamb, by contrast, “From the Wars of Joshua to Jewish Pacifism” contains 16 footnotes, many of which speak in the first person, as though they are in fact from Yoder himself, though they appear to be editorial additions (The War of the Lamb also contains some footnotes that the editors claim as their own).

These differences between the books makes me worry that the editors of The War of The Lamb took some liberties that served to blur Yoder’s voice with their own. In particular, it seems that Glen Stassen’s “just peacemaking” project lurks in the background of certain editorial decisions. For example, the back cover summary, Stassen’s introductory essay, the unspecified editorial additions to the footnotes and subtitles of the chapters—these all work to give the impression that the argument of Yoder’s book supports Stassen’s own project, which is centered around a rapprochement of the just war tradition and pacifism. Indeed, the back cover “summarizes” the book as arguing that the “Christian just war and Christian pacifist traditions are basically compatible.” As I have argued on this blog, this reading of Yoder’s work is patently false. Most distressingly, the text of The War of the Lamb actually refutes the back cover’s summary of it. Yoder is straightforward that his dialogical approach to the just war tradition is not because he thought it complementary to pacifism in any sense:

I know from having tested it for thirty years from inside that the just war tradition is not credible. I don’t dialogue with it because I think it is credible, but because it is the language that people, who I believe bear the image of God, abuse to authorize themselves to destroy other bearers of that image. (p. 116)

Fortunately, as the above quote demonstrates, Yoder’s voice rings through, and thus the book still has very real and indispensable value. However, those of us interested in Yoder’s work being disseminated simply for its own sake and in its original form have reason to be disappointed by the way in which this book was packaged and slanted towards bolstering a project that was not, in any explicit sense, Yoder’s own.

Nonviolence is a different matter altogether. Many of the same themes are covered in similar depth, but the editorial judiciousness is deeply refreshing. The editors of Nonviolence, no less than Stassen, are invested in advancing arguments about how Yoder ought to be read and the direction of his thought. However, none of this agenda is brought to bear on the text of the lectures in the way that Stassen’s just peacemaking seems to appear in The War of the Lamb. For this kind of editorial judiciousness, I am very grateful.

Both of the books are indispensable and very helpful. I highly recommend both. My preference for Nonviolence reflects my judgment that scholars ought to separate clearly the tasks of presenting Yoder’s own thought from offering their own reflections upon it.

Posted in Ethics, John Howard Yoder, Pacifism.

36 comments

By Halden – June 25, 2010