Daily Archives: July 6, 2009

Against “Christian” Education of Youth

Posted by on July 6, 2009 32 comments

Yoder has some pretty harsh (and quite Anabaptist) comments about the notion of churches attempting to deploy “education of the young people” as a sociological tool to preserve the church from the acids of the world. He attacks pretty furiously the notion that we have to work to “keep the young people.” He couches this in a critique of his own Anabaptist tradition, but partly does so by claiming that this youth-protectionist sort of mentality is really the product of the (Constantinian) state-church traditions:

“If we turn from this general introduction to the question of church-guided education of young people, we observe first of all that the movement toward church primary and secondary schools in the United States has been led by those churches that belong to the medieval state-church tradition. The Roman Catholics, the conservative Calvinists, and the conservative Lutherans lead the movement. These are precisely those churches that are by nature committed to a non-missionary view of the church. They baptize their babies, and seek by rigid catechization and strict moral teaching to maintain proper standards of behavior and doctrine. The parochial school is for them an effort to retain, in free America, the cultural monopoly that they had each in its own corner of Europe, in order to survive by use of deterministic forces. There is no reason to hold this against them, for it corresponds to their definition of faith as being primarily doctrinal. For them it is consistent, for they never did accept the biblical and Anabaptist claim that the visible church lives only by evangelization.”

A bit harsh perhaps, but coming from a background of being highly socialized into Christianity, and knowing full well the kind of irrational protectionist mentality that persists in the church about the young people “falling away” if they are allowed to actually experience the world, I think there’s a good point in here somewhere.

If we think the church can only be sustained through concerted social and psychological manipulation of our children, then the church isn’t worth preserving. After all, if we don’t really believe that the church lives by the power of the gospel to call people out of the world, we’ve lost the gospel altogether. Yoder delivers another zinger on this point:

“[Much of the church] fears that if the young person, especially in adolescence, is permitted to become acquainted with the world and its lures, he is sure to be lost. This prediction is, in all its intended realism, a lack of faith and a surrender to determinism. If the Gospel cannot call people out of the world, it is no Gospel. If what we preach to our young people cannot call them out of the world, then we must ask ourselves if what we are preaching is the Gospel. If placing people in a context of choice where it is possible to choose the wrong is unwise, then God himself made the first mistake when he created Adam and the worst mistake when he let people kill his Son. At the bottom of it all, this pessimism means placing oneself fully on the level of the world. It means agreeing with the world that all human development is determined by physical and psychological necessities; agreeing with the world that Christian faith is a matter of behavior patterns and of truths to be passed on; agreeing with the world that there is no miracle of resurrection, no miracle of faith, no Holy Spirit.”

Regardless of if one is persuaded by Yoder’s skewering of paedo-baptism, his blow against the protectionist mentality in the church is a solid one that needs to be heeded.

(Quotes are from John Howard Yoder, “Christian Education: Doctrinal Orientation,” in Concern for Education, Forthcoming from Cascade Books.)

A Yoderian Natural Theology

Posted by on July 6, 2009 12 comments

In a brilliant essay in For the Nations, “Are You the One Who Is to Come?” Yoder delivers one of his utterly succinct and brilliant series of reflections, in this case on the issue of nature and grace:

“For still longer than the Lutherans, Roman Catholics, or at least the Schoolmen among them, have been concerned to clarify that nature and grace stand not in opposition but are integrated in a complementary or organic way. The behavior God calls for is not alien to us; it expresses what we really are made to be. Yet, unfortunately, later Catholic strategy has foreshortened the critical potential of that vision by confusing the ‘nature of things’ with the way things are now in the fallen world, especially in ethnic and national definitions of community and patriarchal definitions of order. When society has been defined as the nation and social order as patriarchy, then it is no longer true that grace completes nature; in the face of that definition of ‘nature,’ the word of YHWH has to be like a fire, like a hammer that breaks rocks into pieces.”

This is a quintessential statement of what has come to be referred to, at least in a lot of our theoblogging circles as an apocalyptic theology of nature and grace. What Yoder really gets at here is that grace must be a sort of apocalyptic fire, an interruptive disturbance, a shattering intrusion into “nature” when nature is defined on the basis of ideologies which enslave humanity. But this hardly means that such an apocalyptic theology means an antipathy toward the created world as such:

“Yet when the ‘nature of things’ is properly defined, the organic relationship to grace is restored. The cross is not  a scandal to those who know the world as God sees it, but only to the pagans, who look for what they call wisdom, or the Judeans, who look for what they call power [1 Corinthians 1:17f]. This is what I meant before, when I stated that the choice of Jesus was ontological: it risks and option in favor of the restored vision of how things really are. It has always been true that suffering creates shalom. Motherhood has always meant that. Sertvanthood has always meant that. Healing has always meant that. Tilling the soil has always meant that. Priesthood has always meant that. Prophecy has always meant that. What Jesus did—and we might say it with reminiscence of Scholastic christological categories—was that he renewed the definition of kingship to fit with priesthood and prophecy. He saw what the suffering servant is king as much as he is priest and prophet. The cross is neither foolish nor weak, but natural.” (p. 212)

This is really a great statement of what an apocalyptic theology of nature and grace looks like. The only issue I would point out here is the rhetoric of vision that Yoder deploys. At point it makes it sound like all we need to do is undergo a sort of optic shift in order to ‘see things right.’ What this might miss is the fact that the principalities and powers cannot be overcome simply by an adjustment of vision. The world is definitively not transformed into the world of YHWH’s eschatological promises. Rather we await that promise in hope, even as we bear witness to the apocalyptic foretaste of that promise that is given to us through the mission of the Holy Spirit, who continue to break into history, invading it in all of its contingencies with the radical agape of Christ, which we proclaim as the future of the world—the world as it truly, naturally will be.

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