Category Archives: John Howard Yoder

Christian distinctiveness

Posted by on September 26, 2011 22 comments

The epistle to Diognetus is perhaps one of the more well known works from among the Apostolic Fathers these days, at least in popular theological discussions. This is due, less to its remarks on the “common silliness and deception and foolishness and pride of the Jews” (4:6 — yikes), than for the chapter that immediately follows it on the nature of Christian distinctiveness in the world. Among popular works in ecclesiology and various sorts of “church and culture” writings, this has been an incredibly popular chapter to quote over the last decade or so. And, interestingly it has been very popular with folks articulating some version of the “church as polis” model for understanding the church-world relationship. I find this interesting, and downright weird, really in that what the author of the epistle puts forth in this chapter seems downright contradictory to the positions he is being used to support.

The chapter starts out by explaining the nature of the distinictiveness of Christians in the world by saying precisely what does not distinguish them: “For Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity by country, language, or custom. For nowhere do they live in cities [Gk: polis] of their own, nor do they speak some unusual dialect, nor do they practice an eccentric way of life” (5:1-2). Interestingly, for the author of the epistle, Christians are distinct from the world, not on the basis of anything that would commonly be thought of as cultural – language, social customs, alternative political arrangements, origins, etc. are precisely not what make the church distinct from the world. On the contrary, according to the author, Christians participate fully in whatever cultural situation they happen to inhabit: “But while they live both in Greek and barbarian cities, as each one’s lot was cast, and follow the local customs in dress and food and other aspects of life, at the same time they demonstrate the remarkable and admittedly unusual character of their own citizenship” (5:4).

Here is the point of distinctiveness, according to the author: not that the Christian possesses an alternative cultural reality over against the ones in which they are set, but rather, that, regardless of their cultural setting, they manifest a distinctive character of involvement in it. The author goes on to describe this at length: “They live in their own countries, but only as nonresidents; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is foreign” (5:5). In other words, the distinctiveness of the Christian in the world is lies precisely in their ability to inhabit any cultural situation “as if not” to borrow the Pauline idiom (cf. 1 Cor 7:29-31). Thus, the distinctiveness of the Christian lies not in their cultivation of some sort of alternative habitable culture, but rather in the nonconformed quality of their involvement in whatever culture they happen to reside in. Thus, they marry and have children but do not commit infanticide or adultery (5:6-7); they obey established laws, but transcend them by love (5:10); they love their persecutors (5:11); and on the the list goes.

In other words, the furthest thing from the thought of the epistle is the notion that the church is distinct from the world by virtue of being polis or a culture of its own. Rather the emphasis is constantly on the quality of involvement in the life of the world which the Gospel calls forth. Christians are distinct from the world, not by any sort of cultural or cultic separation from the world, but rather by the form of their life in the world. It is the selflessness of their love for all (5:11) that sets them “apart” not merely from, but precisely for the world.

This bears a striking similarity to John Howard Yoder’s discussion of the nature of the distinction of the church from the world in The Politics of Jesus. Jesus’s message of self-giving love, and his call to reject patterns of power and domination (cf. Luke 22:25ff) envision “a visible structured fellowship, a sober decision guaranteeing that the costs of commitment to the fellowship has been consciously accepted, and a clearly defined life-style distinct from that of the crowd.” However, Yoder goes on to specify precisely what this distinct life-style entails: “This life-style is different, not because of arbitrary rules separating the believer’s behavior from that of ‘normal people,’ but because of the exceptionally normal quality of humanness to which the community is committed.” (emphasis added)

As with the author of the epistle, for Yoder the distinctness of the church from the world emerges precisely at the point of the church’s transformed involvement with the life of the world, an involvement rightly characterized as an “exceptionally normal quality of humanness.” In other words the church is most visible, most distinct precisely at the point that it is the most human, involving itself in the sufferings and sorrows of the world in the pattern of Christ’s kenotic, self-giving love. Thus, as Yoder concludes: “The distinctness is not a cultic or ritual separation, but rather a nonconformed quality of (‘secular’) invovlement in the life of the world” (p. 39 for all quotes).

In contrast to asserting the distinction of the church from the world in cultural terms (the church as its own polis or culture) in which the distinction is defined under the auspices of ritual (typically with the Eucharist or Baptism being turned into the cultic boundary between church and world), Yoder and the author of the epistle to Diognetus offer a different vision: one in which the church is distinct from the world, not in terms of cult, but rather in terms of Christ’s own calling of his disciples into kenosis in, with, and for the world. The distinctness of the church, and of the Christian thus comes to be seen, not in terms of the maintenance of boundaries, and the guarding of cultic gates, but rather in the calling to go “outside the camp,” finding the meaning of true discipleship and true Christian distinctiveness in the giving up of all pretensions to security and establishment, learning instead to simply let our power be brought to an end in weakness, in love, and in self-abandonment for the sake of the world for whom Christ died.

The disciples’ missional calling

Posted by on July 28, 2010 Comments Off

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.

Yoder’s Warsaw Lectures

Posted by on June 25, 2010 36 comments

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.

Mission, skepticism, and uncertainty

Posted by on June 19, 2010 11 comments

The skeptic who in the face of missionary Christianity says, “Yes, but what about all those good Hindus who lead decent lives and don’t believe that Jesus is the only one?” is not really expecting to become a good Hindu or even to be friends with good Hindus. Certainly this skeptic does not plan to get involved at all in the problems of differentiating between good Hindus and bad Hindus but only to back away from the call of Jesus, who has always admitted that if we entrust our life to him and his cause, we will never be proven right until beyond the end of the story and cannot count on being positively reinforced along all of the way. What is thus stated in the form of a general rejection of all particularity in favor of a vision of universal validity it, when more deeply seen, more particular and more negative; namely, a specific pattern of avoidance of the particular claims of Christian loyalty in its continuing risk and uncertainty.

~ John Howard Yoder, A Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 112-13.

If I didn’t know better I’d almost think that Yoder’s channeling Lesslie Newbigin and Rowan Williams here.

Recent work on Yoder

Posted by on May 13, 2010 11 comments

For fans of the venerable John Howard Yoder, make sure to check out the recent review of Radical Ecumenicity: Pursuing Unity and Continuity after John Howard Yoder, edited by John Nugent. The first part of the review, which focuses on the essays on Yoder’s ecumenical thought is excellent, and does a great job introducing the reader to the chapters (and, I should mention, does a great job of briefly pointing out the rather massive flaws in Craig Carter’s rather flimsy piece in the volume). The second part of the review will be by Nate Kerr and will focus on the essays by Yoder that are included in the volume. I suggest that folks stay tuned.

Powers and Practices §2: Philip Stolzfus

Posted by on January 7, 2010 1 comment

The second chapter of Powers and Practices is a far cry, in terms of quality, from the first, and hopefully all the following essays. It is entitled “Nonviolent Jesus, Nonviolent God?” and it attempts to critique Yoder for allegedly not going far enough in purging his “concept of God” of violent images, such as those contained in the Exodus narrative.

In the last few pages of the chapter the author makes clear what’s really at work in his critique of Yoder. Stolzfus is really just advocating for a certain sort of well-worn of Mennonite theology that parrots Gordon Kaufman and Sallie MacFauge  by simply discounting all elements of the Bible’s depiction of God that are deemed insufficiently nonviolent. For Stolzfus this means that, in contrast to Yoder who reneged on the task, we need to get down to the real business of “theological construction” (p. 40), that is by articulating a properly systematized and pristinely nonviolent conceptuality of God.

Stolzfus’s chapter amounts to little more than a fit of whining about the fact that Yoder didn’t do theology that way. It also makes clear how deeply Stolzfus really doesn’t understand the nature of Yoder’s project. Ironically, Stolzfus, in his rabbid concern to purge all “violent” conceptions of God from theology in advance, winds up advocating some mode of theological thinking that is, from the outset, totalizing and violent in itself. Stoltzfus has no patience for Yoder’s “dialogical stance” (p. 38)  because it fails to secure, in advance, the concept of God that Stolzfus, as a liberal Mennonite is willing to accept.

But this is precisely where Yoder is, in fact the true “pacifist” while Stolzfus by contrast is utterly, well, violent. He cannot take the risk of letting the reality of God come to him from somewhere other than his own predetermined image thereof. God must be only and always this. Therefore any thought along these lines is excluded. The sort of “nonviolence” that Stolzfus wants to hardwire in advance into our conception of God is hardly the peace of Jesus. It requires the presence of “violent” images of God, against which it must be counterposed to have any purchase. The “nonviolent” God that Stolzfus argues for is defined, agonistically, by what it is against. This “nonviolent” God requires violence and is systematically rendered within a binary (violent) mode of theological reflection that is at once simplistic and lackadaisical.

This is not to say that the images of divine violence in the Bible are not real problems. They are. But it is Stolzfus who fails to deal with the problem, not Yoder. Yoder, in keeping with his commitment to vulnerable engagement with the biblical witness, takes time and patience to actually struggle with the text, rather than deciding in advance what simply must be stripped away because of his own predetermined theological sensibilities.

I’m all for reading solid critiques of Yoder, but a lazy half-baked Marcionism like the kind offered here doesn’t impress me at all. I hope the next chapter is better than this.

Powers and Practices §1: Chris Huebner

Posted by on January 6, 2010 9 comments

One of my new aims this year is to blog more consistently about what I’m reading. One way I’m going to do that is by doing more chapter by chapter reviews/notes on books. I’m hoping to do one of these most weekdays. To kick it off, I’m starting with Powers and Practices: Engaging the Work of John Howard Yoder, edited by Jeremy M. Bergen and Anthony G. Siegrist (Thanks to Herald Press for the review copy). Hope it’s helpful.

This book is one of a couple recent projects that is not merely doing work on Yoder, but thinking with Yoder in conversation with multiple other — and highly diverse — thinkers and ideas. Powers and Practices is a welcome collection of essays contributing to important theological work that takes Yoder seriously — something I am very much on board with.

The first chapter in the book is by Chris Huebner, entitled “The Work of Inheritance: Reflections on Receiving John Howard Yoder.” This essay is a very helpful and readable introduction to Yoder’s mode of theological reflection, and specifically his understanding of “inheritance,” that is of faithfulness to “tradition” or “history.” Huebner notes that “Throughout his meandering engagements and conversations, we constantly find Yoder striving to articulate a posture with respect to history that does not reflect a possessive will to somehow manage and control it” (p. 20). According to Huebner:

[Yoder's] work is everywhere laced with notions of memory and hope, of historical discernment and openness to the surprises of the new. But these themes are not to be understood in a manner that suggests a simple or straightforward activity of repetition, of narrowly factual accuracy, or of what we might describe as archival sensibilities. Neither do they present a vision of hope that consists in the desire to realize some given end, as if the future somehow rests squarely on our shoulders. They reflect neither a primitivist or preservationist reification of the past, not a progressive construal of hope as a future goal to be achieved. Rather, we find in Yoder a vision of inheritance that is interruptive and radically transforms those who are in a position to receive it. Indeed, echoing Barth, he emphasizes that it is not so much we who remember, but rather that we are made a part of God’s memory, and in being so remembered have our very we-ness redefined. At the very least, the question of receiving an inheritance is, for Yoder, fare from straightforward. Inheritance names a kind of work, a life’s work of ongoing transformation in which the very identity of the one said to be doing the receiving is somehow part of whats at stake. (p. 21)

This is crucial to understanding what it means to appropriate tradition and history in the task of theology. For Yoder “inheriting a tradition is thus crucially not uni-directional. It does not consist in a linear gaze backward to the past, nor does it give rise to a clear and unambiguous path looking forward. Rather it involves a constant ‘looping back’ to the origins in light of unpredictable, often surprising encounters with other dialogue partners” (p. 23).

In conversation with Wittgenstein, Romand Coles, and Rowan Williams, Huebner hints at what this notion of “the work of inheritance” means both for theological approaches to tradition and history, and more specifically, for our own approach to the work of Yoder. What this involves then is not an attempt to systematize Yoder or get him “right.” Rather we ought to engage in the ongoing and open work of “looping back” to Yoder and inheriting his ad hoc and diasporic mode of theology in conversation with others. And as Huenber notes, this is a more fruitful and faithful way of engaging Yoder’s work, indeed the conversations into which we can bring Yoder often tend to be “more fruitful that some of Yoder’s own encounters with those same figures” (p. 25). This, importantly gives us a way to be both “for and against” Yoder as with think with him in vulnerable receptivity to other, often unexpected dialogue partners.

Yoder on Just War 5

Posted by on November 14, 2009 15 comments

I’ve been reading The War of the Lamb, the most recent posthumous work of John Howard Yoder’s to be released. I’ll have more to say about some of the problems of the published form of the book later. (Short version: I deeply suspect that Stassen has taken too many editorial liberties in the interest of enlisting Yoder in support of his “just peacemaking” program. But I have to investigate more before I make any strong accusations of that sort.)

However, despite what the back cover claims, that in this book Yoder argues that “Christian just war and Christian pacifist traditions are basically compatible,” Yoder’s true voice cannot be edited away. The book actually provides the most clear statement of Yoder’s firm rejection of just war theory as a credible form of moral discourse:

This is a conversation [between just war and pacifism] I have already analyzed more deeply than most people have. I know from having tested it for thirty years from inside that the just war tradition is not credible. I don’t dialogue with the just war tradition because I think is 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)

This is perhaps the clearest statement I’ve yet seen from Yoder about his own rationale for his dialogical engagement with just war theory. Those who construe it as some form of advocating “compatibility” between just war and pacifism are doing violence to Yoder’s work. Yoder’s engagement with just war was of a distinctly pacifist sort. He engaged the just war tradition because he loved both those who held to it and those who suffer under its abuse. Indeed, as Yoder makes clear in the The War of the Lamb, his discourse with just war is simply one of the ways he tried to practice the gospel call to love our enemies (see pp. 110-11).

Violence and Idolatry

Posted by on September 20, 2009 12 comments

The older language in which the theme of “conformity to this world” was stated in Bible times had to do with “idols,” with those unworthy objects of devotion to whom men in their blindness sacrificed. Thus it is quite fitting to describe the use of violence as the outworking of an idolatry. If I take the life of another, I am saying that I am devoted to another value, one other than the neighbor himself, and other than Jesus Christ Himself, to which I sacrifice my neighbor. I have thereby made a given nation, social philosophy, or party my idol. To it I am ready to sacrifice not only something of my own, but also the lives of my fellow human beings for whom Christ gave His life.

In the deep nonconformity of mind to which the gospel calls us, we can not accept the analysis according to which one kind of action (suffering servanthood) is right from the point of view of revelation, but some other pattern is equally right from the practical perspective. This ultimately  denies the lordship of Christ and shuts Him up in the monastery or the heart. There is clearly a double standard in the world, but it is not between discipleship and common sense; it is between obedience and rebellion.

~ John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution, 174-75.

Authentic Protest and the Church

Posted by on September 15, 2009 9 comments

A precondition for authentic protest is that there be a committed community; our word for that is “church,” but of course that is another word which most people use with other meanings. That body must not be the same as the entire society or nation. There must be a critical mass of like-minded people, sustaining one another in the world view they have given themselves to and celebrated. The church is the seed bed where valid dissent can sprout, where the alternative world view can be rehearsed.

The existence of the church therefore answers first of all the question asked by the sociology of knowledge; how is a construction of reality nurtured that can be at the same time holistic and critical? Only by letting one’s life overlap with those of others on the same pilgrimage. Only by teaching one’s children, even in Babylon, the songs of Zion which the Babylonians cannot understand.

~ John Howard Yoder, “Christianity and Protest in America,” Unpublished lecture, 1991

The Voluntary Church

Posted by on September 12, 2009 11 comments

John Howard Yoder often gets critiqued (the work of Oliver O’Donovan is a good example) for his alleged “voluntarism.” Yoder, being an Anabaptist is, of course, opposed to infant baptism and insists that membership in the church must always be a voluntary, free, and uncoerced reality. Thus, the baptism of children is suspect for Yoder as it is an act totally void of active participation on the part of the baptized.

Now, whatever we might think of this I just want to make one point. Yoder is not guilty of voluntarism in any sort of modern sense. Yoder and Anabaptism as a whole does not emphasize the voluntary nature of the church for the sake of enshrining the freedom of the individual to be self-determining. Indeed, this is impossible on the basis of the Anabaptist vision of ecclesial discipleship which always involves strong communal commitments and mutual submission.

The only point Yoder makes in emphasizing the voluntary nature of the church is that membership in the body of Christ cannot be coercively imposed. That is all. The church is voluntary in Anabaptist theology, not because the modern self requires it, but because unilateral coercion cannot be used to make disciples. The one and only point of speaking of the church as a voluntary community is to say that no one is either forced into it or born into it. Rather persons are drawn into it through Christ’s to discipleship.

Judaism and the State of Israel

Posted by on September 11, 2009 12 comments

John Howard Yoder’s The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited is helpful on many levels, but one of the most imporant points he makes therein is the way in which Christianity brought about what we know today as Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism as we know it today was not around in the time of Paul and Jesus. Rather it is precisely the relationship between the church and the Jewish people in the centuries after Jesus that have brought about what we know as Judaism.

Unlike how we have come to think of Judaism, the Judaism that was present in the time of the early church did not automatically consider belief in the messiah a reason to be excluded from the synagogue, nor was it closed off to gentiles. Rather Judaism in the first century was a decidedly missional religion (cf. Matt 23:15; Acts 2:9-11). Only after the church became decidedly identified as a gentile movement did the hardening of the lines between Judaism and Christianity truly take hold and culminate in the sort of ethnic definition of Judaism we know today. Yoder describes the phenomenon in this way:

It may be  that ‘Christians’ progressively differentiated themselves from from Jews in order not to suffer persecution, and thereby diverted the anger of Gentiles toward the non-messianic Jews. Yet this in itself would not explain Jews’ abandonment of their missionary openness. In fact it could well have had the opposite effect. Jews no less than ‘Christians’ could argue that they had no secrets, that thier God was for everyone, that their law was reasonable, open to others, as their thinkers were doing at that time anyway.

In any case the outcome is that Judaism will be an ethnic enclave, less missionary than before, at some points in fact practically discouraging the accession of Gentiles to membership in the synagogue. This abandonment of missionary perspective on the part of Judaism is an adjustment not to the Gentile world but to Christianity. Non-missionary Judaism is a part of, a product of Christian history. For Jews to renounce mission means that they have been contextually ‘Christianized.’ They have accepted their limited slot within a context where telling the Gentiles about the God of Abraham is a function left to others and the Jews are willing to leave it that way. (p. 153-54)

The Christianization of Judaism ends in reducing Judaism to the non-missionary religion of an ethnic group. It turns the formerly universal message of the God of Abraham who created all nations and peoples, to the provincial religion of a sectarian enclave. However, this is only the begining. Yoder describes the culmination of the event of the Christianization of Judaism:

If the abandonment of openness to the Gentiles was the first stage of Judaism’s being influenced by Chistianity, one of the latest is the acceptance of the Jews of their assimilation into western pluralism. Protestants, Catholics and Jews are seen as the three equally legitimate forms of moral theism called ‘the Judaeo-Christian heritage.’ In some cases this has lead to a degree of theological assimilation, but the same tirpartite division of labour within pluralism can also be appealed to by Jews (or Protestants) who are much more orthodox. (p. 154)

The abandonment of missionalit culminates in the assimilation of Judaism into the tapestry of western pluralism, and specifically into the ideological construct known as the ‘Judaeo-Christian heritage.’ Where does this finally leave us?

The culmination of the Christianization of Judaism is the development of Zionism. Zionism creates a secular democratic nation state after the model of the nation states of the West. It defines Jews, for the purpose of building the state, in such a way that it makes no difference if most of them are unbelieving and unobservant. In America the Jews are ‘like a church’ with a belief structure, lifestyle commitments, and community meetings; in Israel Judaism is a nation and the belief dimension no longer matters. To be born in the State of Israel makes one less a Jew, in the deep historical sense of the term, than to be born in a ghetto. This is of course exacerbated by the fact that the Zionist state has taken on the challenge of governing subject populations who are not even ethnically Jewish. Committed Judaism, i.e. people who visibly order their lives around the Torah, is a minority sect in Israel just as are the Christians. (p. 154)

The upshot of all this is that the form of life embodied in and fostered by the secular state of Israel is the polar opposite of what the deep historical definition of Judaism entails. In fact, it is a betrayal of it. As such, support for the state of Israel cannot be construed as support for the Jewish people, let alone Judaism as a faith. Indeed supporting Israel should be seen as fundamentally anti-Jewish in nature. The state of Israel is, in fact the antithesis of the Judaism from the time of Jeremiah through the second century. To support the state of Israel is to continue the Christian mistake that began with the Jewish-Christian schism. Indeed, supporting the state of Israel is the most anti-Jewish act Christians can take, as it constitutes a hyperextension of the Christian (indeed, Constantinian) disciplining of Judaism. To the extent that the church supports Israel (as much of it rabidly does) the church commits itself to a most despicable form of anti-Judaism that should be repudiated by all.

Yoder on Just War 4

Posted by on August 13, 2009 19 comments

To my mind this quote is the final nail in the coffin to any who would argue that John Howard Yoder’s engagement with the just war tradition amounted to a claim that either just war or pacifism are acceptable options for Christians:

. . . we must proclaim to every Christian that pacifism is not the prophetic vocation of a few individuals, but that every member of the body of Christ is called to absolute non resistance in discipleship and to abandonment of all loyalties which counter that obedience, including the desire to be effective immediately or to make oneself responsible for civil justice. (The Original Revolution, 72)

Whether or not one ought to agree with Yoder’s terminology and force on this point here, no one can plausibly argue that he ever viewed pacifism as just one possible form of Christian witness. Rather, for Yoder it is the very form thereof.

A Yoderian Camping Trip

Posted by on July 20, 2009 36 comments

And yet again I am back. The trip ruled. Rivers were floated down and swimmed in. Conversations were had. I totally used my massive Dutch oven for the first time ever. Fantastic trip. I recommend them.

I also finally did a cover-to-cover reading of John Howard Yoder’s The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited. I really regret waiting so long to really bite into this one. Honestly I’m not sure we can really understand Yoder and his important critique of Constantinianism without this book. I’ll probably post more on it shortly, but for now, here’s just one of the many money quotes:

Radical reformation and [Jeremian] Judaism have in common that they see God as active in correlation with historical change and criticism more than with sanctifying the present. For one tack of socio-cultural analysis, it is possible to distinguish ‘religion’ as that which sanctifies and celebrates life as it is, things as they are, the personal cycle of life from birth to death and the annual cycle of the sun and the culture from spring to winter. Over against this understanding of ‘religion’, the category of ‘history’ represents the morally meaningful particular processes, which may not go in a straight line but at least go somewhere; they are non-cyclical, stable, repetitive.

Such a blunt pair of prior categories is far to simple to deal with many important distinctions we need to make: yet there is something to it. Where it does fit, we find majority Christianity on the ‘religion’ side, and on the ‘history’ side we find the Jews, radical Protestants, and (today) the theologies of liberation.

This means that God is not only spoken about and prayed to as the One who once acted. God is expected to keep on acting in particular identifiable events within history, in discernible and in fact to some extent even predictable ways. The way God acts will be the same, yet will continue to challenge and to change. Salvation or wholeness or peace will come, often at great cost for God’s best friends and at the price of surprise, paradox and humiliation for those who felt the power game was already clear.

~ John Howard Yoder, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, 108.

Against the Liberal Arts

Posted by on July 7, 2009 13 comments

Yoder again, more on education:

Many contemporary discussions of the meaning of liberal arts read into this phrase numerous most edifying descriptions of what it means that the Christian is “truly free” or how the study of classical literature “liberates” one. Only a few have the honesty to admit that the historic derivation of the term is quite different one. The “liberal arts” were originally those arts in which the leisure class of society could afford to indulge. Their first value was that they provided the kind of non-utilitarian occupation with which it was seemly for persons of their class to be busied. A second value was that they could thus actually preserve and propagate a classical humanistic heritage for which there was at the time not much other use. Further, the structure of their society being what it was, this training was for them utilitarian in that it prepared them to continue to be the kind of social elite that their parents were. . . .

This general bourgeois cultural reflex takes on a new dimension when it is argued that it is specifically Christians who for “religious” or “character building” reasons should be concerned especially for the liberal arts. For a surprising number of interpreters, the case for a Christian college is identical with the case for a liberal arts college (and usually with the case for a small college). Such things as “perspective” or “cultural breadth and depth” are assumed to be more faithful reflections of religious concern than merely learning to be useful.

~ John Howard Yoder, “A Syllabus of Issues Facing the Church” in Concern for Education, Forthcoming from Cascade Books.

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