[amc] When the Politics of Jesus Makes a Difference
- From: "Ray Gingerich" <RGingerich@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Austin Mennonite Church" <amc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2003 15:00:39 -0600
I have a lot more when you get through with these. Ray
When the Politics of Jesus Makes a Difference
by Stanley Hauerwas
Stanley Hauerwas is professor of theology and ethics at Duke University
Divinity School. This article appeared in The Christian Century October 13,
l993, pp. 982-987. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation; used by
permission. Current articles and subscriptions can be found at
www.christiancentury.org. This text was prepared for Religion Online by John
C.Purdy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus surely would be an odd choice for a
classic. As a fairly recent book (1972), it has not had a chance to prove its
staying power. For that matter, it does not now command great attention in
contemporary discussions of theology or ethics. To be sure, most mark it as an
important work, but not one that has decisively changed the way we think.
Indeed, Yoder does not pretend that the book is anything more than a report on
the mainstream scholarly consensus concerning the political character of Jesus'
proclamation of the kingdom of God as found in the Book of Luke. Yet I am
convinced that when Christians look back on this century of theology in America
The Politics Of Jesus will be seen as a new beginning.
Prior to Yoder the subject of Christian ethics in America was always America.
The more America became the democratic society that the social gospelers so
desired, the more difficult it became to do ethics in a theologically candid
manner. Chastened by the Niebuhrs, those trained in ethics no longer sought to
"Christianize" the social order. Instead they pursued, in the name of love, a
more nearly just political arrangement.
The social gospel spawned ethicists who became social scientists, or at least
read social science, in the interest of social transformation. The "realists"
spawned ethicists who became moral philosophers, clarifying moral questions in
medicine and business and, in their spare time, keeping alive the "God
question." In this mode, Christian ethics continues, but it becomes
increasingly difficult to say what makes it Christian. Indeed, the effort to
discover the relationship between policy questions or basic moral principles
and theological warrants now preoccupies many ethicists.
Yoder comes into this territory from the sectarian badlands. He is the lone
hero standing up to the mob that is willing to secure justice through the
anguished acceptance of violence. He insists that the christologically
disciplined account of nonviolence displayed in The Politics of Jesus cannot be
dismissed the way that liberal Protestant pacifism was. Also, Yoder's account
of nonviolence requires theologians to acknowledge that their work makes no
sense abstracted from the church. In short, for Yoder both the subject and the
audience of Christian ethics are Christians -- the people who are constituted
by that polity called church.
The image of the lone gunman facing down the bad guys does not really fit
Yoder, however, because his work is meant to defeat the myth of the hero. His
work is based on the life of a community. Nonviolence is a way of life for
Christians. If that community produces people whose stories it remembers, it
calls them martyrs, not heroes.
It is odd, then, to regard The Politics of Jesus as a classic. The very idea of
"classic" suggests heroic narratives. The classic is the category of dominant
and dominating traditions. Yoder does not want The Politics of Jesus to be a
classic, but rather to serve those who are living better than he writes. The
very character of the book defies the effort to categorize it as a classic,
since it does not articulate an elegant position but rather provides a close
reading of Luke. Indeed, one of the problems with the book is our inability to
locate it in a recognizable genre. It is not a commentary, though it consists
primarily of comments on scripture; it is not theology, though Yoder makes
extraordinary theological asides of a systematic nature; it is not ethics,
though it challenges and perhaps changes our very idea of what ethics might be.
For many people, the classics are works that are ends in themselves because
they embody essential truths about the human condition. It is assumed that if
you have never read Shakespeare your life is less rich, since you may fail to
appreciate the truths about life that his plays present. But what is important
is not that certain books be read as an end in themselves, but that they be
read because of their relationship to other books in a tradition and community
that make such a conversation significant. Thus we should read Thomas Aquinas
not because the Summa Theologica is a classic, but because reading Aquinas
teaches us how better to read Augustine and the scriptures.
In like manner I want to promote the reading of The Politics of Jesus because
it helps us locate our lives as Christians in the catholic faith. Yoder needs
to be read in the tradition of liberal Protestantism not only because he helps
us recognize the strengths of that tradition, but also because he helps us see
why that tradition has come to an end (which accounts for why he remains
something of an outcast in mainstream Protestant theology). Yoder cannot be
made to fit into the presuppositions we have learned from the Niebuhrs and
their successors. Such theologians keep saying, "We have seen this
Christ-against-culture type before." In mainstream hands, such typologies
become power plays to keep in their place those who might challenge the
reigning explanatory categories.
Yoder challenges the philosophical moves we have learned so thoroughly from
Troeltsch through the Niebuhrs, and so we are desperate to make him but another
example of what it means to be a sectarian. What gives The Politics of Jesus
its power is that Yoder knows us better than we know him. Yoder sees the
peculiar way that Troeltsch and the Niebuhrs dehistoricized the Christian faith
in the name of "history," and he sets himself against the dichotomy of faith
and history.
In fairness it should be said that it is easy to miss Yoder's challenge because
he is so free of the ory. For example, he notes in The Priestly Kingdom that
while he is not disrespectful of self-critical conceptual analysis, he is
skeptical that such exercises can come first logically, chronologically or
developmentally. You cannot start trying to formulate the conditions of
meaningful discourse if such discourse is not already established. There is
simply no place to start thinking prior to being engaged in a tradition. As
Yoder says, "What must replace the prolegomenal search for 'scratch' is the
confession of rootedness in historical community. Then one directs one's
critical acuity toward making clear the distance between that community ty's
charter or covenant and its present faithfulness." Yoder does not talk about
how he might do theology if he ever got around to doing any. Rather, like
Barth, he simply begins to train us to read Luke with eyes unclouded by the
presumption that Jesus is irrelevant for matters of social and political
ethics. By doing so he challenges all pietistic readings of salvation, whether
of the left or the right.
Reinhold Niebuhr's under standing of salvation was fundamentally
individualistic, if not gnostic. Indeed, this has been a characteristic of most
Protestant liberals, excepting Rauschenbusch. Yoder helps us see that Niebuhr's
understanding of salvation had to be depoliticized exactly because he assumed
the normative status of a politics based on violence. Correlatively, the cross
for Niebuhr becomes a symbol of the tragic character of the human condition.
Niebuhr's fatal concession to a very narrow understanding of the political made
his Christology deficient.
Yet Yoder also challenges those evangelicals who describe salvation in terms of
personal fulfillment. "The cross of Calvary was not a difficult family
situation, not a frustration of visions of personal fulfillment, a crushing
debt or a nagging in-law; it was the political, legally to be expected result
of a moral clash with the powers ruling his society." Yoder does not invite us
to become concerned with our personal salvation, since that cannot help but
depoliticize the salvation wrought in Christ.
Yoder does not think he is offering a radical new account of Jesus. "We do not
here advocate an unheard-of modern understanding of Jesus; we ask rather that
the implications of what the church has always said about Jesus as Word of the
Father, as true God and true Man, be taken more seriously, as relevant to our
social problems, than ever before." Commenting on The Politics of Jesus in The
Priestly Kingdom, he notes
Jesus of the Gospel accounts was compatible with the classic confession of the
true humanity o There my point was that the book's emphasis on the concrete
historical-political humanity of the f Christ (i.e., the core meaning of
"incarnation"), whereas those who deny that humanity (or its normative
exemplarity) in favor of "some more spiritual" message are implicitly Docetic.
Secondly I argue that the New Testament's seeing Jesus as example is a
necessary correlate of what later theology calls his divine sonship (the other
side of the "incarnation"), in such a way that those who downgrade the weight
of Jesus' example, on the grounds that his particular social location or
example cannot be a norm, renew a counterpart of the old "Ebionitic" heresy.
This is a small sample of a wider claim; the convictions argued here do not
admit to being categorized as a sectarian oddity or a prophetic exception.
Their appeal is to classical catholic Christian convictions properly understood.
Yoder does not understand himself as a "Mennonite thinker." Indeed, if there is
anything that makes him testy it is being so pigeonholed. Those that so
designate him often mean to honor him as representing a position that is
necessary for reminding us of our sinfulness. But Yoder is not trying to be a
reminder. He is trying to force us to recognize that in spite of what appears
to be orthodox christological affirmations, we are embedded in social practices
that deny that Jesus's life, death and resurrection make any difference.
Thus incarnation does not mean that God approves of all of human nature:
The point is just the opposite; that God broke through the borders of our
definition of what is human, and gave a new, formative definition in Jesus.
"Trinity" did not originally mean, as it does for some later, that there are
three kinds of revelation, the Father speaking through creation and the Spirit
though experience, by which the words and example of the Son must be corrected;
it meant rather that language must be found and definitions created so that
Christians, who believe in only one God, can affirm that he is most adequately
and bindingly known in Jesus.
In a manner that can only be described as catholic, Yoder returns Jesus to the
center of Christian ethics by freeing us from the political presuppositions
sponsored by liberal social orders. The directness of his style belies the
complex nature of his thought. His clarity makes the power of his arguments
deceptive. He shows us that our sense of the alternatives -- that we must
choose between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, between prophet
and institution, between catastrophic kingdom and inner kingdom between being
political and being sectarian, between the individual and the social -- derives
not from categories intrinsic to the human condition but from a
depoliticization of salvation that has made Christianity a faithful servant of
the status quo.
That Yoder's significance has not been widely acknowledged is no doubt due to
his unwillingness to put himself forward. Yoder is not good at self-promotion.
He does not try to find us; he lets us find him. He neither tries to hide nor
calls attention to himself. The way of nonviolence cannot seek easy victories,
and Yoder does not want to make it easy for us to agree with him. His purpose
is to commit us to Jesus' nonviolent mode of discipleship, making that way of
life our own. He is interested not in promoting himself but in inviting others
to live in a way that acknowledges Jesus as the "bearer of a new possibility of
human, social, and. therefore political relationships. His baptism is the
inauguration and his cross is the culmination of that new regime in which his
disciples are called to share."
My introduction to Yoder came in the bookstore at Yale Divinity School. Since
Barth was playing a large part in my dissertation I bought a mimeographed
47-page pamphlet called Karl Barth and Christian Pacifism written by someone
named J. H. Yoder. It noted that it was "work paper number four," prepared as a
study document for the peace section of the Mennonite Central Committee. In
short, this was not an impressive-looking document. But I took it back to my
carrel and began to read, and was absolutely stunned by Yoder's powerful
analysis and critique of Barth. I thought, of course, that the criticisms were
based on an ecclesiology that you would have to be crazy to accept. (This
pamphlet later became Yoder's Karl Barth and the Problem of War, published by
Abingdon in 1970.)
I more or less forgot about Yoder until I began to teach at Notre Dame in 1970.
1 assumed that Yoder must teach at Goshen College, which is not far from South
Bend. In the process of learning the lay of the land around South Bend I found
myself in Goshen. I discovered that Yoder taught not at Goshen College but
rather in Elkhart at the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, but in my
exploration of Goshen I discovered that Yoder had written numerous pamphlets
that could be bought off a rack in College Church for a dime a piece. Always
ready for the unusual and bizarre, I bought among others his pamphlets on
Reinhold Niebuhr and on capital punishment, and another treatment of Barth. In
reading these pamphlets I began to understand that this was not just ."another"
theologian. I was sure he had to be wrong, though I was increasingly having
trouble saying how.
Thinking I needed to know more about him, I called him in Elkhart and asked if
I could meet him. He invited me over, though I am sure he must have thought he
was going to be besieged by another mainstream Protestant collecting data on
the odd ideas of the Mennonites. When we met he did nothing to try to
ingratiate himself. He answered questions that I put to him but seldom went
beyond the answer itself. If Yoder was trying to make disciples, he certainly
was not doing it through flattery.
I told him of my enthusiasm for his work and asked if he had written anything
else. Little did I know how much Yoder had written, but he did not use that as
an opportunity to expose my ignorance. He simply gave me copies of the Yoder
mimeograph library. I left Elkhart with a stack of papers a foot high, thinking
that this guy did not know how to make it as an academic. He thought mimeograph
papers written to specific people in response to concrete requests were
appropriate.
Within those papers lay the basic material we now know as The Politics of
Jesus. The more I read it and the other material the more I was frightened.
Here was a position I was sure implied withdrawal from the world, but that
certainly did not seem to be what Yoder was about. Indeed, his Christian
Witness to the State was an extraordinary attempt to convince Mennonites not to
accept Niebuhrian characterizations of them as morally necesssary s but
politically irrelevant. Yoder simply challenged all the neat intellectual and
theological classification with which I had been so carefully educated. At that
time the yearly ecumenical effort of Notre Dame's theology department was to
have a colloquium with the theology department at Valparaiso University. That
year I was asked to prepare the paper for the colloquium. Since I had spent a
good deal of the year reading Yoder I decided that I would write on him. I
introduced my remarks by saying that here I was, a Methodist of doubtful
theological background (Methodists by definition have a
doubtful theological background), representing a Catholic department of
theology speaking to a bunch of Lutherans to say that the Mennonites had been
right all along. I suggested that this would be an ecumenical effort since I
thought by presenting the work of John Howard Yoder to Catholics and Lutherans
I would help them see they shared much in common -- namely, that Catholics and
Lutherans had always assumed it was a good thing to kill the Anabaptists. Of
course, that was what happened when Catholics and Lutherans competed to show
why under certain circumstances it is a good thing to kill.
I called the paper "The Non-Resistant Church: The Theological Ethics of John
Howard Yoder." I sent the paper to at least six journals, all of which rejected
it, not because they disliked the paper in and of itself but because they
disliked what the paper was about. One of the objections was that Yoder's
position reflected a pre-Bultmannian view of biblical exegesis. I was beginning
to learn that Yoder was perceived by many as deeply problematic because he is
such a decisive threat to our accepted
ways of thinking. (The characterization of Yoder as pre-Bultmannian now almost
strikes one as humorous given recent developments in biblical criticism. Even
on historical grounds Yoder's Jesus in The Politics of Jesus appears more
historically defensible than Bultmann's Jesus.)
Yoder rightly understood that the real Jesus is not to be discovered in
discontinuity with Judaism but in his continuity with the extraordinarily
diverse modes of life we now call Jewish. Indeed, one of the aspects of Yoder's
work that has been unfairly overlooked is his way of reconceiving the
relationship between Christianity and Judaism.
The liberal dismissal of Yoder appears quite odd in light of the celebration of
him as a "postmodern theologian" by Frederic Jameson in his Post-Modernism, or
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Jameson notes that the central
hermeneutic of theological modernism was posed by the anthropomorphism of the
narrative character of a historical Jesus. Modern theologians assumed that
only intense philosophical effort is capable of turning this character into
this or that christological abstraction. As for the commandments and the
ethical doctrine, casuistry has long since settled the matter; they also need
no longer be taken literally, and confronted with properly modern forms of
injustice, bureaucratic warfare, systemic or economic inequality, and so forth,
modern theologians and churchmen can work up persuasive accommodations to the
constraints of complex modern societies, and provide excellent reasons for
bombing civilian populations or executing criminals which do not disqualify the
executors from Christian status.
Yoder challenges that accommodation by his account of "the politics of Jesus."
That is why a secular intellectual like Jameson admires him -- even though the
mainstream maintains that such people should not be able to appreciate Yoder.
Of course, Yoder will not be impressed by knowing that people like Jameson
admire his work. His task is not to represent a position interesting to other
intellectuals. Rather, he works as a theologian in subordination to a church
pledged to witness to the nonviolent politics of the gospel. (The fact that he
has submitted to his church's discipline process regarding sexual misconduct is
but a testimony to his commitment to nonviolence as the community's form of
behavior.)
Nor will Yoder be impressed with my reading of the significance of The Politics
of Jesus. In many ways my reading remains still far too laden with theory,
which always threatens to become a substitute for the church rather than an
enhancement of ecclesial practice. Nor would I want to imply that Yoder will
help us reconceive the tradition of liberal Protestantism simply because of the
mainstream churches' loss of institutional and social power. On the contrary,
Yoder may well help us to use the remaining resources of that tradition to help
Christians rediscover ways to serve our non-Christian brothers and sisters by
being unwavering in our commitment to the politics of Jesus.
Other related posts:
- » [amc] When the Politics of Jesus Makes a Difference
