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Yoder
and Stone-Campbellites:
Sorting the Grammar of Radical Orthodoxy
and Radical Discipleship
by Joe R. Jones
[A slightly revised version of a paper presented at a Conference
on the Stone-Campbell Movement and the Theology of John Howard Yoder at
Englewood Christian Church, Indianapolis, IN on March 13-14, 2009. Posted
here 7/22/09. A revised version of the paper will be in the near future
be contained in a book of conference essays published by Abilene Christian
University Press.]
It is a great pleasure for me to participate in the coming together of
sometime estranged friends from the Stone-Campbell Movement to discuss
the work of John Howard Yoder, one of the most trenchant theologians of
the twentieth century. While intending an irenic spirit, in his writings
Yoder ‘took no prisoners’: his analysis of issues bristled
with such clarity that his patient readers were compelled to think hard
about what he wrote and where they stood in relation to it. Yoder may
not have answered every question we readers might have brought to the
text, but he did speak directly and repeatedly to a decisive set of beliefs
and practices that are at the heart of what it means to be a disciple
of Jesus and a member of his ecclesial body.
In this presentation I do not promise any original contribution to the
ongoing work of Yoder scholars.[1-footnotes at the end of essay] But I
do hope to use Yoder to think about what I regard as the Achilles Heel
of the Stone-Campbell Movement. In short, I intend to explore the Movement’s
hesitation—in all three of its branches—to wrestle with trinitarian
orthodoxy and its connection to a more radical understanding of the Christian
life and the church in relation to whatever world it might find itself.
It is, of course, not the case that other church traditions that claimed
trinitarian orthodoxy did in fact obviously succeed in being the community
of radical disciples. Yet, it certainly is not the case—given the
theological baggage we toted around—that many Stone-Campbellites
were able consistently to be a people of radical discipleship.
The nub of the problem, it seems to me, is that the Stone-Campbell Movement’s
intent to recover the NT church and bypass the orthodox-creating creeds
of Nicaea and Chalcedon left the Movement utterly exposed to the political
world in which it was being born—namely, the rise of American-style
democracy and its need for a civil religious rationale and support. As
a peculiar and self-consciously American movement openly embracing its
free-church non-established status, the Stone-Campbell Movement [hereinafter
referred to as SCM] simply could not resist being co-opted by the needs
of American sectionalism and nationalism and their politics. It might
be helpful to see this continual and differentiated co-opting as a facsimile
of what Yoder has called the Constantinianization of the church.[2] And
Yoder is exactly right: a Constantinian church finds radical discipleship
practically impossible.
I will disappoint you if you are expecting me now to provide all the historical
documentation of just how it was that all three branches of the SCM—in
their differing ways—were simply overwhelmed by American politics
and principalities and powers. Rather, my aim is: 1) to provide some diagnostic
comments about orthodoxy and orthopraxis within the SCM, especially in
its first century; 2) to propose an understanding of ‘radical orthodoxy’
as trinitarian in character and radical in relation to any and every world
in which it might exist; 3) to explore some central convictions of Yoder
regarding Christology and ecclesiology pertaining to radical orthodoxy
and radical discipleship; and 4) engage Yoder and the SCM by constructing
a brief theological imaginary of trinitarian
orthodoxy and radical discipleship.[3] Hence, by examining how certain
trinitarian theological convictions and practices conceptually interpenetrate,
I hope it is clearer how radical discipleship might be kept more keenly
on the minds and hearts of the Movement’s pastors, teachers, and
laity. [4]
Orthodoxy
I have argued elsewhere that any Christian ecclesial tradition simply
cannot avoid questions of orthodoxy—right belief—and of orthopraxis—right
practice.[5] Such questions are practically unavoidable
in so far as any ecclesial body cannot persist without identifying in
its actual discourses those beliefs and practices considered
essential to its own self-identity as an ongoing Christian tradition.
Essential here means those actual identity markers the
tradition repeatedly returns to and acknowledges as minimally constitutive
of its own self-understanding and in the absence of which it would become
confused about its own identity and persons outside the tradition would
be confused about what it would mean to become an active member. How to
decide these matters is, of course, difficult and contentious, and in
good Calvinist practice I contend that, however questions of orthodoxy
and orthopraxis might be answered, they are always reformable.
Surely all members of the SCM are keenly aware that in our tradition there
was from the start a competing worldly creed: ‘nobody can tell me
what I ought to believe; it is my own private decision.’ I would,
however, propose that the SCM from the beginning intended to make the
confession of ‘Jesus Christ is my/our Lord and Savior’ as
the minimal heart of church belief. And yet, all three branches choked
at developing any binding or guiding understanding of what it meant to
say ‘Lord’ and ‘Savior’ about Jesus and see therein
any strong implication about the reality of ‘the Father’ and
even less about ‘the Holy Spirit.’[6] It is sufficient for
my purposes to note that the anti-creedal disposition of all three branches
repeatedly obscured from themselves what right beliefs and practices they
did have and thereby prevented the communal identification and clarification
of theological convictions that might have been beneficial to our ecclesial
faithfulness. Further, according to the way in which I am using the term
‘orthodoxy’ it should not be assumed that all orthodoxies
get expressed as ‘creeds,’ though ecclesially they are cousins.
So, in the first century of their lives, what might it have meant in the
SCM branches to have even talked about ‘right belief’ and/or
‘right practice’? In a way that might offend many in all three
traditions—to which I apologize now—I would suggest something
close to the following is what counted as orthodox within the earlier
and common years of the Movement.
1. Orthodoxy was the right belief that the NT alone was sufficient for
identifying those beliefs and practices that are essential to the church
and the Christian life.
2. Orthodoxy was the right belief that Jesus Christ is my/our Lord and
Savior.
3. Orthodoxy was the right belief that “where the Scriptures speak
we speak and where the Scriptures are silent we are silent.”[7]
4. Orthodoxy was the right belief that the church is comprised of baptized
believers only, whereby baptism is by immersion for the remission of sins.
5. Orthodoxy was the right belief that issues of church governance could
be settled by reference to the singularly clear pattern of governance
of the church in the NT.
6. Orthodoxy was the right belief that creeds are human artifices stultifying
to Christian understanding and commitment.
7. Orthodoxy was the right belief that the church of the NT is more nearly
a movement among local congregations than what can be called denominations,
with their defining creeds.
8. Orthodoxy was the right belief that only a movement of Christian congregations
could achieve genuine Christian unity.
9. Orthodoxy was the right belief that the United States of America, as
a democratic republic, was a God-ordained nation important in God’s
providential governance of the world, however true it might also be that
many Americans lived perversely in sin.
10. Orthopraxis was the right practice of observing the Lord’s Supper
whenever the faithful gather for worship, independent of ordained priests,
apostolic or otherwise.
11. Orthopraxis was the right practice of baptizing by immersion only
adult or near-adult persons who have confessed that Jesus Christ is their
Lord and Savior.
I know that each of us could extend or contract this list according to
our own experience and historical judgment.[8] The point of my list is
that, in spite of our resistance to orthodox confessions or creedal statements,
the SCM was literally and continually awash in orthodoxies, but few were
willing to name and defend the orthodoxies as orthodoxies. Of course,
the 20th century saw the SCM breaking apart as de facto issues of orthodoxy
and orthopraxis began rendering the branches unintelligible and opaque
to each other. So, the question never should have been whether there are
orthodoxies or not, but which orthodoxy and which orthopraxis?
And, why that orthodoxy and that orthopraxis and not
another? [9]
We are now in a position to recognize that none of the branches ever developed
any consensus about trinitarian orthodoxy nor about any orthopraxis of
discipleship such as, for example, refusing to return evil for evil, turning
the other cheek when injured, being a slave to Christ, loving the stranger
and the enemy, forgiving those who wrongly use and abuse you, refusing
to use violence against another, and the making of peace. Surely these
practices that Jesus taught in the NT might have been foundational of
any orthodoxy and orthopraxis in a movement publicly and discursively
putting the emphasis on being disciples of Christ.
Radical Orthodoxy
What might it mean to talk of ‘radical orthodoxy’? I am sure
many of you are familiar with a contemporary movement that calls itself
‘Radical Orthodoxy,’ with such prominent and interesting theologians
as John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward.[10] I admire the
aim of the movement to critique the way modern political liberalism, secularism,
and capitalist culture co-opted much of Protestant Liberal Christianity,
even though I think the movement falters in openly espousing a more Platonic
or Neo-Platonic frame of metaphysics. Such a metaphysics, in spite of
the admirable attempts by these theologians, can never adequately develop
much sense for the agency of God. However, in this essay I am not interested
in exploring and critiquing some of the arresting proposals of this movement.
I simply mention this movement because it has promoted a verbal expression—radical
orthodoxy—important to me in my early years of teaching
in those notoriously conflictual times of the late 1960s and the early
70s. My use of ‘radical orthodoxy’ intends no explicit or
extended continuity with this current movement.
As some of you may know, I wrote my dissertation on Karl Barth, and it
was Barth who was pulling me away from my previous Tillichian and Reinhold
Niebuhrian inclinations in theology and political ethics. With war raging
in Vietnam and in the streets, amidst racism shattering society and churches,
and political assassinations devastating to political hope, almost every
traditional societal pillar was coming under attack: education, religion,
economics, politics, government. It was common for protesters and revolutionaries,
inside and outside the church, to blame and dismiss traditional orthodox
Christian beliefs as wooden and heavy and incapacitated to deal with the
modern world. In particular, this question loomed heavy and threatening:
how could so many American church traditions have ever supported racism
and going-to-war in such seemingly unjust ways?
I found it helpful during this turmoil to say to students that it was
one of the great curiosities—indeed scandals—of church history
that traditions self-identified as orthodox had repeatedly gone to war
so easily in the name of king and nation, had repeatedly absorbed the
ethos and politics of the particular nation or culture in which it was
located, and had repeatedly identified the purposes of God in terms of
the political aspirations and cause of its nation or class or ethnic group.[11]
In spite of the accusation that the church’s orthodoxy repeatedly
succumbed to the ruling principalities and powers and that such orthodoxy
was the root of the church’s dreadful subservience to the powers,
I averred in return that the problem was more nearly that the
church was not radically orthodox enough. Were the church truly
and radically orthodox, I argued, then it would consistently be clear
to the church that it serves God first and that God’s reality and
will is known in the compelling contours of the life, death, and resurrection
of Jesus Christ, very God and very human. Only by bearing this in mind
could the church refuse to identify God’s will with the arrangements
of power and politics in any particular human government and culture.
Hence, it was precisely a Chalcedonian Christology and clear trinitarian
beliefs—not succumbing to a presumably natural theology that any
rational person should properly believe—that would be that radical
orthodoxy and radical orthopraxis that had the power and authority to
engage and critique the variety of human political loyalties, governments,
and social arrangements.
It was this sort of theologizing by Barth that had also empowered and
authorized his particular critique of and nonviolent resistance to the
Nazi overpowering of the German church traditions. God is sovereign as
revealed in Jesus of Nazareth and Hitler is not sovereign; once stated
firmly, we can all play out the logic or grammar of this tenacious radically
orthodox belief. I then argued that a Barth-like radical orthodoxy should
be a theological prophylactic to the church’s inclination to serve
the reigning lords in whatever political and cultural arrangement it might
find itself. Yet it was only in my later encounter with Yoder that the
orthopraxis of nonviolence emerged as important to that theological prophylactic.[12]
The orthodox creeds of Nicaea [325 CE] and Chalcedon [451 CE] intended
to clarify the reality of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection and
the reality of the God of Israel, the Creator of the world.[13] If
Jesus is where God’s sovereignty and will and purpose are truly
and decisively manifest—become incarnate—then this is the
understanding of divinity that critiques all other appeals to divine authorization
and sanction. Trinitarian belief is not about how three-in-one
are magically important: it is about clarifying the divinity of Jesus
and how he might be understood as the Lord of all things and how that
Lord is at work in the world. The ruling belief of a genuinely radical
orthodoxy is that God is incarnate in Jesus the Jew from Nazareth at a
particular time and geography, that this Jesus’ life and teaching,
his death and resurrection convey an identifiable pattern of beliefs and
practices. People who confess this and who thereby follow Jesus are a
peculiar people who live differently and serve a Lord different from the
various lords and powers found in human societies and arrangements.
In making this case about the church and radical orthodoxy I also formulated
my first version of the nature and mission of the church, later formulated
as:
The church is that liberative and redemptive
community of persons
called into being
by the Gospel of Jesus Christ
through the Holy Spirit
to witness in word and deed
to the living triune God
for the benefit of the world
to the glory of God.
Hence to my students in those uproarious and uprooting times, if the church
were truly radically orthodox it would have a more radical sense for what
it might mean there and then to be disciples of Jesus prepared to love
in odd ways and suffer for such loving, without seeking such suffering
for its own sake. Such discipleship—as radical orthopraxis and radical
orthodoxy—is neither complacent about the reigning political lords
nor incessantly seeking ways to overthrow those lords, whether by violence
or nonviolence, in order to become the dominant power
in the world. As might now be apparent, it was Yoder who helped me clarify
and develop these concerns further. Even so, my definition emphatically
affirms that the church exists to witness in word and deed for
the benefit of the world. It is the world, with all of its sinful
violence and conflicts, that God loves and is intent on redeeming! Hence,
the abiding issue: how to be for the world without being for the
world on the terms determined acceptable and subservient to the world.
Considering Yoder
We all are here because in some way or another we have found the work
of John Howard Yoder particularly challenging and illuminating and perhaps
provocatively disturbing. Some of you have also spent more effort than
I trying to interpret Yoder to an increasingly larger ecclesial and political
audience.[14] I applaud all of your efforts: Yoder is a gift to the Christian
church and every encounter we might have with his works should be an encounter
that is spiritually athletic and theologically stringent. Allow me now
to identify some of the salutary traits of Yoder’s work as I see
them.
First, Yoder is continually striving for clarity in his writings: it is
more important to him most of the time to be searchingly clear about the
subject matter under discussion than to be consoling and encouraging.
Of course, the primary clarity he seeks has to do with Jesus of Nazareth
and the biblical testimony to him. It is not too narrow to remember that
a great bulk of his writings are about or pivot about who this Jesus is,
what sort of life he lived and what sort of teachings he conveyed and
embodied in his life and in his death on the cross, and what would it
mean to regard him a Lord and Savior of one’s life and to be a member
of a people who live their lives as his body and as his disciples.
It is from this centering on Jesus that issues about pacifism, politics,
and ecclesiology emerge. If he is wrong about Jesus, then in his own mind
he is wrong about pacifism, politics, and ecclesiology. It is not that
Yoder thinks what he writes is authoritative because of his own authority
as scholar; rather it is Jesus and the NT witness to him that is authoritative,
and Yoder is the earnest student-scholar intending to understand the nature
and content of that authority.
Second, there is amazing complexity, as well as simplicity, in Yoder as
he explores widely what is involved in being a follower of Jesus. He does
surprise us from time to time, refusing to say what we think he should
have said or saying what we thought he would never have said.[15] Yet
even in his richness, he does not pretend to address all the theological
issues we might have wanted him to address. In ways many of you might
regard as odd and idiosyncratic, I find myself continually exploring the
nexus of issues often elaborated in so-called ‘systematic theology’
ventures. But Yoder just does not always go where I wish he might have
gone, yet not because he thinks where I might want him to go is irrelevant
to the Christian life and the church. It is more as though he simply had
no present interest in or appetite for going there. Let me give a couple
of examples of his refusal to elaborate, as it might also clarify some
of my use of Yoder.
I think Yoder is profoundly trinitarian in his theological understanding,
though only in a few instances does he discuss some of the theological
issues at stake at Nicaea and Chalcedon.[16] But he never wavers in his
belief that Jesus is the revelation of the God of Israel and that his
life, death, and resurrection incarnates God’s presence in the world.
Jesus is the Lamb of God revealing the “grain of the cosmos.”[17]
In the same connection Yoder claims that Jesus is the beginning of a new
eon, a new creation, and that eschatology is decisive for Jesus’
preaching and way of life. But I am not aware that Yoder gives any extended
attention to such traditional eschatological themes as the status of death
and life-beyond-death and salvation eschatologically understood. He just
does not systematically go to these topics of discussion, and yet I think
it would be wrong to conclude that he did not think them worthy of a disciple’s
concern. I have wondered whether Yoder ever gave a funeral homily or even
commented on death and churchly grieving and hope. Other issues such as
justification and grace, the work of the Holy Spirit, the relationship
of God to those who do not confess Christ—which is not the same
question as their relation to God—and whether God suffers are left
unexplored.[18]
I make these comments about Yoder in order to suggest that Yoder does
not write in order to satisfy all our theological concerns and questions.
I say this also in order that we not prematurely conclude that if Yoder
did not explicitly and fully explore a particular issue or question then
it must not have been important to him and therefore need not be important
to us.
I turn now to identify those aspects of Yoder’s theologizing that
warrant my identifying him in terms of radical orthodoxy and radical discipleship.
Yoder: Radical Orthodoxy and Radical Discipleship [19]
First, Yoder’s pivotal concerns are Christological
and ecclesiological: Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew, is the very revelation
and incarnation of the God of Israel, and in his life, death, and resurrection,
Jesus teaches, exemplifies, and conveys a way of life that summons persons
to follow him by becoming gathered into a community of belief and practice
that is an alternative way of life from the ways of life that seem so
evident in the human social and political worlds. It is in the work of
Jesus that God is bringing forth a new creation—a new aeon—and
thereby revealing the meaning and goal of human history. It is this eschatological
claim about Jesus and his work—and therefore about his reality and
being—that is at the center of that ekklesia of
folk summoned into a new way of life.
We should note that these basic claims about Jesus, God, and the new ecclesial
community and its way of life are never proposed from any other perspective
than as confessional.[20] He is, of course, interpreting
the NT and in that way interpreting Jesus and stands ready to discuss
whether he has interpreted the NT Jesus correctly. On a variety of grounds
it can be debated whether Yoder has adequately interpreted the NT in its
testimony to Jesus. But he does not discuss whether anyone should believe
these big claims about Jesus by way of some independent arguments that
would corroborate that Jesus is indeed truly God, for example. There is
no retreat to an independent metaphysics or social ethics to confirm that
Jesus is Lord. In these respects Yoder is akin to Barth.
Second, if the above is an accurate representation of
Yoder, for the purposes of our discussing Yoder in the context of the
SCM branches, what might we construct as orthodox for Yoder?
I propose the following theses for our consideration:
1. That Jesus, the Jew from Nazareth, is the very revelation of
the reality and will of the God of Israel, the Creator of the world, and
as such, Jesus is divine.
2. That Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection reveal a new way of
being the people of God, though such a way is a congruent development
within the life of Israel.
3. That Jesus proclaimed that the Kingdom God is bringing is a new social/political/ethical
way of life that centers on love of neighbor, stranger, and enemy, on
the refusal to return evil for evil, and on the refusal to use violence
and to seek to rule the world through domination and coercion.
4. That Jesus called into being a new community of persons to be his disciples,
to follow his path of servanthood, to practice the new politics among
themselves and in relation to the world, and, by so doing, this new community
will be an alternative community in relation to the other communities/cultures/nations/peoples
that presume to give order to their worlds.
5. That this new community—the new ecclesia—will struggle
to maintain its identity as a community of disciples of Jesus in a variety
of ways in relation to the world, intending to be for the world without
being so on the world’s own terms.
6. That this new ecclesia, as the body of Christ in the world, confesses
that God is in control of history and that such history has purpose and
goal, and thereby the church gives up a belief or assumption common among
various peoples that they are in charge of the world and it is their task
to order the world and to do so by a ‘justifiable use of violence.’
As should be obvious, this delineation of Yoder’s orthodoxy is also
a delineation of orthopraxis: at least these beliefs
must be believed and these practices must be lived.
What is not included in Yoder’s orthodoxy? While
Yoder insists that Jesus is divine and acknowledges this belief is the
occasion for trinitarian thinking—that is, trinitarian thinking
only arises because of the apostolic claims about Jesus’ divinity—Yoder
does not seem willing to make trinitarian beliefs essential to the beliefs
of the church. Optional, yes, but not essential. Yoder does not include
the belief in an inerrant NT, and thereby he keeps the focus of the church
on Jesus and his commandments and promises rather than on each and every
sentence in the NT as having equal authority. Yoder does not include the
belief that the reality of the church is dependent on the presence of
‘apostolic successors’ as an unbroken line of leaders ordained
by God.
In what sense, then, might it be illuminating to understand Yoder as embracing
radical orthodoxy and radical discipleship? What is it
in Yoder’s work that would justify applying radical orthodoxy to
him in differentiation from just the traditional orthodoxies of the church?
I suggest that the radical orthodoxy of Yoder consist in his tying
inseparably together: 1) the belief in a divine Jesus who summons into
being a new community of voluntary disciples defined by their confession
of his Lordship; and 2) the community’s practices of forgiveness,
of loving neighbors, strangers, and enemies, of making peace and refusing
to use violence for presumably justified ends, and of refusing to seek
coercive domination of the world. The church’s Lord is
Jesus, the church’s way of life is discipleship to Jesus, and the
church, as an alternative community, lives differently from the ways of
the world. This sort of radical orthodoxy is inseparable from radical
discipleship, and without the practices of radical discipleship, the church
becomes dominated and formed by the principalities and powers of the worlds
in which it lives.[21]
Engaging Yoder and the Stone-Campbell Movement:
I. A Grammar of Radical Orthodoxy as Trinitarian—A Theological
Imaginary
As I mentioned in my earlier brief discussion of ‘radical orthodoxy’,
I am gripped by the conviction that the church must be clear about its
identity if it is not to be repeatedly overwhelmed by and conformed to
the worlds in which it exists. And I am gripped even more by the conviction
that the church’s most basic identity is irrevocably tethered
to the identity of God, or as I have put it, by the radical grammar of
the word ‘God’ in the church’s life. Precisely
because there are many uses historically of ‘God’ and therefore
there are many gods seductively hiding under the word ‘God’,
the church cannot maintain a faithful identity in its life through the
centuries without an ongoing and relentless conversation about the identity
of God. It is in answering this question that the church must confront
issues of orthodoxy, and it is in answering this question that previously
the main traditions of the church laboriously—and often languidly—developed
and embraced trinitarian language.
I want now to engage Yoder—and therewith also the SCM—in the
question of why trinitarian language is intelligible but only optional?
Why isn’t trinitarian language essential to answering the
questions of the identity of God and the identity of the church?
It is beyond question that for Yoder it is essential to Christian understanding
that Jesus is Lord and therefore Jesus is divine. And Yoder has acknowledged
that the great trinitarian theologizing in the early church was a search
for the proper and adequate Christian understanding of God. It is obvious
that in the NT texts the names ‘Father’, ‘Son’,
and ‘Spirit/Holy Spirit’ are used as though they are distinct—the
Father did not die on the cross, e.g.—and yet fundamentally one.
But do we have a grammar here that would fit well within the polytheistic
possibilities of Greco-Roman philosophical and religious life? Supposing
now you are an elder in a congregation in Asia Minor engaged in teaching
the faith to new converts or would-be-converts and one of them asks: ‘how
it is that Jesus is divine and our Savior but this affirmation is not
polytheistic?’ What do you say? Trinitarian conversation and the
creeds of Nicaea and Chalcedon are attempts by the church to put some
exclusionary brackets on some ways of construing God the Father and Jesus
of Nazareth. Nicaea confirmed that the Father and Jesus are one basic
divine reality. Chalcedon confirmed that Jesus is both divine and human,
and any attempt to deny either is to undermine the capacity to call Jesus
Lord and Savior. These decisions are basic grammar for the church, even
though there is much more to be said and developed.
Now when some other ecclesial tradition, like the SCM, says we need neither
Nicaea nor Chalcedon—we just need the real human Jesus—the
question looms as to how this real human Jesus is our Savior. In what
way is Jesus Savior and what does he save us from? Aside from the important
sense in which Jesus summons persons to a new way of life, it must be
admitted that Yoder tarries not over further questions about the meaning
of salvation. He refuses to stress anything like an experience
of being converted by Jesus, though there are such experiences and they
were bread and butter for much of the SCM. And Yoder is certainly wary
of developing atonement theories and he hesitates to clarify any imaginary
of ultimate salvation.[22]
Suppose now some tradition goes on to say ‘it is inappropriate
for the church to attempt to answer these questions in some definitive
way; it must be left up to each individual to answer the questions for
herself.’ The identity of God is left up to the individual to determine
for herself, as though the church—as a community of engaging theological
conversation—is incapacitated to distinguish between its own common
teachings and the predictable struggles individuals might have in understanding,
accepting, and appropriating those teachings? Isn’t that a recipe
for unremitting conflict, confusion, illusion, and despair?
Suppose one then says, as Yoder says, God is in control of history
and the world process. What sort of control
are we talking about, such that we earnest would-be-believers might know
how to conform to and pray to God? As for Yoder, I think he answers this
by referring to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus: God has power
sufficient to bring God’s Kingdom to culminating presence in the
world and yet God rules in the way Jesus rules as the Lamb of God slain
for the redemption of the world. Yoder avers that trinitarian language
arises from these concerns and intends to render these questions intelligible
to the church, but he makes no further attempt to explore and construct
such trinitarian understanding as though it is crucial to the church’s
understanding of God and therefore also the church’s understanding
of itself.
For myself, I think the creedal conversations and rule-making of Nicaea
and Chalcedon are theologically crucial to the life of the church, even
though I admit some of the church’s use of the creeds has been confusing.
In these creedal conversations the church assumed that the identity of
the Father—as the God of Israel and Creator of the world—was
clear and noncontroversial. Using some metaphysical concepts at hand,
the Father was assumed to be immutable, impassible, infinite, all-powerful,
and simple. The theological problem was getting Jesus—the Jewish
human being who suffered and was crucified—understood in terms of
the divinity of the Father. However, at various points in the church’s
life it was able to reformulate the question to become: how does
the divinity of Jesus, given his life, death, and resurrection, affect
and modify our understanding of the divinity of the Father?
I think Yoder saw the radical character of this way of putting the question
of the identity and divinity of God, perhaps under the influence of Barth.
But he abstained—or thought irrelevant to his concerns—from
making further inroads on trinitarian conversation. And my concern is
that in the absence of such further work, it is virtually unintelligible
why anyone should suppose Jesus is Lord and humans are summoned to be
his body in the world. Put another way, to say ‘Jesus is Lord’
is to say more than ‘Jesus is the Lord of my life’;
it is also to say ‘Jesus is Lord of the whole creation,
whether anyone believes it or not.’ Jesus’ Lordship
does not depend on our believing, even though it is important that the
disciples believe he is Lord. Isn’t this why the church cannot confess
the Lordship of Jesus without moving into trinitarian language about the
reality of God and what God has done on behalf of human salvation?
Further, had Yoder pushed more firmly into trinitarian elaboration, he
would have had to confront issues concerning the status of the Holy Spirit.
Yet in this regard, Yoder is akin to the SCM with its almost complete
neglect of the Holy Spirit. Such neglect poses sharply the question of
how the language of the divinity of Jesus as Lord and Savior can be sustained
and intelligible to the church without a trinitarian understanding of
the unity and the complexity within the Divine Life. Furthermore,
it is trinitarian grammar that empowers the church to understand the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus as not only a historical series of events
but also as salvific events internal to the complex Life of God on behalf
of the salvation of the world.
I invite you to look further at my Grammar book to see the virtues, as
well as the truthfulness, of a trinitarian understanding of God. It capacitates
the church’s discourses to think of God as dynamically both one
and complex in which there is real otherness, movement, and relationships
within God’s Life and in God’s free and loving interaction
with the world for the redemption of the world. The incarnational narrative
about Jesus in the NT will surely fall into disarray in the absence of
a robust trinitarian understanding of God. Hence, the radical orthodoxy
I propose is one in which the divinity of Jesus reshapes and deepens the
church’s own life.[23]
II. A Grammar of Radical Discipleship and Ecclesial Identity:
A Theological Imaginary
I have claimed that it is helpful to understand that issues of radical
orthodoxy and radical discipleship are the deep grammar of the church’s
construal of the identity of God and the identity of the church.
I remind you that I am also concerned with the perennial problem of the
church’s relation to the worlds in which it invariably exists and
how the church is empowered to maintain a self-understanding that clarifies
its ongoing and unavoidable being-in-the-world. What sort of identity
must the church have if it is to be for the world without
being of the world or being the vassal
of the world? It is herein that I think Yoder’s claims about radical
discipleship will be helpful for us to examine further.
Radical discipleship is, of course, discipleship to Jesus as Lord and
Savior. It is Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection that summon the
church into existence as the community of persons who live a distinctive
way of life. While I think there is more to say about that distinctive
way of life than Yoder is want to emphasize, nevertheless he is right
to place discipleship to Jesus as central and uneliminable in the church’s
life. Drop out or minimize this discipleship and aim to locate the identity
of the church by some other conceptual means is for Yoder to cease being
the church of Jesus Christ. The church exists, wherever it exists, only
in the form of discipleship.
How then does Yoder give definiteness to this alternative community’s
life of discipleship? That way of life includes: confessing sins and repenting;
accepting sins as forgiven by God and learning thereby how to forgive
others; seeking the good of the neighbor and the stranger and the enemy
and refusing to take the life of another; refusing to use violence against
another; refusing to seek retaliation for wrongs done to oneself or to
another; refusing to put limits on forgiveness; making peace with others;
refusing to rule others as the Gentiles rule by lording over them; and
more. These practices are clearly identified throughout the NT, and as
practices summoned by Jesus, it would be absurd to say Jesus did not really
mean to so summons and form the church as his body.
But! But what?
To understand this ever recurring but in the
historical lives of the churches, let us focus on the disarming title
of one of Yoder’s most important books: The Politics of Jesus.
Why the use of this word politics? Yoder tells
us that he is aiming to question and counter a typical way in which many
liberal Protestant theologians/ethicists have argued that the ethics of
Jesus, which we have identified above, are irrelevant to the realities
of the politics of the world. They claim that the ethics or politics of
Jesus are a useful norm but are not a useable guide
to the church’s concrete witness to and life in the world. If Christians
really care about the world and its infelicitous conflicts and wars, so
a non-Yoderian might argue, then the church must have a social ethics—a
politics—amenable to the politics of the world. Yoder’s counter
to this is to claim that Jesus provides an actual politics—a social
ethics—that in fact bears upon and interacts with the world’s
politics. The way of Jesus is also the way of the cross and may include
cross-bearing suffering as a consequence of discipleship to Jesus. Hence,
the church properly, as the body of Christ in the world, lives an alternative
way of life to the ways of life the world promotes and demands. To live
in conformity to Jesus’ way of life is the basic calling of the
church.
Yet, have not even the various church traditions thought they were living
differently from the world, even if they lived often in some partial
conformity to the world’s politics? How then is such done?
Perhaps it might be argued that the heart of the church are the practices
of neighbor love—agapic love—in which the Christian and the
church seek the good of the neighbor, even the stranger and the enemy
as in the category of the neighbor. Might it happen,
then, that the church so seeks the good of its many neighbors that it
takes up—or is willing to endorse and support the taking up—the
sword to protect the neighbor in peril? Ah, there is the rub: the willingness
to use violence against another in order to protect oneself or another
from violence. For Yoder, that simple allowance of violence in the name
of the world’s various political orders is the source of how
the church itself loses its own identity and becomes the vassal of the
larger political world in which it exists. When the church sanctions the
use of violence in the environing politics of the world, then, according
to Yoder, it has forfeited its summons to radical discipleship and will
thereby lose its distinctive way of life and perhaps its deepest theological
identity.
The critics of Yoder are right to see that Yoder tethers the church’s
identity to radical discipleship to Jesus as that is also tethered to
agapic love and now agapic love tethered to nonviolence. And yet they
criticize Yoder for tethering all these together to comprise the identity
of the church. They want a church that can also engage the interests of
the worlds’ politics on the worlds’ own terms. But how is
that done? It is done by appealing to some other set of principles that
will endorse the use of restrained and justified violence in the political
orders of the world in order to control violence and disorder. What principles?
Consider how natural law can come into play or principles
of political realism. So, the church comes to grips with
two orders: its own internal order to love, forgiveness, and nonviolence,
and the order to the worlds various dependencies on violence in the name
of peace and protection from harm.
Lest his critics or his followers might think Yoder has erected pacifism
into an independent principle that is in general persuasive to thoughtful
folk, Yoder writes another book, Nevertheless: Varieties of Religious
Pacifism, aiming to distinguish the church’s radical discipleship
as Messianic Pacifism from a host of other pacifisms with different rationales.
Hence, it is not any sort of political pacifism that Yoder is endorsing;
it is the pacifism of radical discipleship to Jesus.[24] It is extremely
important to note, however, that Yoder is arguing that nonviolence is
essential to the church and its radical discipleship, but he is not arguing
that the politics of the states and nations could be better organized
were they to adopt policies of nonviolence. Yet it is certainly clear
that Yoder is harsh with Christians who would recommend state violence
by reference to the NT or the teachings of Jesus. The politics of Jesus,
though, are not the politics of the state: the state—in its more
or less liberal democratic rationale and form—is of necessity committed
to the principled use of violence in order to control random violence
and disorder, and whatever role the church might have in stately politics,
it would only be to ameliorate specific practices of state violence.[25]
To put in clear focus the dilemma of church theology in relation to the
use of violence by the nation-state: Yoder is arguing that Jesus Christ
is at the heart of the church and radical discipleship is the form of
the church and such discipleship involves the refusal by the church and
the disciple to use violence against another human for whatever urgent
or long-term reasons. Obviously, a church that practices this
sort of radical discipleship is a church that will never be in danger
of having its identity given to it or overwhelmed by the world in which
it lives. God, Jesus, church identity, discipleship, and nonviolence are
tethered together as radical orthodoxy and radical orthopraxis.
Hence, the real worry about the Constantinianization of the church is
not only or primarily about the church being established
and under the domain of the state; rather it prevails whenever the church
loses it radical discipleship to the various ways in which the state or
cultural powers prevail upon the disciples to conform to the state’s
or the society’s endorsement and authority and relinquish the nonviolent
character of discipleship.
So, how did we Stone-Campbellites become so formed by our worldly circumstances
that we—presuming to restore simple NT Christianity—stumbled
along submitting ourselves variously to American individualism, Southern
and Northern warring sentiments and animosities, trusting an inerrant
Bible that reduced Jesus to every ‘jot and tittle’ of the
text, and casually supporting racism and violence toward women for decades?
How did it come about that we fell into reducing discipleship to Jesus
to discipleship to American democracy or to our local idiosyncrasies or
to our devotion to free market capitalism or to our willingness to go
to war to defend American ‘freedom’ or to our passion for
liberal politics or to a multi-culturalism that relativizes even Jesus?
Might our branches have stayed together and been on target if we had hewed
to a radical orthodoxy and radical discipleship? Is it not even now the
case that each of the branches has its own way of characterizing the other
branches as folk who have forsaken the original dynamism of the SCM?
Speaking boldy—as if for the first time?—are there
even the theological resources, commitments, and appetites remaining in
our various branches to engage robustly the sort of radical orthodoxy
and radical discipleship Yoder seems to envisage and which I
have pushed even further? Or, in what respects would any of us, standing
within our SCM tradition, find good theological reasons for questioning
or even rejecting the basic outlines of Yoder’s vision?
I have my own demurs from Yoder, but I like the stringency of his understanding
of church and discipleship. Yet I do not think a simple affirmation of
the divinity of Jesus is sufficient without a richer exploration of what
Jesus’ divinity means for our identification of who God is, and
I do not see how the identification of God can finally avoid or walk away
from trinitarian articulation. I have tried elsewhere to outline a trinitarian
orthodoxy that is compatible with much of Yoder, but also more than Yoder.
I am skeptical there can be a real ‘reformation’ of the church
in the absence of a profound principle of identity and critique that reminds
the church in all of its life that it has a Lord—Jesus Christ—who
summons it to radical discipleship as a radical alternative community
to whatever world in which the church lives. In the absence of that reforming
principle of identity and critique, the struggling body of the church
will inevitably but variably submit to and rejoice in being the chaplain—or
perhaps even a cranky prophet—of the various politics and economics
of its world’s dominant principalities and powers.
For my own branch of the SCM, the Christian Church (Disciples
of Christ), it is hardly imaginable what it would mean to be radical disciples
of Jesus in Yoder’s sense. But then, whatever could it
mean to call ourselves Disciples of Christ? Yet I also must admit that
my own Christian pilgrimage is deeply rooted in that loose-jointed heritage,
even though it is also the case that most of my lifetime of theological
work and writings are hardly legible, much less acceptable, to my tradition’s
present discourses and practices in their utter disarray. That surely
makes me sad, but Paul repeatedly reminds me that we have these treasures
in earthen vessels that are always in need of reform.
I conclude these reflections on Yoder and us Stone-Campbellites with the
question of whether there is even that solicitous and convicting theological
imaginary among us of a proper radical orthodoxy centered on
trinitarian discourses arising from the divinity of Jesus and a proper
radical discipleship that comprises the church as a genuinely alternative
community—neither simply at-war-with nor in-bed-with
the various nations and communities of the world—but also for-the-world
as those creaturely arrangements of power and goods that need radical
redemption?
Footnotes
1. I was a Johnny-come-lately to Yoder.
I began seminary instruction in philosophical and systematic theology
in 1965. I did not purchase Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus until
1985, and it was only in the late 1980s and the early 90s that a bright
and engaging student of mine at Christian Theological Seminary insisted
that I read Yoder since he thought Yoder and I shared a host of theological
convictions. That student was Mark Nation, our esteemed featured lecturer
at this conference. It goes without saying that I owe Mark much gratitude
for pushing me into having Yoder as a conversation-partner, which also
opened the door to re-engaging a graduate school colleague of mine from
Yale days, Stanley Hauerwas.
2. A theme much articulated by Yoder and much discussed
by others. See John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics
as Gospel (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1984), esp. pp.
135-147.
3. The expression imaginary comes to
me by way of its use by Sheldon S. Wolin and Charles Taylor, and I have
found it a rich way of talking about the deep interrelation between discourses
and practices as construals of the social worlds in the church as well
as in other social relationships. See Wolin’s, Democracy Incorporated:
Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 17-40 for “political imaginary”
and Taylor’s, Modern Social Imaginaries, (Durham, NC: Duke
Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 23-30 for “social imaginary”, also
used extensively in his massive recent work, A Secular Age, (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2007).
4. I have enjoyed two previous opportunities to work
with SCM theologians. See my contribution, “On Being the Church
of Jesus Christ,” in a special issue of Leaven on “The
Church’s One Foundation,” vol. 15, no. 1 (First Quarter, 2007),
pp. 6-11. See also “Spiritual Formation and Christian Discourse:
The Shaping Power of Christian Discourse,” in Spiritual Formation
and the Future of Stone-Campbell Churches (Bloomington, IN: Ketch
Publications, 2008), pp. 1-20; essay also reprinted in Encounter, vol.
69, no. 2 (2008), pp. 29-44.
5. Put succinctly, pertaining to the church’s witness,
I distinguish between 1) questions of orthodoxy and orthopraxis: what
must always be said and done; 2) questions of heresy and heretical praxis:
what must never be said or done; 3) questions of permissible and nonschismatic
disagreement and diversity. See Joe R. Jones, A Grammar of Christian
Faith: Systematic Explorations in Christian Life and Doctrine, 2
vols. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), pp. 40-43. Hereinafter
this work will be referred to as GCF.
6. In ways I seek to justify in GCF, pp. 158-66
[“Patriarchy and ‘Father’ Language”], for particular
purposes I will use Father as an appropriate—but not the only—way
of referring to the First Person of the Trinity.
7. This belief often became the practice that if a belief
could be found in the ‘plain sense’ of the NT, then it was
‘right to believe it.’ How else might we explain the Movement’s
continual obfuscating of differences within the NT, especially on large
issues such as slavery and the status of women?
8. Folk from the Churches of Christ might also identify
acappella worship as orthopraxis supported by the orthodox right belief
that worship without musical instruments is commanded by God.
9. The SCM never reached real agreement about how it
is that Jesus saves us, but neither Nicaea nor Chalcedon elaborated on
salvation.
10. See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory:
Beyond Secular Reason (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1990);
Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003):
The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (Eugene, OR:
Cascade Books, Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2009). For a useful introduction
to and exploration of Radical Orthodoxy, see James K. Smith, Introducing
Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology, (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Baker Academic, 2004).
For a less tendentious historical account of orthodox political theologies,
see Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering
the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1996); The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans , 2005);
with Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection: Christian
Politics, Past and Present (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004) and
Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, eds., From
Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook of Christian Political Thought
110-1625 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999). On the other hand, see Joerg
Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2007) and Kwok Pui-lan, Don H. Compiers, and Joerg Rieger,
eds., Empire and the Christian Tradition: New Readings in Classical
Theologians (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).
11. Concerning The Barmen Declaration of 1934, see Creeds
of the Church, ed. John H. Leith, 3rd ed. (Louisville: John Knox
Press, 1982), pp. 517-522. Among many books on Barth and the subjects
in this essay is the spirited book by Timothy J. Gorringe, Karl Barth:
Against Hegemony (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999). See also Karl
Barth and Radical Politics, ed. and trans. by George Hunsinger (Philadelphia:
The Westminster Press, 1976). Yoder was a careful student of Barth’s
theology, writing an early essay on Barth and War in 1954, which was published
in an expanded version as Karl Barth and the Problem of War (Nashville,
TN: Abingdon Press, 1970) and republished along with some other Yoder
essays on Barth: Karl Barth and the Problem of War and Other Essays
on Barth, ed. with a foreward by Mark Thiessen Nation (Eugene, OR:
Cascade Books, Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2003).
12. For the texts of the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds,
see Leith, pp. 28-36.
13. It is arresting to be participating in this conference
with two genuinely authoritative authors on Yoder serving as our primary
lecturers: my good friend Mark Thiessen Nation’s John Howard
Yoder: Mennonite Patience, Evangelical Witness, Catholic Convictions
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006) and Craig A. Carter’s The
Politics of the Cross: The Theology and Social Ethics of John Howard Yoder
(Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001); see also Carter’s adventurous
recent text: Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective
(Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2006).
14. While it is unquestionable that Yoder and Stanley
Hauerwas were great friends, with Hauerwas being one of the compelling
champions of Yoder’s work, it at least brings a smile to see the
title of Yoder’s 1997 book, For the Nations: Essays Evangelical
and Public (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997) in contrast to Hauerwas’
Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society (Minneapolis:
Winston Press, 1985). Perhaps the difference is more tone than substance,
with Hauerwas battling liberal theology and ethics in the high precincts
and cathedrals of Protestant theological education. But, as I mentioned
above, I have long favored an understanding of the nature and mission
of the church closer to Yoder’s phrasing—“for the benefit
of the world”; see GCF, pp. 25-29, 609-617. Even so, Yoder’s
chapter 3: “See How They Go with Their Face to the Sun” is
a surprising and powerful meditation on Jeremiah, Judaism, and the ecclesial
power to endure foreign residency without hostility or obsequiousness.
15. Sometime in the early 1990s Mark Nation indicated
to me the existence of mimeographed notes of Yoder’s lectures in
systematic theology at the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries in
Elkhart, Indiana, delivered over several years from the mid-1960s to about
1980. I bought the lecture notes, gave them a quick scan, and placed them
in a Yoder file. It was heartening to see these lectures newly edited
and introduced by Stanley Hauerwas and Alex Sider, published in 2002 by
Brazos Press as Preface to Theology: Christology and Theological Method.
In preparation for writing this essay I read this later text with some
care. I am impressed with Yoder’s fair and probing discussion of
issues at stake in Nicaea and Chalcedon. While he never quite recommended
trinitarian constructions, he did not dismiss them either. clearly recognizing
that the creedal controversies were addressing the genuinely serious question
of how to explain the divinity of Jesus.
16. As in the title, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit
Agnus Noster [Behold the Lamb! Our Victorious Lamb], 2nd rev. ed.
(Grand Rapids,MI: Eerdmans, 1994), esp. pp. 246-47.
17. Yes, I know Yoder discusses Paul on “justification
by grace through faith” in Politics, pp. 212-227. Without nitpicking
what he says about Paul, it is important to understand Paul’s language
of ‘justification’ and ‘reconciliation’ as involving
a family of uses that do not yield a precise definition that covers all
the uses. But I am concerned that Yoder and a host of recent Pauline scholars
neglect a fundamental Pauline conviction, namely, that something happened
in Christ Jesus that affects the universal human situation before God
and is prior to any person’s acceptance of Jesus as Lord. That is
the priority of God’s grace, which it appears to me Yoder systematically
underplays. Perhaps this is the Barth-side of me, but it affects how issues
of salvation can be analyzed and understood. See GCF, 503-509,
513-19.
18. In this section I understand myself as doing no more
than identifying convictions and arguments that are so common in Yoder
and among Yoderian scholars that I am foregoing the tedious need to footnote
all the major points.
19. As I recall, in the early 1990s one of the reasons
Mark Nation thought I would enjoy reading more of Yoder was because of
my radically confessional understanding of theology. At that time, Mark
was keen on issues arising in philosophical and theological circles concerning
‘anti-foundationalism’ and was convinced Yoder also was an
anti-foundationalist. See my discussions of some of these issues in GCF,
17-19, 24-25, 70-79, 101-109, 141-47.
20. In the language of the NT and the church, the uses
of the word ‘world’ is varied but interrelated. I have tried
to sort out some of the differences and their interrelation in GCF,
47-52 under the heading of “The Dialectic between Church and World.”
In short, I distinguish among the following uses of world: 1) the world
as the cosmos of creatures created by God; 2) the world as any human culture/society
with its given structures and relations of order; 3) the world as any
human culture/society infected and skewed by sin. The church is in the
world in all three senses and the world is in the church in all three
senses. Hence, there arises a profound and ineradicable dialectic between
the church and the world.
21. See GCF, pp. 503-509 for some brief diagnostic
comments on the various meanings of ‘salvation’ language.
22. See GCF, chapter 4, pp. 149-232, for a full
discussion of the case for trinitarian grammar, while at the same time
adjusting the way some parts of the traditions have talked about God.
23. Revised and expanded edition (Scottdale, PA: Herald
Press, 1992).
24, It is generally conceded in all philosophical discussions
of the politics of the nation-states these days that Hobbes is foundational:
citizens concede a monopoly on violence to the state in order that the
state will protect them from harm internally within the state and externally
from harm by other states and powers. Yet the Yoderian/Mennonite advocacy
of nonviolence has never quite clarified how the church might reckon with
the ‘police’ function of the state in which the issue is not
whether to go to war but how might the church construe, accept, and participate
in and limit this more modest use of force and coercion. These issues
are thoughtfully explored in a recent book edited by a Yoder student and
containing essays from some Mennonite and Roman Catholic thinkers: Just
Policing, Not War: An Alternative Response to World Violence, ed.
Gerald W. Schlabach (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007). The book
advances the thesis that, in light of the ‘fact’ that modern
war is beyond any serious ethical justification, neither just war theories
nor complete nonviolence can seriously come to grips with the need to
control violence in the world and to engage in active peacemaking.
Copyright Joe R. Jones
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