This short story is dedicated to John Howard Yoder, a professor at Notre Dame for 30 years, known as a Mennonite and pacifist, and extremely well-respected from every corner of the Christian tradition. Yoder grew up in the Midwest and got his PHD in Basel, Switzerland in the 50s. At the height of the Vietnam Era, his Politics of Jesus [1972] became intensely popular in both conservative evangelical and liberal Protestant circles because of his unique dedication to both the authority of the Bible and nonviolent resistance. It was listed in the Top 10 Greatest works of Theology of the 20th century by Christianity Today Magazine [#5]. More and more, Evangelicals are finding Yoder's voice refreshing, demanding and illuminating for what it means to be faithful to the crucified and risen Lord in this ever-changing world. Evangelicals, noted by scholars for their anti-intellectual tendencies , should weigh and discern his voice, but need not agree with everything he writes.
In the introduction of the last book published before his death in 1997, a series of essays entitled For The Nations, Yoder wrote, ‘The themes I have been called to treat over the years overlap and interlock, each of them gaining significance from its connection to the others.’ What follows is my attempt to faithfully display Yoder’s thought, with all of its overlapping and interlocking, in a fictional dialogue format, showing how these themes connect and gain massive significance in our current North American context in the last half of 2008. This, in my opinion, is the best way to attempt to systematically portray both Yoder’s unique theology and method in a social location dominated by the language of mainstream Evangelicalism. Of course, much of what follows is autobiographical, borrowing [knowingly and unknowingly] from snippets of many conversations I’ve had over the past few years since I first encountered the writings of Anabaptists like Yoder and McClendon. The story is highly contextual. It attempts to portray the kinds of passionate conversations that erupt when conservative evangelical patterns of thought and action are confronted by the works of John Howard Yoder. Hopefully, what follows will reveal, holistically, the implications and confrontations that Yoder’s thought has had and will have on those, like me, paddling upstream from the turbulent waters of ‘conservative evangelicalism.’
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Chapter 1: Out of the Blue
Ryan Wellspring had been feeling the adrenaline since the day he got the call two weeks ago in his office at Grace Evangelical Free Church in Laguna Niguel, CA. It was from his best high school friend Anthony Tate, who called him ‘out of the blue’ to see if he was going to attend their 20-year High School reunion. Anthony, the quarterback, and Ryan, the wide receiver, were the winning combination on the 1987 CIF Championship football team at Capistrano Valley HS. It was a 42-yard pass from Anthony to Ryan in the final seconds of the final game of their high school careers that sealed the first [and only] title the school had ever seen. From the time they met each other at football camp when they were 14-year old soon-to-be-freshmen until the day they graduated, the two of them were virtually inseparable. But things change, and even best-of-friends take different paths in life, and each path is hectic and everything else is just out-of-sight-out-of-mind. And, then, before you know it, two decades pass by with barely a notice.
Indeed, Anthony’s call was ‘out of the blue.’ They hadn’t spoken since the summer before their senior years in college, when Anthony’s parents were still living in Orange County. That fall, his parents moved up north to Granite Bay, an upper-class suburb of Sacramento because of his father’s job promotion. The next summer, Ryan graduated from Azusa Pacific University and got married to Kimberly…after she got pregnant. They had been dating for 3 years and were planning on getting married soon after graduation, but news of ‘the surprise’ [just 6 weeks before they walked] sparked a shot-gun marriage proposal and a brief engagement period—after all, what bride wants to be showing on her wedding day? Ryan, of course, tried everything to get a hold of Anthony, who, lo and behold, had graduated from Notre Dame a semester early because of the three years of mandatory summer school for all members of the nationally ranked football team. Ryan wanted to ask him to be his best man, but Anthony’s phone number had changed and all this was happening in a bygone era: before cell phones and Facebook and email. It turns out that Anthony got one of those corporate jobs at Sprint in Kansas City and was already working 60 hours a week and making six figures. One thing led to the next and two whole decades had passed and now they were meeting at Santora’s Hot Wings, the place they used to hang with all the boys every Tuesday night for 25-cent wings.
Ryan was shocked that Anthony was even considering going to the reunion. He wasn’t at the 10-year and, of course, he was one of the main topics of everyone’s conversation. Most of their friends seemed far more interested in the mystery of Anthony’s absence than the presence of Ryan with his beautiful wife.
‘Did Anthony fall off the face of the earth?’
‘Did he turn into a Guinness swigging leprechaun at Notre Dame?’
‘Is he embarrassed because he never played a second for the Fightin’ Irish?’
‘Is he gay?’
The class of ’88 had all kinds of theories as to the whereabouts of Ryan’s former sidekick and he felt a lot of shame, and probably a touch of bitterness, over the fact that he had no idea where Anthony was living or what he was doing. That shame and bitterness seemed to evaporate the moment Anthony called to see if Ryan was interested in going to dinner at their old stomping grounds the night before the reunion, just the two of them, to catch up after all these years.
Indeed, Anthony’s call was ‘out of the blue.’ They hadn’t spoken since the summer before their senior years in college, when Anthony’s parents were still living in Orange County. That fall, his parents moved up north to Granite Bay, an upper-class suburb of Sacramento because of his father’s job promotion. The next summer, Ryan graduated from Azusa Pacific University and got married to Kimberly…after she got pregnant. They had been dating for 3 years and were planning on getting married soon after graduation, but news of ‘the surprise’ [just 6 weeks before they walked] sparked a shot-gun marriage proposal and a brief engagement period—after all, what bride wants to be showing on her wedding day? Ryan, of course, tried everything to get a hold of Anthony, who, lo and behold, had graduated from Notre Dame a semester early because of the three years of mandatory summer school for all members of the nationally ranked football team. Ryan wanted to ask him to be his best man, but Anthony’s phone number had changed and all this was happening in a bygone era: before cell phones and Facebook and email. It turns out that Anthony got one of those corporate jobs at Sprint in Kansas City and was already working 60 hours a week and making six figures. One thing led to the next and two whole decades had passed and now they were meeting at Santora’s Hot Wings, the place they used to hang with all the boys every Tuesday night for 25-cent wings.
Ryan was shocked that Anthony was even considering going to the reunion. He wasn’t at the 10-year and, of course, he was one of the main topics of everyone’s conversation. Most of their friends seemed far more interested in the mystery of Anthony’s absence than the presence of Ryan with his beautiful wife.
‘Did Anthony fall off the face of the earth?’
‘Did he turn into a Guinness swigging leprechaun at Notre Dame?’
‘Is he embarrassed because he never played a second for the Fightin’ Irish?’
‘Is he gay?’
The class of ’88 had all kinds of theories as to the whereabouts of Ryan’s former sidekick and he felt a lot of shame, and probably a touch of bitterness, over the fact that he had no idea where Anthony was living or what he was doing. That shame and bitterness seemed to evaporate the moment Anthony called to see if Ryan was interested in going to dinner at their old stomping grounds the night before the reunion, just the two of them, to catch up after all these years.
Chapter 2: Nuts, Flakes and Quakes
As Ryan pulled his Sequoia SUV up to Santora’s, he spotted Anthony’s 6’5”-230-lb-frame getting out of the KIA Rio rental car. He looked just like he did the last time he saw him except for that soon-to-be-forty-something hairline that was sneaking up past his forehead. Ryan’s mischievous and reckless side came out as soon as he laid eyes on Anthony, speeding up, just missing him by inches as he pulled into the parking spot next to him. Ryan whirled out of the car and embraced Anthony who was beaming with delight. Anthony had a t-shirt and hat for Ryan, both of which read: ‘Fresh-Squeezed Jayhawks,’ a reference to the University of Kansas football team’s 14-1 record the prior year, including a victory in the Orange Bowl. Anthony, it seems, wasn’t so ‘corporate’ anymore, getting a job coaching the quarterbacks for this up-and-coming powerhouse collegiate program.
RW: So this is what you’ve been doing with your Notre Dame degree!
AT: You didn’t think I could hack it in an office for the rest of my life, did you?
As Ryan continued the conversation, he ushered the two of them into the restaurant, where their autographed jerseys and team photo were still on the wall. Ryan had a knack for leading a conversation and getting things done. He was a gift for introverts like Anthony who tended to be more intimate, with a need to solely concentrate on the conversation at hand. Ryan shepherded them to the back corner of the joint and ordered 60 ‘nuclear wings’ and a pitcher of water, just like they used to share two decades earlier.
As they ate and sweat and got two refills of their water pitcher, they caught up on their families and jobs and Ryan gave Anthony the scouting report of a lot of their old teammates, where life had taken them and some random tidbits to go with it like, ‘After our old center Joe Ruiz graduated from USC, he went to Wall Street and married into old money and now I get a postcard from him every August from Kennebunkport.’ Of course, Ryan would not only bump into old friends from high school, from time to time, at supermarkets and the little league field, but he also had a Facebook page with a gigantic friend-list who shot one-liners at him just to say ‘hello’ and get a quick update. It was invigorating for Anthony to hear all these names after all these years, but he felt a warm sense of relief to be removed from all this social networking technology that seemed to trap people into old mundane conversations rehashing old mundane identities.
As the night was winding down, Ryan flippantly asked,
‘So, what’s it like to be back out here in California with all these nuts, flakes and quakes? I mean, 2/3 of the state is going to be voting for the most liberal member of the Senate to be our next President!’
Anthony smiled, but in his mind a battle was raging, just as it always did when matters of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ would be presented to him in ways that assumed that he agreed with them. Anthony wasn’t someone who put these twin-headed-ogres on the shelf with a ‘Don’t Touch!’ sign, as our culture seems to pressure us to do. He was passionate about dialoguing about them because they revealed one’s deepest convictions--no wonder they were so dangerous. But these matters, Anthony knew, must be given ample time in order to side-step the sound-bytes of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ packages that he had long since abandoned, but consistently encountered. Matters like these needed space and time and, preferably, quality beverages. The dinner conversation was well into its third hour, but Anthony decided that a conversation like this with Ryan was only going to happen once-every-20-years and so much had changed in his thinking since he and Ryan attended the same youth group together after Ryan had ‘led him to Christ’ at the Hume Lake Summer Camp before their Sophomore year.
AT: There is a lot that is compelling about Obama’s platform and leadership. Since I’m a devout pacifist now, I really respect that he called Iraq a ‘dumb war’ way back in ’02 when it was politically risky and unpopular to do so, when he was preparing for a heated Senate race.
RW: Yeah, seems like he was a bit of a prophet with that description of the war, but Anthony—a ‘pacifist’—-are you kidding me? That seems a little, how shall I put it, ‘irresponsible,' don’t you think? I mean, no offense, but what if a man broke into your home and held a gun to your wife and two daughters? You wouldn’t really just stand there as a bystander and let him kill the three most precious people in your life!
At this point, Anthony knew and appreciated, that this was going to be a long, in-depth conversation that embraced ‘full-disclosure,’ something that he rarely came across. Perhaps it was quite intimidating debating with a 6’5” hulk who spends far more time thinking than speaking. But Ryan, just like in high school, could be counted on to share his heart in an authentically transparent way, something Anthony really admired, but had almost forgotten about his good friend in their nearly two-decade hiatus.
AT: OK, it’s a fair question because my point-of-view on the violence issue is certainly in the minority, but there are some assumptions behind your question that we’ve got to consider. First of all, it falsely assumes that how I respond will inevitably determine the outcome of the situation. Second, it falsely assumes that I have control over the entire situation—that if I actually seek to stop the killer, I can. Third, it falsely assumes that I’m omniscient, like I could foresee exactly how events will unfold so that I could stop the evil killer by making the right move. Let’s face it, any real-life situation is vastly different than those predictable outcomes in all these Westerns—like Tombstone or Silverado—that we used to watch over and over and rehearse all the great lines.
RW: Point taken. But, in fairness to Hollywood, movies seem to be getting a lot less predictable these days—lot more random—like No Country For Old Men or The Departed, mirroring the complexity and confusion of a post-9/11 world.
AT: But even these, and especially these, are still widely endorsing violent solutions to rid the world of violence.
RW: I see.
AT: Where was I?
RW: Fourth?
AT: Yeah, fourth, in all humility, your proposed situation falsely assumes my untarnished righteousness. As my favorite professor at Notre Dame once wrote, the one responsible for my conversion to nonviolent Christianity, ‘I also assume that I am morally qualified to be judge, jury, and executioner—and to perform all those roles in one second.’
RW: Yeah, you were quite the athlete in your day, but surely no superhero. Who’s this guy who turned you into Gandhi?
AT: Ha! His name is John Howard Yoder. I had him for this social ethics class during the last semester at Notre Dame. He was mostly known in theological circles for his genius articulation of radical Christian nonviolence and peace-making. He came up with 29 different brands of religious pacifism in one of his books in the early 70s!
RW: 29? Are there even 29 pacifists in the United States today? Not counting places like Berkeley, Eugene and Madison, of course.
AT: Well, there are a lot more of us coming out of the woodworks in ‘Middle America,’ for any of some 29-odd reasons! Anyways, I only had two classes my senior year at Notre Dame and bowling was the other and I wasn’t wasting any energy since I wasn’t getting any time on the field. I was invigorated by what Yoder taught and how he thought and I started reading all of his works. He was a Mennonite and wrote this masterpiece called The Politics of Jesus in 1972, at the height of the Vietnam War. It was ranked #5 in Christianity Today’s top 100 theology books of the 20th century back in 2000. Anyway, Yoder also wrote this little pamphlet called What Would You Do about 25 years ago that deals thoroughly with your question.
RW: I knew this was a set-up.
AT: OK, I’ve only got one more point. Lastly, the situation leaves no room for any alternatives. Perhaps the ‘killer’ is just looking for dinner for his hungry children or some cash to pay rent. Furthermore, your question seems to falsely assume that if I don’t respond to this situation with force, like Jason Bourne or John Rambo, then I’ll somehow be less manly. Besides, your proposed real-life situation actually is quite different from the reality of war with its innocent bystanders, questions about jurisdiction and authority, the days and months of preparation and escalation, as well as questions of guilt and innocence. But here’s the key: I’m a pacifist, not because it works, but because I’m a Christian. I’ve been compelled by an interpretation of the New Testament that challenges the reader to take up the cross of Jesus by affirming, even to the loss of life, the dignity of the enemy and offender.
RW: All valid points. I see where I jumped into this conversation with a pretty simplistic question. But I’ve always just brushed off die-hard pacifists as idealistic hippies, or worse-off, sectarian Amish folk with funny outfits and IPOD-envy, totally out of touch with the real world. What if everyone in America was a pacifist? Wouldn’t al Qaeda be flying planes into buildings every other day?
AT: This second question you bring up has been around for the past 1700 years, since the days of Emperor Constantine who set the stage for a marriage between church and state. For the first 3 centuries, the Body of Christ was overwhelmingly pacifist. It was taken for granted that Christians, by the very logic of the gospel, would refuse to fight in armies while the Empire was run by pagans who either persecuted Christians at times or were totally indifferent. Since Constantine, Christians have taken on the distinct duty of ‘being responsible’ for society. This led to theologians like Augustine in the 5th c. and Reinhold Niebuhr in the 20th to come up with strategies for how imperfect Christian leaders could lead imperfect societies. After all, every President of the United States has been a ‘Christian’ and so will the next one…unless you really believe all those forwarded emails about Obama being a Muslim in disguise!
RW: Sure, a few disgruntled members of our congregation have passed those email warnings along, including a few predicting he is the Anti-Christ! But seriously, how could either Obama or McCain possibly be pacifist Presidents with bin Laden and Ahmadinejad breathing murderous threats at us and our allies? Again, it seems to me like that would be incredibly irresponsible, leading to the deaths of millions of hard-working Americans?
AT: I guess I’m just interested in asking different questions. Especially at this moment in history, I’m more concerned with the seriousness of Christian communities in the United States actually taking the Bible at face value in their own unique contexts and actually living faithfully where they are at. I think that it is easy to talk about American politics and offer some rather insane circumstances to debunk Jesus’ radical call for nonviolence. His call starts [and usually stops] in our day to day lives, not with decisions that President’s need to make in dire times. I believe that both a serious consideration of the Sermon on the Mount as well as the New Testament’s consistent call for an intentional imitation of the way of Jesus, the culmination of his faithfulness to the point of death on a cross, will lead communities to face the challenge of living by what Yoder called ‘the scandal factors’: enemy love, forgiveness and service. If we prioritize the local community, then we encounter a vocation to pledge allegiance to God’s reign, to be faithful, not necessarily effective. Sometimes, and only sometimes, people like Martin Luther King are faithful and effective. But remember, the effectiveness of the Civil Rights Movement has been tremendously slow and King died for that cause as he seemed to prophecy on a few occasions with statements like, ‘The cross we bear precedes the crown we wear’ or as Jesus said, ‘Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple’ [Luke 14:25]. In Jesus’ day, the cross simply meant death to anyone who was subversive to the Empire. King’s life and death reveal that it is still often the case for those being unpopularly faithful to Jesus' way in a different sort of Empire.
RW: So this is what you’ve been doing with your Notre Dame degree!
AT: You didn’t think I could hack it in an office for the rest of my life, did you?
As Ryan continued the conversation, he ushered the two of them into the restaurant, where their autographed jerseys and team photo were still on the wall. Ryan had a knack for leading a conversation and getting things done. He was a gift for introverts like Anthony who tended to be more intimate, with a need to solely concentrate on the conversation at hand. Ryan shepherded them to the back corner of the joint and ordered 60 ‘nuclear wings’ and a pitcher of water, just like they used to share two decades earlier.
As they ate and sweat and got two refills of their water pitcher, they caught up on their families and jobs and Ryan gave Anthony the scouting report of a lot of their old teammates, where life had taken them and some random tidbits to go with it like, ‘After our old center Joe Ruiz graduated from USC, he went to Wall Street and married into old money and now I get a postcard from him every August from Kennebunkport.’ Of course, Ryan would not only bump into old friends from high school, from time to time, at supermarkets and the little league field, but he also had a Facebook page with a gigantic friend-list who shot one-liners at him just to say ‘hello’ and get a quick update. It was invigorating for Anthony to hear all these names after all these years, but he felt a warm sense of relief to be removed from all this social networking technology that seemed to trap people into old mundane conversations rehashing old mundane identities.
As the night was winding down, Ryan flippantly asked,
‘So, what’s it like to be back out here in California with all these nuts, flakes and quakes? I mean, 2/3 of the state is going to be voting for the most liberal member of the Senate to be our next President!’
Anthony smiled, but in his mind a battle was raging, just as it always did when matters of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ would be presented to him in ways that assumed that he agreed with them. Anthony wasn’t someone who put these twin-headed-ogres on the shelf with a ‘Don’t Touch!’ sign, as our culture seems to pressure us to do. He was passionate about dialoguing about them because they revealed one’s deepest convictions--no wonder they were so dangerous. But these matters, Anthony knew, must be given ample time in order to side-step the sound-bytes of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ packages that he had long since abandoned, but consistently encountered. Matters like these needed space and time and, preferably, quality beverages. The dinner conversation was well into its third hour, but Anthony decided that a conversation like this with Ryan was only going to happen once-every-20-years and so much had changed in his thinking since he and Ryan attended the same youth group together after Ryan had ‘led him to Christ’ at the Hume Lake Summer Camp before their Sophomore year.
AT: There is a lot that is compelling about Obama’s platform and leadership. Since I’m a devout pacifist now, I really respect that he called Iraq a ‘dumb war’ way back in ’02 when it was politically risky and unpopular to do so, when he was preparing for a heated Senate race.
RW: Yeah, seems like he was a bit of a prophet with that description of the war, but Anthony—a ‘pacifist’—-are you kidding me? That seems a little, how shall I put it, ‘irresponsible,' don’t you think? I mean, no offense, but what if a man broke into your home and held a gun to your wife and two daughters? You wouldn’t really just stand there as a bystander and let him kill the three most precious people in your life!
At this point, Anthony knew and appreciated, that this was going to be a long, in-depth conversation that embraced ‘full-disclosure,’ something that he rarely came across. Perhaps it was quite intimidating debating with a 6’5” hulk who spends far more time thinking than speaking. But Ryan, just like in high school, could be counted on to share his heart in an authentically transparent way, something Anthony really admired, but had almost forgotten about his good friend in their nearly two-decade hiatus.
AT: OK, it’s a fair question because my point-of-view on the violence issue is certainly in the minority, but there are some assumptions behind your question that we’ve got to consider. First of all, it falsely assumes that how I respond will inevitably determine the outcome of the situation. Second, it falsely assumes that I have control over the entire situation—that if I actually seek to stop the killer, I can. Third, it falsely assumes that I’m omniscient, like I could foresee exactly how events will unfold so that I could stop the evil killer by making the right move. Let’s face it, any real-life situation is vastly different than those predictable outcomes in all these Westerns—like Tombstone or Silverado—that we used to watch over and over and rehearse all the great lines.
RW: Point taken. But, in fairness to Hollywood, movies seem to be getting a lot less predictable these days—lot more random—like No Country For Old Men or The Departed, mirroring the complexity and confusion of a post-9/11 world.
AT: But even these, and especially these, are still widely endorsing violent solutions to rid the world of violence.
RW: I see.
AT: Where was I?
RW: Fourth?
AT: Yeah, fourth, in all humility, your proposed situation falsely assumes my untarnished righteousness. As my favorite professor at Notre Dame once wrote, the one responsible for my conversion to nonviolent Christianity, ‘I also assume that I am morally qualified to be judge, jury, and executioner—and to perform all those roles in one second.’
RW: Yeah, you were quite the athlete in your day, but surely no superhero. Who’s this guy who turned you into Gandhi?
AT: Ha! His name is John Howard Yoder. I had him for this social ethics class during the last semester at Notre Dame. He was mostly known in theological circles for his genius articulation of radical Christian nonviolence and peace-making. He came up with 29 different brands of religious pacifism in one of his books in the early 70s!
RW: 29? Are there even 29 pacifists in the United States today? Not counting places like Berkeley, Eugene and Madison, of course.
AT: Well, there are a lot more of us coming out of the woodworks in ‘Middle America,’ for any of some 29-odd reasons! Anyways, I only had two classes my senior year at Notre Dame and bowling was the other and I wasn’t wasting any energy since I wasn’t getting any time on the field. I was invigorated by what Yoder taught and how he thought and I started reading all of his works. He was a Mennonite and wrote this masterpiece called The Politics of Jesus in 1972, at the height of the Vietnam War. It was ranked #5 in Christianity Today’s top 100 theology books of the 20th century back in 2000. Anyway, Yoder also wrote this little pamphlet called What Would You Do about 25 years ago that deals thoroughly with your question.
RW: I knew this was a set-up.
AT: OK, I’ve only got one more point. Lastly, the situation leaves no room for any alternatives. Perhaps the ‘killer’ is just looking for dinner for his hungry children or some cash to pay rent. Furthermore, your question seems to falsely assume that if I don’t respond to this situation with force, like Jason Bourne or John Rambo, then I’ll somehow be less manly. Besides, your proposed real-life situation actually is quite different from the reality of war with its innocent bystanders, questions about jurisdiction and authority, the days and months of preparation and escalation, as well as questions of guilt and innocence. But here’s the key: I’m a pacifist, not because it works, but because I’m a Christian. I’ve been compelled by an interpretation of the New Testament that challenges the reader to take up the cross of Jesus by affirming, even to the loss of life, the dignity of the enemy and offender.
RW: All valid points. I see where I jumped into this conversation with a pretty simplistic question. But I’ve always just brushed off die-hard pacifists as idealistic hippies, or worse-off, sectarian Amish folk with funny outfits and IPOD-envy, totally out of touch with the real world. What if everyone in America was a pacifist? Wouldn’t al Qaeda be flying planes into buildings every other day?
AT: This second question you bring up has been around for the past 1700 years, since the days of Emperor Constantine who set the stage for a marriage between church and state. For the first 3 centuries, the Body of Christ was overwhelmingly pacifist. It was taken for granted that Christians, by the very logic of the gospel, would refuse to fight in armies while the Empire was run by pagans who either persecuted Christians at times or were totally indifferent. Since Constantine, Christians have taken on the distinct duty of ‘being responsible’ for society. This led to theologians like Augustine in the 5th c. and Reinhold Niebuhr in the 20th to come up with strategies for how imperfect Christian leaders could lead imperfect societies. After all, every President of the United States has been a ‘Christian’ and so will the next one…unless you really believe all those forwarded emails about Obama being a Muslim in disguise!
RW: Sure, a few disgruntled members of our congregation have passed those email warnings along, including a few predicting he is the Anti-Christ! But seriously, how could either Obama or McCain possibly be pacifist Presidents with bin Laden and Ahmadinejad breathing murderous threats at us and our allies? Again, it seems to me like that would be incredibly irresponsible, leading to the deaths of millions of hard-working Americans?
AT: I guess I’m just interested in asking different questions. Especially at this moment in history, I’m more concerned with the seriousness of Christian communities in the United States actually taking the Bible at face value in their own unique contexts and actually living faithfully where they are at. I think that it is easy to talk about American politics and offer some rather insane circumstances to debunk Jesus’ radical call for nonviolence. His call starts [and usually stops] in our day to day lives, not with decisions that President’s need to make in dire times. I believe that both a serious consideration of the Sermon on the Mount as well as the New Testament’s consistent call for an intentional imitation of the way of Jesus, the culmination of his faithfulness to the point of death on a cross, will lead communities to face the challenge of living by what Yoder called ‘the scandal factors’: enemy love, forgiveness and service. If we prioritize the local community, then we encounter a vocation to pledge allegiance to God’s reign, to be faithful, not necessarily effective. Sometimes, and only sometimes, people like Martin Luther King are faithful and effective. But remember, the effectiveness of the Civil Rights Movement has been tremendously slow and King died for that cause as he seemed to prophecy on a few occasions with statements like, ‘The cross we bear precedes the crown we wear’ or as Jesus said, ‘Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple’ [Luke 14:25]. In Jesus’ day, the cross simply meant death to anyone who was subversive to the Empire. King’s life and death reveal that it is still often the case for those being unpopularly faithful to Jesus' way in a different sort of Empire.
Chapter 3: The Forensic Overkill and God-Ordained Killing
RW: It sounds to me like you interpret the cross of Jesus a little differently than I do. I mean, didn’t Jesus come in order to die for our sins, as a sacrifice? Wasn’t this the point of his life—to die so that we can have eternal life? It sounds like your radical vision, which I certainly appreciate, is more of a works-righteousness, which Paul shot out of the water in Romans.
AT: Martin Luther’s ‘forensic justification’ interpretation of the cross has became so popular in Evangelical churches over the past 500 years that it has become virtually the only way of understanding Jesus’ death. Yoder called this the ‘forensic overkill.’ There are many different metaphors used in the New Testament to make sense of Jesus’ scandalous death on the cross. These are metaphors from everyday Roman Empire life. The New Testament bears witness to the death of Jesus as an interpretive quilt, a patchwork of metaphors borrowed from their original life situations: the language of Jewish law [justification], religious worship [sanctification], medical healing and military rescue [heal and save], family [adopt, wed], life processes [born and reborn], the marketplace [redeem and reconcile]—all of these were adopted, adapted and pressed into service in order to describe how deeply meaningful the cross was for these Christian communities. All of these shed light on the new reality that God brought into the world in Christ.
Ever since I started wrestling with Yoder’s thought and trying to get my hands on everything he wrote, I’ve definitely come to cherish a more ‘political’ interpretation of the cross. By this I simply mean that he died because the powers-that-be were threatened by his words and deeds, or as Yoder wrote, ‘the most worthy and weighty representatives of Jewish religion and Roman politics acted in collusion’ because he refused to support their self-glorification. All of these metaphors can only make sense in the midst of the narratives. And the narratives are littered with political language. This is vital. Jesus had to die—not just for my sins and your sins—but because he confronted the oppressive powers head on. But God got the last word and vindicated Jesus’ way by raising him from the dead. But here’s what I want to emphasize though: we are called to model this same humility and willingness to suffer that Jesus embodied throughout his life…and death. This is what Paul is getting at in the beautiful passage in Philippians 2:5-11. Jesus emptied himself of the need to control history, to be ‘in the form of God,’ the original sin of Adam, in order to become a truly human person and obey to the point of death. Paul points to this as a model for the community in Philippi. He’s trying to plead with them, in the midst of trials and persecution, to be like him in his cross—in humility and suffering—and to treat others just like Jesus did, laying down his life. As Yoder writes in the conclusion of Politics of Jesus,
‘The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection.’
We obey even if we get outvoted or fail to convince others or convert or possibly even get killed. Paul goes on to write in the same letter that when Jesus returns, he’ll turn our ‘humiliated bodies’ into ‘glorious bodies,’ [3:20-21] just like God did to Jesus on that first Easter Sunday.
RW: I think I’m tracking with you, but doesn’t what you’re saying still border dangerously on a kind of ‘works-righteousness,’ thinking that we have the ability to live with such humility and service, exactly like Jesus! Doesn’t that way of looking at the cross, as a pattern to follow, fail to take into account our own sinfulness and fallenness, our inability to do anything good apart from what God has done for us and in us? I mean, isn’t it a bit presumptuous to put ourselves on the same plane as JESUS? He was God, after all, and we are only human.
AT: Great question. Let me answer this by introducing another legendary theologian of the 20th century who died a year before Politics of Jesus was published: Reinhold Niebuhr. He is recognized by political scientists and foreign policy gurus as the theologian who has had the most influence on the decision-making of our Presidents and their advisors since World War II. Niebuhr was actually a pacifist way back in the 20s—-quite fashionable to be one just after the first World War with millions of soldiers killed and millions of acres destroyed. But Niebuhr abandoned the pacifism of his youth and got ‘realistic’ over the years about the human capacity for sin. He emphasized ‘original sin’ and the need for governments to use force, if necessary, to quell our universal human tendency to go astray, especially as it played out destructively in communities [political parties, nation-states, social classes, etc]. Niebuhr’s ‘realism,’ was of course, coupled with an emphasis on Luther’s popular ‘forensic-justification’ view of the cross: we try as best as we can, but in the end, we fail…but we are forgiven through the blood of the cross. God’s grace prevails. Niebuhr’s ‘realism’ was ‘responsible’ and ‘pragmatic’ and gave the Cold War politicians a respectable voice to back their policies.
Yoder critiqued Niebuhr with what he calls ‘biblical realism’ or ‘gospel realism.’ If Jesus is really Lord of the world, as the New Testament makes abundantly clear, then we pledge allegiance to a completely different sort of kingdom. Our faithfulness may be viewed as ‘idealist’ from the point of view of Niebuhr’s pragmatic realism, but it realistically represents the very scandalous enterprise of following Jesus. We can courageously live out this risky brand of Christian faith because of our fervent belief in a God who raises the dead. Death will never have the last word. Yoder prioritizes the cross as a pattern of obedience—it is the price of social nonconformity. This is what we are scandalously committed to as ‘Christians,’ but we will fail in the process. Jesus called for the disciples to deny themselves and ‘take up the cross’ and follow Jesus. In the Gospel narrative, none of the disciples are bold enough to take up the cross…only Jesus obeys the will of God all the way to the point of death. One disciple betrays him, another denies him and the rest scatter. The disciples in Mark’s Gospel are stumbling, bumbling fools as they journey with Jesus and slowly learn his very ‘political’ way of the Kingdom. But in the end, despite the fearful, scattering of the disciples at the cross, Jesus calls them back to Galilee, to the start of Mark’s story all over again. With Jesus, we always have a second chance, an opportunity to take up the cross again and again. But the point of the story, the invitation, is first to take up the cross, not to be forgiven! Forgiveness is the side-car, albeit an important one, to the main source of transportation for our journey.
RW: So the Christian life is an invitation to a life of failure?
AT: Yes, but we partner with a God who is overflowing with forgiveness and mercy. I mean, he’s a God who was willing to watch his Son murdered by the powers in order to show us the way to liberating life.
RW: OK, let me just take one last stab at chipping away at your radical nonviolence. What do you do about these Old Testament texts where God commands the nation of Israel to destroy every man, woman and child in their path [Deut 7 & 10; Joshua 10:34-44] and where he tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac [Genesis 22]? This seems to be saying that sometimes God is OK with violence and war games—sometimes he even commands it!
AT: This is probably the biggest challenge to reading the Bible nonviolently. These ‘holy war’ passages are befuddling and reading all the different perspectives from theologians and biblical scholars can be mind-numbing. Yoder points out that we must take the culture during the time of Abraham and Joshua into serious consideration and that God, at that early juncture, was teaching his people, slowly but surely, to trust him. During the time of Abraham, everyone probably sacrificed their firstborn son just like they made an offering for the first-fruits of their farm and the livestock. The focus on the Abraham/Isaac story is on God’s promise that from Isaac, a gigantic family would spring to life. So, the confusing thing about God telling Abraham to sacrifice his firstborn son was not that it was crazy for anyone, let alone for God to do such a horrific thing, but instead that it was diametrically opposed to God’s promise to Father Abraham--that he would produce a world-redeeming community through his son, Isaac [not Ishmael or any other son for that matter].
As far as Joshua’s holy war is concerned, the focus, again, is on teaching Israel to trust the God of the universe. The morality of killing wasn’t even on the radar yet. Humans learn slowly. What we see in these texts are miracles. No doubt, God is fighting for Israel. Israel isn’t prepared for battle. They don’t have a strategy, unless you count Moses raising his hands! They probably don’t even have the proper weapons. They are just grabbing hoes, shovels and pick-axes, whatever they could get their hands on, trusting that God will provide the victory. I’m just not compelled that the OT tells us war is OK with God. The OT chronicles the life and times of a nation of God’s children slowly being transformed into his people. In addition, we should always have the words of Jesus at the forefront of our minds, interpreting the Torah on the mountain for his disciples: ‘You have heard that it was said, but I say to you…’ Jesus intensifies the Torah of Israel and interprets it in the line of the prophets who had consistently called Israel to do things like ‘beat your swords into plowshares’ [Is 2:4; Micah 4:3].
These Old Testament passages are ridiculously complex. A group of us back home in Kansas recently dialogued 6 different interpretive strategies that all come from biblical scholars and theologians of different Christian stripes. My ‘Yoderian’ option was just one of these. It seems like, from my research and conversations, that most scholars would say that it would be a stretch for these texts to justify violent solutions today, especially in light of Jesus’ life and teaching. I’m convinced, now more than ever, that pacifists, like me, who vow to never take up arms no matter what and just-war advocates, like you, who always view violence as the very last resort, can and should come together to find common ground in a third way: just peace-making. We can be creatively committed to practices, however small, that lead to peaceful solutions, both in our own neighborly [and not-so-neighborly] relationships and in the wider world of politicians and their policies, facing each other down.
Ryan was excited about this conversation. He had been a pastor for the past 15 years, first with the youth and now as the next-in-command with a congregation of about a thousand. His job consisted of ‘spiritual’ conversations of all sorts, but he certainly wasn’t used to being so stretched by being confronted with such a different theology which seemed to spring from a completely different set of questions. He was eating up everything Anthony was spewing out, and he found himself thinking of more and more questions as he listened, most of them starting with, ‘But how about…’ Just then, Ryan looked at his cell phone and saw that it was already 11pm—-5 hours had passed and they were just getting started.
As Ryan stepped outside the restaurant to call his wife, Anthony humbly wondered if Ryan, being a pastor, might think he was a bit kooky or even heretical. But really, Anthony had not even begun communicating the tip of the iceberg of how much his mind had been transformed since he sat at the feet of John Howard Yoder during his final semester at Notre Dame. What, after all, would Ryan think when they started talking about their church back in Lawrence?!
AT: Martin Luther’s ‘forensic justification’ interpretation of the cross has became so popular in Evangelical churches over the past 500 years that it has become virtually the only way of understanding Jesus’ death. Yoder called this the ‘forensic overkill.’ There are many different metaphors used in the New Testament to make sense of Jesus’ scandalous death on the cross. These are metaphors from everyday Roman Empire life. The New Testament bears witness to the death of Jesus as an interpretive quilt, a patchwork of metaphors borrowed from their original life situations: the language of Jewish law [justification], religious worship [sanctification], medical healing and military rescue [heal and save], family [adopt, wed], life processes [born and reborn], the marketplace [redeem and reconcile]—all of these were adopted, adapted and pressed into service in order to describe how deeply meaningful the cross was for these Christian communities. All of these shed light on the new reality that God brought into the world in Christ.
Ever since I started wrestling with Yoder’s thought and trying to get my hands on everything he wrote, I’ve definitely come to cherish a more ‘political’ interpretation of the cross. By this I simply mean that he died because the powers-that-be were threatened by his words and deeds, or as Yoder wrote, ‘the most worthy and weighty representatives of Jewish religion and Roman politics acted in collusion’ because he refused to support their self-glorification. All of these metaphors can only make sense in the midst of the narratives. And the narratives are littered with political language. This is vital. Jesus had to die—not just for my sins and your sins—but because he confronted the oppressive powers head on. But God got the last word and vindicated Jesus’ way by raising him from the dead. But here’s what I want to emphasize though: we are called to model this same humility and willingness to suffer that Jesus embodied throughout his life…and death. This is what Paul is getting at in the beautiful passage in Philippians 2:5-11. Jesus emptied himself of the need to control history, to be ‘in the form of God,’ the original sin of Adam, in order to become a truly human person and obey to the point of death. Paul points to this as a model for the community in Philippi. He’s trying to plead with them, in the midst of trials and persecution, to be like him in his cross—in humility and suffering—and to treat others just like Jesus did, laying down his life. As Yoder writes in the conclusion of Politics of Jesus,
‘The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection.’
We obey even if we get outvoted or fail to convince others or convert or possibly even get killed. Paul goes on to write in the same letter that when Jesus returns, he’ll turn our ‘humiliated bodies’ into ‘glorious bodies,’ [3:20-21] just like God did to Jesus on that first Easter Sunday.
RW: I think I’m tracking with you, but doesn’t what you’re saying still border dangerously on a kind of ‘works-righteousness,’ thinking that we have the ability to live with such humility and service, exactly like Jesus! Doesn’t that way of looking at the cross, as a pattern to follow, fail to take into account our own sinfulness and fallenness, our inability to do anything good apart from what God has done for us and in us? I mean, isn’t it a bit presumptuous to put ourselves on the same plane as JESUS? He was God, after all, and we are only human.
AT: Great question. Let me answer this by introducing another legendary theologian of the 20th century who died a year before Politics of Jesus was published: Reinhold Niebuhr. He is recognized by political scientists and foreign policy gurus as the theologian who has had the most influence on the decision-making of our Presidents and their advisors since World War II. Niebuhr was actually a pacifist way back in the 20s—-quite fashionable to be one just after the first World War with millions of soldiers killed and millions of acres destroyed. But Niebuhr abandoned the pacifism of his youth and got ‘realistic’ over the years about the human capacity for sin. He emphasized ‘original sin’ and the need for governments to use force, if necessary, to quell our universal human tendency to go astray, especially as it played out destructively in communities [political parties, nation-states, social classes, etc]. Niebuhr’s ‘realism,’ was of course, coupled with an emphasis on Luther’s popular ‘forensic-justification’ view of the cross: we try as best as we can, but in the end, we fail…but we are forgiven through the blood of the cross. God’s grace prevails. Niebuhr’s ‘realism’ was ‘responsible’ and ‘pragmatic’ and gave the Cold War politicians a respectable voice to back their policies.
Yoder critiqued Niebuhr with what he calls ‘biblical realism’ or ‘gospel realism.’ If Jesus is really Lord of the world, as the New Testament makes abundantly clear, then we pledge allegiance to a completely different sort of kingdom. Our faithfulness may be viewed as ‘idealist’ from the point of view of Niebuhr’s pragmatic realism, but it realistically represents the very scandalous enterprise of following Jesus. We can courageously live out this risky brand of Christian faith because of our fervent belief in a God who raises the dead. Death will never have the last word. Yoder prioritizes the cross as a pattern of obedience—it is the price of social nonconformity. This is what we are scandalously committed to as ‘Christians,’ but we will fail in the process. Jesus called for the disciples to deny themselves and ‘take up the cross’ and follow Jesus. In the Gospel narrative, none of the disciples are bold enough to take up the cross…only Jesus obeys the will of God all the way to the point of death. One disciple betrays him, another denies him and the rest scatter. The disciples in Mark’s Gospel are stumbling, bumbling fools as they journey with Jesus and slowly learn his very ‘political’ way of the Kingdom. But in the end, despite the fearful, scattering of the disciples at the cross, Jesus calls them back to Galilee, to the start of Mark’s story all over again. With Jesus, we always have a second chance, an opportunity to take up the cross again and again. But the point of the story, the invitation, is first to take up the cross, not to be forgiven! Forgiveness is the side-car, albeit an important one, to the main source of transportation for our journey.
RW: So the Christian life is an invitation to a life of failure?
AT: Yes, but we partner with a God who is overflowing with forgiveness and mercy. I mean, he’s a God who was willing to watch his Son murdered by the powers in order to show us the way to liberating life.
RW: OK, let me just take one last stab at chipping away at your radical nonviolence. What do you do about these Old Testament texts where God commands the nation of Israel to destroy every man, woman and child in their path [Deut 7 & 10; Joshua 10:34-44] and where he tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac [Genesis 22]? This seems to be saying that sometimes God is OK with violence and war games—sometimes he even commands it!
AT: This is probably the biggest challenge to reading the Bible nonviolently. These ‘holy war’ passages are befuddling and reading all the different perspectives from theologians and biblical scholars can be mind-numbing. Yoder points out that we must take the culture during the time of Abraham and Joshua into serious consideration and that God, at that early juncture, was teaching his people, slowly but surely, to trust him. During the time of Abraham, everyone probably sacrificed their firstborn son just like they made an offering for the first-fruits of their farm and the livestock. The focus on the Abraham/Isaac story is on God’s promise that from Isaac, a gigantic family would spring to life. So, the confusing thing about God telling Abraham to sacrifice his firstborn son was not that it was crazy for anyone, let alone for God to do such a horrific thing, but instead that it was diametrically opposed to God’s promise to Father Abraham--that he would produce a world-redeeming community through his son, Isaac [not Ishmael or any other son for that matter].
As far as Joshua’s holy war is concerned, the focus, again, is on teaching Israel to trust the God of the universe. The morality of killing wasn’t even on the radar yet. Humans learn slowly. What we see in these texts are miracles. No doubt, God is fighting for Israel. Israel isn’t prepared for battle. They don’t have a strategy, unless you count Moses raising his hands! They probably don’t even have the proper weapons. They are just grabbing hoes, shovels and pick-axes, whatever they could get their hands on, trusting that God will provide the victory. I’m just not compelled that the OT tells us war is OK with God. The OT chronicles the life and times of a nation of God’s children slowly being transformed into his people. In addition, we should always have the words of Jesus at the forefront of our minds, interpreting the Torah on the mountain for his disciples: ‘You have heard that it was said, but I say to you…’ Jesus intensifies the Torah of Israel and interprets it in the line of the prophets who had consistently called Israel to do things like ‘beat your swords into plowshares’ [Is 2:4; Micah 4:3].
These Old Testament passages are ridiculously complex. A group of us back home in Kansas recently dialogued 6 different interpretive strategies that all come from biblical scholars and theologians of different Christian stripes. My ‘Yoderian’ option was just one of these. It seems like, from my research and conversations, that most scholars would say that it would be a stretch for these texts to justify violent solutions today, especially in light of Jesus’ life and teaching. I’m convinced, now more than ever, that pacifists, like me, who vow to never take up arms no matter what and just-war advocates, like you, who always view violence as the very last resort, can and should come together to find common ground in a third way: just peace-making. We can be creatively committed to practices, however small, that lead to peaceful solutions, both in our own neighborly [and not-so-neighborly] relationships and in the wider world of politicians and their policies, facing each other down.
Ryan was excited about this conversation. He had been a pastor for the past 15 years, first with the youth and now as the next-in-command with a congregation of about a thousand. His job consisted of ‘spiritual’ conversations of all sorts, but he certainly wasn’t used to being so stretched by being confronted with such a different theology which seemed to spring from a completely different set of questions. He was eating up everything Anthony was spewing out, and he found himself thinking of more and more questions as he listened, most of them starting with, ‘But how about…’ Just then, Ryan looked at his cell phone and saw that it was already 11pm—-5 hours had passed and they were just getting started.
As Ryan stepped outside the restaurant to call his wife, Anthony humbly wondered if Ryan, being a pastor, might think he was a bit kooky or even heretical. But really, Anthony had not even begun communicating the tip of the iceberg of how much his mind had been transformed since he sat at the feet of John Howard Yoder during his final semester at Notre Dame. What, after all, would Ryan think when they started talking about their church back in Lawrence?!
Chapter 4: Professional Religionists and Pastor-Heroes
When Ryan walked back into the restaurant a few minutes later, he had that smirk on his face like he did back in high school when he had an idea that he was sure Anthony would love.
RW: My wife is ready for bed, but she would like to have a male presence at the house—-just to feel safer. How about we go back to my place, you can meet Kimberly before she turns in for the night and then we’ll continue this conversation in the Jacuzzi?
At this point, a similar smirk formed on Anthony own face…
AT: Sounds great. I’ll stop at Ralphs to get the Twinkies.
The two of them had a tradition during their two years on the varsity football team after every Friday night game. Win or lose, they always came back to Ryan’s house and soaked in the hot water with the air jets on full blast, playing the game back over and over while they polished off a whole box of Hostess Twinkies. Ryan’s parents moved out to Palm Desert just a few years ago and handed Ryan the keys to the house [with the Jacuzzi!] since he was the only child.
When they got to the house, Anthony finally met Kimberly and they chatted for just a few minutes. Ryan, as he did back in high school, came back out in his tight speedo—-just like the ones that Olympic swimmers wear—-and it somehow caught Anthony off--guard, perhaps due to the 40 extra pounds Ryan had put on over the years, as he almost hit the floor laughing. Anthony borrowed one of Ryan’s ‘normal’ swimsuits and they headed outside. Ryan started in immediately:
RW: So, do you go to church in Kansas?
AT: Oh, we don’t have to ‘go’ anywhere. We have church at our house. Don’t get me wrong, this isn‘t like how my dad used to joke about going to St. Mattress with Pastor Sheets on Sunday mornings. We actually have a little ‘house church’ that meets every Monday night, which is great for us during the football season and recruiting period since I have to travel quite a bit on the weekends. There are 5 couples that are committed to the community and we’ve been meeting every Monday for the last 7 years. We have dinner together and then someone will direct a time of Scripture reading, but the floor is always open for questions, comments and concerns. We’ll have a time of prayer and sharing. We’ve really gotten to know these folks over the years and they’ve really gotten to know us. We feel like we really get to experiment with this New Testament concept called koinonia—what most English translations of the Bible call ‘fellowship’—but better translated ‘common life’ or ‘solidarity’ in Christ.
RW: That sounds just like our ‘small groups,’ but you guys save a lot of gas money and time not going to the Sunday service—what a deal! In fact, we even call them ‘Koinonia Groups’ at Grace Evangelical! How’s it different from that?
AT: Well, it doesn’t necessarily need to be any different from your small groups at all. But we do think our focus is a little bit unique. Most churches that I’ve experienced tend to be places that offer worship services and ministries to be involved with. We think that, overwhelmingly, ‘the church’ in the United States has come to mean a place where Christians go to get their needs met, whether that’s emotional worship through music or sermons to understand life and the Bible better or classes and groups to help them ‘grow spiritually.’ We are attempting to model a different idea of what church is. We think the church is a ‘political body’ or as Jesus called his gathered disciples, ‘a city on a hill.’ The church is the community where Christians, together, pledge allegiance to the kingdom of God with all of its alternative beliefs, practices and virtues.
In addition, churches divide their people into two groups: there are ‘professional clergy,’ pastors like yourself who are called and paid to do the work of the church, and then there are ‘laity’ like myself who have ‘secular’ jobs during the week and participate with the church on Sundays and during specified activities during the week, like small groups. Yoder speculates that what we now call ‘senior pastors,’ or ‘bishops’ and ‘priests’ in other traditions, started popping up in church communities about 75 years after the time of Christ. These ‘professional religionists’ were probably a carry-over from the pagan lifestyle of the Gentiles. Yoder critiques this idea and even thinks the New Testament doesn’t really support it. Our community wants to wipe out the ‘laity’ label altogether.
RW: So, does this mean you don’t have any leaders?
AT: No, actually we are all leaders in each of our own gifted ways. We’re all ‘professional’ Christians playing our roles in the power of the Spirit. Just like what Paul writes about in Romans 12 and I Corinthians 12 and, if he wrote it, Ephesians 4: we all have different gifts to serve the church with—-all vitally important for the health of the community. This NT vision of the people of God is empowering to all and gives both privilege and responsibility to all of God’s children, in all of their unique giftedness.
RW: What do you mean ‘if he wrote it?’ Are you questioning Paul’s authorship of Ephesians?
AT: Can we get back to that later?
RW: Sure, but it seems like your group is a standing rebuke to my career. Almost a thousand members at our church look to me as a ‘professional’ when it comes to the Bible and counseling and spirituality and basically all things ‘Christian.’ I don’t get paid much when compared to other ‘professions,’ but without the pay I wouldn’t be able to serve the church like I do. Isn’t it ‘biblical’ that each church has certain people who are called and gifted to be leaders, and that in these positions of leadership, they have greater responsibility for the spiritual growth of the congregation. These are leaders with a God-given ‘authority’ exercised to interpret Scripture, to feed God’s sheep, to protect the church from wayward teaching and to maintain a certain degree of order. Isn’t this vital so that not just ‘anything goes’ and so that decisions can be made instead of breeding chaos.
AT: This is something that I’ve been wrestling with for years. It seems to me, from observation and experience, that pastors in evangelical churches have become jack-of-all-trades spiritual advisors-teachers-comforters-administrators all rolled into one. All these roles that Paul and the other NT writers wrote about in regards to church communities were filled by multiple men and women. Now, these roles have all been laid on the shoulders of one or just a few pastors who are overwhelmingly men. Why is that the norm? I think there are two factors: (1) men like you are extremely gifted in a variety of areas of leadership so they find themselves doing ALL these tasks for the church and, if they can get paid for it, all the better; and (2) human beings feel more comfortable with certain men being the professionals in the whole realm of spirituality so that they can focus on ‘the rest-of-their-lives,’ as they lean on Pastor Ryan's expertise with ‘religious’ matters. American culture, from heroic characters in movies to CEO’s running corporations, has trained us to value the Renaissance man who can do-it-all and get the pretty girl in the end. I firmly believe that if pastors took seriously that this new people of God in Christ are ‘a kingdom of priests’ [not a kingdom with priests] then there would be a real burden lifted, a level of stress and pressure that they have to do everything in the church. It would also be tremendously healthy for church members to really be challenged with using their gifts and to take seriously that they, too, are doing priestly work for the kingdom, both at their ‘secular’ jobs and when the community gathers.
RW: So, in your opinion, should all these pastors like me give up their salaries and go out and get ‘real jobs?’
AT: I don’t envision that at all. Church communities, especially with a thousand people in it, desperately need leaders that are trained in the art of interpreting the Bible and others trained in counseling and others who are needed to give a little extra time to administrative work. These shouldn’t all be done by the same person and they shouldn’t all be men. It sends a message to the church community at large and to the non-Christian world that says, ‘We have some people in the church who are ‘professionals,’ and in many cases ‘superheroes’ or ‘rock stars’ who are doing the real work, the kingdom work, and then there are the masses who attend services [put on by the experts] and work at other non-kingdom jobs, but are expected to ‘do their time’ with a ministry at the church—the ‘kingdom work.’
RW: I think you are on to something here. In our own church leadership meetings or at these pastors’ conferences we go to, we often talk about how we can get the rest of the congregation serving—how 10% of the church does 90% of the work. The general consensus is that it is very much ‘their problem’: they are too busy or too lazy or don’t care about ‘spiritual’ things enough or are afraid of getting too involved or they are too comfortable. Yoder’s analysis seems to be getting at the heart of the problem—that God’s design is for his people to be a community of priests, not divided between two different classes of ‘Christian’—which, unfortunately, doesn’t necessarily mean solutions are easy.
AT: There are pastors I’ve heard of doing creative things like giving 10% of their salary each year until they are serving at the church voluntarily with what they are gifted in. Of course, that means they are working increasingly more and more part-time hours somewhere else and others in the church community are putting in time with the church community. I heard of another pastor recently who was doing all the teaching on Sunday mornings for years, but now he only teaches once a month because he finally realized that he wasn’t as gifted a teacher as he was with some areas, but some in the congregation were gifted and passionate and surprisingly well-trained to do the teaching. I just think we need pastors who aren’t threatened by the thought of others—who are gifted in areas that they aren’t—doing that work for the community. We need leaders who are committed to empowering people and not manipulating them. Maybe we just need a lot of pastors who don’t take themselves so seriously.
RW: Don’t you think that part of the solution must lay with the congregation though?
AT: Amen. Many of those descriptions you recounted earlier—too lazy, too comfortable, too busy—-are all valid issues, and those same every-Sunday-church-attendees are content, without a hint of critical thinking, to let the religious expert tell them how to live. But I do think that the church leadership [pastoral staff] must guide this in ways that are empowering to the rest-of-the-church-body. I think the majority of evangelicals need to get over this thing where everyone needs a ‘pastor-hero.’ This will take both humility and empathy. They need to humbly admit that they can’t possibly do it all and that its not God’s plan for the church. They also need to learn to see and experience the struggles of life through the point of view of ‘Joe the Plumber-Christian’ who works 40-80 hours a week just trying to pay the bills AND, in their workplace, be a sign and foretaste of God’s inaugurated reign. Wow…that’s a challenge! I think pastors need to invite a dialogue, challenging congregations with the notion that, perhaps, Scripture doesn’t really support it. But maybe more importantly, pastors need to start modeling it. These ‘pastor-heroes’ are just going to need to respectfully and gently say ‘no’ to a lot of what they are doing, and give opportunities for others in the community, with their distinct gifts and talents, to be involved with some of the burdens placed on the pastors’ shoulders. As harsh as it sounds, perhaps the ‘pastor-hero’ should stop taking all the hospital visits and others in the community can be challenged and, in the process, empowered to step it up with their gifting. But, I know, there is always something comforting, something special to have the ‘pastor-hero’ by my hospital bedside kneeling with me in prayer before the big operation! This is the bind that we are in. Expectations need to be scaled back and the people of God need to see what a community where everyone does pastoral work really looks like.
RW: I think I’ll need you in our leadership meeting on Tuesday to communicate all of this.
AT: It's all yours. I’ll be busy trying to win football games…and be a sign and foretaste of God’s reign in the process! Wow…what a challenge!
RW: My wife is ready for bed, but she would like to have a male presence at the house—-just to feel safer. How about we go back to my place, you can meet Kimberly before she turns in for the night and then we’ll continue this conversation in the Jacuzzi?
At this point, a similar smirk formed on Anthony own face…
AT: Sounds great. I’ll stop at Ralphs to get the Twinkies.
The two of them had a tradition during their two years on the varsity football team after every Friday night game. Win or lose, they always came back to Ryan’s house and soaked in the hot water with the air jets on full blast, playing the game back over and over while they polished off a whole box of Hostess Twinkies. Ryan’s parents moved out to Palm Desert just a few years ago and handed Ryan the keys to the house [with the Jacuzzi!] since he was the only child.
When they got to the house, Anthony finally met Kimberly and they chatted for just a few minutes. Ryan, as he did back in high school, came back out in his tight speedo—-just like the ones that Olympic swimmers wear—-and it somehow caught Anthony off--guard, perhaps due to the 40 extra pounds Ryan had put on over the years, as he almost hit the floor laughing. Anthony borrowed one of Ryan’s ‘normal’ swimsuits and they headed outside. Ryan started in immediately:
RW: So, do you go to church in Kansas?
AT: Oh, we don’t have to ‘go’ anywhere. We have church at our house. Don’t get me wrong, this isn‘t like how my dad used to joke about going to St. Mattress with Pastor Sheets on Sunday mornings. We actually have a little ‘house church’ that meets every Monday night, which is great for us during the football season and recruiting period since I have to travel quite a bit on the weekends. There are 5 couples that are committed to the community and we’ve been meeting every Monday for the last 7 years. We have dinner together and then someone will direct a time of Scripture reading, but the floor is always open for questions, comments and concerns. We’ll have a time of prayer and sharing. We’ve really gotten to know these folks over the years and they’ve really gotten to know us. We feel like we really get to experiment with this New Testament concept called koinonia—what most English translations of the Bible call ‘fellowship’—but better translated ‘common life’ or ‘solidarity’ in Christ.
RW: That sounds just like our ‘small groups,’ but you guys save a lot of gas money and time not going to the Sunday service—what a deal! In fact, we even call them ‘Koinonia Groups’ at Grace Evangelical! How’s it different from that?
AT: Well, it doesn’t necessarily need to be any different from your small groups at all. But we do think our focus is a little bit unique. Most churches that I’ve experienced tend to be places that offer worship services and ministries to be involved with. We think that, overwhelmingly, ‘the church’ in the United States has come to mean a place where Christians go to get their needs met, whether that’s emotional worship through music or sermons to understand life and the Bible better or classes and groups to help them ‘grow spiritually.’ We are attempting to model a different idea of what church is. We think the church is a ‘political body’ or as Jesus called his gathered disciples, ‘a city on a hill.’ The church is the community where Christians, together, pledge allegiance to the kingdom of God with all of its alternative beliefs, practices and virtues.
In addition, churches divide their people into two groups: there are ‘professional clergy,’ pastors like yourself who are called and paid to do the work of the church, and then there are ‘laity’ like myself who have ‘secular’ jobs during the week and participate with the church on Sundays and during specified activities during the week, like small groups. Yoder speculates that what we now call ‘senior pastors,’ or ‘bishops’ and ‘priests’ in other traditions, started popping up in church communities about 75 years after the time of Christ. These ‘professional religionists’ were probably a carry-over from the pagan lifestyle of the Gentiles. Yoder critiques this idea and even thinks the New Testament doesn’t really support it. Our community wants to wipe out the ‘laity’ label altogether.
RW: So, does this mean you don’t have any leaders?
AT: No, actually we are all leaders in each of our own gifted ways. We’re all ‘professional’ Christians playing our roles in the power of the Spirit. Just like what Paul writes about in Romans 12 and I Corinthians 12 and, if he wrote it, Ephesians 4: we all have different gifts to serve the church with—-all vitally important for the health of the community. This NT vision of the people of God is empowering to all and gives both privilege and responsibility to all of God’s children, in all of their unique giftedness.
RW: What do you mean ‘if he wrote it?’ Are you questioning Paul’s authorship of Ephesians?
AT: Can we get back to that later?
RW: Sure, but it seems like your group is a standing rebuke to my career. Almost a thousand members at our church look to me as a ‘professional’ when it comes to the Bible and counseling and spirituality and basically all things ‘Christian.’ I don’t get paid much when compared to other ‘professions,’ but without the pay I wouldn’t be able to serve the church like I do. Isn’t it ‘biblical’ that each church has certain people who are called and gifted to be leaders, and that in these positions of leadership, they have greater responsibility for the spiritual growth of the congregation. These are leaders with a God-given ‘authority’ exercised to interpret Scripture, to feed God’s sheep, to protect the church from wayward teaching and to maintain a certain degree of order. Isn’t this vital so that not just ‘anything goes’ and so that decisions can be made instead of breeding chaos.
AT: This is something that I’ve been wrestling with for years. It seems to me, from observation and experience, that pastors in evangelical churches have become jack-of-all-trades spiritual advisors-teachers-comforters-administrators all rolled into one. All these roles that Paul and the other NT writers wrote about in regards to church communities were filled by multiple men and women. Now, these roles have all been laid on the shoulders of one or just a few pastors who are overwhelmingly men. Why is that the norm? I think there are two factors: (1) men like you are extremely gifted in a variety of areas of leadership so they find themselves doing ALL these tasks for the church and, if they can get paid for it, all the better; and (2) human beings feel more comfortable with certain men being the professionals in the whole realm of spirituality so that they can focus on ‘the rest-of-their-lives,’ as they lean on Pastor Ryan's expertise with ‘religious’ matters. American culture, from heroic characters in movies to CEO’s running corporations, has trained us to value the Renaissance man who can do-it-all and get the pretty girl in the end. I firmly believe that if pastors took seriously that this new people of God in Christ are ‘a kingdom of priests’ [not a kingdom with priests] then there would be a real burden lifted, a level of stress and pressure that they have to do everything in the church. It would also be tremendously healthy for church members to really be challenged with using their gifts and to take seriously that they, too, are doing priestly work for the kingdom, both at their ‘secular’ jobs and when the community gathers.
RW: So, in your opinion, should all these pastors like me give up their salaries and go out and get ‘real jobs?’
AT: I don’t envision that at all. Church communities, especially with a thousand people in it, desperately need leaders that are trained in the art of interpreting the Bible and others trained in counseling and others who are needed to give a little extra time to administrative work. These shouldn’t all be done by the same person and they shouldn’t all be men. It sends a message to the church community at large and to the non-Christian world that says, ‘We have some people in the church who are ‘professionals,’ and in many cases ‘superheroes’ or ‘rock stars’ who are doing the real work, the kingdom work, and then there are the masses who attend services [put on by the experts] and work at other non-kingdom jobs, but are expected to ‘do their time’ with a ministry at the church—the ‘kingdom work.’
RW: I think you are on to something here. In our own church leadership meetings or at these pastors’ conferences we go to, we often talk about how we can get the rest of the congregation serving—how 10% of the church does 90% of the work. The general consensus is that it is very much ‘their problem’: they are too busy or too lazy or don’t care about ‘spiritual’ things enough or are afraid of getting too involved or they are too comfortable. Yoder’s analysis seems to be getting at the heart of the problem—that God’s design is for his people to be a community of priests, not divided between two different classes of ‘Christian’—which, unfortunately, doesn’t necessarily mean solutions are easy.
AT: There are pastors I’ve heard of doing creative things like giving 10% of their salary each year until they are serving at the church voluntarily with what they are gifted in. Of course, that means they are working increasingly more and more part-time hours somewhere else and others in the church community are putting in time with the church community. I heard of another pastor recently who was doing all the teaching on Sunday mornings for years, but now he only teaches once a month because he finally realized that he wasn’t as gifted a teacher as he was with some areas, but some in the congregation were gifted and passionate and surprisingly well-trained to do the teaching. I just think we need pastors who aren’t threatened by the thought of others—who are gifted in areas that they aren’t—doing that work for the community. We need leaders who are committed to empowering people and not manipulating them. Maybe we just need a lot of pastors who don’t take themselves so seriously.
RW: Don’t you think that part of the solution must lay with the congregation though?
AT: Amen. Many of those descriptions you recounted earlier—too lazy, too comfortable, too busy—-are all valid issues, and those same every-Sunday-church-attendees are content, without a hint of critical thinking, to let the religious expert tell them how to live. But I do think that the church leadership [pastoral staff] must guide this in ways that are empowering to the rest-of-the-church-body. I think the majority of evangelicals need to get over this thing where everyone needs a ‘pastor-hero.’ This will take both humility and empathy. They need to humbly admit that they can’t possibly do it all and that its not God’s plan for the church. They also need to learn to see and experience the struggles of life through the point of view of ‘Joe the Plumber-Christian’ who works 40-80 hours a week just trying to pay the bills AND, in their workplace, be a sign and foretaste of God’s inaugurated reign. Wow…that’s a challenge! I think pastors need to invite a dialogue, challenging congregations with the notion that, perhaps, Scripture doesn’t really support it. But maybe more importantly, pastors need to start modeling it. These ‘pastor-heroes’ are just going to need to respectfully and gently say ‘no’ to a lot of what they are doing, and give opportunities for others in the community, with their distinct gifts and talents, to be involved with some of the burdens placed on the pastors’ shoulders. As harsh as it sounds, perhaps the ‘pastor-hero’ should stop taking all the hospital visits and others in the community can be challenged and, in the process, empowered to step it up with their gifting. But, I know, there is always something comforting, something special to have the ‘pastor-hero’ by my hospital bedside kneeling with me in prayer before the big operation! This is the bind that we are in. Expectations need to be scaled back and the people of God need to see what a community where everyone does pastoral work really looks like.
RW: I think I’ll need you in our leadership meeting on Tuesday to communicate all of this.
AT: It's all yours. I’ll be busy trying to win football games…and be a sign and foretaste of God’s reign in the process! Wow…what a challenge!
Chapter 5: Going to Practice
RW: Back to your Monday night community—it still just sounds like a glorified small group.
AT: OK, here are two things that I think really set it apart from your normal ‘evangelical’ church small group in Orange County, or most anywhere in North America. First, it is how we define what church is. In the days and years following the death and resurrection of Jesus, communities that committed to Jesus’ nonviolent way began to call themselves ekklesia. This was a political concept, like an assembly or a parliament or a town hall meeting. It was the place where they worked out, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, how to be faithful to what God was doing in and around their community. In those early years, most of these folks were Jews who believed that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, the King of Israel that would restore them to faithfulness—most Christian communities were simply made up of ‘Jews for Jesus.’ Then, some Gentiles began receiving this message about what God had done in Jesus and got an open invitation to participate with Jews in these communities. This was a socio-political miracle: Jews and Gentiles worshipping the one Creator and Redeemer God under the same roof! This is what Yoder called ‘the original revolution.’ So, first of all, church is a political body that pledges allegiance to God’s Kingdom. It is what Paul calls a ‘new creation’ in II Corinthians and Galatians, even though most Christians interpret that phrase individually.
The second key difference is what our community is committed to. Most churches have websites with doctrinal statements and key beliefs. These beliefs about biblical authority, Jesus’ identity, eternal salvation and views on other religions are, indeed, important to address and dialogue. However, in our community, we put the priority on practices. There are five practices that we are whole-heartedly committed to within and without our community: (1) a one-on-one commitment to conflict resolution and consciousness raising to deal with sin and error; (2) the open floor during our times together—anyone and everyone gets to share and question; (3) the multiplicity of gifts used—everyone has a role to play. And then the last two are two classic Christian sacraments with a twist: (4) our communion or Eucharist is an emphasis on sharing our food and resources with each other and those in need outside of the community; and (5) our baptism isn’t simply a one time event, but a commitment to interethnic solidarity, the new humanity in Christ, just like it was in those first Jew + Gentile communities—but in Lawrence, Kansas we have African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, refugees from the Middle East and Africa, all living in the same city and many of them are brothers and sisters in Christ, baptized into a new identity. These practices, we believe, are uniquely ‘Christian,’ and they constitute our worship, but also our evangelism since they are naturally practices that our non-believing neighbors are longing for and can actually participate with us quite organically. Another way of putting it is, in our time together on Mondays or any day of the week, our community is practicing what it means to be distinctly Christian. The more we practice these things together, the more these naturally overflow, in the power of the Spirit, in our workplaces, in the grocery store, in our eating and leisure times and everything else that constitutes ‘real life.’ It’s just like in prime-time college and pro sports: you’ve got to practice in order to win. Our Mondays are committed to practicing so that we can play aggressively—yet nonviolently, of course—for God’s Kingdom…and win.
RW: These all sound like great ideas, but I’m a bit skeptical of this overemphasis on ‘being relevant.’ Aren’t we just catering to what is chic or popular in our culture?
AT: It is impressive how ahead of his time Yoder was. I mean, he was publishing these ideas 20 years ago. But let me follow up with two notes. First of all, these practices are straight out of the New Testament: for instance, Matthew 18 is one of the hardest passages to follow in our gossip-saturated culture and I Corinthians 11 clearly calls the little ekklesia in Corinth to allow all members, men and women, to have the floor during their times together. Second, Yoder complemented these five practices with what I shared with you before—the three scandal factors: service, forgiveness and enemy love. These, by no means, are relevant concepts, if what you mean by that is that it is catering to culture in order to define Christian faith. Instead, these notions are rooted in the identity and mission of the scandalous messiah and his people. They are hard work and they cut against the grain of dominating leadership and vengeful solutions that our culture continues to be obsessed with. This vision calls Christian communities to more radical living, requiring blood, sweat and tears. At the same time, a community who models this way-of-life, consistently and practically, will produce an intriguing and mostly magnetic response from the neighbors. That’s what relevance should consist of in the Body of Christ today.
AT: OK, here are two things that I think really set it apart from your normal ‘evangelical’ church small group in Orange County, or most anywhere in North America. First, it is how we define what church is. In the days and years following the death and resurrection of Jesus, communities that committed to Jesus’ nonviolent way began to call themselves ekklesia. This was a political concept, like an assembly or a parliament or a town hall meeting. It was the place where they worked out, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, how to be faithful to what God was doing in and around their community. In those early years, most of these folks were Jews who believed that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, the King of Israel that would restore them to faithfulness—most Christian communities were simply made up of ‘Jews for Jesus.’ Then, some Gentiles began receiving this message about what God had done in Jesus and got an open invitation to participate with Jews in these communities. This was a socio-political miracle: Jews and Gentiles worshipping the one Creator and Redeemer God under the same roof! This is what Yoder called ‘the original revolution.’ So, first of all, church is a political body that pledges allegiance to God’s Kingdom. It is what Paul calls a ‘new creation’ in II Corinthians and Galatians, even though most Christians interpret that phrase individually.
The second key difference is what our community is committed to. Most churches have websites with doctrinal statements and key beliefs. These beliefs about biblical authority, Jesus’ identity, eternal salvation and views on other religions are, indeed, important to address and dialogue. However, in our community, we put the priority on practices. There are five practices that we are whole-heartedly committed to within and without our community: (1) a one-on-one commitment to conflict resolution and consciousness raising to deal with sin and error; (2) the open floor during our times together—anyone and everyone gets to share and question; (3) the multiplicity of gifts used—everyone has a role to play. And then the last two are two classic Christian sacraments with a twist: (4) our communion or Eucharist is an emphasis on sharing our food and resources with each other and those in need outside of the community; and (5) our baptism isn’t simply a one time event, but a commitment to interethnic solidarity, the new humanity in Christ, just like it was in those first Jew + Gentile communities—but in Lawrence, Kansas we have African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, refugees from the Middle East and Africa, all living in the same city and many of them are brothers and sisters in Christ, baptized into a new identity. These practices, we believe, are uniquely ‘Christian,’ and they constitute our worship, but also our evangelism since they are naturally practices that our non-believing neighbors are longing for and can actually participate with us quite organically. Another way of putting it is, in our time together on Mondays or any day of the week, our community is practicing what it means to be distinctly Christian. The more we practice these things together, the more these naturally overflow, in the power of the Spirit, in our workplaces, in the grocery store, in our eating and leisure times and everything else that constitutes ‘real life.’ It’s just like in prime-time college and pro sports: you’ve got to practice in order to win. Our Mondays are committed to practicing so that we can play aggressively—yet nonviolently, of course—for God’s Kingdom…and win.
RW: These all sound like great ideas, but I’m a bit skeptical of this overemphasis on ‘being relevant.’ Aren’t we just catering to what is chic or popular in our culture?
AT: It is impressive how ahead of his time Yoder was. I mean, he was publishing these ideas 20 years ago. But let me follow up with two notes. First of all, these practices are straight out of the New Testament: for instance, Matthew 18 is one of the hardest passages to follow in our gossip-saturated culture and I Corinthians 11 clearly calls the little ekklesia in Corinth to allow all members, men and women, to have the floor during their times together. Second, Yoder complemented these five practices with what I shared with you before—the three scandal factors: service, forgiveness and enemy love. These, by no means, are relevant concepts, if what you mean by that is that it is catering to culture in order to define Christian faith. Instead, these notions are rooted in the identity and mission of the scandalous messiah and his people. They are hard work and they cut against the grain of dominating leadership and vengeful solutions that our culture continues to be obsessed with. This vision calls Christian communities to more radical living, requiring blood, sweat and tears. At the same time, a community who models this way-of-life, consistently and practically, will produce an intriguing and mostly magnetic response from the neighbors. That’s what relevance should consist of in the Body of Christ today.
Chapter 6: Was Luther Wrong?
RW: You mentioned earlier that these practices form your evangelism strategy, but they sound more like this ‘social justice’ stuff that every evangelical church in America is jumping on the bandwagon with. It seems like every cool evangelical pastor in America is touting their outreach to Africa and the homeless. This is great, but shouldn’t we be putting more focus on the real work of evangelism: saving souls for eternity? Shouldn’t we be giving them the real gospel, instead of this watered-down ‘social gospel?’
AT: OK, here’s where Yoder really makes a lot of sense to me, but can be a bit abrasive to North American Evangelicals who have assumed that Jesus’ mission to save the world was primarily spiritual and futuristic [heaven]. For Yoder, the gospel, euangelion in the Greek [where we get the word ‘evangelical’], was originally yet another ‘socio-political’ term [sound familiar]. ‘Gospel,’ in its original context, was ‘good news’ announced by the Roman Empire that Caesar was coming to town or that a huge battle had been won that insured the safety of the far-flung Empire outposts like Colosse and Philippi. It was exciting news that had implications for fellow citizens of the kingdom of Rome. The ‘good news’ that Paul was announcing was that there was a different Lord than Caesar ‘sitting at the right hand of God’ and that this messiah named Jesus birthed a whole new society bearing his name that embodied the love, forgiveness, righteousness and justice of God’s reign. Jesus came to usher in the long-awaited new age in the Palestinian Jewish community during the 1st century. It was political, not spiritual or religious as we know it. It was a ‘social revolution,’ God’s judgment on the present order, but with it, the promise of a new regime was breaking into the world with Jesus. We think of repentance in terms of sorrow or guilt, but really it was ‘a redirected will ready to live in a new kind of world.’ And remember, John the Baptist, announced the nearness of God’s inaugurated kingdom coming in Jesus, calling the people of God who were coming out to the wilderness to a new set of social practices [like our five practices]. It’s easy to skim right over John the Baptist’s answer to the repenting folks in Luke’s Gospel when they ask him what they should do to prepare for God’s reign: ‘Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise’ [Luke 3:10]. John the Baptist called these gospel practices ‘fruits worthy of repentance.’ That’s what the Sermon on the Mount was all about—giving the disciples a vision for the new world that God was bursting into our present existence through Jesus and his disciples. The ekklesia embodied the new reality in the midst of a sin-dominated world. Repentance simply meant ‘turn your mind around’ or in our terms ‘join the team.’ Yoder’s reading of the New Testament in Politics of Jesus shattered the individualistic and uber-spiritual, and I may note apolitical, notions of what Christian faith was and is all about.
RW: Wow, that’s a different reading than I’m accustomed to. What about good old-fashioned ‘justification by faith’ alone?
AT: Again, we’ve been conditioned, especially since Luther 500 years ago, to think of ‘justification’ as an individualistic law-court term just like we learned back in youth group: ‘justified’ means ‘just-if-I’d-never-sinned’—in Christ, I’m acquitted! But I’m more compelled by what biblical scholars have called ‘the new perspective on Paul’ for the past four decades, although I don’t think Yoder ever used that phrase. The ‘new perspective’ is actually the oldest perspective on Paul. It claims that when Paul used that justification language—a lot in Romans and Galatians—it was always about how Gentiles become part of the people of God. You guessed it—it is a socio-political concept. Justification is about joining the movement, not how an individual’s sins can be wiped out in order to have a relationship with God and be saved for eternity. It is a term about how the covenant God is ‘setting things right’ in the world and how he invites everyone, Jew and Gentile, to join him.
RW: So, you’re saying Luther was flat-out wrong?
AT: No, Luther was flat-out cultural. He was reading and meditating on Paul in his medieval context, flooded with concerns about mortality [disease and war] and anxious guilt brought on by a corrupt Roman Catholic Church. Paul’s ‘justification’ was the cure for Luther’s self-flagellation!
RW: So, don’t we, too, interpret Paul contextually?
AT: Sure, but we’re in a unique era, I think, where our concerns actually parallel the concerns of 1st century Palestine quite closely. We are coming out of the modern era where the world has been dualistically divided into ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ and ‘political,’ and where historical and scientific study has provided certain foundational truths to build our lives on. It has been a time of intense focus on the individual who lives autonomously and objectively. We are slowly discovering that these dualisms and reductionisms and self-focus have led us into cul-de-sacs that don’t allow us to journey deeper and farther into understanding who God is and what it means to join him in his world-redeeming activity. In very similar ways to Jesus’ Palestinian world, our postmodern sensibilities are training us to think more holistically and communally. Yoder said that Evangelicals were constantly in danger of confusing the benefits of the kingdom for the kingdom itself. That is why he put all the marbles in the basket of seeking first the kingdom, following the way of Jesus. This following is salvation. Salvation in the first century was all about being a part of God’s people, not about each individual saying the right prayer or making the right individual moral decisions. God was about ‘setting things right’ in the world and that meant that Jesus and his people would set their sights on redeeming socio-political practices like loving their enemies and telling the truth and sharing their possessions. In the process, individuals were transformed.
AT: OK, here’s where Yoder really makes a lot of sense to me, but can be a bit abrasive to North American Evangelicals who have assumed that Jesus’ mission to save the world was primarily spiritual and futuristic [heaven]. For Yoder, the gospel, euangelion in the Greek [where we get the word ‘evangelical’], was originally yet another ‘socio-political’ term [sound familiar]. ‘Gospel,’ in its original context, was ‘good news’ announced by the Roman Empire that Caesar was coming to town or that a huge battle had been won that insured the safety of the far-flung Empire outposts like Colosse and Philippi. It was exciting news that had implications for fellow citizens of the kingdom of Rome. The ‘good news’ that Paul was announcing was that there was a different Lord than Caesar ‘sitting at the right hand of God’ and that this messiah named Jesus birthed a whole new society bearing his name that embodied the love, forgiveness, righteousness and justice of God’s reign. Jesus came to usher in the long-awaited new age in the Palestinian Jewish community during the 1st century. It was political, not spiritual or religious as we know it. It was a ‘social revolution,’ God’s judgment on the present order, but with it, the promise of a new regime was breaking into the world with Jesus. We think of repentance in terms of sorrow or guilt, but really it was ‘a redirected will ready to live in a new kind of world.’ And remember, John the Baptist, announced the nearness of God’s inaugurated kingdom coming in Jesus, calling the people of God who were coming out to the wilderness to a new set of social practices [like our five practices]. It’s easy to skim right over John the Baptist’s answer to the repenting folks in Luke’s Gospel when they ask him what they should do to prepare for God’s reign: ‘Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise’ [Luke 3:10]. John the Baptist called these gospel practices ‘fruits worthy of repentance.’ That’s what the Sermon on the Mount was all about—giving the disciples a vision for the new world that God was bursting into our present existence through Jesus and his disciples. The ekklesia embodied the new reality in the midst of a sin-dominated world. Repentance simply meant ‘turn your mind around’ or in our terms ‘join the team.’ Yoder’s reading of the New Testament in Politics of Jesus shattered the individualistic and uber-spiritual, and I may note apolitical, notions of what Christian faith was and is all about.
RW: Wow, that’s a different reading than I’m accustomed to. What about good old-fashioned ‘justification by faith’ alone?
AT: Again, we’ve been conditioned, especially since Luther 500 years ago, to think of ‘justification’ as an individualistic law-court term just like we learned back in youth group: ‘justified’ means ‘just-if-I’d-never-sinned’—in Christ, I’m acquitted! But I’m more compelled by what biblical scholars have called ‘the new perspective on Paul’ for the past four decades, although I don’t think Yoder ever used that phrase. The ‘new perspective’ is actually the oldest perspective on Paul. It claims that when Paul used that justification language—a lot in Romans and Galatians—it was always about how Gentiles become part of the people of God. You guessed it—it is a socio-political concept. Justification is about joining the movement, not how an individual’s sins can be wiped out in order to have a relationship with God and be saved for eternity. It is a term about how the covenant God is ‘setting things right’ in the world and how he invites everyone, Jew and Gentile, to join him.
RW: So, you’re saying Luther was flat-out wrong?
AT: No, Luther was flat-out cultural. He was reading and meditating on Paul in his medieval context, flooded with concerns about mortality [disease and war] and anxious guilt brought on by a corrupt Roman Catholic Church. Paul’s ‘justification’ was the cure for Luther’s self-flagellation!
RW: So, don’t we, too, interpret Paul contextually?
AT: Sure, but we’re in a unique era, I think, where our concerns actually parallel the concerns of 1st century Palestine quite closely. We are coming out of the modern era where the world has been dualistically divided into ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ and ‘political,’ and where historical and scientific study has provided certain foundational truths to build our lives on. It has been a time of intense focus on the individual who lives autonomously and objectively. We are slowly discovering that these dualisms and reductionisms and self-focus have led us into cul-de-sacs that don’t allow us to journey deeper and farther into understanding who God is and what it means to join him in his world-redeeming activity. In very similar ways to Jesus’ Palestinian world, our postmodern sensibilities are training us to think more holistically and communally. Yoder said that Evangelicals were constantly in danger of confusing the benefits of the kingdom for the kingdom itself. That is why he put all the marbles in the basket of seeking first the kingdom, following the way of Jesus. This following is salvation. Salvation in the first century was all about being a part of God’s people, not about each individual saying the right prayer or making the right individual moral decisions. God was about ‘setting things right’ in the world and that meant that Jesus and his people would set their sights on redeeming socio-political practices like loving their enemies and telling the truth and sharing their possessions. In the process, individuals were transformed.
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