The Heterodox Yoder

By Paul Martens

The Heterodox Yoder provides a critical rereading of Yoder's corpus through his own conviction that discipleship is, most basically, ethics. Tracing the development of Yoder's theological foundations through to their final role in redefining Jewish-Christian and ecumenical relations, this volume explains why the appropriation and use of the language of politics eventually constrains Yoder's ethical vision to the point that it reframes Christianity within the limits of social ethics alone. Because this vision self-consciously excludes or, at best, relativizes many of the claims of orthodox Christianity (including but not limited to the ecumenical creeds), Martens concludes that Yoder's Christian ethic is best described as heterodox.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781621891369

Book preview

Preface

Reading John Howard Yoder has been a polemical affair. Standing

in the midst of one of the most volatile conversations of the twentieth century—the role of the Christian in a world at war—Yoder forced his readers to pick a side: either nonviolence or violence; either faithfulness or unfaithfulness. One either had to resist his position or embrace it.

Of course, war and military conflicts of all kinds have not disappeared in the twenty-first century. Yet, shifting time, context, and voices have reshaped several of the foundational matters in the field of Christian ethics so that the choice of nonviolence or violence has been significantly modified and nuanced. For many, the debate between nonviolence and violence has been recast from a question that forces a single or isolated choice into a discussion about competing social or political practices that display a certain kind of character, habits, and virtue formed in particular and intentional communal contexts. Those who have embraced and appropriated Yoder have generally narrated the primary communal context for forming character and virtue as the church. And, in the course of rereading Yoder with these more robust concerns in mind, it has become clear that Yoder himself had begun presciently exploring this trajectory in his own way as early as the 1950s.

Yet, if Yoder’s articulation of nonviolence in the 1970s had a tremendously galvanizing effect for a wide variety of pacifists (and by this I am broadly referring to the effects of the publication of The Politics of Jesus in 1972), the ongoing rereading of Yoder’s foundational ecclesial and ecumenical convictions has provoked a much less unified reception. This book is one attempt to illuminate why this might be the case. Therefore, although I do not desire to denigrate individual texts that are deeply cherished, the argument contained in these pages is concerned with the overall shape and character of Yoder’s corpus in a way that contextualizes his nonviolence within a larger theological matrix. Specifically, the argument traces the introduction and development of the foundational theological commitments that motivate and guide Yoder’s relentless pursuit of a more faithful Christian existence, commitments that may have ended up being, by the mid-1990s, as provocative and contested as his nonviolent convictions were in the 1970s.

There are, of course, certain limits to this approach. First, following this sort of trajectory means that the book will not fall within a popular school of thought that operates on the belief that works ‘on’ Yoder are best, not when he is described and discussed, but when he is used for ends beyond, but in sympathy with his own projects.¹ I am sympathetic with this position, and I am impressed by Richard Bourne’s Seek the Peace of the City, Alex Sider’s To See History Doxologically, and several other works that constructively appropriate Yoder in this manner. That said, I also believe that much of the current appropriation of Yoder selectively determines what his own projects are. This selectivity may be entirely defensible and appropriate, but it also rarely does justice to the complicated coherence of Yoder’s own projects. For better or worse, it is this latter concern that occupies the following pages.

Second, from the opposite direction, this text is limited to the extent that not every one of Yoder’s writings has been examined, thereby leaving the possibility that some of my readers will be dissatisfied, feeling that I have concluded this project too quickly. To be clear, I have no intention of being exhaustive; I simply intend to sketch what I take to be the key topographical features of the corpus. It is my hope that the rough map provided here will provoke and energize closer readings of Yoder’s texts and deeper engagements with the questions he deemed most important. In this way, perhaps this book can contribute to the work of those who are interested in Yoder’s projects and to the projects of those who are interested in going beyond Yoder.

1. Bourne, Seek the Peace of the City, ix.

Acknowledgments

As always, there are many people who have contributed to the final

shape of this book. In a book pitched as a sympathetic critique of Yoder, I can imagine that some of my friendly interlocutors would just as soon not appear on this particular page. That is just too bad, as one cannot always choose which gifts he or she is given!

It would be fair to say that the first formal steps toward this book began during an independent reading course with Michael Baxter—a request he most graciously indulged—while I was a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame. Yet, it must also be acknowledged that even that beginning is rooted in an indirect debt to Yoder himself for creating a disposition in the Theology Department at Notre Dame that was open to welcoming a rather naïve Mennonite kid from Canada into the PhD program. Ever since these first formal engagements with Yoder at Notre Dame, Jerry McKenny has been and continues to be the voice of patient reason that encourages—and encourages responsibility. And, the final formal step in this process is indebted to Cyril O’Regan—thanks for the title . . . and so much more, of course.

Since I began working on the argument of this book in earnest, I have greatly appreciated the fruitful conversations with Jonathan Tran—a great friend and colleague—and the enjoyment of working together with excellent graduate students—Myles Werntz, Matthew Porter, and Jenny Howell—on various Yoder projects. I am also incredibly grateful for the time and care Dan Marrs invested in making this a much more readable and complete manuscript. Further, I want to thank Tim, Phil, Nick, Jordan, and Josh because, yes, this really is about a kingdom born upside-down.

I am also indebted to Mark Nation, Glen Stassen, Branson Parler, and Jamie Pitts for treating components of this argument that have been previously presented seriously enough to provide constructive criticisms. I doubt that this book will satisfy all of the concerns they have voiced, but it will provide a larger framework within which to continue discussion.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Anne Yoder and Martha Yoder Maust for energetically enabling and encouraging all of us to continue wrestling with these most important questions by making John’s work readily available. In this same vein, I also want to acknowledge, with considerable gratitude, Charlie Collier’s encouragement and willingness to ensure that the contested argument in this book will get a hearing.

Finally, I would also like to thank the Dean’s Office of the College of Arts and Letters at Baylor University for providing a semester of research leave that enabled the completion of this book. It is always a pleasant challenge to work at a university whose motto stands at the same intersection as this book: Pro Texana, Pro Ecclesia.

one

Introduction: A Simpler Approach

Heterodox. It is rarely a good word, a positive word, or a complimentary word. It refers to the bringing together of two things that are of a different kind. And, usually on this basis, it also refers to something that is contrary to an accepted standard or tradition, unconventional, not orthodox. All of this is further complicated when cast in theological terms or within the history of the Christian church. In choosing The Heterodox Yoder as the title for this book, I am invoking this label in three interrelated respects.

The first evocation of heterodox concerns the selection of texts that I use to narrate Yoder’s position. Several texts have achieved a definitive status in Yoder’s corpus, beginning with The Politics of Jesus (1972) and followed by a group of secondary importance that includes The Christian Witness to the State (1964), The Original Revolution (1971), The Priestly Kingdom (1984), and The Royal Priesthood (1994). Occasionally, and depending on the context, For the Nations (1997), Preface to Theology (2002), and Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution (2009) find a significant place in the conversation, but usually they are relegated to a level of tertiary importance. The rest of Yoder’s corpus, for the most part, then serves an illustrative or supplementary role. How this hierarchy of texts came to be is not my concern in this context. That said, this book essentially ignores this hierarchy, first, by largely ignoring the relative weight placed on these particular texts within the current discourse and, second, by introducing a variety of other texts into this mix, texts that may be just as defining as those listed above.

A second evocation of heterodox emerges from the above, namely, a rather unorthodox narrative of Yoder’s thought—both its foundation and its development—emerges when a wider variety of texts are mixed in and considered in a straightforward manner. Outlining this narrative in some detail is the central task of the chapters that follow.

Finally, and most importantly, this book is an attempt to raise the question of whether Yoder’s thought, at the end of the day, is best described as heterodox Christianity. Of course, labeling something as not something else—as heterodox as opposed to orthodox—begs for a definition of that something else. Therefore, it would seem that I ought to define the criterion of orthodoxy before proceeding further. To dare to even get one’s toes wet in this debate immediately exposes one to the multiple undertows or rip currents that can drag one unsuspectingly well beyond the safety of the shore, well beyond the safety of the solid familiarity of firm ground. Yet, this is precisely the turbulence in which one finds Yoder swimming. Because of this, a few summary comments are required to frame the following argument.

From certain perspectives, Yoder’s free church convictions will be enough to provoke charges of heterodoxy. From other perspectives, his equivocal semi-embrace of the classic Christian creeds or his historicizing of Trinitarian affirmations slide rather far down the slippery slope towards a rejection of orthodoxy. Exploring these issues is helpful for clarifying what is at stake in Yoder’s rendering of Christianity and, therefore, they cannot be ignored in this book. Yet, these are not the criteria I am referring to; my criterion is more basic and gives rise to these secondary issues. My criterion is the Christian affirmation of the particularity or uniqueness of Jesus Christ as a historical person and as a revelation of God. For those who have argued for years that it is precisely Yoder who has preserved the particularity or uniqueness of Jesus Christ against the acids of Constantinianism, modernity, or any number of other threats to Christianity, all I can do is beg for your patience and ask that you read my argument through to the end before rendering judgment.

Perhaps the best way to articulate the issue at stake is to appeal to Yoder’s Preface to Theology. In the Introduction, he outlines several different modes of doing theology. Among the modes he rejects is dogmatic theology, which he defines as the interpretation of the statements made by or implied in the classic Christian creeds.¹ Alternately, he describes historical theology, theology concerned with how Christian convictions came into being, how people first came to speak in a certain way, and why it happened. In Preface to Theology, this is the form of theological engagement Yoder adopts, with his face turned toward the systematic agenda, and not merely for the purpose of providing a simple narration.² Beyond Preface to Theology, however, Yoder (1) remains loyal to the mode of doing theology he refers to as historical theology and (2) always rejects a simple narration in favor of an ethical or political agenda. His method is, throughout the corpus, inductive and historical. His method is to watch the theology of the early Christian church (often explicitly filtered through the sixteenth-century Anabaptists) and then draw conclusions about how we ought to do theology from watching how it has been done in the past.

³

In this way, Yoder attempts to affirm the particularity of following Jesus Christ in the manner of the early church, thereby providing a comprehensive and coherent reorientation of Christian theology. And, in this process, one might say that Yoder forces a reappraisal or reconfiguration of the very meaning of Christian orthodoxy.⁴ My argument, however, is that it is precisely this reconfiguration that contains the seeds of Yoder’s own devaluation of the particularity or uniqueness of Jesus Christ. As he continues outlining the methodology employed in Preface to Theology, he notes: I said our method is ‘inductive’; that means that instead of registering right answers already distilled, we go through the process of distillation observing variety as well as similarity.⁵ In the pages that follow, I attempt to demonstrate that it is this attempt to distill the theology of the early church that leads to what I am calling Yoder’s heterodoxy. To be as clear as possible at this point, I argue that Yoder’s distillation amounts to a complex narration of the early Christian church in primarily ethical terms. Thus, his narration provides an account of the early church’s particularity (a particularity that eventually earns the title of the politics of Jesus), but, as Yoder’s corpus progresses, his narration of the early church’s particularity eventually—and perhaps unwittingly—advocates an ethical or political particularity that becomes so distilled that the defining activities of the early church become abstracted into a general and universalizable, not-particularly-Christian ethic: Jesus becomes merely an ethico-political example or paradigm within a form of ethical monotheism (at best) or a form of secular sociology (at worst).⁶ This, in my judgment, is a heterodox account of the particularity and uniqueness of Jesus Christ. Moreover, the effects of Yoder’s redescription of Jesus reverberates throughout the rest of his theology, providing occasions for what I take to be secondary disputes about Yoder’s heterodoxy.

As one might suspect, my conclusions run contrary to many of the contemporary appraisals of Yoder’s theological ethics. Branson Parler, speaking for a large contingent of Yoder readers, claims: Part of Yoder’s genius is his ability to see beyond the binary oppositions of many modern theological dilemmas.⁷ As intimated above, I argue that it is precisely Yoder’s attempt to overcome the prevailing dualisms in modern theology that leads him to unite theology and ethics, and this final move invites my third invocation of heterodoxy. To be clear, this does not mean that I am inferring that all resolutions of this alleged dichotomy are heterodox; it means that Yoder’s idiosyncratic resolution of the tension between theology and ethics is heterodox. I will argue that his early statement of the relationship—The Christian life is defined most basically in ethical terms⁸—is, likewise, most basic to his lifelong redefinition of theology in the direction of ‘Christian-ness’ as being an ethical matter.⁹ In ways that will become clear as the argument unfolds, not only does Yoder overtly challenge what he takes to be the interests and conclusions of Christian orthodoxy, his thought is intentionally unconventional and contrary to tradition in its content from the earliest writings to the latest.

I do recognize, however, that making this argument convincing is going to be an uphill battle. Therefore, in order to articulate this case, certain assumptions that guide most readings of Yoder’s corpus must be examined and challenged since these have been employed to ensure that Yoder falls within what his readers consider Christian orthodoxy. I refer to these preliminary assumptions as the regulative framework that has shaped the reception of Yoder’s corpus. Challenging this familiar regulative framework makes room for the invocation of a heterodox Yoder: a heterodox approach that includes less familiar texts, elevates relegated themes, and yields a rich panoramic portrait of his thought.

Having stated my intentions up front in such a stark way, it may appear that this book intends to be a resounding rejection of Yoder. That is not the case; this book is not a simplistic rejection of Yoder as representing a type of christomonistic sectarianism or politically naive pacifism or neo-liberal free church voluntarism as has been done in the past.¹⁰ Rather, this book intends to read Yoder sympathetically—yet critically—as a voice that never could reconcile itself with the dominant strain of thought that is usually referred to as orthodoxy. That said, even Yoder recognized that criticism is not rejection, that to criticize a thought is to take it seriously and to ask why its claims are to be believed.¹¹ Therefore, assuming a value judgment up front concerning either (1) the mode of reading Yoder utilized or (2) the construal of his thought as a whole contained in this book may be too hasty. Rather, it just may be that Yoder’s heterodoxy is an equivocal blessing, a misguided attempt to rewrite Christian theology and ethics that nonetheless helpfully provokes us all in certain ways. I have already stated the broad conclusion of this book, and I will leave the articulation of the supporting argument for the chapters that follow. For now, I will return to the preliminary deconstructive step that is necessary to clear the ground for a rereading of Yoder’s corpus.

Rethinking the Regulative Framework

for Reading Yoder

The introduction of any given author or subject is expected to begin by explaining or justifying why the particular book is needed. Introductions to books written about the thought of John Howard Yoder are no exception. Craig Carter’s The Politics of the Cross begins with the claim that the social-ethical thought of John Howard Yoder represents a major contribution to Christian theological ethics in the second half of the twentieth century, but it has not been taken with the seriousness it deserves at the level of disciplined scholarship.¹² Five years later, Mark Thiessen Nation began his introduction to John Howard Yoder with a reflexive appeal to another authority: "‘Nineteen seventy-four, I believe, was the year I read John Yoder’s Politics of Jesus.’ James McClendon opens his three-volume systematic theology with this sentence, thereby signaling not only that John Yoder had made a substantial contribution to his thinking, but more importantly, that reading Yoder had transformed his whole approach to the enterprise of theology."

¹³

It is natural to expect introductions of this nature in the decade following Yoder’s passing, as they represent the attempt by sympathetic colleagues and students to consolidate, synthesize, defend, or extend Yoder’s life and work. This introduction simply acknowledges the fact that a book on Yoder’s thought no longer needs to be justified since that argument has already been made through the pioneering work of Carter, Nation, and many others.¹⁴ Of course, acknowledging this fact simply pushes the justification to a second level: why is this particular book on Yoder necessary? In short, the purpose of this book is to examine carefully and critically whether Yoder’s celebrated rearranging [of] the theological landscape in the twentieth century is an unmitigated good.

¹⁵

In a sense, this book is part of the next logical step in the reception of Yoder’s life and work, a step that has already begun piecemeal in several conferences and collections of essays.¹⁶ Now that there have been several book-length attempts to introduce Yoder’s thought comprehensively, it is possible to take a step back and evaluate the synthesis that has emerged. As I see it, during the first decade of consolidating the life and work of John Howard Yoder, there has been substantial agreement among many of his readers. This agreement is frequently rooted in a common approach to Yoder’s corpus, a common approach that is often implicit, unstated, or only stated informally in more personal contexts. The power of this common approach cannot be underestimated, and one cannot attend a conference on Yoder or read very far in the secondary literature without discovering a few familiar refrains that frame this popular perception. The interpretive keys to this regulative framework could be listed as follows:

The Politics of Jesusis Yoder’s defining text.¹⁷ In a sense, yes, of course, this is Yoder’s defining text in terms of readership, influence, and identity. This text, for many interpreters of Yoder, was the text that introduced them to Yoder and, therefore, has become the canon within the canon, so to speak, of Yoder’s corpus. For example, in her thoughtful and articulate attempt to describe Yoder’s theological research program, Nancy Murphy determines the hard core of his program (and the relation of this hard core to ethics) in reference only to The Politics of Jesus. Even though she may do so for good reasons, one ought to note that Murphy then introduces Walter Wink, Gustav Aulén, Stanley