A Pacifist Way of Knowing: John Howard Yoder's Nonviolent Epistemology

By John Howard Yoder

In A Pacifist Way of Knowing: John Howard Yoder's Nonviolent Epistemology, editors Christian Early and Ted Grimsrud gather the scattered writings of Yoder on the theme of the relationship between gospel, peace, and human ways of knowing. In them, they find the beginnings of a pacifist theology of knowledge that rejects strategies of empire while at the same time avoids a self-defeating relativism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781621890805

John Howard Yoder

John Howard Yoder (1927-1997), author of The Politics of Jesus (1972), was best known for his writing and teaching on Christian pacifism. He studied theology and served as a Mennonite mission staff person in post-war Europe from 1949-1957 and continued in overseas mission administration from the agency's base in Elkhart, Indiana, from 1959-1965. He received his doctorate from the University of Basel. During the 1960s he began teaching at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries, leaving it in 1984. He continued his teaching and scholarly work as professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame until his death at the age of 70.

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Preface

The twentieth century has been called a century of total war. An especially devastating aspect of several of the worst of these wars was that they were fought between Christian nations. A common confession of Jesus Christ as savior failed to lead to an ability to resolve conflicts without overwhelming destruction—making the biblical hope of the families of the earth learning the ways of peace from God’s covenant people a distant dream.

In a broad sense, never have the Christian churches been so far removed from the one they confess as Lord—the one who taught love your enemies.  So far, the twenty-first century has not evinced much of a sense that it will be very different.

Nonetheless, many Christians have recognized the problem and witnessed against war. If it weren’t for how big and destructive humanity’s wars have been and the potential for much worse terror to come, we could look at the twentieth century as a golden age for Christian pacifism. More Christians have come to clarity about their rejection of warfare on moral grounds than any time since the fourth century. But they remain a tiny minority.

Still, the importance of their witness should not be underestimated. This witness involves on-the-ground activism, political persuasion, passionate preaching, the skillful practice of peacebuilding techniques; it also involves, we believe, the further development of peace theology.

For this latter task, the writings of the late Mennonite theological ethicist John Howard Yoder remain an essential resource. Yoder left us with a rich and deep collection of thoughtful materials—most famously and still foundationally his books, especially The Politics of Jesus and Nevertheless: The Varieties of Religious Pacifism among others. Newly collected and revised writings continue to find their way into print; particularly notable is the recent publication of his lectures, Christian Attitudes Toward War, Peace, and Revolution.

One theme Yoder devoted significant attention to in the latter part of his career was reflection on the epistemological significance for Christian pacifism. Is there a distinctive way that a Christian pacifist might view the world?  His writings that address pacifism and epistemology remained scattered in various sources, some quite difficult to access. Plus, they took the form of relatively short, isolated essays. 

In this book we have gathered what we believe to be Yoder’s most important essays on Christian pacifism and epistemology. We do this partly simply to make some extremely important but heretofore quite difficult to track down essays more readily available. Even more, we want to bring these essays into closer conversation with one another in the hopes that Yoder’s contribution might be more easily appreciated.

Read together, Yoder’s essays on the deep thinking underlying Chris-tian pacifism provide a powerful challenge to any Christian theology that does not understand Jesus’ message of peace as a foundational element. These essays as a collection also point ahead to the further work Christian theology must undertake as it faces up to the challenges presented to us by our world’s (and too many churches’) embrace of warfare.

We believe this collection of essays needs very little in terms of commentary. However, to set the stage we provide a brief summary of what we mean by Christian pacifism—a summary we believe to be compatible with Yoder’s thought. We conclude, finally, with a brief effort to push out the implications of Yoder’s pacifist way of knowing. We have kept our comments to a minimum because it is our hope that others will come after us, suggest new lines of reflection, and help us again to see Jesus.

Acknowledgments

Chapters of this book appeared in an earlier form in various journals and books. The editors and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint from these publications:

1. ‘But We Do See Jesus’: The Particularity of Incarnation and the Universality of the Truth was originally published in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel, 46–62. Notre Dame: University

of Notre Dame Press, 1984.

2. On Not Being Ashamed of the Gospel: Particularity, Pluralism, and Validation was originally published in Faith and Philosophy 9:3 (1992) 285–300.

3. Why Ecclesiology is Social Ethics: Gospel Ethics Versus the Wider Wisdom was originally published in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, edited by Michael G. Cartwright, 102–26. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994.

4. Walk and Word: The Alternatives to Methodologism was originally published in Theology Without Foundations: Religious Practice and the Future of Theological Truth, edited by Stanley Hauerwas, Nancey Murphy, and Mark Nation, 77–90. Nashville: Abingdon, 1994.

5. Meaning after Babble: With Jeffrey Stout beyond Relativism was originally published in the Journal of Religious Ethics 24 (1996) 125–39.

6. ‘Patience’ as Method in Moral Reasoning: Is an Ethic of Discipleship ‘Absolute’? was originally published in The Wisdom of the Cross: Essays in Honor of John Howard Yoder, edited by Stanley Hauerwas et al., 24–42. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999.

prologue

Christian Pacifism in Brief

Ted Grimsrud with Christian E. Early

John Howard Yoder begins The Politics of Jesus by characterizing that book as coming from a Christian pacifist commitment. Yoder attempts, he states, to respond to ways mainstream Christian theology has set aside the pacifist implications of the New Testament message.

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In a persuasive way that still today, well over thirty years later, witnesses powerfully to those pacifist implications, Yoder presents New Testament teaching as speaking directly of social ethics in ways that remain normative for Christians—and that point directly toward pacifism.

Yoder’s essays included in the present book speak, directly and indirectly, of the significance of a pacifist commitment for how we know, for our epistemology. However, to better approach the implications of pacifism for epistemology, it will be helpful to explore more directly what pacifism means. As this term commonly lends itself to misunderstanding and caricature, we believe it will be helpful to begin with a short explanation of what we mean by pacifism. When we present Yoder’s pacifist epistemology as exemplary, what follows in this chapter will show what we mean by pacifism.

Pacifism has the connotation of a complete rejection of involvement in warfare, and usually other forms of violence. Beyond that simple assumption, however, the term pacifism is used in many different kinds of ways. Yoder’s classic analysis, Nevertheless: Varieties and Shortcomings of Religious Pacifism, describes no less than twenty-nine different types of religious pacifism.² Given this variety, no one is in a position to make claims for all pacifists because pacifism is an essentially contested concept. We wish to be very clear at the outset that our intent in this essay is to argue in favor of a particular, contestable understanding of pacifism. We thought that perhaps it would be helpful to begin with some examples of what we consider to be misunderstandings of pacifism, and then go on to give a short case for what we will call Christian pacifism, allowing the rest of the book to be an exploration of the epistemological consequences of our view so that readers may judge it and its consequences more fully.

Pacifism According to its Critics

Pacifism Is Evil

Some non-pacifists are strongly anti-pacifist. Pacifism for them is seen as a refusal to take responsibility for the necessary use of violence to stop evil people in our rough-and-tumble world. This includes Christian leaders and theologians as well. Popes Paul VI and John Paul II expressed views equating pacifism with a cowardly and lazy conception of life and peace at any cost, respectively.

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The right-wing American pundit, Michael Kelly, wrote a widely circulated op-ed essay for the Washington Post shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. In that essay, he asserted that, in relation to the war on terror, "American pacifists . . .

are on the side of future mass murderers of Americans. They are objectively pro-terrorist. Pacifists do not want the U.S. to fight back and neither do the terrorists. Therefore they are on the same side. And since terrorism is evil, he concluded flatly that the pacifists’ position . . . is evil."⁴ Kelly did not give examples or specify whom he had in mind in his characterization of pacifism. It would appear that he defined pacifism primarily as principled opposition to the use of American military might, including opposition to going to war to resist the obvious evils of global terrorism.

So, according to these two Popes and to Michael Kelly, pacifism seems largely to be understood as the refusal to fight back (or even to support fighting back) in the face of evil. As such, it is directly complicit in the furtherance of said evil.

Pacifism Is Irrelevant

The great American theological ethicist, Reinhold Niebuhr in many ways shared elements of the pacifism is evil perspective. In 1940, between the beginning of World War II in 1939 and the United States’ entry into that war in 1941, Niebuhr wrote his most direct critique of pacifism, Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist. In this essay, Niebuhr differentiates between heretical and non-heretical pacifism.

According to Niebuhr, the heretical version, characteristic of many liberal Protestants in the years between World War I and World War II naively assumed human goodness, rejected the Christian doctrine of original sin, reinterpreted the Cross so that it stands for the idea that perfect love is guaranteed a simple victory in the world, and rejected all other profound elements of the Christian gospel as hopelessly Pauline.

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While viewing this heretical pacifism with contempt, Niebuhr respected what he termed "the pacifism that is not a heresy." This pacifism, characteristic of the early Anabaptist leader Menno Simons, does not present the effort to achieve a standard of perfect love in individual life as a political alternative. This approach disavows the political problem and task. For non-heretical pacifists, setting up the most perfect and unselfish individual life as a symbol of the kingdom of God can only be done by disavowing the political task and by freeing the individual of all responsibility for social justice.

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This non-heretical pacifism is a reminder to the Christian community that the relative norms of social justice, which justify both coercion and resistance to coercion, are not final norms, and that Christians are in constant peril of forgetting their relative and tentative character and of making them too completely normative.

⁷

Pacifism Is Worldly

Guy Hershberger, a Mennonite contemporary of Niebuhr’s, believed deeply that the message of Jesus forbade all of his followers from using violence, especially from participating in warfare. However, he echoed many of Niebuhr’s analyses concerning what Niebuhr called heretical pacifism, the pacifism characteristic of many mainline Protestants that was influenced by the Social Gospel and that sought through political influence to move the world in a peaceful direction. Hershberger, though, rejected the use of the term pacifism for the faithful Christian rejection of violence. He preferred the term nonresistance. When he refers to pacifism, he has in mind Niebuhr’s heretical pacifism.

Like Niebuhr, Hershberger charges liberal Protestant pacifism with an unduly optimistic view of human nature and human possibilities in the social realm. For Social Gospel pacifism, he asserted, there is no sinful world to be renounced. Human beings are inherently good, hence they are not in need of personal salvation. Sin is not a personal, but rather a social evil, for these pacifists. Their only salvation is a social salvation. According to this view, Christ is not the redeemer of humankind, but rather our example.

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Along with this unwarranted optimism about the character of social life in the real world, Hershberger also believes that pacifists are way too sanguine about the use of force in trying to implement their social ideals. He characterized pacifism as fully accepting of nonviolent coercion wherein the wronged person places the emphasis on a demand for justice.⁹ However, in contrast to Jesus’ command to turn the other cheek and to not resist evil with coercion, nonviolent resistance is still resistance. It is a form of coercion or compulsion. It seeks to compel the enemy to give up.

¹⁰

Hershberger, then, rejects pacifism because it too thoroughly conforms to a violent world. In its optimism about human possibilities, it minimizes the depth of sin and violence that inevitably characterizes this fallen world. And, it ends up being too comfortable with accepting worldly tactics of coercing others—these tactics ultimately contradict the message of Jesus.

Pacifism Is Passive

Theologian and activist Walter Wink does not reject pacifism because it is anti-war or anti-patriotic. Nor, contrary to Niebuhr and Hershberger, does he believe that social justice compatible with the message of Jesus is impossible in the real world. He does not accept their characterization of the message of Jesus as being the basis for separation from social justice concerns or incompatible with the use of nonviolent resistance. So he does not reject pacifism because it is too optimistic or too interventionist.

To the contrary, Wink rejects pacifism because he defines it as more or less the same phenomenon as what Hershberger would call nonresistance. He writes, pacifism must go. It is endlessly confused with passivity. In the nations in which Christianity has predominated, Jesus’ teaching on nonviolence has been perverted into injunctions to passive nonresistance, which is the very opposite of active nonviolence.

¹¹

For Wink, pacifism is passive while nonviolence is active. Pacifism is harmless and therefore easier to accept than nonviolence, which is dangerous. Gandhi had utter contempt for nonactive pacifism. He regarded such a passive stance as cowardly, calling inaction rank cowardice and unmanly, and said he would rather see someone incapable of nonviolence resist violently than resist not at all.

However, the term nonviolence, preferred by Wink and others of like mind, has its own problems. Nonviolence advocate Mark Kurlansky, who shares Wink’s critique, nonetheless admits that nonviolence is not a proactive word. It is not an authentic concept but simply the abnegation of something else.¹² Kurlansky’s recognition opens the door to a reconsideration of the term pacifism. Is it possible that this despised term might actually be able to do the work needed so we can convey in a positive sense our commitment to making peace in our broken world?

Defining Pacifism

Pacifism: A Brief History

The word pacifism has the virtue of being a positive term, connoting the affirmation of peace more than simply the opposition to violence. However, as we have seen from our survey of people who do not like the term, and as we would see were we to survey various ways the term is used by those who do like it,¹³ there are many pacifisms. We will not be arguing for one definitive or normative understanding of pacifism here. Rather, we simply want to articulate one proposal for understanding pacifism as a positive and attractive perspective over against the negative associations summarized above.

The word pacifism is quite recent in English, dating back perhaps only about a hundred years. It was not listed in the 1904 Complete Oxford Dictionary. According to the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1982, the first occurrence came in 1902 at an international peace conference as an English version of the French word pacifisme, used to express opposition to war.¹⁴ However, the French term originally had the meaning of making peace, not simply opposing war.

The root word is "paci, or peace. If we take the word pacifism literally we could define it as love of peace, or devotion to peace. We might best think of pacifism as the conviction that no value that could justify the use of violence takes priority over the commitment to peace. Hence, pacifism" is more than simply approving of peace, which everyone in some sense would do, it is the conviction that the commitment to peace stands higher than any other commitment.

We are conscious that some may be uncomfortable with this conception of peace. It may seem that we place peace higher even than God, effectively making peace into a God. We confess to be puzzled by this concern. To say that God is peace (or God is love or just or any other appropriate adjective) is obviously not the same as to say that peace is God (or that love is God and so on). When one reverses the nominative case, one loses narrative specificity, storied concreteness.

In saying God is peace we mean to say that Jesus of Nazareth reveals to us that God is peace. By contrast, saying peace is God is unspecified and vague, so much so that we are not sure what is being said or what examples could show us what that would look like. We will still need to flesh out much more what we mean be peace, of course, but we believe that the Bible supplies us with a thick portrayal of genuine peace, and that as Christians we must begin our thinking about God and peace with thinking about Jesus of Nazareth.

Starting with Jesus of Nazareth

Christian pacifists—who believe that Jesus’ life and teaching are at the center of the Bible, the lens through which we read the rest—see in Jesus sharp clarity about the supremacy of vulnerable love, peacableness, and compassion. Jesus embodies a broad and deep vision of life that is thoroughly pacifist, even if he did not explicitly address participation in warfare.

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We will mention four basic biblical themes that find clarity in Jesus, but in numerous ways emerge throughout the biblical story. These provide the foundational theological rationale for Christian pacifism. They include first and most basic, the love command that Jesus gave as a summary of the biblical message. The second theme is Jesus’ vision for love-oriented politics in contrast to the tyranny of the world’s empires. The third theme is Jesus’ optimism about the human potential for living in love. And the fourth theme is the model of Jesus’ cross that embodies self-suffering love and exposes the nature of the structures of human culture as God’s rivals for the trust of human beings.

Jesus’ Love Command

When asked what is the greatest of the commandments, Jesus according to Matthew 22, responds: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets (22:34–40).

Mark and Luke also report this assertion (though Luke puts the actual words in the mouth of Jesus’ questioner)—as does Paul, in a slightly modified form (Rom 13:8–10; note that Paul summarizes the law simply as loving neighbor, effectively refuting any attempt to lessen the thrust of the second part of Jesus’ command), and John in his first letter (1 John 4:18–21).

We see three key points being made here that are crucial for our concerns. First, love is at the heart of everything for the believer in God. Second, love of God and love of neighbor are tied inextricably together. In Jesus’ own life and teaching, we clearly see that he understood the neighbor to be the person in need, the person that one is able to show love to in concrete ways (not to be an insider over against non-neighbors who are other and whom we are not expected to love). The third point is that Jesus understood his words to be a summary of the Bible—that is, what Christians now call the Old Testament. The law and prophets were the entirety of Jesus’ Bible—and in his view, their message may be summarized by this double love command. He quotes Deuteronomy and Leviticus directly in making