The creedal protectionist reading of Yoder

In some of the conversations about Craig Carter, the accuracy of his interpretation of Yoder has been called into question. Some of us have spoken of a “shift” in Carter’s theology, because many of us had read and enjoyed his book on Yoder. Now, Carter himself admits of such a shift, but one cannot help but wonder whether there are seeds of this shift in his earlier work. In a recent comment, Tim Kumfer helpfully observes that such a seed might be evident in Carter’s insistence on the orthodoxy of Yoder in his The Politics of the Cross: The Theology and Social Ethics of John Howard Yoder. I have been re-reading Carter’s book today, partially because I am in the middle of writing a chapter of my master’s thesis on Yoder, and partially because I apparently have all things Carter on my mind as of late.

In his introduction Carter I think rightly states that pacifism is “not the point” of Yoder’s theology, rather “Jesus is the point.” Carter, however, goes on to say that, “Not only is Jesus the point, but protecting, declaring, and unpacking the claims of classical Christology is what Yoder is about” (17). In contrast to the early Anabaptist theologians who did not have the leisure of developing a systematic theological account, according to Carter Yoder is “a thinker who is steeped in the writings of the church fathers and the Reformers, who has a firm grasp of the history of Christianity, and who has a deep respect for the creeds and historic Christian orthodoxy” (17). Now, certainly Yoder read deeply, but he is by no means uncritical of the “classical” tradition, even to the point of being critical of creedal tradition. Now, that is not say Yoder did not have a “deep respect” for the creeds, but he was decidely not overly concerned with “protecting, declaring, and unpacking” the Christology of classical orthodoxy especially if this meant abstracting from the particular narrative of Jesus of Nazareth. Yoder did think his Christology was in line with the creeds, but he certainly was not in the business of deriving his Christology from the creeds.  I think Alain Epp Weaver is correct in saying that “Yoder’s approach to Nicea and Chalcedon followed a two-pronged strategy of appealing to the creeds while simultaneously relativizing their centrality” (Weaver, “John Howard Yoder and the Creeds,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 74:3 (July 2000): 425). Carter states that the central thesis of his book is “the conviction that Yoder’s work shows us how the trinitarian and christological orthodoxy of the fourth and fifth centuries contains the key to the survival and flourishing of the church’s witness to Jesus Christ in the post-Christendom era that is now dawning” (23). I find it interesting that Carter thinks that such a “key” can be found in Yoder’s corpus. Yoder, in fact, was most centrally interested in rigorously maintaining that the “only normative point of orientation can and must be the Jesus of the New Testament witness” (Royal Priesthood, 191). In fact, for Yoder any other starting point was structurally sectarian. He states, “If I say I am committed to the authority of Jesus plus a particular church or of Jesus plus common sense or of Jesus plus my own best insights, or of Jesus plus a particular creedal heritage, that very addition of something extra is structurally sectarian” (Royal Priesthood, 191). Further, I find it odd that Carter would associate such commitment to the creedal tradition to the survival and flourishing of the church’s witness to Jesus Christ in a post-Christendom era. I think we begin to see “seeds” of Carter’s shift in his reading of Yoder here. I think the sort of protectionist mentality and survival mode of thinking that Carter reads in Yoder is really problematic. Such an approach seems to me to be the very antithesis of what Yoder’s nonviolent method and style was all about. Moreover, such a mentality seems to be at the heart of Carter’s conservatism, concerned as it is most fundamentally with the protection and survival of Christianity against the onslaughts of liberalism.