The meaning of resurrection for ethics
If you have yet to order the latest collection of John Howard Yoder entitled Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution, you should go ahead and do that now. It is freaking fantastic.
The present meaning of resurrection for ethics is that we are never boxed in. As believers, we are not to be calculating on the basis of the assumption that we are boxed into a world in which there are no new options. Many “saving” events in history were unforseeable, unplanned, but they happened. The resurrection was an impossible unforseeable new option, and it happened. We do not know what happened in such a way that we could take it to the American Medical Association and show them what shape the corpse is in now. We cannot show them how resurrection works with modern, scientific, causal models. Yet we are committed to confessing as relevant for our ethics that there is a power in history that reaches beyond the boxes in which we find ourselves. So one more reason that the cross is meaningful is that even though it fails, it does not fail if there is resurrection.
John H. Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution, eds. Theodore J. Koontz and Andy Alexis-Baker (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2009) 319.
Woooooooooooooooooo….! He is risen!
roger flyer
May 27, 2009 at 10:25 am
I’m reading the book now and I’m loving it. It’s like being able to take a class with Yoder himself.
Marco Funk
June 14, 2009 at 1:40 am
Is Yoder saying what you’re hoping he’s saying, that Christ’s resurrection is the engine that drives the ethics ontologically? Yoder’s notoriously skeptical of ‘Constantinian’ metaphysics…
Myles
June 29, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Myles:
Could you say more?
And R.O.:
What are you hoping Yoder is saying here?
Nate Kerr
June 29, 2009 at 11:01 pm
What I’m suggesting is that resurrection for Yoder isn’t something ontological, but paradigmatic. In the places where Yoder dismisses metaphysical claims about Christianity as ‘Constantinian’ (i.e. sacramentality, Greek entis and ontology, etc.), Yoder moves increasingly towards Gospel-as-paradigm. This is where, as much as I like what you do with Yoder, Nate, I’m not convinced that it’s there in terms of the apocalpyticism–or at least not metaphysically for Yoder. I think Yoder could go with some sort of discursive reasoning that allows for the emergence of new possibilities and call that apocalyptic, but beyond that, I have my doubts.
Myles
July 2, 2009 at 8:37 am