The church-as-polis
In his excellent book Christ, History and Apocalyptic Nate Kerr criticizes the “church-as-polis” model in favor of a missionary conception of the church. For those schooled in the world of Stanley Hauerwas the “church-as-polis” model marks a basic conviction. In fact, if Kerr is correct in his criticisms, then many of us will need to radically rethink not only our indebtedness and relationship to Hauerwas, but also our theology of the church more generally. But Kerr’s criticisms do not apply only to Hauerwas and his followers, they also apply to John Howard Yoder.
Kerr’s criticisms of Hauerwas and Yoder revolve around two key points: 1) the political ontologization of the church and 2) the instrumentalization of worship.
What Kerr calls “the political ontologization of the church” is a way of conceiving of the church as an ontologically “stable” political body that exists prior to “encounter” with the world. In this perspective, the church’s worship is instrumentalized insofar as it tends to correlate or even identify specific practices of the church with the work of the Spirit. When the Spirit is identified with the specific practices of Christian worship, then the Spirit is domesticated precisely as the possession of the church. For Kerr, however, “worship only ‘is’ as an apocalyptic pneumatological event” (Kerr, 170). As apocalyptic event the Spirit refuses domestication and possession. If the church is constituted by the Spirit, who exists only as event, then the church, in Kerr’s perspective, never really “is” at all. The consequence of such a view of the Spirit’s relation vis a vis the church is the loss of any identifiable continuity. The “tradition” of the church is never stable, never certain, and can always be called into question by the ever newness of the Spirit’s action. Lest this view be misconstrued as another form of liberal Protestantism (think of the UCC slogan “God is still speaking”), the Spirit’s work, for Kerr, is precisely not in discontinuity with the “apocalyptic historicity” of Jesus of Nazareth.
Kerr’s worry is not only that the identification of the Spirit with the practices of the church stablilizes the church’s interior identity and domesticates the Spirit, but that such a view usually involves an instrumentalization of Spirit by positing “the church” as a counter political identity over-and-against “the world” (i.e. liberalism, capitalism, secularism, modernity, whatever). Such a move, according to Kerr, amounts to an inversion of Constantinianism. As Kerr puts it, “The ‘meaning’ of Christ’s lordship is displaced from the operativity of Jesus’ ‘independence’ and onto the operation of the church as a polis in history, such that the meaning of history is borne along precisely by the ‘social function’ of the Christian community, which is now bound to the world precisely as ‘a microcosm of the wider society’” (Kerr, 170). Kerr is worried about Yoder’s claims that “the ultimate meaning of history is to be found in the work of the church” and that “the meaning of history is carried first of all, on behalf of all others, by the believing community” (See Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 118, 151). Such claims are, however, absolutely central to Yoder’s ecclesiology. Contrary to Kerr, for Yoder, the church is a polis, almost paradoxically, precisely in its dispossession and deterritorialization. The meaning of history is to be located in “the church” not because of an easy identification of Jesus or the Spirit with the church and its practices of worship, but because redemption and reconciliation happens and this is what “the church” names. The church’s existence is always unstable—Jesus indeed remains independent—but the church is no less a political body. Moreover, the church-as-polis in Yoder’s vision resists the political ontologization of the church precisely because of its proleptic and secular character. The claim that the church is what the world is called to be ultimately is not a statement about the ontology of the church but about God’s work in the world to judge and redeem humanity.
Unfortunately this analysis of Yoder is completely wrong. A little known fact about Yoder is that he was deeply involved in missional work, from advising the Mennonite Board of Missions for decades, to going on missional trips from his college youth to post-war Europe and Algeria, to teaching classes on missiology.
In fact, I cannot give more details than this, but based on his course on missional ecclesiology, there will be a book published…I know, I just transcribed the lectures and will begin co-editing them in the fall. It will be the freshest, newest material to come from Yoder in three decades.
Hopefully this book will put a stop to this type of accusation and misreading of Yoder!
Andy Alexis-Baker
July 3, 2009 at 9:55 pm
Andy, I appreciate your comment, but I don’t think you should dismiss Kerr so easily here. Kerr decidedly does not doubt Yoder’s involvement in missionary work. In fact, his entire last chapter is devoted to explicating precisely this aspect of his work. So, I’m not entirely sure what you mean by saying “this analysis of Yoder is completely wrong.” I also don’t think that what you say is a “little known fact.” Yoder’s involvement in missionary work is no secret.
R.O. Flyer
July 3, 2009 at 11:01 pm
[...] R.O. Flyer on Nate Kerr and his critique of the church-as-polis. [...]
Items of note (7/6/09) : Theopolitical
July 6, 2009 at 10:14 am
R.O.,
I think your comments on Yoder’s notion of the church as polis in your last paragraph are right on target.
Doug Harink
July 6, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Agreed. I agree with your analysis at the end of your original post. It is worth noting also that Yoder did not really use the language of “polis” for the church as Hauerwas does.
Also he did not talk in terms of “ontology” as Kerr does. This is a translation of Yoder into philosophical language he never really liked to use, and it makes a difference because it makes things even more abstract and adds little except confusion.
I don’t think that Yoder, contra Kerr (I recently read several of his chapters), makes the church exist prior to an encounter with the world. The church exists out of an encounter of God with the world, and becomes a specific medium through which God interacts with the world.
Kerr’s philosophical language abstracts Yoder’s thought and probably distorts it to some degree. For instance, Yoder talks about practices in missions and denies that missionaries should go to another culture with preconceived notions about what it means to be church in that culture. In “As You Go” a very influential pamphlet of Yoder’s amongst Mennonites (but not generally widely read beyond our churches), Yoder encourages entire congregations to pack it up and move and give up the notion of professional missionaries. The church should not be created out of scratch because all of the message has to be embodied by a community, and missionaries cannot really do that. Love means nothing in the missionary field without a community to show what it means in Christian practice.
To shift the argument to ontology here would be to abstract Yoder’s thought into a chicken and egg argument that is not only fruitless, but distorts what Yoder means. He is not talking the language of ontology, but the language of Christian missions and ecclesiology: theological language. Transposing Yoder to ontological language allows a person to make claims on Yoder that he “instrumentalizes” the worship and practices of the church, when in actuality Yoder is doing something very different. Only the translation into Kerr’s language allows that type of interpretation.
Maybe…just some initial thoughts.
Thanks for pointing out Kerr’s book. I will read it more carefully over the next few months. I bet there is a lot there to learn from and do not mean to dismiss it too easily. I am distrustful of transposing a person like Yoder into that language however (like transposing the Gospel into the language of the creeds: it signals a radical shift in focus and meaning).
Andy Alexis-Baker
July 6, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Andy, I think you are almost entirely misguided here. Far from attempting to “translate” Yoder’s theology into ontology so as to render his thought abstract, Kerr is trying to clarify the operative logic at work in Yoder’s thought. The fact that Kerr’s work is philosophically complex is not something to bemoan, Andy. You can’t escape “ontology.”
Kerr is highlighting and clarifying many of the important insights at work in Yoder. The idea that he is somehow “transposing” or “translating” Yoder into some sort of obscure foreign language is just plain wrong.
R.O. Flyer
July 8, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Sounds like a fascinating book.
Ironically, many of the people who are most critical about Augustine’s two cities perpetuate his errors with political and (counter-)cultural conceptions of the church.
It’s as if they see the church as an alternative ‘world’, or a new nation that takes Israel’s place among nations.
I think a contempoaray critique of this neo-Augustinian ecclesiology requires a reexamination of Christ’s metaphors for the church, namely, salt and leaven. To me, these suggest an effective but ‘invisible’ presence for the church in the world.
zwingli 2.0
July 8, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Thanks for your comments, Andy; and thanks for clearing up some things, Ry. I think you are reading me right here, Ry. More importantly, I think you are opening up a different way of reading Yoder here that is helpful. I agree with Doug’s assessment of your last paragraph.
If I could, I’d like to address a couple of Andy’s concerns, which, as stated, are quite valid.
First of all, my turn to the language of “ontology” here is not meant to suggest that Yoder himself was concerned to articulate the church’s essence in terms of the philosophical cateogory of “being.” It has to do with the claim that he makes, at a certain period of his writing (particularly in Body Politics), that the church essentially is a polis. It was that claim that I am meaning to address in the final chapter of my book. It is from Yoder that Hauerwas claims to be taking the idea of the church-as-polis, and it is in Hauerwas that that claim gets filled out much more in terms of the philosophical language of being (his talk of the church as an “ontological necessity,” etc.). But my point in part was that the move to conceive the church ontologically vis-a-vis the world (via a “counter-ontology”) is rooted in the practical decision to conceive the church as a polis in-itself prior to encounter with the world. Yoder runs that danger in Body Politics, and it is a way of thinking that operates more overtly and strategically in Hauerwas’ writings.
Now, that being said, it is the point of the section that Ry quotes from above to show how the thrust of Yoder’s work is in fact to move in a different direction altogether — to think the church not first of all as polis but as mission. And so Yoder gives us to think a church that is not so much a polis in-itself, so much as a church that happens by way of a missionary politeia — as embodying a “politics of mission.” In his later work, Yoder seemed to me thus to be coming back around to the matter of his earlier essay, “A People in the World” [1967], in which his main concern was to “see the church in relationship to the world rather than defining ecclesial existence ‘by definition’ or ‘as such,’” so that “peoplehood” and “mission” might each be seen as “the condition of the genuineness of the other.” That is Yoder at his best. It is the Yoder that Ry exposits in his last paragraph of this post, and it is the Yoder that I am sure is reflected in the lectures on mission that you are editing. (Which I cannot wait to read! Thank you for doing the work to see them published!)
I do think that Yoder’s Body Politics can be read quite differently, and when thought in terms of this church-as-missionary movement, we can certainly think the church as a kind of “political community” that is not its own ontological “place” as such and in-itself. I have tried to indicate something like this in a forthcoming essay called “Communio Missionis,” in which I extend my comparison of Yoder and Certeau. But Ry is clearly doing some of this work himself, and apparently quite well. But my fear is when Yoder’s understanding of the sense in which “mission makes the church” gets lost sight of, his claim that the church is a polis gets taken up and distorted by his followers — in just the philosophical ways you are concerned about. And it is this point about “mission” that I’d like to see Hauerwas himself take up, because I think we’d find that his talk of the church as a polis would be seriously re-situated and re-configured, in all sorts of helpful ways.
One more point: Ry is right. One cannot escape “ontology” as such. However, the question is: How do you think “being” in this missionary, dispossessive mode of existence. If our concern is to think the sense in which the church is or displays an ontology, in-itself, then I fear that we will find ourselves caught up in just the kind of concern for maintenance and effectiveness that Yoder named “unfaithfulness.” I think rather that the church that understands itself as consituted by mission in the apocalypse of Jeus Christ, finds that its “being” is to be unhanded doxologically in a movement inseparable from its missionary, dispossessive encounter with the world. This, I think, is why Yoder never feared working with philosophical concepts, precisely as a missionary endeavor. Certainly such an idea was at the heart of his his assessment of the “metaphysical” language of the creeds, for example.
At any rate, I hope that helps to clear up some of what I’m thinking here. Thanks for the engagement.
Nate Kerr
July 8, 2009 at 7:57 pm
That was helpful to hear what you were trying to do and what you think Yoder was doing by using the language you use.
I think you are exactly right in your post about Yoder wanting us to “think the church not first of all as polis but as mission.” Perfectly said. The fact that “polis” language is so rare in Yoder should caution against assuming that that image is a primary motif for the church in Yoder’s thought. Whereas Hauerwas uses the language readily and often, Yoder uses it only rarely (Body Politics might be the only place). For Yoder, the church is “a new people,” more than a “polis.” The new people is by definition a mission.
I am finding it very interesting to see how Yoder actually describes mission in his work on mission and ecclesiology. I think R.O. Flyer is right that there is a “dispossession and deterritorialization” at work, and the new people is “redemption and reconciliation.” I completely agree with R.O Flyer’s final statement. Sounds like we all do!
I completely agree with your assessment of Hauerwas here as well. By using the language that you do, and at first reading the assessment R.O Flyer gave, I thought that is what you were doing: loosing sight of Yoder’s understanding of the missionary nature of the church in favor of a primary motif of a static metaphysical polis that I just think cannot help but cause problems (are there any biblical references to cities that are positive in the long view? I doubt it…which again makes that motif hard to use as primary…I am from New York, so it’s not out of fear I say that). Seems like I was right on the critique, but hit the wrong target with it (I still don’t like the language though!)
I am very glad you wrote a response and clarified. I have not had the time to read your entire book yet. I’ll be reading it this semester as I take a missions and ecclesiology course at Marquette (Ph.D. program there). I’ll also be using it as a source in assessing Yoder’s lectures and can’t wait till those come out and you (and R.O. Flyer too for that matter) can do the same.
Andy Alexis-Baker
August 3, 2009 at 5:03 am