Rain and the Rhinoceros

In the previous post I quoted from a paper that John Howard Yoder presented to the Bonhoeffer Society at the 1987 American Academy of Religion conference. There are two points that I want to highlight about this quote, which pertain to the key differences and perhaps points of convergence between the theology of Yoder and Bonhoeffer: discipleship and secularity.

In his paper Yoder explores the concept of “discipleship” in Anabaptism and in Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Yoder concludes that the concept of discipleship carried a variety of different meanings within the Anabaptist heritage. The term, discipleship, took on something of an identity marker for Anabaptists especially after Harold Bender listed it among the key “principles” of the Anabaptist vision. This is not to say that discipleship was not important to Anabaptists before Bender, only that the term itself took on a more self-identifying function after Bender. Yoder, I think, rightly asks if Bonhoeffer had some role in bringing this out for Bender, as a core “principle” of Anabaptist faith.

Now, Yoder concludes that “Bonhoeffer neither began nor ended with a vision of discipleship cognate with that of the Anabaptists.” He makes this assertion on the grounds that what motivated Bonhoeffer’s Christology was “more dogmatic than exegetical or historical.” According to Yoder, Bonhoeffer “was not driven either to concreteness about the pre-passion Jesus nor to any abiding challenge to the axioms of Constantinian political ethics.” And this is Yoder’s central challenge to Bonhoeffer’s conception of discipleship. Bonhoeffer, according to Yoder, paid more attention to the dogmatic significance of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, while tending to sideline the concrete historical life of Jesus of Nazareth. For Yoder, if discipleship in some sense means a following after, then we must be given some clue as to what kind of person we are following. In Yoder’s interpretation, Bonhoeffer focuses heavily on the importance of obedience in his conception of discipleship. In Yoder’s words, “At the core, the issue put to a person by the ‘call to discipleship’ is a concern not first of all with how he will behave if he follows Jesus, but with the renunciation of self-determination and of one’s own reasoning.” The demand to renounce self-determination and one’s own devices is certainly a key feature of Bonhoeffer’s work, especially in Discipleship. Yet, Yoder points out that such demands could be made by any lord, or any moral teacher. Such a demand is not “intrinsically linked with how that particular master himself behaved, or with whether what he asks of me is the same as his own behavior.” Yoder does note that in Bonhoeffer’s discussion of discipleship he does speak of the importance of the cross. The disciple will suffer as Jesus suffered, by rejection. Yet, even here, Yoder does not think Bonhoeffer is concrete enough, as the discussion remains too much on the level of “existential self-understanding” and not enough on the behavior and concrete decision-making that leads the disciple to rejection and the cross. Other key questions remain for Yoder: will the disciple that follows Jesus by going to the cross be “a monk or a politician? An emigrant or a conspirator? Or does the meaning of bearing the cross exist on a level unrelated to such concrete decisions?” Even at the point when Bonhoeffer brings the Beatitudes into the discussion, it is still not concrete enough. The discussion of the Beatitudes focus more on disposition and tend to be stated by way of negations: the disciple is called to renounce power, honor, and violence, but there are no concrete examples in the affirmative about the way the disciple should then live.

In all of this, Bonhoeffer’s understanding of discipleship runs parallel to the “mystical” and “moralistic” strand of Anabaptism which manifests itself by the logic of renunciation and obedience without question. According to Yoder, however, the most “original” and “socially realistic” strand of Anabaptism is the position that the church must be ready to “give up her control over society.” In Yoder’s words, “This realism perceived that the model of Christian social participation is not simply the cross of Christ in some symbolic or emotional sense, but also the attitude toward political office which helped to bring him, the Jesus of the gospels, to the cross.”

Yoder’s concern is that Bonhoeffer’s Christology leaps “from the crib to the cross.” What is perhaps most interesting in all of this is that Yoder finds Bonhoeffer’s suggestions about a “religionless Christianity” in his prison letters to point in exactly the right direction. An awareness of the secularity of Christ, the immanence of God’s action in Christ, opens up Christological reflection to attend to the constitutive life history of Jesus. Yoder points out that Bonhoeffer’s leap “from the crib to the cross” is “precisely to leave out of one’s christology the substance of (“secular”) social living in occupied, rebellion-torn Palestine.” Thus, the much disputed meaning of Bonhoeffer’s letters about “the world-come-of-age,” “secularity,” and “religionless Christianity” is perhaps the most interesting point of contact between Bonhoeffer and Yoder.

Bonhoeffer neither began nor ended with a vision of discipleship cognate with that of the Anabaptists . . . As his christological preoccupations were more dogmatic than exegetical or historical, he was not driven either to concreteness about the pre-passion Jesus nor to any abiding challenge to the axioms of Constantinian political ethics. Such a concretization would have been eminently compatible with the ‘non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts’ (for what could have been less cultic or otherworldly than Jesus’ social style?) but it did not occur to Bonhoeffer then. It would have put ‘God’s suffering in the world’ into the form of a politically relevant, ‘non-religious,’ ’secular’ paraphrase; but instead those slogans were left to the Bultmannians, who somehow think that ‘existential interpretation’ is non-religious, and to Hanfried Müller, who assumes that socialist promises for party-led history are the same as ‘Mundigkeit.’

John Howard Yoder, “The Christological Presuppositions of Discipleship,” unpublished paper presented  at the 1987 AAR Bonhoeffer Society.

I have had the good fortune of having the brilliant Gerald Schlabach as my thesis advisor. Among the many benefits of having Gerald supervise my thesis on Bonhoeffer and Yoder, have been the various personal anecdotes Gerald has shared with me about the man John Howard Yoder and the broader Mennonite context in which Yoder lived and breathed. It is difficult to convey how mind-boggling it is to talk with your advisor about your thesis and have him respond with, “Oh, so and so, was my neighbor, my father is actually writing a biography on him right now…” Another excellent benefit is the access Gerald has given me to a vast array of unpublished Yoder material.

I’ve now spent two years working on an MA at an ultra-conservative Catholic seminary with a whole host of issues. I have to say Gerald has been all too patient with me through the height of my rather serious misgivings about Catholic theology–assuring me that one can be both Catholic and politically radical!–and he’s been supportive of my decision to become a member of the Mennonite church of which his wife, Joetta, is a pastor. If all goes as planned, I’ll be completing my thesis within the next month or two, teaching as an adjunct instructor at St. Thomas in the Fall, and preparing doctoral applications.

In a recently published collection of lectures entitled Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution, John Howard Yoder observes the oddity that the major Mennonite identity crisis of the twentieth century is the consequence of accommodation to a professor of applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary.  The professor, of course, is one of the major American Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr. With the rise of Hitler, the liberal pacifist movement, so prominent after World War I, almost completely collapsed not least due to the stinging critiques launched by Niebuhr. If the threat of the Hitler regime pushed the liberal pacifist ethic to its limit, Niebuhr’s theological critique was just enough to push the movement over the edge. The remaining pacifists in America, found primarily now in the historic peace churches, were also forced to respond to the Niebuhrian challenge, but from a different angle. Niebuhr’s criticism of liberal pacifism questioned both the scriptural basis and the effectiveness of their position. According to Niebuhr, the Jesus of the New Testament teaches nonresistance as opposed to the type of strategic active nonviolence advocated by liberal pacifists. The problem with liberal pacifism, in Niebuhr’s view, is that it attempts to ground its absolutist position in an erroneous interpretation of the teachings of Jesus. Strategic active nonviolence is to be commended as a (sometimes) effective method of social change, but it is a form of coercion, a form of power that Jesus expressly rejects. Thus, liberal pacifists have no basis to attack non-pacifists. Pacifists of the Mennonite variety, however, in their simple obedience to Jesus’ teachings on nonresistance are at least biblically consistent, despite their social and political irrelevance. Niebuhr believed that Mennonites fulfill a particularly important vocation of the Christian church. By their social and political “withdrawal” Mennonites helpfully serve to remind the rest of the Christian church of the lofty ideals of Jesus. Yet, no matter how commendable, such an ethic of nonresistance can never serve as the basis of a Christian ethic that seeks to be responsible in the messy world of politics.

Niebuhr’s back-handed compliment to Mennonites in his critique against liberal pacifism helped to create a division in Mennonite theology along the lines of a dichotomy between withdrawal and responsibility. In response to the criticisms of Niebuhr many Mennonites felt compelled to distinguish themselves from the liberal pacifist position by accepting the role of pacifism as an apolitical socially irrelevant vocation that Niebuhr had created and commended. Yoder observes a strikingly similarity in the responses of the conservative Mennonite biblical scholar John R. Mumaw and the liberal Mennonite Donovan Smucker to the challenge of Niebuhr. In order to section themselves off from Niebuhr’s critique of liberal pacifism, both thinkers chose to accept the role given to them by Niebuhr: to become more fully that nonresistant sectarian withdrawing enclave of Niebuhr’s imagination, in the name of renouncing the type of pacifism that is concerned with effectiveness and responsibility. Yoder observes that more than anything Niebuhr’s impact served to reinforce “a Mennonite tendency to dualistic analysis…that says we cannot do anything in the wider world—because we want to be different from those pacifists who are naïve about the possibilities of the good” (297).  Such a position, however, did not stem from the history of  Mennonite faith, but was rather learned from Mennonite “accommodation to Reinhold Niebuhr.” In short, such a position was invented by “accepting the backhanded compliment that Niebuhr gave us when he said we are consistent but irrelevant” (298).

Today is the International Day for Conscientious Objectors.

Let us give thanks for the witness of conscientious objectors to war and military participation. In my own life I am blessed and inspired by the witness of my wife, Marcia, who refused to cooperate with the standard process for gaining United States citizenship.

Because of her deep convictions, Marcia refused to say the US oath of allegiance in her citizenship ceremony and she became a conscientious objector to U.S. military service. She is a witness to the peace of Christ in the world.

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.

The Mennonite publishing company Herald Press has already released three great books in their series Polyglossia: Radical Reformation Theologies, and it looks like they’re about to release another entitled First Be Reconciled: Challenging Christians in the Courts by Richard Church. According to Herald Press Polyglossia is

A series intended for conversation among academics, ministers and laypersons regarding knowledge, beliefs and the practices of the Christian faith. Polyglossia grows out of John Howard Yoder’s call to see radical reformation as a tone, style, or a stance, a way of thinking theologically that requires precarious attempts to speak the gospel in new idioms. It is a form of theological reflection that blends patient vulnerability and hermeneutical charity with considered judgment and informed criticism.

So far I’ve only read Chris K. Huebner’s fantastic work A Precarious Peace in which he creatively engages thinkers as diverse as John Howard Yoder, John Milbank, Karl Barth, Alistair MacIntyre, Paul Virilio, Terry Eagleton, Atom Egoyan, as well as many others. Adam Steward has written a helpful review here.

The other books include Tripp York’s The Purple Crown (review here) and Alain Epp Weaver’s States of Exile (introduction here).

What do you picture when you think of the Mennonites? A horse, buggy, amish-type people, washing clothes by hand?

There is a new breed of Mennonites out there who are attempting to bring the radicalism of their tradition to our contemporary, technologically savvy culture. If you haven’t read it you must look into the new Mennonite magazine Geez. The Mennonite’s radical critique of “progress” has found a creative voice in this Adbusterish awarding winning magazine.

Here is how Geez describes themselves,

Because it’s time we untangle the narrative of faith from the fundamentalists, pious self-helpers and religio-profiteers. And let’s do it with holy mischief rather than ideological firepower.

We’ll explore the point at which word, action and image intersect, and then ignite. So let’s blaspheme the gods of super-powerdom, instigate spiritual action campaigns and revamp that old Picture Bible.

We’ve set up camp in the outback of the spiritual commons. A bustling spot for the over-churched, out-churched, un-churched and maybe even the un-churchable. A location just beyond boring bitterness. A place for wannabe contemplatives, front-line world-changers and restless cranks. A place where the moon shines quiet, instinct runs mythic and belief rides a bike (or at least sits on the couch entertaining the possibility).

Bridgefolk is a movement that seeks ecumenical dialogue between Roman Catholicism and the Mennonite tradition. According to their website,

Bridgefolk is a movement of sacramentally-minded Mennonites and peace-minded Roman Catholics who come together to celebrate each other’s traditions, explore each other’s practices, and honor each other’s contribution to the mission of Christ’s Church. Together we seek better ways to embody a commitment to both traditions. We seek to make Anabaptist-Mennonite practices of discipleship, peaceableness, and lay participation more accessible to Roman Catholics, and to bring the spiritual, liturgical, and sacramental practices of the Catholic tradition to Anabaptists.

I first heard about Bridgefolk as an undergraduate from a theology professor of mine at the University of St. Thomas, Gerald W. Schlabach. Although I was attracted to Dr. Schlabach because I share his theological leanings, we actually met and began to talk when we realized that we shared something in common: we both smoke pipe tobacco. Schlabach and I had many conversations about theology and ethics while smoking a pipe between classes outside the theology wing at St. Thomas. Recently, I have become more interested in Mennonite – Catholic dialogue. Bridgefolk is the center for such dialogue and Schlabach has been quite involved in the movement; he is the Executive Director of the Board of Directors. Schlabach grew up in the Mennonite tradition and attended the University of Nortre Dame; after much prayer and consideration he recently converted to Roman Catholicism. He considers himself a Mennonite Catholic.

Dr. Schlabach is also a prolific theologian. He has written numerous books and articles. He recently edited a volume called Just Policing, Not War: An Alternative Response to World Violence which will be released next month.