MTS-1b: Yoder

Discussed on September 25, 2012, with Stanley Hauerwas as part of my MTS Thesis Proposal.

Prompt for Discussion

John Howard Yoder's The Christian Witness to the State (1964) and Body Politics (1992) were selected in order to explore an embodied witness to the established political order, particularly the somatic theological implications therefor.

The Christian Witness to the State began by defending the relevancy of the Christian (and therefore, for Yoder, pacifist) witness to a non-Christian, non-pacifist establishment in which they live and work and worship. From the outset, Yoder has Niebuhrian theology in mind, and begins by lamenting the "prophetic irrelevancy" (7) to which his colleague apparently relegates Christian pacifism. A few particular points that are helpful are his claims that a) "the bearers of political authority are in spite of themselves agents of the divine economy, being used whether in rebellion or submission as agents of God's purpose," (12) b) "The meaning of history… lies in the creation and the work of the Church." (13)

These twin claims are powerful and compelling to any person who considers themselves a Christian, since it forces them to put political claims directly subordinate to the God from which they derive their authority, despite the arrogance of many political assumptions. In fact, to take the universal vocation of the church seriously, it leads us to the conclusion that "…the Christian church knows why the state exists… better than the state itself." (16) And it is from this conviction that one overcomes the supposed prophetic irrelevancy to which Niebuhr wants to condemn pacifists.

A central concept Yoder advances is what he calls "middle axioms" (32-33, 35, 47, 72-73) that are "halfway between meaningless broad generalities and unrealistically precise prescriptions… midway between absolute moral principles and mere pragmatic common sense." (33, n.3) To reconcile the claims of the state and the convictions of the Church, Yoder tries to find that area of grey that might satisfy both. Going into each example would be redundant here, though it seems as though one of the central issues he forces each view to confront is the privileged nature of reason and justice known apart from or held over and above revelation. Yoder's own view attempts to combine Niebuhr's rightful insistence on the persistence of sin, the unknowable nature of justice as a norm/middle axiom, and the agape-love of Christ as the foundation upon which the created order rests.

Yoder's Body Politics, written 28 years later, explores specific embodied practices (hence the title) that the church offers the watching world; binding & loosing, Eucharist, baptism, diversity of gifts, and open meetings. The inclusion of this text was meant to provide a somatic/ecclesial response to the generally abstracted theology of Witness and other scholarly treatises, which it did quite well. Perhaps unfairly, I re-read Body Politics with Witness in mind, trying to find points of connection with my pre-determined project.

In Witness, Yoder only sporadically brings in the notion of vocation/calling, and usually to make the point that the burden of proof is upon the statesman, not the pacifist, that theirs is a calling from God. In Body Politics, this theme comes under greater scrutiny. His mention in his chapter on Eucharist is exemplary; keeping in mind the Medieval/Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran distinctions he describes in Witness, between two realms (the political and the ecclesial), Yoder instead insists "The Gospel response to this notion is not that there is no such thing as a Christian calling or vocation, but that it is not to be distinguished from or contrasted with following Jesus." (26)

A similar criticism is again leveled in his conclusion, in which he claims the these major Christian traditions set up "a firm dualism separating Christ from culture… [in which] social ethics can and should be less authentically derived from the gospel than should Christian thought and witness in any other realm of discourse." (75) The gospels, he reminds us, should be more constitutive for Christians than later 'developed' or 'enlightened' intellectual discourse and theoretical abstraction.

~

I found Witness to be much more directly relevant to my thesis, though Body Politics was not without value. In the former, I found myself making connections to thoughts I am exploring more deeply, whereas in the latter, I had a robust exploration of how that witness is bodily enacted. I had a few thoughts left hanging;

Questions

If it is true that "The good action is measured by its conformity to the command and to the nature of God" (Witness, 44), then how can the Church learn obedience from its soldier saints like Martin, Ignatius, Francis, etc.?

Yoder claims (in the negative) it would be apostasy for a nation to claim "the sword is itself not part of the fall." (Witness, 38) But his emphasis on the Bible makes this connection difficult, as violence does not seem present until well after Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden. Does he equate "the sword" not with violence per se, but with general disobedience?

Yoder's insistence that "communication to the statesman is… pastoral" (Witness, 24) is much appreciated. He qualifies "pastoral" by reminding us that it includes looking to the stranger with an esteem that does not exclude God's judgment. This is not what most ministers mean when that same word is uttered. Usually, divine appraisal is associated with the 'prophetic' office. In his larger body of work, does Yoder maintain this distinction between the pastoral and the prophetic, or challenge it, as he does here?

Discussion

Transcirpt

Logan M. Isaac: Okay.

Stanley Hauerwas: You're right — your response to The Christian Witness to the State, locating at its heart the claim that the church gets to tell the world what it is, is an extraordinary claim, and it's at the heart of what Yoder's about. Where you write, "In fact, to take the universal vocation of the church seriously, it leads us to the conclusion that... the Christian Church knows why the state exists better than the state itself. And it is from this conviction that one overcomes the supposed prophetic irrelevancy to which Niebuhr wants to condemn pacifists" — that's very well put. But what I didn't see you doing is showing how central Yoder's eschatological view — that you live at the same time between two ages — is for sustaining that claim, and why that's crucial for his fundamental church/world dualism.

Logan: Him being Yoder, or Niebuhr?

Hauerwas: Yoder. And the crucial distinction between church and world isn't a Lutheran "kingdom of God, kingdom of the world," law-and-gospel dualism — it's a difference between agencies. I just think it's very important to get a handle on that, Logan.

Logan: Okay.

Hauerwas: It also has to do with — John increasingly backed away from the middle-axioms approach. You use it here fairly clearly, but a middle-axioms approach often presupposes a kind of Constantinian strategy for the church still being in play, and more continuity between church and world than you can really sustain. I just wanted to make sure you'd registered the eschatological claim about living at the same time in two ages. Do you have a response to that?

Logan: No — I was just trying to take it in. I wasn't really trying to explore it that much yet. I didn't have a response. I was still just trying to listen to you on Yoder, well. I did want to ask — so what do you...

Hauerwas: Well, the reason I raise it has partly to do with the second email you sent — about "I think just war as a framework has been set up by people who are categorically exempt from the consequences of the very policy of which they give shape. The problem is this puts me on the side of Yoder against Niebuhr." What do you mean by that?

Logan: Well, the way he reads Niebuhr is that Niebuhr wants to, or does, relegate Christian pacifists to prophetic irrelevancy. But I worry — this is part of my underlying thesis, part of what I told Dr. Smith — that if I'm honest, I'd like to discredit Augustine as the founder of just war, because there was something going on prior to Augustine that he doesn't seem to take into account: people who were actually in the military, working from that lived assumption. So what I worry I'm doing is saying the same thing about the theologies of just war more broadly — that they don't take into account the people who have a dog in the fight, I guess.

Hauerwas: Well, that's not true of Augustine.

Logan: Okay.

Hauerwas: I think Augustine's reflections on justifiable war were primarily pastoral. If you read the Atkins–Dodaro collection [transcribed as "Pidaro"/"Nadar-Nardaro" — verify] of his letters to Marcellinus and other figures, you'll see these were Christians who were mayors of cities, wondering how to negotiate penitential practice — how do you punish wrongdoers? Augustine was reflecting on that as a pastoral problem and trying to provide some direction.

Logan: Do you think — I had that question about the term "pastoral." In the contemporary church we tend to put "pastoral" on one side and "prophetic" on the other. Does Yoder maintain that distinction?

Hauerwas: No. I think Yoder would say any strong distinction between prophetic and pastoral betrays the fact that the church itself is at once prophetic and pastoral. He'd call that distinction into question. Some years ago I wrote something called "The Pastor as Prophet" that you might find useful — it's in a book called Christian Existence Today.

Logan: Okay — is that a journal?

Hauerwas: No, it's my book.

Logan: Oh — and you said "The Pastor is Prophet," or...?

Hauerwas: The essay is called "The Pastor is Prophet."

Logan: Okay. Before I forget — I'm slated to read the letter to Boniface, I think, or two of his letters. Are there other Augustine letters you'd recommend?

Hauerwas: The letters to Marcellinus, in the Atkins–Dodaro collection — Political Writings. It's terrific; Warren will know it well. But here's why the eschatological point matters so much for Yoder: my premise is something like yours — theologians, pastors, are exempt from the personal consequences of the very thing they describe or oppose, namely war. Now, Yoder wouldn't put it quite that way, because for him it's already the church telling the world what it is, which makes the word "personal" itself problematic. But tell me more about the worry you're working through.

Logan: I came to all this after my own combat deployment, and I couldn't get past the sense that just war theory, for most of its history, has been much more interested in policymakers. It doesn't speak much to me, or probably to the numerical majority of people who actually fight wars. So I want to say that people like me know something about war — that there's an epistemological value to lived experience. That's really the thesis underneath this thesis: what is the epistemological value of lived experience, particularly through war? My reading of just war philosophy — and this may not be fair — is that it abstracts away from lived experience in order to understand the thing it's studying.

Hauerwas: For Luther, though — and for others in the tradition on just war — when asked, "Is it the job of the soldier to determine whether the war is just?" Luther's answer is no. That's the job of the prince. If the soldier fights a war the prince has declared just, even if it isn't, the soldier is exempt from that judgment. So the very idea that a soldier's experience might bear on whether a war is morally justified is a very modern development — it draws on presumptions of democratic citizenship.

Logan: Yeah, I realize it comes from the assumption that the individual is sovereign — which is very democratic, very modern.

Hauerwas: Some of that. It doesn't necessarily carry strong sovereignty claims about the individual — it just assumes your experience matters in some way. And that hasn't been the predominant presumption in most reflection on war prior to, say, the eighteenth century.

Logan: Part of my response to the Luther point, in my head, is — I'm not sure it works to assume that... I don't think he necessarily disagreed, but I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. If the prince says it's okay, and he bears the responsibility — take Afghanistan. Most people would call that a more-or-less just war. And yet we still have people coming home with extreme feelings of guilt. Or, another example, not war: a farmer in Shiner, Texas is having a barbecue with his farmhands. He hears screaming from the barn, goes to find one of his workers sexually assaulting his daughter. He pulls the man off, beats him, calls 911 himself — and by the time they arrive the assailant has died. By all accounts this man did nothing morally wrong. And yet he still expresses guilt. So what do we do with that disconnect — the idea that it should be the state's responsibility, the way we say the President is responsible, and yet—

Hauerwas: The way most just-war thinkers would put that is that it's a psychological problem, not a moral one, regarding the justification of war — and you handle psychological problems psychologically. I'm not terribly happy with that response, Logan, but that's how it would work, I think. Which means the actual experience of soldiers in war wouldn't itself be a defining feature in judgments about the morality of warfare.

Logan: Okay.

Hauerwas: Now — does Yoder give you a way of addressing that, that you don't get from someone like Niebuhr?

Logan: Not the so-called psychological response — that's part of what's fueling my cognitive dissonance here. But I think Yoder's claim that the church is actually more central to the created order than the state is really helpful — it allows someone to obey God rather than man, rather than the officers appointed by the state.

Hauerwas: Right.

Logan: The week before this, I read a chapter from the Cambridge history of the church that went through warfare and then into Bishop Ricka's career [name unclear in recording] — the church's career. That's why I thought this was a good time to read Witness to the State, to work out the relationship. Something was becoming something, and I was looking indirectly at the Constantinian shift and all that.

Hauerwas: Right — and what's really important is why the church/world dualism matters so much: for Yoder, the Constantinian shift creates a "we" that shouldn't exist if the church/world dualism is determinative. So you don't ask, "What should we do about the Taliban?" — because that question already implicates you in a narrative not disciplined by the church/world dualism. It puts you in a fundamentally different context than Niebuhr would. For Niebuhr, the "we" of the Christian community and the "we" of the State Department pursuing policies to make America safer are the same "we." For Yoder, those two "we"s can never be the same.

Logan: Could we talk a little about justice? You mentioned — I didn't put this in a question, but I meant to — where he's describing Niebuhr's middle axiom and comparing him to liberal pacifists, and he says justice as a norm is not a fixed point. On my copy it's around page 67. He writes something like: "Niebuhr has seen that justice is a relative and instrumental concept, and not a fixed and clearly definable norm." I'm also reading a bit about natural law elsewhere, which makes some sense — but could you give me some background? Avoiding relativism — what does either Yoder or Niebuhr mean when they say justice isn't fixed?

Hauerwas: For Niebuhr, justice is always the working-out of the most equitable balance of power possible in specific historical circumstances — it matters that labor has organizational power to qualify the power of the owner of the steel mill. But it's always an ongoing negotiation about what constitutes equitability. Yoder agrees with Niebuhr that justice isn't simply given but has to be worked out historically — though he doesn't agree about "equitable balance of power." He never quite says what justice means, but I think he's fairly close to certain forms of Marxism, where need determines justice.

Logan: What about eschatologically — does justice have any teeth?

Hauerwas: Sure — Christians are always committed to the protection of the innocent, that the widow be cared for, the orphan given safety, and so on. That's how Yoder would think of it — not in a Rawlsian sense of providing a theory of justice for society as a whole, but: are you caring for the poor, are you protecting the orphan? That's biblical.

Logan: I think this might be my last question, unless you want to get into other things. He talks about the sword — I think it's on page 38.

Hauerwas: Right, where?

Logan: Page 38.

Hauerwas: I made a note to talk to you about that. You ask whether he equates the sword not with violence per se but with general disobedience. The sword is made necessary by our sin, but it isn't equated with disobedience, though there's obviously a relation. Notice at the top of 38: "The real error... need not be confessed and apostasy need not be cultic to be expressive of central rebellion against God. The real error of this religious criterion for the apostasy of the state is not the most extreme evil it would identify, but the implication that there can be an exercise of violent dominion which is not intrinsically self-glorifying — that there can be a nationalism which is not idolatry, or a total war which is not intrinsic evidence of the state's absolutizing itself." In other words: the sword is itself part of the fall.

Logan: Yeah, I had that underlined, and I wrote in the margin, "How does Yoder narrate the Fall?" — because he seems to cling fairly closely to the biblical narrative, but violence doesn't appear until Cain and Abel. I'm trying to work out how he's using the language of the sword in parallel with sin.

Hauerwas: As I said, the sword is the result of sin — not necessarily sin itself. What people often miss is that Yoder isn't saying the sword is necessary for a state to be a state. It just turns out that's usually how it works.

Logan: Okay. But how does that interact with his criticism of the utopian idea that we're moving toward an ideal we can achieve? What does a state without the sword look like?

Hauerwas: He doesn't know. You'll have to discover that. There's a very important comment — Yoder is so precise — in the small print at the bottom of page 39, where he says something like: "We may observe the symbolic demonstration of this point in the fact that anarchy is only a word, a grammatical invention" — an imaginary concept. There's no such thing as anarchy.

Logan: Yeah, yeah.

Hauerwas: You could write books on that alone. There's no such thing as anarchy — there are varying forms of government, from tyranny to constitutional democracy, varying degrees. So the "what about Hitler" question — if you don't have some commitment to the sword, won't the world go to hell in a handbasket, won't anarchy result? Yoder's answer is no: you're always going to have people providing various forms of order, and it's not unthinkable that some of those forms of order would be an expression of nonviolence. And on page 40 — this addresses the "are you withdrawing" question — he writes something like: "We refer here not only to the cultural activities of the entire fabric — community and togetherness, attitudes of honesty, mutual respect, hard work and clean thinking, unselfishness, tolerance — which Christian witness creates not only among the committed church members but also [what] we have called moral osmosis," and so on. Living truthfully within social orders is one of the things Christians do to be of service — you're not withdrawing at all. He also writes that "the Christian social critique will therefore distrust every proposal to sacrifice personal values in the present for future institutional benefit — especially if the making of the sacrifice and the later achievement of the good purpose are entrusted to the political authorities and vision to the establishment of a better order." That's his case against the utopian move.

Logan: I realized — the comment about whether the sword is necessary: if the sword derives from sin, you can do away with the sword, but you can never do away with sin. That connects to Niebuhr too — what I really liked about the middle-axiom idea is that everything is weighed down by the weight of sin. It doesn't go away.

Hauerwas: Yeah.

Logan: And it persists in the world — and in the church.

Hauerwas: And in the church, of course. Yeah. John loved diagrams.

Logan: Yeah, this was — I was intimidated at first. I thought, "What is all this drawing?" But once I started reading it, I got it.

Hauerwas: His proposal is anti-sectarian, in terms of how the church discovers the possibility of living within her own life nonviolently, which gives her political sensibilities she can recommend to the state — the state is open to that kind of living. His exegesis of Romans 13 is terrific too.

I went to Notre Dame in 1970. I was going to teach a course on Christian ethics and democratic society, went out and met John, and got a copy of this book somehow. I wanted to use it in the class, but it was out of print, so I wrote to Faith and Life Press in Newton, Kansas — and this is the letter I got back: "We have written to Dr. C. J. Dyck of the Institute of Mennonite Studies, to see whether Dr. John Howard Yoder desires to have a reprinted edition. As soon as we know the extent of any revision, we'll determine whether to reprint The Christian Witness to the State. We're willing to reprint the book — the decision was waiting on whether it would be incorporated into a larger volume Dr. Yoder was considering." He didn't do that, so they reprinted the book so I could use it in class.

Logan: Huh, interesting.

Hauerwas: That's a responsive community. There's nonviolence inherent in that itself.

Logan: Mm. To the Yoderian exemplification. If we have time — one of the things Yoder does new in his proposed middle axiom... I'm looking at the diagram, where I wrote "self-sacrifice" in the cloud. I can't remember exactly how he phrased it, but he said the statesman can't really see what's above the norm of justice, the middle axiom — page 73: "Looking directly up, he can see only a cloud, within which he fears there might lie an ideal demand for self-sacrifice, which he understands as suicide — i.e., not a meaningful alternative. The point at which agape becomes meaningful for him is rather the point at which... the relevance of love operating from within the realm of faith goes out of sight through this wall." I take that to be what he means by the middle axiom.

Hauerwas: Mm-hmm.

Logan: I'm trying to tie this to my first question — whether and to what extent "the good action is measured by its conformity to the command," on page 44, conformity to command and to the nature of God — and how that connects to a question I had at the peace conference: what does the military have to teach the church? One answer, I imagine, is this conformity to command for the sake of the commander. I don't know if there's a more sophisticated eschatological way to understand that, other than to say—

Hauerwas: He doesn't say self-sacrifice is a middle axiom.

Logan: No, no — self-sacrifice was the cloud he can't really see.

Hauerwas: Right.

Logan: And all he knows is that it's an ideal demand for self-sacrifice, which he understands as suicide.

Hauerwas: Mm-hmm.

Logan: And I don't think he's equating the two, but he sees it that way—

Hauerwas: He's saying an emperor would understand self-sacrifice as suicide. He's got a great passage on this — let me find it... It's in The Priestly Kingdom. Something like: from the time of Constantine to the sixteenth-century Swiss Brethren leader Michael Sattler, including the witness of the fifteenth-century Czech figure Chelčický [transcribed as "Šiška"/"Čekli" — verify], people have assumed that what it takes to be a Caesar is firmly defined by a lifestyle and set of moral assumptions counter to the gospel. The choice, as Chelčický and Sattler stated it, is that a Christian simply cannot do that — he can withdraw or be thrown out. But it would be logically possible to argue the other way: that Caesar would be just as free as anyone else to take a risk in faith. In an authentically imperial society with respect for monarchy, without a theory calling for revolution, without an established pattern of frequent assassination or usurpation, Caesar would be perfectly free to bring the ordinary meaning of the Christian faith to bear on the exercise of his office. It might happen that his enemies would triumph over him — but that often happens to rulers anyway. He might have to suffer, or not stay in office his whole life — but that too happens to rulers, and Christians are supposed to be ready for it. He might be killed — but most Caesars are killed anyway. Some of his followers might have to suffer — but emperors and kings are accustomed to having people suffer for them. So a Caesar could act like a Christian.

Logan: Mm-hmm. It wouldn't be much different. Okay.

Hauerwas: It's not — what's the big deal?

Logan: I'm trying to make the connection between my instinct — ingrained in me — to obey.

Hauerwas: Mm-hmm.

Logan: How do I translate that into a virtue the church understands not as obedience as such, but obedience by virtue of the one who commands it? That's another one of my—

Hauerwas: The one who commands it, for Yoder, is God.

Logan: Right — I think that's true for the church as well. But how do I take what I've learned and help the church learn the same thing? What would that look like?

Hauerwas: Part of it — a wonderful text for you to reflect on would be Jesus' interaction with the soldier who does what he's commanded to do, in the Gospels.

Logan: The centurion — "great faith"?

Hauerwas: Yes — the healing of his daughter.

Logan: Mm-hmm.

Hauerwas: There are clearly analogies between learning to obey in a context like that and obedience to God — though obviously obedience to God is going to limit the soldier's obedience in the other case. What are you reading next?

Logan: For Dr. Smith, I'm reading a book — Fields, I think — Liberty, Dominion, and the Two Swords, with some material on Hilary of Poitiers and Martin of Tours. I'm moving into how the theology of the two swords developed. I can't remember the exact chapters I selected.

Hauerwas: Ah — good.

Logan: So I'm moving into historical theology a bit with Dr. Smith. And then I have to decide which martyrdom text you and I will do — either York's or Whitefield's [as transcribed — verify], I think. They both look very interesting.

Hauerwas: They're both good.

Logan: I might be able to read both, I don't know. But we'll be discussing martyrdom and the two swords alongside each other. Okay — I think that's it.

Hauerwas: Good.

Logan: I'm going to take off. I think that's all I need from you. I really appreciate it.

Hauerwas: Yeah. Take care.