The Politics of Jesus

John Howard Yoder

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9781467420426
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Instituciones y organizaciones religiosas

Tradition has painted a portrait of a Savior aloof from governmental concerns and whose teachings point to an apolitical life for his disciples. How, then, are we to respond today to a world so thoroughly entrenched in national and international affairs? But such a picture of Jesus is far from accurate, argues John Howard Yoder. Using the texts of the New Testament, Yoder critically examines the traditional portrait of Jesus as an apolitical figure and attempts to clarify the true impact of Jesus' life, work, and teachings on his disciples' social behavior. The book first surveys the multiple ways the image of an apolitical Jesus has been propagated, then canvasses the Gospel narrative to reveal how Jesus is rightly portrayed as a thinker and leader immediately concerned with the agenda of politics and the related issues of power, status, and right relations. Selected passages from the epistles corroborate a Savior deeply concerned with social, political, and moral issues. In this thorough revision of his acclaimed 1972 text, Yoder provides updated interaction with publications touching on this subject. Following most of the chapters are new "epilogues" that summarize research conducted during the last two decades -- research that continues to support the insights set forth in Yoder's original work. Currently a standard in many college and seminary ethics courses, The Politics of Jesus is also an excellent resource for the general reader desiring to understand Christ's response to the world of politics and his will for those who would follow him.

CHAPTER 1

The Possibility of a Messianic Ethic

The Problem

The peculiar place of Jesus in the mood and mind of many young “rebels” is a sore spot in the recent intergenerational tension of Western post-Christendom, and one of the inner contradictions of our age’s claim to have left Christendom behind. It may be a meaningless coincidence that some young men wear their hair and their feet like the Good Shepherd of the Standard Press Sunday school posters; but there is certainly no randomness to their claim that Jesus was, like themselves, a social critic and an agitator,¹ a drop-out from the social climb, and the spokesman of a counterculture.

The equation is so glib, and so surrounded by the not-sure-I-really-mean-it indirection of the age of McLuhan, that the Christian ethicist can just as glibly pass it off as not only irreverent but also irrelevant to the real business of ethics. But is it that simple? Or might it be that in this half-spoofing exaggeration there is breaking into common awareness a dimension of biblical truth that we—precisely the reverent and relevant ethicists—had been hiding from ourselves?

This study makes that claim. It claims not only that Jesus is, according to the biblical witness, a model of radical political action, but that this issue is now generally visible throughout New Testament studies, even though the biblical scholars have not stated it in such a way that the ethicists across the way have had to notice it.²

This “stating it” is all the present study tries to do; to let the Jesus story so speak that the person concerned with social ethics, as accustomed as such a person is to a set of standard ways to assume Jesus not to be relevant to social issues, or at least not relevant immediately, can hear.

Such an effort at interdisciplinary “translation” has its own set of serious perils. To both the parties whom it attempts to bring into hailing range of one another it must seem to be oversimplifying, since it begins by disrespecting the boundaries, and the axioms, of each discipline, and since the “translator” or bridge-builder is always somehow partly an alien, partly a layperson blundering beyond his or her depth. We may plead only that if the experts had built the bridge we need, the layperson would not have needed to.

Our study, then, seeks to describe the connection which might relate New Testament studies³ with contemporary social ethics, especially since this latter discipline is currently preoccupied with the problems of power and revolution.⁴ Theologians have long been asking how Jerusalem can relate to Athens; here the claim is that Bethlehem has something to say about Rome—or Masada.

By what right dare one seek to throw a cable across the chasm which usually separates the disciplines of New Testament exegesis and contemporary social ethics? Normally any link between these realms of discourse would have to be extremely long and indirect. First there is an enormous distance between past and present to be covered by way of hermeneutics from exegesis to contemporary theology; then still another long leg must be covered from theology to ethics via secular sociology and Ernst Troeltsch. From the perspective of the historical theologian, normally perched on an island between these two spans and thus an amateur on both banks, I can justify leaping into the problem in such an amateur way on only two grounds. For one thing, it seems that the experts who set out to go the long way around never get there. The Scripture scholars in their hermeneutic meditations develop vast systems of crypto-systematics, and the field of ethics remains as it was; or, if anything new happens there, it is usually fed from some other sources.⁵

The other reason for my boldness, which would be in its own right also a subject for debate in the exegetical guild, is the radical Protestant axiom, which more recently has been revitalized and characterized as “biblical realism,” according to which it is safer for the life of the church to have the whole people of God reading the whole body of canonical Scripture than to trust for enlightenment only to certain of the filtering processes through which the learned folk of a given age would insist all the truth must pass.⁶

It is thus not unawares, nor irresponsibly, that in the present book I take the risk of synthesis in proposing to bring the Jesus of the canonical Gospels into juxtaposition with the present. This hazardous venture involves no disrespect for the many kinds of historical questions which might be appropriately asked about the link between Jesus of the canonical Gospels and the other Jesuses whom scholarship can project.

Mainstream Ethics: Jesus Is Not the Norm

The classically naive approach once could assume an immediate connection between the work or the words of Jesus and what it would mean today to be faithful “In His Steps.”⁷ To this there is an equally classic nonnaive answer, which can be played back from every age in the history of Christian thought about society. Thus if we can restate this mainstream answer we will have set the stage for our argument. The first and most substantial affirmation of this classic defense against an ethic of imitation is the observation that Jesus is simply not relevant in any immediate sense to the questions of social ethics. The great variety of ways of grounding this negative statement can perhaps not unfairly be summarized in three theses, the first being the sixfold claim of Jesus’ irrelevance.⁸

1. The ethic of Jesus is an ethic for an “Interim” which Jesus thought would be very brief. It is possible for the apocalyptic Sermonizer on the Mount to be unconcerned for the survival of the structures of a solid society because he thinks the world is passing away soon. His ethical teachings therefore appropriately pay no attention to society’s need for survival and for the patient construction of permanent institutions. The rejection of violence, of self-defense, and of accumulating wealth for the sake of security, and the footlooseness of the prophet of the kingdom are not permanent and generalizable attitudes toward social values. They make sense only if it be assumed that those values are coming to an imminent end. Thus at any point where social ethics must deal with problems of duration, Jesus quite clearly can be of no help. If the impermanence of the social order is an axiom underlying the ethic of Jesus, then obviously the survival of this order for centuries has already invalidated the axiom. Thereby the survival of society, as a value in itself, takes on a weight which Jesus did not give it.⁹

2. Jesus was, as his Franciscan and Tolstoyan imitators have said, a simple rural figure. He talked about the sparrows and the lilies to fishermen and peasants, lepers and outcasts. His radical personalization of all ethical problems is only possible in a village sociology where knowing everyone and having time to treat everyone as a person is culturally an available possibility. The rustic “face-to-face model of social relations” is the only one he cared about. There is thus in the ethic of Jesus no intention to speak substantially to the problems of complex organization, of institutions and offices, cliques and power and crowds.

3. Jesus and his early followers lived in a world over which they had no control. It was therefore quite fitting that they could not conceive of the exercise of social responsibility in any form other than that of simply being a faithful witnessing minority. Now, however, that Christianity has made great progress in history, represented symbolically by the conversion of Constantine and practically by the “Judeo-Christian” assumptions underlying our entire Western culture, the Christian is obligated to answer questions which Jesus did not face. The individual Christian, or all Christians together, must accept responsibilities that were inconceivable in Jesus’ situation.¹⁰

4. The nature of Jesus’ message was ahistorical by definition. He dealt with spiritual and not social matters, with the existential and not the concrete. What he proclaimed was not a social change but a new self-understanding, not obedience but atonement. Whatever he said and did of a social and ethical character must be understood not for its own sake but as the symbolic or mythical clothing of his spiritual message.¹¹ If the Gospel texts were not sufficiently clear on this point, at least we are brought to a definitive clarity by the later apostolic writings. Especially Paul moves us away from the last trace of the danger of a social misunderstanding of Jesus and toward the inwardness of faith.

5. Or to say it just a little differently, Jesus was a radical monotheist. He pointed people away from the local and finite values to which they had been giving their attention and proclaimed the sovereignty of the only One worthy of being worshiped. The impact of this radical discontinuity between God and humanity, between the world of God and human values, is to relativize all human values. The will of God cannot be identified with any one ethical answer, or any given human value, since these are all finite. But the practical import of that relativizing, for the substance of ethics, is that these values have become autonomous. All that now stands above them is the infinite.¹²

6. Or the reason may be more “dogmatic” in tone. Jesus came, after all, to give his life for the sins of humankind. The work of atonement or the gift of justification, whereby God enables sinners to be restored to his fellowship, is a forensic act, a gracious gift. For Roman Catholics this act of justification may be found to be in correlation with the sacraments, and for Protestants with one’s self-understanding, in response to the proclaimed Word; but never should it be correlated with ethics. Just as guilt is not a matter of having committed particular sinful acts, so justification is not a matter of proper behavior. How the death of Jesus works our justification is a divine miracle and mystery; how he died, or the kind of life which led to the kind of death he died, is therefore ethically immaterial.

It results from this consideration of the type of thinking and teaching Jesus was doing, that it cannot have been his intention—or at least we cannot take it to have been his achievement—to provide any precise guidance in the field of ethics. His apocalypticism and his radical monotheism may teach us to be modest; his personalism may teach us to cherish the values of face-to-face relationships, but as to the stuff of our decision-making, we shall have to have other sources of help.

What Other Norm Is There?

The second substantial affirmation of the mainstream ethical consensus follows from the first. Since, as we have seen, Jesus himself (either his teachings or his behavior) is not finally normative for ethics, there must be some kind of bridge or transition into another realm or into another mode of thought when we begin to think about ethics. This is not simply a bridge from the first century to the present, but from theology to ethics or from the existential to the institutional. A certain very moderate amount of freight can be carried across this bridge: perhaps a concept of absolute love or humility or faith or freedom. But the substance of ethics must be reconstructed on our side of the bridge.

Third, therefore, the reconstruction of a social ethic on this side of the transition will derive its guidance from common sense and the nature of things. We will measure what is “fitting” and what is “adequate”; what is “relevant” and what is “effective.” We shall be “realistic” and “responsible.” All these slogans point to an epistemology for which the classic label is the theology of the natural: the nature of things is held to be adequately perceived in their bare givenness; the right is that which respects or tends toward the realization of the essentially given. Whether this ethic of natural law be encountered in the reformation form, where it is called an ethic of “vocation” or of the “station,” or in the currently popular form of the “ethic of the situation,” or in the older catholic forms where “nature” is known in other ways, the structure of the argument is the same: it is by studying the realities around us, not by hearing a proclamation from God, that we discern the right.¹³

Once these assumptions about the sources of a relevant social ethic and about the spirituality of Jesus’ own message have been made, we may then observe a kind of negative feedback into the interpretation of the New Testament itself. We now know, the argument runs, that Jesus could not have been practicing or teaching a relevant social ethic. Then the Jewish and Roman authorities, who thought he was doing just that and condemned him for it, must have misunderstood very seriously what he was about. This is an evidence of the hardness of their hearts. Matthew as well, who organized and interpreted the teachings of Jesus so as to make of them a simple kind of ethical catechism, misunderstood Jesus: from his misunderstanding arises that regrettable phenomenon which Protestant historians call “Early Catholicism.”¹⁴

Fortunately before long, the explanation continues, things were put into place by the apostle Paul. He corrected the tendency to neo-Judaism or to early catholicism by an emphasis upon the priority of grace and the secondary significance of works, so that ethical matters could never be taken too seriously.

Let those who have wives live as though they had none,

And those who mourn as though they were not mourning,

Those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing,

And those who buy as though they had no goods,

And those who deal with the world as though they had no...