The Priestly Kingdom

Social Ethics as Gospel

John Howard Yoder

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1985
• Print ISBN: 9780268016289, 9780268016272
• eBook ISBN: 9780268161682
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

In this volume of essays John Howard Yoder projects a vision of Christian social ethics rooted in historical community and illuminated by scripture. Drawing upon scriptural accounts of the early church, he demonstrates the Christian community's constant need for reform and change. Yoder first examines the scriptural and theoretical foundations of Christian social ethics. While personally committed to the "radical reformation" tradition, he eschews "denominational" categorization and addresses Christians in general. The status of Christian community, he argues, cannot be separated from the doctrinal content of beliefs and the moral understanding of discipleship. As a result, the Christian's voluntary commitment to a particular community, as distinct from secular society, offers him valuable resources for practical moral reasoning. From a historical perspective, Yoder reviews the efforts of sixteenth-century radical (or Anabaptist) reformers to return to the fundamental ethical standards of the New Testament, and to disengage the community, as a biblically rooted call to faith that does not imply withdrawal from the pluralistic world. Rather, radical commitment to Christianity strengthens and renews the authentic human interests and values of the whole society. His analyses of democracy and of civil religion illustrate how Christianity must challenge and embrace the wider world.

PART I

Foundations

1. The Hermeneutics of Peoplehood:

A Protestant Perspective

THE TASK OF THIS STUDY

It is not always necessary, and it is certainly not elegant, to begin an exposition with definitions of terms. Yet in this case it will be functional. Locating and justifying my subject is a major portion of this assignment.

“Protestant Ethics”

The territory of “Protestant ethics” is even less subject to being helpfully included in standard typological categories than the other major traditions. There are all kinds of diversities within Judaism or within Roman Catholicism; yet one can at least define an affirmative social and historic center around which those diversities cluster and can be clarified. No such simplicity for the “Protestant.” Protestantism never was either a single social organization or a single intellectual system. Its common marks are negative, even when they are stated in affirmative form like the (historically not very well-founded) Tillichian notion of a “Protestant principle.”

I therefore despair of coming up with any proper definition of what Protestant identity is supposed to be. That despair is not traumatic; nonetheless it separates me from some of the more easily constructed current typologies.

It would drive us even farther in the direction of a not immediately helpful cataloguing process if I attempted to define “Protestant” by way of the history of the term. My own ethnic and denominational orientation, by birth and by choice, represents a tradition which for most of the centuries since the Reformation has not been acknowledged by Protestants as belonging among them.¹ From this perspective, the camp which is usually called “Protestant” represents an unstable bridge position between, on the one hand, a fundamentally critical renewal of all Christian thought oriented by a renewed simplicity of understanding of the authority of Scripture and, on the other hand, the heritage of the medieval establishment in which the Bible, the established social order, and the sum of all human wisdom had flowed together in one great fusion.

Nonetheless, one trait which unites those called “Protestant,” across the spectrum from “mainstream” to “radical,” is the conviction that in the earlier history of Christianity something had gone wrong. For some, the corrective change that would be needed should be minimal, limited to those points “necessary for salvation,” with no intention to call into question the inherited church order. For others, the change needs to be sweeping. But that there needs to be critical change at all means in any case that our moral reasoning cannot proceed unself-critically. We can never simply stand on the shoulders of an unquestioned consensus from the past, claiming it to be “catholic” and assuming its acceptability simply by virtue of the claim that it has been believed always everywhere by everyone.

This does not mean that the classical Vincentian criterion always/everywhere/everyone becomes useless. Far from it: in Protestantism it became a critical tool to use in naming and rejecting what the Reformers believed to have been medieval or pagan accretions. (Especially was this done by John Oecolampad.) Its function was the “Protestant” or critical one of labeling aspects of medieval tradition which needed to be denounced because one can show when, or where, or by whom they had not been believed.

The implication of this one critical beginning move, once initiated, can then be projected minimally or maximally. For our present purposes, I suggest that there be no prior discussion of “how far” to carry the critical thrust, or “at what point” it needs to be buffered or diluted by “realistic” or “pastoral” or “ecumenical” considerations. This leaves me then to define the criterion of Protestant identity in the course of its use, in the perennially unfinished process of critiquing the developed tradition from the perspective of its own roots.² The critical process and the commitment to scriptural accountability which it incarnates are more important for definitional purposes than any particular denominational narratives (including my own) through which that critical concern has left its tracks.

If there is to be a fundamental skepticism about what everybody everywhere always thought, we shall expect it to include an element of challenge concerning who was doing the thinking before. That theology should only be taught by theologians, that catechesis and confession must be reserved to the duly ordained, and that decisions about the exercise of power need primarily to be made by the people who legitimately hold that power, are elements of the previously prevailing moral wisdom which it is not merely permissible but imperative to doubt. This doubt is expressed classically in the New Testament, which says that all of God’s people should be kings, or priests, or prophets, or charismatics. Any reservation of the responsibility for moral discernment to a specialist must be challenged, especially if that specialist is understood to hold authority partly because he is one of a category of persons separated from the life-situations of people making moral choices.³ Different “Protestant” criticisms have made this point with different degrees of radicality, but all have in some way or another sought to redefine or to relocate the prerogative of the priesthood in moral discernment.

To begin my definition modestly I should say that, for our purposes, all that is sure about “Protestant” identity is that it is not Roman Catholic: it does not have a pope or magisterium with theologically imperative, morally binding authority, nor a structure of confession and absolution wherewith to educate and to enforce. Yet that negation is not made on behalf of a counter-patriarch or an anti-magisterium, but rather by virtue of a critical principle of appeal to the sources, which can reach unpredictably farther than those who first called themselves “Protestant” dreamed.

“Practical Moral Reasoning”

By “practical moral reasoning” is meant (I take it) that people make particular choices which are illuminated by their general faith commitments, but which still need to be worked through by means of detailed here-and-now thought processes. Thus it is not possible in a strict sense to discuss “the place of” practical moral reasoning as if there could be ethics without it, i.e., as if one could choose to “use” or “not to use” it. Then the question is in what context it occurs, what weight it has.

It would be possible to construct a typology of the various ways Protestants talk about other things than practical moral reasoning, so that practical moral reasoning would take different places in the total context of their concerns. The other things they talk about have different relationships to ethics in general and to practical moral reasoning in particular. To orient ourselves on this extensive terrain, I shall allude to some obvious examples, but with no claim to fullness, nor even with much claim to fairness in detail.

1. One set of Protestants is concerned for the authenticity of religious self understanding. They feel that morality, hard to separate from moralism, may easily become (or perhaps in fact always is) a barrier to authenticity, so that there is positive importance attached to not talking about practical moral reasoning. This approach has various pietistic and existentialistic variants.

For our present purposes Rudolf Bultmann, at least as he is received, may be taken as a prototype. Thomas Oden has written a very competent, sympathetic summary of the thought of Bultmann in this realm, under the heading Radical Obedience (1964). The agenda of ethics here becomes the occasion to work at the authenticity of religious self-understanding. The most important resource for such renewal is the lesson which must be learned, and learned again and again, that nothing that we can do makes us any better. So Radical Obedience is not about ethics. It is about authenticity, and about how authenticity is safeguarded, in Rudolf Bultmann’s theology, by means of a preoccupation with openness to the present and the future, which forbids any material ethical content. It can only ever be known within a given situation what the needs of the neighbor in that situation are. The function of the statements of the law is not to tell us what to do, nor to provide substantial background to the interpretation of the “situation,” but only to exemplify and dramatize our standing without any merits or righteousness of our own before God. So Oden’s entire book makes no reference to any specific decisions, nor to any specific words of Torah which might illuminate moral decisions, nor even to any specimens to fill out the concept of “the concrete situation.” All that we need to know about particular decisions is the drive of love and the grace of freedom with which we enter the situation, to discover then and there what it will mean, just then and there, to love the neighbor. Oden does not explain (and properly not, because Bultmann does not explain) how that process of “discovering” in the context what the neighbor needs will proceed. Neither the factual data explaining what the available choices are, nor those considerations which other people would call “value” data that explain why one choice is preferable to another, should be talked about ahead of time for fear of destroying the authenticity of the command of God in the moment. The reader is at a loss to know, on the one hand, whether this is because all values are assumed to be selfevident, so that there may be a very concrete process of practical moral reasoning going on. (Bultmann is not interested in talking about such a process, though, because it would be on a more mechanical level than he is interested in: one can hardly go wrong if one loves genuinely.) Or on the other hand is Bultmann actually claiming, as some existentialists and some pietists would like him to say, that knowing what is needed will come in a flash of intuition with no moral reasoning at all?

It goes without saying that there need be in such a subjectively concerned portrayal no reference to the social dimension of ethics: neither a word to the church as a community counseling me, nor any critique of or word to the “world” or the “principalities and powers” or multinational corporations or universities or races, as entities impinging upon me or upon the neighbor I am supposed to love in this situation.

Bultmann does not acknowledge the sociopolitical dimensions even by denying that they are important. There is nothing “radical” about the resulting behavior, in the ordinary social meaning of that adjective. Perhaps Bultmann’s word “situation” could be expanded to include consideration of those matters; yet in the text itself the main function of the noun “situation” is not to draw our attention to a specifiable location of the person within structures beyond the self, but rather to draw our minds away from any temporal continuity, especially from any preparation before the “situation” in order to make an informed response to it.

It would be a mistake, in our brief sampling, to take this specimen as one of several possible ways to do moral reasoning. It is rather one of the few standard ways to do without it, or not to do it. Therefore it does not really show on the grid of our agenda. The detour was nonetheless important, precisely because it makes us recognize that there are particular protypically “Protestant” pastoral perspectives from which the possibility or the fruitfulness of practical moral reasoning are overshadowed or even set aside for the sake of other concerns, notably the salvation or the authenticity of the individual.

The radical discontinuity of Søren Kierkegaard’s “suspension of the ethical” is one more failed way to drive home the same point. Ronald Green has shown that no one before Kierkegaard ever gave such a meaning to the story of Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac,⁴ but that is not why the point fails. Nor is it that Kierkegaard assumes a notion of a father’s moral duties and the son’s rights quite foreign to the age of Abraham.⁵ It is that by writing about the text as he does, using it to make a point as he does, Kierkegaard after all makes the “suspension” of the (ordinary) “ethical” into a case to be explained “teleologically.” “Whenever God himself tells you⁶ to do something, even if it is something (otherwise) quite wrong, do it.” Thus despite himself, Kierkegaard brings the akedah obedience of Abraham back into the realm of tragic necessity. It was after all the obedient thing, the right thing to do. (We need not blame Kierkegaard himself for the fact, but it is a fact that some have made his “teleological” suspension into a case for a utilitarian ethic, without being as clear as Abraham was about the voice of God. Instead of the suspension of “the ethical” by a higher order of faith imperative, we have the suspension of a norm in favor of a higher ethical value.)

2. Another set of mainstream Protestants would not go as far as Bultmann, but would retain, together with him, a strong concern for keeping ethics from distorting the framework of pastoral concern. The general Lutheran accent upon the discrimination between law and gospel does not set aside ethical deliberation, but is concerned to keep it in its place. This has a chastening impact upon the amount of time and attention which concrete ethical matters tend to be given, yet without rejecting practical moral reasoning. The great compendia of Thielecke or of Søe testify that one can still say a lot after the law/gospel preamble has been stated.

3. Protestant scholasticism, when in the seventeenth century it took its critical stance over against Roman Catholicism, claimed that the Bible was the only moral authority and announced a fundamental suspicion of moral discernment when (as in Catholic moral theology) such discernment claims rootage in reason, nature, and tradition. Yet when this official Protestantism turned to the problems of administering its own society, there resulted at the time no profound difference between it and Catholicism on any practical moral issues: divorce, usury, war, or truth-telling. Protestantism, by rebelling against Rome, had opened the gates for freer theological change from then on, but not intentionally: not because of fundamentally different ideas about the foundations of practical moral reasoning.

4. In that same seventeenth century Protestants could welcome the polemic of Pascal, in his Provincial Letters, over against the probabilism advocated by some of the Jesuits of his time. For the sake of radical obedience Pascal took the position which Bultmann rejects, namely, that only a firm criterion not at all within our discretion can give roots to moral accountability.

It would be worthwhile in some other context to try to fill out and make fully fair this kind of inventory of types of reasoning. For present purposes, however, it suffices to show that the various concerns of a polemic or pastoral character do not in most cases correlate in any predictable or verifiable way with a different set of outcomes in particular decisions, e.g., about just war or justifiable divorce. The variations which we have observed do not create a balanced or rounded scheme or scale. They do not answer the same question differently. They rather attend to different questions. They do not correspond fully with classical denominational traditions or theological families. The argument with Pascal comes closest to making such a difference, but he represents the debate within one tradition of pastoral casuistry, rather than between different theological families.

Thus there is no reason, arising out of the comparison of major schools, to think that being “Protestant” is in itself a necessary and sufficient determinant of one distinctive style of practical moral reasoning. If we had hoped that some understanding of “Protestant identity” in the realm of moral reasoning would arise inductively out of the inventory of alternatives, as sometimes does happen for some questions, we should now be disappointed. But this is not the case. We have verified that the theme we are interpreting cannot be sorted out by means of some simple principles of classification. It is rather a variety of phenomena for which the phrase “practical moral reasoning” is too loose a grab bag. I take this conclusion not as a counsel of despair but rather as a step forward and as a reason to prefer my own definition to another that could (perhaps) be documented inductively out of the history of Protestant ethical thought. I therefore proceed to seek to define a coherent view without making the case that it synthesizes all the others.

This leaves me with a more modest and yet at the same time a more presumptuous definition of what perspective on practical moral reasoning ought fittingly to flow from what a Protestant identity is prototypically claimed to be. To the question, “which Protestantism?” I am now freer than I would have been before to give the simple answer: “my kind.” The claim that it is prototypical as contrasted with other streams of Protestantism will have to remain implicit. An intra-Protestant debate would be worthwhile but not on this occasion. Some name the following account “free church” or “radical Protestant”; I would prefer to describe it as seeking to draw out consistent conclusions from the initial informal originality which marked the common Protestant origins in the early 1520s. But that it does that adequately, and in the only possible way, I do not now mean to argue.

AN OPEN PROCESS

At all your meetings, let everyone be ready with a Psalm or a sermon or a revelation.… As for prophets, let two or three speak, and the others attend to them.… (1 Cor. 14:26, 29)⁷

Both Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli were challenged in 1523 to make the case for the canonical autonomy of the local congregation. In Zurich the occasion was the January “disputation” convened by the city fathers to hear testimony on the accusation that their preacher Huldrych Zwingli was heretical. The only representative of the hierarchy who bothered to show up was the episcopal Vicar of Constance, John Faber, who contested the right of that assembly of guildsmen to debate theology. Zwingli’s response was based on 1 Corinthians 14, where the working of the spirit in the congregation is validated by the liberty with which the various gifts are exercised, especially by the due process with which every prophetic voice is heard and every witness evaluated. This dialogical liberty, which Zwingli once called “the rule of Paul,” did not become a reg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Foundations
• Part II: History
• Part III: The Public Realm
• Notes
• Index