Was the Early Church Pacifist?

Lots of people recently have been convinced by John Howard Yoder that the pre-Constantinian church fathers were all pacifists and then, in the fourth century, like the French Communist Party receiving news of the new party line from Moscow in 1941, abruptly reversed themselves and suddenly people like Augustine became rabid theocrats. So the answer to the question in the title of this post would be "Yes!" First they were pacifists and then suddenly they did a 180 degree turn over night. Is this a convincing reading of early church history?

In this post at First Thoughts a while back, Matthew Lee Anderson tentatively suggested that J. Daryl Charles just might be right - and John Howard Yoder wrong - about the stance of the church fathers on pacifism. Yoder famously said that the fathers up to the end of the third century were pacifists (though he thought that their convictions unfortunately weakened a bit during the "long peace" in the second half of the third century between the 9th and 10th great waves of persecution). In opposition to this view, Anderson reports, Charles argues that there is a great deal of ambiguity in the teachings of the Fathers on the issue of serving in the Roman army and pacifism with no evident consensus.

Now, we also must remember that Yoder famously lumped Augustine in with Eusebius and Constantine as creators of what he called "Christendom," which according to Yoder means something like a totalitarian theocracy - kind of like contemporary Iran with bishops replacing the mullahs.

Anderson quotes me offering a rebuttal to Peter Leithart on the meaning of the term "Constantinianism" in Yoder's writings. I pointed out that for Yoder, Constantinianism is an eschatological heresy, not an historical conclusion about what happened in the fourth century. For Yoder, Constantinianism is an illegitimate attempt to reach forward into the future and pull the kingdom of God into the present as if the kingdom had already come in its fullness. This idea is wrong whenever it pops up in history and if it isn't in a particular century or place that does not affect its existence as a theological idea. Well, I still think that is true, but I think Yoder also did contend that the church from the fourth century onward did fall into Constantinianism and Leithart is right about that.

So is Yoder right about the pre-Constantinian Fathers? Is he right about Augustine? Is he right about the "Constantinian Shift"? Is he right about "Constantinianism" being an eschatological heresy? Let's go one at a time.

1. Is Yoder right about the pre-Constantinian Fathers being pacifists? I now think that Charles and those who see more ambiguity in the first three centuries have the better of the argument. It is difficult to be categorical but the most I think we can say is that some early Christians took a pacifist position. But there is nothing decisive like the inclusion of the homoousion in the Nicene Creed to prove that it was an agreed upon doctrine of the ecumenical church. Yoder's view is not supportable by the facts.

2. Is Yoder right about Augustine? I have now read Augustine for myself and I am a bit embarrassed to report that Yoder is spectacularly wrong to lump Augustine in with Eusebius. Yes, the young Augustine got caught up in the excitement of the Theodosian settlement after his conversion in 386. But from about the middle of the 390s onward he gradually worked his way free of these assumptions through his biblical studies and by 410 was in a position to articulate his mature eschatology in The City of God. He renounced Eusebian postmillennialism and adopted his amillennial eschatology of the two cities, in which the State becomes part of the secular - that which belongs to this age - and is thoroughly desacralized. The doctrine of the separation of church and state is rooted in Augustine's thought and there is no basis for theocracy in The City of God.

3. Is Yoder right about the "Constantinian Shift"? I have to say that I think it is overblown by Yoder for one very good reason. Although there is a shift in that the church embraces the state to a considerable extent, the pacifist impulse continues in the form of monasticism while the impulse of the church to partner with the state has more precedents in pre-third century thought that Yoder would have us believe. So there is evolution but not a sudden, wrenching, 180 degree about face.

4. Is Yoder right about "Constantinianism"? I think he is both right and wrong about what he calls "Constantinianism." I think that the term is unfortunate, as is the tendency to equate "Christendom" with "Theocracy." More is obscured by this terminology than is illumined. First, the theologically illegitimate reaching forward and pulling the kingdom back into the present is a perennial temptation of both liberal and conservative, or, better, Romantic Utopian and Coercive Theocratic theologies.

Liberal Pacifism is an example of the former tendency and it is heretical because it envisions the perfection of human nature by the reform of political institutions, which is impossible. The Spanish conquest of the Americas and forced conversion of native peoples is an example of Coercive Theocracy.

I do believe there are examples of tendencies toward theocracy in Western history, although one hates to say so just because the Left unfairly blows them all out of proportion and defines theocracy as Christian morality having any influence on public affairs whatsoever. But where theocratic tendencies do pop up, they are betrayals of Augustinian theology, not implementations of it.

The Bottom Line
The really important point to see is that both Romantic-Utopian and Coercive-Theocratic theologies are both rooted in the same postmillennialist attempt to bring about the kingdom of God here and now within history and without the spectacular Divine intervention the NT refers to as the Return of Christ.

One of the implications of this insight is that Romantic-Utopian and Coercive-Theocratic theologies are not as different from each other as proponents of both might think. Certainly, all attempts to impose Utopian schemes in history tend to degenerate quickly into coercion and violence. This is true of medieval millennial movements, the 16th century peasants revolts and various kinds of Marxist revolutions in the 20th century.

In contrast to all these stands the Augustinian amillennialist, two cities doctrine in which the state and church are kept separate and the state is seen as potentially good and potentially evil in this age. Christians are encouraged to work within the state, but not to sacralize it. Between pacifism and revolution lies the just war doctrine to guide moral decision-making on issues of defending good and repelling evil while realizing that the final defeat of evil will not occur within this age of history as we know it.

The bottom line is that the Church Fathers were neither Utopian pacifist nor warmongering theocrats and we ought to follow their example.

Yoder and the Evangelical Left

Mark Tooley has a good review of Peter Leithart's Defending Constantine at the American Spectator. He writes of John Howard Yoder's influence on the Evangelical Left:

Much of the Evangelical Left, so influential on Christian college campuses and increasingly prominent in Washington, D.C., relies on neo-Anabaptist beliefs. Sojourners activist Jim Wallis, who last week launched a crusade against "cuts" in the 2012 federal budget, adheres partly to this tradition. These neo-Anabaptists demand total pacifism and reject the military. Unlike traditional Anabaptists, they are not separatists, and many exuberantly advocate Big Government control over medical care, food, energy, and virtually all of life. The godfather of sorts for these disjointed neo-Anabaptists was the late Mennonite theologian and Notre Dame professor John Howard Yoder. He joined most Anabaptists in assuming that Christianity was massively corrupted by 4th century Roman Emperor Constantine's embrace of Christianity. The resulting Christendom created over 1,600 years of wars and oppression ostensibly in the name of Christ.

Read the whole review here.

It strikes me as right that Tooley, who is such a keen observer of all things having to do with theological liberalism, should identify John Howard Yoder as the "godfather" of the Evangelical Left. This is precisely why I was drawn to him in the 90's and also precisely why I now find his theology to be pretty much useless, except when it is dangerous.

Someone asked me just this morning how I became so conservative (politically and theologically) and I am never sure if I fully understand it all yet myself. But one major flash of insight came when I realized that the cultural Marxists - who are so powerfully influential today in academic and cultural elite circles - hate the traditional family, traditional sexual ethics and the sanctity of human life as much as they hate capitalism. That ended my ability to posit moral equivalence between the Left and the Right. Compared to the Right, the Left is far more evil. They simply are not equivalent.

I mention this because Tooley's paragraph above makes clear that Yoder's influence was to train a generation of younger Evangelicals to hate and despise their own cultural heritage - to reject as violent, colonial, patriarchal and racist the legacy of Western Christendom over the past 1500 years. By doing so, Yoder helped create a void into which cultural Marxism could move. Marxism Has been in the process of colonizing the ecclesiastical structures of a dying Christian faith in the West for over a century now. As faith in Jesus Christ declines, Marxism offers a modern, this-worldly substitute complete with eschatology, guilt, martyrdom, holy books, a prophetic stance and much more.

This is part of the explanation (which of course is far more complex than this one little point) for why the Evangelical became "Left" politically and economically. And it explains why those who first embrace economic Marxist theories are so susceptible on all the other "culture war" issues: sanctity of life, traditional marriage, sexual morality etc. There is a connection between rejecting one's cultural traditions, embracing the sexual revolution and using Marxism to criticize capitalism. These three moves fit together and reinforce one another.

But maybe it all starts with a loss of confidence in one's tradition, one's culture and one's heritage. If so, the influence of Yoder has been massive - and tragic.

Yoder, Augustine and Christendom: What is the Real Politics of Jesus?

I continue to ponder the implications of Peter Leithart's brilliant answer to John Howard Yoder in his Defending Constantine: The Twilight of Empire and the End of Sacrifice. I am trying to think through the question of why Yoder advocates a minority church and pacifism for all disciples as the core of that minority church and why he rejects all of Christendom as "Constantinian" and thus heretical.

The problem I have with Yoder at this point is that as Yoder's influence grows and spreads among left-wing Evangelicals and liberal Protestants alike, the theology that emerges from those who are influenced by him is, all too often, individualistic and privatized. For example, many (most) of those influenced by Yoder are acquiescing in the redefinition of marriage by the State.

Now, the Evangelical Left, which is influenced by Yoder, will jump all over me at this point and angrily deny my charge on the basis that they have embraced a socialist ideology which they see as communal. In their account, it is the conservative Evangelicals who are buying into modernity by accepting the marginalized place the church is afforded in late modernity. They are different because they proclaim peace and justice and concern for the poor expressed in welfare statism or democratic socialism.

But what if socialism and the liberal democratic state are simply parodies of true community? What if, as Alasdair MacIntrye recognized, they mask a deep individualism at their roots which is more modern than Christian? Suppose we apply an Augustinian analysis to the modern welfare state. Should we not conclude that the modern state is - precisely to the extent that it privatizes Christianity - deeply idolatrous and pagan?

In the light of these musings, listen to Stanley Hauerwas' comments on Defending Constantine.

Leithart does not think his disavowal of pacifism means he has to reject Yoder's contention that Jesus has a politics. In order to defend his own understanding of the politics of Jesus, he introduces a theme I can only hope he will develop in the future: his defense of Constantine turns on his claim that as a Christian, Constantine ended the Roman sacrificial system. Accordingly Constantine "desacrificed" the Roman political order because he understood that Jesus was the end of sacrifice. The church, for Augustine, is the embodiment of Christ's sacrifice, and this creates a new political reality necessary to keep the state appropriately modest.

It seems to me that what Leithart sometimes calls the "desacrificing" of the Empire, and other times the "baptism" of the Empire, could also be called the "conversion of the Empire." But misunderstanding lurks at every turn here. This "conversion" is the renouncing of idolatry by the Empire, not the turning of the Roman State into the Church. When the State becomes a Church we have a deformation of Christendom. Rather, what happens when the Roman State ceases sacrificing to the gods is that it becomes secular (i.e. belonging to this age between the two comings of Christ, destined to pass away at the end of the age).

Implicit in the ceasing of sacrifice is the recognition of the Church as an alternative polity, a community which proclaims the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ as the call to worship the True God alone through the sacrifice of Christ and therefore to cease from sacrificing to the gods. Yet, in recognizing the Lordship of Christ, the State does not become a Christian State in the sense of the Church taking over the State; instead the State recognizes the existence and legitimacy of an alien polity within its territory - the Church. The Church is the embodiment of true religion so the State no longer has to be religion in and of itself. It is Christian precisely by being secular.

The Church is the node at which Christendom connects to Divine Revelation and therefore its preaching of God's will has authority for all within Christendom including rulers. But rulers still rule according to prudence and are justified in making space within Christendom for dissenters (Jews, pagans, Muslims, atheists). This is where tolerance came from historically. The Church proclaims moral truth; rulers practice statecraft. We have two sources of authority in society, not just one. Neither the Church leaders or the political leaders are all-powerful.

The problem with Yoder is that his view of conversion is all or nothing. For him, either Constantine becomes a pacifist or he remains pagan. The conversion of the state, for Yoder, can only mean a theocracy and he, quite understandably, cannot imagine a violent theocracy being a proper witness to Jesus Christ in this world. (It is significant that separated Anabaptist communities have quite often become Constantinian mini-Christendoms.).

Yoder failed to recognize that for a state to be converted might look different from what it would mean for an individual to be converted. We as individuals are not converted to secularism, but to Christian discipleship. For you or me, to become a Christian means to worship God through Christ. But for the state to be converted means for it to cease sacrifice and not presume to worship at all. Why? Because it recognizes that worship happens in the Church and that the State is not the Church.

Yoder has to dismiss all Christendom as Constantinian and evil because he does not recognize that there are three, rather than two, ways for the State to be the State. The State can either be a pagan idolatrous State or a Theocratic, Church-dominated State, but it can also be a modest, limited government that recognizes that it is not ultimate or Divinely sanctioned in and of itself. It can recognize its limits precisely by doing what Constantine did: that is, by ending sacrifice and recognizing the truth of the Gospel and the role of the Church as a polity distinct from the State with its own proper role to play in Christendom.

Such a State will not presume to re-define marriage by fiat, nor will it authorize the killing of the pre-born, the young, the sick, the elderly or the handicapped. It will not require its citizens to be practicing Christians, but it will encourage them to be such. It will give many advantages to the Church, make holidays conform to the Christian calendar and seek to promote marriage and the family as the foundations of a healthy society. It will be open to civil society and avoid totalitarian tendencies to meddle in the lives of individuals to the extent compatible with law and order. It is appropriate to call such a State "Christian" so long as you know what that means. You know what it means if you can give an account of why a "Christian" State must be secular and give individuals the freedom to believe or not.

It is my conviction that Yoder's theology plays into the hands of late modern, Statism by not calling the State to the conversion that is proper to the state. Because of this error, Yoder can only imagine a minority Church ever existing and thus he equates Christendom with unfaithfulness. Meanwhile, the State is left free to proceed on the path to its own divinization. Just as the Roman Emperors gradually began to accept worship, so the late modern State gradually assumes Divine prerogatives.

To hold, as Yoder does, that the State cannot be converted without becoming pacifist and thus committing suicide, is to determine ahead of time what God's Spirit is allowed and not allowed to do in history. If Kenya, for example, goes from being 9% Christian in 1900 to being 91% Christian in 2000, (which it did), then we have Christendom like it or not. A true Christian political theology must allow for such a possibility and have something constructive to say to Christian politicians in Kenya. What is has to say is the true politics of Jesus, but ironically we need to look to the Augustinian tradition rather than the Anabaptist tradition for help in spelling out that politics.

Defending Constantine by Peter Leithart: A Brief Review

The title "Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom" should have been "Defending Constantine from John Howard Yoder." This is not meant, I hasten to add, as a put-down. This is a splendid book and by far the most substantial response to Yoder's The Politics of Jesus to date.

Yoder's theology is interwoven with history in intriguing and rich ways and Leithart's work displays a similar inter-weaving of history with theology that take both seriously while recognizing that, in the end, it is the theology that matters crucially.

Some may have been surprised by Stanley Hauerwas' extremely positive review of this book recently in The Christian Century, but Hauerwas is right to discern in Leithart a worthy opponent and a very attentive reader of Yoder. I want to offer three points on which I think Leithart is right in this book and Yoder is wrong and then ask the question of whether Leithart's critique of Yoder is fatal to Yoder's version of the politics of Jesus, and in particular to Yoder's call for all Christians in all times and all places to embrace pacifism. In conclusion, I will return to the issue with which Hauerwas ends his review: the question of contemporary liberal democracies as sacrificial states due to their lack of openness to the Church as a "model city."

First, it should be recognized that Leithart has demonstrated the failure of Yoder's historical argument for the "fall of the Church" in the fourth century from a pacifist community to a chaplaincy status vis a vis the Roman state. Clearly, the Church got in bed with Rome and no one can deny that abuses, failures and shameful incidents followed in due course. Leithart has no interest in denying such facts of history. But Leithart raises two questions: (1) has Yoder demonstrated that the early church (pre-fourth century) was pacifist and (2) was the influence of pagan society on the Church a one-way street or did the Church actually change Rome as well as being partially corrupted herself?

I do not think that any fair-minded reader of Liethart's scholarly, historical research interspersed with his close reading of Yoder's writings will fail to conclude that Yoder did not prove that the early Church had a pristine, pre-Constantinian, purely pacifist character which it then was able to lose in its rush to embrace Constantine's offer of Imperial wealth, prestiege and power. It could not fall from a height it had never attained.

The evidence for Christian participation in war and violence is mixed all through the first three centuries and Yoder's method, upon encountering evidence of Christian's serving in the army or other evidence of Christian non-pacifism, is simply to interpret it as "creeping Constantinianism," that is, as Constantinianism before Constantine. This is an exceedingly weak rationalization, trading as it does on the assumption that where the sources are silent they would all, if known, reveal a pacifist church from which the examples of Christians serving in the army in the known sources are deviations.

Now, Leithart recognizes that the historical argument cannot be decisive. Even if the early Christians were not pacifist, perhaps they should have been. But to the extent that Yoder delegitimizes the post-Constantinian Church so easily and thoroughly, this means that his argument from history is not valid. We will see how easily the fall of the Church narrative leads Yoder to dismiss Augustine in due course.

Secondly, Leithart easily demonstrates how horribly unfair Yoder was toward Augustine and how Yoder's failure to wrestle with Augustine's philosophy of history undermines much of the force of Yoder's criticism of Christendom. Yoder makes no distinction between Eusebius and Augustine, even though it was Augustine, more than anyone else, who enabled the Church to extricate itself from the shallow, over-realized political theology of Eusebius. Leithart even makes the point that Eusebius himself was more nuanced than he is often given credit for being.

But Yoder's failure to come to grips with Augustine, combined with the failed "fall of the Church narrative," is what sinks his understanding of Constantinianism. Yoder simply did not have Augustine's robust and differentiated eschatology and so fell into the same trap as Eusebius. Just as Eusebius viewed the conversion of Constantine and the Christianization of the Roman Empire as the dawning of the kingdom of God, Yoder viewed the same events as the fall of the Church. Both overstated what was happening. The one who kept his head and worked out a view of history in which both state and Church are necessary and neither can do without the other during this time between the first and second comings of Christ was Augustine. In so doing, Augustine laid the foundation for Christendom - not the unmitigated disaster of racism, violence, persecution, colonialization, exploitation, greed etc. imagined by so many - but the attempt to fashion a society in which the vast majority of people, including the rulers, confess Christ as Lord. For Augustine, the Church contains both true believers and hypocrites and the State can be either demonic or restrained and sometimes fluctuates wildly between the extremes. This sounds like Western history.

Thirdly, Leithart's explanation of in what sense Constantine "Christianized" the Roman Empire is suggestive and insightful. He says that Rome was "baptized" by Constantine's initiative in halting pagan sacrifice; in so doing Constantine "desacrificed" the Roman empire (pp. 326ff). The death of Christ means the end of sacrifice and Constantine implemented that in the Roman world. Hauerwas appreciates this insight and writes:

Leithart seems to be of two minds about the implications of this for understanding our current political alternatives. He observes that America is not a sacrificial polity and that "we have Constantine to thank for that," but he also claims that because the modern state, now shaped by the nihilism of modern politics, refuses to welcome the church as the model city necessary for judgment, it has again become a sacrificial state. Yoder could not have said it better. In fact, in some of Yoder's last work he sounded very much like Leithart on sacrifice as he sought to remind us that one of the realities that sacrifice names is war.

Hauerwas nicely captures Liethart's ambivalence at this point. Quite rightly, Leithart wants to say something positive about modern Western society. Insofar as it remains Christendom - or, at least, what comes after Christendom - it is "desacrificed" and this is a good thing. However, Leithart's cryptic comments about "the nihilism of modern politics" point to a reality that we have to consider. (One hopes Leithart will spell out his political theology in more detail in future writings.) Hauerwas is right to name war as one of the sacrifices made in the modern state and as one of its pagan features.

But, to say "war" is too abstract. Here I suspect Leithart would push back and remind us, in an Augustinian fashion, of the ambiguities of why people fight. For a Christian to participate in war is not always to participate in pagan sacrifice. This is the heart of the disagreement between Leithart and Augustine, on the one side, and Yoder and Hauerwas, on the other.

I suggest that if we really want to point to a clear and unambiguous example of the "resacrificing" of modern, Western, liberal democracies, we should point to the clearly sacrificial practice of abortion in the name of the sexual revolution. Our daily sacrifices to the god Pleasure condemn our societies as pagan and unbelieving. Maybe another Constantine would not be such a bad thing.

Does this book constitute a comprehensive and final answer to Yoder's call for the Church to embrace pacifism as its essential posture in this world? My reading of Augustine over the past five years has convinced me that it is time to move on from Yoder's version of the politics of Jesus and be much less hasty in dismissing Christendom as I, like many others, have been. In truth, the only reason Leithart's book did not convince me of the absoluteness of pacifism as the essence of the Church's witness is that I had already been convinced by Augustine. But I predict that Leithart's book will lead many to re-consider their "Yoderian" position and ponder the possibility of a politics of Jesus that moves beyond doctrinaire pacifism.

A Kind of "Pacifism" that Leads to War

I have been struggling with the issue of pacifism for nearly twenty years now and my academic work includes a doctoral thesis and book on John Howard Yoder. Yoder, or at least the early Yoder, taught a Christological pacifism for the Church as part of the witness of the Christian community to the eschatological Kingdom of God.

Unlike the liberal pacifism of the Social Gospel movement, which urged modern nation states to disarm unilaterally after World War I and thereby made it safe for Hitler to re-arm and start World War II, Christological pacifism does not expect non-Christian governments in a fallen world to be pacifist. Paul was clear on this point in Rom. 13 and the Sermon on the Mount is for the Church, not the unbelieving world.

The problem is that Mennonites from the beginning of their history to the present have been tempted to make the call to pacifism the content of their message to the world instead of the Gospel of salvation through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ with pacifism following as the result of faith and discipleship. When the Church asks the world to be pacifist without being converted, it in effect denies original sin and implicitly downgrades the necessity of regeneration by the Holy Spirit. It becomes a subset of liberal Protestantism.

The Mennonites and other peace churches are always tempted by liberal pacifism and, from my experience with Mennonite scholars, they succumb to this temptation more often than not. A controversy is currently going on concerning the proper interpretation of the work of John Howard Yoder and the currents are flowing in the direction of co-opting him for the side of liberal pacifism.

I went to the Mennonite Central Committee website hoping against hope that I would not find them taking the usual anti-Israel line in common with the secular and religious Left. I was hoping that they would not be advocating a "peace" in which Israel simply allows Hamas and Hizbollah to blow it to bits. I was hoping that the Mennonites would see peace as the mission of the Church rather than a political program for nation states in a fallen pre-Second Coming world.

I was disappointed. Below is a portion of a press release in which the MCC joins with the Marxists, liberationists, social gospelers, socialists, the EU, Hamas, Iranians, Turks, etc. in condemning Israel for defending itself. The press release calls for the unilateral lifting of the blockade of Gaza by Israel immediately. It proposes no mechanism by which arms to Hamas may be kept out of Gaza. It makes no demands of Hamas or its sponsors. It does not condemn Hamas for rejecting a two-state solution or calling for the destruction of Israel. In the name of peace it calls for a policy that will surely lead to war, bloodshed and the killing of civilians.

If this is pacifism, I would like to distance myself as far as possible from it. The use of the words "pacifism" and "peace" is positively Orwellian. The "liberal pacifists" unwittingly helped pave the way for the first Holocaust and they have learned nothing from history.

Here is the press release entitled: "MCC urges governments to end the Gaza blockade."

WINNIPEG, Man. – Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) is urging the governments of the U.S. and Canada to work constructively within the international community to restore the normal flow of goods and people through Gaza-Israel border crossings.

In letters to the U.S. president and Canada’s foreign affairs minister, MCC urges them to support an impartial and independent investigation into Israel’s deadly response to the Free Gaza flotilla on May 31.

The convoy, carrying 10,000 tonnes of much-needed aid, was attempting to enter the Gaza Strip by sea and break the Israeli blockade that has a devastating effect on the livelihoods and lives of Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinians. The convoy was intercepted by the Israeli military before reaching Gaza and clashes led to the deaths of nine people.

Daryl Byler, MCC’s representative in the region, said hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza live in dire conditions without employment and basic supplies because of the Israeli blockade.

Read the rest here.

This is modern Progressivism but it is not historic, orthodox, Christianity. In my heart, I want to believe Yoder would not be so naive, but it is hard to prove what he would or would not say today, a decade after his death.

But it would appear that those who claim his mantle today have enlisted him in modern Progressivism. Let there be no mistake: Yoder interpreted through the lens of modern Progressivism is a heretic and a dead end theologically - just like theological liberalism in general.

Milbank and Yoder on the Church and Society

In his Theology and Social Theory, John Milbank notes Max Weber's point that "salvation-religions . . . are generally most promoted by lower-middle class strata in towns and cities." (88) For Weber, this means that the strong ethical emphasis of salvation-religions must be connected with an "individualistic, enterprising and socially aspiring way of life, to which rational predictability, the matching of promise to conduct, and strong eschatological expectation make a great appeal." Milbank grants that, as a near tautology, it is obviously true that Christianity, (for it is clear that Weber only has Christianity in view, despite his use of the abstraction "salvation religion"), "has an affinity with certain modes of social action and not with others." (88) Milbank's point here seems solid. As he says, it did not require sociology to teach us that it is easier for an artisan to be a Christian than say a wealthy merchant or a warrior noble.

The more important point of Milbank's analysis, however, is his challenge to Weber's contention that what he has showed by his analysis is that the form of religion preferred by certain people is a function of their prior economic and social status, as if religion were an epiphenomenon of sociology or economics. Weber's recognition, described by Milbank as, "the medieval town, dominated by guilds of self-regulating producers, an economics of frugality, and relatively free from aristocratic and kinship dominations, was uniquely able to instil a Christian ethos" is true because of the nature of Christianity. As Milbank points out, there is little point in making the "social" prior to or fundamental to religion since "there is nothing identifiably 'social' that can be separated from political, economic or religious arrangements." (88) Practices engendered by Christian faith lead to the social organization of the medieval town and to try to "explain" religion in terms of social and economic structures is to confuse effect for cause.

Milbank says that military-aristocrats are not attracted to salvation-religions because they practice a way of life which is "itself sustained by a particular ideological code, itself a kind of religion." (90) Here he is deconstructing modern sociological explanations of religion that rest on the assumption of the secular as the given and religion as the odd thing that requires explanation. Behind such assumptions are a whole set of narratives and presuppositions that themselves are never brought to the surface or debated in modern social science. The modern understanding of "the secular," (as opposed to the Augustinian understanding) thus functions religiously as a starting point accepted by faith and used as the basis for understanding everything else. The hypocrisy comes when those who do this criticize Christians for staring with the particularity of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and using that as the basis for understanding everything else. Hence, we see the meaning of Milbank's claim that theology must abandon its false humility and take its place as the master narrative it must be if it is true to the Gospel.

The question I find fascinating in all of this is the issue of what forms of social practice encouraged by the Church on the basis of theological presuppositions ought to inform the way the Church lives in the contemporary world? And are such practices even possible in modernity, with its massively-constituted, bureaucratic, managerial state with its commitment to social engineering in the name of perpetual progress? Does social space exist for the Church to be the Church without attracting persecution? The ethos of Medieval towns still exists to a certain extent in the sense that much rural life continues to resist modernity to this day in some ways. But to the extent that the Church lives out radically Christian practices within the limits of modernity, is it not the case that either the practices tend to be trivialized by virtue of being limited to the sphere of the "private" or they attract persecution and get denounced as "oppressive" to the exact extent that they infringe on what some interest group perceives as the "public?"

There is an interesting parallel between Yoder and Milbank on the question of how the social practices of the Church are to impact society in general. In both cases, the Church simply goes about its business and the resulting way of life seeps out in the wider society a little bit at a time. In Body Politics, for example, Yoder speculates about the possible relationship between the "rule of Paul," New England town hall meetings, and Anglo-Saxon democracy. In describing his own position, Milbank says that there is no need for a Christian social theory. Instead, he says: "the social knowledge advocated is but the continuation of ecclesial practice, the imagination in action of a peaceful, reconciled social order, beyond even the violence of legality." (6)

There is no doubt that there are serious differences between Yoder and Milbank on how the Church should influence society, but the puzzling thing is how these differences arise from two starting point that are so similar. Both Yoder and Milbank see Christianity as resting on a mythos of peace, in distinction from both pagan antiquity and modernity. Both are theological realists who nevertheless accept a great deal of modern historicism and therefore see the task of Christianity as being to try to "outnarrate" our opponents. Yet Yoder is a pacifist and Milbank is not. Does this indicate some deep contradiction in their basic beliefs? Or does it mean that both pacifist and just war forms of Christianity can express the social ethical task of the Church adequately?

To raise the stakes a bit higher, can Yoder's goals of social ethics be attained without adopting Milbank's frank endorsement of "Christendom?" Is a Christendom without violent coercion, i.e. based on evangelism, social consensus and a shared commitment to Christ, possible? Is Yoder's vision all that different from Milbank's in the end? If coercion is all that separates them, does that not mean that in certain historical situations (i.e. ones in which a Christian consensus prevails at least temporarily) their ecclesiologies and understandings of mission might be virtually indistingushable from each other?

Yoder and the Creeds

Samuel Powell, in his The Trinity in German Thought, (Cambridge U. Press 2001, ch. 1), points out the oddity that Protestants of impeccable Trinitarian orthodoxy, as well as deniers of the doctrine of the Trinity, both hearkene back to the writings of Luther and Melanchthon for support for their positions. His discussion of their writings on the authority of the creeds reveals considerable ambiguity. Luther was convinced that councils had erred and that creeds, therefore, could not be presumed to be true automatically. Yet, they could not be presumed to be wrong either. So he proposed to test each statement of each creed by means of Scripture in order to see if they are true or not. Protestantism has been in confusion ever since. As Powell says:

". . . the fact that Melanchthon came finally to disclose in an express and unambiguous manner his adherance to the doctrine of the Trinity does not in itself settle all questions. Something had entered into the stream of Protestant Trinitarian thought that would prove difficult to control and unpredictable in its consequences. In spite of intentions to the contrary, an idea had been introduced that would in future generations make the doctrine of the Trinity a matter of suspicion. Luther and Melanchthon had unwittingly driven a wedge between creeds and the Bible by insisting that creeds are subject to inspection and criticism according to their agreement with the Bible. . . The reformers allowed such a contradiction in the case of medieval creeds and councils; these they found quite contrary to Scripture. It would be for later Protestants to extend this principle and claim that even the ancient creeds and councils had gone awry by thoroughly misconstruing the Bible's teaching. " (22)

In a post entitled "The Creedal Protectionist Reading of Yoder" R. O. Flyer seeks to understand my (alarming to him) conservativism:

"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 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. . . .

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."

I thank R. O. Flyer for trying to understand me and I think he is right on most points. First, he is right to see the seeds of my current thought in my earlier work; I have not actually changed much. Second, he is right to view me as trying to interpret Yoder as a conservative theologian insofar as I imply that he accepts the authority of the creeds. Third, it is fair to question my interpretation of Yoder at this point. I think it is a questionable (not necessarily wrong) interpretation; I hope I'm right but I do acknowledge the weight of counter evidence. Fourth, he is correct in linking the theological issue of creedal authority and my unease with political liberalism. I am definitely unsympathetic to the questioning of the ecumenical consensus of the early, undivided Church on Trinitarian and Christological dogma and I do not think that this ecumenical consensus should be seen as being on the same level as the formulations of medieval councils or doctrine developed by the divided Western Church, let alone the opinions of modern theologians. Fifth, however, I would need textual evidence to accept R. O. Flyer's contention that Yoder was critical of the creedal tradition. I don't see it; perhaps the meaning of "critical of" is the ambiguity. (see below) Sixth, I think that what he terms a: "protectionist mentality and survival mode of thinking" is standard NT fare (see I Cor. 15:1-11, Tit. 1:5-2:2), so I don't see why Flyer has such a problem with it. I find it odd not to connect the flourishing of the Church's witness to creedal orthodoxy.

The problem with the Protestant tendency (from Luther to Yoder) to subordinate the authority of the creeds to that of Scripture is that this risks enshrining the private, individual interpretation of Scripture as the highest authority (i.e. the papacy of the professors). Luther's concern was to deny that Popes and Councils could never err and most (all?) of the actual errors he was concerned about came from the medieval period, not the first five centuries. Actually, Powell points out, Luther singled out the first four councils for praise because (unlike later councils close to Luther's day) they did not introduce any new articles of faith. (Powell, 15)

The problem is that the creeds were intended to be summaries of apostolic (biblical) faith, but also as authoritative guides to reading Scripture in future. If you want to be with the Church Catholic from the 4th century on, then you must interpret the Bible according to the tradition enshrined in the creedal tradition (at least the Apostle's & Nicene Creeds). The early Church was adamant that both the creeds and the New Testament faithfully preserved and guarded the one apostolic tradition. Believing the Nicene Creed is to adopt one particular (non-Gnostic, non-Arian etc.) interpretation of the apostolic tradition and of the New Testament itself. Canon and creed go together in a mutually reinforcing manner. To suspend judgment on the Nicene creed, or leave it to the tender mercies of the higher critics, is to open the door to many heresies.

I think that Yoder does comes very close to falling into the Protestant trap of relativizing the creeds of the first five centuries by subordinating their authority to the private interpretation of Scripture, but it is unclear whether he does so or not in the end. It is probably safe to say that he does so no more than Luther does. For Yoder, “The doctrine of the Trinity is a test of whether your commitments to Jesus and to God are biblical enough that you have the problem the doctrine of the Trinity solves.” I take that to mean that he thinks the doctrine of the Trinity is biblically warranted and should be regarded as settled orthodoxy.

Let me say this clearly. Whatever Yoder tells us he really meant when we get to heaven, my position is as follows.

I think that the early creeds (specifically Apostle's and Nicene) are the unanimous testimony of the early Church Catholic and are the right way to read Scripture. All ways of reading Scripture that deny what these creeds say are heretical and unfaithful to apostolic tradition and there were plenty of such ways of reading Scripture in the early church, some of which are being revived today like classical nineteenth century Liberal Protestantism, neo-Gnostics like Elaine Pagels, the anti-creedalism of John Spong and many others. I do believe that the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity is taught in the Bible and I am highly suspicious of anyone who wants to drive a wedge between the Bible and the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity by insisting that we must endlessly discuss, investigate and "prove" that the Nicene doctrine can legitimately be derived from the Bible. Instead, I take the Nicene fatih as settled doctrine.

That is why Tyndale University College & Seminary, in the preamble to its recently revised Statement of Faith makes specific reference to the Apostle's and Nicene Creed as defining what we believe. This was the addition that I, as a revision committee member, was most pleased about. The Nicene Creed is not a hypothesis awaiting the judgment of contemporary theologians; it is simply what Christians believe. Protestants need to make up their minds about what it means to confess orthodoxy. For me, it means confessing the Nicene Creed as the right interpretation of Scripture.

Peter Leithart on Yoder and the Constantinian Shift

Peter Leithart is on a roll with finding flaws in Yoder, except this time he isn't careful enough. He notes the Yoder admits that the Constantinian Shift started before Constantine and concludes that this undermines Yoder's thesis:

"If, as Yoder claims, the “Constantinian” compromise of the church with the world begins in the second and third centuries; if it begins when Christianity is still an illicit religion, persecuted periodically but savagely; if it begins when the church is still populated by martyrs - is it still a Constantinian shift? That is, is the shift attributable to the church becoming legal, official, the majority religion, the religion of the empire?

Evidently not. Whatever shift there was in the second and third centuries, it has other sources and is evidence (as Gerald Schlabach has suggested) of more general problems of Christian faithfulness rather of the mainstreaming of the church.

Yoder’s acknowledgement that the church was becoming Constantinian before Constantine is not a qualification of his thesis. It undermines his thesis."

Nice try, Peter, but you don't understand what Yoder meant by the Constantinian Shift. Your mistake is actually a common one. This is not for Yoder an historical thesis as in: "Constantine caused the Church to become unfaithful by co-0pting it."

Constantinianism for Yoder is an eschatological heresy which tries to reach forward and pull the future kingdom of God back into the present sphere of history with no regard for the necessity of a still-future Second Coming of the Messiah, thus turning the Kingdom into a human political project. Yoder names the shift after Constantine to give it a handy label, but he is talking about a lack of faithfulness in the Church caused by bad eschatology, rather than trying to give an historical explanation of where this bad eschatology and resulting unfaithfulness came from.

Peter Liethart on Yoder on Augustine

Peter Liethart has been reading Yoder's War, Peace and Revolution, which has recently been published for the first time by Brazos Press. (It was originally written in the early 60's as lectures for a class on the history of war and peace that used Roland Bainton's book as the text.)

Anyway, here is Liethart's take on Yoder's understanding of Augustine:

"Yoder is a sometimes bizarre combination of profound insight and infuriating oversimplification verging on ignorance. He claims, for instance, that Augustine offers “a consensus kind of moral thought,” a moral thought based on “what everybody thinks.”

He goes on: Augustine “does not radically ask, do you get that from the Bible? Can you get that from revelation? It does not ask, can you get that from Plato? It just asks, does that make sense to all of us? Is it part of our cultural agreement?”

This doesn’t count as a fair summary of Augustine by any standards. But it gets worse:
“Augustine’s thought merges New Testament reconciliation language with classical peace language and Roman order language, as if they were all the same thing. Rome, nature, and providence are all seen as essentially the same. Religion celebrates the unity of everything and the way things are.”

This is baffling. ”Merging” the NT language of peace with “Roman order” is precisely what Augustine is not doing. His whole point is to distinguish the tranquilitas ordinis of the temporal city with the genuine shalom of the kingdom. Yoder objects to Augustine’s eschatology on other grounds, but that doesn’t count as a “merger” of Rome with Christian peace.

To suggest that Augustine “celebrates” the way things are is equally baffling. Augustine does have a word to say about the deep distortions of desire and order caused by sin. And he hardly thinks that Rome as such is something to be celebrated. Milbank is right to say that Augustine is involved in a profound deconstruction of Roman virtue."

Ouch, that hurt - the truth, I mean. The truth hurts, Peter. Let's just agree that among Yoder's many accomplishments we won't list "scholar of Augustine" among them.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

1. I'm speaking at a conference coming up on Mar. 13-14 on the legacy of John Howard Yoder sponsored by some folks in the Stone-Campbell movement. The conference website is here: http://www.englewoodcc.com/yoder/

My topic will be "The Liberal Reading of Yoder: How Not to Read The Politics of Jesus." I'll be asking if and how Protestants can receive Yoder's work without turning him into a liberal pacifist.

2. On Mar. 21, I'll be a workshop leader at the Evolving Church Conference, sponsored by Epiphaneia. The conference website is here: http://epconference.net/

My topic will be "Liberalism and the Culture of Death." Students from my "Christianity and Culture" course at Tyndale will have some awareness of what is coming. But I do want to tie into the conference theme "Amidst the Powers" by talking about what it would mean to think of the culture of death as a "power" or as a result the activities of certain "powers."

3. I'm being interviewed by Michael Horton for the radio show "The White Horse Inn" next week, but I don't know when the interview will be aired. The topic is my book: Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective. I think you will be able to listen to the interview on the show's website. The website is: http://www.whitehorseinn.org/

4. I'll also be speaking at our church's Good Friday service and I'm really looking forward to preaching on the penal substitution aspect of the meaning of the cross. I'll post the title when I get one.

I've done enough theologizing about how penal substitution fits into an overarching doctrine of the atonement and I think I have a grip on how to approach it without falling into some of the traps that can lead us astray in trying to comprehend this mystery. Now it is time to let the rubber hit the road and preach it.

Can a Disciple of Jesus Be a Theoretical Pacifist?

Note: This was the last post on my old blog, The Politics of the Cross, before I took it down. I'm re-posting it here because it fits with the thrust of this new/old blog.

Halden has argued that I am wrong to say that the right to life cannot be reduced to being merely one issue among many. I'm concerned about the arguments he uses to reach this conclusion - much more so than the conclusion itself.
http://inhabitatiodei.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/moral-equivalence-war-and-abortion/#comments

Like the Catholic bishops who have responded to Pelosi's and Biden's misleading statements, I agree that to vote for a pro-abortion politican when a choice exists to vote for a pro-life one, is to cooperate in a grave moral evil and to cut oneself off from the church. This is because, while many other issues involve prudential judgments, abortion is always the taking of an innocent human life and is therefore always intrinsically evil.

To commit a grave moral evil knowingly is to sin in a "high-handed" manner, as the book of Leviticus puts it, and is distinguished from sinning by omission or without being conscious of what one is doing. (This is related to the difference between venial and mortal sin.) Both kinds of sin (high-handed and unintentional) incur guilt, but the sacrificial system makes clear that they have different moral standing in God's eyes and are therefore treated differently in terms of the kind of sacrifice (and the kind of restitution) required. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is embeded in the Torah and the punishments for them are different. Capital punishment and war are also distinguished from murder in the Torah. Now you can say that the Torah is fulfilled in Jesus, but as Paul argued to his Jewish critics, this is not the same as saying that the Torah is simply abolished. To follow and obey Jesus is not to lose the ability to make moral distinctions between different kinds of sin; in fact the Torah continues to instruct Christians in such matters.

Halden thinks all killing is morally equivalent and that the kinds of distinctions between, say manslaughter and first degree murder, do not exist. So the Polish soldier fighting the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazi death camp guard killing Jewish men, women and children for being Jewish, the state executing a mass murderer, a policeman shooting a gunman who has been killing students in a high school and a doctor injecting poison into the veins of a mother so the son can inherit her estate are all morally equivalent. He denies that there is any difference between killing the innocent and killing the guilty, so far as incurring guilt is concerned (though he admits we have a different emotional reaction to them).

He seeks to ground this is the doctrine of atonement and says that because God gave His life for sinners, that proves there is no real distinction between the innocent and the guilty. But if that were true, I fail to see why God should have to become incarnate and die on the cross to redeem the world. If there actually is no distinction betwen the innocent and the guilty, why not just declare everyone saved and skip the cross? It seems to me that to deny any moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty is to deny the whole concept of lost and guilty sinners needing redemption because they have broken God's law and are deserving of nothing but death.

In the course of thinking about a lecture I'm to give next Spring "A Critique of the Liberal Reading of Yoder" I have been wrestling with what it means to subscribe to "pacifism." Perhaps, to sharpen the question, we should speak of "theoretical pacifism" as opposed to "practical pacifism." It is well known that Karl Barth, in CD III/4 on the ethics of war, claimed that he could not affirm pacifism per se but must leave room for the Grenzfall, the borderline exception in which it might be possible to hear the command of God to go to war. However, he called himself a "practical pacifist," and condemned most war including all nuclear war. I define "practical pacifism" as Barth's position, as over against "theoretical pacifism," which says no to all killing with an absolute certainty that permits pacifism to become a principle that can be used to shape and critique everything else.

Yoder was disappointed in Barth's reluctance to go all the way to pacifism and called the Grenzfall a remnant of natural theology that is inconsistent with Barth's overall theology. Yoder wanted Barth to go further toward what I'm calling "theoretical pacifism," although it is far from clear to me that he wanted what I have just defined as "theoretical pacifism." Certainly people like J. Denny Weaver adamantly claim that he did, but I think that there is considerable ambiguity in Yoder's position.

Yoder recognized that, for Barth, the Grenzfall is not an escape hatch introduced when things get tight, but rather, a "solid principle," and "a rule that there must be an exception to every rule" and even "a theological necessity." And Yoder did affirm that he could accept one possible interpretation of the Grenzfall. He wrote:"Still another way of understanding the 'extreme case' would be to say that human knowledge is finite and that all human statements are open to correction because there might still be further facts to be discovered or further truths to be revealed. Therefore any statement which we make, and this would apply to doctrine as well as ethics, is made 'subject to further notice.' This is certainly a very defensible argument." (Karl Barth and the Problem of War, 52)

As Yoder points out, the Grenzfall does not guarantee that we will ever find an exception to the command to nonviolence any more than we can guarantee that we will not. It can simply function as a reminder and a marker of the limits of human knowledge. So far as we know right now, we will never encounter a situation in which the norm of nonviolence should be abandoned. But we leave open the possibility. (This also allows us to see such exceptions having been made in cases in the Old Testament, such as in the extermination of the Canaanites.) For Yoder, accepting the Grenzfall did not necessarily mean abandoning practical pacifism. Yoder clearly was more comfortable not using the concept. But Yoder was not able to convince Barth to drop the concept; they disagreed on the relevance of the Grenzfall for Christian ethics. Barth would not call himself a "pacifist" (his term) meaning a "theoretical pacifist" (my term), even though he would go so far as to call himself a "practical pacifist" and say that pacifism has almost infinitely strong arguments on its side. My interpretation of this dispute is that Barth remained an Augustinian for what I consider to be very good reasons, whereas Yoder never really came to grips with Augustine. For Yoder, the Grenzfall really functioned in Barth's theology as a remnant of natural theology. For Barth, it functioned as a barrier between church dogmatics and systematic theology.

I think that Yoder could have accepted Barth's interpretation of the Grenzfall and that it would have strengthened, not weakened, his pacifism. But to argue that he could have is not to forget that he didn't do so. So I see Yoder as ambigious at this point. I don't think Yoder was a "theoretical pacifist," but I think that there is enough ambiguity in his work to argue both ways. My main point is not to argue that Yoder can't be interpreted as a "theoretical pacifist," but to argue that he need not be interpreted that way and that we should not either interpret Yoder that way or take that view ourselves.

Barth rejected all systematic theology because he held that the human mind cannot capture the truth about God in a human intellectual system. Since the mystery of God in Jesus Christ cannot be fully grasped by the human mind, we must approach this mystery from different angles using the various dogmas and each one will give us a unique and partial yet true insight into God. Each volume of the CD starts again from the beginning to speak of God from yet another angle. In this approach, Barth was Augustinian. Augstine once said: "If you can comprehend it, it isn't God."

I think that Barth was right and Yoder was wrong on this issue of the usefulness of the Grenzfall as a concept in Christian ethics. Why? For two main reasons:

1. God being a God of love does not preclude the fact that God is also a God of judgment. This is a moral universe and good will be rewarded and evil will be punished. If it were not for the resurrection, judgment, reward and punishment, then there would be no answer to the problem of evil. We know that we will judge angels. (I Cor. 6:3) We don't know what this means, but it is a reminder that the saints have some sort of role in the eschatological judgment by which evil will be dealt with and the New Heavens and New Earth come into being. Since there is often a triumph of injustice in this life, we better hope that there is a Day of Judgment and a settling of accounts by a perfectly just and righteous Judge. God used Israel to judge pagan nations in Canaan in the Old Testament and we are told that we will judge angels in the New Testament. We would not expect to receive a command to engage in judgment and punishment in this age, but would be going too far to eliminate totally the possiblility in theory.

2. If "theoretical pacifism"becomes a principle (an "ism") then it can easily turn into an organizing principle for a systematic theology. This happens in certain liberal readings of Yoder, as for example in Denny Weaver's The Nonviolent Atonement. Non-violence or pacifism becomes the central organizing principle and is used to re-interpret Christology, the doctrine of the atonement, the doctrine of final judgment, the doctrine of sin and, finally, the doctrine of God. (This is similar to the way the doctrine of double predestination comes to distort post-Reformation Reformed theology. A rationally clear principle is taken as the center piece and via deductive logic all the other loci are re-interpreted in such a way as to produce a logical system.) Ironically, in the case of Weaver, this is done all the while loudly protesting against the systematic theology of Christendom as inherently totalizing and violent! When Anabaptist theology becomes liberal, it becomes rationalistic even while purportedly rejecting systematic theology.

Conclusion
The assertion that there is moral equivalence between killing in war, capital punishment, the killing of a criminal by a policeman who is protecting innocent people, abortion and ethanasia is a sign that something has gone wrong in theology. When all forms of taking human life are said to be morally equivalent, it is a sign that nonviolence has turned into a rational principle that trumps everything else. Degrees of innocence and guilt are irrelevant because there is actually only one real moral principle left: nonviolence. You either are nonviolent or you aren't - end of discussion.

The principle of nonviolence then becomes a criteria by which all other doctrines are judged and refined. Sin, judgment, Christology, atonement and eschatology are all understood in a novel manner.The final outcome is that God comes to be defined as nonviolence. This reduces God to a rationally comprehensible principle that, once it is known by us can be used as a magic key to unlock every door. The end result is the worship of an idol created by us in our image according to an interpretation of Jesus that is not the result of exegeting the Scriptures as a whole, but rather is the result of importing a rational principle that makes sense to us into the biblical accounts of Jesus and then used as a hermeneutical key to bring the Bible as a whole into line with this principle.

I conclude therefore that, so far as I can see, a disciple of Jesus can be a "practical pacifist" but not a "theoretical pacifist" because practical pacifism involves following a Lord on a path of discipleship in such a way that we cannot know the future, but have to trust him to lead and guide us when we get there, whereas theoretical pacifism involves coming to know a rational principle that make discipleship possible without the Lord because we already know the answer to all the questions ahead of time.

The Cross as Judgment

In the two quotes on the heading of this blog, we see St. Augustine expressing the common faith of the early church in the doctrine of Divine judgment. The end of the second article of the Apostles' Creed says: "He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead."

In the first quote, St. Augustine sees the cross as a judgment seat from which Christ begins (and foreshadows) his work of dividing the sheep and the goats to his right and and to his left respectively. In the second, St. Augustine speaks of the future bodily second coming of Christ when he will judge all men in human form. In the same passage just prior to this quote, St. Augustine notes that, even though the Father will judge, He will judge by the coming of the Son and quotes John 5:22, which says that the Father "Judges no one, but has committed all judgment to the Son."

In modern, liberal interpretations of the cross I note that quite often the element of judgment is muted or elided. The current debate within Evangelical circles arising from the attempts of some to dismiss the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement as sub-Christian is a sign that liberal theology is becoming more congenial to some Evangelicals than it used to be. I do not think that the atonement can be reduced to nothing but the penal substitutionary theory, as if the Christus Victor and exemplarist theories were unimportant to a full-orbed understanding of the meaning of Christ's death. I do, in fact, see something true in all the major theories of the atonement. But I do not think that one can simply throw out the idea of Christ bearing our sins as our atoning sacrifice and the wrath of God falling on Him instead of on us and still do justice to the New Testament as a whole. Christ is the "Judge Judged in Our Place" as Barth famously put it. (CD IV/1, 211).

When I wrote The Politics of the Cross: the Theology and Social Ethics of John Howard Yoder, I did not interpret Yoder as denying the fact of God's judgment of sin either on the cross or in the future, although many others do interpret Yoder in such a way as to make God completely passive in simply bearing sin Himself, but not judging sin actively, and in suffering the wrath of the powers but not being wrathful against "the godlessness and wickedness of men." (Rom. 1:18) The suffering love God endured in the person of the God-Man on the cross is sometimes seen as the sum and substance of God's redemptive action in history and as the model for us to adopt as nonviolent followers of Jesus.

But I cannot accept a definition of Christian love as essentially, or exclusively, passive suffering; I think it is necessary to see God's love as active judgment as well as passive suffering. In the cross we are confronted with a mystery of Divine love and Divine wrath coming together in such a way that God bears the sins of the world in Himself, that is, in the person of the God-Man. Modern liberal theology takes the tension out of this mystery and resolves the meaning of the cross into a rationally comprehensible principle of nonviolence. Many theologians in the Anabaptist tradition see this liberal emphasis as a logical expression of their theological tradition. I do not.

As a Baptist, I have one foot in the Anabaptist tradition and the other in the Puritan wing of the Anglican Church out of which the English Baptists came. So perhaps it is not up to me to say what the logical culmination of the continental Anabaptist tradition is or is not. But let me say this quite clearly: if the logical development of the Anabaptist tradition is the bland theology of inclusion and acceptance as currently taught in liberal Protestantism, then I cannot recognize that tradition as my own. And if I am wrong about the proper interpretation of John Howard Yoder's thought (as I may well be, after all,) then I cannot recognize the Anabaptist/Liberal Yoder as a good teacher or myself as his follower.

This is why I have posted these quotes from St. Augustine on the header of this blog. I believe in a christologically-determined politics, a politics of the cross, but I do not believe that such a politics is mere passivity and the avoidance of violence through the adoption of a posture of withdrawal from the world. I don't believe Yoder reduced Chrisitian social witness to mere passivity and the avoidance of violence either; though that is a debate that is on-going. But the kind of christological politics (or politics of the cross) that I think is faithful to the complete biblical revelation of Jesus Christ and the tradition of the Church catholic is a politics that recognizes that in the cross God was in Christ both saving and judging the world simultaneously. And the mission of the Church involves bearing a witness to both of these aspects of the cross. Preaching Jesus is not the same thing as preaching Ghandi.