Yoder on the Church

I'm serving as a graduate assistant in a Christian Ethics course this semester, and the instructor (Dean Sam Wells) has got perhaps the best reading list I've ever seen for a survey course. It's going to be a great semester.

One of the theologians we'll be dipping into is John Howard Yoder, who I studied in a seminar with Stanley Hauerwas a couple of summers ago. [If you'd like to read Hauerwas' eulogy to Yoder after his death in First Things, click here.] I've been pulling my Yoder texts of the shelf, and it hasn't taken me long to remember why I love reading him so much - I don't know of another theologian who challenges me down to my core while filling me with an almost inexpressible hope at the same time.

If you ever want to be reminded why the church is centrally important to history, read Yoder. Describing the societal temptation toward Constantinianism in The Original Revolution, he writes:

"All [the] efforts to defend the cause of the church before the bar of secular analysis have in common the same basic axiom. This is then what is really important; the true meaning of history, the true locus of salvation, is in the cosmos and not in the church. Then what God is really doing He is doing through the framework of society as a whole and not in the Christian community" (p.146).

As Yoder could point out with an insight few others have possessed, the Constantinian tendency we all have is exactly that we place our trust in Caesar rather than in Christ, in the governments of nation-states rather than in the church. After all, governments have power while the church is weak - right? Yoder counters:

"Why then is it reasonable that we should continue to obey in a world which we do not control? Because that is the shape of the work of Christ" (p.155).

To embrace his ecclesiology is madness, on the surface of things. But it is also to place one's full faith that Jesus is who he says he is, and that God's promises will surely be brought to fulfillment. There is hope in this, brothers and sisters, and Yoder gives it to you:

"We are not marching to Zion because we think that by our own momentum we can get there. But that is still where we are going. We are marching to Zion because, when God lets down from heaven the new Jerusalem prepared for us, we want to be the kind of persons and the kind of community that will not feel strange there" (p.159).

Those are beautiful words. And they're words of hope.

Veni, Domine Iesu!