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!

Hey, Arkansas: Just Say No

Say no to the lottery amendment today, that is!

This is my one piece of direct political advocacy for the election today, largely because for Christians I think this is a completely unambiguous issue.

Lt. Gov. Bill Halter has been pushing for this amendment as a way to fund education. Halter has been trying to dupe Arkansans in the same way that lotteries do: telling them that it is possible to get rich quickly and painlessly, solving all your problems. For Halter, the issue is state-funded education. For lotteries, the issue is life in general.

But lotteries are a bad, bad idea. Here are some reasons why:

1) Lotteries are equivalent to a regressive tax on the poor, who buy them in inordinate quantities relative to the wealthy. I see this everyday in gas stations in North Carolina, and it is depressing.

2) Lotteries hold out a false sense of hope and teach a poor work ethic. It is a terrible lesson for the children of our society, and it teaches the foolishness that you can 'get something for nothing.'

3) Lotteries crack the door open for other types of legalized gambling. And with expanded legalized gambling comes organized drime, drug trafficking, alcoholism, and other social problems.

4) The United Methodist Church holds a sensible anti-gambling position. Here it is from Paragraph 163G of The United Methodist Book of Discipline:

"Gambling is a menace to society, deadly to the best interests of moral, social, economic, and spiritual life and destructive of good government. As an act of faith and concern, Christians should abstain from gambling and should strive to minister to those victimized by the practice. Where gambling has become addictive, the Church will encourage such individuals to receive therapeutic assistance so that the individual's energies may be redirected into positive and constructive ends. The Church should promote standards and personal lifestyles that would make unneccessary and undesirable the resort to commercial gambling - including public lotteries - as a recreation, as an escape, or as a means of producing public revenue or funds for support of charities or government."

Ultimately, lotteries are ways for cowardly politicians to try to solve difficult problems that they don't want to solve through either a)tax increases or b)budget cuts. So their answer is to introduce a societal practice that has been shown to have ill effects on many different levels while often not solving the very problems they were designed to solve in the first place. Politicians like Halter need to be rewarded for their poor leadership by being voted out of office at the next opportunity. But first, their bad ideas have to be voted down.

If you are a resident of the state of Arkansas, please vote 'no' to the lottery measure and encourage others to do the same.