I will start this blog with some chapter-by-chapter reflections on The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder. I had previously written reflections on Chapters 1 through 4 and will post those right away. I hope to write reflections on other chapters in the weeks ahead.

Reflection on Chapter 1 of John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus
The Possibility of a Messianic Ethic

Yoder begins his book, which was first published in 1972, with the observation that students are becoming aware that Jesus is a model of radical political action. Those of you who read the beginning of Moltmann's book, The Crucified God, should find this familiar. Moltmann starts his book in the same way. There is nothing unique to the 60's about this. Here is a 1940 song by Woody Guthrie:

Jesus Christ (to the tune of Jesse James)

Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land
A hard-working man and brave
He said to the rich, "Give your goods to the poor,"
But they laid Jesus Christ in His grave

Jesus was a man, a carpenter by hand
His followers true and brave
but all the legislators called them dirty agitators
And they laid Jesus Christ in His Grave

He went to the preacher, He went to the sheriff
He told them all the same
"Sell all of your jewelry and give it to the poor,"
And they laid Jesus Christ in His grave.

When Jesus come to town, all the working folks around
Believed what he did say
But the bankers and the preachers, they nailed Him on the cross,
And they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

And the people held their breath when they heard about his death
Everybody wondered why
It was the big landlord and the soldiers that they hired
To nail Jesus Christ in the sky

This song was written in New York City
Of rich man, preacher, and slave
If Jesus was to preach here what He preached in Galilee,
They would lay Jesus Christ in his grave.

Non-christian activists like Woody Guthrie generally find it easy to see Jesus as predominantly concerned with social ethics. A famous example is Gandhi’s lament that the only people who don’t believe that Jesus taught non-violence are Christians.

Yoder’s critique of some non-Christian radicals’ use of Jesus is that they take from Jesus that which conforms to their beliefs and leave it at that. So Woody’s Jesus is concerned about Woody’s main concern, distributive justice, but is silent on non-violence. However, the Christian who entirely denies that Jesus had a social ethic (or finds only an individual ethic) is distorting Jesus just as much or more than the non-Christian radical. Yoder contends that Christians avoid the social ethics of the gospel by interpreting the bible entirely spiritually. This separation between social ethics and spirituality is akin to the “theological world view” described by Walter Wink in which there is a sharp difference between the material and the spiritual, so much so that they exist in different realms. Yoder talks about throwing a cable between the chasm that separates these realms. I believe that he is implicitly stating that the division between social ethics and spirituality is imposed on the text by modern readers and the biblical writers had no such division in mind, so by drawing these realms together we are coming closer to the way that early readers would have read the text. (Paul does talk about flesh and spirit but it is reasonable to believe that for Paul these are in the same realm just as the letter and spirit of a law are both of the same law.)

Yoder lists many ways that people have found to reason that Jesus should not inform our social ethics. In the epilogue to the second edition he lists several more. I just want to focus on one in the epilogue: the tradition that the function of the law is less to tell us what we can do than to bring us to our knees because we cannot do it. Jesus’s social ethic is strenuous, but this doesn’t mean we are supposed to admit our inadequacy and look for a social ethic elsewhere. It is possible for a social ethic to be both strenuous and relevant. For example, Tolstoy says that Jesus’s ethic tells us which way is up. It is our efforts to climb up and our rate of accent that matter not where we are on the ladder (the only occurrence of differential calculus in theology that I am aware of.) Yoder suggests that when Jesus is not the source of social ethics for Christians, they take their social ethics from other sources, such as the secular laws of the state which are derived from “common sense” and “the nature of things.” Yoder goes in to this more deeply, including a strong critique of the brothers Niebuhr in chapter 6. So I won't comment on this now (although this doesn't mean that you shouldn't!), except to say that this is where the "just war" doctrine comes from.

Yoder also indicates how the denial of Jesus’s social ethics, leads to distorted interpretations of the New Testament. The arrest of Jesus by the Roman authorities only makes sense if Jesus is understood to have taught and acted upon a social ethic that was threatening to the state. It does not make sense if he merely taught that we should love one another. Martin Luther King and Mr. Rogers both taught that we should love one another. Martin Luther King was a threat to the state. Mr. Rogers was not.