Reflection on Chapter 4 of Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder
God Will Fight For Us
In the last chapter Yoder and Trochme considered this passage in Matthew "If you pardon others for their offenses, your heavenly Father will forgive you as well. But if you do not forgive others, your father will not pardon your offenses."
In my last reflection I suggested that at the time this was said, its hearers would have had the word equations in their head "forgiveness of sin"= "release from debt" = "release from bondage." Jews of that time, (and of modern times too), would have also understood salvation in a communal sense. Since we don’t naturally have these equations in our head, we have to make them explicit in translation to get these ideas across. We are also biased towards interpreting sin individually instead of socially and need to make the social aspects explicit. Doing this we wind up with a translation like "If we order our community in a way that is a forerunner to the beloved community (by enacting the Jubilee for example) then God will save us from those that oppress us. If we do not order our community in this way, but instead try to gain salvation by the same means that other nations do (military alliances, etc), we should not expect God to save us."
In Chapter 4, Yoder describes several incidents in the Hebrew Bible in which this way of understanding salvation is manifest. In these stories, the Jews in a time of crisis obey God’s will and God intervenes on the Jews’ behalf, using one aspect of fallen creation to defeat another. In the Exodus story Pharaoh’s horsemen and chariots are hurled into the sea, in the story of Deborah a storm causes the enemy’s chariots to be stuck in the mud, in other stories enemies of Israel come to blows among themselves. God’s salvation in these stories is for Israel as a community and it is portrayed as part of history. Yoder writes "We have every reason to assume that the inauguration of the jubilee was understood by Jesus’s hearers with the same concreteness as the Exodus story or the deliverance of Jehoshaphat had for them."
This is good evidence for the idea that the community around Jesus would have understood salvation to be liberation from the Roman invaders. But it does so by drawing attention to the troubling fact that there are many instances in which God offers salvation in the Bible through violence. Many Christian pacifists do a selective reading of the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible that leaves them with the impression that God of the Hebrew Bible is violent and God of the New Testament is non-violent. This allows them to disregard the violence of God as something not relevant to the new age introduced by Jesus. But Yoder cautions against this. Yoder is saying that Jesus’s nonviolence was at least partially motivated by Hebrew Bible stories that portray God using violence and that this idea of God is as strongly present in the New Testament as it is in the Hebrew Bible. If we want to read the New Testament in a way closer to Jesus’s hearers would have understood it, we should read it with a conception of God that is informed by these Hebrew Bible stories and the interpretations given to them by the prophets.
As a pacifist inspired by the idea of the coherence of means and ends, I want Judaism and Christianity to unambiguously motivate pacifism by saying: "We should love because God loves. We should forgive because God forgives. We should be non-violent because God is nonviolent." But Yoder challenges us by showing ample examples for a Biblical pacifism founded on a different conception of God. In these stories God is the only legitimate user of violence. For us to use violence to attempt to achieve salvation is idolatrous and is doomed to failure because violence cannot be used by humans in a way that brings salvation. The Jewish Publication Society translation of Exodus 15.3 is "The Lord, the Warrior" which indicates that the title of warrior is for God alone. The NRSV "The Lord is a warrior" misses this. Even in those Bible stories where God does call on Israel to use violence, it often occurs after the salvation event and it is clear that this violence is not responsible for Israel’s salvation.
The idea that the use of violence in human hands does not bring salvation but that violence in the hands of God can bring salvation is consistent with the conception of God and people expressed in many New Testament passages, such as the one I led off this reflection with. We are obliged to forgive but God doesn’t have to forgive and sometimes won’t. The rules that we should abide by as members of the covenant community are not the same rules that God operates by.
Yoder does not say that other motivations for pacifism such as "We should be nonviolent because God is nonviolent" cannot be found in the Bible. These ideas can be found in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. As an example, Paul quotes from Proverbs when he says that only good can overcome evil. But Yoder’s goal in this chapter is to show that the holy war stories can be interpreted with a nonviolent meaning as well. These stories were told to and written for a violent people (who were just like us) to lead them away from violence. The prophets, at the time of impending military invasions, used these stories to council against Israel’s involvement in military alliances, to leave the warrior stuff to God. God would save Israel provided that Israel devoted itself fully to following God’s commandments to caring for orphans and widows and towards creating the beloved community. These stories can still serve that purpose today. But to modern liberal ears, stories that seem to conflate God with the means of the domination system can be pretty jarring. There was an interesting episode of This American Life recently in which a woman described her growing disbelief in the God portrayed in the Bible. Many of the stories that drove her towards atheism are the stories that say that God saves us by the methods of the domination system. The Bible is written by people and therefore it is marred by the domination system. Any stories that portray God in league with domination or endorsing the violence committed by Israel (not to mention sexism and slavery and a whole bunch of other really bad stuff), we can interpret as Israel justifying its violent actions by attributing them to God’s will. But just because we believe a text is marred by the domination system doesn’t mean it has nothing to teach us. What I like so much about Yoder is that his conception of the Bible prevents him from throwing any part of it away, even when he acknowledges that it is marred by domination. So Yoder has to wrestle with every text and always manages to find some wisdom in the very texts that on a first reading I would have been tempted to have thrown away as utterly wrong headed.
The idea that "God is nonviolent" and the idea that "God is the only legitimate purveyor of violence" appear to be based on incompatible conceptions of God. But the two seemingly contradictory concepts lead to precisely the same actions by us individually and communally as members of the faith community. The Bhagavad Gita also has multiple and seemingly contradictory conceptions of God in different parts of the text, some of which do not appear compatible with the idea of the coherence of means and ends. I wonder what Gandhi had to say about this. How do you deal with these different conceptions of God in the Bible?
God Will Fight For Us
In the last chapter Yoder and Trochme considered this passage in Matthew "If you pardon others for their offenses, your heavenly Father will forgive you as well. But if you do not forgive others, your father will not pardon your offenses."
In my last reflection I suggested that at the time this was said, its hearers would have had the word equations in their head "forgiveness of sin"= "release from debt" = "release from bondage." Jews of that time, (and of modern times too), would have also understood salvation in a communal sense. Since we don’t naturally have these equations in our head, we have to make them explicit in translation to get these ideas across. We are also biased towards interpreting sin individually instead of socially and need to make the social aspects explicit. Doing this we wind up with a translation like "If we order our community in a way that is a forerunner to the beloved community (by enacting the Jubilee for example) then God will save us from those that oppress us. If we do not order our community in this way, but instead try to gain salvation by the same means that other nations do (military alliances, etc), we should not expect God to save us."
In Chapter 4, Yoder describes several incidents in the Hebrew Bible in which this way of understanding salvation is manifest. In these stories, the Jews in a time of crisis obey God’s will and God intervenes on the Jews’ behalf, using one aspect of fallen creation to defeat another. In the Exodus story Pharaoh’s horsemen and chariots are hurled into the sea, in the story of Deborah a storm causes the enemy’s chariots to be stuck in the mud, in other stories enemies of Israel come to blows among themselves. God’s salvation in these stories is for Israel as a community and it is portrayed as part of history. Yoder writes "We have every reason to assume that the inauguration of the jubilee was understood by Jesus’s hearers with the same concreteness as the Exodus story or the deliverance of Jehoshaphat had for them."
This is good evidence for the idea that the community around Jesus would have understood salvation to be liberation from the Roman invaders. But it does so by drawing attention to the troubling fact that there are many instances in which God offers salvation in the Bible through violence. Many Christian pacifists do a selective reading of the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible that leaves them with the impression that God of the Hebrew Bible is violent and God of the New Testament is non-violent. This allows them to disregard the violence of God as something not relevant to the new age introduced by Jesus. But Yoder cautions against this. Yoder is saying that Jesus’s nonviolence was at least partially motivated by Hebrew Bible stories that portray God using violence and that this idea of God is as strongly present in the New Testament as it is in the Hebrew Bible. If we want to read the New Testament in a way closer to Jesus’s hearers would have understood it, we should read it with a conception of God that is informed by these Hebrew Bible stories and the interpretations given to them by the prophets.
As a pacifist inspired by the idea of the coherence of means and ends, I want Judaism and Christianity to unambiguously motivate pacifism by saying: "We should love because God loves. We should forgive because God forgives. We should be non-violent because God is nonviolent." But Yoder challenges us by showing ample examples for a Biblical pacifism founded on a different conception of God. In these stories God is the only legitimate user of violence. For us to use violence to attempt to achieve salvation is idolatrous and is doomed to failure because violence cannot be used by humans in a way that brings salvation. The Jewish Publication Society translation of Exodus 15.3 is "The Lord, the Warrior" which indicates that the title of warrior is for God alone. The NRSV "The Lord is a warrior" misses this. Even in those Bible stories where God does call on Israel to use violence, it often occurs after the salvation event and it is clear that this violence is not responsible for Israel’s salvation.
The idea that the use of violence in human hands does not bring salvation but that violence in the hands of God can bring salvation is consistent with the conception of God and people expressed in many New Testament passages, such as the one I led off this reflection with. We are obliged to forgive but God doesn’t have to forgive and sometimes won’t. The rules that we should abide by as members of the covenant community are not the same rules that God operates by.
Yoder does not say that other motivations for pacifism such as "We should be nonviolent because God is nonviolent" cannot be found in the Bible. These ideas can be found in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. As an example, Paul quotes from Proverbs when he says that only good can overcome evil. But Yoder’s goal in this chapter is to show that the holy war stories can be interpreted with a nonviolent meaning as well. These stories were told to and written for a violent people (who were just like us) to lead them away from violence. The prophets, at the time of impending military invasions, used these stories to council against Israel’s involvement in military alliances, to leave the warrior stuff to God. God would save Israel provided that Israel devoted itself fully to following God’s commandments to caring for orphans and widows and towards creating the beloved community. These stories can still serve that purpose today. But to modern liberal ears, stories that seem to conflate God with the means of the domination system can be pretty jarring. There was an interesting episode of This American Life recently in which a woman described her growing disbelief in the God portrayed in the Bible. Many of the stories that drove her towards atheism are the stories that say that God saves us by the methods of the domination system. The Bible is written by people and therefore it is marred by the domination system. Any stories that portray God in league with domination or endorsing the violence committed by Israel (not to mention sexism and slavery and a whole bunch of other really bad stuff), we can interpret as Israel justifying its violent actions by attributing them to God’s will. But just because we believe a text is marred by the domination system doesn’t mean it has nothing to teach us. What I like so much about Yoder is that his conception of the Bible prevents him from throwing any part of it away, even when he acknowledges that it is marred by domination. So Yoder has to wrestle with every text and always manages to find some wisdom in the very texts that on a first reading I would have been tempted to have thrown away as utterly wrong headed.
The idea that "God is nonviolent" and the idea that "God is the only legitimate purveyor of violence" appear to be based on incompatible conceptions of God. But the two seemingly contradictory concepts lead to precisely the same actions by us individually and communally as members of the faith community. The Bhagavad Gita also has multiple and seemingly contradictory conceptions of God in different parts of the text, some of which do not appear compatible with the idea of the coherence of means and ends. I wonder what Gandhi had to say about this. How do you deal with these different conceptions of God in the Bible?
posted by ross at 9:10 PM
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