Consensus theology

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.

Yoder’s unsustainable claims about Augustine turn positively contradictory later in the same essay (contained in the recently published Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution ) when Yoder raises questions about natural theology and theological method. He points, helpfully, to 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul claims that long hair on women is according to nature, and on men is contrary to nature. He concludes, “Contra people who do natural theology, it is not all clear that nature is accessible, that we know it for sure or what it says these specific things.”

What does Paul mean by nature here? It’s “the cultural consensus of that group of people.” So, it seems, Paul is engaged in a “consensus kind of moral thought,” drawing ethical demands from “what everybody things.” Is the apostle, then, the first Constantinian?