The Politics of Yahweh<\/a><\/em> (Cascade, 2011), John C. Nugent, Professor of Old Testament at Great Lakes Christian College, not only synthesizes this body of work, but also provides a thoughtful critique and correction of various aspects of Yoder\u2019s Old Testament theology.<\/p>\nDissatisfied with the \u201cMarcionite\u201d readings of the Old Testament sometimes used by pacifists, Yoder set out to show instead that Jesus\u2019 advocacy of non-violence was a natural climax to the history of Israel. Nugent calls Yoder\u2019s approach \u201ccanonical-directional,\u201d canonical in the sense that Yoder was more interested in the final form of the biblical text than in its prehistory and directional in the sense that Israel\u2019s history should be read as an arrow pointing to its fulfillment in Christ.<\/p>\n
Two themes stand out in Yoder\u2019s treatment of Israel\u2019s history. First, Yoder\u2019s God is reactive, orchestrating and limiting human sin to achieve His promises. Blood vengeance was already practiced in the time of Cain and Abel, and in giving Noah authority to exercise capital punishment God placed this practice \u201cmore fully under his jurisdiction\u201d (p. 36). Israel established monarchy in rebellion, but in Deuteronomy 17 Yahweh \u201ceffectively denies Israel\u2019s request to have a king \u2018like the nations\u2019\u201d by requiring a \u201cunique, Torah-advocating ruler\u201d (p. 58). Yoder extends the logic of Jesus (\u201cBecause of the hardness of your heart\u201d) to argue that Yahweh\u2019s control does not imply endorsement.<\/p>\n
Second, Yoder read the Old Testament as a history of Israel\u2019s maturation. Fundamentally, it is a pedagogy in faith, beginning with the call that cut Abram off from all natural means of support. It is also a pedagogy in a particular kind of warfare, \u201cYahweh war,\u201d in which Israel depends on Yahweh as the warrior who will fight their battles. By the end of the Old Testament period, Israel has no armies of her own and is forced by the circumstance of exile to rely on Yahweh alone. Jesus takes up the mantle of Jeremiah, urging His disciples to seek the peace of the city and not to take control of the empire themselves.<\/p>\n
Even with Nugent\u2019s corrections, there are fairly glaring oversights and weaknesses in Yoder\u2019s work. His account of kingship, especially David, is one-sidedly negative. From the Psalms, it would seem that David represents a continuation of \u201cYahweh war\u201d into the period of the monarchy. Though Israel lost its political and military independence after the exile, they were hardly \u201cnon-aligned-with-empire,\u201d as Yoder and Nugent suggest. And they were hardly non-violent: Yoder cites Esther several times as an example of faithfulness in exile, but he ignores Mordecai\u2019s effort to organize armed resistance with the permission of the Persian king. At several points, in short, Yoder\u2019s telling of Israel\u2019s story clashes with the canon.<\/p>\n
More globally, Yoder polarizes Yahweh-war and Israel-war in a way that the Bible does not. At times, Israel does nothing and watches Yahweh defeat their enemies. Other times, Israel fights in faith while<\/em> Yahweh defeats their enemies. I wonder if this betrays a more fundamental flaw in Yoder\u2019s theology, a tendency to treat divine\/human action as a zero-sum game.<\/p>\nBesides, the story of maturation could be told differently: Growing up might mean that the kids learn to fight alongside daddy, rather than watching him handle all the baddies. There is plenty of biblical evidence for this narrative line. Noah is granted the power of the sword; he doesn\u2019t have to wait for another flood to rid the world of violence. Paul says that we have been given spiritual weapons powerful to cast down vain imaginations; he says that we trample Satan underfoot; Revelation says repeatedly that we are made kings and priests in Christ Jesus. These all refer to \u201cspiritual\u201d warfare, but in the Bible the wars of the Spirit are also<\/em> political events, and in any case these texts all indicate that, possessed by the militant Spirit, we participate in Yahweh\u2019s wars, more<\/em> than ancient Israel ever did.<\/p>\nScattered comments raise questions about Yoder\u2019s theology of creation, and hence theology of culture (he was a student of Barth!). For instance, he insists that Christians are freed from the burden of running the world and can leave coercive political actions to others, as Israel in exile left her protection in the hands of Babylonians and Persians while they devoted themselves to Torah, hospitality, and worship. Why, he wonders, would a Christian want to be involved in running the state anyway? \u201cThe Christian who wants to put the role of Christian living into second place in order to serve the state as a first priority is like a musician who leaves the stage in order to work as an usher in the concert hall.\u201d<\/p>\n
This immediately elicits several objections: Is it possible to serve in the state without making it a \u201cfirst priority\u201d? Is public service necessarily<\/em> idolatrous? Elsewhere, Yoder acknowledges that Christians can serve in public office, so long as they do not shed blood. Yet his comment here leaves me with a lingering suspicion that Yoder has reservations about the goodness of human society as such (\u201cCulture . . . is already morally ambivalent,\u201d p. 35). <\/p>\nYoder\u2019s reference to the musician is an analogy, I know, but it left me wondering what he would say about a Christian who \u201cputs the role of Christian living into second place\u201d in order to pursue a career as a musician. As Nugent puts it, Christians \u201care freed from running the world so that they may serve the world with the life-giving resources only they possess\u201d (p. 195), which seems to suggest that Christians are all to be full-time \u201cpriests\u201d and nothing else. Can a Christian serve the world with life-giving resources in the process of running a Christian bakery, teaching mathematics, working as a real estate agent, repairing the plumbing?<\/p>\n
Yoder is an interesting reader of the Old Testament, and his Old Testament writings have their share of challenging insights. He is right to emphasize that the Old Testament order was pedagogical, and, though in my estimate the canonical direction does not point to pacifism, it does prepare a people for the Prince of Peace. By bringing the entire Bible fully into play, Nugent\u2019s important book deepens the debate for both pacifists and non-pacifists.<\/p>\n
(An earlier version of this review was published in Credenda\/Agenda<\/em>.)<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder is best known for his seminal book on The Politics of Jesus (1972). Yoder\u2019s writings about the Old Testament \u201cprequel\u201d to Jesus are less well known, partly because they are scattered in articles that Yoder never gathered between two covers. In The Politics of Yahweh (Cascade, 2011), John C. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1837,840,1395],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-howard-yoder","category-pacifism","category-war"],"yoast_head":"\n
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