Walking Through The Politics of Jesus: Introduction

Several years ago, I considered myself an absolute pacifist. To make a long story short, I spent years defending a pacifist reading of the Old and New Testament to my Reformed peers. Unfortunately, I lacked a theological framework that would help me to make sense of the overall Scriptural narrative. Particularly, I had a hard time understanding how I could believe that it is always wrong to do violence, while at the same time believing that God had commanded extreme acts of violence in the Old Testament times without resorting to a dispensational hermeneutic.

I was introduced to The Politics of Jesus via the writings of Duke University professor, Stanley Hauerwas. I turned to Hauerwas because he was a prominent opponents of the Iraq war following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and most importantly to me, he opposed it as a Christian. Living in the Bible-belt and being surrounded by warmongers was starting to get to me, so his non-Americocentric perspective felt (and still does) like a breath of fresh air. Hauerwas seemed to believe that the writings of John Howard Yoder were profoundly important for understanding how a Christian could love and adhere to the complete testimony of the Scriptures while at the same time holding to a strictly pacifist ethic.

As such, I bought my own copy of The Politics of Jesus and began reading ardently through the book in hopes of filling in the missing pieces of my puzzle. I made pretty thorough notes as I read through the book, summarizing what I was reading in hopes of someday sharing my findings with others. The end of my journey (so far) was a little less dramatic than I had hoped. I ended up basically rejecting Yoder's views because I felt it required too much of a theological shift for my own comfort. Where Yoder saw politics in the New Testament, I saw personal salvation. In fact, Yoder seemed to attack people like me who favored a reading of the New Testament which understood the narrative as being more about salvation than about politics.

One of my favorite points which Yoder makes is that wars between nations prevent unity in the body of Christ since Christians from each nation end up subconsciously being nationalists instead of Christians, favoring their own country almost by default. Such biases are difficult to overcome when it comes to matters of war. Pacifism certainly seems to prevent such errors, but as we will see in my study of Yoder, I believe this to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Given my current brief conversation with Jared S. in my Unprofessional Music Review of Derek Webb's new album, I have something of a renewed spark of interest in Yoder and have decided to share what I found when reading through The Politics of Jesus. Also, it seems more and more that I am detecting Yoder's influence in theological conversations, so perhaps my timing on this "series" will be apropos.

In addition, the more I think about it, it becomes obvious to me that Yoder's views stands as a direct contrast to the Two Kingdoms model, and as such I think we all may derive a great deal of benefit from reading Yoder even if we end up disagreeing with him.

Please note that if you are a Yoder fan expecting a glowing summary, you should look elsewhere; I plan mostly to summarize Yoder's work, but I will not restrain myself from pointing out where disagreements (and agreements) occur when I cannot help myself.