The Priestly Kingdom

John Howard Yoder

Description

In this volume of essays John Howard Yoder projects a vision of Christian social ethics rooted in historical community and illuminated by scripture. Drawing upon scriptural accounts of the early church, he demonstrates the Christian community's constant need for reform and change. Yoder first examines the scriptural and theoretical foundations of Christian social ethics. While personally committed to the "radical reformation" tradition, he eschews "denominational" categorization and addresses Christians in general. The status of Christian community, he argues, cannot be separated from the doctrinal content of beliefs and the moral understanding of discipleship. As a result, the Christian's voluntary commitment to a particular community, as distinct from secular society, offers him valuable resources for practical moral reasoning. From a historical perspective, Yoder reviews the efforts of sixteenth-century radical (or Anabaptist) reformers to return to the fundamental ethical standards of the New Testament, and to disengage the community, as a biblically rooted call to faith that does not imply withdrawal from the pluralistic world. Rather, radical commitment to Christianity strengthens and renews the authentic human interests and values of the whole society. His analyses of democracy and of civil religion illustrate how Christianity must challenge and embrace the wider world.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Philosophy
• New Testament
• Historiography
• Ethics
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 31 janvier 1985
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268161682
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

THE PRIESTLY KINGDOM
The Priestly Kingdom
Social Ethics as Gospel
JOHN HOWARD YODER
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS
NOTRE DAME, INDIANA
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 All Rights Reserved
www.undpress.nd.edu
Copyright 1984 by University of Notre Dame
Copyright 2001 Foreword by Stanley Hauerwas
Manufactured in the United States of America
Reprinted in 2008, 2010, 2011
The Hermeneutics of Peoplehood is reprinted with permission from the Journal of Religious Ethics 10/1 (Spring 1982), 40-67. But We Do See Jesus is reprinted with permission from Foundations of Ethics , edited by Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 57-75. Radical Reformation Ethics in Ecumenical Perspective is reprinted with permission from the Journal of Ecumenical Studies 15/4 (Fall 1978), 647ff. Anabaptism and History is reprinted with permission from Umstrittenes T ufertum , edited by Hans-J rgen Goertz (G ttingen: Vandenhoeck Ruprecht, 1975). The Constantinian Sources of Western Social Ethics is reprinted with permission from Missionalia 4/3 (November 1976), 98-108. The Christian Case for Democracy is substantially rewritten, with permission, from the Journal of Religious Ethics 5/2 (Fall 1977), 209-233.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yoder, John Howard.
The priestly kingdom.
Includes index.
1. Christian ethics-Mennonite authors-Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Social ethics-Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Anabaptists-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Title
BJ1251.Y6 1985 241 84-40358
ISBN 10: 0-268-01627-5 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 13: 978-0-268-01628-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 10: 0-268-01628-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 9780268161682
This book is printed on acid-free paper .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
Contents
Foreword
Stanley Hauerwas
Introduction
PART I: FOUNDATIONS
1. The Hermeneutics of Peoplehood: A Protestant Perspective
2. But We Do See Jesus : The Particularity of Incarnation and the Universality of Truth
3. The Authority of Tradition
4. The Kingdom As Social Ethic
PART II: HISTORY
5. Radical Reformation Ethics in Ecumenical Perspective
6. Anabaptism and History
7. The Constantinian Sources of Western Social Ethics
PART III: THE PUBLIC REALM
8. The Christian Case for Democracy
9. Civil Religion in America
Notes
Index
Foreword
Stanley Hauerwas
On May 18, 1981, I received the following memo from John Howard Yoder:
To:
Interested parties beginning with Stanley Hauerwas
From:
John H. Yoder
Subject:
A HAUERWAS-TYPE BOOK
Discussion in recent weeks has brought forward a few steps the effort to define what it is that I should be writing for publication some time soon. This discussion has been stagnant for two years since that text was not right.
Now a set of different kinds of supportive comments coming at about the same time has begun to help in crystallizing my thoughts.
One of the ways of defining a body of material which might belong together in a book would be the comparison to the writings of Stanley Hauerwas, which come out in frequent paperbacks, collecting essays first presented as papers independent of one another, sometimes in fact already printed in the proceedings of conferences. This is the least urgent of my material, in the sense that it is already available, but often it is available in the form which people who would be attracted to my writings do not find out about. If a press were to take something like this it would most likely be Notre Dame University Press, in line with the parallel between it and the Hauerwas publications.
John continued the memo, observing that if the book were to have any unity of content it should not cover all the fields of his interest. Specifically, the book should leave out his writing on (a) war/peace/violence, (b) missions and ecumenical relationships, (c) church renewal, and (d) Judaism. This would leave anything he had done that dealt with the overlap between ecclesiology and ethics, which might include: (1) Anabaptism and History, (2) Practical Moral Reasoning, (3) a lecture given at Wake Forest University on civil religion, and (4) a lecture on traditions and ethics given at a Notre Dame conference on the same subject. He made several other suggestions, such as whether two papers on Karl Barth might be included, before ending with the typical Yoderian comment:
This memo is prepared for sharing with a number of people who have significant perspective on its content and whose advice I would respect as to:
a whether the idea is good at all
b if so, whether there are any other texts which would also belong, or whether any of the above would not belong in it.
The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel is the result of the exploratory process John began with his 1981 memo. I confess I take more pride in my part in getting this book published than in the publication of any of my own books. The memo was, I believe, at least partly the result of my constantly badgering John to get his work out to a wider audience. Yoder had forever changed the way I think, and I was anxious to have others challenged by his work the way I had been. Yet, as is clear from his memo, John felt no special need to be influential. After all, he did not think he was trying to develop some novel new position, but rather, as the essays in Part II of The Priestly Kingdom make clear, he was simply representing what he thought the radical reformers had rediscovered.
Yet John did not think that the radical reformers had reinvented Christianity. Rather, what they rediscovered was the radical character of Christian orthodoxy. One of the reasons I was anxious for John to publish a book like The Priestly Kingdom was for others to appreciate how Yoder stood within the Christian tradition. Of course, I am not suggesting that Yoder was in agreement with everything that Catholicism may name; but then the Pope is not in agreement with everything Catholicism might name. However, at the very least, the perspective Yoder develops in The Priestly Kingdom makes clear that he cannot be dismissed or appreciated as someone representing a Mennonite view. As he declares in the introduction, the view he represents is a vision of unlimited catholicity because-in contrast to both sectarian and established views-his understanding of the church prescribes no particular institutional requisites for entering the movement whose shape he identifies as restorationist.
The Priestly Kingdom is accordingly Yoder s attempt to broaden his conversation partners. His earlier books, The Original Revolution and The Christian Witness to the State , were meant to address challenges within and without the Mennonite world. I think they are no less significant for that and should be read by all Christians. The Politics of Jesus was written as a report of recent New Testament scholarship and was, therefore, not specifically targeted for Mennonite readers. However, even by the time John was putting the essays together that make up The Priestly Kingdom , the significance of The Politics of Jesus was not as widely acknowledged as it is today. The Priestly Kingdom was written to Christians in general, which makes it all the more important that the book stay in print; for it is my conviction that we are only beginning to understand and receive the extraordinary contribution John Howard Yoder has made for helping us rediscover our common task as Christians.
Of course, Yoder asks much of his readers if we are to understand him. At least one of the reasons Yoder continues to be dismissed as sectarian is the failure of many to appreciate how Yoder forces us to change our questions. For example, those who read Yoder seeking to discover how he understood the implications of the gospel for political life fail to appreciate the subtitle of The Priestly Kingdom , that is: Social Ethics as Gospel . Indeed, the subtitle can be misleading just to the extent it suggests that an ethic may exist which is not social. The way Yoder wants us to think about what it means to be Christian forces us to reconsider assumed distinctions between personal and social ethics or between the gospel and politics.
Yoder was certainly a critic of Ernst Troeltsch, yet he also was one of his students. For example, Yoder observes that the development of a high Christology was the natural cultural ricochet of a missionary ecclesiology when it collides as it must with whatever cosmology legitimates and governs the world it invades. The insight is pure Troeltsch, but the substantive implication is pure Yoder. Yoder helps us see not only why but how Nicea s confessions that Jesus is very God and very man is not just theology, but entails a politics that will always challenge the violence at the heart of the politics of the world.
As the last paragraph may suggest, I am tempted to use this foreword as an introduction to The Priestly Kingdom . I am so tempted because I continue to be frustrated that in spite of Yoder s extraordinary clarity, he continues to be misunderstood. Yet I must resist explaining Yoder, if for no other reason than that he has explained in his introduction why he brought these essays together in this Hauerwas-like book far better than any account I would be able to give. Of course, I should like to think that in some small way I helped Yoder in my response to his memo. I did suggest he include The Christian Case for Democracy, but I was not able to convince him to use the Barth essays in this book-an idea I still think a good one.
In the end I can do no more than thank those at the University of Notre Dame Press for their willingness to keep The Priestly Kingdom in print. John was never at home, I think, anywhere-but he loved those who gave him a home