John Howard Yoder’s
Body Politics
SIMPLIFIED
Five Practices of the
Christian Community
Before the Watching World
Preface to the simplified version
In 2004, my church,
Perth Anabaptist Fellowship, followed up a study of Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus by studying Body Politics. We read it out loud week
to week and discussed the five practices he writes about. These practices were
a foundation for what we were trying to do, a way to think about our life
together as an Anabaptist house-church. They suggested to us a way to live
Anabaptism.
This simplified version
of John Howard Yoder’s Body Politics
aims to make his ideas more accessible, so more people can benefit from them.
Yoder had a brilliant mind which managed to hold many strands of thought at
once, and constantly divert on interesting and difficult tangents. He is
constantly challenging all the assumptions we make. Many of his sentences are
dense. For these reasons, a simplified version is helpful. I have kept some
tangents because they make brilliant points. I have left out others that seem
less important to non-academics. I have tried to keep the language simple;
sometimes this makes the meaning less precise than the technical term. At other
times, there doesn’t seem to be any other way to say something than to use a
big word.
This simplification has
been specially prepared for the 2007 Anabaptist Association of Australia and
Our church blog is at http://perthanabaptists.blogspot.com.
My homepage, including the simplification of The Politics of Jesus and a short course, The Body of Christ : An introduction to
Christianity from an Anabaptist perspective, is at www.geocities.com/savageparade. If
you have any comments about this simplification, please email me at [email protected].
Thanks to Brad Schilling
and my wife, Nicole Hobby, for editing this book and encouraging me.
- Nathan Hobby, 7
November 2006
Introduction
This is a book about the
life of the church. You might, then, be wondering about the title. Why use the
word ‘politics’?
For most people,
‘politics’ is what politicians do. It is
a nasty world of spin-doctors, polling, election promises and political parties
with beliefs about the way the world should be run. Rest assured that Yoder definitely doesn’t
want your church to become like this.
Some Christians believe
we should avoid all involvement in this world of politics. Other Christians believe that we should be
involved in all of life, politics included.
They say being involved in politics - becoming a politician - is something
some Christians are called to. Thus
Just as politics is
something politicians do, most Christians think worship is what the church
does, and it is separate from politics.
In fact, they think worship is not only separate from politics - it is
also separate from everyday life.
There are some Christians who want to bridge
the gap between the world of worship and either everyday life or politics. There are two common approaches, using
different bridges:
·
Liberals (and
some evangelicals and Anabaptists) believe the bridge is the set of insights
into justice and peace that worship helps us reach. For example, worship reminds us of God’s
creation and our role in looking after it; we leave the worship service caring
more about the environment and ready to change our lifestyle. Another example - worship reminds us to care
for the poor; we go home and do it.
·
For many evangelicals,
the bridge is a new set of insides.
Worship modifies our ‘hearts’.
For example, it may fill us up with a sense of God’s love and
forgiveness. This may encourage us to go
home and care more about the needy.
In both cases, worship
is separate from politics or everyday life.
We get help in politics or real life through worship, but worship is not political and it is not everyday life.
What if worship is meant
to be both political and a part of
everyday life?
Our English word
‘political’ has its roots in the Greek word ‘polis’. ‘Polis’ is often translated ‘city’, but it
doesn’t just mean the streets and the houses or even just the residents. It means the way in which the people live
together and make decisions, the way they structure their common life. This is a good way to begin understanding
what Yoder means by ‘political’.
This book pictures the
church as a political body. Not
political in that sense we mentioned earlier of spin doctors and
elections. But political in the sense
that it is a structured social body.
Political in the sense that the church makes decisions, assigns roles
and distributes power.
Where are these
political practices to be found in the church?
Not just in the members’
meeting, not just in the pastor’s office, not just behind the scenes. No - these practices are to be found in
worship! Yoder wants us to return to the
Bible to find that baptism, the Lord’s Supper, the open meeting, church
discipline and the gifts of all believers are political, everyday worship
practices.
That’s not all. Not only should these practices be reclaimed
as political and everyday; they are also the pattern for what the world is
ultimately meant to be! As the church, we
get a chance to live out life to its fullest now, as a beacon to the rest of the world. The people of God are
called today to be what the world is called to be ultimately.
This book, then, picks
up five sample practices (there could be more) God called the early Christians
to live out. It then also shows how they can offer a pattern of life for the
whole world. Yoder shows us secular applications of these Christian practices,
and thus shows us how the church is politically relevant.
Discussion questions
1.
What is the relationship between worship and
everyday life for you?
2.
If we take Yoder’s definition of political (makes
decisions, assigns roles, distributes power), do you agree that churches are always political?
Chapter 1 – Binding and loosing
Group discernment and church discipline
Jesus gives to the church the
authority to decide things in God’s name. This is called binding and loosing,
and it takes the form of dialogue, sometimes between two believers, sometimes
amongst a whole congregation. At times
its purpose is to reconcile a sinner.
Other times its purpose is to decide the best thing to do in a
particular situation.
What is ‘binding and loosing’?
‘If another
member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the
two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.
But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that
every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the
member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender
refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and
a tax collector.
‘Truly I
tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you
loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you
agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in
heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.’
- Matt. 18:15-20 (NRSV)
In this passage, Jesus
instructed his disciples that when they bind and loose, their actions would be
the actions of God at the same time – ‘What you bind on earth is bound in
heaven’ (Matt. 18:18).
Binding and loosing
brings together two types of dialogue under the same name – reconciling and
discerning.
·
Reconciling dialogue involves restoring to the community a brother or
sister who has sinned. We can understand what Jesus means here quite easily –
he gives us instructions on how to win the brother or sister back from their
sin. We are to make three attempts. The first attempt is just the two of us
face to face, avoiding disgrace and avoiding gossip. If this doesn’t work, we
bring in a third person as a mediator and witness to get an outside perspective.
If this still doesn’t work we finally bring it to the whole congregation. If
the offender won’t to the right thing by the rest of the congregation, he or
she will be treated as an outsider until they are willing to repent.
Jesus makes clear:
1.
We all have a
duty to reconcile, confess and forgive each other – not just the minister.
Anyone who sees his brother or sister in sin has a responsibility to help them.
2.
We are aiming
to restore the brother or sister, not punish them.
3.
We shouldn’t
save this just for major offences; any offence is forgivable but none is
trivial.
4.
We have the
authority to forgive one another in God’s name.
(Some versions of the Matthew text read, ‘if your brother or sister sins against you.’ People use these last two
words to limit the process to cases of personal offence. But these two words
are not in the earliest manuscripts of Matthew or in the parallel verse in Luke
17:3. We are called on to help our brother or sister back to spiritual health
even when we’re not the one sinned against.)
·
Discerning dialogue involves working out what God wants us to do in a
particular situation. Its meaning is less obvious to us reading today than reconciling - we need to know the
background.
‘Bind’ and ‘loose’ were two words with special meaning for the Jews. They were
used to describe the process of trying to work out how the Law applied to a
particular situation. If a rabbi decided a law did apply to a particular
situation, he was ‘binding’ it. Jews were obligated to apply it. If he decided
it did not apply to a particular situation, he was ‘loosing’ this law. Jews
were ‘loosed’ from the obligation to apply it.
In
his essay, “Binding and Loosing – a paradigm for ethical discernment” (available
online from www.findarticles.com), Mark Allan Powell writes:
For example, the question was raised whether one
might be guilty of stealing if one finds something and keeps it without
searching for the rightful owner. When is such a search required, and how
extensive must it be? The Talmud states, "If a fledgling bird is found
within fifty cubits of a dovecote, it belongs to the owner of the dovecote. If
it is found outside the limits of fifty cubits, it belongs to the person who
finds it"
To use Matthew's terminology, the decision was
that the law ("Do not steal") was bound when the bird was found in
proximity to its likely owner; one who keeps the bird under such conditions has
transgressed the law and is guilty of sin. But the law is loosed when the bird
is found at a distance from any likely owner; the law against stealing does not
forbid keeping the bird in that instance.
We are given authority by Jesus to carry on this process in the church. Not to
apply the Law to our particular situations, but to apply Jesus to particular
situations. Some of the questions we decide by binding and loosing will be
personal ones; other questions will be practical and moral questions for the
church.
Abuses of church discipline
Church discipline has a
bad name. There are many Christians who have been scarred by churches which
practice strict discipline. For many, the antidote is no discipline at all.
But, as Lois Barrett says in Building the
house church, the antidote to ‘bad’ discipline is not ‘no’ discipline, but
‘good’ discipline. There are key guidelines for church discipline implicit in
what Jesus was saying, and any practice of church discipline needs to remember
them:
1.
The intention
is to win the brother or sister – not punish them.
2.
It shouldn’t
make the leaders more powerful. All members are responsible for discipling their brothers and sisters, not just leaders. In
many abuses of church discipline, leaders use their power to discipline others
to control the church and further their own ends.
3.
It is not a procedure
just for small sins, while big ones
are dealt with more strictly – all are treated the same.
4.
It is not, as
others have argued, to be used only on big
sins while we try to forget about small ones.
Church discipline relies
on voluntariness. We can practice reconciling dialogue because we choose to
place ourselves in such a relationship. Where the relationship is involuntary,
church discipline is abusive. The Puritans practiced involuntary church
discipline, and it gave the word ‘Puritan’ a bad taste; in their society
everyone was forced to accept
discipline, and that discipline aimed to punish rather than restore.
Yoder believes that
distortions and abuses arise when the label ‘discipline’ is used for the
process. The foundation – reconciling dialogue – gets lost; the image becomes
punishing authority rather than reconciliation.
Relationship between discernment and reconciliation
You can only confront
your brother or sister in their sin after you have both agreed on what is right
and wrong. So reconciliation presupposes discernment. For the process to work,
you need to be in a church community which talks about its ethics, decides
together what standards to hold each other to, and then holds each other to
them through reconciling dialogue.
The process of
reconciling dialogue will also involve further discernment – the ethics the
church decided on before might prove to be misguided or not applicable to a
particular situation. You can also work out which issues cause offence and so need
to be agreed on, and which ones you can agree to differ on.
Much Christian debate
about moral issues makes the mistake of focusing on what the standards ought to
be - instead of how they are to be worked out and put in place. The New
Testament does not give us a book of rules applicable to every moral situation.
If a full system of rules was inspired by God and written down for a particular
time and place, it would be out of date or out of place in another situation.
Instead, the New Testament gives us a process – binding and loosing – and
examples of a church full of the Holy Spirit practising binding and loosing,
and coming to agreement on moral issues. By giving us this process, God has
allowed us to find out what following Jesus means in any new situation.
The church’s empowerment
to make moral decisions is summed up well in John 16:7, 12, where Jesus says,
‘... it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I did not go away, the
Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you... When the
Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.’
That promised guide, the
Holy Spirit, will work in the church to tell us the meaning of following Jesus
in unforseen situations. The Holy Spirit guides a fully human communication process
– binding and loosing. It is a process that has some things in common with what
we call today ‘conflict resolution’. It encourages us to benefit from different
perspectives on any question and to use loving negotiation to come to answers.
The conclusion of the Jerusalem conference of Acts 15:28 – ‘It has seemed good
to the Holy Spirit and to us’ – is the conclusion that the Holy Spirit will
help us to reach when we discuss issues and come to a decision.
Binding and loosing in church history
Binding and loosing as
we’ve been describing it gives more authority to the church than Roman
Catholicism; it trusts more the to the Holy Spirit than Pentecostalism; has
more respect for the individual than liberal humanism; makes moral standards
more binding than Puritanism; and is more open to new situations than the ‘new
morality’ movement in the 1960s. If practiced, it would radically restructure
the life of churches.
At the time of the
Reformation in the sixteenth century, many people recognised the importance of
binding and loosing to the church. Martin Luther, Calvin’s teacher Martin Bucer and the Anabaptists called the process ‘the Rule of
Christ’. They believed this process could move the Reformation from the
university to the lives of ordinary Christians.
In September 1524, the
first Anabaptists wrote to the German radical Thomas Muntzer,
rejecting his revolutionary violence and urging him to use the Rule of Christ
instead:
March forward with the Word
and create a Christian church with the help of Christ and His Rule such as we
find instituted in Matthew 18 and practiced in the epistles. (Leland Harder
(ed) The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism, p.284)
Later renewal movements,
including John Wesley, have restored binding and loosing in one way or another.
Wesley’s classes and bands performed this function. Today, many evangelical
churches urge their members to find a discipleship partner to confess sins to,
and to receive forgiveness from each other. This practice begins to live out
what Jesus was talking about.
The meaning for the church today
Like the rest of the
world, churches don’t usually follow Jesus’ command in Matthew 18. Yoder
observes that today, recovering binding and loosing can change the way we think
about pastoral care and congregational decision making. It offers a third way
between legalism and non-directive counselling. If we are to even begin trying
to put Matthew 18 into practice, we need to flesh this out some more, and so I
add the following ideas:
1.
Going
directly to our brother or sister when we’re offended. It sounds like a small thing, but it would
actually make a huge difference to the life of churches. Too often, instead of
telling the person who has offended them, Christians tell someone else and get
this third person on their side. Gossip and bitterness replace honesty and
love. In fact, the failure to follow Matthew 18 holds churches back from
developing true Christian community.
In
going directly to our brother or sister, we prevent conflict from escalating.
We develop honesty between each other, and we begin to truly understand each
other. For example, I might be getting angrier and angrier that each week a
newcomer to our church argues passionately against theological points other people
make during discussion. My first impulse is to complain to others in the church
who would agree with me that he is argumentative and difficult. But instead, I
decide to talk to him about it, just between the two of us. He tells me that he
had no idea that was the way he came across; the only way he is used to talking
about theology is in a debating style like he was taught when he studied at
university. I tell him that our Sunday meetings are more aimed at encouraging
each other to follow Jesus than at debating theology for its own sake. He says
that in future he will be less argumentative and more focused on encouraging. I
come away with a better understanding of why he is the way he is; he
understands our church’s expectations better.
2.
Bringing
big decisions to the church. Too
often we’re like the rest of the world, thinking that as Christians we’re
morally independent of each other, and need to wrestle with our own conscience
to come up with the answers to the questions in our lives. But what we do affects
the others in our church, especially as we develop closer community. We have to
work out how far we are willing to take this, but at the very least we should
be taking big decisions to our church for prayer and discernment. The advice
will not be binding, but it is likely to be helpful. Jesus also suggests that
it will reflect what God wants. In a house church, the appropriate time for
discernment is often in the sharing time of the worship meeting. In a
conventional church, you might need to look to your small group to provide the
prayer and discernment Jesus talks about. The sort of decisions might include –
·
‘My lease is
running out. Where should I live?’ (When I asked this of my church, they
suggested I move closer to the rest of them, rather than closer to work; I did
so and it helped build up the life of our church.)
·
‘I’m thinking
of changing jobs.’ (Perhaps your church will ask you what effect the new job
will have on your family life, the amount of time you have to serve God, your
leisure time. Perhaps someone in the church will know about an even better job
opportunity.)
3.
Discerning
Christian ethics as a church.
Ethics are not for the individual conscience either. We have to work out
together as a church in what ways Jesus’ life and words and the example of the
early church are ‘binding’ on a particular situation. We work out what
following Jesus means so that we can then help each other when we sin by not
living up it.
The
sort of issues you will want to discuss together and come to consensus in the
Holy Spirit will include things like the following questions (there is overlap
with the previous point; often moral issues arise in the context of decisions)
–
·
What should
our attitude to money be? (‘I’d like to buy a house so I can stop renting, but
the prospect is taking over my life!’)
·
How do we
respond to defacto marriages? (‘I have a non-Christian child living in one!’)
·
What response
should we make to the Iraq War? (‘I think we all should go on a protest
march!’)
Following Matthew 18 breathes new life into
churches. It is a practice which clearly distinguishes churches from the rest
of the world. It builds a foundation of honesty and understanding. On this
foundation, God builds true Christian community.
Importance for the world
The principles of
conflict resolution in the secular world are not very different from those of
binding and loosing. Conflict resolution is often a good alternative to bitter
and expensive legal battles. Yoder sums up these principles like this, showing
their similarity to binding and loosing:
1.
The intention
is not punishment but resolution.
2.
The two
parties share a common value which is used as a frame of reference.
3.
The mediator
tries to find a solution where both parties will win.
4.
The first efforts
are made in ways which minimise publicity and threat, and maximise flexibility
without risk of shame.
5.
If the
negotiations fail, the ultimate sanction is public disavowal of the party
refusing reconciliation.
In the
Conclusion
To sum up, to be human
is to be in conflict, to offend and to be offended. To be human in the light of
the gospel is to face conflict in redemptive dialogue. When we do that, it is
God who does it. When we do that, we discover that out of conflict can come an important mode of truth-finding and
community-building. This is true in the church; it is also true in the world.
Discussion questions
1.
How do people in your life usually handle conflict?
What works well?
2.
Try summing up what Yoder is saying in this
chapter. (Don’t evaluate it yet; just sum it up.)
3.
Are you convinced that Jesus intended us to go
directly to a person who offends us?
4.
What sort of decisions would you like to be able to
bring to your church for discernment? How would you like the process to work? (Ie : how many people would there be listening to you; would
it be a part of a church meeting or midweek meeting or something else; what
influence would their advice have on you?)
5.
Do you think ‘binding and loosing’ can help in
criminal and civil legal cases?
Chapter 2 - Disciples break bread
together
The Lord’s Supper is a shared meal
In the early church, the Lord’s
Supper was not originally a ritual or a symbolic piece of bread and mouth of
wine. Instead, it was a real meal shared by the disciples. The rich provided
food for the poor. The sharing at the common meal extended into the rest of
life too, with disciples sharing their money, time and resources.
The simple meaning of the Lord’s Supper
And he [Jesus] took bread, gave thanks and broke
it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in
remembrance of me.’
- Luke 22:19
We probably think we
know what Jesus meant when he said this.
But we’ve covered over what he said with centuries of ceremonies and
arguments about what those ceremonies mean. For too long, Christian thinking
about the Lord’s Supper has been sidetracked by abstract questions about the
meaning of the bread and wine, and what happens to them when the right words
are spoken by a priest. These questions
keep us away from the simple meaning of the text.
What were the disciples
meant to do in his memory? It can’t mean
‘Whenever you celebrate Holy Communion’; there was no such thing as ‘Holy
Communion’ or the ‘Lord’s Supper’.
Yoder suggests two ways
we could begin thinking about the question of the Lord’s Supper:
·
Uncovering the distortions - It would be useful to track how the
straightforward meaning of the Lord’s Supper gave way to ritualistic and
superstitious understandings. One key
point was when the state and church merged in the fourth century. The church changed the economic meaning of
the Lord’s Supper to allow those with wealth and power to join in without
changing their lifestyle. (A similar
shift happened with baptism, as you will read in chapter three.)
·
Recovering the cultural context - It would also be useful to get an understanding
of the social meaning of eating together in the first century. In most cultures, common meals have special
meanings. We could look to the Old
Testament and think about the Passover meal and the manna in the wilderness. We could review the prophets’ predictions
about a coming messianic banquet.
But for now, we will
just make a simple reading of the Gospel text.
What did Jesus mean? What were
the first Christians doing when they did it?
The meal just before
Jesus’ death was in a Passover setting.
So Jesus could have meant
‘whenever you celebrate the Passover
do it in remembrance of me’. But that
is not what his hearers took him to mean.
The Passover is celebrated once a year; what the disciples did in his memory
was much more often.
Jesus’ first followers
took him to mean ‘whenever you have your common meal do it in remembrance of
me.’ The meal Jesus claimed as his
memorial was their ordinary eating together.
We already see the
connection between eating together and remembering Jesus in the resurrection
appearances. The disciples on the way to
Emmaus (Luke 24) do not recognise Jesus while he walks with them. It is only when he thanks God for the bread
(24:30) that they recognise him. The other disciples don’t believe their story
until Jesus appears again and eats with them (vv41-43). We find the same
pattern in Acts 1:4 and John 21:9-13
Eating together in the first church
In Acts, after Jesus’
resurrection and ascension, the Holy Spirit came upon the early believers
during Pentecost. It is not surprising
that the Pentecost story ends with more common meals. The disciples’ life together is summarised in
four activities - they “remained faithful to the apostles’ teaching, to
fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to the prayers” (2:42) and “they met
in houses for the breaking of bread; they shared their food gladly and
generously” (2:46, Yoder’s translations).
From sharing food
together, the disciples went on to sharing money – “no-one claimed for his own
use anything that he had” (4:32). This
sharing was a natural extension of the common meal.
The common meal was not
something new. It carried on the way of
life Jesus and his disciples had led while they were going from town to town,
teaching and healing. As early as Luke
8, there is a reference to the way Jesus and the disciples were fed by
donations provided for by others.
The common meal was
central to the life of the early church; they were prepared to change the
structure of their church for the sake of it. This is shown in Acts 6. The
incident begins with a problem between the Greek-speaking Jews and the
Hebrew-speaking Jews. The Greek-speaking
Jews were born outside of
Yoder sees two important
points:
·
The sharing of
food was so important that it led to the apostles reorganising the leadership
of the church to make sure it was done fairly.
·
The
appointment of Greek-speaking deacons shows a church adapting to new members and
their culture. It is an attitude that
saw the church grow from a few gatherings in
The importance of eating
together continues throughout Acts and Paul’s letters to the churches. Some examples:
·
Acts 15 - The church calls a conference to resolve the
question of table fellowship, laying the foundation for a missionary policy
that would be free to welcome Gentiles.
·
1 Corinthians
- many of the questions Paul is answering cconcern table fellowship - meat
offered to idols (chapters 8 and 10); and a table divided according to class
(chapter 11). Paul tells the Corinthians
that if their meal together fails to overcome social divisions, then they are
celebrating their own condemnation.
The Old Testament
pictures the messianic age as a banquet (Isaiah 25:6-10a; Ezekiel 39:17-20). In
celebrating fellowship around the table, the early Christians showed that this
messianic age, this banquet had begun.
Men and women gathered together around food in a new family with Jesus
as its head.
Further dimensions of the celebration
The Lord’s Supper echoes
with other Bible stories, too, and these are a part of its meaning:
·
The fact that
Jesus and his disciples were celebrating the Passover when Jesus asked them to
eat together in his memory, connects us to the story
of the people of God in the Old Testament.
The Passover was an act of worship in the form of a meal which
remembered the flight from
·
The disciples
would have remembered the feeding of the five thousand and the four thousand
earlier in Jesus’ ministry. These
miracles were a taste of what was to come - the messianic banquet celebrated by
the early church now, and one day to be celebrated by the whole world when
Jesus comes again.
The basic economic fact
We must not let the
symbolic meanings and importance of the Lord’s Supper take us away from the
literal importance of it. For the early church,
the food shared in the Lord’s Supper did not just symbolise daily sustenance;
it was daily sustenance. The primary meaning of the Lord’s Supper was
not ceremonial - it was economic.
The sharing was real,
and it was necessary because the disciples depended on each other like a family
depends on each other. We must remember
that many in the movement had left behind families or jobs, or had sold their
houses and placed the money in a common fund.
They were no longer financially independent; they were now dependent on
each other. In eating together, the
disciples looked after each other like a family looks after each other.
The detour of interpretation as special ‘ritual’
When we understand the
Lord’s Supper as a set-apart religious ritual in a worship service, we miss how
much it should change the way we live together.
When we realise that the
Lord’s Supper is about sharing food and money with other believers, we see the
economic newness of the
It’s not Communism, a
system where private property is abolished and the state (in the name of the
people) controls all property. Communism is a secular theory which came
centuries after the Lord’s Supper. It
takes us away from the voluntary, Christ-centred gathering we are talking
about.
But even if it’s not
Communism, it doesn’t let us off lightly. The Lord’s Supper demands radical,
uncomfortable sharing and support for the poor.
We must wrestle seriously with the witness of those first Christians who
sold their houses to share the money with the others in the church.
Our society rewards merit
and productivity. As Christians, we believe in unmerited sharing - grace - and
we value the lowly, meek and poor who are not productive.
Not just food, but also status
The sharing of food and
money in table fellowship leads to equality in Christ. The world judges us by our economic status -
in the first century, between master and slave; in our society, between
successful businessmen, investors and career-people and the unemployed or lowly
skilled. But the sharing of bread and
money begins a redistribution that recognises we are equal in Christ, and which
condemns the snobbery which says some people are better than others.
Economic radicals in church history
It’s not surprising that
over the centuries, the people who have realised the economic newness of the kingdom have tended
to be those on the edges of society.
People like St Francis, Peter Waldo, the band of Anabaptist brethren who
established a commune in 1528, the English Levellers and even some monastic
orders caught this vision of what the kingdom was like, and chose to forgo
status and wealth.
These economic radicals
did not realise that they were practising the principles of the Lord’s
Supper. By medieval times, the Lord’s
Supper had become so distorted by abstract theological questions that everyone
had lost sight of its meaning. But they
still found this vision in the life and work of Jesus and the early church,
even when the Lord’s Supper had become something quite else.
(This is a key part of the
pattern of the practices in this book – they stand up even if you disagree with
the context Yoder puts them in. We are called to eat together and share money
even if you insist that it’s not part of what we call the Lord’s Supper.
Different races are called into a new people, the church, even if you don’t
think that’s part of baptism – the theme of chapter three.)
Sharing applied to land – the Lord’s Supper and the
Jubilee
The Lord’s Supper is
related to another part of Jesus’ message - the permanent Jubilee. While the
Lord’s Supper’s first meaning is justice in consumable like food, the Jubilee
is about justice at the level of capital - property, savings, investments.
In Leviticus 25, the
Israelites are told to return all land to its original owners every fifty years
in the year of Jubilee. By the time
Jesus arrived, the Jubilee had not been practiced for centuries. It would have been impossible to trace the
original owners and share the land amongst so many descendants. Yet, in Luke 4 when Jesus, reading from
Isaiah, ‘proclaims the acceptable year of the Lord’ - many scholars believe he
is referring to the Jubilee.
Neither Isaiah nor Jesus
were calling for the literal implementation of the
rules found in Leviticus 25. Instead,
they were using an image from their holy books that summed up the concept of
structural justice - forgiving debts and sharing property amongst everyone.
We see how Christians in
the early church did this amongst themselves, by selling property or sharing
their houses. We might think about how it relates to our own life as a
church.
It is also part of our
message of hope for the wider world.
Perhaps we can support global efforts at achieving justice for
third-world countries like the Make Poverty History campaign. At a local level, we might find ways to
tackle economic injustice in our neighbourhood.
The gospel transforms the role of the banker and
every other ‘vocation’
Yoder finishes the
chapter with a detour that is important to understanding Christian social ethics. This is the idea that the Gospel transforms
even our jobs.
Some Christian theology
teaches that our society and its institutions are God given just how they are -
they are the ‘order-of-creation’. According to this thinking, the way things
are is the way God wants them to be. Christians are called to a particular
vocation or role and should do it with honesty and hard work without
challenging it.
The example most
relevant to the Lord’s Supper is banking.
According to the ‘order-of-creation’, a Christian banker’s role is to
make lots of money, not share it like Jesus told us to.
Other examples: soldiers
and hangmen should kill, because that is their role in the world. Slaves should remain slaves; women should
remain submissive; employees should always obey their bosses.
What is Yoder’s
response? The order-of-creation has been
so corrupted by sin that in many ways it no longer reflects God’s desire. Our
Christian calling is to follow Jesus.
This will bring us into conflict with the way things are. We are to
plant signs of the new world - the kingdom - in the ruins of the old
world.
The Christian banker
will try to find realistic ways to put in practice the Jubilee. There are people doing this. The Christian real-estate agent will find ways
to house people according to need. There
are people doing this. The Christian
judge will open the court to conflict resolution procedures and try to stop the
trend toward more suing. There are
people doing this.
Discussion questions
1. What importance does eating
together have in your life? Think about family meals, as well as dinner guests
and Christmas meals. Is there something special about sharing food with others
in your church?
2.
Many Christians find that inviting others from church home to eat with
them is an important part of fellowship, even though they don’t associate it
with the Lord’s Supper.
3. Try summing up what Yoder is
saying in this chapter. (Don’t evaluate it yet; just sum it up.)
4. Are you convinced that Jesus meant
the Lord’s Supper to be a real meal?
5. How could your church implement a
shared meal as part of the Sunday worship meeting? What practical and
theological issues would it raise?
6. What are some of the ways your
church could approach the wider sharing of money and time that the Lord’s
Supper involves?
7. How does this view of the Lord’s
Supper speak to the world outside the church?
Chapter three - Baptism and the new humanity
Baptism is entry into a new people
Baptism has a social meaning that has
been lost by most Christians. It celebrates a person’s entry into a new people
– the church. This new people is a tie stronger than
race, ethnicity or family. Different types of people who were once hostile to
each other are brought into the same family.
Bringing Jews and Gentiles together in the writings of Paul
...with us therefore worldly standards have ceased
to count in our estimate of anyone; even if once they counted in our
understanding of Christ, they do so now no longer. If anyone is united to Christ, there is a new
world; everything old has passed away; see, everything has
become new! (2 Cor. 5:16-17)
One of Paul’s missionary
policies was to make Jews and Gentiles members of the same church, eating and
worshipping together. Both sides criticised this policy. In 2 Corinthians, Paul
responds by writing the verses above.
The New English Bible
translates ‘new world’ where a lot of translations translate ‘he is a new
creature’. In Politics of Jesus (pp.
221-223, 2nd edition), Yoder makes a strong argument that ‘new
world’ or ‘new creation’ is the much more accurate translation. Not just the individual changes - there is a
whole new world.
The ‘worldly standards’
which cease to count are more precisely ‘ethnicity’ (Greek: ‘according to the
flesh’.) The old divisions of race, class and ability are no longer important,
because when we are united to Christ, we belong to a new people where these
divisions are overcome.
In Galatians 3:27-28,
Paul writes:
Baptized in Christ, you are
clothed in Christ, and there is neither slave nor free, neither male nor
female; you are all one in Christ Jesus.
(Yoder’s translation)
In Ephesians 2:14-15,
Paul writes:
He is himself our peace.
Gentiles and Jews, he has made the two one; and in his own body of flesh and
blood has broken down the enmity which stood like a dividing wall between them;
for he annulled the law with its rules and regulations, so as to create out of
the two a single new humanity in himself, thereby making peace. (Yoder’s
translation)
In all three epistles,
using different words, Paul makes the same point - Christ has broken down the
divisions between people. There is a new creation and we enter it through
baptism. Baptism celebrates the merging of the Jewish and Gentile stories. In
the baptism ritual, one of the expressions like ‘new humanity’, ‘peace’ or ‘new
creation’ would have been used. The ritual would highlight the contrast between
believers’ old identity as part of an ethnic group and their new identity in
Christ.
Jesus and John the Baptist
The idea didn’t start
with Paul. John the Baptist was probably challenged by the authorities for
baptising everyone who came to him in repentance – unclean Jews (tax
collectors), perhaps even Gentiles. He responded by saying that God makes
daughters and sons of Abraham by faith (Matthew 3:5-10). Baptism gives all
people the same new start.
Jesus said the same
thing in John 8, and Paul in Galatians 3. You don’t have to be born a Jew to be
a descendent of Abraham. Now, anyone can become a descendent of Abraham by
believing in Christ.
Baptism inducts people
into a new society – the church. This
new society is a model for the rest of the world to follow. Unfortunately,
through history the church has often failed to be the new society.
Baptism in church history
Later Christian theology
turned baptism into something very different. After the fifth century, there
were no more outsiders to convert because the known world had been declared
Christian by the emperor. Baptism became a celebration of your birth into a
particular country and ethnic group – the opposite of its original meaning,
when it was a transcending of your nationality and race in a new people.
It was natural that a new
theology developed to explain what the ritual of baptism does to a baby who
receives it without asking for it. This new theology borrowed from the
non-Christian philosophical idea of ‘original sin’ - that being born into a
human body was sinful in itself. The baptism ritual became a way to wash away
the original sin. In this understanding, there was no breaking down the
barriers between classes of people and no new age breaking in.
In reaction, the
Reformer, Zwingli, turned baptism into an acted-message. It was an outward
symbol of an inner new birth. This meant babies
couldn’t be baptised; but it did not involve egalitarianism or a new social
reality. Today, many Baptists hold this view.
Importance for the world
The oneness and equality
of humanity is a message which applies beyond the church to the whole world.
The world has its own versions of this message that are different to the
Christian one we have been describing.
The United States
Constitution proclaims, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights.’ It’s a nice sentiment, but it isn’t true. ‘Self-evident’
means that people already agree on something without needing to be convinced.
That is not the case about the equality of all humans. Most people do not
really believe it.
Yoder believes we
shouldn’t look to the order-of-creation to find equality, but to Jesus Christ
and redemption.
The church should be
announcing to the world that we believe in the equality of all humans, and that
they can come together as one people. The problem is that it seems like we are
tagging along behind the world, using words of our own to say something the
world taught us needed saying.
This problem occurs
because for too many centuries, the church lost the message of oneness that
originated with Jesus. Instead, from the time Christianity became a state
religion up until a century ago, ‘Christian’ authorities claimed by the
order-of-creation that peoples, nations and classes should stay apart and that
men should rule over women, and that white people should rule the globe. The
mainline church did not live up to its own message or even realise its own
message.
We can only try to make
it clear that our vision comes out of the New Testament, and out of what God
intends the church to be, and that it is older and more deeply rooted
Current debates about baptism and mission
What we believe about
baptism has a big impact on our view of mission – that is, the work of the
church.
Here are three ways of
thinking about baptism and mission:
1.
Conservative
evangelicals - The work of the
church is to bring individuals, one at a time, to respond to information about
Jesus and ask him into their hearts. The ‘new creature’ will be freed from
sins, including racism. The evangelicals who hold this view believe that the
social reality of the church is necessary, but it is not the message itself.
The social grouping of the church is simply a result of individuals being converted
and meeting together.
To
this, Yoder would say that the social reality of the church comes first; it is
the sign of the messianic age. There is more than just individuals freed from
racism; there is a new people who show that different races
can be one people.
2.
Liberals –
The work of the church is to
get involved with whatever justice or peace or equality movements are happening
in the world. The church isn’t distinct from the world and so doctrine and
conversion are irrelevant.
To this, Yoder would say the
particular form of justice, peace and equality found in the New Testament is
important. There is common ground on which the church can co-operate with
feminists or Aboriginal land rights activists, but there are also important
differences. The church itself is the new people who demonstrate the hope for
the world – a people bound together in Christ. Our message of hope for the
world is this church showing the oneness of all types of people
3.
Church
growth movement – The work of
the church is to plant viable churches in every culture. The most effective way
to do this is to make them monocultural. We plant a
church aimed at a particular culture or even ‘market’ – Indonesian immigrants;
Aborigines; young rich singles; working class families. The church does not
show the overcoming of divisions; it retains them.
To
this, Yoder would say that a crucial part of the gospel is that different types
of people are brought together into fellowship. It is easier to stick to our
own kind of people, but it’s not the full gospel.
According to Yoder,
Paul’s understanding is different to all three of these ways of thinking. The
messianic age has begun; Paul simply proclaims it. What he and his readers are
to do is announce and celebrate it. Because it has begun, status differences –
whether sexual, ritual, ethnic or economic – are overarched in a new reality.
The truth of this announcement will echo with some listeners who will join in
the celebration, but the truth is not dependent on the echo. The proclaimed
truth will have effects, making cultural waves, making history happen, both
within the believing community and beyond, but its truth does not depend on
these effects. When heard, the message will change people both inwardly and
outwardly, but that change is not the message. The message is that Christ has
begun a new phase of world history. There is now a group of people who are a
‘new world’ or a ‘new humanity’. We know the new world has come because it
breaches the old divides.
So we don’t have to
choose between evangelism and social justice. The Gospel is that the old divides are overcome, a new people are brought
together in Christ. Baptism proclaims it. We are to constantly tell people the
good news (evanglise) that there is a new world
(social justice).
Baptism also means repentance
So far, we have been
discussing baptism’s message of bringing together different ethnic groups. But
baptism also has other political meanings. Even before Jesus, it meant
repentance and cleaning – it meant ‘You can leave your
past behind; you can change!’
Does this message have
meaning for the world?
It certainly speaks
against social sciences which say that offenders can’t change, that criminals
are stuck in being a product of social and psychological forces. We hold out
hope for everyone to change – even our enemies. And this leads us to be
non-violent. It is our hope that our enemies (which the world tells us to kill)
will one day be our brothers and sisters in the new creation.
A common pattern begins to emerge
We’ve now looked at
three practices of the early church and their contributions to mission and
politics. We can begin to see a pattern emerging.
1.
For all three,
the New Testament says that when humans do it, God is doing it. (The
theological word for this is ‘sacrament’, but that is a word loaded with the
wrong meanings.)
2.
All three are
ordinary human behaviour – reconciling through dialogue, sharing bread with one
another, different races sharing community. They are not mysterious or esoteric
like later Christian theology made them. Because they are ordinary human
behaviour, all three can make sense to the world.
3.
The New
Testament describes all three as coming from the work of Jesus. Binding and
loosing and breaking bread are direct commands from Jesus. Baptism celebrates
the new world brought about by the cross and resurrection.
4.
All three
start with a social meaning. In the introduction, we were talking about the gap
between worship and everyday life. These practices have no such gap. They are
social, practical and public. They can be prototypes for what others can do in
the wider world. Beyond the church, it is possible to resolve conflicts and
make decisions by conversation, to feed the hungry, and to build interethnic
community by inclusion. So the practices are political in two senses. Firstly,
they are practiced by a church with a particular social shape. And secondly,
they can be used by any society as a way to organise life together.
5.
All three are
procedural guidelines. They give us the skills to resolve moral questions,
rather than giving us precise moral answers. This means that they are not bound
to their original cultural setting; they are skills we can apply to new
cultural settings to learn how to follow Christ in whatever situation we find
ourselves in.
Discussion questions
1. What does baptism mean to you?
2. Try summing up what Yoder is
saying in this chapter. (Don’t evaluate it yet; just sum it up.)
3. Do you agree with him?
4. Are you convinced that Paul
believed all members of the body were gifted and that there be
no more religious specialists?
5. What would a church which
practiced ‘every member empowerment’ be like today?
6. What implications does this
practice have for your church?
Chapter four - The fullness of Christ
Everyone has a gift for the church
The Holy Spirit has poured out gifts
on each member of the church. We miss
the importance of this in most churches; we give all the jobs to the
super-pastor and sit passively in the pews. But the fact that everyone has a
gift is radical and powerful. It means the end of the religious specialist in
Christian churches. It means a church where everyone contributes, where
everyone is part of a body: an interdependent unity.
New group dynamics
His gifts were that some should be apostles, some
prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers... for building up the
body of Christ... until we attain to the unity of the faith and of the
knowledge of the Son of God... to the measure of the stature of the fullness of
Christ. (Ephesians 4:11-13, RSV)
When Paul uses the term
‘the fullness of Christ’ in Ephesians 4:13, he’s talking about the new group
dynamics found in the church. The new
dynamics are that God has given every member a special gift to use, a role to
play in building up the church. (By
building up the church, I mean encouraging and strengthening the people in the
church.)
It’s a point Paul makes
in other places, too, including:
·
In 1
Corinthians 12:7, he states specifically that ‘to each one the manifestation of
the Spirit is given for the common good.’
·
In Romans 12,
Paul talks about the body having many parts with different gifts, and each person
is to use their gifts according to the measure they’ve been given. When he writes
‘according to the measure of faith God has assigned’ (12:3), he does not mean
that some people have been dealt out a lot of faith or grace and some only a
little. ‘Measure’ is not like a
‘measuring cup’, but more like a serving, or a portion.
The same way of speaking
also appears in 1 Peter 4:9-11. This
shows that it wasn’t just Paul’s idea; it was held by other Christian
communities as well. Paul is the one,
however, who spells it out most fully for us.
Every member empowerment
was a very different pattern to the existing ones of Paul’s world, and it is
also very different to the patterns we find in our world, including our
churches. We need to remember that what
Paul was talking about is very different to the way later Christian theology
has understood his key concepts, ‘charisma’, ‘ministry’ and ‘body’.
Today, there are
differences between different denominations on the pattern of roles in the
church, but there is a basic dominant assumption that in each church, just one
or two or three people have the special role of ‘minister’. Only especially qualified person can do the
special thing that makes the church what it is supposed to be.
Part of the victory of Christ
In Ephesians 4, Paul
says that the giving out of gifts to every believer is a part of the victory of
Christ. It is something very new and
unnatural. It is a case of living up to
a new direction we have been shown.
Today, Christians miss the
newness of the multiplicity of gifts because they assume they already
understand it. They think it is the same
as business models of teamwork that they see in the world. In contrast, Paul says that it has never
existed before and it had to be achieved by Christ; it is part of the victory
procession of Christ sharing with his people the spoils of his victory.
Body-thinking: not the same as individualism
In our society, the
individual is very important. This individualism is not all bad. It may partly
owe its origins to the idea that each member of the body is individually
gifted. But while we can recognise a
similarity, it’s more important to emphasise the differences between the
gospel’s every member empowerment and the world’s individualism.
The image Paul uses for
us is as hands or eyes or feet of a body.
Each of these parts is unique and irreplaceable but not independent – a
hand can’t function on its own. Its role and usefulness only makes sense in the
context of the body as a whole.
The idea extends outside
the church to every group of humans.
Humans are less than they are meant to be when they are not part of a
body in organic interdependence with others. We become what we were created to
be when we are a part of a body – in its fullest sense, in the church; but also
as part of a team on the sporting field or in the office.
Keeping the body together
It will help us better
understand Paul’s vision if we consider the situation he was responding to at
Some of the Christians in
the
1.
Every
member of the body has been given some gift by the Holy Spirit and all of the
gifts are of equal dignity. Thus each
member is called to recognise everyone else’s gift, giving special honour to
people with the less glamorous gifts.
2.
In the church
meeting, there are two important principles: (i)
orderliness is important and (ii) prophecy - the speaking of God’s Word for the
present - takes priority over the other gifts (this is the Rule of Paul, the
subject of the next chapter).
3.
It seems that
some Corinthians were calling themselves ‘spiritual’
and claimed to possess the Holy Spirit more fully than the others. Paul
responded by replacing their word spiritual
with gift (charisma, from which we get charismatic). It was not that some
possessed the Spirit and some did not, but that all roles were gifts given by
the Spirit. Since they were a gift, they were not a reason to be proud.
Basically, Paul was
trying to correct the chaotic enthusiasm in the church that was causing
disorder. For the Corinthians, wild
displays of tongues were overvalued.
Soon, however, a different
role was overvalued - a role that wasn’t even present in the churches Paul
wrote to. This role combined teaching, eldership, prophecy and pastoral support
into something called ‘priest’ or ‘minister’. One person in each church was
suddenly given a virtual monopoly on gifts!
Paul’s message to us: recapture the Spirit-empowered
church!
What is Paul’s message
to the church since his time, a church where the priest is usually dominant and
the lay-people are passively sitting in the pews? We don’t need to be corrected
for chaotic enthusiasm! We need to
recapture his idea of the Spirit-empowered church which caused the chaos in the
first place! Paul first said, ‘Everyone has
a gift’; then he said, ‘Let everything be orderly.’ The Corinthians needed to hear the second
truth; we need to hear the first one. The idea that everyone has a gift means
changing the way we do things, changing the way we have institutionalised roles
and restricted gifts to the few. When we look at church history, we see that
Bible-centred renewal movements have recaptured that first truth, at least for
a while. This is discussed further below.
The words ‘charisma’ and
‘gift’ are crucial to this new pattern of ministry. But the problem is that the way we use these
words today confuses us and takes us away from what Paul meant. There are three confusing uses of these
words:
1.
We use the
word ‘charismatic’ to describe a powerful, charming leader. ‘Charisma’ is a kind of charm that only a few
people have. This is opposite to how
Paul used the word ‘charisma’. He was
trying to downplay the uniqueness of ‘charisms’ - it
is not something to be proud of, but a gift from God.
2.
We use the
word ‘charismatic’ to describe a particular type of Christianity. Some churches
are ‘charismatic’ and some are not.
Again, this is the opposite of what Paul meant; he meant that all
Christians and all churches were ‘charismatic’ - were given gifts and used
them.
3.
We use the
word ‘gifted’ to describe someone with special natural ability. But Paul only talked about people being
‘gifted’ in the setting of the church.
Gifts are something given to Christians to build up the church. Let’s
not confuse the gifts of the New Testament with its current secular use.
We also think of bodies
- committees, organisations, churches - in a way different to Paul. We call the boss of a body the ‘head’, and so
we imply that there is an order of importance, a hierarchy. Paul’s metaphor of the body has Christ as the
head; all the rest of us are of equal importance.
The apostles knew Jesus
and so had a special place in the church, but they died out. Prophets were
valued but they were still under the authority of the church. There were also
lots of members of the body giving prophecies.
The role of elders was another important one, and they had some
authority in the early churches. But there seems to have been a number of
elders in each small church, a team of them. At every point, the vision points
away from concentrating power in the hands of one or two.
In our time, Paul’s call
for role diversity is not so unusual - we hear the same call from other people
for other reasons. What we need to be clear on is what Paul meant by it. It is
not because he believes in democracy. It is not because he is an anarchist
suspicious of all authority.
Instead, Paul proclaims
that in the midst of a fallen world, the grace of God has given each believer,
without merit, a special gift and a special place in a body of people. God has
not made everyone the same, but has empowered each member differently yet
equally. He has restored everyone to what they are meant to be - a part of a
body; in doing this, they are doing what God intended for humans.
The powerful alternative
Paul’s message goes
against our instincts and against our traditions. Religions from all cultures
and societies tend to put access to God in the hands of one special priest or
shaman or minister. This role is a profession for a specialist. There is
usually a special ceremony that only the priest can perform.
The specialisation of
religion is a sign of the fallen nature of the world. But God has been at work
throughout history reversing this fallenness.
Already in Ancient
Israel, God was acting to de-centralise the priestly specialist. Abraham was
not a priest; he took his sacrifice to Melchizidek. Moses was not a priest; he
let his brother, Aaron, and then the Levites do those rituals. In Numbers 11,
at God’s instruction, Moses calls seventy men to share the Holy Spirit’s
empowerment with him. When these men become ecstatic, Joshua asks Moses to stop
them. Moses replies, ‘I wish that the Lord
would give his spirit to all his people and make all of them shout like
prophets!’ (11:29 - Good News Bible).
When the Jews were sent
into exile and no longer had a temple, Judaism survived by replacing priests
with rabbis. Synagogues were formed of any ten households, with no religious
specialist needed in their midst at all. (In modern Judaism, ‘rabbi’ is an
ordained position. It wasn’t so in the time of the New Testament; it was simply
a title of respect for a learned layperson.)
By the time of Jesus,
the temple and its priesthood had been restored. Jesus relativised it again. He
formed a movement out of fishermen, zealots, publicans and women and sent
seventy of them (the same number as Moses) out across the countryside. This set
the stage for the churches Paul was writing to, where everyone had a special
gift and role. Since Pentecost, when the Spirit fell on all God’s people,
priests have been out of work – they no longer have special access to God.
Sometimes the early
Christians said they were all priests; sometimes they said that the priesthood
was done away with. The meaning is actually the same. All members of the body
are Spirit-empowered. There is no longer a monopoly on access to God. Yet since then, it’s one of the parts of the
Gospel message which has been least understood and least practiced.
Soon Paul’s vision was
lost. There was no central authority in the early church, so perhaps it never
won out in the first place. When Christianity became allied with the state in
the fourth century, the ideas of king and priest reinforced each other.
Over the centuries
since, renewal movements have begun to recover Paul’s vision by giving power and
roles to everyone. However, it rarely lasts long and it is rarely thought
through as part of the renewal project. The Quakers, the Plymouth Brethren and
the Salvation Army have come closer than most Protestants to relativising the
priestly monopoly and validating varied gifts. Yet they did not set out to put
in place what Paul wrote about. Instead, as they were being led by the Spirit
they found God empowering non-clergy, including women, and they honoured these
gifts.
Importance for the world
Paul’s vision of working
together, of complementary functions, is helpful for any organisation doing
things. The modern idea of teamwork is a spin-off from Paul’s concept.
Factories and businesses where every worker is involved in policy making and
quality control make better cars or sell more software than those whose
structure is hierarchical.
Our theme in its context
We have now looked at
four practices commanded, and to some degree, practiced in the early churches.
Unlike the others, the multiplicity of gifts is not usually called ‘worship’.
It should be!
Like the other three so
far, this practice has been distorted, if it has been practiced at all. Binding
and loosing was distorted into the ‘sacrament of penance’, where a religious
specialist forgives the church members for their sins. The responsibility of every believer to
disciple their brothers and sisters was lost. It’s a similar story with every
member empowerment - the role of every member was replaced with the role of a
few religious specialists.
The reformation that has yet to happen
According to Yoder,
every member empowerment is the first of the five practices that has not yet
had its reformation. Its practical form still has to be worked out and
practiced.
This should remind us
that the New Testament hasn’t been exhausted. It reminds that there’s not just
one right model of reformation that will always be the same. There is no
finished pattern; it’s not as simple as restoring a biblical church. It has to
be worked out newly in each new context. It has to transform the existing
structures.
Yoder wrote this book in
the early 1990s; in the years since then, the house church movement has grown
rapidly. Perhaps he would have regarded house churches as the movement which
would carry out this reformation. Many house churches are formed with the
deliberate intention of starting a church where everyone can participate. Even
when this isn’t a conscious intention, house churches lend themselves to
everybody participating because they are small and they don’t usually pay a
minister.
So, ‘every member
empowerment’ is a reformation that is potentially sweeping across the globe
like previous reformations. But the issue that is getting the most attention in
denominations is debate about women in ministry.
The debate goes like
this: taking for granted that there is one role called ‘ministry’, churches
then either deny or allow women to fill this role.
From Paul’s vision, the
mistake which dominates this debate is not in the answers but in the question. There
should not be one ‘ministerial’ role, of which we can then argue about whether
it is gender-specific. There are as many ministerial roles as there are members
of the body of Christ, and so half of them belong to women.
The roles least justified
by the New Testament are those of priest and bishop over multiple
congregations. It is these ones that men alone have traditionally held and want
to keep women out of. To let a few women into a role that did not even exist in
the apostolic churches may be a good kind of ‘affirmative action’, but it is
hardly the most profound vision of renewal. It’s like trying to say that
Margaret Thatcher changed the nature of politics.
The transformation that
Paul’s vision calls for would not be to let a few gifted women share with a few
men the rare roles of domination. It would be to change the idea of ministry so
that every person is gifted, every person is called, every person is empowered
and no-one is dominated. Only that would live up to Paul’s call to ‘lead a life
worthy of our calling.’
Discussion questions
1. How have gifts and roles been
recognised in your own church experience?
2. Has the pastor or priest been the
religious specialist?
3. Try summing up what Yoder is
saying in this chapter. (Don’t evaluate it yet; just sum it up.)
4. Are you convinced that Paul
believed all members of the body were gifted and that there be
no more religious specialists?
5. What would a church which
practiced every member empowerment be like today?
6. What implications does this
practice have for your church?
Chapter 5 - The Rule of Paul
The open meeting
The Rule of Paul is
A couple of examples of the Rule of Paul
Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others
weigh what is said. If a revelation is made to someone else sitting nearby, let
the first person be silent. For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all
may learn and be encouraged.
1 Corinthians 14:29-31 (NRSV)
In 1 Corinthians 14,
Paul tells the Corinthians how they should behave when they are gathered for
worship. In v. 30, he says that when someone receives a message from God - a
prophecy - whoever was speaking should stop and let the person with the message
speak. Everyone else should then weigh up what the person says and decide
whether it is from God. The message from God could come to anyone in the
congregation. It is an open meeting - everyone is allowed to speak.
The same idea about the
nature of the church meeting can be seen in Acts 15, where the early church
meets to work out the relations between Jews and Gentiles in the new churches.
The procedure was simple. Paul and Barnabas reported on their way Gentiles had
been joining the movement. Some
The rule of Paul in church history
In the early centuries,
the churches sent representatives to ‘synods’ or ‘councils’ to decide
controversial issues. They were meant to work like the Jerusalem Council, but
were bigger and more formal and so had less and less of the spontaneity and
openness of the
The Reformers had a
similar hope for a representative council, and Luther and Zwingli both thought,
in different ways, that all believers should have a right to speak. Yet they saw
it as an ideal, which could not be put into practice in their present time. In
1533, some Swiss Brethren - an Anabaptist group - produced a pamphlet called
‘Answer of some who are called Anabaptists, why they do not attend churches’.
Their first reason for not attending (the official) churches is that these
churches did not follow the ‘Christian order’ found in 1 Cor 14 - ‘that a
listener is bound in Christian love (if something to edification is given or
revealed to him) that he should and may speak of it also in the congregation.’
God’s will is known by the Spirit working in the
meeting
Reading 1 Cor 14, the
early Protestants came separately to the same conclusion - God makes his will
known by open conversation in the Christian meeting. There is no voting in
which a majority overrules a minority. There is no decision made by a leader.
Instead, a consensus arises, everyone ends up feeling they are being led in the
same direction.
This idea came out again
in the British Reformation, among Seekers, Levellers, Ranters, Friends and
radical Baptists. Some historians think it influenced British democracy. But of
these groups, the first three folded and the Baptists retained a pastor-centred
approach. It was the Friends - the Quakers - who developed and practiced the
idea that the Spirit of Christ is present in all members to shape and guide the
church.
Quaker silence is not
mystical and it is not silent worship. It is a time of expectant waiting until someone
- and the point is that it can be anyone - is moved to speak. Consensus is
reached when everyone has had a chance to say all they are led to say and there
is no further disagreement.
This is the process for
both church ‘worship’ and ‘business’ meetings. Allowing dialogue in a worship
meeting makes it feel a bit more like a business meeting; it often makes it
more practical. On the other hand, seeing the open meeting as worshipful in
itself means that business meetings become another form of worship.
The Quakers believe that
the Word is at work in everyone (John 1:9), giving them the capacity to hear
God. It means that the principle of open dialogue works beyond the church as
well, even if there isn’t the same common goal and the same special presence of
the Holy Spirit. One of the ways Jesus is at work healing people in the world
is the idea from his ministry that we listen not only to our neighbours, but
also to our enemies. Gandhi says we should renounce violence not only because
it is wrong; but also because the enemy helps us find the truth. We need to act
non-violently so that our enemy will listen to us; and also, we need to hear
our enemy.
The spectre of anarchy
But surely we can’t let
just anyone speak out at our church worship services? Surely we don’t have the
time to get consensus on every important decision? Won’t we have chaotic
diversity?
It’s a mistake to think
that imposing decisions on people creates unity and that letting them speak
creates diversity. The diversity is always there; it’s just that we usually try
to silence it. A decree is quicker than careful listening, but is often wrong.
A quick majority vote may reach a decision rapidly, but it doesn’t resolve the
problem. The minority who were outvoted remain unconvinced.
If the truth is only
found when every member of the church contributes, then we need to make sure we
have the time and patience to discover it.
Discussion questions
1. In a
meeting or conversation, have you experienced truth emerging through everyone’s
contribution?
2. Try summing up what Yoder is
saying in this chapter. (Don’t evaluate yet; just sum it up.)
3. Are you convinced that this is
what Paul meant in 1 Corinthians 14?
4. How could your church implement an
open meeting? What practical and theological issues would it raise?
6 - Conclusion
Now we have looked at
five sample practices of the church, we can try to see patterns and make some
generalisations.
Generalisations for the church’s life
All five practices are worship,
are ministry, are praise, are celebratory and are essential to the church. They
are actions of God, in and with, through and under what men and women do. Where
they are happening, the people of God is real in the
world.
Generalisations for the church’s relation to the
world
Yoder asks what general
lessons he has learnt concerning the question with which the study began – how
the gospel affects the rest of the world.
1. Which
is the ‘real world’? Too often Christians make the mistake of thinking there
is an agreed reality – a ‘real world’ – which the church has to fit into.
Instead, we should believe that we have our own understanding of reality, just
as unbelieving people have their own understanding of reality. That means we
can afford to begin with the gospel itself and then work out from there, as
this study has done, rather than beginning with someone else’s definition of
‘the nature of things’ and then trying to place the call of God within it.
2.
Respect the world’s unbelief. It’s not possible to Christianise the world with
all its non-Christian structures. The way the world is structured, it would be
impossible to rule it according to the gospel. The answer is not to find
another way to rule it; the answer is to realise that we are called to serve
the world, not to rule it.
3.
Common agenda. There is, however, hope of affecting the world for the better, which
our five practices all show. We affect the world by doing ordinary social
things differently for Jesus’ sake. We are one family with people from many
cultures; we share our bread; we forgive one another. These activities can be
observed and copied by non-Christians.
4.
Good news to the world. All five practices can be called together ‘good
news’. ‘News’ because they say something people wouldn’t know if they weren’t
told. ‘Good’ because it is helpful, saving and healing to those who accept it.
By definition, news is public; it is proclaimed in the open; we proclaim the
good news when we do these five practices.
5.
As a body. The focus of these practices is not the individual but a believing
community. They give a lot of dignity to individuals, but the individual is not
the focus.
6.
Refuse nationalism, violence and lordship. All
five practices are those of a church which serves, rather than rules. They come
out of Jesus choosing servanthood instead of power.
Baptism into a new humanity means rejecting nationalism and war, because we are
brothers and sisters with people from all nations. The sharing of food and
goods also speaks against war, because most of the time war is about wanting
economic control.
7.
Example for the world. These practices are not ritualistic or ‘religious’
in the normal sense. Non-Christians can understand them and learn from them.
Binding and loosing can provide models for conflict resolution. Sharing bread
is a model not only for soup kitchens but also for non-Christians to think
about welfare in general. ‘Every member has a gift’ is an alternative to vertical
business models of management in business. Dialogue under the Holy Spirit (the
rule of Paul) is an idea that shows how democracy could potentially work.
The believing body of
Christ is the part of the world already renewed. It is the instrument of the renewal
of the rest of the world to the extent to which it manages to live out the
gospel.
Sometimes the body of
Christ will have to stand against the world and its rebellion against God.
Sometimes the body of Christ will be called to be working with the world when
the world is working toward something God wants.
Is this a pattern?
Each of these practices
fulfils and extends themes from the Old Testament. The New Testament expresses
them simply. In the time since the New Testament, the practices have been
distorted or forgotten and then, at key times, resurfaced. Each practice can
reach beyond the church into the world, giving shape to our general human hope.
Yoder suggests that this
might be the pattern of God’s saving purposes. God’s purpose for the world can
be seen in history, in the social existence of his people. We return again and
again – sometimes by accident; often by prayer and by rediscovering Jesus in
the Bible – to the pattern of life God ultimately wants the whole world to
live.
Discussion questions
The challenge of this book is putting
it into practice. You might have begun to see some options as you discussed
each chapter. Discuss the best options for you; it might be one of the ones
below, or another that you can add.
·
Try to reform a conventional church – eg
introducing a common meal as the culmination of a Sunday meeting (many churches
have a church luncheon for special occasions; maybe this could be made much
more regular.)
·
Introduce these practices to a small group within a
conventional church. It is a difficult task to make a church of two hundred an
open meeting; but if there is a midweek small group or Bible study, why can’t
it reflect all these practices? It would, of course, become a real church in
its own right, but this might scare some people, so you can avoid this label,
at least at the start.
·
Plant a church with these practices at its core.
Churches which have at their core agreed practices rather than agreed doctrine
are more likely to work. You probably only need two families who want to live
out these five practices and you can start a house church. (You will need to be
missionary minded, reaching out for new people to join you.)
·
Consider secular applications. (This should be used
in combination of one of the above church options.) Can you introduce a form of
the open meeting at work? The shared meal? Yoder is convinced that each of
these practices have application in the secular world; however, the task is
surely more difficult when we do not have a group of people committed to Jesus
who set out the practices.