371 - The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics As Gospel

The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics As Gospel
By John Howard Yoder
Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. 222 pp. $16.95 ($8.95 paper).

John Howard Yoder is among the most important of contemporary writers working on a normative definition of Christian theological ethics. His writings have been especially significant because he has taken care to show how his ethic, which shares the Radical Reformation claim that the life and teachings of Jesus are directly relevant to politics and economics, differs from most post-Constantinian Christian ethics, which seek foundations in the wider culture. The nine essays in this volume are not the place to begin reading Yoder, because they do not include an interpretation of the biblical account of the ministry of Jesus which grounds Yoders pacifist and egalitarian ethic. (Read The Politics of Jesus for that interpretation.) These essays do, however, develop Yoders criticisms of any social ethic that presumes the moral necessity for agents to use power and violence to serve the nations and misconstrues Radical Reformation ethics as being appropriate for only a few Christians who chose to withdraw from the realities of politics.

The essays are categorized under three headings. the first of which Yoder calls "Foundations." For Yoder, the foundations for ethics are two: the incarnation of Gods will in Jesus of Nazareth and the church constituted by persons who have chosen to obey Jesus faithfully. The ethic of Jesus does not provide a ready answer for every moral problem. This ethic must be interpreted by the church for each new age. But the New Testament provides a model for how a voluntary community of believers should carry out the task of faithfully interpreting the relevance of Jesus' ministry for new moral questions and circumstances. The church may draw upon the wisdom and language of the wider culture, but there are no "foundations" or "sources" for ethics other than the church's faithful interpretation of Jesus' embodiment of the Kingdom of God. Yoder grants the historical particularity of this ethic, but argues that ethics which purport to be founded upon universal concepts, for example, nature, are no less provincial and begin with the values of a fallen culture. He claims this historically grounded ethic is applicable to all persons because "the particularity of the incarnation is the universality of the good."

The second part of the book, entitled "History," contains two essays delineating essential characteristics of faithful instantiations of the ethic of Jesus in the history of Christianity and an essay pointing out the unfaithfulness of Christian ethics that have fallen into the Constantinian error of identifying a civil authority (present or future) as the bearer of Gods cause. According to Yoder, the key to the faithfulness of Radical Reformation ethics was in restoring the voluntary commitment to the

372 - The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics As Gospel

non-violent way of Jesus as the mark of membership in the church, as it was in the early church; the key was not its stance against culture. Non-involvement in the politics of the dominant culture was forced on the Radical Reformers by the majority's rejection of their ethic; it is not entailed by faithfulness to Jesus and was not the choice of the Radical Reformers.

The two essays in the third part of this volume illustrate the applicability of this gospel ethic to "The Public Realm." Yoder makes a Christian case for the relative value of democracy because it is more likely to allow dissenters to speak and be heard (not because the majority is more likely to embody moral wisdom) and offers a scathing criticism of civil religion in America because it serves the nation rather than God's will revealed in Jesus Christ (not because the civic life is intrinsically evil). These essays emphasize the contributions the "minority church" makes to democracy and the civil realm based upon its faithfulness to the ethic of Jesus, contributions that are apparent when they are not judged on the basis of whether or not the church fully endorses and participates in the given politics of a democratic nation.

The recurrent theme throughout this volume is Yoder's dissatisfaction with an interpretation of the ethic of the peace churches (especially by Troeltsch and the Niebuhrs) that casts it as a sectarian ethic, possible for an admirable few who choose to be politically irrelevant and do not proffer universal principles for political and economic life. Yoder repeatedly argues that the obedience to Jesus instantiated in the peace churches, even though it is not altered to accommodate common sense morality, is for all persons. Furthermore, it is the most effective service that can be offered to the public realm if one believes Jesus is the lord whose reign will be universally actualized in the eschaton. Yoder makes a strong case for the political relevance and universal applicability of his ethic. But on the question of how one knows God's will, he remains unabashedly sectarian. Since "the church precedes the world epistemologically," knowledge of creation, history, and values depends entirely upon a faithful interpretation of Jesus' ministry without independent recourse to experience, nature, or science. Yoder's ethic is neither apolitical nor limited in applicability, but it provides no basis for convincing those who do not believe Jesus fully incarnates God's will for the political realm. In this respect, Yoder is sectarian. Whether that is a criticism depends upon ones views on revelation and the nature of the incarnation.

Harlan Beckley
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, Virginia