Ecclesiology and Ethics

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 2000 by Arne Rasmusson

One might therefore say that this account implies a sort of naturalism, in the sense that our ethics is dependent on how we construe the world. Yoder's Christian ethics is meaningful only if Christianity as he construes it is true. Like Hauerwas and Milbank, Yoder does not accept the modern placement of theology in a category separate from theoretical knowledge, the modern dualism between revelation and reason, faith and knowledge. We have seen that this was part of the marginalization of the church in the modern state. "Religion" has to do with the personal life; and theology is an analysis of the faith of the church, which does not make claims of theoretical knowledge.

Thus when Yoder questions Reinhold Niebuhr's realism, he does so because he challenges Niebuhr's understanding of reality. Yoder builds his theology on the claim that the crucified Jesus is an "adequate key to understanding what God is about in the real world" and if this is true it has immense practical consequences.

   To follow Jesus does not mean renouncing effectiveness ... It means that in
   Jesus we have a clue to which kinds of causation, which kinds of
   community-building, which kinds of conflict management, go with the grain
   of the cosmos, of which we know, as Caesar does not, that Jesus is both the
   Word (the inner logic of things) and the Lord ("sitting at the right
   hand").(22)

In other words, Yoder reads reality theologically. A kind of metaphysics, embedded and implied in an ecclesial discourse-practice, creates a framework for historical, social and political interpretation and practice. He is thus not defending some blind obedience to rules, nor the idea that ethics and politics can be directly derived from scripture. But the church thinks and lives within this Christian discourse-practice (or so it should), even though it also employs knowledge derived from many other sources(23) This theological account cannot simply be read off the surface of history, because the trinitarian understanding of reality is implicit in it, but Yoder thinks it can generate new readings of history and social and political reality whose fruitfulness can be tested "empirically". He offers many examples, though one would have wished that he had developed them more.

Yoder does not think that we can develop from this a general theory that provides a handle on history and its direction and thus calculate what would be effective political action. This is not a deficiency in his "theory"; it is intrinsic to his Christian metaphysic that this type of calculation is impossible. Yoder is therefore critical of social and political theories (like Marxism, liberal social engineering, much economic theory) that assume a clearly discernible and manageable relationship between cause and effect, so that if we have enough information and power we can move society in the "desired" or "necessary" direction. This idea tends to make "effectiveness" itself into a moral value ("responsibility"), so that the means are justified by the ends to which they are used. In contrast, Yoder defends the final inseparability of means from ends.