Chapter 7
The Free Church as Body Politics
EARL ZIMMERMAN
God Sent me to reveal the mystery that has been hidden since the beginning
of time by God, who created everything. Gods purpose is now to show
the rulers and powers in the heavens the many different varieties
of his wisdom through the church.
--THE APOSTLE PAUL (EPH 329-10)
Because the risen Messiah is at once head of the church and kyriosof the kosmos, sovereign of the universe, what is given to the church
through him is in substance no different from what is offered to the world.
The believing community is the new world on the way.
--JOHN HOWARD YODER(1)
John Howard Yoder°s view of discipleship to Jesus comes to its fullest
expression in his understanding of the church. Chapter 1 displayed
Yoder’s approach to Christology and ethics and his understanding that
God is present in the story of Jesus. Living in Jesus’ story, following Jesus
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1. Yoder, For the Nations, 50.
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PART THREE--EXTENDING JOHN HOWARD YODER’S THEOLOGY
produces the community that is the visible church. But discipleship con-
cerns more than the church. The church is a model for all to see of God’s
purposes for the world.
Yoder espoused a paradigm of the church as a voluntary fellowship
of disciples of Jesus committed to the priesthood of all believers. His
congregational, free church model is biblically oriented, Spirit-led, and
has a shared leadership that draws on the gifts of each member, which
means that it eschews hierarchical, sacerdotal, creedalist, and sacramen-
talist models of the church.(2) Yoder found a historical precedent for this
ecclesiology in the sixteenth-century Anabaptist or radical reforma-
tion. However, he believed that the free church paradigm applied to all
communions rather than being an apology for a given denomination or
family of churches.(3) Any existing church, he argued, not only fails in
Various ways, but is in fact sinful. That is why there is a need for continual
reformation and even “radical” reformation.(4)
This chapter displays Yoder’s extended argument for this radical
reformation, free church paradigm and its social engagement, which he
called “body politics.” The chapter thus fills out the description of Ana-
baptist ecclesiology identified in chapter 2 and that distinguished Yoder
from Goshen School Anabaptism in chapter 3. (5)
The Free Church
Given Yoder’s doctoral studies in sixteenth-century Anabaptist historical
theology his free church paradigm naturally draws on those sources.‘
________________
2. Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 75-78.
3. Yoder claims that his model in not an apologetic for his own Mennonite de-
nomination and that some Mennonite denominational characteristics are irrelevant or
at worst misleading. See Yoder; PTi€Sfb/ Kingdom, 4.
4. Yoder even claims that the ecclesiological vision he is espousing is dramati-
cally visible in some developments in Roman Catholic experience. See Yoder, Priestly
Kingdom, 5-6.
5. In addition to Walton’s apt demonstration in chapter 3 of Yoder’s difference from
the Bender School, I also note Yoder’s intense clash with Bender over church polity in
my Practicing the Politics, 46-50.
6. Yoder translated a Swiss-German Anabaptist document on “congregational
order” that, among other things, instructs congregations to center their services on
the reading and exposition of Scripture, to have a shared common meal as part of their
gathering, and to establish a common fund for economic sharing so that no member
will suffer need. See Yoder, Legacy of Sattler, 44-45. The document is also included in
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ZIMMERMAN--The Free Church as Body Politics
The Anabaptists made a definitive break with the ruling state church as
unfaithful to the biblical vision of a religious community that is socio-
logically differentiated from the surrounding society and its structures
of power, For example, Dutch Anabaptist leader Menno Simons spoke
of the true church as a suffering little flock that chose the costly path
of penitence and discipleship in contrast to the state churches, each be-
holden to a particular competing European political power. He pointedly
exclaimed, “Where the papists stick with the papists, Lutherans with the
Lutherans . _ . etc., now build up, and anon demolish and act the hypocrite
in keeping with the magistracy’s wishes, everyone who is enlightened by
the truth and taught by the Spirit may judge what kind of church that is.(7)
The Anabaptist emphasis on the believing community differs from
the classic Protestant position that the church is present where the Word
is preached truthfully and the sacraments are rightly administered. In-
stead, Anabaptists spoke of the church as “a gathered congregation which
is built on Christ,” as “an assembly of the children of God” or as “a com-
munity of saints.”(8) Yoder identified the central marks of the Anabaptist
vision as (u) a focus on the authority of Scripture, (b) a Spirit empowered
communal discernment process, (c) following Christ in life, (d) suffer-
ing love, (e) a voluntary believers church, (f) the discipline of communal
admonition sometimes referred to as “the rule of Christi’ and (g) com-
munity of goods or economic sharing.(9)
While the sixteenth-century Anabaptist communities were a prima-
ry source for Yoder’s ecclesiology, he noted that the free church paradigm
has been a recurring phenomenon in church history. Instances he lifted
out include the Franciscans in the eleventh century, the Waldensians in
the twelfth century the Quakers or Society of Friends in the seventeenth
century the restorationist movement in nineteenth-century America that
gave birth to the Churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ, and base
communities associated with the liberation theology movement in the
________________
Klaassen, Anabaptism in Outline, 119-20.
7. Menno Simons, Complete Writings, 741.
8. Klaassen, Anabaptism in Outline, 102-15.
9. Yoder’s summary of the things that various sixteenth-century Anabaptist
groups held in common is a helpful guide, but the reader needs to be cognizant of the
range of diversity within those groups spread across northern Europe. For a recent
primer on the early Anabaptist movement that shows the diversity and multiple ori-
gins of Anabaptists, see Weaver, Becoming Anabaptist.
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PART THREE--EXTENDING JOHN HOWARD YODER’S THEOLOGY
twentieth century.(10) Yoder also engaged contemporary congregations,
such as the Sojourners Community in Washington, DC, which experi-
mented with more radical, communal, and activist forms of church life.
He called such churches, modeled on the life and vision of Jesus and his
first band of disciples, the “original revolution” because their gathered life
made concrete a radical new way of being human.(11)
The title “free church” has been used historically to designate
churches that were not established, in contrast to the official, established
or state churches in European countries or in the American colonies.
That definition has become thoroughly scrambled with the advent of the
modern, secular nation-state and the disestablishment in a number of
countries of all religious bodies. Today numerous American churches
with an historical free church background actually support the social
establishment of their version of Christianity-an unofficial Christian
America~through government action and have become key pillars of
support for an imperialist American foreign policy And some former
state or established churches have moved over to be critical of the idea
of a Christian society and seek prophetically to engage official Ameri-
can ideologies and policies. This distinction is captured by Yoder’s belief
that the free church was distinguishable from churches that assume that
God’s rule is exercised through national offices and policies in support of
a “Christian society” Debra Dean Murphy aptly captures the essence of
the free church stance as it relates to church and society:
For Christians, what is “given” (inevitable, assumed) is not “thesecular” or the political arrangements of modern, democraticsocial orders but the body politic of the church across time andspace. And as a body politic, the church engages other orders,spheres, powers, etc. in an ad hoc way: sometimes resisting,sometimes cooperating, and, when at its best, negotiating thecomplexity of these challenges with generosity, not hostilitypracticing the way of radical, embodied, cruciform witness.(12)
As Yoder continued to develop his free church paradigm,” he iden-
tified its precedents in Jewish history long before the time of Jesus and
_______________
10. Yoder, Priestly Kingdom; Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 246~47.
11. Yoder, Original Revolution, 28-29.
12. Murphy “Bearing Witness,” 39. Italics Murphy’s.
13. Yoder variously used the terms free church or believers church for this
paradigm. Historians have used the term free church to designate the Anabaptist or
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ZIMMERMAN- The Free Church as Body Politics
the early church. What Jesus did in calling his band of disciples was what
God had done through Abraham, Moses, and the Hebrew prophets: “He
gathered his people around his word and his Will.”(14) The Davidic project of
establishing a kingship “like the other nations” was a deviation that needs
to be understood as a rejection of God’s design for authentic human com-
munity (1 Sam 8:1~18).15 The Davidic project eventually ended in failure
when the Jewish people were carried into exile in Babylon; there they
developed a more faithful way of forming themselves as God’s people
in the midst of the society Where they now lived. Speaking through the
prophet Jeremiah, God instructed them to “seek the welfare of the city
where I have sent you, and pray to the Lord on its behalf for in its welfare
you will find your welfare” (Jer 29:7). Yoder saw the religious community
model they developed, based on God’s call to live in the midst of the na-
tions as a distinct people seeking the common good of the whole society,
as prefiguring the free church. Central to this way of being in the world
is the conviction that God is sovereign over history and there is no need
to gain political control in order to make sure God’s will is done or that
history comes out right.(16)
Babylon would become the cultural center of Judaism from the time
of Jeremiah until well into the middle ages-an historical reality largely
unrecognized by scholars. The Jews in Babylon became a multilingual
people who served as cultural brokers in the ancient world. They lived
without the temple or attachment to the land, which had formerly been
central to their religious identity. They became innovators that developed
new forms of communal identity to sustain their religious community in
this initially alien setting:
-- The writing, copying, and study of Scripture became the core of theirreligious identity. Their Scriptures could be copied and read any-where and were not tied to ritual forms related to temple worship.
_______________
non-magisterial reformation groups. It eventually became imprecise when former
state-churches became formally disestablished in the modern era. The term believers
church originated with sociologist Max Weber, who used it to describe Anabaptists
and Quakers. For further discussion of history and usage of these terms, see Cart-
wright, “Radical Reform.” 23-28.
14_ Yoder, For the Nations, 175.
15. Ibid., 60.
16. Ibid., 66-67. See also Yoder’s further discussion of the Jewishness of the free
church vision in Yoder, Jewish-Christian Schism, 105-19.
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PART THREE--EXTENDING JOHN HOWARD YODER’S THEOLOGY
-- They developed the synagogue as a center for study worship, andcommunity life. A congregation could be formed wherever there were ten Jewish households. No priesthood or hierarchy was nec-essary If they could afford a rabbi, his role was that of facilitator,teacher, and scribe
-- Worship was rooted in the reading and singing of Scripture. International Jewish unity was sustained through visitation and rabbinic consultation as well as commercial and inter-family relationships. There was no intra-Jewish hierarchical structure or central administration.
-- Jewish intellectual life involved the creativity and freedom to develop philosophical systems but it was rooted in the community’s common life, its halakah (walk or practice), and the shared remembering of the story that formed the identity of the community
-- Nothing in the life of these Jewish communities was dependent on or pushed toward cultural hegemony or political domination. They made their home in any society in which they were accepted and were in creative dialogue with that society.(17)
The first churches that sprang up in the Mediterranean world grew
out of or were coterminous with these Jewish synagogues. They shared
common patterns of structuring their religious life and of relating to the
larger culture and society in which they lived. Yoder noted that scholarly
debates about early Christian pacifism completely miss “any recognition
that Christian moral standards may have been largely derived from, and
therefore could be fruitfully illuminated by, earlier Jewish models of how
to relate to this world’s powers.”(18) Another often-missed aspect of Jewish-
Christian relations (as seen in chapter 10 below) is that a Jewish-Christian
common life existed at least into the fourth century and often beyond.
Teasing out these historical facts enabled Yoder to make the bold claim
that “the Jewish-Christian schism did not have to be” and that “for over a
millennium the Jews of the diaspora were the closest thing to the ethic of
Jesus existing on any significant scale anywhere in Christendom."(19)
_____________
17. Yoder, For the Nations, 55-60.
18. lbid., 66.
19. Yoder, Jewish-Christian Schism, 81-82. While it goes beyond the focus of this
chapter, the reader may be interested in Yoder’s chapter “The Jewishness of the Free
Church Vision,” in Jewish-Christian Schism, 105-19.
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Reading History from the Margins
John Howard Yoder read church history from the margins, enabling him
to make radical determinations about what is significant outside the stan-
dard focus on rulers, wars, and empires. It enabled him to read events
differently and to draw alternative conclusions about God’s purposes and
how God is active in history He learned this way of reading history from
the biblical narrative where God called Abraham and Sara to leave Meso-
potamia (a powerful cultural and political center in the ancient world)
and live as sojourners in a strange land; where God heard the cries of
Hebrew slaves in Egypt and sent Moses to deliver them from Pharaoh;
where God enabled the Jewish exiles in Babylon to survive, reform their
faith tradition, and creatively engage the society where they now lived;
where Jesus was born to a Jewish peasant couple, called disciples, was
crucified as a subversive by the ruling elites, and whose death and resur-
rection became the turning point in history; Where the early churches
lived out the gospel of Jesus as alternative communities in the heart of
the Roman Empire.(20)
Yoder also learned this way of reading history from his study of the
sixteenth-century Anabaptists, who called into question the political es-
tablishment of Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries. How was it
that a movement among subject peoples of the Roman Empire, namely
the Christian church, formed as an intentional alternative to imperial-
ism, had now become the official religion of that same empire? Should we
read these events as the triumph of Christianity and the beginning of the
millennial reign of Christ as Eusebuis, the apologist for Emperor Con-
stantine claimed? Instead, the Anabaptists had maintained that it was a
moral failure and a wrong turn in history because it made the church
captive to an imperial ethic of power and violence. The voluntary believ-
ers church, as an alternative to empire, was replaced by a state sponsored
church in which it was now a civil offense not to be a Christian; within a
century Augustine was even calling it a civil offense to be the wrong kind
of Christian. Emperors not only supported Christianity they insisted on
having a voice in defining orthodox belief-commonly against their po-
litical enemies.(21)
_________________
20. For an insightful study of the nature of early Christian communities as an
alternative to Roman imperial society read Horsley Paul and Empire.
21. Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 243 -48. For analysis of how the patronage of the im-
perial family helped shape orthodoxy see Ienkins, Jesus Wars.
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PART THREE--EXTENDING JOHN HOWARD YODER’S THEOLOGY
According to Yoder, supporters of Constantine conferred on him
near-mythological status because of the concomitant alliance of the cross
and the sword. His supporters saw this alliance as ushering in the millen-
nial reign of Christ. Long before the radical reformers, earlier monastic
critics had leveled the verdict of apostasy against this alliance of corrupt
clerics and princes. Later mainline Protestant historiography also used
the concept of the “fall of the church” but equivocated because “they
needed to retain the consensus quinque-secularis, the common deposit of
the first five Christian centuries, the Christian Empire and the Ecumeni-
cal Councils.”(22) Yoder will have none of that equivocation. He is adamant
about the debilitating consequences of this wrong turn in church history.
“If as the New Testament indicates, extending certain phases of the Old,
God calls his people to a prophetically critical relationship to structures
of power and oppression, then the alliance between Rome-as-Empire and
Church-as-Hierarchy, which the fourth and fifth centuries gradually con-
solidated, is not merely a possible tactical error but a structured denial
of the gospel.”(23)
During that era, the ecumenical councils of Nicea and Chalcedon
developed the classic creedal formulations on the nature of God and of
Jesus. They focused on ontological definitions and ignored the life and
message of Jesus in the gospel narratives, making it possible now to
weld together church and empire-cross and sword, That is why Yoder
considered it necessary to decenter the creeds in the Christian imagina-
tion.(24) The welding of cross and sword, Yoder says, calls for a stance of
repentance. It is not enough to parse differences dispassionately and to
seek commonalities with faith communities that Christendom formerly
persecuted. Christians need to receive the grace to say
We were wrong. The picture you have been given of Jesus by theEmpire, by the Crusades, by struggles over holy sites, and bywars in the name of the “Christian West” is not only somethingto forget but something to forgive. We are not merely outgrow-ing it, as if it had been acceptable at the time: we disavow it and
________________
22. Yoder, Jewish-Christian Schism, 138.
23. Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 245. For challenges to Yoder’s view of these develop-
ments, and for responses to these challenges, see chapter 2, note 48 above.
24. For a discussion of the ways Yoder decentered Nicea, see Sider, To See History
Doxologically, 116-17. Although Sider fails to do so, chapter 1 of this book applies
Yoder’s decentering of the historical creeds to his Christology, which gives primacy to
Scripture and the gospel narratives about Jesus.
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ZIMMERMAN--The Free Church as Body Politics
repent of it. It was wrong even when it seemed to us to be goingwell. We want our repentance to be not mere remorse but a newmind issuing in a new way--metanoia.(25)
The Church and the Powers
As just noted, Yoder identified the problem of the Constantinian turn as a
capitulation to the domination and violence of the Roman Empire rather
than remaining in prophetic engagement with it. It is a commonly held
belief that the Anabaptist position on the separation of church and state
has prevailed in the modern world as secular governments have gradu-
ally ended the formal establishment of Christendom. Yoder disputed
this way of framing the matter. It misunderstands the central issue, he
said. The state-church tie was not a self-standing issue for the Radical
Reformation. Rather, it was related to their understanding of the nature
of Christian discipleship that created a distinct or visible community.
Furthermore, to say that the Anabaptist position has triumphed because
a given society has now legally separated church and state is actually to
privilege the narrative of the nation-state. According to Yoder, “these
ways of stating the °success’ or the ‘progress’ of the free church social
critique presupposes precisely what the Anabaptists and their spiritual
relatives denied, namely that the course of history and the structures of
society are the most significant measure of whether people are doing the
will of God.”(26)
With such arguments, Yoder contested the predominant Way of ori-
enting our existence in relation to the structures and ideologies of nation-
al societies and their institutions. At first glance, establishing another way
appears to be an impossible endeavor. Yet posing this visible alternative
is precisely what the church is called to do as an ecclesia or assembly that
orients its communal life as a witness to empire. In this effort, Yoder drew
on Dutch theologian Hendrik Berkhof’s Work on the biblical language
of the “Powers” (Eph 6:12; Col 2:15), which had been commonly treated
as vestiges of an ancient mythological worldview that had lost its mean-
ing in the modern era. The experience of European national rivalry that
erupted into two World Wars and the rise of ideologies such as fascism
caused some biblical scholars and theologians to read these texts with
_______________
25. Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 2 50-5 1.
26. lbid., 67-68.
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PART THREE--EXTENDING JOHN HOWARD YODER’S THEOLOGY
new eyes. Rather than reading them as referring to disembodied spirits
in a heavenly realm, they now recognized these entities as manifestations
of prevailing political and economic powers.”
It is not that the Powers are evil in themselves. They are actually
part of God’s good creation in that they serve the necessary purpose of
providing order and structure in human life. Paul writes, “In [Christ]
all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invis-
ible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers-all things have
been created through him and for him” (Col 1:16). Yoder wrote that the
powers are the values and structures that are necessary for human life in
society However, they entice people to serve them as though they were
absolute or an end in themselves; as such they are in rebellion against
the purposes of God. Even so, they continue to serve a limited good as
an ordering function in society.” Thus the task of the church is to call
the Powers to modesty and to exercise patience toward them rather than
yielding to the temptation to sanctify them, and when necessary to resist
them nonviolently while avoiding the temptation to challenge them with
violence.”
The metaphorical language of Powers indicates both concrete exter-
nal structures and an inner spiritual gestalt that shapes people’s lives and
their social consciousness. They take many shapes and can include local
structures such as a town council, the municipal police, the high school,
or a church. The primary manifestation of the Powers that concerns the
discussion here, however, is a privileged cluster of institutional entities
that dominate the life and consciousness of an entire nation or group
of nations in our global era. In contemporary American society these
Powers include a military establishment with a budget nearly equal to
the total military spending of all the other nations combined; powerful
corporate business interests that have a pervasive global reach; two domi-
nant rival political parties; the different branches of the federal govern-
ment; elite universities; the national news media; and the entertainment
industry. These entities have an inner psychological and spiritual nature
______________
27. Berkhof Christ and the Powers, 15. The analysis here carries forward the dis-
cussion of Yoder’s use of Berkhof and the Powers that was introduced in chapter 4
and begun in chapter 6, where the argument concerned Yoder's view that the Pauline
concept of the powers was an extension of the social ethic of Jesus. In the current
chapter, we consider the powers in the context of Yoder’s ecclesiology.
28. Yoder, Politics of]esus (1994), 140-44.
29. Yoder, Original Revolution, 149.
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which is more than the sum of their parts. The external, tangible reality of
their inner spiritual nature is signified by the metaphorical language that
confers names on them such as “Wall Street,” “The Pentagon,” or “Capitol
Hill.” Biblical scholar Walter Wink has identified such a cluster of Powers
as a “Domination System.”(30)
The Powers shape all of human life in society and, consequently
cannot be either ignored or destroyed. Rather, they need to be treated as
finite, human constructions that can be challenged and reformed rather
than imbued with the authority of unquestioned absolutes. In theological
terms, their absolute dominance needs to be broken and they need to be
redeemed. Yoder notes that this is what Jesus did by living a genuinely
free human existence. Treating the powers as finite rather than absolute
entities challenges their authority and can be dangerous. In response to
Jesus’ challenge, the Powers in first-century Palestine, represented by
powerful Roman functionaries and Jewish elites, colluded against him
and executed him on the cross.” By submitting to crucifixion, Christ
triumphed over the Powers by exposing their true nature as false gods,
by exposing the limitation of their ability to coerce conformity to their
wishes. The resurrection established and made visible what was already
accomplished on the cross. In Christ, God challenged the Powers and
demonstrated that God is more powerful than they” The weapon of the
Powers, according to Berkhof has been the power of illusion that they
used to convince people “that they were the divine regents of the world,
ultimate certainty and ultimate direction, ultimate happiness and the
ultimate duty for small, dependent humanity.” Christ’s death and resur-
rection exposed that fiction.
Christ has already won the victory over the Powers and the exis-
tence of the church is the beginning realization of that victory in history
______________________
30. Walter Wink, expanding and developing the earlier work of Berkhof and Yo-
der, among others, wrote extensively on the Powers as a Domination System. Drawing
on Jungian psychology, Wink has understood the biblical language of Powers as the
personification of an inner spiritual reality that is inextricably linked to an outer mani-
festation such as a concrete political/ economic entity See Wink, Engaging the Powers,
5-10. For Wink’s trilogy on the Powers, consult the bibliography.
31. Wink, Engaging the Powers, 147.
32. For an atonement theology that develops this understanding of Christ’s vic-
tory over the Powers, see Weaver, Nonviolent Atonement. The motif is briefly sum-
marized in chapter 11 to follow..
33. Berkhof Christ and the Powers, 39. Also cited in Yoder, Politics of Jesus (1994),
147.
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PART THREE-EXTENDING JOHN HOWARD YoDER’s THEOLOGY
According to Yoder, “The triumph of Christ has already guaranteed that
the ultimate meaning of history will not be found in the course of earthly
empires or the development of proud cultures, but in the calling together
of the ‘chosen race, royal priesthood, holy nation’ which is the church of
Christ.”(34) The church engages the Powers in ways that draw on Christ’s vic-
tory over them. Though restrained by God, the Powers continue to control
the lives and imaginations of people. Christ’s victory over them, however,
enables his followers to recognize the Powers’ illusions for what they are
and to enter the struggle to live in the world as free and humane people.
Berkhof delineates some concrete manifestations of this liberation:
Where the Spirit of Christ rules, Mammon shrivels down to “fi-nances,” conventional morality to a set of rules of thumb, subjectto criticism and limited in scope and authority. Changing cus-toms, slogans, and isms of the moment are seen as ideas whichare merely “in the air,” worth no more and no less than the olderslogans they replaced. Where the victorious kingship of Christis confessed, there prevails a consistent unbelief in the utilityof military power, and national or international armament isat the most grudgingly accepted as a bitter duty of responsiblecitizenship. Anxiety before the fearsome future gives way to asimple carefulness, since we know that the future as well is inGod’s hands.(35)
Since the post-World War II era during which Berkhof wrote, it is
becoming increasingly evident that human life shaped by the continually
increasing consumption of natural resources and the accompanying pol-
lution of our ecosystem is not sustainable and now threatens the future
of the entire planet. Accordingly to Berkhof’s list of manifestations of the
Powers from which liberation is needed should be added the forces of
global capitalism, militarism, and nation-state competition that drive the
quest for ever increasing consumption and domination. The constella-
tion of Powers in our twenty-first century world is increasingly identified
as a global “Empire” It is understood as a system of political, economic,
military and cultural interests that benefits the powerful at the expense
___________________
34. Yoder, Christian Witness (2002), 13. Christian Witness was first published in
1964. The fact that Yoder titled future books The Priestly Kingdom and The Royal
Priesthood is an indication of how central this understanding of the church in relation
to society and history is in his theology.
35. Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, 49.
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ZIMMERMAN--The Free Church as Body Politics
of the most vulnerable.3“ Different from past empires, it is not confined
to a particular nation-state or geographic center. While its most powerful
center is in the United States as the last remaining superpower, it crosses
national borders and is spread all over the world as a network involving
the most powerful nation states and allied business, military, and politi-
cal structures.” It manifests itself as a Domination System through such
things as predator drone attacks against those identified as enemies in
poor countries, covert cyber warfare against nations considered to be a
threat, and global economics structures that favor powerful transnational
corporations at the expense of poor communities.(38)
“Body politics” is Yoder’s challenge to the Dominion System. Body
politics is a heuristic depiction of the life of the congregation as a model
of God’s design for human relations. In other words, Yoder saw the local
congregation as the first level of witness about economic issues, human
relations, decision making, and the nature of community that would
align human structures with the reign of God.
Body Politics
As chapter 4 displayed, John Howard Yoder’s vision of the function of the
church in society is dependent on Oscar Cullmann's formulation of the
“reign of Christ” Drawing on New Testament sources, Cullmann claimed
that the reign of Christ extends to all creation, including the state and
other centers of power but remains distinct from the church and the
future reign of God. The church is the heart and center of the reign of
_________________
36. Often cited statistics such as more than one billion people who live on less than
one dollar a day cannot convey the degree of suffering in the lives of poor people in
our global economy Paul Farmer's case studies of the lives of poor Haitians can help
us better understand the daily struggles of such people and the structural barriers that
prevent them from escaping their situation. See Farmer, Pathologies of Power. Jour-
nalist Katherine Boo has written an illuminating account of the lives of poor people,
based on her three years of living in a Mumbai slum, which raises disturbing questions
about the underside of global capitalism. See Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers.
37. Two excellent books in this vein are Horsley, In the Shadow of Empire, and Mi-
guez, Rieger, and Sung, Beyond the Spirit; the latter offers a more detailed description
of “empire in the contemporary world.” 5-9.
38. For an insightful discussion of how Yoder’s non-Constantinian theology fits
within an age of global capital, see Dula, “Disavowal of Constantine.” For a more ex-
tensive discussion of the church, which is also constantly evolving in relation to an
evolving global empire, see Zimmerman, “Church and Empire.”
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PART THREE--EXTENDING JOHN HOWARD YODER’s THEOLOGY
Christ (what happens in the church has a decisive influence on the whole
creation) but it is not the extent of that reign. What distinguishes the
church from other entities is that church members consciously proclaim
their allegiance to the reign of Christ, while others reflect the reign of
God without specific awareness of it. All governments serve as God’s
servants within the reign of Christ even though they may not recognize
or acknowledge it.” Working from within this formulation, Yoder makes
the claim that Christ is at once head of the church and the ruler of the
whole cosmos. What the church has been given in Christ is no different
in substance from what is offered to the whole world; in this respect “the
believing community is the new world on the way.”(40)
In his small book Body Politics, Yoder pulls together arguments he
made in previous writings to draw a sketch of what the church as the new
world on the way looks like. Congregations generously embrace and seek
the welfare of the towns and cities where they live and serve/*’ What is at
stake is the life and witness of the church as an alternative to the oppres-
sive reach of the Powers as global Empire that are increasingly anything
but modest in the way they affect individuals and local communities.
Body Politics sketches the shape of early churches that sprang into
existence through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pente-
cost (Acts 2:1-47) and quickly spread to subaltern people in the Roman
Empire in the various cities around the Mediterranean basin. Each local
ecclesia (assembly) saw itself as an alternative to the existing social and
religious status quo in its respective city, including the governing assem-
bly of the city. In that respect, they contained a revolutionary impulse but
did not seek violently to usurp power. Rather, they took their assembly’s
common life and the welfare of each member seriously.(42)
__________________
39. Cullmann, Early Church, 128. For a more detailed analysis of Cullmann’s discus-
sion of the reign of Christ, see chapter 4.
40. Yoder, For the Nations, 50.
41. Some have charged that Yoder°s “body politics” as a witness to the world is a
reduction of theology to ethics (e.g., Martens, Heterodox Yoder, 138, 142, 147). For
a response to this charge, see chapter 5, note 47 and the context. The charge against
Yoder does not recognize that he always worked from within the theological formula-
tion of the “reign of Christ” that he learned from Cullmann and the framework of
engaging the “Powers” that he learned from Berkhof, as well as his extension of Barth's
christocentric theology.
42. For a case study of the Christian assembly in Corinth as a new society alterna-
tive to the dominant imperial society, see Horsley, “ 1 Corinthians,” in Paul and Empire,
242-52.
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ZIMMERMAN--The Free Church as Body Politics
Yoder lifts out five central practices that shaped the body life of a lo-
cal assembly or church. The church is a body in the sense that it is a social
organism and it is political in the sense that it distributes power, defines
rules, and makes decisions. It is common to make a distinction between
what a congregation does in worship and its activity in ordinary life. That
distinction requires some kind of bridge to span these two worlds. Yoder
seeks to break down this dichotomy by relating worship elements such as
baptism and communion to social practices within the church that also
have relevance for the larger society.(43) These practices can be understood
as sacraments in the sense that we understand God to be acting in and
through that human activity.“(44) It goes beyond our purposes here to dwell
on each of the practices that Yoder identified, but a brief description of
each gives a sense of the paradigm he developed based on the communal
life of the early church.
The first practice, using ancient rabbinical language, is called
“binding and loosing” (Matt 18:15-20). It involves a proscribed process
of conflict mediation when one member feels wronged or injured or
when serious disagreements arise. Two central elements of the process
are moral discernment and reconciliation. The practice of binding and
losing poses a contrast to commonly practiced retributive justice, which
focuses on punishment.(45) The second practice is the Lord’s Supper or
breaking bread together. Drawing on the teaching of the Apostle Paul
(1 Cor 1 1:20-3 3), Yoder argues that authentic communion includes mak-
ing sure that the economic needs of each member are met and includes
sharing resources with the poor. This sharing stands in sharp contrast to
the Dominion System, which allows money to accumulate in the hands
of a few to the detriment of the many.
The third practice is baptism or the creation of a new humanity where
the barriers of common social divisions such as Jew or Greek, male or fe-
male, slave or free, are broken down (Gal 3128). Here is a clear model for
transcending the racial and ethnic and class conflicts that abound in the
United States and in much of the world. The fourth practice contravenes
structural hierarchies. Each person and all spiritual gifts are recognized and
_________________
43. Yoder, Body Politics, vi-ix.
44. lbid., 1.
45. Chapter 13 points out that Yoder’s own failure and the long-drawn-out disci-
plinary process to which he submitted indicate the need for development of additional
processes for dealing with individual failures so that they do not call into question the
validity of the ecclesiological model itself See also note 53 below.
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PART THREE--EXTENDING JOHN HOWARD YODER’S THEOLOGY
honored (Eph 4:1 1-13). Even those gifts that we consider to be the least are
necessary and actually the most important. Recognizing the gifts of all does
not of necessity do away with various church offices such as pastor but
it radically reorients their role so that they serve the entire congregation
through enabling its members in their ministry. This practice challenges
the common attitude that some people, particularly the economically
deprived and the homeless, are expendable. The fifth practice, sometimes
referred to as the “Rule of Paul” is a process of decision making that honors
the voice of each person and arrives at a decision through consensus (1
Cor 14:26-33). It is different from voting in the sense that it goes beyond
majority rule. It considers and values the voice and the rights of the minor-
ity in any action that is taken. This final practice challenges the democratic
process. It reminds winners to respect the losing side in elections and con-
gressional votes and to take their concerns seriously rather than following
the common practice of ignoring them.
Although Yoder described body politics as the practices of a local
congregation, it needs to be emphasized that he intended the implica-
tions to reach far beyond the local arena. These ideas of reconciliation,
sharing, overcoming differences, respect for minority voices, and valuing
the contribution of every member apply as well to national and inter-
national relations. To state only one obvious example: when the United
States has about six percent of the world’s population but consumes 30 to
40 percent of the worlds goods, that is an accumulation of wealth in the
hands of a relative few to the detriment of much of the world.
There is nothing exclusively sacrosanct about the five practices-we
might also identify others-yet Yoder surmises that they may participate
in a deep structure that displays God’s saving purposes for the whole
world.‘*‘ By identifying these five, Yoder sought to break down the odd
selectivity that lifts up rituals of baptism and communion as sacraments
to the exclusion of other practices.
In light of Yoder’s robust description of these five practices, the
common understanding that participation in the life of a church means
showing up on Sunday for worship, listening to the sermon, affirming
certain dogmas, the ritual that involves water and another that involves
partaking of a thin wafer of bread and sip of wine seems incredibly thin
and anemic. This observation is not an outright rejection of liturgical
practices but rather a plea for their transformation through consciously
__________________
46. Yoder, Body Politics, 80.
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recognizing and celebrating the bond between them and the body life of
the congregation and its witness.”
Recognizing the body life of churches formed through the Spirit-
breathed practices identified by Yoder offers a robust understanding of a
church and its engagement in the world. It ought not lead to triumpha-
lism, however, since actual congregations are far from perfect and never
fully live into the kind of body life that these practices cultivate. None-
theless, we should recognize the wonderful gift that such congregations
are-a living foretaste of human social life that God desires for the whole
world. According to Yoder, “Church and world are not two compart-
ments under separate legislation or two institutions with contradictory
assignments, but two levels of the pertinence of the same Lordship [of
Christ]. The people of God is called to be today what the world is called
to be ultimately.”(48)
For the Nations
In the introduction to his For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical,
John Howard Yoder wrote that his position has been defined as sectar-
ian by both critics and friends. While he had generally not contested the
label for the sake of participating in the conversation under other people’s
rules, in this book he did choose to defend his position. Being “sectarian”
is generally understood as a posture of withdrawal or of being against the
larger culture in contrast to “public” or establishment forms of Christian-
ity that affirm culture. In this sense, he explained, the way the term is
used involves an a priori judgment that the so-called sectarian stance
is deficient. Yoder also notes that the designation “sect” has historically
been used to define movements of prophetic dissent by reference to their
minority status rather than what they believed. An added problem is that
establishment does not indicate the majority, as is generally assumed,
but rather a minority of people in dominant social roles who assume the
right to speak for everyone.”
__________________
47. An inspiring example is the liturgical practice of St. Gregory of Nyssa Epis-
copal Church in San Francisco, which has placed its altar in the center of the sanc-
tuary surrounded by the gathered congregation during worship. At other times
the altar becomes the place for the distribution of food for the congregations food
pantry, which serves over one thousand families. See http://www.saintgregorys.org/
community_service/groups/name/C148.
48. Yoder, Body Politics, ix.
49. Yoder, For the Nations, 1-5.
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PART THREE--EXTENDING JOHN HOWARD YODER'S THEOLOGY
Returning to his archetype of the Jewish exiles in Babylon, Yoder
says, “'1hey had no choice but to work out, in response to the challenge
of missionary existence, whether their acceptance of the Chaldean cul-
ture around them would be grudging and clumsy or wholehearted and
creative.”(50) Part of their adaptive creativity involved becoming multilin-
gual--they maintained the Hebrew language in which their Scriptures
were written, but they became so fluent in the language of their host
culture that they could serve as translators, educators, and diplomats,
and they developed a third language that bridged between the other two.
Such fluency in various languages is indicative of the wholehearted and
creative response required to seek the peace and welfare of the society in
which the community of faith is placed by God--“to live for the nations.”(51)
This way of posing the role of the community of faith in every society
in which it exists breaks down the binary distinction between “sectarian”
and “public” faith stances. The experience of any living community of
faith involves negotiating degrees of pluralism, hybridity, and complexity
Yoder has referred to the challenge as “not a way to keep dry above the
waves of relativity, but a way to stay within our bark, barely afloat and
sometimes awash amidst those waves, yet neither dissolving into them
nor being carried only where they want to push it.”(52) This way of living in
the world reflects God’s stance of vulnerable love and generosity.
Living in the world in this way necessarily involves creating a space
where lives centered in the way of Jesus can be formed. The church has to
be distinct to have something to say as it participates in the multiple con-
versations taking place. This was central to Yoder’s ecclesiology and the
basis of his critique of Christendom. It includes the recognition that there
is brokenness and even willful sinfulness in individuals and human insti-
tutions, including the church. Using the biblical language of the Powers,
this sin manifests itself as what Walter Wink called Domination Systems
and more recent theologians and social philosophers call Empire.(53) The
faithful church collaborates with all who seek the common good and op-
pose imperial forces that exploit vulnerable people, the environment, and
________________
50. Ibid., 1.
51. Ibid., 2-3. Italics Yoder’s.
52. Yoder, PTi€Sfb/ Kingdom, 58; Yoder, “But We Do” Priestly, 34.
53. As chapters 12 and 13 indicate, it is painful but necessary to add that Yoder’s
own hurtful sexual behavior toward numerous women illustrates this brokenness and
sinfulness within the church and calls for renewed attention to processes for dealing
with such offenses.
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ZIMMERMAN--The Free Church as Body Politics
fragile democratic institutions. It also works together in various efforts
to develop communities through things such as disaster relief affordable
housing, education, food security conflict mediation, and health care.
The missional church avoids the fallacy of conceptualizing any so-
ciety or structure as monolithic or essentially sinful. It is careful about
taking a social stance that is “against the nations” or overly judgmental of
contemporary culture and society.(54) While it avoids sanctifying a particular
society (especially in its fight against perceived enemies), it recognizes that
all societies contain much that is good and true. The art of “seeking the
good of the city” includes the recognition and celebration of social goods in
the language, literature, art, sports, music, architecture, religion, entertain-
ment, design, and crafts of a given culture or social grouping. These goods
reflect the soul of a culture and we can rightly feel pride in being part of
this larger community The adventure of discipleship includes finding and
developing these aspects of our common humanity with our neighbors.
All of this is rooted in the faith community’s transcendent hope in
the God of history The life of congregations expressed through the prac-
tices of “body politics,” though often faltering, offers a foretaste of what
the reign of God looks like. The same is true in our active opposition to
violent and exploitative forces that are not of God. Our ability to be a
multilingual people at home in a given society though not completely
identified with any society enables us to serve as emissaries of God’s new
world on its way And certainly our embrace of that which is good and
true in all societies celebrates the promised arrival of the eschaton as a
new heaven and a new earth (Rev 21:1). God’s future does not arrive as
something foreign; it is integrally related to the present working of the
Spirit of Christ in the church and in the world. Yoder talked of this as
“suffering love” being validated by its cosmic ground, empowering us to
persevere in the face of sacrifice and to be creative in the face of dismay
because we know that the grain of the universe is with us.(55)
The following two chapters developed dimensions of the witness of
peace and nonviolence of the church as “body politics” Chapter 8 dis-
plays how Yoder’s pacifism is a way of perceiving the world. Chapter 9
develops the lesser-known activist dimension of Yoder’s peace witness in
a nonviolent public theology.
_________________
54. In this sense, Yoder distinguishes himself from Stanley Hauerwas, who, ac-
cording to Yoder, “maximizes the provocative edge of the dissenting posture” in his
writings. See Yoder, For the Notions, 3 n. 6.
55. Yoder, War of the Lamb, 62.
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