Anabaptism, Sojourners and John Howard Yoder

Quite briefly in my youth I flirted with the brand of Anabaptism associated with the Sojourners community, whose flagship periodical was at the time known as the Post-American. Why was it so attractive? For two reasons. First, it resonated strongly with my burgeoning commitment to social justice, especially as manifested in public efforts to alleviate poverty. Second, from age 19 I considered myself a pacifist and genuinely believed that Christians ought not to fight in wars – for any reason.

Founded by Jim Wallis and others, Sojourners grew out of the student movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Vietnam was the issue of the day, and many young people were disillusioned by the foreign and defence policies of the American government. The Christians among them were especially cynical about the role of churches in supporting these policies. Seeing evangelist Billy Graham fraternizing rather too easily with the discredited President Richard Nixon in the White House was a continuing irritant. As a youthful baby-boomer with a developing social conscience, Sojourners touched a chord with me.

It didn't take me long to run up against the limitations of their approach. In particular it seemed unable to envision a positive role for the state as a truly political community called by God to do public justice in his world. The ultimate solution to the power of sin on earth was to be found in the church as an alternative community, while earthly communities such as state and government belonged only to the order of providence. This, it seemed to me, failed to do justice to St. Paul's reference in Romans 13 to political authority as precisely God's servant. In the course of writing a review of Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus I discovered that the Greek word the apostle uses for servant, viz., diakonos, is the same one used for a deacon in the church community.

This suggested to me that political authority, normatively speaking, was more than an inadvertent doer of God’s will, as was the Persian emperor Cyrus, but is called, like David and Solomon and their successors, to respond actively to God’s summons to do justice. A king now converted to faith in Christ does not cease to be a king; rather he now rules justly according to God's commands. He exercises the responsibilities of his office as an active doer of God's will. After making this discovery, I could no longer call myself an Anabaptist in the full sense.

Because Anabaptism lacks a positive view of the place of political authority within God's world, it is difficult to find good reason for mounting a trenchant critique of the various secular ideologies that have infused it over the past two to three centuries. If politics falls at best within the realm of God's providential sovereignty, and if one should focus one's redemptive efforts only on building up the institutional church, then the need for discerning the spirits (which was the title I had originally chosen for my book) within the political realm becomes less significant.

This does not mean that Anabaptists will then become enthusiasts for, say, liberalism or socialism. Instead, following Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder (see particularly his The Politics of Jesus, chapter 8: "Christ and Power"), Hendrik Berkhof, and ultimately Karl Barth himself, there is a tendency to lump state authorities as such together with various spiritual forces into the catch-all category of "principalities and powers." There is, in other words, a tendency to conflate creational structure with spiritual direction.

The net result is a tendency to truncate the full scope of Christ's redemption, which now involves breaking the sovereignty of the powers but not reclaiming them as such by reorienting their foundational religious direction. I will write more on this notion of the powers at some point, because it has been extraordinarily influential on a number of protestant theologians in the past half century.