Approaching the End. Stanley Hauerwas

Howard Yoder, as Douglas Harink has suggested, would have found Lou Martyn’s account of Paul’s apocalyptic gospel supportive of his reading of Paul.1 Like Martyn, Yoder did not think Paul’s “gospel” to be first and foremost about us. Rather, as Martyn suggests, Paul’s gospel is centered on “God’s liberating invasion of the cosmos. Christ’s love enacted in the cross has the power to change the world because it is embodied in the new community of mutual service.”2 Thus Yoder and Martyn, in quite similar ways, contend that Paul understood that in the cross and resurrection of Christ a new creation has been enacted, bringing an end to the old age and inaugurating a new time characterized by the reign of God as King.3

Sometimes when I am reading Martyn I almost forget I am reading him and think instead that I am reading Yoder. Many of Martyn’s sentences could have just as easily come from Yoder. For example, commenting on Paul’s view that God had dispatched the Spirit of Christ into the believers’ hearts to make them soldiers for Christ, Martyn writes: “The martial, cosmic dimension of Paul’s apocalyptic applies, then, to the church and for that reason Paul can speak of the church itself both as God’s new creation and as the apocalyptic community called to the front trenches in God’s apocalyptic war against the powers of the present evil age.”4 Yoder, who emphasized the significance of the principalities and powers for understanding what it means to live at the same time in two times, could have easily written that sentence.5

More, much more, could be done to show how Yoder anticipated Martyn’s apocalyptic reading of Paul (and John), but, as interesting as that exercise would be, it is not the main purpose of this essay. I only call attention to their similar views on apocalyptic to suggest that Yoder can provide a politics that Martyn’s account lacks. Douglas Harink observes that the focal concern of Martyn’s later work has been that of divine and human agency. As a result, Martyn has not given attention to the political aspects of Paul’s thought.6 By contrast, Yoder’s thought is political all the way down, and so it is my contention that Martyn’s case would be stronger if he had read Yoder.7 But such a statement is hardly helpful, so to move from a more constructive place I will reframe my argument by suggesting that for contemporary readers Martyn’s work can be tested and complemented by reading him in conversation with Yoder.

      Before turning to Yoder, however, I want to call attention to Harink’s suggestions about how Martyn’s work might be developed politically. For Harink quite rightly observes that there is a politics, a politics that is perhaps underdeveloped, in Martyn’s understanding of the three-­actor moral drama that constitutes Paul’s understanding of the human situation. Besides divine and human agency, there also exist anti-­God powers whose agency is apparent in their ability to deceive and enslave. Harink suggests that in most accounts of Christian ethics the role of these powers, particularly as corporate agents, is ignored, which often means that the church as a political entity and agent is also lost.

Harink argues that, just to the extent that Martyn develops an account of the church as a corporate agent capable of countering the powers by fulfilling the law of Christ, he has begun to make explicit the politics inherent in Paul’s apocalyptic gospel. What Martyn has not done, according to Harink, is suggest how this newly created agent called the church enacts this political witness among the nations. Harink thinks the way forward is to develop an account of how the messianic community even now participates in the Kingdom of God in a manner that avoids the “wreckage of worldly political history.” Accordingly, this cruciform community will not be caught up in “locating those points of worldly-­political leverage from which it might launch the next ‘conservative’ effort to keep things as they are, or the next ‘progressive’ movement in order to ‘advance toward’ or ‘bring about’ the Kingdom of God or at least a ‘higher’ stage of history.”8

That certainly seems right to me, but surely more needs to be said about what kind of politics the church represents amid the “wreckage of worldly political history.” In an attempt to develop the “more,” I want to direct attention to the significance of sacrifice as a central political reality. I may well test the patience of my readers in the development of this theme because I cannot deny that the argument I try to make is anything but straightforward. I begin by suggesting that Yoder’s account of apocalyptic that emphasizes the lordship of Christ is different from Martyn’s account in important ways. The significance of Yoder’s understanding of the crucified one as Lord, I will suggest, is best seen in light of Peter Leithart’s criticism of Yoder in Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom.9 For Leithart rightly contends that the heart of the political revolution that the church represented was to be “the end of sacrifice.” In what follows I will try to show how the issue of sacrifice remains relevant to our current political realities.

      Yoder on Christ the King

In his presidential address to the Society of Christian Ethics in 1988, “To Serve Our God and to Rule the World,” John Howard Yoder took as his text Revelation 5:7-10. He explained that the Apocalypse was not his theme for that occasion, but the text from Revelation was crucial for what Yoder argued to be the main task of Christian ethics, that is, “to see history doxologically.” To see history doxologically, according to Yoder, does not mean that Christians should try to usurp the emperor’s throne or to pastor Caesar prophetically, but rather “to persevere in celebrating the Lamb’s lordship and in building the community shaped by that celebration.”10 Christians see history doxologically because they are convinced that they participate in God’s rule of the cosmos.

Yoder observes, however, that apocalypse is only one of many modes of discourse the believing community uses to discern what such a rule entails. But apocalyptic language is particularly appropriate to express what it means for God to be praised as the ruler of the world. That Yoder associates apocalyptic discourse with claims of God’s rule of God’s creation suggests a subtle but quite important difference from Martyn’s account of apocalyptic. For in spite of the similarities between Martyn’s and Yoder’s accounts of apocalyptic, Yoder’s stress on the lordship of Jesus Christ means that the political character of the Kingdom of God is evident from the beginning. To see Jesus “sitting at the right hand of the Father” not only indicates Jesus’ role in the cosmic victory, in which he is put in charge of history by becoming sovereign over the principalities and powers; that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father is also a declaration of his rule of the world.11

This way of stating the significance of apocalyptic allows Yoder to avoid Martyn’s language of “invasion” and intervention. Of course, Yoder does not disavow God’s agency, but he observes that what was novel about the Christian understanding of God’s “intervention” was that the God who “intervenes” in Christ is the one God whose “intervention” is not unusual because that is the way God works. According to Yoder, what was unique about New Testament eschatology is that, instead of several gods using the world as their playground, the Christians maintained that there is one God who uses the world as the theater of divinely purposeful action. The God who is the Father of Jesus Christ has always wanted to gather a people to operate in fellowship with God and with one another. History has an end, and we are it.12

Everything Yoder writes is informed by his conviction that Jesus is “sitting at the right hand of the Father,” but perhaps his most concentrated account of what it means for Jesus to be so