John Howard Yoder on Nonviolence

John Howard Yoder  Nonviolence: A Brief History - The Warsaw Lectures edited by Paul Martens, Matthew Porter and Myles Werntz (Baylor University Press, 2010)

John Howard Yoder’s Nonviolence: A Brief History, is yet another in what is proving to be an extended series of posthumously published books. The text is comprised of lectures that he gave in Warsaw Poland in 1983. To remind you of the historical context, at that time the Solidarity Movement had became a powerful nonviolent force trying to affect change in Communist Poland and Pope John Paul II was to visit Poland just a month later.

While the material contains little that is original it is good to have the lectures as they pull together in a simple accessible way a coherent overview of Yoder's account of the history and practice of nonviolence and its theological underpinnings. Hopefully the lectures might eventually be published in paperback as the hardback version is highly expensive for a book of 150 pages.

There is a good review by Andy Alexis-Baker at Jesus Radicals.

Engagement with others part 2

To follow up yesterday's post on starting engagement from other from "The place where we are wrong' I promise to put up a link to the sermon when it goes up on the Canberra Baptist website.

In the meantime here is another attempt to sketch in an affirmative mode a form of Christian engagement, this time in the words of Roman Coles radical democrat activist and political theorist (re)interpreting the anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder.

Witness to Jesus as Lord must not be read as a solicitation to strive for a singular and direct knockout victory over outsiders. Instead, it calls for multiple particular vulnerable encounters in which the strengths of the church body are little by little brought to light and perhaps themselves radically reformed and renewed. (p.127 Beyond Gated Politics)

In a time of church conflict...

In a time of Anglican church conflict, the following comments by a political theorist Romand Coles and activist in grass roots radical democratic movements offers a helpful reading of the theology of Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder - a reading in favour of radical democracy. The careful attention Coles pays to Yoder in his reading demonstrates demonstrates a respect for someone from a differing faith trajectory, a respect and care that serves as a helpful model that could well be usefully practiced by some of the controversialists in the wolrd wide Anglican community.

What unity asks Coles does the church seek? According to Coles...

Yoder emphatically rejects notions of church unity based upon extant agreements that would proide a lowest -common denominator foundation for identity, direction and tolerable pluralism. Such understandings tend to construe every serious dispute as a call for division.

...
Far better Yoder argues to understand church unity as a commitment to dialogical processes of reconciliation figured by the early churchees' gathering discernment around Jesus's wisdom of the cross. This "racialises the particular relevance of Jesus, enabling dialogue through the content of his message: the love of the enemy, the dignity of the lowly, repentance, servanthood, the renunciation of coercion." (p.117 Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy)

Christianity and Radical Democracy

This is a most amazing and rewarding book.

Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian By Stanley Hauerwas & Romand Coles Cascade Books, 2008

The title talks about conversations and the book really delivers - in a series of lectures, papers and letters in which Stanley Hauerwas, written off as sectarian by many mainstream theologians, engages in a probing exploration with Roman Coles, a political theorist, non-believer and community activist of the possible connections between a radical Christian faith and radical democracy.

This is a challenging exchange that demonstrates an open listening and honest exploration of points of connection and question between the traditions.

I learnt much from Coles sympathetic and open reading of texts from Rowan Williams and Jean Vanier and his sharp eye for the intrusion of Christendom assumptions and languages into our best efforts to get beyond a Christendom mentality. What do they have to do with organising for radical democracy? Go read.

This probing exchange reveals an emerging friendship that does not arrive at any easy synthesis or collapse the tension between the faith commitments of Hauerwas and the political commitments of Coles.

What is important is that they are both talking about a reimagining of politics and the practices that would sustain the practice of a radical politics and both questioning the contemporary shape of political imagination that is shaped by both the denial and the production of death.

Coming into view here are the practices of the early civil rights movement exemplified in the work of Bob Moses and Ella Baker, the local community organising of the Industrial Areas Foundation and the life and worship of the L'Arche communities. In the background is the work of John Howard Yoder, Mennonite theologian and his articulation of what Coles terms a "wild patience".