Brian Hamilton

Yoder on Christology and Ethics

Yoder’s social ethics are consistently based on a high rather than a low Christology, not only arguing that the human Jesus is normative for ethics but that he is so precisely because he is the second person of the trinity. Or, even if Yoder does not often enough invoke explicitly trinitarian language, he nonetheless depends on it explicitly for his development of a Christian social ethic. Yoder’s creedal orthodoxy in this respect is not a subplot in his writing, nor is it only implicit. On the contrary, Jesus is the principle of the world and the Lord of history from his earliest writings through his latest, and it is for this reason and no other that he is the only true model for social ethics.

Then to follow Jesus does not mean renouncing effectiveness. It does not mean sacrificing concern for liberation within the social process in favor of delayed gratificationin heaven, or abandoning efficacy in favor of purity. It means that in Jesus we have a clue to which kidns 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”). It is not that we begin with a mechanistic universe and then look for cracks and chinks where a little creative freedom might sneak in (afor which we would then give God credit): it is that we confess the deterministic world to be enclosed within, smaller than, the sovereignty of the God of the Resurrection and Ascension. “He’s got the whole world in his hands” is a post-ascension testimony. The different it makes for political behavior is more than merely poetic or motivational. —Politics of Jesus, 246–247.

11 May 2007 |
tags: Christology, John Howard Yoder, Theological Ethics