John Howard Yoder’s newest posthumously published book, Nonviolence: A Brief History, is comprised of lectures that he gave in Warsaw Poland in 1983. At that time the Solidarity Movement had became a powerful nonviolent force trying to affect change in Communist Poland. Pope John Paul the II was to visit Poland just a month after Yoder delivered his lectures. So the time for Yoder to urge nonviolent resistance was ripe, though Yoder did not reference contemporary events in Poland during the lectures. First Yoder urged his hearers to consider the lessons that have been learned by nonviolent movements in the twentieth century. He then refutes objections that just war theorists might raise to the effectiveness and legitimacy of a nonviolent movement, moving from there to ground nonviolence resistance in the Judeo-Christian heritage. Finally he addresses the Roman Catholic Church in the final three lectures, agreeing with liberation theologian Adolfo Pérez Esquivel that “It is love, not violence or hatred, that will have the last word in history.”
For those who have read much in Yoder, these lectures present little that is new or surprising. Much of the material here, plus much more, can be found in Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution or The Politics of Jesus, not to mention other books. Yet there is an element to these lectures that brings out more clearly than ever Stanley Hauerwas’s claim that Yoder provides us with resources to think of “natural theology” in a new way. “The gain of the cosmos” bends towards Jesus and nonviolence (46).
Thus Yoder narrates the “cosmological conversions” that Tolstoy, Gandhi and King underwent that pushed them to see reality anew. Speaking of Tolstoy’s insight that influenced Gandhi and King Yoder states:
The key to the good news is that we are freed from prolonging the chain of evil cause engendering evil effects by action and reaction in kind. By refusing to extend the chain of vengeance, we break into the world with good news. This one key opened the door to a restructuring of the entire universe of Christian life and thought. There developed from it a critique of economic exploitation, of military and imperial domination, and of westernization. (22)
Yoder invites the reader to have their own “cosmological conversion” as he explains the New Testament’s cosmology (thus overcoming some weaknesses in Tolstoy’s viewpoint). The “powers and principalities,” which help create order but also dominate and oppress people in forms such as the state, have been disarmed and defeated in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. They were put on public display and shown for what they truly are: emperors with no clothes. Jesus now wages a cosmological war against these defeated powers, and invites us to be part of the march toward history’s christological telos. Christians are a sign of Jesus victory and the eschatological kingdom. As such we take part in an alternate politics that sees that the “grain of the universe” is not with the powerful, but the oppressed and downtrodden, not with violence but with suffering as Christ suffered. As such, Jesus’ church will inevitably run headlong into the empire’s of this world as they resist Jesus, and the church will have to witness publicly, and sometimes at great cost.
This cosmological conversion to which we are invited is to a new way of living in and viewing the world, not merely to feelings and beliefs. It is to see that Jesus is more determinative of history than anybody in the White House, the Kremlin or some country’s Parliament. He goes on to show how in the past few decades the Holy Spirit has moved within the Catholic Church to help many people to this conversion, most importantly people in the Catholic Worker movement, but there have also been stirrings in the bishops themselves. Jesus is lord and has altered the course of humanity’s sinful, violent rebellion. The question for us is whether we care to take the medicine that will make us well enough to see again, to see not merely shadows, but the reality that casts them.
This is a kind of natural theology. It is also a realist epistemological and metaphysical outlook. Not realist in the Machiavellian sense of political self-interest, but realist in the sense that the actual material world is the place where history lies and in which Jesus operates and moves. Without a real, live Christian community—such as the Catholic Workers—that embodies this cosmological worldview, without these living examples, there is little hope that others can come to see how radically Jesus altered reality.
So although there is not a lot of new material here, the way it is presented may help a new reading of Yoder and more importantly a recovery of the more precise political sense in which Christians are called to operate in this world.
Finally, I should make a note about the good introduction to the text. Martens and the other editors tell us the general historical situation of Poland in 1983, as well as give a very helpful overview of the content of the lectures. I was hoping to know who Yoder’s exact audience was and what questions he was asked to address (which Yoder would have taken very seriously), but that information is not there. I read these lectures in their unpublished form in 2005, but even then lacked the context in which to place them. Other than that missing element of context the editor’s introduction is good. Moreover, they helpfully tell us what they did and did not do to the text (unlike Stassen’s introduction to the recent Yoder book, War of the Lamb, in which he fails to mention that they added, subtracted and moved things around in the text). In sum, I’d recommend this book as supplementary material to Yoder’s Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution and other writings. At 145 pages, it might also make a decent introductory text to Yoder and nonviolent history as well.
–Andy Alexis-Baker
