ICTHUS started a blog series on Yoder’s works a month or so ago, and I just satrted reading the posts (after searching in vain for signs of when that collection might be getting published — any word on that Vaughn?)

Anyway, I thought this might be a good set of things to read as we roll into the holy days of American Nationalism, and its present day canonical status as we “fight the war on terror”. Yoder, Bonhoeffer, along with Hauerwas, the RO crowd, and many of my blogging friends have been focusing on this sin of national idolatry for some time now, since the Empire of the Neocons have reared their beast-like- heads.

ICTHUS: Yoder Blogging, Week One: Cain, Jesus, and the War on Terror

Yoder argues that our conviction that God’s providence can only be protected and carried on through violence, a violation of the teachings of Jesus and of our whole revelation of God, is a denial of Jesus’ enthronement and eschatological promise, and even God’s sovereignty. For Yoder, the only solution is the same solution which the early church sought to their troubles. It is the same solution to escalating violence which Cain needed: the intervention of God. The intervention has come in Jesus.

As Gandhi and King demonstrated the power of innocent suffering in breaking the cycle of violence, so Yoder suggests a sort of inside-out satisfaction theory of the atonement, in which the innocent Jesus died not to satisfy God’s need for vengeance but mankind’s. The good news of the cross is that Jesus has destroyed the “law of gravity” of retributive violence. As Yoder says, the Gospel is not about delegitimizing violence, as we so often attempt, but it is about overcoming it.

The “law of gravity” is a good analogy. It’s the same matter-of-factness that we hear in “that’s war” and “that’s the way it is”, “and “we live in a violent world”, and “kill or be killed”. All, summarily dismissing the clear teachings of Jesus (*and substituting in their stead, a clearly culturally palatable compromise and watering down of the “non-violence” of Jesus; his clear and unmistakable “alternative” in the Kingdom of God, and the neccessity of our utter trust in that coming to pass as our hope for history.