Beautiful stuff from Nate’s summary of Yoder’s section on
ICTHUS: Yoder Blogging, Week Two: Where Are We Going?
The Ethic of Perfect Love is imitating God’s boundless love. Yoder argues that while this has been interpreted as a life-long process or as an unattainable ideal, it is in fact a simple choice one can make immediately: simply to love those beyond whom the standards of the world would call us to love. Especially, it is to love one’s enemy. Yoder sees the problem of war as being addressed by calling us to love those beyond our family or friends or nationality. To see someone’s life as dispensable for the achievement of some end is not to love with God’s boundless love.
With The Ethic of Excess, Yoder argues that Jesus’ teaching compels his disciples not to calculate outcomes or to react to the choice which the world gives us, but to find a third way of love beyond that which is visible without the Spirit.
In The Ethic of Reconciliation, Yoder attempts to bring this all together. The problem with ethical systems which allow for violence is that they calculate certain achievable goods versus certain moral wrongs. The ethic which Jesus teaches, however, focuses not on moral platitudes or human achievements but on the good of one’s sister or brother. Thus, in accordance with the Kingdom of God, reconciliation is our goal instead of accomplishing certain ends. This calls for resembling God in his boundless love.
“reconciliation is our goal instead of accomplishing certain ends.”
I would add, humbly to this assesment, that maybe reconciliation IS the end. Not some calculation of “greater good”, which is , as The Radical orthodoxy folks would say, a deeply “religious” and “theological” calculation, based on what I wouold call “underlying values”. When “values” are more beholden to cultural norms and not the Kingdom’s underlying “values”, then the “values” discussion goes completely bonkers, and turns it upon itself.
I’m glad you have been giving us these summaries, Nate! I’m gonna have to get me one of them thar
The Lamb’s War
books.
