It’s been much too long since I’ve had the luxury of time to read and reflect. Thus my joy at discovering Kim Fabricius’ post “Faithfulness, not effectivness and results” offering this quote from Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus and a thoughtful comment by Kim:
“The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection….
“Thus the most appropriate example of the difficult choice between effectiveness and obedience, and the most illuminating example, is that of Jesus himself. What it means for the Lamb to be slain, of whom then we sing that he is ‘worthy to receive power,’ is inseparable from what it meant for Jesus to be executed under the superscription ‘King of the Jews’….
“The choice that he made in rejecting the crown and accepting the cross was the commitment to such a degree of faithfulness to the character of the divine love that he was willing for its sake to sacrifice ‘effectiveness.’ Usually it can be argued that from some other perspective or in some long view this renunciation of effectiveness was in fact a very effective thing to do. ‘If a man will lose … his life he shall find it.’ But this paradoxical possibility does not change the initially solid fact that Jesus thereby excluded any normative concern for any capacity to make sure that things would turn out right….
“Christ renounced the claim to govern history….
“This is significantly different from the kind of ‘pacifism’ which would say that it is wrong to kill but that with proper nonviolent techniques you can obtain without killing everything you really want or have a right to ask for. In this context it seems that sometimes the rejection of violence is offered only because it is a cheaper or less dangerous or more shrewd way to impose one’s will upon someone else, a kind of coercion which is harder to resist. Certainly any renunciation of violence is preferable to its acceptance; but what Jesus renounced is not first of all violence, but rather the compulsiveness of purpose that leads the strong to violate the dignity of others. The point is not that one can attain all of one’s legitimate ends without using violent means. It is rather that our readiness to renounce our legitimate ends whenever they cannot be attained by legitimate means itself constitutes our participation in the triumphant suffering of the Lamb….
“This vision of ultimate good being determined by faithfulness and not by results is the point where we moderns get off.” —The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder
Then Kim’s response to this comment by a reader: “[w]hat do you see as the main areas where the modern church opts for effectiveness rather than obedience?”
Of course I am all for competence and accountability: the slipshod and irresponsible have no place in the Christian life. But signs that we are possessed by the pelagian demons, indeed by the “principalities and powers”, of effectiveness and results, include elements of what the sociologist George Ritzer called “McDonaldization”: a preoccupation with “efficiency” – beware of “how to”, “ten ways to”, and “purpose-driven” quick fixes; “calculability” – beware of accountancy-speak about numbers, size, and measurement and quantification in general; “predictability” – beware of homogenizing tendencies that would turn out Christian clones (e.g. an uncritically run Alpha Course, which demonstates that people will believe almost anything – and the same thing – if you get them together in groups around a table over a plate of pasta); and “control” – beware of those who go on about “sound” and “unsound” teachers, particularly when they put the frighteners on people about them. Flee, on the one hand, self-styled “successful” churches as if they were a betrayal of the cross of Christ – because they are: Bonhoeffer said that the Crucified is God’s judgment on the successful; and, on the other hand, churches that are obsessed with their “survival”. And be careful about what William Stringfellow called “playing church in endless and revolving conferences and training sessions and consultations.” The church is obsessed with “training” – which is ironic because so much of our training not only infantilises people but also disables them.
The church, as the Reformers insisted, is creatura verbi divini [creature/servant of the divine word], so our attention should focus on Word, sacrament, and radical and obedient witness to Jesus through living the Sermon on the Mount, i.e. living lives of peace, truth, and mercy, and thus eschewing all violent, mendacious, and tit-for-tat practices, practices that ensure my power and my patch. And remember the Bible’s repeated refrain: “Do not be afraid!” It is quite unseemly for Christians to worry about themselves or the church: that is God’s business. The paradigm here is St. Paul, who boasts of his weakness and wears his catastrophes as a badge of honour.
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