If, as Yoder maintains, the lordship of Christ is at the heart of apocalyptic, then the political implications are immediate. Indeed, that way of putting the matter is misleading. It is not a matter of working out the “implications”; rather, the politics of apocalyptic simply is the existence of a people who refuse to acknowledge the claims of worldly rulers to be kings.14 Moreover, because the one who is Lord has triumphed on the cross, his followers refuse to use the violence of earthly rulers to achieve what are allegedly good ends.
Nonviolence is obviously a central commitment defining the kind of politics Yoder thinks is required to acknowledge the lordship of Christ, but it is equally important that nonviolence not be isolated as the defining feature of apocalyptic politics. Nonviolence is but one aspect of the conviction that history is determined not by kings and empires, but by the church. Nonviolence is therefore but an expression of a more determinative ecclesiology. The church’s first duty to the societies in which she finds herself is, therefore, the same duty she has to her Lord. That means the church’s witness to the lordship of the Crucified One cannot let “local obligations” to one state lead her to treat those in another state as an enemy. Any attempt, for example, “to justify war for the individual Christian citizen, after it has been judged incompatible with the ministry of the church, is a refusal to be honest with the absolute priority of church over state in the plan of God.”15
Though often accused of being apolitical, Yoder makes the extraordinary claim that the church knows better than the state what the state is to be and do. The church may well be a moral stimulus to help a society and state to be better, but the church does not exist to enable the work of the alleged “wider” society. Rather, “it is for the sake of the church’s own work that society continues to function.”16 The meaning of history is to be found in the existence of the church.
Apocalyptic politics is based on the confidence that God uses the power structures of this world in spite of themselves for God’s purposes. Christ carries out the purposes of the One who is sovereign by ruling over the rebellious structures of the universe.17 That rule is hidden but made visible through the servant church. The place of the church in the history of the universe is the place where Christ’s lordship is operative. This is where it is clear that he rules, as well as the kind of rule he exercises. He is the suffering servant whose rule is decisively revealed on a cross. The church makes history not through domination but through being the servant of a crucified Lord.18
That the gospel is to be preached to the ends of the world is why time does not stop. What it means for Christ to be King is that he rules over history to give the church time to preach the gospel. Yoder is quite well aware that strong metaphysical claims are correlative of this understanding of the role of the church. That God gives the church time to witness to the lordship of Christ means that God is not timeless. That does not mean God is not eternal, but rather eternity is not not temporal; eternity is atemporal. Put differently, God is “more temporal than we are, who is ahead of us and behind us, before us and after us, above us in several directions, and who has more of the character of timeliness and meaningfulness in movement rather than less.”19
Metaphysics is often thought to be apolitical, but for Yoder these claims about the way the world is are constitutive of the position he takes in The Politics of Jesus. Yoder’s view of God’s timefulness expresses his contention that “the cross and not the sword, suffering and not brute power determine the meaning of history. The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience (John 13:10). The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification of the use of violence and other kinds of power in every human conflict. 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 cross and resurrection.”20 This relation between cross and resurrection, moreover, is the most determinative mode of seeing history doxologically.
Yoder’s well-known criticisms of the Constantinian settlement are but the expression of this understanding of the eschatological character of the gospel. The fundamental problem that beset the church when Constantine became a member, a problem Yoder recognizes was beginning well before Constantine, was how becoming established changed the self-understanding of the church. Under the influence of Constantinianism the church no longer understood herself to live simultaneously in two times. Eschatology had now become an ideal relegated to the future rather than a reality that transforms the character of time.
As a result, the church no longer thinks she is standing in the obedient line of the true prophets, witnessing to the reality of God’s kingdom. Rather, the church now has a vested interest in the present order, tempting her to use cultic means to legitimize that order.21 Consequently, it is now assumed that everyone is Christian, so that Christian ethics no longer is the exploration of what makes us faithful disciples, but rather is an attempt to develop an ethic that is workable for all of society. For it is now assumed that the church exists to serve society, and as a result the apocalyptic presumption that society exists to serve the church is lost.
Yoder’s understanding of Constantinianism is nuanced and complex, but hopefully I have said enough to suggest how Yoder’s emphasis on the lordship of Christ for determining the apocalyptic imagination is a politics.22 It is a politics, moreover, that I should like to think is compatible with Martyn’s understanding of Paul’s apocalyptic gospel in Galatians. For Martyn, like Yoder, thinks no questions are more important for determining the politics of apocalyptic than “What time is it?” and “In what cosmos do we actually live?”23 The answer to those questions is revealed by the sacrifices of a people who think it necessary to legitimate their existence.
Leithart on Sacrifice
In his book Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom, Peter Leithart develops a helpful critique of Yoder’s politics. His critique is helpful because Leithart’s criticisms, I hope to show, help us better appreciate the significance of Yoder’s eschatology. I need to be clear. I am not particularly concerned with Leithart’s defense of Constantine’s integrity as a Christian. As Leithart recognizes, Yoder’s critique of Constantinianism has little stake in questions surrounding the authenticity of Constantine’s “conversion.” Much more interesting is Leithart’s suggestion that Yoder failed to appreciate how Christianity fundamentally transformed Rome by Constantine’s outlawing of sacrifice.
That Constantine outlawed sacrifice, a law he enforced haphazardly according to Leithart, was significant because sacrifice was thought to be essential to Roman social and political life. That sacrifice was considered essential to a good politics was an unquestioned assumption in the ancient world. For example, Leithart calls attention to Celsus’s contention that religion had to do with culture and political traditions, with support of the city or state, and was expressed primarily through the act of offering sacrifices.