Chapter 6: Was Luther Wrong?

RW: You mentioned earlier that these practices form your evangelism strategy, but they sound more like this ‘social justice’ stuff that every evangelical church in America is jumping on the bandwagon with. It seems like every cool evangelical pastor in America is touting their outreach to Africa and the homeless. This is great, but shouldn’t we be putting more focus on the real work of evangelism: saving souls for eternity? Shouldn’t we be giving them the real gospel, instead of this watered-down ‘social gospel?’
AT: OK, here’s where Yoder really makes a lot of sense to me, but can be a bit abrasive to North American Evangelicals who have assumed that Jesus’ mission to save the world was primarily spiritual and futuristic [heaven]. For Yoder, the gospel, euangelion in the Greek [where we get the word ‘evangelical’], was originally yet another ‘socio-political’ term [sound familiar]. ‘Gospel,’ in its original context, was ‘good news’ announced by the Roman Empire that Caesar was coming to town or that a huge battle had been won that insured the safety of the far-flung Empire outposts like Colosse and Philippi. It was exciting news that had implications for fellow citizens of the kingdom of Rome. The ‘good news’ that Paul was announcing was that there was a different Lord than Caesar ‘sitting at the right hand of God’ and that this messiah named Jesus birthed a whole new society bearing his name that embodied the love, forgiveness, righteousness and justice of God’s reign. Jesus came to usher in the long-awaited new age in the Palestinian Jewish community during the 1st century. It was political, not spiritual or religious as we know it. It was a ‘social revolution,’ God’s judgment on the present order, but with it, the promise of a new regime was breaking into the world with Jesus. We think of repentance in terms of sorrow or guilt, but really it was ‘a redirected will ready to live in a new kind of world.’ And remember, John the Baptist, announced the nearness of God’s inaugurated kingdom coming in Jesus, calling the people of God who were coming out to the wilderness to a new set of social practices [like our five practices]. It’s easy to skim right over John the Baptist’s answer to the repenting folks in Luke’s Gospel when they ask him what they should do to prepare for God’s reign: ‘Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise’ [Luke 3:10]. John the Baptist called these gospel practices ‘fruits worthy of repentance.’ That’s what the Sermon on the Mount was all about—giving the disciples a vision for the new world that God was bursting into our present existence through Jesus and his disciples. The ekklesia embodied the new reality in the midst of a sin-dominated world. Repentance simply meant ‘turn your mind around’ or in our terms ‘join the team.’ Yoder’s reading of the New Testament in Politics of Jesus shattered the individualistic and uber-spiritual, and I may note apolitical, notions of what Christian faith was and is all about.
RW: Wow, that’s a different reading than I’m accustomed to. What about good old-fashioned ‘justification by faith’ alone?
AT: Again, we’ve been conditioned, especially since Luther 500 years ago, to think of ‘justification’ as an individualistic law-court term just like we learned back in youth group: ‘justified’ means ‘just-if-I’d-never-sinned’—in Christ, I’m acquitted! But I’m more compelled by what biblical scholars have called ‘the new perspective on Paul’ for the past four decades, although I don’t think Yoder ever used that phrase. The ‘new perspective’ is actually the oldest perspective on Paul. It claims that when Paul used that justification language—a lot in Romans and Galatians—it was always about how Gentiles become part of the people of God. You guessed it—it is a socio-political concept. Justification is about joining the movement, not how an individual’s sins can be wiped out in order to have a relationship with God and be saved for eternity. It is a term about how the covenant God is ‘setting things right’ in the world and how he invites everyone, Jew and Gentile, to join him.
RW: So, you’re saying Luther was flat-out wrong?
AT: No, Luther was flat-out cultural. He was reading and meditating on Paul in his medieval context, flooded with concerns about mortality [disease and war] and anxious guilt brought on by a corrupt Roman Catholic Church. Paul’s ‘justification’ was the cure for Luther’s self-flagellation!
RW: So, don’t we, too, interpret Paul contextually?
AT: Sure, but we’re in a unique era, I think, where our concerns actually parallel the concerns of 1st century Palestine quite closely. We are coming out of the modern era where the world has been dualistically divided into ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ and ‘political,’ and where historical and scientific study has provided certain foundational truths to build our lives on. It has been a time of intense focus on the individual who lives autonomously and objectively. We are slowly discovering that these dualisms and reductionisms and self-focus have led us into cul-de-sacs that don’t allow us to journey deeper and farther into understanding who God is and what it means to join him in his world-redeeming activity. In very similar ways to Jesus’ Palestinian world, our postmodern sensibilities are training us to think more holistically and communally. Yoder said that Evangelicals were constantly in danger of confusing the benefits of the kingdom for the kingdom itself. That is why he put all the marbles in the basket of seeking first the kingdom, following the way of Jesus. This following is salvation. Salvation in the first century was all about being a part of God’s people, not about each individual saying the right prayer or making the right individual moral decisions. God was about ‘setting things right’ in the world and that meant that Jesus and his people would set their sights on redeeming socio-political practices like loving their enemies and telling the truth and sharing their possessions. In the process, individuals were transformed.