Revolutionary Christianity. John Howard Yoder
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of the Church,” Drew Gateway 30 (Spring 1960) 151–60; and “The Otherness of the Church,” Concern 8 (May 1960) 19–29. The same piece also appears in The Mennonite Quarterly Review 35 (October 1961) 286–96; and in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1998) 54–64.
25. See Yoder, “Christ, The Hope of the World,” in The Original Revolution, 140–76; and in The Royal Priesthood, 194–218.
26. Yoder, Nonviolence—A Brief History: The Warsaw Lectures, eds. Paul Martens, Matthew Porter, and Myles Werntz (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010).
27. In the original manuscript, Yoder would often loosely translate or paraphrase biblical passages and, at other times, he would simply leave a note indicating that certain passages should be inserted at a particular point. Where we have standardized according to the NRSV, we have provided the passages in italics (and this is the norm throughout the volume). Where we have retained Yoder’s paraphrase, we have not introduced italics (and this has only been done where he is attempting to highlight an aspect of the passage not readily evident in the NRSV translation).
28. We have also taken the liberty of moving references for direct biblical citations to the footnotes, whether they were supplied by Yoder in the original text or not.
1. Only Believers
In the missionary situation of Protestantism in Latin America, it has been most natural to conceive of evangelical Christianity as a unity. Under the pressure of an ancient and anti-religious secularism, what all non-Roman Catholic Christians held in common was invariably more significant than what divided them.
But from the beginning it was not so. Students of the sixteenth-century Reformation have in recent years made it abundantly clear that there were actually two quite different Reformation movements, expressing two divergent conceptions of the nature and mission of the church. On one side, there was the Reformation supported by governments in northern Europe and Britain. Whether in the Lutheran, Reformed, or Anglican forms, these official magisterial reformations had in common a fundamental conception of the limits and the pattern of reform. They maintained, from the Middle Ages, the alliance of church and state as this was expressed in the church’s support for the political goals of the local government and in the government’s responsibility for seeing through the Reformation. They also maintained the identity of church and society as expressed in the universal obligation of infant baptism.
On the other side of the great division, even though springing from the same historical soil of the early Swiss Reformation, there was the position of the free churches: the Swiss Brethren, the Bruderhof movement in Moravia, and Mennonites in the Low Countries. These were the weak but courageous representatives of this other vision of the church’s liberty, which has not ceased to grow in numbers and in spiritual vitality over the centuries.
The time is rapidly drawing near when Protestant Christians in Latin America will need to face with growing seriousness this division within the Protestant heritage. During the first generation of missionary aggressiveness, and continuing as long as evangelicals lived under the pressure of persecution, every member of an evangelical congregation obviously had come to that position by deep personal conviction. But now, with the decrease of clericalism, the change in the attitude of the Roman church, and a growth in numbers of Protestants, it may soon come about that second- and third-generation Protestants will raise for all evangelicalism many of the traditional questions implanted in the ancient debate about the baptism of infants. Likewise, the growing numbers and social prestige of Protestants will place before them questions of social responsibility and the possibility of a kind of establishment attitude toward society which was not previously possible in these nations.
Still another aspect of the need for a clarification of the issue of the free church is the great strength in Latin America of the “nonhistorical denominations.” These movements have neither a strong sense of historical perspective nor an outspoken concern for the sociological faithfulness of the church, although they are exclusively free church in their character and theological structure. As the strength of North American leadership is replaced by the intellectual and sociological maturation of indigenous leadership in these young movements, their attitudes toward culture and society can be expected to shift quite rapidly, as has already been demonstrated by the evolution of Pentecostalism in the United States. Therefore, it is not a sectarian revival of divisive character but, rather, an ecumenical responsibility for the spiritual freedom of the entire Protestant movement that leads us to suggest that the great theological challenge of the coming generation will center on the choices that need to be made at this point.
As we approach such a study it should not be assumed that our concern is to determine which denomination is and always has been right. With regard to a particular issue, such as the baptism of infants, it is true that theological responsibility demands that we not be satisfied with affirming two equally valid but contradictory answers. Yet, neither of the traditions currently represented in Latin America has come there straight from the New Testament. On one hand, the pedobaptist Protestant traditions (Waldensian, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist) brought with them a form developed in Europe in the age of Protestant establishment at its height. Its maintenance in a free church missionary situation, although perhaps logically a contradiction, has not fundamentally changed the stance of the churches in society thus far. On the other hand, the North American believers-baptist groups have come to faith in a society for which, by a similarly paradoxical contradiction, the baptism of adults has become the established form of Protestantism in spite of formal separation of church and state. Thus, neither group has created a form of church life directly out of the Latin American situation. They have taken account of neither the Catholic conservatism of the past nor the revolutionary secularism that is now breaking in upon us. Therefore, although we deal with matters which historically have been expressed in the form of debate between denominations, let us not undertake them under any such immediately polemical assumptions.
Historic contestation over infant baptism has usually been made unfruitful by two mistakes:
a. On the one hand, in the Reformation era and ever since, it has been possible (and has in fact seemed most normal) to carry on a discussion of whether infants should be baptized as an isolated issue within the theology of the sacraments, a discussion seeking to decide the question solely on the basis of texts in the New Testament dealing specifically with baptism as authorized by Christ and as it is practiced by the apostles. While this kind of study is not completely inappropriate, it has also been largely fruitless because it placed the conversation in too narrow a frame. Far more is at stake than the proper handling of a ritual; the entire nature of the church and her place in the world is the issue.
b. The second misunderstanding has been just as harmful. Reformation debates about this issue began at the same time that Europeans were coming to conceive of themselves more and more as individuals. The Reformers themselves mightily fostered this humanistic individualism in their interpretations of the nature of faith and of revelation, but they retained the outward character of the institutions of Christendom in the sociology of their Reformations. It was normal that on both sides of the debate the question of infant baptism was understood consciously as concentrated upon the inward and individual experience. This concentration on the character of the experience of the individual was furthered immensely by the continuing argument around the topic of baptism in the following centuries. What it means to believe truly, what personal understanding and experiences are involved, how one can be sure that one has been forgiven—all such discussion tended in the direction of individualism which seemed to fit in well with the modern Western view of the person as a sovereign, and perhaps lonely, individual.
Again, this kind of study is not inappropriate. It continues to be theologically necessary. But, it is not at the center of the definition of the free church.
The Children of Abraham
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