Browsing by Subject "Yoder"

This dissertation attempts to do two things. First, I provide a theological interpretation of congregation-based community organizing by connecting this activity to the politics of the church. The link between the two, I argue, is the rule of Christ, a non-hierarchical process of political judgment that operates in a mode of receptive generosity and vulnerability as well as accountability to deliberate and discern how best to resolve conflicts. Situating this activity within an apocalyptic orientation determined by lordship of Jesus Christ, I suggest that this process, when accompanied by the other structuring practices of the church, allows the social, historical community to embody the new age of God's reign. Congregation-based community organizing, I conclude, is the extension and extrapolation of this constitutive process, and therefore, can be understood as an act of mission in witness and service to the world. In addition, this missionary activity can also help to retool the church in the practice of binding and loosing, which has fallen into desuetude. Second, I describe how this missionary activity functions both faithfully and effectively to challenge and counteract the forces of late, global capital. By challenging the configuration and experience of time under capital, the work of organizing can serve to recover political judgment from a regnant market ideology so as to reconstitute the way decisions are made and conflicts resolved by opening them to a process more lilted to the justice of God's reign. Moreover, in doing so, the political work of organizing can serve to offer a new future through forgiveness and reconciliation to individuals and a society trapped within a capitalist history whose end is immanently experienced in the destructive pursuit of unlimited growth and expansion.

With the rise of the modern nation-state in recent centuries, "the people" has emerged as the most determinative concept of human community, the decisive imaginary for negotiating and producing human difference. It has become the primary basis for killing and the measure of life and death. John Howard Yoder sought to articulate the Christian political alternative in the face of the violence of modern peoplehood, a violence that cannot be understood apart from its anti-Jewishness. After expositing Yoder's account, I argue that it is inadequate insofar as it does not attend to God's election of Israel. I then trace the rise of modern peoplehood from "the West," particularly in the case of the people of the United States, in order to expose both the peculiarly Christian racism that has informed it and the key trope of "new Israel" for the imagination of political independence and exceptionalism. Following this historicization and analysis of modern peoplehood, I build critically on Karl Barth's account of the elect people of God in order to offer a Christian understanding that can subvert the violent, racist tendencies of modern political formations and embody a peaceable alternative in the midst of them. I sustantiate my Christian account of peoplehood as determined by God's election of Israel in Messiah with readings of key passages in the Tanakh/Old Testament, the Gospel of Matthew, and the Epistle to the Romans.