Yoder wrote a follow-up letter to José Míguez-Bonino that described what animated his interest in accepting the invitation: “My entire trip confirmed the expectations with which I undertook it, namely, that in my not being acquainted with Latin America I was out of touch with the most exciting part of the life of the Christian Church, and that your part of the world is one in which the rediscovery of the vision of the Free Church is most relevant.”8 As this brief note indicates, there is no question that this trip to Latin America left a lasting impact on Yoder. Not only did it provide him with an opportunity to speak with Mennonites in significantly different cultural contexts, it also forced him to begin to learn about the particular forms of oppression—and the Christian responses to oppression—in Latin America.
Therefore, these lectures provide an initial glimpse into Yoder’s understanding of the Latin American situation. But they are not the last word. Repeatedly, for many years, Yoder would revisit the challenges concerning the witness of the church amidst an increasingly revolutionary context, challenges that are frequently recast using the language of liberation in subsequent years.9 At the invitation of Míguez-Bonino, Yoder would also return to Buenos Aires to teach for the 1970–71 academic year. In this later context, several important and lasting connections were made. For example, the active engagements with Míguez-Bonino and Rabbi Marshall Meyer enabled Yoder to place the questions of social place alongside the issue of Jewish-Christian relations. In a paper presented in this context—“Minority Christianity and Messianic Judaism”—Yoder argued that “the predominant Christian understanding of the relation between Jesus and Judaism is fundamentally distorted by the position of cultural establishment from which Christians observe,”10 an argument that would eventually evolve into The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited.11 Or, as a further example of the manifold connections emerging at the time, Yoder was discovered by several Latin American evangelical theologians—especially Samuel Escobar and René Padilla—who would openly acknowledge a substantial debt to Yoder.12 This influence, demonstrated through continued theological and personal connections to the people and context of Latin America, would eventually result not only in a critical rethinking of Yoder’s theology but also in an affirmation: Yoder would end up becoming an honorary member of the Latin American Theology Fraternity.
The Shape of the Lectures
To return to this volume for a moment, it is clear that there are three discrete sets of lectures presented here. That said, their arrangement is intentional in that each subsequent series builds upon the previous.
The initial and shortest series—“The Believers Church”—seeks to demonstrate that it is precisely the believers church, the free church, that can best remain faithful to Jesus Christ amidst the many challenges facing Latin American churches. Addressing the particular practices of baptism, binding and loosing, the Eucharist, and discipleship,13 Yoder systematically argues that only the free church can (a) offer true religious liberty and maintain its missionary character over the generations, (b) restore the real person-to-person character of forgiveness among believers and, because of this, (c) call all people to live together in a community of mutual respect and to reorder their society in a truly human way. Therefore, he concludes that the path of the New Testament vision of obedience is found in community, expressed in community, and illuminated by a common hope. In short, the path of obedience is a witnessing free church community.
The contribution of the second series—“Peace”—is briefly foreshadowed in the first. Yet, because of its particular importance in the free church vision of obedience and the volatile revolutionary context of Latin America, a separate series of lectures is provided to flesh out both why peace is so important to the New Testament vision of communal obedience and how alternate visions of obedience undermine the New Testament vision and, in the process, the community of believers.14 The first two chapters of the series present a biblical defense of love beyond the limits of reason and justice, a defense of following Jesus not based in a formal moralism or a literalist imitation but rooted in a vision of the testimony of what God is like that organically incites our fellowship with God and participation in God’s work. These chapters are followed by another pair that outline what Yoder takes to be the two most serious digressions from the New Testament position: (a) the modern mentality of Reinhold Niebuhr15 and (b) the ancient tradition of the just war.16 To bring the series to a close, Yoder strikes at the heart of the issue he has been circling throughout: the question is not whether a Christian should be involved in the social struggle because Christ is and always has been involved. The choice is whether this involvement is done on the wrong side “after the fashion of this world” (which has been done for a long time) or on the right side with “substantial illumination or judgment from Jesus Christ” (which is exemplified by the believers church).17 In a manner that evokes the later Politics of Jesus,18 Yoder challenges a variety of popular understandings of revolution and concludes this series with the claim that the way of the cross is the “most constructive social strategy for our age.”
The third and final series—“Church in a Revolutionary World”—essentially seeks to explicate the claim that “What is morally lacking in the political revolutions of our day is not that they are too radical but that they are too much like the movements they oppose.”19 To this end, the series begins with an account of the course of history as a debate about the relationship between the church and the world that is immediately followed by a revised account of this contested relationship through the New Testament language of principalities and powers that enables a constructive rethinking of the victory of Jesus Christ and the distinctiveness of the church. Continuing the descriptive/constructive chapter couplets of this series, Yoder then turns to outline the connection between obedience and the fulfillment of God’s purposes, the connection that is exemplified most emphatically in the kenotic self-emptying of Christ who gives life through the cross, the connection that is “the gospel pattern of social significance.”20 Practically speaking, this means that the way of the cross in social change includes identification with the humblest segments of society and loving concern for the adversary that begins in the covenant community birthed at Pentecost, “the most fundamental social revolution of all time.”21
In conclusion, both to the final series and to the volume as a whole, the final chapter turns toward the relationship between salvation history and world history. In a final bracing yet encouraging salvo, Yoder suggests that the fellowship of God’s covenant people is the fountainhead of social revolution—e.g., the rejection of racial and cultural pride and provincialism, the demythologizing of religious ceremony, and the democratic philosophies of modern times—in ways that are often mediated through expanding circles over generations (and even through the work of rebels). The appropriate Christian response to this reality, however, is not pride but humility and patience, humility to acknowledge that the community of love is a gift from God, and patience to avoid identifying God’s deliverance with the rise and fall of regimes. The claim that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation”22 is a claim that Christ has overcome the world. It is the “concrete historical beginning of a new kind of human society as well.”23 In this new kind of human society,
