Chapter 17: Politics of the Church, Hidden and Revealed, in Søren Kierkegaard and John Howard Yoder
17
Politics of the Church, Hidden and Revealed, in Søren Kierkegaard and John Howard Yoder
It is almost a banality now in Kierkegaardian circles to suggest that Kierkegaard’s final, “direct” attack on the established church is markedly different in style and theme than the writings that preceded it, both early and late, both pseudonymous and signed. While there is a host of ways in which this truism remains true, a single factor complicates it—namely, the fact that these latest, direct, polemical writings aim squarely at that which Kierkegaard has had in his sights at least since Postscript: the host of sociopolitically-inscribed and religiously-underwritten assumptions and temperaments that he calls “Christendom.” In that sense, the attack literature culminates a major trajectory of his life’s work rather than departs from it. Yet this continuity in critique of Christendom seems only to highlight a more subtle but important shift. It is only late that we find that critique redirected from “the Establishment” or acculturated Christianity in general to landing squarely at the church, with its paid clergy, infant baptism, and lack of “suffering for the truth.” Even if one can and should retrieve a marked sense of “community” and “politics” in Kierkegaard, it is very difficult to reconstruct any positive description of church, at least in light of his final attack. There, Christendom seems equivalent with “the church” and the “established” or “inherited” church nothing more or less than “Christendom.”
Yet there are ironies here, too. One notes that the shift from Kierkegaard’s earlier indirect critique to his direct polemics largely revolves around the question of whether religious suffering is essentially inward and hidden or outward and recognizable.814 The earlier Kierkegaard championed the hidden inwardness accompanying “dying to the world,” convinced as he was that any bourgeois philistine may in fact be a knight of faith.815 Kierkegaard eventually becomes concerned that such appeals might mask a spiritless lack of having ventured at all or, worse, that they themselves might become clear evidence that one has achieved the highest. Kierkegaard thus eventually assumes that New Testament Christianity will manifest itself in willed and noticeable suffering (“denying myself, renouncing the world, dying to the world, etc.”).816 Based on this shift from inward to outward, from invisible to manifest, one might guess that Kierkegaard in the end would portray and fight for a visible church rather than merely critique the institutional one. In other words, one would expect him to want, not to do away with church as institution, but to make it more pronounced, identifiable, discrete. Others use the “true church” as a norm by which to critique the chief institution of accommodated and cultured Christendom; Kierkegaard by comparison, seems to throw out one with the other, at least at first glance.
This irony shows up best if we compare Kierkegaard’s critiques of nineteenth-century Christendom to one of the twentieth century’s most influential critics of Christendom—Mennonite theologian, church historian, and social ethicist John Howard Yoder. Yoder’s primary complaint about the established church is its presumption to be invisible, a “spiritual” reality as opposed to having a particular, social, political form.817 In Yoder’s phrasing, we mainline denominations and mainstream American culture have “shut [Jesus] up in the monastery of the heart”818—quietly refusing to follow his example in our collective life together. Yoder’s corrective to Christendom or Constantinianism is thus for the church to become distinguishable from the world, a visible polis with its own distinctive politic.819
In the rest of this essay, I want to trace Kierkegaard’s antiestablishment writings alongside Yoder’s anti-Constantinian writings in the hopes that the close convergences and enduring differences between the two can help us think through what a hidden, yet manifest church might look like, especially beside a Christendom that is still very much with us. I will concur with Yoder that any understanding of the true church as a spiritual, invisible reality precludes the kind of countercultural witness that both he and Kierkegaard otherwise sought. At the same time, Kierkegaard offers ways to see the church more christologically, that is, as a corporate body that remains incognito—hidden in its very disclosure. To deny direct recognition with Kierkegaard is not the same as rendering the church invisible, although the church may in fact remain hidden. I will close by suggesting that a visible but also perpetually hidden church would include penitential and liberatory practices—that is, a distinctive politic—that are sorely needed in America’s new Christendom.820
Yoder for Kierkegaard
Yoder wrote his best-known work, The Politics of Jesus, at an opportune time. Published in 1972, the book built on and gave voice to discontent with America’s involvement in an unpopular war as it reconstructed Jesus not as a spiritual, a-political leader of people’s hearts (that he would leave to Princess Diana), but as concerned with issues of power, status, and war—both sanctioned and unsanctioned. On Yoder’s reading, Jesus and the early church join the Israelites in exhibiting a distinctive social arrangement—an “ethic” or “culture” or “politic”—that is recognizable and inhabitable and that provides a real alternative to the power-politics, hierarchical structures, and sanctioned violence perpetuated by empires and modern-day nation states. Because the life and death of Jesus provide a pattern of radical service, forgiveness, and nonviolent resistance to the powers of church and state, disciples of the crucified one will necessarily find their community countercultural and politically subversive.821
Rather than directly or extensively critique those alternative social arrangements, then, Yoder critiques the ways in which Christianity has become depoliticized in the first place. It is only by losing their “original,” sociopolitical form that they are thought to be compatible with an essentially non-Christian politics. This he calls “Constantinianism,” a name that overlaps considerably with Kierkegaard’s use of “Christendom.”822 The real tragedy (what Yoder calls the apostasy) of Constantinian arrangements is not that Christianity becomes dominant or mainstream, but that it ceases to have a distinctive ethos and politics. Once soldiers and hangmen are baptized, Christianity becomes not a way of life, but a doctrine to believe. Most disconcerting to Yoder is this: once the church and nation share borders—as with the Holy Roman Empire or state-church arrangements, and also according to popular sentiments about a “Christian America”—then a “real church” must be posited above and beyond historically visible churches. In other words, in order to preserve the meaningfulness of “the true church” or “the elect,” Constantinian churches need to posit a difference between the visible and invisible church. The “real” church becomes invisible to the extent that the “actual” church becomes compromised.
Notice, then, that Yoder’s leverage against any given Constantinian arrangement depends on his ability to offer a thick description of “the politics of Jesus” and that of the early church. Only a historian of religion—and perhaps one willing to take the latest modern biblical scholarship into full account—can paint the early followers of Jesus with enough detail to exhibit exactly what is lost when the church is rendered invisible and thus made to accommodate other social forms. Without a visible church, past or present, Yoder has nothing by which to mark its absorption into Christendom and disappearance into the hidden church.823
Kierkegaard’s portrayal of Christendom is similar to that of Yoder. Both portray Christendom as largely the problem of redundancy and identity. If I am a Christian by virtue of birth, upbringing, and default assumptions of the dominant culture, what in the world could it mean to become Christian? Both assume that identity relies on borders (something that I am / we are not) and that Christendom obscures or elides essential differences between what is and isn’t Christianity. Kierkegaard via Socratic ignorance and Yoder via historical reconstructions beg for redefining Christianity or the Christian church in light of that which is necessarily outside. The church polis must, for both, be here and not there, and the difference must be “visible.”
It is on this point that important differences between Yoder and Kierkegaard might offer the latter a way out of certain problems inherent in his final attack on the church. I suggested earlier that one might expect Kierkegaard to offer distinctive marks of the true, visible church when he also began marking the importance of Christian suffering (which is always chosen, and intrinsically related to discipleship)824 as distinguished from his earlier depictions of the hidden, inward passions of a Christian.825 Instead, he largely portrays real Christians in the following images of individual suffering, which are repeated mantra-like through his latest newspaper articles and attack essays: True Christians “suffer for the doctrine”; they deny themselves, renounce the world, die to the world; they should be salt, and be willing to be sacrificed; they know “cross and agony and suffering, crucifying the flesh, hating oneself . . . etc.” Christianity itself is “the doctrine of renunciation, of suffering, of heterogeneity to this world, the doctrine that issues no checks except on another world.”826
Such tropes serve Kierkegaard well in distinguishing the Christian ideal from Christendom. But notice that heterogeneity with the world and thus suffering at the hands of the world offer the most defining marks of that Christian ideal. We are not so much given a thick description of discipleship proper but of the necessary suffering that ensues when Christianity is practiced here and now. While this emphasis on present sufferings and tribulations looks similar to Yoder’s commitment to portraying Christianity in terms of concrete social forms, there is an important difference: For Kierkegaard, Christianity is “marked” almost entirely by its inability to get along in the world, its “heterogeneity” with the world; whereas, for Yoder, the “narratability” of the Christian church on its own terms and thus its ability to offer an alternative politic—which is fully inhabitable and practical—provides the very ground of his critique of Christian accommodation. For Kierkegaard, while we might glimpse true faith in a heroic individual’s passion (meaning both her resolve and her suffering), such glimpses are indirect and fleeting and appear to be socially and politically unsustainable.
Compared to Yoder’s substantive display of the political structure, concrete practices, and embodied social ethic of the early Christians (as recapitulated by “restorationist” churches), Kierkegaard’s final appeals to “New Testament Christianity” or “authentic Christianity” appear disappointingly nominal and thin. It is this thinness, to the point where they approach mere tropes and foils, that leads interpreters to see Kierkegaard abandoning the church itself as he lampoons Christianity. Kierkegaard underscores martyrdom or suffering at the hands of the world as the primary mark of authentic Christianity. Note, then, that that mark exhibits not essential characteristics of Christianity itself—much less of the true Christian church—but rather its being overtaken by a capacious Christendom.
Kierkegaard for Yoder
We have seen that Yoder helps Kierkegaard by insisting on a concrete social form that is able to hold the “not-Christian” in its place and so gain some resistance against the Constantinian blending. But from this description we can already see a number of ways in which Kierkegaard might help Yoder. Kierkegaard better accounts for Christendom’s amorphousness and tenacity. While Yoder tries to make sense of “the ever-new shape of the establishment” by showing how “the basic structural error, the identification of a civil authority as bearer of God’s cause,”827 or how church as chaplaincy can be “transposed” into various keys,828 he does not portray the problem of Christendom as the problem of redundancy as clearly as does Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard more fully recognizes how even the quest to become distinctive vis-à-vis any dominant culture might get reclaimed and repackaged by, and so reabsorbed within, the dominant culture. What happens when being a countercultural Christian becomes permitted and sanctioned, thus becoming the norm and rather normative? Kierkegaard has his finger on this danger in ways that Yoder does not.
Kierkegaard also helps Yoder break down an overly-stable duality between a visible and invisible church and a too-clean distinction between those who belong to the elect (“authentic” Christians) and the nominal “Christians” of Christendom. To get at these differences, one must turn from their explicit ecclesiologies to the Christologies undergirding them.
In The Heterodox Yoder, Paul Martens traces the contours of Yoder’s corpus to show just how “heterodox” (not quite heretical, but not orthodox, either) Yoder’s social ethic becomes, theologically and christologically speaking. To quickly condense a work that resists summary: Martens claims that the political or social shape of the church (i.e., the visible church) becomes so determinative for Yoder and that Jesus’ life and death so entirely function to exhibit a repeatable pattern of human obedience, that any claims about the divinity of Jesus become not only unnecessary, but also obfuscating. In other words, the shape of the church—as exhibited by the human life of Jesus, his disciples, and early Christians—takes precedence over the claim that Jesus is God or an understanding of church as a people or body called to worship the particular God made known in Jesus Christ. In short, the life of Jesus becomes an instance of the political pattern of the church.829 One could say that we get an ecclesial Christology rather than a christological ecclesiology (my terms, not Martens’s). Obscured by this is what Kierkegaard calls the Christian witness to the “scandal of particularity,” to the non-repeatable presence of God in Christ, which can never “show up” except as hidden under an opposite sign.
There are good reasons while many “orthodox” Christians would get nervous about Yoder’s descriptions. For our purposes, though, I want to ask whether critiques of Christendom by way of a directly perceivable church can properly stand on their own, or whether both might not depend on something more theologically foundational—faith in God made fully known in Jesus with the intrinsic possibility of offense (which Christendom so easily skirts). Does Jesus provide the foundation for a countercultural community first and foremost as the example of the commitment needed to exhibit an alternative politic, as Yoder seems to suggest? Or is that foundation itself founded on something less controllable: the supra-rational ability to recognize God in Christ despite his being “the Incognito”?
Anti-Climacus, in Practice in Christianity, writes of the “inessential offense” that arises when any single individual (or perhaps collection of individuals, including the church)830 runs up against the leveling and self-deification of the established order. This collusion between faithful Christians and the established order parallels Yoder’s distinction between the faithful church and “the world,” theologically understood. While Kierkegaard nowhere minimizes the difference between “authentic” Christians (with Jesus) and “the crowd,” this particular mismatch and the accompanying possibility of offense remains for Kierkegaard “inessential.”
Essential offense, by contrast, stems from the incarnation as such, the fact that Jesus as the Christ “speaks or acts as if he were God,” or that God self-debasingly “proves to be the lowly, poor, suffering, and finally powerless human being.”831 Anti-Climacus’s analyses of essential offense are occasioned by a Christology from below (a human claims to be God) and a Christology from above (God becomes a human being). Unlike Yoder, then, who marks the particularity of the Christian church through its discipleship of Jesus the human being, Kierkegaard patterns discipleship on a kenotic Christology. Christians become Christ-like and not simply like Jesus, but must do so always indirectly and by non-identically repeating the One who can never disclose himself directly. There is “heterogeneity” between Christ and Christians, for the latter can only “resemble the prototype as much as it is possible for a human being to resemble him.”832 Their discipleship will include an inessential redoubling of an essential redoubling: “A human being [cannot] come closer and closer to God by lifting up his head higher and higher, but inversely by casting himself down even more deeply in worship.”833 Christ and then Christians perpetually remain hidden under opposite signs.834
Certainly, Kierkegaard calls Christians to follow the radical named Jesus no less than does Yoder. In fact, for all Anti-Climacus’s focus on essential offense occasioned by God-Man’s “composition,” that focus is often prefaced and supplemented—even rhetorically supplanted—by passages concerned with the whole life of Jesus and how it might be reduplicated (although never directly) in the lives of Christians. Still, unlike Yoder, for whom Jesus gets reduced to one (albeit the most important) instantiation of the politics of the church, for Kierkegaard, any church politics or discipleship must be non-identically patterned after something that remains essentially particular and essentially non-repeatable: the scandalous event of God-become-flesh.835
Were Kierkegaard to develop such a line of thinking, he might say that the church of this Christ—the very body of this Incognito—is also called not to direct visibility after the humanity of Jesus but to a revealed hiddenness or hidden disclosed-ness analogous to the incarnate, scandalous Christ. To my knowledge, Kierkegaard nowhere explicitly links his description of Christ, who as Incognito can only be indirectly disclosed, to a church that is neither wholly visible nor wholly invisible, but rather hides in its very disclosure. There are, however, structural parallels within Practice in Christianity that all but beg for this connection.
Near the end of Practice, Anti-Climacus paints in broad strokes church history from early Christianity to the present age.836 In terms familiar to Anti-Constantinians such as Yoder, Anti-Climacus contrasts the “militant church” with the “church triumphant.” Early Christianity and the later “official” Christian culture resemble one another no more than a circle resembles a square. The early church can be discerned only inversely (but directly so)—by being hated by “the world.” In contrast, medieval Christendom’s Christians gain favor, honor, and esteem in the world. In fact, Anti-Climacus adds, that “world” is now thought to be identical with Christianity.837 The church militant and the church triumphant are binary inversions or polar opposites of one another; they establish endpoints of a political-religious spectrum.
But Kierkegaard then introduces a third category, the “church of indifference,” which complicates the picture by introducing “another kind of opposition.”838 Here, church and world do not blend into one another as they do in the church triumphant. The world as a whole does not necessarily applaud outward demonstrations of religiousness. But neither do the two stand in opposition to one another, as they did in Christianity’s earliest years. Rather, in the church of indifference, Christians now face the “peculiar difficulty” of being met with apathetic acquiescence; the world simply doesn’t care whether someone is earnestly Christian. The problem of maintaining religious identity against indifference is then exacerbated by the fact that this new “established Christendom,” as Kierkegaard here calls it, treats all concrete manifestations of faith as shallow and smug. Real Christians, according to this perspective, would never show themselves as such; their piety is too lofty for that.839 In this era, martyrdom and persecution are just as unimaginable as they were in the church triumphant, since this would presuppose that faith is recognizable, that it might actually do something that mattered, and that anyone would care enough to persecute it. In the age of the church indifferent, the truest sign of one’s earnest Christianity is the ability to don the faith loosely, with an air of ironic detachment, and thereby blend into the rest of the (nominally) Christian crowd.
Notice the structural parallels between the church militant, triumphant, and indifferent, on the one hand, and a manifestly visible church, a wholly invisible church, and something like a church that is manifest-but-hidden, a church that can only be glimpsed under opposite signs, on the other hand. Notice, too, how Kierkegaard’s penetrating descriptions of Christendom’s indifference ask for something different—another kind of response—than continuous demands for a clearly manifest, visible church. While Kierkegaard never directly or fully articulates what a manifest-but hidden-church would “look” like, his entire analysis suggests that it will be christological in a particular sense. The true faithful church would be hidden among all the tax collectors and bourgeois philistines populating Christendom. And yet one could find it there, especially by looking for its particular and peculiar political practices, as I will try to unpack in a final section.
Church Politics
The Christian church becomes Christ-like in its own, analogous kenotic self-emptying. Just as Christ, the Incognito, essentially takes the form of a servant and is thus “expressed” in his very “unrecognizability,” so too might the church become visible not as directly noticeable to others looking in (as Yoder assumes), but only insofar as “the world” is able to notice what otherwise remains hidden: the people of God under opposite signs—as servants of the world and those who confess their sin. I conclude with three political forms and practices that would mark a church that is both hidden and revealed.
First, the clearest boundary of the church might just distinguish all political partisanship on the one side—distinctions between conservative and liberal, Democrat and Republican, friend and enemy, right and wrong, white and black, the haves and the have-nots, sinners and saints—and, on the other side, those whose discipleship of Christ and solidarity with out-casted others tears down every other partition. The church might inhabit a politics beyond all partisanship, one that provides a visible alternative to the very self-righteous divisions that otherwise rule our world.
Second and related: a manifest, hidden church would follow Christ in siding and hiding with and among the poor and oppressed. For all of the structural symmetry between Anti-Climacus’s high Christology and low Christology, clearly Kierkegaard considers God’s kenotic self-emptying into a poor and suffering human being to be determinative for occasioning the possibility of offense and for providing the prototype for Christian emulation. Repeatedly, Anti-Climacus associates triumph and glory with eternity; in this world, disciples have only suffering, humility, and the cross as their models. The church of Christ must therefore be a church of the cross; it must discipline its members to see God in so-called God-forsaken people and in places abandoned by those with conventional political power.
A third way that the church reveals itself as hidden is by publically confessing its sin. Note that theologians who emphasize the invisibility of the church often do so out of a realism about sin. As Karl Rahner has shown, the tendency in Catholicism since Vatican I (and in mainline Protestantism from its inception), has been to be “realistic” about the institutional church’s sin by positing purity in an abstract or “spiritual” (invisible) church.840 But what if the holiness of the church is revealed as hidden in its very repentance for sin, just as God is made visible in Christ’s life of service and suffering?841 Right up until his final attack on Christendom, Kierkegaard understood that the admission of sin was a legitimate way into authentic Christianity.842 What if he—or we—were to take such confession of sin not as the narrow entrance into Christianity but as the enduring, visible mark of the true church—that which fully discloses the church of Christ, albeit under an opposite sign, and so remains hidden in its very disclosed-ness?843
Confession of sin can sound pretty churchy—hardly the sort of politics befitting of radical discipleship. At full stretch, however, the church’s confession of sin provides a way of engaging the world, of acting politically, that resists setting up the very “us versus them” mentality that plagues both partisan politics and sectarian ecclesiologies. Penitential practices might also help Christians more truthfully and effectively engage in what Yoder and other anti-Constantinians designate as the most un-Christian of non-Christian politics: war.
Yoder suggests that the world’s legal violence is best diagnosed and held at bay from the alternative, nonviolent, place called church. The difference between the church’s original pacifism and the Constantinian recourse to war is as clear as that between visibility and invisibility. Judith Butler, by contrast, assumes that nonviolence itself “denotes the mired and conflicted position of a subject who is injured, rageful, disposed to violent retribution and nevertheless struggles against that action.”844 Or again, she claims that “the struggle against violence accepts that violence is one’s own possibility.”845 In other words, only those constantly vigilant of their own inclinations toward violence are capable of offering genuine resistance and subversion. Butler seems to have in mind something like Yoder’s all-too-visible church when she warns about the “moralization of the subject that disavows the violence it inflicts.”846 Readers of Kierkegaard may seem to have someone like Butler in mind when they link a hidden church to its confession of sin, and confession to political resistance.
Kierkegaard’s politics are nowhere as developed or as subversive as Butler’s. Having wholly equated the church with Christendom at the end of his life, his ecclesiology also remains undeveloped at best. Still, I have tried to show that Kierkegaard points toward an understanding of church that is both manifest and hidden, and that such a church would have political agency of a particular, subversive sort. Political theologians and radical ecclesiologists can take some cues from Kierkegaard. Countercultural Christians, political protestors, nonviolent activists, and other disciples of Jesus might just do the same.
Bibliography
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics. Translated by Reinhold Krauss et al. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.
Cavanaugh, William. Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.
Cramer, David, et al. “Theology and Misconduct: The Case of John Howard Yoder.” Christian Century, August 4, 2014.
Goosen, Rachel Waltner. “‘Defanging the Beast’: Mennonite Reponses to John Howard Yoder’s Sexual Abuse.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 89 (2015) 7–80.
Guth, Karen V. Christian Ethics at the Boundary: Feminisms and Theologies of Public Life. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015.
Harvey, Jennifer. Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice through Reparations and Sovereignty. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Christian Discourses. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
———. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
———. For Self Examination; Judge for Yourself. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
———. The Moment and Late Writings. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
———. Practice in Christianity. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Mahn, Jason. Becoming a Christian in Christendom: Radical Discipleship and the Way of the Cross in America’s “Christian” Culture. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016.
Martens, Paul. The Heterodox Yoder. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012.
McBride, Jennifer M. The Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Rahner, Karl. “The Sinful Church in the Decrees of Vatican II.” In Theological Investigations VI: Concerning Vatican Council II, 288–89. New York: Seabury, 1974.
Yoder, John Howard. Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community before the Watching World. Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1992.
———. The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism. Scottdale, PA: Herald, 2003.
———. The Politics of Jesus. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994.
———. The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.
———. The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiastical and Ecumenical. Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1998.
814. Kierkegaard, For Self Examination, 168–69.
815. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 38–40.
816. Kierkegaard, The Moment and Late Writings, 36.
817. Among the many places Yoder makes this claim, see “Kingdom as Social Ethic,” 98–101, and “Let the Church Be the Church,” 107–24.
818. Yoder, Original Revolution, 175.
819. Yoder, arguably the most influential critic of Constantinian arrangements (especially of the American church’s accommodations to war), has now been shown to have committed egregious sexual violence against numerous women he knew throughout much of his career. See Cramer et al., “Theology and Misconduct,” 20–23; Goosen, “Defanging the Beast,” 7–80; and Guth, Christian Ethics, 21–22n36. That Yoder horrifically failed to live up to the Christian pacifism and communitarian politics he professed is clear. By drawing from his work in this essay, I am neither overlooking nor excusing the violence he perpetrated. In fact, putting him in conversation with Kierkegaard may begin to sketch an understanding of church that includes a more self-critical, penitential attitude, as well as a mandate to protect the most vulnerable inside and outside its borders.
820. See my Becoming a Christian in Christendom.
821. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 134–61.
822. Yoder typically uses the term “Christendom” to name the medieval ecclesiastical-political synthesis jointly presided over by emperor and pope or as a general term for the “majority consciousness” or assortment of assumptions accompanying the accepted social privilege and power of Christianity in the Western world. Yoder, Royal Priesthood, 106. By “Constantinian,” Yoder typically means something more precise: either a particular historical lineage traceable to the legalization and then institutionalization of Christianity by the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth century, or (more commonly) a particular priority given to that history based on assumptions traceable to—but not limited to—that particular period. Yoder, Priestly Kingdom, 210n5.
823. For Yoder on the church’s visible marks, see Yoder, Body Politics. For the marks contrast with “the world,” see Yoder, Original Revolution, 110.
824. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 106–20.
825. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (with Repetition), 37–38.
826. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 5, 36, 42, 125.
827. Yoder, Priestly Kingdom, 141–44.
828. Ibid., 143; Yoder, Original Revolution, 147.
829. Martens, Heterodox Yoder, 107–14, 141–47.
830. Anti-Climacus suggests that it is only “single individuals” who are capable of struggling against the established order. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 223. He even claims that a “congregation” proper will not exist until eternity, since a congregation is at rest, whereas the single individual will battle and struggle throughout life (ibid.). But while the individual-collective distinction is important, more important is the distinction between striving and intentionality on the one hand, and complacency and carelessness, on the other.
831. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 94, 102.
832. Ibid., 221, 115.
833. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, 292.
834. I borrow language of hiding under “opposite signs” and of God remaining “hidden” even as God discloses Godself in Christ and the cross from Martin Luther. In Becoming a Christian in Christendom (see n5 above), I argue that Luther’s theology of the cross informs the ecclesial politics of both Kierkegaard and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
835. This non-repeatability of Christ helps explain why Kierkegaard claimed that he, too, was not (yet) a Christian—only that he was trying to become one. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 212, 340–43. He adds this: “I am far short of being a Christian to dare to associate myself with anyone who makes such a claim. Even if I am perhaps a little, indeed, even if it were the case, if I were a bit more than a little ahead of the average among us, I am ahead only in the poetic sense—that is, I am more aware of what Christianity is.” Kierkegaard, For Self Examination, 21.
836. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 201–32.
837. Ibid., 212–13.
838. Ibid., 214–15, my emphasis.
839. Ibid., 217.
840. Rahner, “Sinful Church,” 288–89.
841. Incredibly helpful here is Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy, 141–69.
842. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 67; compare The Moment, 69, where Kierkegaard writes that if Practice were published during his final attack on Christendom, he would revoke the “lenient” option (the loophole?) of entering into Christianity by confessing one’s sin.
843. While these trajectories are broadly Kierkegaardian, it is Dietrich Bonhoeffer who follows them through. According to Bonhoeffer, Christians are formed to be the body of a Christ who has taken on the sin of others, who dies guilty in solidarity with sinners, so that others might live. It follows that the visible form of the true church also hides in the form of those gathered in repentance for their sins and for the sins of others. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 95–98. See also McBride, Church for the World, 119–52; compare Harvey, Whiteness and Morality. Both McBride and Harvey retrieve the church practices of confession and repentance for addressing white privilege, American imperialism, and other social sins.
844. Butler, Frames of War, 171.
845. Ibid.
846. Ibid., 172. That Yoder sexually abused women might exemplify this criticism of his work, but the criticism remains relevant even to those who do not egregiously abrogate their own commitments to nonviolence. See n4 above. I develop this use of Butler a bit more in Mahn, Becoming a Christian in Christendom, ch. 8.