“Jesus for President”

The Sunday School class I attend each week has spent the last six weeks discussing Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals (2008) by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw. Claiborne (b. 1975) is also the author of the fairly widely read The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical (2006).

During the previous quarter we studied John Howard Yoder’s classic work, The Politics of Jesus (1972, 1994). The content of the two books is quite similar in many ways, and the authors of Jesus quote Yoder repeatedly. But the style of the two books couldn’t be more different. While Yoder’s book is presented in a very scholarly, and somewhat pedantic, manner, Jesus is written in a very jazzy, and somewhat gaudy, style.

As one reviewer has remarked, the design of Jesus for President is “a wonder to behold.” Quite so. I have never seen a book as elaborate (or outlandish?) in its visual presentation. The design is so extreme it is off-putting to some people. But no doubt it is quite appealing to others. (It was most probably designed to appeal to people the age of my older grandchildren much more than to people my age.)

But the content of Jesus for President needs to be taken seriously by Christians of any age. One main point seems to be that the followers of Jesus are not primarily seeking to gain and wield political power in the secular world. Rather, they are seeking to embody a political and social alternative to the dominant society (see p. 228).

The authors conclude that “rocking the vote” may mean “going to the booths and writing in our Candidate, because he doesn’t seem to be on the ballot” (p. 335). But I am not quite sure what the authors are suggesting here. Surely they are not seriously suggesting that that be done literally. But others are.

Bill Keller, an American television evangelist and the host of “Live Prayer,” recommends voting for Jesus literally. On VotingForJesus.com he exclaims, “It is time for Christians, true followers of Jesus Christ, to rise up and say NO to satan [sic] this November!” He goes on to say that if God allows the upcoming election for President to be between Obama and Romney, “it would truly be satan flipping a two-headed coin with his head on both sides!”

This morning Keller’s website indicates that more than 225,723 people have “committed” to vote for Jesus in November. But what good is that going to do?

True, we need to beware of thinking that any politician is going to be a “messiah.” That is perhaps one of the mistakes the some Left supporters of Obama made in 2008—and that may be a central point Claiborne and Haw are trying to make in their book published that year.

In October 2008 I said more than once that I thought Obama was promising too much (as perhaps most politicians do). And some of his supporters expected much too much. Some seem to have seen Obama as a type of messiah—and his opponents have charged that he had (or has) a messiah complex. Certainly the President has not lived up to the expectations of those who thought he was an American savior.

Our true hope for the kind of change most needed in this country, and in the world, will not come from any politician. That is a major point well made in Jesus for President.

Pacifism or Passivism?

One Thinking Friend responded to my February 25 posting, which was partly about pacifism, with a comment about passivism. That was just a slip, for he knows well the difference between pacifism and passivism. But I have found that some of my students, and others, do not seem to know the difference, thinking that pacifism is passivism.

This matter is complicated by the fact that sometimes pacifists have been, and are, passive. Thus the charge of passivism has often been a major criticism of the pacifistic position.

It is true that through the centuries the Anabaptists, baptists with small b, have not been very active in trying to correct social evils. But there has usually been a good reason for their passivism: they were long a small, persecuted group—just like the early Christians. So they were unable to be directly involved in working for such worthy goals as social justice—again, just like the early Christians.

Arthur G. Gish, a baptist who is the author of the highly influential (for me, anyway) book The New Left and Christian Radicalism (1970) and about whom I have previously posted (here), was a dedicated Anabaptist. But he admits that passivism (not his word, but what he is writing about) is “one aspect of Anabaptism of which we need to be critical” (p. 75).

In contrast to the passivity of many Anabaptists of the past, the last chapter of Gish’s small book is “A Theology for Revolution,” and in that important chapter are these significant words I have often quoted: “. . . violent revolution is occurring because nonviolent revolution is not occurring” (p. 139). Gish was an ardent pacifist, but he was anything but passive. (Unfortunately, he died last year in an accident on the farm where he lived and worked.)

Gish was one of the early leaders of what is sometimes called neo-Anabaptism, a helpful designation and a movement that I greatly favor.

James Davison Hunter is the author of a noteworthy book titled To Change the World (2010). In the chapter called “The Neo-Anabaptists,” Hunter says, “Perhaps no one has been more important in the development of the neo-Anabaptist vision and for making it intellectually respectable than the Mennonite theologian, John Howard Yoder” (p. 152). (Yesterday the Sunday School class I am a member of at Rainbow Mennonite Church started a three month study of Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus.)

Neo-Anabaptists include such people as Jim Wallis, founder of the Sojourners community and editor of the Sojourners magazine, and Shane Claiborne, co-founder of The Simple Way in Philadelphia and author of The Irresistible Revolution (2006) and other books.

Wallis began the Sojourners community (under a different name) forty years ago as a seminary student opposed to the Vietnam War. I don’t know whether he is an absolute pacifist, but he certainly has very much been a peace activist. His pacifism has definitely not meant passivism.

That is the kind of pacifism I am most interested in: not the type that just opposes war but the kind that actively wages peace.

The Pacifism of "Hannah's Child"

Stanley Hauerwas is a most colorful person, and last month I had the joy of seeing him again and of chatting some with him. I also purchased his latest book, which he graciously autographed. The book is Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir (Eerdmans, 2010), the title coming from the fact that Hauerwas was born after his mother prayed a prayer similar to that of Samuel’s mother, Hannah, in the Old Testament. That fact also significantly shaped his life.

In 2001, Time magazine pronounced Hauerwas (b. 1940) the “best theologian in America.” Upon hearing that news, Hauerwas quipped, “‘Best’ is not a theological category.” (One of my Thinking Friends reminded me of that after I posted my list of “top ten” Christians, and I replied that Hauerwas was probably right.) 

Hauerwas is a theologian, but even more he is a Christian ethicist. Since 1984 he has taught theological ethics at Duke University. He is also the author of numerous books, mostly in the field of Christian ethics. One of his most significant books is The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (1983).

Last fall, esteemed blogger Bill Tammeus posted “Pondering Pacifism Today” on his weblog. (As many of you in the Kansas City area know, Tammeus is the former Faith columnist for the Kansas City Star and now writes a daily (!) blog called “Faith Matters.”) In his Nov. 11 posting, he makes reference to Hannah’s Child and to having heard Hauerwas speak in Kansas City last year.

After stating that “Hauerwas identifies himself as a pacifist,” which he has clearly done for a long time now, Tammeus then writes, “I wanted Hauerwas in his memoir to explain clearly why he’s chosen pacifism. He doesn’t. And I contend that it’s not painfully obvious why those of us who are followers of the Prince of Peace should automatically adopt pacifism as our position.”

It is true that Hauerwas doesn’t explain much about why he is a pacifist in Hannah’s Child. But he does state clearly, “I am a pacifist because John Howard Yoder convinced me that nonviolence and Christianity are inseparable” (p. 60). Then later he writes, “Yoder forced me to recognize that nonviolence is not a recommendation, an ideal, that Jesus suggested we might try to live up to. Rather, nonviolence is constitutive of God’s refusal to redeem coercively” (p. 118).


John Howard Yoder (1927-97) was an outstanding Mennonite theologian, the author of The Politics of Jesus (1972), and widely known as a radical Christian pacifist. He is also known for being a mentor of Stanley Hauerwas. They were faculty members at the same time at Notre Dame before Hauerwas moved to Duke.

Yoder’s pacifism, which was so influential on Hauerwas, is set forth, among other places, in The War of the Lamb: The Ethics of Nonviolence and Peacemaking (2009), edited by Glen Harold Stassen and two others. That was the book Yoder was working on when he suddenly passed away the day after his 70^th birthday. Stassen, a friend whom I also chatted with at the Society of Christian Ethics meeting in New Orleans last month, wrote the introduction, which is subtitled “John H. Yoder’s Christological Peacemaking Ethic.”

You might not be convinced to be a pacifist if you study Yoder’s writings. But Hauerwas became a pacifist largely because of Yoder’s influence. So I recommend that Mr. Tammeus and others who have similar doubts about Christian pacifism read Yoder’s work.