Truthful, Peaceable, Subversive Allegiance to Jesus - Charles Moore

Yeah, ethics is always within a story. So which story are you living out? Are you living out the narrative that the world says leads to prosperity, fulfillment, and happiness, to the good life? Or are you going to adopt Jesus's story as your own? And only within that story can we make sense of His teaching, because you can't separate the teaching from the teacher.

And this is really important. Jesus didn't teach some universal truths that smart people contemplate and go, "Ah, yes, that's right. Turn the other cheek. That's a good strategy." No, we don't really understand what that means, apart from who Christ is and how He lived that out.

Welcome, Charles, to Anabaptist Perspectives podcast. And yeah, today we're going to be reflecting on some of the challenge that's presented to the church in this age by Stanley Howard Voss and some of his writings, and especially this collection that you worked on, helped put together, called Jesus Changes Everything.

But yeah, as an introduction to that, I'd like to know a little bit who you are and how Howard Voss has influenced you personally. I'm going to read a little quote that you wrote in the introduction to this volume and let you go from there. So you wrote, "Stanley Howard Voss and his writings were a large reason why, 30 years ago, I left a professorship at a seminary and moved 2,000 miles with my wife to join the Bruderhof, a Christian community that shares possessions in common in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount.

Disillusioned with Christianity as usual, we wanted to live like the first Christians, where no one was in need and everyone belonged." So yeah, tell us a little more. Well, good to be with you, Marlon. Thank you for this opportunity to share about our latest publication from Plow. It's good to be with you. And yeah, I can tell you a little bit more about my background. I became a Christian in the Jesus movement in California, and my introduction to the faith was, by and large, from within an evangelical context. But as I grew in my faith and immersed myself in the Scriptures, I came to the awareness of how personalized, hyper-individualized, and spiritualized the evangelical perspective was on the faith.

And this caused me to have to take stock of my faith and ask myself, is all there to the message of Jesus, of salvation and eternal life in some other by and by? And I began reflecting and reading more, and I came across Stanley Howard Voss's writings. At the time, I was a doctoral student. I had finished seminary, and I was a doctoral student at the University of Colorado in Boulder studying ethics and public policy. And I had great hopes for that program. But after reading Howard Voss's early works, I began to realize that the liberal ideal of objective universal ethics was based on a myth of freedom and this idea of neutrality. And so I delved more into his writings.

And when his book, The Peaceable Kingdom, came out, I was thoroughly liberated from this idea that you can only do ethics from a rational, objective point of view. And so I actually left that program and then went on to study theology. And in that process, I became convinced that the nature of the Christian life was such that it had to be lived within a communal or community context.

And so my wife and I started seeking more about that. And after an attempt at an inner-city ministry and community in Denver, which failed in the end, we had come across the Bruderhof and the publication The Plow. And we started exploring that community, and eventually we joined. And shortly thereafter, I was assigned a task to work in our small publishing house, The Plow. And it was then I started up a correspondence with Stanley, who supported our efforts over the last 30 years. And so he's been very influential in my journey, and he's been a great support to us as a community in our publishing efforts.

So it was interesting. The first kind of stage you mentioned was philosophical. You say you were in a public policy program? Correct. And so kind of first stage was leaving that and then eventually went further into, I guess, intentional Christian community. That's right. I had gone to seminary, and actually, eventually I went back to that seminary and taught for about 10 years. And what Howard Voss convinced me of is that you can't do ethics apart from Christ and the story of Christ. But then he also argued that you can't really understand who Jesus is apart from Israel, the people of God. And so you can't do ethics apart from the church. And so I had to grapple with, well, what church?

Which church? The psychotherapeutic church, the social justice church, the seeker-friendly church, the Bible-believing church? Which church? And after really grappling with that, none of those options were viable for my wife and I. We wanted to live out an alternative community as depicted in the Scriptures and described. And that's what propelled us to a thicker kind of life of community with others.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so I'm anxious to dive into some of the content of this book, Jesus Changes Everything, and that picture of discipleship and so on. But also would like to ask a few kind of questions about Stanley Howard Voss.

You know, this enormously well-known figure, and like you said, he supported your publishing efforts at the Bruderhof. A lot of his themes on violence and things like that, in the way he talks about church, sound very familiar to, you know, most Anabaptist groups.

At the same time, 2001, Time Magazine names him America's best theologian.

And the stuff he advocates does not seem very American, at least as I read it. So any backstory on that? Well, I think that's quite ironic, actually. You know, I think it was Dorothy Day who said that a radical, the way you tame a radical in the faith is to name them a saint.

And I think this was one way the American mainstream tried to tame Stanley Howard Voss. He often says that the word or term best is not a theological category. So why was he picked on? Well, the fact of the matter is that his writings had become so influential, and they actually dislodged a lot of people from the liberal attempt to justify Christianity in a Western context.

And many, many young students from all across the spectrum, including a good number of evangelical students, came to study at Duke purposely to study with Stanley Howard Voss. And one of the reasons why that is, is that I think the evangelical subculture was beginning to implode, that this pietistic vertical notion of Christianity was no longer viable. And committed Bible-believing Christians believed that the gospel had impact on the here and now. There was a social dimension of Jesus's message.

And yet they were also allergic to the politicization of the faith. So you had the moral majority and the beginning of the politicizing of the evangelical faith. And there was an increasing number of evangelicals that were not satisfied with that culture war approach. And again, Stanley was giving language and a paradigm in which to live out a social gospel that was rooted in Scripture and centered on Christ. And no longer was faith to be just privatized, character mattered, but so did community, because you could not really grow into the character of Christ apart from a community. So this attracted quite a number. And of course, he was controversial among fellow theologians and academics because he was questioning the fundamental presuppositions of what the academy had been working with for a long time.

So he attracted a lot of attention, and I think that's why Time, you know, dubbed him as America's best theologian. Yeah, and ironically, that piece came out in September of 2001, like right when the Twin Towers came down and America responded with, let's just say, a response that was not nonviolent by any means.

Yes, and he vehemently reacted to that and rebuked the automatic retaliatory measures that our country engaged in. So he was also very prophetic. So if the Time Magazine had said the most prophetic theologian of the century, that would have been a little bit more befitting. Although I think Stanley, knowing him quite well, would have also reacted against that, because he does not see himself or try to be in any way a prophet. He just seeks to speak what he understands to be the truth. Yeah, now thanks for sketching that out.

I'm curious, do we have any way of sensing like kind of how wide the impact has gone? Has this affected American Christianity? So it clearly made a big impact in at least certain intellectual or academic spheres. People found a way of talking about things that was helpful. It seems to me like, you know, some of these Anabaptist ideas have become much more popular in American Christianity or certain segments of the church.

Yeah, I don't know. What are your thoughts? Well, yes, I think we can trace Howard Voss's influence in some direct ways. I think that the New Monastic movement back in the early 2000s, they were heavily influenced by Howard Voss.

And Shane Claiborne quotes him profusely. And part of that was gathering people in a more disciplined, rule-governed, meaning a set of disciplines and practices, a new set of living a liturgical life in community together. And so I think there was an influence there in the mainline tradition, which I grew up in a mainline church, but have not really been involved. But movements like Fresh Expressions often refer to Stanley's writings.

And of course, among evangelicals, as I mentioned. So I think that's had some hands and feet. In fact, this is one of the complaints against Howard Voss, because many people have been influenced by him and made significant changes.

And in a way, have decidedly turned either away from the institutional church or call it into question. They find out that Stanley is a relatively staid individual who is a part of a mainline church, and he doesn't live particularly radical, not like the red-letter Christians or many who are attracted to, like Shane Claiborne early.

So some have wondered, you know, you write these things, and how exactly do you live them out? But that's another subject. I don't think any of us fully live out what we confess. But he's the first to admit that he doesn't fully put into practice or has not found a way to fully realize the implications of his own teaching.

Yeah, I mean, the one point on that that I do want to follow up, you know, he writes some pretty strong things about, you know, there's no second-generation Christians, voluntary discipleship, and all of that. And in my tradition, we would tie that idea pretty closely to, you know, baptism is upon your own confession of faith. We don't bring anybody into the church automatically and so on. But he, from what I know, grew up and remained in traditions where, you know, infant baptism was the norm. And I guess he also has a very strong sense of, you know, bringing up children as Christians and so on.

Yeah, I'm a little curious how he puts them together. Obviously, he does, but, you know, for some of us, those things jar a little bit. Yeah, you know, I'm not Stanley Howard Voss. I'm not sure if he's fully put it together or not.

It's interesting. I think one of the reasons why he has remained in the mainline is that he has a strong allergic reaction to any kind of ecclesial sectarianism. He really believes in the unity of the church and that we should seek for a greater unity in the church. The Anglican tradition, which he's part of, and Methodist previous, gives wiggle room for a greater sense of unity.

And so I think that has caused him to kind of remain in the broader historic tradition. And then he speaks paradoxically that neither the church nor the faith is something we ultimately choose. We are chosen, and we are formed in and through the church.

Our even understanding of the faith, if we think we just freely adopt a faith because we, along with our Bibles and in our own personal prayer closet, come up with an understanding of Christ, that's a myth. There's always some version of Christianity that we're introduced to. And so we come to Christ in and through the church. That we don't adopt.

We are adopted by that. Now, granted, we still have to give our assent and give ourselves to that. So I think there's a bit of a paradox. He often uses the analogy of marriage. Because we are tradition's storied people, and the gospel always comes through a tradition, we maybe have a lot less choice than we think of. And so he uses the analogy of marriage. He said, really, actually, you don't fall in love and then learn to be married. You get married, and then you learn the way of love.

And so this idea of something that is over and above and against you is the posture. And then we learn and grow into our understanding of what discipleship is and what the faith is and what it means to bear witness. So there's a historic objective aspect of the church, and yet it also has to be owned.

And there's a subjective dimension to it as well. Yes. And I mean, to be fair, all of us have to figure out how we navigate that as well, right? I mean, and what I mean by that is things that we understand our own responsibility for God and then being with others who may understand things differently and different pieces.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. For my wife and I, we had already been Christians for quite a long while. And then when we felt the call to join the Bruderhof, as an example, we thought before that we knew what dedicated self-sacrifice was. We thought we knew what submission was. We thought we knew what it meant to be free from mammon possessions. We thought we knew a lot of things. And we realized that only once we joined did we really learn what it meant to be a true brother and sister, to live a humble way, to learn to serve.

So it was actually only once we committed ourselves to a community did we actually grow in the depths of our faith.

When I read this book and read through it much too quickly, Jesus Changes Everything is a collection of very well worth savoring.

But the predominant theme for me was, here's a picture of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, both in a community, in my own kind of before the Lord. And that's really what I want to tease out. I have a number of questions, but they're trying to come at that, what's this picture of discipleship from different ways?

But maybe even by introduction, like, yeah, what does it mean to be a disciple as Howard Voss is helping us think about it? Well, I think a starting point is that you can't be a disciple without joining others along the road of discipleship.

So this idea of a lone ranger Christian is just automatically ruled out. But then I think secondly, because Jesus is full of grace and truth, he is the way, the truth, and the life. To be a disciple means to live truthfully and to own up where we are duplicitous, where we're hypocritical, where we compromise.

And it's not just receiving the blessings of the faith. It's being disciplined, discipleship, being disciplined by God to be transformed into the way of Christ and into his image personally. So part of that picture is learning the way of peace because Jesus showed us the way to peace with God and one another on the cross.

It shows, or discipleship is about forgiveness, not just forgiveness from God, but forgiving one another. For every vertical dimension of faith, there is a corresponding horizontal implication of practice.

I think Howard Voss rightly puts a great deal of emphasis on the Sermon on the Mount in his works. And he has many sermons on the Sermon on the Mount, a couple of books. And for Stanley, this is not some kind of strict ethic. It's actually good news.

Good news. You can be liberated from your lust. Good news. You can be liberated from procuring your security. You can be free from worry. Good news. You can be freed from your anger. This is a good news declaration of what it looks like to be a citizen of his kingdom. Good news. You can be freed from the dictates of mammon.

And this Sermon on the Mount is given to his community, to the disciples. Yes, there were crowds listening in. But this is what the new Israel is to be about. And this isn't an ethic of gloom and doom and obligation and hardship. It's actually a message of liberation. So the vision of the Christian life is very full orbed. It's total. It has impact now. It's not just a personal piety.

It affects every dimension of life. He has not quoted Augustine that I know of, but Augustine's, he once said, "If Jesus is not Lord of all, he is not Lord at all." And I think that generates Stanley's thought that the Lordship of Christ encompasses every dimension of life. And that's what the Sermon on the Mount does.

In the chapters, he does go into more specifics of what it would look like and give some very nice, poignant examples from his own life and whatnot. But so it's not just some abstract ideal.

So you mentioned the emphasis on truthfulness, which I picked up on, a very thoroughgoing truthfulness, and also a very thoroughgoing emphasis on peace with others and not peace in a sort of non-confrontational way, but peace in seeking relationship.

Is there a way in which, like, I think he sees a deep connection there. Are those almost two sides of the same coin or interrelated? Oh, I think they're definitely interrelated. There's a chapter in this collection where Stanley reflects on Matthew 18, where Jesus says, "Hey, if someone has sinned against you, go to him directly. If they listen, you've won a brother. If not, bring another brother.

And if not, if you haven't gotten through, bring it to the church." And he says, you know, it's paradoxical. You think, wow, if you do that, you're going to ignite a firestorm. But he actually says, this is key, being truthful. But truthfulness with the readiness to forgive and to be forgiven, that leads to peace. When we're not truthful, we may have declared truths. We may live parallel lives with one another, but we do not have the fullness of Christ's peace. And the fullness of Christ's peace is far more than just the absence of conflict or avoiding each other so we don't have further conflict. It's a matter of really entering into the fullness, the wholeness of God's shalom, which restores everything, makes everything well and right, where people and relationships flourish.

I recently asked Stanley, I said, you know, why do you think that especially the mainline Protestant church is dying? And he said, well, because God's killing it. And I thought about, well, then why is God killing it? Is it because we don't live truthfully and we don't speak truth to one another?

And he uses many different kinds of examples. One of his favorite ones is that, you know, can we be truthful with how much capitalism has a grip on our life and consumer capitalism in particular? What about before you become a member of the church, you declare what your annual income is and how much you spend on yourself and the spending choices?

Are we willing to be disciplined? And Jesus speaks quite a bit about the dangers and afflictions of mammon and so forth. And you can't serve God in mammon. But he says, quite realistic, people would probably rather talk more about their sex lives than about their pocketbook.

We're afraid to tell the truth about how much in bondage we are to the American nightmare of making money, spending money, and spending it on ourselves. So they are inextricably bound together because mammon separates us from one another. The have and the have-nots, those who are upper class and lower class, paying services for one another. We're in the church. Why should we be paying personal services to one another? This should be voluntary, out of love, and service to one another.

So that leads us maybe to the question of, you know, how he sees how the church fits into this picture. I think you've already started to illuminate it with those ideas of, yeah, truthfulness with each other and peace.

But yeah, that's another theme throughout this book is the importance of that close community. Yeah. And if we want to be accountable to Christ, who is the head of the church, then we need to be accountable to and for one another in his body.

And so the church is crucial. The church is where we learn who Jesus is in the scriptures through our worship and our liturgy. But it's where we meet Christ in our brother and sister. Unto the least of these, Jesus said, "I'm in your midst."

And so the church is critical not only for personal formation, but to bear witness to God's kingdom. And for Howard Voss, Jesus is not just a personal savior. He is the auto basilea, the kingdom of God in person.

Jesus preached the gospel of the kingdom, the gospel of God's new order here on earth that breaks into our midst and transforms not just our personalized, but the existing social order. And if we don't have a way to live that out as the church, then we don't have much to bear witness to about the power of Christ. We reduce Christ to being somebody who died for our sins and made us right with God, and then we're just waiting to meet God in the afterlife. And that's not really great news for here and now. It might be great news at some other point.

So it's also vital. The church is really vital because this is where we learn to be free. Not America, not the marketplace, not in entertainment and personal choices. We learn true freedom in the context of being a committed body one to another, ready to lay our lives down one for another.

And if we can't do that, then the world can't see what is possible in Christ. It can't even see what it is. He often says that the world needs the church so that the world can see what it is apart from God.

And so it's vital that we figure out what it means to be the body, to be the alternative to a world that is trying to operate on very fundamentals from a life apart from God or in rebellion against God.

This illusion of self-sufficiency, we don't need God. And the confusion and the corruption and the heartache and the war and the violence and so forth. So the church models, demonstrates this is the kind of world that is possible in Christ.

Yeah. That also helps to tie in some of the earlier emphasis on, you know, you can't make sense of Christianity as, well, here's a set of ethics that you can put out to the world just as this is the way to live because they don't actually make sense or they can't be understood until it's, you know, here is Jesus himself and the people who belong to him and each other. And there's that picture. Yeah. Yeah. Ethics is always within a story. So which story are you living out? Are you living out the narrative that the world says leads to prosperity, fulfillment, and happiness, to the good life? Or are you going to adopt Jesus's story as your own?

And only within that story can we make sense of his teaching because you can't separate the teaching from the teacher. And this is really important. Jesus didn't teach some universal truths that smart people contemplate and go, "Ah, yes, that's right. Turn the other cheek. That's a good strategy."

You know, any rational person can discover that. And other religious traditions also maybe assert the same thing. No, we don't really understand what that means apart from who Christ is and how he lived that out, the particularity of following Jesus. And that's why this book centers on discipleship. It's not a book on Jesus's ethic.

It's about Jesus and the kingdom that breaks in through him and into the church today.

Yeah. And you mentioned strategy there. So Howard Voss tells us that nonviolence is not optional for us, but nonviolence is also not a strategy, he says. You want to clarify that? Yes. For him, nonviolence is not a way to improve the world. It is not a way to end war or lessen on the likelihood of war.

Nonviolence is the fruit of being faithful to the way of Jesus. It will bear fruit, but it can also bear great suffering. There's no guarantee that you will get your head cut off. It doesn't always work in a worldly point of view, but we are faithful to the way of Christ because this is how God conquers evil.

We don't have to be in control. God is in control. We take up arms because we feel it's up to us to make things right. And we take desperate measures to make things right. Our faith is placed in the one who sovereignly restores all things through the cross. He doesn't skirt the cross. It's always through the cross of self-sacrificial love.

So it's not a strategy. It doesn't mean we can't lend a word of advice or some wisdom to the world to help lessen the cycle of violence. It doesn't mean we ignore the need of the world, but it is not a strategy. And that's not why we follow it.

We follow, we don't actually don't follow nonviolence. We follow the way of Christ. We follow Christ. And part of that is also rooted in our love of enemy. While we were yet sinners, God loved us. And so the way to win the enemy or the way to express God's love to the enemy is to actually love the enemy.

Whether they are won by that love or not is up to God, but this is an unconditional way to give witness to the love of God. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for that. So I think, you know, thinking back to my own circles and tradition, you know, Anabaptist Mennonite, you know, we've had a sense of a similar emphasis.

We say we don't go to war, but we're not naive enough to tell the government that, you know, they could have a strategy of peace that would avoid problems or difficulty or whatever. And, you know, a couple of ways, well, one way that that has come out is we sometimes talk about being apolitical and not being political because we're not using those kinds of strategies of violence or strategies of electoral politics or whatever.

But then a quote here from the book, and I'm picking up on this word political, Howard Voss writes, "To worship Jesus is itself a politics, a politics that subverts the status quo."

So if we don't have strategies and we're not exercising, you know, Jesus's teachings as a strategy, what kind of politics is this? Yeah. What kind of politics subverts the status quo? Well, Jesus models the politics. Okay. He takes up a towel and washes feet.

That's the beginning of God's politics, the way of humility. We don't solve our problems with each other, nor do we solve our problems that we confront socially by way of coercion or having power over. It is actually in the humble service of considering the interest of others above our own. Now, that's just the exact opposite of the world's politics.

Most people are voting according to their perceived self-interest and what party will serve their self-interest. Now, some do think that serving a particular party will serve the interest of the country, not just their own. But of course, implicit in that is that if it serves the interest of the country, it serves my own. And why that country?

Howard Voss is very critical of any form of Christian nationalism. Our allegiance is to King Jesus and the kingdom of God, which is a transnational rulership of God on earth that not only transcends, but includes all peoples. So to worship Jesus is a kind of politics. It's not just a pious set of exercises that are highly personal and removed. It gives expression.

Another politics is that there will not be rich nor poor. There's not going to be social stratification. This is quite different than the way the world operates. And to say we worship Jesus means we give our full allegiance to him and to the way in which he reigns in the world. And that will incarnate itself in very public, social, concrete ways. And it will be in contradistinction. And then sometimes it will come into conflict with the governments of man.

And that's one part of the reason it might come into over conflict might be whether the state perceives such a witness as a threat or not. And you refer to it as politics because it is how we live together, what it means to be a community.

How we order our life. How we order our life, how we handle money, all of these things. Yeah. How we make decisions together and how we navigate a social life together. That is a kind of politics, but it's not partisan politics. It's not power politics.

So it's very different than how we usually use the word politics. Yeah. I mean, as a kind of closing here, a couple of quotes that I'll read here and then perhaps you have a few comments on them. The one that struck me from this book, "Disciples of Christ are those who journey forth from the conventional to base their lives on the nature of God to be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect."

And then the other one that really caught my attention was, "We believe that the revolution has happened and we are it." Yeah. Both of those are kind of, they're enigmatic. They're very bold claims about what it means to be a Christian and the effect on it, effect on us. Yep. And I think it's important to understand that when Howard Voss talks about perfection, he's referring to the perfection that Jesus is referring to. And if you look in the sermon, "Let them out, be perfect as your heavenly Father, be indiscriminate in your love." The sun shines on both the good and the evil.

We are called to love not just our friends who pay us back, but our enemies. Be indiscriminate, unconditional in your love. It's not about being sinless. It's not about being impeccable morally. We still stand under the cross. And I think that unfortunately, in some Anabaptist traditions, the striving to be perfect, there's a misunderstanding of what that is. And they miss the essence. And that is the love of Christ.

And that's the revolution. That is the revolution. Here is a people who love. And they take great sacrifice. It takes great humility.

It is something that really can only come about by a perfection that is not of our own. It's revealed in Christ and through the Holy Spirit. Remember, holy means set apart. The Spirit that works in our midst that sets us apart for a new world that is possible gives us the power and the grace to do that. It's not from ourselves.

But this is what we're not only called to, but we are actually privileged to experience in Christ. And it's what we want to share with the world. There is a different new kind of world that is possible, but it's in Christ because Jesus can and does change everything.

We don't change everything. Our piety does not change everything. Our theology does not change everything. Christ changes everything and makes a new kind of life together possible. Well, and there we ended up right back at the title of the book, which is "Jesus Changes Everything," which we will be sure to link in our description and all of that.

Yeah. Thank you, Charles, for joining us and yeah, helping us to think through some of these things and yeah, for the work you put into arranging this collection from Howard Voss. I guess you took stuff you wrote earlier and then worked with him to kind of condense it and put it together into this book, if I understand right. Yeah. This book is not written for the academy. I worked with Stanley on a lot of his other writings, and we reworked them, made them a bit more accessible. And we made sure that the theme of following Jesus, the theme of Jesus changing everything really comes through the entirety of these pages.

And just for your listeners, we do have a group study guide online through Plow that they can download to help them. So it's a great book to read personally, but it's even better if you can find a group of people to read it together. The chapters are short, as you know.

They're crisp, but they're packed full. And you will feel the heart of Stanley Howard Voss, not just the brilliance of his mind and his ability to articulate who Jesus is and what he lived for. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks again for joining us. Well, thank you for this chance to be with you. I wish you all the best.

Thanks for joining us for this episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. Our mission is to encourage allegiance to Jesus' sacrificial kingdom. Our resources include this podcast, written essays, a lecture series by Frank Reid, which is called "Developing as a Servant," and we're currently producing a documentary series on the history of Anabaptism, specifically the origins in the Reformation era, which will be filmed on-site at various locations in Europe.

You can find these resources and more information at anabaptistperspectives.org.