Some of My Favorite Quotes by John Howard Yoder

[Frank Viola]

"The whole concern of Reformation theology was to justify restructuring the organized church without shaking its foundations."

"There are few more reliable constants running through all human society than the special place every human community makes for the professional religionist . . . But if we were to ask whether any of the N.T. literature makes the assumptions listed -- Is there one particular office in which there should be only one or a few individuals for whom it provides a livelihood, unique in character due to ordination, central to the definition of the church and the key to her functioning? Then the answer from the biblical material is a resounding negation [no]."

"The conclusion is inescapable that the multiplicity of ministries is not a mere adiaphoron, a happenstance of only superficial significance, but a specific work of grace and a standard for the church."

"Losing the specific and original trait of the primitive community, the church by and large became again subject to the usual anthropologically universal pattern of the single, sacramentally qualified religionist. By and large . . . this pattern has continued to our day in churches of every polity and theology."

"Let us then ask first not whether there is a clear, solid concept of preaching, but whether there was in the N.T. one particular preaching office, identifiable as distinctly as the other ministries. Neither in the most varied picture (Corinthians) nor in the least varied (Pastoral Epistles) is there one particular ministry thus defined."

Wow! (Editor's comment ;-)

[Mark Van Steenwyk]

Great quotes. People are resistant to this stuff...though I don't think it is because they disagree. The problem is a combination of a lack of imagination and fear. Folks don't know how to imagine how things could be different-yet-better. And folks (mostly clergy-folk) are scared about the financial realities of a de-institutionalized church. Furthermore, the "parishoners" have been taught to fear having "unschooled" folks having say.

[Jason Winton]

I want to be a professional religionist when I grow up. :)

[Frank Viola]

Babylon pays well :-)

[Jason Barr]

"By claiming that the times have changed, they pursue a hidden agenda, that of looking for other guidelines to replace the scriptural ones. For the Catholicism of the Middle Ages these guidelines were simply the norms of the Roman state, taken over with hardly any modification. For the Reformation it was the absolutely fixed concepts of "government authority" and "calling" and the assumption that these terms were self-evident and equally valid for Christian and non-Christian alike. In the age of the Enlightenment it was the terms "Freedom" and "Democracy," and in our day it is all too often the concept that God has chosen a particular nation or race. These solutions have one thing in common: All have been used by Christians to free themselves from biblical guidelines for understanding the relationship between church and world, and in one way or another all have been adopted in order to use non-Christian norms to guide and justify the behavior of Christians." --- from Discipleship as Political Responsibility, p. 34.

I chose that quote because just as in church leadership matters too often the decentralized Spirit-led condition of the Acts church has given way to the "professional religionist" model that denies the priesthood of all believers, so also pagan political norms have come to define the politics of the church. I think there's a connection there - denial of the politics of Jesus and the leadership of the Spirit, rather than "professional religionists" goes hand-in-hand.

[Kevin Gasser]

Frank, where do these quotes come from? I would be interested in reading more.