Lee Camp and I were classmates in the PhD program in Christian Ethics at the University of Notre Dame. After I served as John Howard Yoder’s graduate assistant for two years, Lee was his last graduate assistant before Yoder died in 1997. Lee is Professor of Theology and Ethics at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, he authored most recently Who Is My Enemy?, and he hosts the popular Tokens Show. In many ways, Lee reminds me a lot of Yoder. Here is a brief piece recently posted over at Richard Beck’s blog, Experimental Theology, on the Christian church in the midst of this current US partisan political season.
Justice, Politics of Scripture, States of Exception
Lee Camp on How “History Never Sits Still. Thus Neither Can Our Politics.”
With this sort of starting point, we take an altogether different approach: our task, short of the full in-breaking of the Kingdom of God, can never be any partisan agenda. This is because anything short of the full consummation of the Kingdom of God will necessarily still be tainted, or worse, corrupted, by sin. All political activism then—in the sense of being active in talking to the contemporary powers-that-be in western culture—is always and necessarily ad hoc, never utopian, and never idealistic. We deal with each concrete question and issue as it arises, and seek to bear faithful witness as best we are able.
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And the search for the historical Yoder continues! I like this blog yet it should be noted that even if there is not a utopian or ideal earthly politic, the Yoderian vision of the normative “kingdom” or the politics of Jesus is indeed ideal and thus it is not clear to me how this helps us with the culturally contingent and pragmatic work of politics beyond serving as a mere witness to the extra-historical and nonhuman register.