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Yoder continued in this pacifist tradition and argued that the church itself is a political stance in society. The church’s problems, he argued, are a result of “Constantianism,” a reference to the Roman emperor who made Christianity the de facto religion of the Empire in 313. A church in bed with government, according to Yoder, is a church that’s lost its nerve and forgotten who it’s supposed to be

Don Stanley saw this and marshaled the forces of Don Yoder and Don MacIntyre to develop a new way forward for the liberal tradition. Instead of watering down their distinctives to the point of meaninglessness, the church should close ranks and develop an internal coherency that would serve as an example to the world.

I think it’s these very experiences that have led me to appreciate philosophical pragmatism more than the neo-Artistotelianism of the HM (although pragmatism is also rooted in the thought of Aristotle). The pragmatists argue that there can be no uniform rule that dictates actions in all endeavors. Instead, we must become as wise as possible and then make the best decisions that we can.

don’t have any grand strategy to protect my Christian particularity. I know who I am.

it for the long haul

I don't like calling it "terrorism" because it's completely uncontrollable -- it doesn't do work that you need it to do for moral discrimination. I think you need to call it murder -- and insofar as it's murder, you want to arrest the perpetrator.

B52s turn out to be very crude police officers

My best hunch right now is that the allies of nonviolent people are political realists. Political realists have a sense that bombing a Stone Age country back to the Stone Age is exactly what bin Laden wants us to do.

How could you have had the Civil Rights movement without the patience of the black church? You've got to have people schooled in the gospel to say, "We would rather lose than fight wrongly."

I think a police force is the best institutionalization of what just war should be about. But then the arresting agent is not the same as the judging agent. In war, those two are the same.

"What would you do if your grandmother's going to be raped and you need to kill somebody?" Given the alternatives, of course I can support it! (Laugh.) Yes, that's certainly the least violent alternative we have, and I would think that's good

We want to support those who would rather die than murder. If you take Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- if you call the World Trade Center terrorism, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrorist acts. And I've had people say, "Well, that was war." And I say, "Well, you murder in war, too." The question is, would the American people have been ready to have more American soldiers die and more Japanese soldiers die on the beaches of Japan rather than to commit the murders of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? That's who we want to be: a people that would rather have more people die than to have to do a murderous act. I think that's who the military is, by the way. I think the military was profoundly embarrassed about the bombing in Yugoslavia. They're honorable people. I think there are probably some of them who are embarrassed about the bombing we're doing in Afghanistan, because they understand that part of what they're about is that they would rather die than murder. I give high credence to that.

we're not running the world. But in a world we're not running, we want to be an alternative that forces imaginative possibilities that wouldn't be there otherwise

You've got to be really embedded in a different set of practices to force a different imagination.

Pacifism, Christian nonviolence, is a commitment to vulnerability. We have to put our lives in one another's hands, because that's the way God created us -- to be vulnerable.

I don't want to be terribly judgmental about people rediscovering their patriotism, because I think it's a sign of how deeply lonely the American people are that suddenly they feel together. And that's very frightening, because a rootless consumer society suddenly deciding it has something to kill for is a very frightening reality.

We
Christians do not believe that we have inalienable rights. That is the false presumption
of Enlightenment individualism, and it opposes everything that Christians believe about
what it means to be a creature.

We do not believe that we have a right to our bodies because when
we are baptized we become members of one another; then we can tell one another what it is
that we should, and should not, do with our bodies.

Here is the way it works: you can only act in the world that you
can see, and you must be taught to see by learning to say.

One of the crucial issues here is how we learn to be a people dependent on one another.
We must learn to confess that, as a hospitable people, we need one another because we are
dependent on one another. The last thing that the church wants is a bunch of autonomous,
free individuals. We want people who know how to express authentic need, because that
creates community.

We, as church, are ready to be challenged by the other. This has to do with the fact
that in the church, every adult, whether single or married, is called to be
parent. All Christian adults have a parental responsibility because of baptism. Biology
does not make parents in the church. Baptism does. Baptism makes all adult Christians
parents and gives them the obligation to help introduce these children to the Gospel.
Listen to the baptismal vows; in them the whole church promises to be parent. In this
regard the church reinvents the family.

I often remind my right-to-life friends that Christians took their
children with them to martyrdom rather than have them raised pagan. Christians believe
there is much worth dying for. We do not believe that human life is an absolute good in
and of itself. Of course our desire to protect human life is part of our seeing each human
being as God's creature. But that does not mean that we believe that life is an overriding
good.

To say that life is an overriding good is to underwrite the modern sentimentality that
there is absolutely nothing in this world worth dying for. Christians know that
Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been
about. Listen to the Gospel! I know that today we use the church primarily as a means of
safety, but life in the church actually involves extended training in learning to die
early.

Honestly, I cannot imagine anything worse than
people saying that they have children because their hope for the future is in their
children. You would never have children if you had them for that reason. We are able to
have children because our hope is in God, who makes it possible to do the absurd thing of
having children. In a world of such terrible injustice, in a world of such terrible
misery, in a world that may well be about the killing of our children, having children is
an extraordinary act of faith and hope. But as Christians we can have a hope in God that
urges us to welcome children.

Even Christians now think that we ought to marry people simply because
they are "in love." Wrong, wrong, wrong! What could being in love possibly mean?
The romantic view underwrites the presumption that, because people are in love, it is
therefore legitimate for them to have sexual intercourse, whether they are married or not.
Contrary to this is the church's view of marriage. To the church, marriage is the public
declaration that two people have pledged to live together faithfully for a lifetime.

Christians witness to wider society first of all not by
lobbying for a law against abortion, but by welcoming the children that the wider society
does not want. Part of that witness might be to say to our pro-choice friends, "You
are absolutely right. I don't think that any poor woman ought to be forced to have a child
that she cannot afford. So let's work hard for an adequate child allowance in this
country." That may not be entirely satisfactory, but that is one approach.