Exodus

In preparation for the Assembly of the Commission on World Missions and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches held in Bangkok, a collection of documents was circulated in March 1972 under the heading, Salvation Today and Contemporary Experience. In the Introduction to the collection, written by Thomas Wieser, we read:

The contemporary quest for liberation, whether political, economic, cultural or personal, has for many Christians become the context for the Church's mission and its proclamation of salvation. The biblical story, too, especially in the Old Testament, is to a large extent a story of liberation. A number of interpreters see in this affinity a direct scriptural support for the present quest, contending that the biblical meaning of liberation must not be allowed to be "spiritualized." Others, however, warn that the Bible cannot be used to support what they believe to be a mere temporary political struggle.

My good friend Tom Wieser is right; the dominant vogue of "with-it" theology since the late 1960s has been centered on liberation as the purpose of God. It seemed self-evident to many that the dominant biblical image is that of Exodus and that by taking off from the event of Exodus it would be possible in some broad sense to have a "biblical basis" for an especially committed Christian involvement in the political struggles of our age.

There have been a few thinkers asking careful questions about this very popular approach. Jose Miguez Bonino, for instance, has asked why it should be so obvious that out of the total biblical heritage it should be dominantly or even exclusively the picture of Exodus which becomes illuminating and motivating without equal reference to exile, captivity, cross, the giving of the law, the taking of the land, the scattering of the faithful, or other major themes of the biblical witness.

Another set of critics, thinking on the level of the methodology of proper theology, have expressed doubts about whether this approach was not a new and questionable form of natural theology, in the sense that liberation theologians tag after cultural styles trying to accredit their theology by proving that it can also say what other people are saying anyway. Is not the relevance of a transcendent critique greater than the "search for relevance" of echoing contemporary styles?

Still another set of critics have been unconvinced about the clarity and solidity of liberation language when tested for its own sake. Do we really know what that liberating action is in which we should participate if we were to follow the mandate of Exodus? Are those particular guerrilla efforts which call themselves liberation fronts really liberated or liberating? Or are they a new form of cultural colonialism, imposing upon oppressed peoples yet another no less alien, no less self-righteous, no less violent form of minority rule in the name of a Marxist or a nationalist vision of independence? Have liberal democratic, or Marxist, or one-party nationalist movements demonstrated sufficient capacity to liberate that it should be the business of Christians to sanctify those programs by reverberating to them in theological idiom?

But all three of these criticisms -- that on the level of biblical selectivity, that on the level of theological method, and the internal critique of the political ideology -- have been expressed less sweepingly and less publicly than the liberation rhetoric, with the end result that it still seems useful to face liberation language in its own right and to test the legitimacy of its claim to be echoing a biblical message.

We may take as expressive of the quintessence of the approach of which we speak a fragment of an address delivered by Mr. Poikail John George to the United States Conference for the World Council of Churches at Toledo, Ohio, in May, 1972. This particular quotation is picked out not because it is unique or original but because it is representative.

The cries of God's people everywhere, the continents of Africa and Asia particularly, as well as those around us here at home, have reached the ears of the Lord when he tells us first of all to go and tell the Pharaohs of this world, 'Let my people go.' Exodus must come before Mt. Sinai, liberation of God's people must come before communion with God.

The same centering upon the paradigm of Exodus is typical of the "liberation theology" of Latin America; Rubem Alves or Gustavo Gutierrez show the same selectivity. The following sample from Alves will suffice:

The Exodus was the generating experience of the conscience of the people of Israel. It constituted the structural center which determined their way of organizing their time and space. I am not simply saying that the Exodus is part of the content and conscience of the people of Israel. It is the structural center because it determines the integrating logic, the basis of organization and the interpretation of the facts of the historical experience. Thus the Exodus does not go down as a past experience which took place at some well-defined time and space. It really becomes a paradigm for the interpretation of all of space and all of time.

Our respectfully critical response shall lead us in two directions. First, by staying with the Mosaic model itself, we shall test the appropriateness of its application by extension to the revolution rhetoric of our day. Secondly, we shall return to the question of Dr. Miguez Bonino: What of the other models?

Exodus as Miracle
The Exodus experience is of a piece with the ancient Hebrew vision of holy war. The wars of Yahweh were certainly lethal, but they were not rationally planned and pragmatically executed military operations; they were miracles. In some of them (and the Red Sea is such a case), the Israelites according to the record did not even use arms. The combatant was not a liberation front or terrorist commando but Yahweh himself.

The legitimate lesson of the wars of Yahweh for contemporary ethics is not that "war must not be sin because God commanded it;" but rather that because God declared and won it, entering a war was not a matter of human strategizing and winning; it was not an effect of preponderant human power. The Red Sea event is for the whole Old Testament the symbol of the confession that the Israelites do not lift a hand to save themselves. They only trust and venture out. What the wars of Yahweh point to in their fulfillment in Christ is not righteous bloodshed but non-violent non-conformity.

The model of revolution most currently called "liberation" in our time is for subject peoples (or more accurately for a minority group acting in their name) to seize sovereignty within the land within which they are oppressed, taking that sovereignty away from a foreign power or from a feudal minority in their own society. This is very strikingly not what the Exodus did. Even though the princely figure of Moses would not have made unthinkable an effort to rise up and take over Egypt, as minority groups of invaders and infiltrators did many times in the history of the ancient Near East, this never is suggested as the story is told. Liberation means literally Exodus: going out. The only reason there must be plagues and ultimately death is that the hardness of Pharaoh's heart would not permit the Exodus to be peaceful.

It thus appears that if the appeal to the model of Exodus were to be taken seriously as a model rather than whimsically as a slogan, it would point far more clearly to the creative construction of relatively independent counter-communities, and less to a seizure of power in the existing society. This counter-community would be built with the sober expectation that it would call forth a violent reaction by the powers in control, and that in this violent reaction the powers might expose themselves to their own destruction. But the way it is done is very different. Moses was no Bonhoeffer. The old tyranny is destroyed not by beating it at its own game of intrigue and assassination, but by the way the presence of the independent counter-community (and its withdrawal) provokes Pharaoh to overreach himself.

There would never have been a Red Sea experience if there had not previously been the willingness to follow Moses out of Goshen. This was a leap of faith, made in common by the Hebrew people, not on the basis of any calculation of their capacity to destroy the Egyptians, but fully trusting in the transcendent intervention of Yahweh.

Before that there was the fostering of a sense of communal solidarity and vocation as the Israelites had survived through the plagues as an experience of their distinct identity as objects of God's care. There had already been a series of smaller experiences of liberation as a minority people.

Before the experience of preservation through the plagues, there had to be proclamation: preaching of the liberating purpose of God, addressed to both the oppressed and the oppressor, by the preacher Moses who had come from outside the situation with a message from God. That preaching involved a need to accredit (by signs) the status of the prophet; it did not involve planning processes to engineer liberation, or predicting either a possible or a Utopian design for the liberated state. Its insistence was upon the identity and the saving purpose of Yahweh.

Even before there could be a Moses and a people to hear him, there had to be an oppressed community affirming its identity by talking about the fathers and the God of the fathers. Moses would not have recognized his mandate, and his brethren would not have heard him, if there had not been a prior common history of recital amidst and despite the bondage. Goshen is prior to Exodus. The identity of the people, and even in a serious sense the very identity of the liberating God, were dependent upon the confessing community. The God of their fathers could not have called them to the Red Sea if they had not already been a people under the whips. Peoplehood is the presupposition, not the product of Exodus.

The tragedy of many "liberation fronts" in our time is that the minority which claims to have the right to establish the new order leaps to righteous violence without passing through the experience of creating a coherent ethos which will permit their own leadership team to work together without recurrent new division. To say it another way, to be oppressed together is not sufficient to constitute a people. Nor being a people yet sufficient to be the people of God. Exodus is not a paradigm for how all kinds of groups with all kinds of values can attain all kinds of salvation. Exodus is a particular form of withdrawal into insecurity.

At this point we must note that Mr. George, in the quotation above, seems to equate indiscriminately the phrase "people of God" with any and all subject peoples. This is certainly counter to the meaning of Exodus, which is the experience of one oppressed and wandering minority, not of any and all suffering peoples. "The people of God" is not everybody. To transpose the motif of liberation out of that distinct historical framework and thereby also away from the distinct historical identity of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, into some kind of general theistic affirmation of liberation, is to separate the biblical message from its foundation. There exists a liberation message only because of the particularity of the God of the fathers; Jews and Christians cannot talk confidently about liberation except in that connection. Thus peoplehood is not the product of liberation; peoplehood with a history and a trust in the God who has led the fathers is prior to liberation. This has implications for contemporary thinking.

One is the awareness that what really makes liberation possible is the cultural fruit of generations prior to liberation which developed in the fiber of their cultural personalities a sense of those values which could then lead them together into new liberating engagement. Several generations of ex-slaves singing Black spirituals are the presupposition of a Martin Luther King. If you want to help liberate the people, it is not a service to tell them that violence is justified; it is a service to help them develop their spirituals.

A more negative conclusion to draw from the above observation is that there are times and places where no liberation is possible because no peoplehood has been formed. There are slums and favelas, there are perhaps whole racial groups and especially there are refuge cultures who have no songs, no historical self-understanding even as oppressed peoples. In such a context there is no base for liberating change either violent or non-violent. But in such cases the argument for violence is even less fitting. There is no possibility of constructing a new people on the other side of the Sea if peoplehood does not exist in Goshen.

The slogan "Exodus before Sinai" presupposes that "liberation" is a single and final event; that is the claim which justifies treating its violence as a legitimate ethical exception. Yet Sinai was to become the place of a new bondage. Exodus leads not to the promised land but to the desert, and in that desert Sinai is the place of a new enslavement motivated partly by loyalty to the values of Egypt.

What happened at Sinai was thus first the fall of Israel, unwilling despite the liberation just experienced to be patient in awaiting the word of God from the mountain, preferring under Aaron's leading to take things into their own hands. If this has any relation to the question how we take the initiative in the combat against injustice it would hardly be in the direction of fostering the authority of any human community to define autonomously and implement violently its own liberation.

Mr. George, in the text I quoted, referred to Sinai as the symbol of the "communion with God" which can come only after liberation. Yet what happened at Sinai was not "communion with God" in any "religious" sense, but rather the formal constitution of Israel as a community under the law. This consolidation of the community is part of the meaning of liberation. Historically Exodus was the prerequisite of Sinai, but morally it is the other way 'round. Liberation is from bondage and for covenant, and what for matters more than what from.

If Exodus was the prerequisite of Sinai, in terms of movement, Sinai was the prerequisite of Exodus in terms of motive. It was the reason given to the Egyptians (Exodus 8:2, 20, 26f). Even before the arrival at Sinai, the column of fiery cloud was a symbol of Sinai leading them. Liberation after the model of Exodus issues in the reconstitution of community around the liberator. This is then another point at which to take the contemporary rhetoric seriously. Can the various "fronts" and "movements" which today call themselves "liberation" point us with any confidence, on the basis of experiences elsewhere or of the inherent quality of their vision, to a constitutive event following the "exodus" which will give substance to their separate existence? Or is not what is today called "liberation" sparked and justified only by the wrongness of the oppression it denounces, while sharing with the oppressor many of his ethical assumptions about how to deal with dissent, about the use of violence, about the political vocation of a liberating elite?

So liberation has its post-requisites as well as its prerequisites. It is not a revolution but only a threshold linking two phases of pilgrim peoplehood.

In giving this degree of attention to the fuller dimensions of the Exodus story I am not merely pressing a parable beyond its limits into allegory; I am unfolding the meaning of "story," as illumination of how we understand a God who works among humanity for its salvation. The primary resources for the Exodus are not located in the money or the weapons or the stratagems brought to bear at a particular point to destroy some tyrant. They are rather the prior developments of an identity, a common story, a sense of community and purpose and a set of expectations as to the shape of the divine initiative, without which the story of the Red Sea would have no frame and no point. It is not too much to suggest that as Christians talk about Exodus and liberation there is still need for the awareness of similar prerequisite dimensions. Clarifying the identity and mission of minorities might then be a better guide even today than efforts to take over the pagan society from above and make it a good.

Most relevant to the "oppressed people" theme, and most in tension with the juxtaposition of exodus language with modern guerrilla theology, is the fact that over against the paradigm of leaving Egypt and destroying Pharaoh on the way we find in the Old Testament, more often, another model of how to live under a pagan oppressor. It is the way of Diaspora. This is the model taken over by the New Testament church and the model as well of two millennial of rabbinic Judaism.

These are the words of the letter which Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the elders of the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon ... Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

There is only one Exodus in the history of Israel; but on the other hand there are several samples of the way a moral minority can "seek the welfare of the city." This advice of Jeremiah was given in the age of the exile after the defeat of Josiah, but we have the same stance taken by Joseph in Egypt, by Daniel under Nebuchadnezzar, and by Mordecai in Persia and even in a sense by Jonah in Nineveh. Far from destroying the pagan oppressor, the function of the insightful Hebrew is to improve that pagan order so as to make it a resource of protection for the people and viable as a government. He does this in ways which force the pagan power to renounce its self-mythologizing religious claims and to recognize the higher sovereignty which is proclaimed by the Hebrew monotheist.

This Joseph/Daniel/Mordecai model is so characteristic in the Hebrew Bible that we have to claim that this kind of elite contribution to the reforming of the existing order is more often the fitting contribution to the pagan community than any theocratic takeover. The complement to the Exodus of the counter-community is not a coup d'etat by the righteous oppressed, but rather the saving message of the resident minority.

Let us return to the last words of our opening quotation from Thomas Wieser. Some want to identify "the contemporary quest for liberation" with biblically understood "salvation in contemporary experience," to ward off "spiritualization." Others don't want the Bible to be used to support a "mere temporary political struggle." We have not been testing the latter position. It would be a more serious reproach that it is "temporal"; i.e., lacking in or denying transcendent depth which goes beyond the present power struggle.

More important in our present concern, however, is that Wieser's phrasing misframes the criticism of the "liberation" focus as "spiritualizing" or as avoidance of the "political." It will be visible from the above that that is not my criticism at all. It is rather that the "many Christians" in question have borrowed from the Bible an imagery or language of liberation, but have avoided learning from the biblical story anything about the meaning of liberation.

The form of liberation in the biblical witness is not the guerrilla campaign against an oppressor culminating in assassination and military defeat, but the creation of a confessing community which is viable without or against the force of the state, and does not glorify that power structure even by the effort to topple it.

The content of liberation in the biblical witness is not the "nation-state" brotherhood engineered after the takeover but the covenantal peoplehood already existing because God has given it, and sure of its future because of the name ("identity") of God, not because of a coming campaign.

The means of liberation in the biblical witness is not prudentially justified violence but "mighty Acts" which may come through the destruction of the Red Sea -- but may also come when the King is moved to be gracious to Esther, or to Daniel, or to Nehemiah.

What the world most needs is not a new Caesar but a new style. A style is created, updated, projected, not by a nation or a government, but by a people. This is what moral minorities can do -- what they have done time and again.

Liberation is not a new King; we've tried that. Liberation is the presence of a new option, and only a non-conformed, covenanted people of God can offer that. Liberation is the pressure of the presence of a new alternative so valid, so coherent, that it can live without the props of power and against the stream of statesmanship. To be that option is to be free indeed.

John Howard Yoder—the author of several books, including The Politics of Jesus—was a contributing editor of Sojourners when this article appeared in The Post-American, September 1976. This article is a version of a speech given at Bethany Theological Seminary in 1972 which appeared in edited form in the Fall 1973 issue of Cross Currents. Much of Yoder's theological work came under review in 2014 after evidence surfaced indicating years of predatory behavior by Yoder and sexual abuse of women. (See "The failure to bind and loose: Responses to Yoder’s sexual abuse" by  Rachel Waltner Goossen in The Mennonite magazine.)