Yoder on Barth on Christendom

Commenting on Karl Barth’s section on church law (CD IV/2, §67.4), John Howard Yoder writes: “Barth is affirming for the first time in mainstream … theology since Constantine the theological legitimacy of admitting about a set of social structures, that those who participate in them cannot be presumed to be addressable from the perspective of Christian confession.”

—John Howard Yoder, “Why Ecclesiology Is Social Ethics: Gospel Ethics Versus the Wider Wisdom,” in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 108.