To Hear the Word - Second Edition. John Howard Yoder

nourished by later experience, for determining from the early context what they do not exclude, thereby cramping the life-giving potential of Torah for continuing guidance.

      To correct adequately for this minimizing thrust, we would have needed to review the broader issues that I here have only named but had to set aside: the meaning of Torah as grace and liberation;7 the place of cultic recital in covenant renewal; the abiding difference between covenant obedience and civil enforcement; and the abiding meaning of the rejection of “other gods,” gods other than the one who sanctifies the neighbor’s life.

1. Reprinted by permission from the theological quarterly Interpretation (October 1980) 393ff. The topic had been assigned to me by the editors. Passages removed by the editors of Interpretation have been restored. This first sentence in its original phrasing referred to the kind of articles for which that particular quarterly was best known.