In each of these three studies the cross appears—always briefly (or even implicitly) yet always centrally—as the hermeneutical key for Christians: from Paul as justification for the acceptance of brokenness and for the public character of faith; from Jesus as the potential cost of true, public faith; and from the commandment against murder as the grounds for Christians expanding their definitions of both “murder” and “neighbor.”13
In the exegetical section, and also of course in the book’s other two sections, we find also the “how” of Yoder’s interpretive strategy. Four of these key themes are indentified and discussed here.14
A Paradoxical Hermeneutic of Suspicion and of Trust
A hermeneutic of suspicion is a reading posture of criticism and distrust. Unlike many who advocate such an interpretive strategy in reading the Bible, Yoder’s suspicion is not of the biblical text, but of received interpretations of the text, especially those interpretations in the Protestant tradition that have been shaped by Western individualism and privatism. “[T]he form of suspicion which is most valuable is not doubting the text but doubting the adequacy of one’s prior understanding of it” ([x-ref] 52). More irenically, he advocates “sitting loose to tradition” or “openness to alternative hypotheses” ([x-ref] 57).
In effect, then, Yoder’s hermeneutic of suspicion toward the tradition is in fact a hermeneutic of trust toward the text. Or, more exactly, it is a hermeneutic of trust toward God. Yoder believes that we should seek a fresh reading of the text and expect a fresh word from God for our circumstances. “The hermeneutic task is never done” ([x-ref] 4). The questioning of old assumptions, and the invitation to a new, radical lifestyle, is in a sense the epitome of the reformational cry for the church to be semper reformanda—always reforming. Scripture has repeatedly been “subject to manipulation” ([x-ref] 83). “[T]he function of the Bible is to continue correctively to stand in judgment on our past failures to get the whole point” ([x-ref] 93). Yoder is therefore fond of a saying of the puritan John Robinson: “the Lord has yet much more light and truth to break forth from his holy word” ([x-ref] 4, 86, 92, 124, 137). Yoder sees this “more light,” not as something brand new, but as an extrapolation or expansion of a text’s original significance into new situations ([x-ref] 44–45, 103, 187). He sees this movement, which begins already within Scripture itself, as an organic process, which he compares to a trajectory ([x-ref] 112–13). Yoder’s confidence in this process means that for him exegesis is highly contextual and missional: “In the spiral movement whereby the mind of the church constantly links the world’s agenda and the canonical texts, one does find a degree of progress in any given context in becoming clearer both about what it is in the present challenge to which Scripture speaks and about what the answer is” ([x-ref] 92).15 On occasion, Yoder also compares this process to translation ([x-ref] 90–91, 103, 123).
Straightforwardness and “Biblical Realism”
Translation, however, does not mean watered-down paraphrase. In these essays Yoder is deeply concerned that the text of Scripture is often either ignored or interpreted in such a way as to sidestep its “straightforward” meaning ([x-ref] 23, 26, 31, 56 146–47, and chapter 12). He saw this happening both at the level of the individual believer and the local church and at the level of the most sophisticated theologians. Yoder’s solution is not, however, a fundamentalist reading of the text that ignores its historical setting and literary features. Rather, Yoder wants us to take the Bible seriously “on its own terms” ([x-ref] 74; chap. 11), “taking the texts as an ordinary reader would normally take them” ([x-ref] 56), striving to avoid misreading Scripture by importing the traditional or cultural prejudices noted above in the discussion of his hermeneutic of suspicion and trust. Yoder does not think that presuppositionless exegesis is possible, but he does believe that “the presuppositions that are brought to a text can become, by virtue of sustained self-critical discipline, increasingly congruent with the intent of the text’s author” ([x-ref] 75). The “tools of critical scholarship” serve to allow the Bible to speak “within its own world view” rather than being distorted by either conservative or liberal agenda (p[x-ref] 100–101)—but such tools are to be used with a healthy skepticism ([x-ref] 146). At the same time, Yoder finds unacceptable the Protestant “Scholasticism” that read (and reads) the Bible as an inerrant collection of fixed, timeless, dogmatic propositions ([x-ref] 98, 148–52).
Yoder uses the term “biblical realism” to describe his approach to reading Scripture (e.g., [x-ref] 58, 61, 74, 100, and chap. 11). The term refers to a post-liberal movement in biblical studies especially in the 1950s that was dedicated to discerning and engaging the distinctive biblical worldview. Yoder names Paul Minear, Otto Piper, Markus Barth, Hendrik Kraemer, and George Eldon Ladd as its chief practitioners, with Karl Barth as one source of inspiration.
Biblical realism is, for Yoder, a position between the extremes of dogmatic Protestant Scholasticism and fundamentalism, on the one hand, and liberalism and humanism, on the other ([x-ref] 74, chap. 11). Advocates of biblical realism affirm “the existence and usefulness of a straightforward grasp of the intended meaning of the ancient texts, without prejudice to the need for all sorts of critical disciplines in order to refine that understanding” ([x-ref] 61), and they do so without either liberal skepticism or conservative preoccupation with inspiration and authority ([x-ref] 158–59).16 Yoder saw his own work as an extension of biblical realism into the realm of the church’s life and social ethic. Biblical realism was also a position between an ahistorical biblicism and the “political realism” of those who largely rejected Jesus as the norm for Christian social and political ethics.17
Five pairs of adjectives can serve to characterize the approach of Yoder’s biblical realism to “hearing the word”:
• canonical and “post-critical” ([x-ref] 89, 189): while attending to historical and literary issues, it deals with the final form of the text and its theological message, it is aware of the problem of imposing alien hermeneutical frameworks on the text, and it employs a variety of interpretive strategies ([x-ref] 88) without being unduly preoccupied with critical issues and methods;
• narrative and coherent: it recognizes that the Bible’s contents are predominantly in narrative form and situated within an overarching narrative framework ([x-ref] 85, 88) that “contains a coherent testimony which it is the reader’s task to disengage” ([x-ref] 76), yet this coherence is a unity marked by diversity ([x-ref] 118–19, 190–91);
• pastoral and missional: it acknowledges that the biblical writings (especially the New Testament) reflect, and were intended to shape, a community that is “missionary, aggressive, and subversive” ([x-ref] 97);18
• ecclesial and eschatological: it is rooted in the ecumenical theological interests in ecclesiology and eschatology that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, with Yoder seeing his task as extending the movement into an ecclesial ethic ([x-ref] 181, 190);
• creative and critical: