7. This is not to say that Yoder saw eye-to-eye with the entire Anabaptist tradition or with all of his contemporary Mennonites, as he himself stated on numerous occasions, sometimes in order to defend himself against charges of sectarianism. Mark Nation describes Yoder’s treatment of his tradition as “creative reworking” that might be called ecumenical, catholic, or neo-Anabaptist (see John Howard Yoder, 27–29).
8. I am here only repeating the charge of sectarianism leveled against John Howard Yoder and against my friend and colleague Stanley Hauerwas; I do not share it.
9. However, Mark Nation has kindly shared with me a copy of a Yoder lecture from 1973, “The Biblical Evaluation of Human Life,” that argued for a biblically inspired mandate for the Christian community to protect the fetus as one of the “defenseless.” Yoder also expressed appreciation for the gift of my own book, Abortion and the Early Church, especially because of the book’s connections between the early church’s pre-Constantinian pacifism and its opposition to abortion.
10. This obituary may now be found at http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/07/us/john-h-yoder-theologian-at-notre-dame-is-dead-at-70.html?sec=&spon=&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink.
11. Some pieces are edited versions of earlier presentations or essays; approximately half come from about a five-year period centering on 1980.
12. The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996.
13. The theme of the cross is not as pervasive in this volume of largely methodological essays as it is in Yoder’s major works, but many studies of Yoder rightly refer to his cross-centered ethic.
14. This discussion is necessarily limited in scope and is not intended to be an exhaustive synthesis. Still less is it a comprehensive study of Yoder’s hermeneutic. Other brief studies of his hermeneutic include Hays, Moral Vision, 239–53, and Michael G. Cartwright, Practices, Politics, and Performance: Toward a Communal Hermeneutic for Christian Ethics, Princeton Theological Monograph Series (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2006) 217–33, esp. 217–22.
15. At this point Yoder interestingly mentions ecological concerns, both for the care of the earth and for the human race, as biblical mandates clarified by the church’s departure (at long last) from neo-Platonism.
16. Yoder also distinguishes biblical realism from the biblical theology movement (chap. 12), arguing that biblical realism never neglects the particularity of texts in its quest to discern the biblical message. Yoder seems to see biblical realism’s successors in the work of Paul Ricoeur, James Sanders, and Brevard Childs, and more generally in journals such as Horizons in Biblical Theology and Ex Auditu: An International Journal of Theological Interpretation of Scripture ([x-ref] 184 n. 10).
17. For a succinct summary of biblical realism according to Yoder, see the preface to the first edition of The Politics of Jesus, reprinted in the second edition (p. x). The description of it here, however, is taken primarily from various essays in the present volume.
18. These terms should not be understood as suggesting an ecclesiology that is characterized by either colonialism or Christendom, both of which Yoder would reject. “Aggressive,” for example, means something like “passionate” rather than practicing some sort of domination, which for Yoder was the exact antithesis of Jesus’ way.
19. John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution: A Companion to Bainton (Elkhart, IN: Mennonite Co-op Bookstore, 1963), cited in Cartwright, Practices, 217.
20. “John Howard Yoder’s Systematic Defence of Christian Pacifism,” 45–68, in The Wisdom of the Cross: Essays in Honor of John Howard Yoder, eds. Stanley Hauerwas et al. (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1999) 48.
21. Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Social Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983) 99 (emphasis added).
22. Yoder comments that this is a “much-abused” line ([x-ref] 137).
23. Hays, Moral Vision, 253.
PART 1
1
“There Is a Whole New World”1: The Apostle’s Apology Revisited
Introduction
The most striking thing I learned from the critical responses to my The Politics of Jesus2 has been the relatively low importance that the critics—even when they were Scripture scholars by profession—gave to basic questions of textual interpretation. My book was presented in 1972 as an exercise in reading the text of the New Testament with certain questions in mind. Those who disagreed with the book’s conclusions, however, very seldom found it fitting or necessary to differ on the grounds that I had not read the text of the New Testament correctly. They did not fault incorrect literary or historical interpretations. The critics’ differences were stated in a variety of ways but very seldom on the basis of the text.
The critics found it easy to disregard matters of direct textual interpretation, especially when the reading of the text calls into question one or another of the deeply believed axioms of Western Protestant culture. The ability to perceive that what the Bible says is different from what we have always assumed it meant is very difficult to acquire and to act upon. This problem is the same for people who consider themselves “liberal” as for those who consider themselves “evangelical.”
It is not simple for an author to deal with this kind of critical response. It rejects what had been argued without dealing with the textual and historical basis on which the argument rests. One can argue with the nonbiblical assumptions that the critic holds and that have kept him or her from reading the text straightforwardly without being conscious that they are nonbiblical. But to lift up and argue with the unavowed philosophy of one’s own culture is difficult.
The other path, which requires more patience, is simply to go back yet again to the text, to read yet again, still more modestly; with still less confidence that we already know all that it says; with still more attention to historical context and literary coherence; with still more concern to understand, from the inside, the mind of the writer(s); with still more trust that “the Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from his Holy Word.”
John