Is a Messianic Ethic Possible: Recent Work By and About John Howard Yoder

IS A MESSIANIC POLITICAL ETHICPOSSIBLE?

Recent Work by and about John Howard Yoder

P. Travis Kroeker

ABSTRACT

In his landmark monograph, The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoderchallenged mainstream Christian social ethics by arguing that the NewTestament account of Jesus’s founding of a messianic community entails anormative politics, not only for early Christianity but for the contemporarychurch. This challenge is further elaborated in several important posthu-mous publications, especially Preface to Theology, in which Yoder examinesthe development of early Christology with attention to its political and eth-ical implications, and The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, Yoder’s pro-posal for a renewed Jewish–Christian dialogue around the moral meaningof messianism. This article interprets these writings with reference to arange of critical scholarship on and about Yoder, Yoder and Augustine, andJewish and Christian messianism, paying particular attention to questionsof political ethics.

KEY WORDS: Augustine, biblical realism, Jewish–Christian relations,messianism, political theology, Yoder

IN 1972, WRITING ON ASSIGNMENT FROM HIS POSITION as associate directorof the Institute of Mennonite Studies and president of the AssociatedMennonite Biblical Seminaries in Goshen, Indiana, John Howard Yoderpublished his landmark monograph, The Politics of Jesus, posing thequestion: “Is a messianic socio-political ethic possible?” By doing so, andby providing an affirmative programmatic answer as one that is bindingupon all who call themselves Christian (and, in effect, only upon thosewho do so), Yoder quite self-consciously placed himself into a provoca-tive and radical dissenting position vis-a-vis the prevailing consensusof mainstream liberal and postliberal (Christian realist) Protestant so-cial ethics. It is a challenge that did not go unnoticed. In a sentencethat he might retrospectively have come to regret, James Gustafson,in the first volume of his Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, statedhis conviction “that all constructive theology in the Christian traditionneeds to be defined to some extent in relation to this radical option”—bywhich Gustafson meant the challenging option of the “traditional radical

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Protestant view” (Gustafson 1981, 75). Gustafson himself devoted onlya page and a half to this engagement, even though, as the “one mostdramatically different from the option I shall pursue,” it represented the“sharpest challenge” to his own position. For much of his career, Yoderserved as a foil—representing a type of christomonistic sectarianism orpolitically naive pacifism or neo-liberal free church voluntarism—ratherthan as a serious interlocutor warranting extensive engagement. To someextent Yoder himself bears responsibility for this, as much of his writ-ing was occasional, prompted by the invitations of others to represent aradical dissenting opinion (see Yoder 1984, Introduction).

This is however by no means the only or indeed the dominant story.When the second edition of Yoder’s Politics came out in 1994 (by whichtime Yoder had for almost two decades been a professor at the Universityof Notre Dame), Stanley Hauerwas proclaimed, “I am convinced thatwhen Christians look back on this century of theology in America, ThePolitics of Jesus will be seen as a new beginning”—a judgment recentlyseconded by Craig Carter in what is now the finest systematic study ofYoder’s theological social ethics, The Politics of the Cross (Carter 2001).Carter’s book offers a sustained argument for the view that Yoder’s workis best read not as an apologia for Mennonite pacifism or Anabaptist par-ticularism but as the compelling normative articulation of the social ethi-cal implications of classical trinitarian and Christological doctrine for theChristian church’s witness in the postliberal, post-Christendom era thatis now upon us. At the heart of Carter’s argument is his thesis that Yo-der’s project unites important aspects of his Anabaptist heritage with thetheological method (and “biblical realism”) of Karl Barth to provide themost coherent, cogent, and classically orthodox alternative to Christianrealism, liberation theology, and evangelicalism in current Christiansocial ethics. Hence the importance also of the recent posthumouspublication of Yoder’s Preface to Theology: Christology and TheologicalMethod (Yoder 2002) in which Yoder offers an account of the developmentof classical theology and his own brand of theological method.

There is yet another facet to the challenge unleashed in Yoder’s project,and this has to do with his retrieval of Jewish messianism, not simply as ahistorical exploration of the apocalyptic setting of New Testament ethicsbut as a normative paradigm for understanding the social and politicalform of the church as the creation of a new community made up of bothJews and Gentiles (and all manner of “others”). In the chapter of The Pol-itics of Jesus entitled “Justification by Grace through Faith,” Yoder citesKrister Stendahl and Markus Barth in arguing that Pauline languageof “justification” has to do not only (or even primarily) with God’s remis-sion of guilt for the anguished conscience but primarily with the consti-tution of a new humanity “in Christ”—a new humanity in which hostil-ity between peoples is also politically addressed and overcome through

Is a Messianic Political Ethic Possible? 143

love of enemy. This early reference to a renewed Jewish–Christiandialogue about Christian origins signals a direction that Yoder pursuedintensely in the final years of his life, the results of which are publishedin two volumes—For the Nations and the posthumous volume (with com-mentaries by Peter Ochs and Michael Cartwright) The Jewish-ChristianSchism Revisited. It has also been taken up critically in a number of re-cent publications (Hauerwas et al. 1999; Harink 2003; Ollenburger andKoontz 2004).

1. Barth and Biblical Realism

In To Hear the Word (Yoder 2001), another of the growing number ofposthumously published collections—this one having been collected byYoder himself, before his death, under the title “How to be Read by theBible”—Yoder suggests that the most striking thing he noticed aboutcritical responses to Politics of Jesus was the slight attention given tobasic questions of textual interpretation. That is, criticisms of Yoder’sbook were seldom addressed to his literary or historical readings of thebiblical texts—especially where his close readings of the texts called intoquestion deeply believed axioms of Western Protestant culture (Yoder2001, 9). The resulting irony is that Yoder was often the one character-ized as having a “programmatic” reading of the Bible, when what he sawhimself doing was simply to allow the political meaning of the New Tes-tament claim that “Jesus as the Messiah is Lord” to be brought into focusfor social ethics. It was the programmatic exclusion of this meaning fromChristian ethics by, for example, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey,who set aside the authority of Jesus in favor of other sources and criteriaof moral guidance for political thought, that Yoder sought to question.To do so, suggested Yoder, is by no means “sectarian.” To the contrary, itis to raise and test the truth question implicit in New Testament Chris-tological claims that the crucified and resurrected Jesus is the cosmicLord over all creation, whose lordship is expressed in the world by fol-lowers who imitate his kenotic “revolutionary subordination”—not onlyindividually or “in their hearts,” but visibly and socially as well. If thisclaim is true, it must be true not only for first century Christians but alsofor twentieth and twenty-first century Christians, and it will be as com-municable and as scandalous today as it was to the Jewish and Gentilecommunities of Jesus’s day.

Yoder’s messianic biblical realism, in other words, sets off the sameapocalyptic charge detonated by Barth in the context of twentieth cen-tury German cultural Protestantism and by Paul in what Jacob Taubeshas provocatively called the “nomos consensus” of first century Hellenis-tic Judaism (Taubes 2004, 23–24). Paul’s apostolic calling as a prophetof the crucified Jewish messiah to the Gentile nations required him to


articulate a political sovereignty that radically called into question thesovereignty of Rome (and of ethnic Israel) and proclaimed the found-ing of a new people, who would not recognize traditional boundaries ofinsiders and outsiders, friends and enemies, pure and impure. So also,claims Yoder in his 1988 Presidential Address to the Society of Chris-tian Ethics (Yoder 1994b, 127–40), the calling of the messianic ethicistis to be vigilant in upholding the authoritative speech and logic of theslain Lamb. This crucified Messiah even now exercises real, living cos-mic sovereignty, a rule displayed not in the exercise of juridical authorityor state power but in the pattern of life displayed in the slain Lamb andimitated in the community of disciples that follow him, identified by Paulas the “messianic body” or “body of Christ.”

This apocalyptic Christological paradigm has a number of charac-teristic social marks: binding and loosing as the messianic pattern ofdiscernment, forgiveness, and reconciliation; the eucharistic pattern oftable fellowship and economic sharing rooted in the liturgical and cel-ebratory receiving of life as divine gift; baptism, as the initiation intoa new humanity of inter-ethnic ecumenicity; the fullness of the mes-sianic body in which no “I” stands alone but all are gifted and requirethe full participation of each gift; and the open meeting in which thefreedom of speech is found through the shared discernment of what thedivine spirit may be saying (Yoder 1992). While this fivefold pattern ofthe messianic body politic should be explicitly displayed in the ekklesia,the community called out in obedience to messianic authority, it is notlimited to Christians. All people are to be invited into the messianic polisand to understand the meaning of their shared life in terms of its distinc-tive patterns, since the calling of the people of God is no different fromthe calling of all humanity. Hence Yoder can also trace analogies of themarks of the Christian community in the wider, non-confessional world.1

For example, binding and loosing may be displayed in a non-confessionalsociety as conflict resolution and mediation, eucharistic community asthe sharing of goods and reinterpretation of power and rank, and so on.This is a lesson, Yoder indicates, that he learned from Barth (Yoder 1997,23–24). Indeed this precisely is the mission of the messianic community:

1 Sometimes Yoder also calls these “middle axioms”: “These concepts will translate intomeaningful and concrete terms the general relevance of the lordship of Christ for a givensocial ethical issue. They mediate between the general principles of Christological ethicsand the concrete problems of political application. . . .Social–ethical thought has in the pasttended to sway between a relativism that challenges the existence of any standards be-yond the good intention of the person making a decision and a natural law concept whichsupposes that we can know clearly a pattern of ideal order which it is our assignment toimpose on our society. The conception of middle axioms avoids these alternatives. It per-mits meaningful communication of a significant Christian social critique without involvingextended speculation about the metaphysical value of the principles appealed to” (Yoder1964, 32–33).


The challenge to the faith community should not be to dilute or filter ortranslate its witness, so that the “public” community can handle it withoutbelieving [in Jesus’s cosmic sovereignty], but so to purify and clarify andexemplify it that the world can perceive it to be good news without havingto learn a foreign language [Yoder 1997, 24].

The scandal of the messianic paradigm, therefore, is not its closed “in-sider” information or special privileged status, but precisely those visibleauthoritative characteristics of the crucified Messiah’s sovereignty thatalways have and will continue to scandalize wise and responsible human-ists, both inside and outside the church, who appeal to other models ofresponsibility. These scandal markers include: the renunciation of domi-nation in favor of servanthood, the pacifist love of enemies which breaksdown closed identities, and the practice of forgiveness rather than re-tributive justice as the path to social reconciliation and harmony (Yoder1997, 47–48).

These comments support Carter’s argument, in The Politics of theCross, that Yoder’s biblical realism is Barthian but not “Yale school.”That is, it is not tied to an epistemological or methodological theoryabout the Bible and Christian doctrine as a socio-linguistic “grammar.”Rather, Yoder proceeds exegetically, seeking to expound the social eth-ical implications that follow if the biblical account of the sovereignagency of God revealed in the Messiah Jesus is true and indeed au-thoritative. In an interesting essay, Scott Davis (himself a non-believingAristotelian) defends Yoder’s messianic realism (against other putativeChristian realisms) if in fact the Jesus of the gospel is the Messiah.Davis makes the important observation that Yoder’s biblical realism “istied closely to what we might call the logic of lordship” (Davis 1999,299). He points out that while one may think about lordship in termsof the law, and therefore about divine sovereignty in juridical terms ofretributive justice, such notions of lordship and sovereignty are brokenin Herbert Fingarette’s reading of Job and Yoder’s reading of Paul. Thepenitential, messianic logic of lordship evident in Yoder’s biblical realismchallenges other moral and political realisms. Davis helpfully enucle-ates the important relationship between lordship and realism for Yoder,that also sets the agenda for this review essay. The binding nature ofJesus’s call to discipleship is related not to the power of his moral ex-ample or teaching, nor to his “God-consciousness,” but rather to theclaim that in him the character of divine sovereignty is decisively dis-closed as a sovereignty that dispossesses all other claims to power, wis-dom, and goodness. There is here no appeal to a “public reason” or a“comprehensive doctrine” or theory of justice that grounds an ethic. In-deed there is here an active unveiling that dispossesses such humanappeals of their prideful and often violent claims to universality anddominion—not by outdoing them, or even out-narrating them, but by


refusing to exercise rule on those terms. This reading is in keeping withthe kenotic posture of Jesus’s messianic lordship in which the world isreconciled one particular, embodied act of serving, suffering love at atime.

If this is so, however, then it also calls into question Carter’s descrip-tion of Yoder’s work as an “application” of Barth’s theology to social ethics.Carter’s point is to counter critics such as James Reimer who argues thatYoder’s historicist approach is incompatible with the theological ortho-doxy of patristic Christianity, which grounds ethics in metaphysical–ontological affirmations about Christ. Carter’s close reading of Yoder’srelation to creedal orthodoxy, facilitated through the posthumous pub-lication of Yoder’s Preface to Theology, advances the discussion, partic-ularly in the context of current debates about historical narrative andnatural theology. Yoder, like Barth, is historicist but not relativist whenit comes to Christology. He clearly affirms Nicene and Chalcedonian for-mulations. And Yoder, like Barth, rejects all appeals to a natural the-ology not in keeping with Christological authority. While not himself asystematic theologian a la Barth, Yoder was, Carter argues, applyingBarth’s theology to social ethics in a coherent but necessarily occasionalmanner—through contextual ecumenical dialogue about particular eth-ical questions and issues rather than by developing an architectonicaccount.

However, it could be argued that the very success of Carter’s system-atic portrayal of Yoder’s thought is a betrayal of Yoder’s Christologicalvision of diaspora ethics—a vision that in this regard may stand in con-trast to Barth’s systematic Church Dogmatics and therefore can hardlybe depicted as an application of Barth’s theology to social ethics.2 Carter’scriticism that Yoder, like Anabaptists in general, never wrote a systemat-ics and therefore left himself open to misunderstanding and caricature,is finally a Constantinian criticism. It seeks to establish conceptual con-trol within the theological domain. Insofar as systematic theology maybe depicted as a “blood sport” of sorts, Yoder preferred to suffer harm inoccasional contextual dialogue rather than to cause it. In this regard, itmay be that Yoder is more of an Anabaptist than a Barthian, and this isa crucial point theologically, methodologically, ethically, and politically.The theological enactment of the incarnation for Yoder is an ecclesial,

2 Though here one would have to contend with the Yale school, and most recently theimportant account offered by Hauerwas’s With the Grain of the Universe (Hauerwas 2001,chapter 7), insisting that Barth did not understand himself as a “systematic theologian”but rather as a “narrative theologian,” retelling the Christian story in contemporary speechas an ongoing act of conceptual re-description of reality in the language of the church. Ifthis is true, then Yoder could be (as indeed Hauerwas argues) simply doing what Barthwas doing in his Church Dogmatics in a more occasional manner. Even this, however, couldnot simply be described as an “application” of Barth’s theology.


dialogical, kenotic practice that lets go of the desire to control the re-ception and critical success of one’s ideas (though it must be noted thatYoder did not always practice such “letting go” himself). This is not tosay that it is anti-intellectual or incoherent. To the contrary, it proceedson the conviction that understanding, like faith, hope, and love, is a mat-ter of non-coercive servanthood that is built up in the ongoing historicaldrama, not doctrine, of God’s sovereign governance—which is why theinterpretation of Scripture and history in order to enact this governance,and not the building up of systems, is the central theological task of thechurch. Divine governance is best displayed not in architectonic systemsor narrative “savanthood” but in the cross-bearing, fine-grained diasporaservanthood of the messianic body.

2. Yoder and Post-Constantinian, Augustinian Theology

In order to assess Yoder’s contribution and its future directions, it isimportant to consider the two most recent major publications of Yoder’swork, Preface to Theology and The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited,and critical responses to them. These books are helpfully examined to-gether, in that in both of them Yoder develops his constructive theologicalaccount of the political and ethical implications of Jesus’s messianic lord-ship with constant reference to the contrast between historical–Hebraicand philosophical–Hellenistic thinking. Within this broader context,Yoder builds up his heuristic contrast between the biblical trajectory ofdiaspora messianism (culminating in the politics of Jesus) and variousforms of the “Constantinian temptation.” It is not always clear how theseat times descriptive, at other times normative, contrasts map onto oneanother in Yoder’s own accounts. James Reimer argues that Yoder’s sus-picion of metaphysical–ontological thought in favor of historical–ethicalcategories is itself the product of post-Enlightenment historicism andtherefore tends to reduce theology to ethics, indeed, to political ethics(Reimer 2001, 253–54, 168–69). Yoder too uncritically reads modern eth-ical historicism as being in harmony with the “Hebraic view” of biblicalChristianity, while the reputedly static, hierarchical metaphysics of Hel-lenistic and creedal Christianity are depicted as compatible with thetrend toward the Christian empire politics of Constantinianism—wheredivine sovereignty becomes visible in an established church supportingthe power structure of a dominant empire. Not only is such a reading ten-dentiously modern, argues Reimer; Yoder’s preference for the prophetic-apocalyptic trajectory of the Jewish–Christian tradition that authorizesdiaspora messianism over the priestly sacramental trajectory is too se-lective (Reimer 2004). It compromises the “biblical realism” of Yoder’spolitical theology in its ability to appreciate or appropriate important re-sources (a) in the Old Testament, especially Torah and legal covenant


traditions, and (b) in the post-Constantinian church and HellenisticChristianity, which Yoder tends to demonize. To put Reimer’s critiqueanother way, Yoder in these regards is not living up to his own visionof the Christian ethicist (articulated in his Society for Christian EthicsPresidential Address) as the scribal agent of communal memory, “select-ing from a too-full treasury what just happens to fit the next question”(Yoder 1994b, 139–40). He is rather rendering normative one limited his-torical ethical strand within the Jewish and Christian narratives thatauthorizes free-church pacifism but that cannot envision other impor-tant and necessary types of civic engagement and institutional forms.

There is a certain irony in the fact that Reimer’s critique of Yodercomes not from the Protestant mainstream but in this case from a fellowMennonite theologian who is interested in retrieving the classical, onto-logical tradition for contemporary theological ethics so as to preclude thereduction of theological reflection to ecclesial moralizing. Reimer arguesfor a more honest Anabaptist theology of law and civil institutions that isboth more attentive to the classical Christian tradition and more attunedto the range of social and political ethics in the Jewish story, both bibli-cal and extra-biblical (Reimer 2004, 252). A related criticism of Yoder’sAnabaptist tendency to define Constantinianism as the most basic prob-lem for Christian social ethics comes from another Anabaptist inter-preter, Gerald Schlabach. Yoder’s heuristic construal of the problem notonly misrepresents the complexities of this period in church history (seealso the articles by Heilke and Sider in Ollenburger and Koontz 2004).More importantly, it tends “to concentrate our ethical reflection on theeffort to avoid evil and unfaithfulness—rather than the challenge of em-bracing the good in a faithful manner,” and it is the good, after all,that provided the occasion of temptation in the first place (Schlabach1999, 450). The more basic problem, Schlabach argues, is defined by theDeuteronomist’s challenge as “the problem of how to receive and cele-brate the blessing, the shalom, the good, or the land’ that God desiresto give, yet to do so without defensively and violently hoarding God’sblessing” (451, cf. 454). Defining the problem this way enables one todiscern that the Christendom vision is itself a vision of shalom in whichthe right ordering of relationships in relation to God is the aim, thusproviding an even stronger challenge than Yoder can to those aspects ofhistoric Christendom that grasp prematurely through faithless violencethe gift that God offers fully only eschatologically (456).

This enables Schlabach to develop in his most recent essay (Schlabach2004) the claim that Yoder may be read as an interlocutor in theAugustinian tradition, providing a pacifist ecclesial social ethic in an-swer to Augustine’s definitive question: How are we to seek the peace ofthe earthly city without eroding loyalty to the heavenly one? Schlabach’sargument is that Augustine and Yoder share a common eschatological


realism—not a static ontology, but a messianic ethic rooted in a provi-dential ordering of history and a theology of creation that is discernedChristologically. While Yoder’s elaboration of an ecclesial social ethicspecifies more clearly the normative material implications of Augustine’sown messianic realism in a creative politics for the pilgrim city that“uses” well the peace of the earthly city, Augustine’s more robust theol-ogy of creation prevents Yoder’s useful “mediating axioms” from devolv-ing into liberal pragmatic compromises of the voluntarist sort. That is, inAugustine’s view, “mediating axioms” that truly reflect the divine order-ing of love and therefore contribute to the ordinata concordia of peaceableearthly communities, must have some kind of “metaphysical” status be-yond the value projections of human wills. Otherwise they would notbe “useful.” I will return to this dialogue between Yoder and Augustineopened up by Schlabach’s unconventional and provocative essay below.First, with the above critical considerations in mind, let us considerYoder’s account of the relations between biblical and classical theologyin the Christian tradition more carefully.

As we have seen, the heart of Christian theology according to Yoder isChristology, and its task—and the test of its development—is messianicdiscipleship. Preface to Theology: Christology and Theological Methodwas published first in 2002, though the mimeographed lectures on whichit is based date back to the early 1960s and were regularly updatedthrough 1981, when Yoder was teaching the course for Mennonite semi-narians. The introduction, penned in 1981, suggests that the usefulnessof these lectures lies “in the inductive portrayal of how theological dis-course proceeds within the life of the church” (Yoder 2002, 33). By in-ductive Yoder means “historically descriptive” of the development of cen-tral Christological claims in early Christian communities as the churchsought to interpret and communicate that to which it was called to bearembodied witness. Since Christology is intelligible only in the context ofIsrael and the wider biblical narrative, Yoder begins neither with con-temporary nor with classical theology but with the New Testament textsand their appeals to the Hebrew scriptures and the “received tradition”in order to account for the meaning of the messianic event.

Especially important for the New Testament witness, argues Yoder,is the “logic of solidarity” depicted by the early hymn in Philippians 2(utterly central in Yoder’s Christology) as the kenosis of Christ. This is tobe interpreted not in terms of metaphysical humiliation (though Yoderwill speak of divine condescension), but primarily in terms of the rever-sal of prideful Adamic grasping after godlikeness. It is this reversal—taking the form of the servant in humble obedience to death on a cross—that leads to the messiah Jesus being exalted to cosmic lordship. Yoderthus points to the unity of condescension (as the mode of God’s beingin loving self-emptying) and exaltation (of the humble and obedient,


crucified servant) as the pattern—the logic of solidarity—between Godand humankind. The pattern reveals both the divine disposition of lov-ing sovereignty and the proper human disposition as the sharing in andimitation of Jesus’s humble obedience. At the center of this logic is thecross—the stance in the world that most truly participates in the mes-sianic divine-human pattern of reconciliation (Yoder 2002, 105) that lib-erates human beings from bondage to the fallen “powers” (ordered bydomination) so as to participate in God’s new creation (ordered by “rev-olutionary subordination”).3 This new creation is pivotal for Yoder—notas a figure of speech but as a cosmic claim that must hold true on ev-ery level. It cannot be delimited by appeals to causal “necessity” thatcontradict this transformative messianic logic.

From the Pauline texts, Yoder moves to further intensifications of thelogic of solidarity in the Christologies of Hebrews and John. The earlychurch sought to express the meaning of the messianic event not onlyfor themselves but also for others, and not only to other Jews alreadyformed by the Hebrew scriptures and its categories of intelligibility (suchas the priestly and sacrificial tradition), but also to the Gentiles of thepagan world. The traditions and language of the pagans are centered in“ontology” (Yoder 2002, 130), speculatively concerned about the originsof things, related ultimately to the reality underlying the appearances.In Yoder’s view, New Testament Christological affirmations regardingpre-existence and creation are not designed to deliver new speculativeinformation; they are rather ways of expressing messianic priority overall cosmologies, including that found in the biblical narratives.

The process of theological growth and revision takes place in earlyChristianity through discriminating discernment. Not just a matter of

3 This cruciform logic, so central to Yoder’s political theology, is most clearly spelled outin chapter 8 (“Christ and Power”) and chapter 9 (“Revolutionary Subordination”) of ThePolitics of Jesus. Yoder’s position (heavily indebted to a little book by Hendrik Berkhof,Christ and the Powers, which Yoder first translated into English in 1962) is that Jesusbreaks the sovereignty of the fallen “principalities and powers” that bind human existencein slavery to self-glorifying and pretentious codes, customs, institutions, values, theories,that govern by the threat and fear of death. Jesus lives in a manner that is free fromthis threat, which leads to his crucifixion. By freely accepting this death, he exposes thedestructive dominion of these powers, and his resurrection reveals that these powers arenot ultimate—they are thus disarmed. The church is to herald this same freedom: “Whatcan be called the ‘otherness of the church’ is an attitude rooted in strength and not inweakness. It consists in being a herald of liberation and not a community of slaves. It is nota detour or a waiting period, looking forward to better days which one hopes might comea few centuries later; it was rather a victory when the church rejected the temptations ofZealot and Maccabean patriotism and Herodian collaboration. The church accepted as agift being the ‘new humanity’ created by the cross and not by the sword” (Yoder 1994a,148–49). This new humanity exhibits the pattern of freedom for service in the world, thecreative transformation of social relations by living according to an alternative structureof sovereignty.


translation or deductive elaboration, it is shaped by critical and creativeresponses to religious and socio-political challenges in the wider culture.Furthermore, “high Christology” expressing the cosmic lordship of Jesusas Messiah is present from the beginning (it is not a Hellenistic innova-tion). And it expresses, above all, the normativity of Jesus. The move-ment in the earliest stages is also toward, not away from, historicity, asthe gospels seek to clarify and represent “the concrete human content ofthe faith in Jesus of whom the most exalted things were already beingsaid” (Yoder 2002, 140). In considering the development of postapostolictheology, the same sort of process is at work. Dealing with challengesas they arose, the apostolic fathers did not try to represent everything(Yoder 2002, 153), and again Christology was at the center of reflection.The burden of Yoder’s interpretation of developments leading to Niceaand Chalcedon is to show that a high Christology entails a strong empha-sis on the normativity of the historical Jesus, while lower Christologies(such as the Arians formulated) tended toward cultural and politicalalliances with the Roman empire/emperor in order to gain greater socio-political respectability and “influence” (Yoder 2002, 199).4

Despite these hermeneutical efforts, it must be said that Yoder’s ac-count of the Hellenistic traditions—the Platonic and neo-Platonic Chris-tianity in particular—is generally superficial and unsympathetic. Thisleads him to make rather sweeping statements about the contrast be-tween the “Hebraic historic” and the “Greek onto-philosophic,” and torepresent the latter generally in negative terms. While he allows thatNicean trinitarian language of Father, Son, and Spirit is the way to com-municate that God is “love” in the language of ontology (Yoder 2002, 202),he believes the form moves us further away from Gospel narrative and itsdynamic eschatological realism. So also the subject matter moves awayfrom focusing on the resurrection and exaltation of the crucified Jesusto debate about the eternal status of the resurrected and exalted one.Chalcedon for its part sought to affirm the full humanity of Jesus in theface of Monophysite deification and the theological challenges unleashedin the Nicean affirmations. As in the case of Nicea, the Chalcedoniancreed was not a work of exegetical theology that is trying to understand

4 Yoder states: “If you lower your concept of Christ, then you can raise your vision ofthe emperor because the Logos was in both Jesus and the emperor. . . . If Jesus is a littlesmaller, the king will be a little higher, and that is just what Constantine and his advisorswanted.” On the other hand, Yoder suggests that the practical political realities were notso clear (which would seem to contradict the above claim): “But it must mean something tous that the Arians and the Nestorians—each in their own age—were less nationalistic, lesspolitically bound to the Roman Empire, more capable of criticizing the emperor, more vitalin missionary growth, more ethical, and more biblicist than the so-called orthodox churchesof the Empire. At the most, these creeds fruitfully define the nature of the problem withwhich we are struggling. They are helpful as a fence, but not as a faith” (Yoder 2002, 223).


the way different statements about Jesus might cohere. Rather it was try-ing to define and address a problem arising from the encounter betweendifferent linguistic and cultural worlds. Yoder takes the Anabaptist po-sition on the creeds, then—accepting them as part of the tradition andhistory of the church but not as having any final authority (Yoder 2002,222–23). That is, Yoder will not allow that the ontological and meta-physical categories of the creedal tradition have the kind of definitionalauthority possessed by the biblical narratives.

The creeds of classical Christianity may not set the dogmatic termsfor systematic theology in our own time, for two reasons. One is thatthe intellectual challenges and questions faced by Christians of anothertime and culture may well take different forms, and that to appeal to dog-matic formulations of the Greco-Roman world as the solution is to fallinto a kind of Gnosticism (ironically, since Gnosticism was the primaryadversary of early Christianity), which makes a speculative cosmologywith its insider language and systematic structure the measure of “be-longing” or orthodoxy (Yoder 2002, 258; cf. 275). High Christology, whichaffirms the priority of Jesus as Lord over all systems of speculation, is ananti-Gnostic approach. It also requires Christians to articulate the nor-mative meaning of Christ within the terms of the challenges, questions,and languages of the cultures and times in which they live—a normativemeaning displayed above all in the biblical texts. The second reason fornot granting the creedal tradition definitional authority, then, is thatit tends to turn attention away from the embodied historical narrativecontext in which the normative meaning of Christ is both displayed andworked out. This normative meaning is above all an ecclesial processand practice that ignores the historical character of revelation and itsimplications for imitative discipleship to its peril.

Yet this historical hermeneutic is precisely what Yoder himself nei-ther practices nor recognizes with regard to Augustine and the post-Constantinian “Christendom” era of Western Christianity. Augustine’stheological corpus is nothing if not exegetical and historical, though, ofcourse, it is also true that Augustine freely appropriates the “gold andsilver and clothing” of the pagan philosophers (and especially the Platon-ists) in order to put to use those resources in the service of the caritas ofthe messianic body (On Christian Doctrine II, 40–42). In doing so, how-ever, Augustine simply practices the hermeneutical approach advocatedalso by Yoder in his depiction of “diaspora ethics,” namely that, like exilicand diaspora Jews, Christians are called to live out their identity in acondition of “cosmopolitan homelessness” (Yoder 2003, 183–84; 1997, 51–52; 1994b, 133). Like Yoder, Augustine in City of God XIX, 26, articulatesthe mission of the “people of God” as a pilgrim people with an appeal tothe prophetic word of Jeremiah 29:7 to the people being taken into exile:“ . . .he bade them, by divine command, to go obediently into Babylon,


thereby serving God even by their patient endurance; and he himself ad-monished them to pray for Babylon, because ‘in its peace is your peace,’the temporal peace shared for the time being by good and wicked alike”(Augustine 1998, XIX, 26). Such an appeal does not hold up the virtuesof the Babylonians or the Romans for their own sake or ascribe to themsome independent religious or moral status, but rather uses them in theservice of another end (the end of true peace) by referring them to theultimate messianic peace of God. Insofar as the virtues (or any other use-ful conceptual or cultural categories) are treated as being self-sufficientpossessions without reference to the ultimate Good who bestows themas gifts, they become vices that undermine temporal peace. This is noless true for people in the church than it is for people in the pagan world.It is for this reason that the “prayer of the whole City of God during itspilgrimage on earth . . . cries out to God with the voice of all its members:‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’”(XIX, 27; cf. XXII, 23).

This penitential vision of the people of God as humble servants ratherthan self-sufficient dominators certainly seems compatible with Yoder’secclesial and political vision as well. Yet the context of Augustine’s dis-cussion in City of God begins to point up certain differences betweenhimself and Yoder. That is, Augustine is clear in XIX, 27, that “true righ-teousness [iustitia] insofar as it is directed towards a good end, consistsin this life more [or ‘rather,’ potius] in the remission of sin than in theperfection of virtue.” The reason for this, Augustine goes on to explain,is that true peace or full peace [plena pax] is unattainable in this life—itis a peace anticipated by faith that provides a “solace for our wretched-ness” rather than [potius] the “joy of blessedness.” Until our fallen mortalnature is healed in that final eschatological peace by the divine gift of im-mortality and incorruption, “peace” in the earthly sense will continue tobe mocked by the highly ambiguous “necessities” essential to governingand restraining the vices. He adverts to a favored text in Job 7:1 (LXX),“Is not human life upon earth a temptation?” This mortal life, in otherwords, is a penal life full of anxiety and the agonistic struggle betweenvirtue and vice (cf. XXI, 14–15).

We see here a moral tone quite different from Yoder’s emphasis onthe “new creation” initiated by the messianic event. Yoder shares withAugustine a seminal cosmology in which divine providence, active inthe humble causality of caritas, ultimately vanquishes the violent andpunitive necessities of fate—leading both Yoder and Augustine to appealto the exemplars of martyrdom rather than warrior heroes as most inkeeping with divine causality. (Augustine too asserts that the blood of themartyrs works as seed with the messianic grain of the cosmos [XXII, 7].)And yet in Augustine’s account of the social life, these tragic necessitiescontinue to necessitate corporal household punishment, judicial torture,


war, and other tragic duties that befall the Christian sapientes seekingto use responsibly the peace of the earthly city (XIX, 5–6).

Gerald Schlabach valiantly argues that Augustine’s purpose in thesepassages is about descriptive indictment, not normative guidance: “It isone of Augustine’s many and characteristic endeavors to drive his readersto despair precisely in order that they like he will look elsewhere for hope,recognize their need for God and cry out for deliverance” (Schlabach 2004,225). This is true, and yet it seems no less true that for Augustine, theordered concordia of the earthly city requires evil necessities (especiallyof the corporeal and punitive sort) even of those whose leadership ismotivated by loving duty rather than a lust for mastery (XIX, 14–15).This is part of the punitive servitude of the fallen order to which evenpilgrim Christians, “alien citizens” of the earthly city, belong and whosepeace they must “of necessity” use (XIX, 17). Yoder will refuse preciselysuch “necessity” language in his depiction of messianic ethics.

At the end of his life, Yoder was also working on the question of pun-ishment (another of his numerous desktop publications of unfinishedfragments—this one yet unpublished—is entitled “You Have It Com-ing: Good Punishment. The Legitimate Social Function of Punitive Be-haviour”). As in other places where he discusses this question, he ac-knowledges with New Testament authors (Romans 13 and I Peter 2, forexample) that modes of retributive justice have their place both politi-cally and domestically. Christians therefore ought to be willingly subor-dinate to such disciplinary structures—not out of fear or spiritual sub-servience, but out of obedience to an even higher and precedent orderrooted in divine gift, or grace. Thus Christians will not revolt againstauthority even when they are unjustly punished, or indeed punishedfor doing what is right. The point is that Christians will not return evilfor evil, and while they are voluntarily subordinate to structures of re-tributive justice, they do not themselves live by such necessities. Theylive rather by reconciling forgiveness, the measure of justice revealed inChrist, which breaks the reciprocal cycle of offense, violence, and counter-violence. To do otherwise is to fail to “refer” earthly peace properly to itsultimate origin and end in God.

Here, of course, it is precisely an exegetical and theological engage-ment that may open up fruitfully between Yoder and Augustine, ratherthan the terse caricatured dismissals of Augustine—his Platonism andhis “Constantinianism”—that one tends to get in Yoder. Were we to followthis exegetical engagement further in terms of messianic political the-ology, we might discover many shared topoi with mutually illuminatingpoints of contrast. For example, Augustine understands the diversity oflanguages in the Babel story of Genesis 11 to be the result of God’s pun-ishment imposed upon human pride that seeks to build up a monolithic


city against God’s sovereignty (XVI, 4).5 The confusion of communicationthat results is precisely characteristic of Babylon itself, the epitome ofhubristic human empire that stands against God’s purposes. The pun-ishment, claims Augustine, fits the crime: “Because the power of a rulerlies in his tongue, it was there that Nimrod’s pride was condemned, sothat he who refused to understand and obey God’s bidding was himselfnot understood when he gave his bidding to men.” To scatter the proudin the imagination of their hearts is the punitive but pleasing conse-quence of divine judgment, and it shows precisely that punishment neednot be separated from what is good—which is how Yoder construes the“punishment” interpretation of Babel (Yoder 1997, 61–62; 2003, 188–89).

Yet the punitive aspects of diversity, laments Augustine, remain withus as the diversity of tongues continues to divide people from one another.Our differences divide and render human association and communica-tion perilously difficult (XIX, 7). Such punishing differences lead to evernew imperial political impositions of one language “as a bond of peaceand society” and of social cooperation for the sake of shared goods, thatnevertheless come at tremendous human cost of violence and bloodshed.Such imposed unities are necessary, claims Augustine, but also miser-able. Of course citizens of the heavenly city on pilgrimage as exiles inthe earthly city subordinate themselves to such necessities, but they donot themselves impose them. So ten chapters later, in XIX, 17, of City ofGod, Augustine has this to say:

5 So also does Oliver O’Donovan follow this Augustinian reading of the Tower of Babelin his Common Objects of Love: “. . .the story of the Tower of Babel saw plurality as anecessary restraint, a curb on evil to which unity had given free reign” (O’Donovan 2002,40). For O’Donovan and Augustine, then, plurality is a social problem to be solved (“re-deemed”) through disciplined self-restraint (since the real problem is the sin of idolatry,not the created fact of difference). It is not itself “good news” (as Yoder has it). Therefore,it is interesting that O’Donovan’s Christological grounding for “self-restraint, a patiencethat is prepared not to grasp” after social redemption prematurely (2002, 41) is Christ’screedal status—very God and very man—as the “double representative” around whom theuniversal society (without particular identity) comes into being, in a negative, ascetic sense(2002, 44). For Yoder, of course, it is quite otherwise: “The ordinariness of the humannessof Jesus is the warrant for the generalizability of his reconciliation. The non-territorialparticularity of his Jewishness defends us against selling out to any wider world’s claim tobe really wider, or to be self-validating. . . .The particularity of incarnation is the univer-sality of the good. There is no road but the low road. The truth has come to our side of theditch. . . .The real issue is not whether Jesus can make sense in a world far from Galilee, butwhether—when he meets us in our world, as he does in fact—we want to follow him” (Yoder1984, 62). Thus different normative meanings regarding the relations between particular-ity/plurality and universality/reconciliation flow from different (Christologically informed)interpretations of the Babel story.


Therefore, for as long as this Heavenly City is a pilgrim on earth, shecalls out citizens of all nations and all languages, and brings together asociety of pilgrims without concern for differences in the customs, laws, andinstitutions by which earthly peace is achieved or maintained. She does notrescind or destroy these things, however. For whatever differences there areamong the various nations, these all tend towards the same end of earthlypeace. Thus, she preserves and follows them, provided only that they donot impede the religion by which we are taught that the one supreme andtrue god is to be worshipped.

While Augustine does not advocate externally imposed unities as a so-lution to the punitive aspects of diversity—indeed he believes such impo-sitions often contribute to greater misery and punishment—he does notminimize the challenges of multiplicity and difference for earthly peace.The secular is precisely this ambiguous context in which earthly peaceis in the process of being judged as well as transformed through refer-ral to the ultimate peace of the heavenly city. This ambiguity is presentin non-Christians and Christians alike, though Christians are to dealwith it through penitential prayer and humble serving love, not the im-position of unambiguous monolinguistic regimes of political conformismso characteristic of human empires. The city of God on pilgrimage, saysAugustine, speaks the truth of God by humble penitents in all languages(XVIII, 49); the kingdom militant is the church governed by martyrs whowitness to the truth through death, not killing (XX, 9–10; XXII, 6–7).

While Yoder agrees with Augustine about this, and indeed offers amore extensive account of how the church witnesses to a different ethi-cal vision of peace in the messianic “form of the servant,” he seems lesswilling to concede the ambiguity and the punitive character of diversityand the continuing struggle for earthly peace for Christians. That is, hedisplays greater confidence in the agency of the church to maintain avisible messianic witness in the earthly city without attention to thoseinternal conflicts generated by temptations of visibility (visible virtue,visible goodness, visible “results”) that so plagued Augustine’s ecclesialawareness. For Augustine, the fact that the net of the visible churchcomprises both the elect and the reprobate who swim together withoutseparation (XVIII, 49) would be true whether or not that church baptizesinfants in a “state church” or baptizes adults in a “believers’ church.” Yo-der’s principle of voluntariety has too sanguine a vision of the humanwill and its ongoing conflicts with fallen desires. This debate betweensinful necessity and the freedom of the will and its implications for mes-sianic political ethics is important, not only for secular politics but alsofor the understanding of Christian moral agency and the penitential self-understanding of the church.

A second topos of exegetical engagement between Yoder and Augustineconcerns their respective accounts of biblical political theology and here


too the similarities and the differences are important. In Preface to Theol-ogy, Yoder organizes his “systematic treatment of Christological themes”(the second, constructive half of the book) around the Protestant “three-fold office” of Christ as prophet, priest, and king—the marks of Israel’ssocio-political life in the Old Testament, all of which are related to theMessiah. Yoder relates each of these offices to classical theological topoi:king to eschatology, priest to atonement, and prophet to revelation. Notsurprisingly, and in Barthian fashion, he begins with eschatology and themost explicit claim to Christ’s royal sovereignty. In the Hebrew scrip-ture, the king is the ambivalent expression and personification of Is-rael’s identity—ambivalent because true kingship is reserved for YHWHalone.

In other writings, notably in For the Nations and The Jewish-ChristianSchism Revisited, Yoder subordinates the kingship tradition to theJeremian prophetic and diaspora tradition. This latter tradition becomesnormative in the face of the “failed kingship experiment” of ancientIsrael (Yoder 2003, 70–71, 187–88). What Yoder argues here is not thatthe Davidic project is restored in Jesus, but that Jesus “renewed thedefinition of kingship to fit with the priesthood and prophecy. He sawthat the suffering servant is king as much as he is priest and prophet.The cross is neither foolish nor weak, but natural” (Yoder 1997, 212; cf.2002, 243–44). Eschatological kingship represents God’s people in thesuffering servant, as the one who will restore Israel to her true iden-tity. And not only Israel but also the whole created order, insofar as thesuffering messianic king fulfills the original creative intent of God andthus expresses the nature of divine sovereignty in the world (Yoder 2002,246).

If this is so, then obedience is possible for those who live according tothe “new creation” made present in the kingship of Christ. These exaltedaxioms lead Yoder to the following claim: “The fact that God extendsChrist’s reign in a hidden way through the powers [who in their violentrebellion reveal their defeat] and in a visible way through the servantchurch is the reason for history. This is why time goes on” (Yoder 2002,248). That is, the church moves history by the servanthood that partic-ipates in the divine messianic sovereignty, which transforms the worldtoward shalom through suffering love. From this it follows, argues Yoder,that eschatology cannot be understood in Platonic terms of immortalityor timeless fulfillment, as Augustine envisioned it (Yoder 2002, 249, 266,276). The biblical God is not atemporal but “hypertemporal,” whose tem-poral dynamism is in radical excess of our own mortal historicity. Cre-ation and providence require this and cannot be interpreted from withinthe framework of an ontological contrast between temporal bodies andeternal souls. It is the apocalyptic claim that a crucified criminal is cosmiclord, that the cross represents the causal movement of creation toward


God’s peace, that ought to scandalize human beings, not the rupture ofcertain metaphysical or ontological categories.

Here again we see Yoder setting up a normative political, theological,and ethical contrast between biblical eschatology and Platonic ontology,with Augustine serving as the representative (without extensive anal-ysis) of the Hellenist deformations of post-Constantinian Christianity.This is evident also in The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, wherethe “Augustinian” is portrayed as follows:

In the Augustinian framework, finitude and sin tend to coincide. Faithful-ness or ‘perfection’ is an ‘ideal.’ The visible, the historical, participates bydefinition in the fallen state of all creation. Full obedience is by definitionimpossible, on grounds not of a wrong decision or rebellion but of ontology.No human being, no visible community, can be faithful to the will of Godwithin a fallen history [Yoder 2003, 122].

Furthermore, claims Yoder, Augustine’s contrast between the two citiesis not a biblical eschatological contrast between the just and peaceablerule of God and the idolatrous rule of human sovereignty, but rather aneo-Platonic ontological one between the ideal heavenly realm of tran-scendent eternity and the finite sinful realm of temporal social life (Yo-der 2003, 160). This shift from the Jewishness of early Christianityto the Hellenism of the Roman Empire leads to a metaphysical andmoral dualism between eternal messianic ideals impossible to realize onearth and earthly necessities imposed by the responsibilities of temporalpower.

Augustine’s biblical political theology of the two cities in the secondhalf of The City of God, however, diverges significantly from Yoder’s car-icatured account. His account of the two cities in Books XV–XVIII intheir historical development is, in fact, rooted in the apocalyptic Paulineanthropology of flesh and spirit and the two Adams typology, related tothe two covenants represented allegorically/typologically by Sarah andHagar. It is a complex, structured exegetical paradigm that is best under-stood, not Platonically, but eschatologically (see Van Oort 1991; Kamlah1951). This means that the allegorical types may not be “spiritualized”as ciphers for speculation but ought rather to be “analogized” in a logicof spiritual-corporeal participation in the ordering of loves, delineatedin Book XIV, that are worked out in history—in the saeculum “in whichthe dying accede to the newly-born who succeed them” (XV, 1). It is herethat Israel’s political theology becomes significant for Augustine. It is analternative history to that of pax Romana, founded as it was on the frat-ricide of Remus by Romulus in a power struggle over temporal goods, acharacteristic of the violent self-division (adversus se ipsam, XV, 4–5; cf.XVIII, 2) of desire in the earthly city. Israel’s history may be interpreted


with reference to another fratricide that symbolizes a different kind ofstruggle—the murder of Abel by Cain, rooted in “diabolical envy,” in thedesire to possess privately and selfishly the good that may only be en-joyed when shared with others in the concord of love.6

This is a struggle between the city of God and the earthly city over thetrue (spiritual and political) meaning of justice and peace. The humblereferral of all loves to the shared goodness given by God is characteristicof those who imitate their rex optimus, Christ (XVII,16). This messianickingship is prophetically revealed as the preeminent priest king accord-ing to the order of Melchizedek (XVII, 17), whose name literally means“my king is righteous,” the first priest king of Salem, the city of peacethat becomes Jerusalem (Genesis 14:17–18; Psalm 110; Hebrews 5). Theother city, of course, presided over by the “father of lies” is symbolizedby Babylon, meaning “confusion,” rooted in the self-division and warfareintroduced by pride and envy. If the exemplars of the earthly city thatorders its loves according to the flesh are warriors, the exemplars of thecity of God on pilgrimage in the world are martyrs, in imitation of Abel-Christ. The martyrs become intelligible as exemplars only prophetically,by faith—as in the case of that vir optimus et fortissimus Saint Paul, whogloried in his weakness, was crucified with Christ, was made a spectacle(XIV, 9), and yet as an exemplary embodiment of the messianic form ofthe servant shows us the standard of human justice (De Trinitate VIII,9–10). It is a standard that is discerned only through the eye of the soulformed already by the imitation of divine love; it cannot be reduced toan external moral exemplarism. This is why, when Augustine reflects onthe exemplarity of Davidic kingship in City of God XVIII, 20, it is not tonote David’s great warrior exploits or nation-building but rather his pen-itential humility in seeking the forgiveness of sins. Indeed the Davidickingship is not central to Augustine’s exegetical political theology exceptinsofar as it discloses (through the Psalms especially) the messianic hope,symbolized in the figure behind the city David renamed Jerusalem (thepossession of no tribe) after making it the capital—namely the priest-king Melchizedek. Davidic kingship is prophetic insofar as it points pen-itentially beyond itself toward royal messianism. This is not a processof trans-historical idealism to be spiritually realized only in transcen-dent eternity; it is a process that is worked out historically via those whoimitate the form of the servant that radically refers all virtue to God’sgoodness. In all of these ways, then, it may be fruitful to explore furtherthe suggestive intersections between the biblical political messianismsof Augustine and Yoder.

6 Superbia and invidia go together in diabolus, the exemplar of the vices of pride andenvy: see City of God XIV, 3; XV, 5; On the Trinity XII, 15.


3. Jewish and Christian Political Messianism

In his final years, Yoder’s exploration of the social embodiment ofJesus’s messianic vision and practice led him to a critical reconceptionof the standard account of the Jewish–Christian schism (Yoder 2003).The standard account, Yoder claims, is too reified and cannot adequatelyrepresent the true reality, either historiographically or theologically.7 Itis rooted in conceptions of normative Judaism and normative Christian-ity that render them mutually exclusive religions, but only by overlook-ing the actual historical and theological diversity in both traditions andin their interactions. Revisiting the standard account critically and re-covering the diversity, Yoder believes, might open up a more engagingdialogue regarding Jewish and Christian identities and ethics in a post-Christendom, post-Holocaust context.

The assumption that there was a normative homogeneous rabbinicJudaism centered in Palestine from which Paul decisively broke awayin order to found a new normative religion, patterned after Jesus’srejection of normative Judaism, is questionable on several accounts.Yoder argues that Paul did not found another religion but rather definedone more stream within Jewry that could only be intelligible within thebackground of Jewish messianism and defined in relation to Jewish mis-sion to the Gentiles. The Pauline understanding of messianic mission,furthermore, was not new, nor was it “founded” by Jesus. The notion ofdiaspora (galuth) as mission is present in Jeremiah and in BabylonianJewry long before Paul, and is itself rooted in an interpretation of theJewish Scriptures and the meaning of Abrahamic identity and people-hood to which Jesus’s messianism is closely tied. What changed in Paul,

7 It is beyond the scope of this essay and my competence to evaluate the historiographicaccount. However, recent scholarship seems to support Yoder’s critical assessment of the“standard account” or “master narrative” of Jewish-Christian schism—see now especiallyBecker and Reed 2003, 2–3: “Contrary to the ‘Parting’ model, our sources suggest thatdevelopments in both traditions continued to be shaped by contacts between Jews andChristians, as well as by their shared cultural contexts. Even after the second century, theboundaries between ‘Jewish’ and ‘Christian’ identities often remained less than clear, con-sistent with the ambiguities in the definition of both ‘Jew’ and ‘Christian’ . . . .Accordingly, agrowing number of scholars have begun to challenge the ‘Parting’ model, citing its method-ological paucity, its inadequacy as a historical account, and its inability to explain muchof our primary evidence. Spurning the simplicity of the notion of a single, early, and deci-sive separation between the two religions, many have turned to explore now approachesfor understanding the relationship(s) between Jews and Christians in the centuries aftertheir purported ‘Parting’. . . .Rather than approaching Judaism and Christianity as mono-lithic entities that partook in a single act of separation, we here attempt to illuminatethe broad range of regional and cultural variation in the encounters between differentbiblically based religious groups—including Jews and Christians, but also those so-called‘Jewish Christians’ and ‘Judaizers’ who so strain the dichotomous definitions of modernscholarship.”


then, was not his “religion,” but his belief that in Jesus the messianic ageand the eschatological ingathering of the Gentiles had begun. The exclu-sivist lines between early Christian messianism and rabbinic Judaismwere not rigidly drawn until the Gentile cultural political establishmentdesignated “Christendom” defined itself over against Judaism from thefourth century on.8 In Yoder’s view, this entailed as much a distorted reifi-cation of Jesus and Pauline messianism as it did of Judaism. Judaism assuch never rejected Jesus or Paul—there could be disagreement aboutmessianic claims and biblical interpretation within the tradition itself—and Christian messianism need not have become anti-Jewish. Given thebreakdown of the Christendom establishment, Yoder is interested in re-visiting the question of the messianic once again as an open question tobe taken up by Jews and Christians together in dialogue: “The spectrumof differences within each of the faith communities is now broader thanthe distance between their centres; the terrain of their overlap may againbecome substantial” (Yoder 2003, 62).

Yoder of course brings his own normative agenda to this dialogue,arguing that the essential trajectory of Jeremian “diaspora Judaism”leads directly to the missionary messianism of Jesus the Jewish paci-fist and Paul his great Judaizing apostle to the Gentiles. This calls intoquestion the “standard account” of the Jewish–Christian schism at thelevel of ethics, which Yoder characterizes as follows: “the Jews” rejectedJesus’s messianic claims because they sought an earthly kingdomwhereas Jesus offered a spiritual kingdom; Jesus’s pacifism is not onlya rejection of Old Testament holy war and violent retributive justice butalso represents an interiorized dispositional ethic of love in contrast toan external legal covenant. According to Yoder, however, the Judaism ofJesus’s time was shaped by the Jeremian notion of peoplehood identitythat had abandoned kingship and nationalist sovereignty for diasporacommunity, military action for trust in divine providence, and a purelyexternal legal covenant for a voluntarist covenant of the heart. This pre-pares the way for Yoder’s characterization of both the “mental structure”(Yoder 2003, 82–83) and the sociological markers (Yoder 2003, 170–71,187) of Jewish pacifism and diaspora ethics, a depiction that highlightsthe parallels not only with Yoder’s description of early Christianity but

8 In this regard, too Yoder’s account is confirmed in recent historical scholarship. SeeBecker and Reed 2003, 22–23: “. . . even with regard to the Roman Empire, a strong case hasbeen made that the fourth century CE is a far more plausible candidate for a decisive turningpoint than any date in the earlier period. It is, however, perhaps less profitable to debatethe exact date of the ‘Parting’ than to question our adherence to a model that prompts us tosearch for a single turning point that ushered in a global change for all varieties of Judaismand Christianity, in all communities and locales.” For Yoder, Constantinianism is preciselysuch a global model—setting the religious terms so as to establish generalized ethical andpolitical control over the relevant categories.


also with radical “free church” Protestantism and the so-called “peacechurches” (chapters 4–6).9 In effect, then, the ethics and theo-politics ofJesus and of pacifist diaspora Judaism are much more closely relatedto one another than to the ethics and theo-politics either of the Davidickingship or of post-Constantinian Christendom. It was in the process ofbecoming non-Jewish that Christianity also became non-pacifist (Yoder2003, 72), and correlatively, modern forms of statist Zionism are indebtedmore to Christendom than to Jewish theo-politics (Yoder 2003, 106–7).

Yoder’s account of Christian-Jewish messianism is intended as aprovocation to further dialogue. It is therefore appropriate that theposthumously published Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited containshelpful commentaries by the co-editors, postliberal Jewish scholar Pe-ter Ochs, and one of Yoder’s foremost Christian interpreters, MichaelCartwright. Both are critical of what they consider to be residual super-sessionist tendencies in Yoder’s work. While deeply appreciative of Yo-der’s alternative to the “standard account,” Ochs argues that Yoder’s di-aspora pacifist portrayal of exilic Judaism is an overstatement or reifica-tion in the service of a “doctrinaire pacifism” that excludes other norma-tive possibilities and features of diaspora and Rabbinic Judaism. HenceYoder is not only overly restrictive in his dualistic depiction of theo-political options within Judaism, but he unfairly dismisses other optionsas not essentially or authentically Jewish insofar as they fail to conformto the pacifist messianism of early Christianity—or indeed of the An-abaptist restitutionist vision of such an ethic. In his response to Yoder’scompelling reading of Stephan Zweig’s Jeremias (composed during WorldWar I), Ochs suggests:

The sad, tragic prophet Jeremiah dominates Yoder’s book in the end. . . .Forboth Zweig and Yoder, chapter 29 of Jeremiah’s prophecy offers a scripturalwarrant for their desires to join the fate of the people Israel directly to theuniversal goal of redeeming humanity and, thereby, to avoid the embar-rassment, burden, and unreasonable complexity of Israel’s landedness. Forboth Zweig and Yoder, there is no middle between Israel’s exilic separationfrom the land and the Maccabean strategy for remaining in it: that is, be-tween an ancient foreshadowing of modern nationalist sovereignty in thatland and Israel’s forced separation from it in this world [Yoder 2003, 203].

9 Yoder’s claim is stated concisely as follows: “. . . Judaism within Christendom sinceConstantine has the shape which historians later call ‘radical reformation’ or ‘peace church’.Jews expect and accept minority status. They deny ultimate loyalty to any local nation orregime, which is what war presupposes, while they provisionally accept its administration.They look on past and present righteous violence and religious nationalism, including thatof their own ancient history, as mistaken. . . . In sum: for over a millennium the Jews ofthe diaspora were the closest thing to the ethic of Jesus existing on any significant scaleanywhere in Christendom” (81–82).


Such a dichotomous modern and tragic logic may have defined Jewishlife in late-modern Europe but its unmediated tension does not fit post-Shoah Judaism, which must bring together both exilic and landed lifeinto an emerging new theo-political relation. Here, argues Ochs, Yoder’sparadigm remains unhelpful and burdensome.

Michael Cartwright further calls into question Yoder’s binary logic,in which his master narrative of Jeremian-messianic galuth becomesnormative as the model of Jewish–Christian faithfulness, and landedmonarchial Israel, narrated in terms of pagan kingship and Constan-tinian establishment, the model of unfaithfulness. Not only does thisoverlook the “pluriform character” of covenant peoplehood both in theHebrew Bible and in postexilic and postbiblical Judaism more gener-ally, but it also constructs a moral history of peoplehood that privilegesChristian messianism as the normative essence of the Jewish–Christiandialogue (Yoder 2003, 228). Furthermore, it is a moral narrative cen-tered upon the reductionist hermeneutics of obedience articulated in thepacifist vision of the Anabaptist tradition. The result, ironically, is anon-dialogical and ultimately non-peaceable narrative that “erases thecovenantal basis of Jewish peoplehood even as it attempts to redescribeJewish identity within the framework of the ‘new covenant’ of Jesus”(Yoder 2003, 229). At the heart of this covenantal basis of peoplehoodlies the vexed question of the “election” of Israel—an issue taken upcentrally if controversially by Paul in Romans 9–11, but ignored by Yo-der in favor of a moral history more attuned to the question of humanfaithfulness than to divine agency. Here Cartwright is indebted to thecritique of Yoder developed in Douglas Harink’s new book, Paul amongthe Postliberals (Harink 2003, chapter 4), which argues that Yoder losessight of Paul’s Jewish apocalypticism by focusing on the moral and vol-untary character of diaspora Judaism as a way of life, rather than on apeople that receives its covenant identity as a divinely given gift even inexile.

Harink’s argument is not that Yoder’s messianic ethics is not Pauline.To the contrary, Harink argues that Yoder’s Politics of Jesus, more thanhalf of which is devoted to interpreting Paul, incorporated and antici-pated some of the most important developments in recent Pauline schol-arship, especially as concerns the political and the ethical implicationsof Paul’s apocalyptic messianism (Harink 2003, 106; cf. Hays 1996, 245–46). This is extended, Harink suggests, in Yoder’s Pauline articulationof the ekklesia as a “body politics” (Yoder 1992), the social form that“justification by faith” takes in the world, characterized above all by areconciliation between Jews and Gentiles in the messianic community.In these ways, Yoder’s work has provided a compelling and coherent ren-dition of Paul’s political theology and its implications for contemporaryethics.


The problem with Yoder’s account of Judaism, argues Harink, is thatit is not Pauline enough. That is, unlike Paul in his letters, Yoder seeksto provide a moral history of Judaism that focuses more on the questionon Jewish faithfulness or unfaithfulness than on God’s action (Harink2003, 201–2; 2004). Paul’s position is clear that a messianic theology andan “adequate ecclesiology must give priority to election over ethics, thefaithfulness of God over the faithfulness of Jews and Gentiles” (Harink2003, 203). By contrast, Yoder tends to focus on Jewishness as a “wayof life,” a chosen set of ideas and practices. Harink’s critique of Yoderreturns us to the question of voluntarism. Paul’s insistence that “God’selection of a specific, nonsubstitutable, fleshly historical people” (Harink2003, 202) is replaced in Yoder by a notion of Abrahamic peoplehoodthat relativizes the historical and ethnic embodiment of the people ofIsrael for a messianic diaspora identity rooted in a faith and a path offaithfulness that must be freely chosen. Cartwright expands on this samecritical point, suggesting that Yoder redescribes the covenant with Israelin supersessionist terms:

The notion of fulfillment that he puts forward . . . which he imaged as a‘permanently open border between what came before and what came next’,conveys the strong sense of ‘voluntariness’ that he ascribes to Jews andChristians alike. At the same time, the way Yoder deploys the term ‘ful-filment’ (in opposition to abolition of the law) also functions to delimit theidentity of authentic or ‘true’ Judaism. Simultaneously, then, Yoder is open-ing ‘the border’ between Christianity and Judaism even as he re-locatesthe centre of identity for Jews (in effect re-describing membership in syna-gogues as ‘voluntary’) in a way that frames the conversation as ‘messianic’by definition” [Cartwright in Yoder 2003, 228].

Whatever else one might want to say critically about Yoder’s depic-tion of Paul as “Judaizer” of the Gentiles (or about his “binary logic”of hermeneutical judgment regarding the measure of obedience–disobe-dience or faithfulness–unfaithfulness), surely it is passing strange tosuggest that in “framing” the conversation in terms of the messianic heis himself being unfaithful to Paul! And yet it would seem that Yoderhimself paved the way for precisely this kind of interpretation.

In The Politics of Jesus, Yoder argues that Paul’s messianic theologyhas to do not with a contrast between justification by faith and justi-fication by law, but (here following Markus Barth) with the more basicquestion of the social form of the covenant people of God—was it to in-clude the Gentiles or not, and would the Gentiles first have to becomeTorah-keeping Jews or not? Yoder answers: “What was at stake in the‘proclamation of the righteousness of God to both Jew and Gentile’ wasprecisely that it was to be proclaimed to both and that both were to be-come parts of the new believing community, some having come by way


of the law and some not” (Yoder 1994a, 217, my emphasis). The primarymeaning of Paul’s language of justification and reconciliation, then, hasto do with the extension of neighbor love to enemies, breaking down thehostilities that divide through the renunciation of violence and the en-actment of a new messianic covenant, the “new law” of Jesus’s Sermonon the Mount which is indeed nothing but an interpretation concerningthe fulfillment of the Jewish law itself in its halakhic and aggadic unity(Yoder 2003, 140).

Without entering into the debate about the “new perspective” on Pauland the “Lutheran” Paul that pertains to these matters,10 let me insteadconclude with reference to another posthumously published work, thevery interesting Political Theology of Paul, by the Jewish philosopher Ja-cob Taubes (Taubes 2004). Like Cartwright and Harink, Taubes—whosestudy revolves around an interpretation of Romans 8–11—argues thatfor Paul God’s founding election of a people is of central importance to hispolitical theology, which is fundamentally Jewish even while being mes-sianic. Like Yoder, Taubes suggests that Paul understands himself to becalled as a Jeremian prophet to the nations. This calling is rooted in therevelation of Jesus enthroned as Messiah, who therefore poses a politicalchallenge both to the empire sovereignty of Rome and to the “nomos con-sensus” of Hellenistic Judaism. However, and this is for Taubes a point ofkey importance, what is at stake in this messianic revelation is nothingless than pas/pan: “all, every, the whole,” including the election of “allIsrael” (Taubes 2004, 1, 10, 25, 47, passim). It is here that Paul’s mes-sianic transvaluation of values carries its most intense political charge,as it calls into question any and all reliance upon nomos, whether Mosaicor Roman, Jewish or Greek:

It isn’t nomos but rather the one who was nailed to the cross by nomos whois the imperator! . . . This transvaluation turns Jewish-Roman-Hellenisticupper-class theology on its head, the whole mishmash of Hellenism. Sure,Paul is also universal, but by virtue of the “eye of the needle” of the crucifiedone. . . .So it’s a universalism, but one that signifies the election of Israel.Only that Israel is now being transfigured, and then in the end it says pasIsrael [Taubes 2004, 24–25].

For Paul, the messianic establishment of the people of God cannot beunderstood in terms of blood kinship, but in terms of the kinship ofpromise—a promise now revealed in the Messiah whom the people haverejected, condemned according to the law.

A new founding of the people of God is occurring here and Taubesshows, through a comparative reading of Romans 8–9, Exodus 32–34,

10 For the landmark account of this debate in Pauline scholarship, which is in manyways pertinent to this discussion, see now Westerholm 2004.


and Berakhot 32a, that the central issue is the peoples’ redemption fromsin, atonement. Here the Paul-Moses typology comes into view. Paul, ar-gues Taubes, is “outbidding Moses” by suggesting that in Messiah theinner meaning of the Law is realized in a manner that establishes anew people of God made up of both Jews and Gentiles. This is done, ofcourse, not via ethics (a new ethics) but via “spirit”—“pneuma as a forcethat transforms a people and that transforms the text” (Taubes 2004, 45).This is why Paul in Romans 9–11 proceeds with constant reference to theTorah and focuses above all on the question of election, with particularreference to the Abrahamic covenant of promise that precedes circum-cision. The Gentiles, who are not Israel according to the flesh, may beelected to the peoplehood of Israel via the spirit and by faith in Messiahwho hangs condemned on the cross. This does not mean, however, thatfor Paul there are two valid paths—the Law for Jews and Messiahfor Gentiles. No, according to Taubes’s Paul, the Messianic covenantenacts atonement for all—but only by way of a remnant, the remnantof faith. That is, justification by faith in Messiah is indeed the centralquestion.

It is precisely at this point, states Taubes, that the central importanceof enemy-love for Paul’s political theology comes into view. “As regardsthe gospel,” Paul says in Romans, “they [non-Messianic Jews] are ene-mies [of God; not in the Greek text], for your sake . . . ” (Romans 11:28).There is nothing moralistic here. The point is that enemy-love is notonly characteristic of God (in every direction breaking enmity down), butmust be characteristic also of human political community. The sovereignMessiah, by suffering death, bears witness to the breakdown of everyhuman claim to self-sufficient autonomy. It is God who elects a peoplefor the purpose of redeeming all. There is no ground in Messiah for any-one, Jew or Gentile, slave or free, to make a claim to represent divineelection and purpose in anything other than the martyrdom and power-less “I” of faith that lives in the world as the sacrificial messianic body(Taubes 2004, 87). Unveiled here is a radical challenge to human polit-ical sovereignty that takes its stand on a completely different politicaltheological ground—pace Carl Schmitt and his Christian authorizationof state sovereignty. In a letter to Schmitt, Taubes writes:

Perhaps there will still come a moment at which we can speak about whatis to me the most significant Jewish as well as Christian political theology,Romans 9–11. The word “enemy” also appears there, in the absolute sense,but—and this seems to me to be the most decisive of decisive points—connected with “loved” [2004, 112–13].

What is significant here, of course, is that for Carl Schmitt the foundingconcept of political sovereignty is the constituting political power behindthe law that entails a decision about the relationship of nature to law.


“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” says Schmitt in the fa-mous opening line to his definition of sovereignty (Schmitt 1985, 5). Thisrequires that sovereignty be seen not in strictly juridical terms, but asa limit concept in which there is an agential power who decides on the“state of emergency” that suspends the normal rule of law. For Schmitt,this founding notion of sovereignty must be read together with the found-ing “definition of the political”—namely, the distinction between friendand enemy (Schmitt 1996, 26).

The ultimate challenge to this basic political principle, as Schmittrecognizes, is articulated in the words of Jesus, “Love your enemies”(Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27)—words that Schmitt, in keeping with conven-tional Christendom political ethics, regards in terms of a private, spiri-tual, and ultimately depoliticizing ethic. Schmitt comments:

Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems didit occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of lovetoward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the political sense need notbe hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense tolove one’s enemy, i.e. one’s adversary [Schmitt 1996, 29].

Precisely on this point Jacob Taubes disagrees, and so also John Yoder, inrecognizing that for the messianic vision of the New Testament, enemyis not a private concept relating to private feuds. It is no less a public andpolitical concept for being related to salvation and how God is related tofriends and enemies.

For the record, we might note that Schmitt is also in error historically.The Schleitheim Confession (1527), which renounces the weapons of vi-olence to protect friends and ward off enemies, was largely drafted bythe hand of Michael Sattler, a former Benedictine who became an im-portant early Anabaptist leader. Upon his return from the Schleitheimconference, Sattler and other Anabaptists were arrested, interrogated,and tortured, before being condemned to death for (among other charges)refusing to wage war against the Turks, the great enemy of Christendom.(See the account of Sattler’s trial in Yoder 1973.) The reason Sattler givesfor this refusal is no less agonistic and political than is the injunction byChristendom political authorities to wage war: there are enemies, andthey are to be loved, not killed, in obedience to the messianic teachings ofthe kingdom of God ordered by the “perfection of Christ.” These enemies,states Sattler, include not only the Turks:

If the Turk comes, he should not be resisted, for it stands written: thou shaltnot kill. We should not defend ourselves against the Turks or our otherpersecutors, but with fervent prayer should implore God that He might beour defense and our resistance. As to me saying that if waging war wereproper I would rather take the field against the so-called Christians who


persecute, take captive, and kill true Christians, than against the Turks,this was for the following reason: the Turk is a genuine Turk and knowsnothing of the Christian faith. He is a Turk according to the flesh. Butyou claim to be Christians, boast of Christ, and still persecute the faithfulwitnesses of Christ. Thus you are Turks according to the Spirit [Yoder 1973,72–73].

This messianic pacifism is therefore no liberal strategy of depoliticizationthrough the individualization and privatization of the public realm. It isnothing less than a declaration of war, a war of messianic sovereigntyover against all other political sovereignties (whether ancient or mod-ern, religio-cosmological or secularist) that order human relations onnon-messianic terms. But it is a war waged by martyrs who do not resisttheir enemies through violence, but witness to another way, the mes-sianic path of enemy-love. Such a politics, of course, will have no moralgrounds for boasting in its own strength or virtue or purity. Messianicsovereignty dispossesses the faithful, as is indicated in the hos me logicof I Corinthians 7:29–31:

I mean . . . the time (kairos) has become contracted; in what remains (toloipon) let those who have wives live as if they did not (hos me) have them,and those who mourn as if not (hos me) mourning, and those who rejoice asif not (hos me) rejoicing, and those who buy as if not (hos me) possessing,and those who use the world as if not (hos me) fully using it. For the outwardform of the world (to schema tou kosmou) is passing away.

There is a particular kind of “making use” of the world that treats it ina manner appropriate to its ontology of “passing away”—a using that isnot proprietary, not related to human sovereignty or juridical ownership,that dwells in the world (“remain in the calling in which you have beencalled” [7:20, 17]) in a manner that opens it up to being made new, to“being known by God” (I Cor. 8:3).

The identity of the “Christian” born by the Messianic community, inother words, is not a new universalism that somehow transcends or es-capes particularity and difference. Indeed it is not to be related to a formof universal “knowing” of any sort (“if anyone imagines that he knowssomething, he does not yet know as he ought to know”). It is rather anidentity “in Messiah” that seeks the perfection of love not in the domina-tion or possession of any part, but in the apocalyptic transformation ofall partial things to their completion in divine love. This transformationoccurs in the messianic body conformed to the “mind of Messiah” thatwillingly empties itself in order to serve the other, a pattern of radicalhumility and suffering servanthood. It is a pattern that can only be spiri-tually discerned, even though it is being enacted in the bodily realm thatis “passing away,” and therefore appears as failure. Paul emphatically


insists on this in I Corinthians 1, scandalously relating the calling of theecclesia to the foolish power of the cross, which is mysteriously relatedto divine power and wisdom depicted not as ontological plenitude but asemptiness: “God chose what is low and despised in the world, even thingsthat are not (ta me onta) in order to bring to nothing ta onta (the thingsthat are).” It is, finally, a pattern that can be described as sacramentalor parabolic in which the excess of the whole (the “all”) may be discernedwithin the particular part that is, selflessly and in loving use of the world,bearing witness to its hidden and sustaining divine life. This would beto restore the created, secular world order to its truest meaning—its fullbut not self-sufficient significance as the site where God is becoming “inMessiah” ta panta en pasin (“all in all”).

It may be fitting to conclude, then, with reference to a recent article bythe political theorist Romand Coles, “The Wild Patience of John HowardYoder: ‘Outsiders’ and the ‘Otherness of the Church’” (Coles 2002). “As amember of no church,” but rather as a participant in “radical democraticcoalition politics,” Coles finds Yoder’s ecclesiology of “vulnerable receptiv-ity” to others—both within the church and outside it—to be a compellingvision for “pursuing justice and political engagements in heterogeneoussocieties” (Coles 2002, 306). Differences are engaged not through strate-gies of universalizing claims, either religious or secular, but through rec-onciling practices bound to messianic lordship interpreted as “the open-ing of dialogical relations between the church and the world in whichgiving and receiving is possible, nay probable, in both directions” (Coles2002, 307). Appealing to Yoder’s image of tradition not as a tree but ratheras a vine—“a story of constant interruption of organic growth in favor ofa pruning and a new chance for the roots” (Yoder 1984, 69)—Coles rep-resents Yoder’s account of messianic politics as the ecclesial enactmentof vulnerable dialogue with others, looping back to Scripture preciselythrough the engagement of difference and diversity that the Scripturalnarrative itself enjoins. Coles puts it this way:

. . . in the presence of outsiders, the looping back of discerning ethical prac-tice cannot itself happen in absence of a vulnerable and expectant loopingthrough engagements with those of other dispositions, faiths and reasons.While the church has a certain precedence both epistemologically and axi-ologically as the body of focused dialogical discernment and action in lightof Jesus’ practices and pregnant wisdom . . . (and thus there can be no “pol-itics of Jesus” that could be coercive, selfish, nondialogical, invulnerable,or cease to loop back to Scripture), it is . . . even the case that the churchhas often learned about these most basic practices from “outsiders” [Coles2002, 314].

For example, for Yoder the fact of modern pluralism is not a lamentablefragmentation of tradition (as Alasdair MacIntyre has it) but a


providential opportunity to rediscover the multiplicity of cultures as adivinely willed good that saves human beings from the idolatrous im-position of political and cultural uniformity in order to attend to theparticular relations of particular communities in the relevant particularlanguages. It opens up a politics of vulnerable encounter “from below” asopposed to domination through coercive imposition “from above.” Simi-larly, the nonviolence of such reconciling encounters may be representedto the messianic body by “outsiders” such as Gandhi, whose practice ismore compatible with Jesus’s vision than the practice of many “Chris-tians” may be. Such dialogical practice and multi-directional witness,always full of surprises and paradoxical reversals as in the parables ofthe Gospel, takes time and therefore requires patience. For it is not thecase that all traditions and cultural engagements are “good”; messianictraditioning is a complex and conflictual process of discernment thatmust keep faith with its messianic Lord. This is a delicate matter.

Coles nicely picks up on a phrase used in Yoder’s characterization ofsuch radical fidelity, as “fidelity to the jealousy of Christ as Lord” (Coles2002, 321; quoting Yoder 1984, 86). It is found in Yoder’s description of theradical reformers’ protest against all forms of “establishment” Christian-ity, which compromise messianic lordship with reference to some othermeasure of the good—power, mammon, fame, efficacy—that calls intoquestion the fundamental cruciformity of the cosmos and the remnantcharacter of the messianic community. This phrase intersects in a sig-nificant way with the foregoing discussion of Pauline political theologyand the relations between Jews and Gentiles. At the height of Paul’s dis-cussion of the paradoxical mystery of divine election in Romans 9–11, hequotes the Moses song (Ha’azinu) of Deuteronomy 32: 21–22, in whichthe relationship between God and the people is characterized as a “dramaof jealousy” (cf. Taubes 2004, 50). Because the people have stirred God tojealousy with abominable practices of fidelity to what is no god, declaresMoses, God will now stir the faithless people to jealousy with those whoare no people. This too is how Paul understands the messianic dramabetween the people of Israel and the Gentiles, with the aim being thereconciliation and salvific inclusion of “all.” Yet, as we know, gifts givenin jealousy can be both paralyzing and poisonously exclusive, rather thanliberating and redemptive. Paul is aware of this and tells his Roman au-dience, “So do not become proud, but stand in awe” (11:20). Coles is lesscertain than is Yoder that the jealousy of Jesus as Lord (not only as anidea, but as narrative, dispositions, habits, and practices—as Yoder al-ways insists) can avoid the various pulls toward closure of the church or“people of God” to the generous and vulnerable engagement with others(Coles 2002, 326–27).

The divine election to peoplehood is finally a mysterious drama of lovethat may not be possessed nor coercively imposed, and this, Coles points


out, has implications for Yoder’s elaboration of the church’s discernmentof fidelity in its “body politics.”11

On Yoder’s list of what and how fidelity is not: “polytheism.” For the church,the path to reformation with the unanticipatable manifoldness of His giftmust pass through the jealousy of the One. But, then, add this qualification:this paradox is too big for any one (individual, group, time) to handle orclaim to possess entirely. Then add: that “the prophetic denunciation ofpaganism” will always be “ad hoc,” “vulnerable,” and “fragmentary.” Thesum, for Yoder, is that which is beyond a “sum” [Coles 2002, 322].

The non-summing practice that is central for Yoder’s understanding ofChristian ethics is found in his “Patience as Method in Moral Reason-ing” (Yoder in Hauerwas et al. 1999). Messianic patience is not simplya matter of “self-restraint” or “moderation.” It is, as Coles characterizesit, a “wild patience” that can take the many particular forms needed forvulnerable witnessing, discernment, and participation in the mysteriousjudgments and ways, the “unanticipatable breaking-forth,” of divine wis-dom. There is an excess in this radical, apocalyptic patience that has thecourage to act from the modest stance of “infinality” just because in thecross of the resurrected Messiah is revealed the power of the sovereignGod. This frees the church from the “compulsiveness of purpose” thatunderstands political ethics as “moving history in the right direction.”Here we may best conclude with Yoder’s conclusion in his 1972 essay onThe Politics of Jesus (Yoder 1994a, 240–41):

11 Hence the importance of another of Yoder’s comments on the jealousy of God, here inthe context of his treatment of the Jeremian vision of diaspora community as the missionaryform of the people of God: “This enormous flexibility and creativity force us to return to thequestion, Is there anything nonnegotiable in the dispersed minority’s witness? Anythinguntranslatable? Of course there is; it is that there is no other God. The rejection not only ofthe pagan cult but also of every way of putting their own YHWH/LORD in the same frameof reference with pagan deities, even while not speaking the divine NAME as others would,was tied for the Jews in Babylon with the proclamation of his sovereignty over creationand history. There is no setting into which that deconstructing, disenchanting proclamationcannot be translated, none which can encompass it. That anti-idolatry message is not badbut good news. It can free its hearers from slavery to the powers that crush their lives”(Yoder 1997, 76–77). What Yoder here judges “good news” (in keeping with his accountof God’s jealousy and of the scattering at Babel) Derrida judges more ambiguously in DesTours de Babel (Derrida 1985). For Derrida, the scattering that results from God’s jealousy,in which God imposes his untranslatable name over against all human namings, the act ofdivine deconstruction eventuates in irreducible confusion, “the necessary and impossibletask of translation, its necessity as impossibility” (Derrida, 171). In effect, for Derridathere can be no clear line between a “colonial violence” (the universalization of an idiom)and a “peaceful transparency of the human community” (rational transparency). Colesworries in this same direction, suspicious that Yoder’s language of messianic triumph cantoo easily be translated into the self-confident universalizing “good news” of particularinsider communities.


Christians must realize that they are not only a minority on the globebut also at home in the midst of the followers of non-Christian and post-Christian faiths. Perhaps this will prepare us to see how inappropriateand preposterous was the prevailing assumption, from the time of Con-stantine until yesterday, that the fundamental responsibility of the churchfor society is to manage it. And might it be, if we could be freed from thecompulsiveness of the vision of ourselves as the guardians of history, thatwe could receive again the gift of being able to see ourselves as participantsin the loving nature of God as revealed in Christ? . . . A church once freedfrom compulsiveness and from the urge to manage the world might thenfind ways and words to suggest as well to those outside its bounds theinvitation to a servant stance in society.

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Is a Messianic Ethic Possible: Recent Work By and About John Howard Yoder