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Radical catholicity

Christian Century, Jan 21, 1998 by Michael G. Cartwright

As it is, we do not see everything in subjection to God. But we do see Jesus, revealing the grace of God by tasting death for everyone (Heb. 2:8-9).

When John Howard Yoder died on December 30, the morning after celebrating his 70th birthday, an extremely rich life of theological scholarship and Christian service ended. From his days as Mennonite Central Committee relief worker and graduate student in postwar Europe through his term as president of a denominational seminary to his tenure as a professor at the University of Notre Dame, where he taught for a quarter of a century, Yoder was astonishingly productive. He wrote articles and books in fields as diverse as systematic theology, just war and peace studies, ecumenism, the history of 16th-century Protestantism, missiology and hermeneutics while maintaining active involvement in the church catholic and local.

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With such breadth, it would be difficult to bring it all into focus were it not for the fact that Yoder himself was always so precise about what he was doing. With daunting forthrightness, he presented his arguments as a witness t+o the gospel -- albeit a witness of uncommon erudition, not to mention tenacious argumentation.

Yoder's witness was offered with an equally insistent emphasis on the radical catholicity of the gospel, by which Yoder meant the capacity of the Christian evangelion to "unendingly meet new worlds." Indeed, this life of three score and ten years might best be summed up as a persistent witness to the claim found in the words from the Letter to the Hebrews: "But we do see Jesus . . ."

Yoder's evangelical revisionism ran against the stream of scholarly trends, genres, conventions and classifications. One thinks of the ever present but or nevertheless that readers discovered in his books and essays. Yoder patiently engaged the objections offered by whatever conversation partner he confronted and gently but firmly admonished colleagues when they made misstatements of historical, moral or theological import. In the process, he taught us that fraternal admonition is the logical prerequisite for ecumenical dialogue.

Most readers of the Century probably identify Yodere with The Politics Of Jesus. First published in 1972, this book influenced a generation of radical evangelical Christians, such as those associated with the Sojourners community. Less well known are the ways The Politics of Jesus provoked mainline Protestants and Catholics to reassess their practice of interpreting the Bible for ethics. More than a few theologians and Christian ethicists have dated their intellectual conversions to the reading of Yoder's book. For some of us, it was the first time we grasped the authoritative status of the questions we ask in theology and ethics.

That Yoder called into question the assumptions of mainstream Protestant ethics is clear to anyone who reads the first chapter, "The Possibility of a Messianic Ethic." He claims that Jesus' vision of the reign of God can continue to speak to our age, "if it can be unleashed from the bonds of inappropriate a prioris." Making explicit epistemological presuppositions of those who assume the irrelevance of Jesus to contemporary social ethics, Yoder reframes the argument, showing that the messianic ethic of Jesus and Paul becomes more plausible when it is read as "the document of a transition made by a message-bearing community from one world to another."

Yoder thereby reminds readers that the church's conversation with scripture is never complete and may in fact have to be reconstituted from time to time. The primary significance of The Politics of Jesus does not derive from Yoder's exegetical arguments -- as provocative as they are -- nor from his argument for a "bridge" between scripture and ethics. Rather, he helped us to locate the a priori assumptions that we would have to reconsider if we were to move beyond "modernist" hermeneutics to re-engage scripture.

Ironically, some of the very assumptions that Yoder taught us to question turn out to have their origin in the context of 16th-century disputes with the Anabaptists, a legacy that most Protestants are content to ignore. Yoder's preparation for writing The Politics of Jesus began almost 20 years earlier when he was a graduate student studying with Karl Barth in Basel. He completed a doctorate in church history while working in the war relief effort. The focus of his dissertation, completed in 1957, was an analysis of the dialogues between the Swiss Anabaptists and the magisterial Reformers in the early 16th century, an exposition that laid bare the theological and hermeneutical assumptions of both sides of the debate.

Not coincidentally, Yoder was a participant at the Puidoux Theological Conference held at the Evangelical Academy near Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1955. This gathering was the first significant encounter between mainstream Protestant theologians and theologians of the Radical Reformation traditions since the disputations of the early 16th century. A draft of what eventually would be published as The Politics of Jesus was presented at the second Puidoux Conference (actually held at Iserlohn) in 1957. There Yoder introduced the thesis that "the political decisions of the Man Jesus are to be understood as the Revelation of God's will for man."

Radical catholicity

Christian Century, Jan 21, 1998 by Michael G. Cartwright

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