Review:
The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited contains ten
essays by the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder.
They have been posthumously edited by the Methodist
theologian and Dean for Ecumenical & Interfaith
Programs at the University of Indianapolis, Michael
G. Cartwright, and the Jewish philosopher and theologian
Peter Ochs, Edgar Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic
Studies at the University of Virginia. Yoder’s
articles are predominantly based on lectures which he
gave between 1970 and 1995 at conferences or universities
in the United States. The pacifist theologian had already
revised the partially unpublished texts to prepare their
publication, and collected them in the “Shalom
Desktop Packet” before he died unexpectedly on
the 30th December 1997.
In the edition presented here, these essays are embedded
in introductions and notes by the editors with commentaries
by Peter Ochs at the end of each article, an afterword
by Michael G. Cartwright and two appendixes. One appendix
is a sermon by Yoder while the other was written by
Cartwright and gives some background information on
Mennonite mission activities in the Near East. Using
this framework the editors enable readers to recognise
Yoder’s reasoning in its historical and theological
context. The respect and gratitude Ochs and Cartwright
display toward Yoder does not prevent their remarks
from dealing critically with his ideas. In his segment
of the introduction Peter Ochs points out the significance
of Yoder’s teachings for Jewish scholars and practitioners,
but in his comments he also considers carefully the
wider implications of his thought. Michael G. Cartwright
merely summarises the central issues of Yoder’s
thoughts in the introduction, but reflects on some of
them quite critically in his afterword. Thus as a volume
in the series “Radical Traditions. Theology in
a postcritical key” Yoder’s remarks share
the “Community of dialogue in difference”
which was presented two years earlier as a part of the
same series in the volume Textual Reasoning. In the
case of The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited the interplay
between introductions, commentaries, afterword and the
two appendixes with the essays by Yoder opens up a dynamic
conversation between scholars who are on the one hand
active and committed members of their religions and
on the other established in the academic world. Besides
the author and the editors, Rabbi Steven S. Schwarzschild,
to whom Yoder dedicated his remarks, shares this ‘community
in difference’ like a ‘falcon in a novella’
(cf. p. 12-19, and 35, 84, 95, 162 or 203).
Following the preface titled “What Needs to Change
in the Jewish-Christian Dialogue and Why” Yoder’s
essays are divided into four chapters with likewise
meaningful titles. These afford an appropriate overview
of pivotal issues and theses which are discussed and
argued in the current reasoning. Part I is titled “Tertium
Datur” and includes “1. 'It Did Not Have to
Be' ”, “2. Jesus the Jewish Pacifist”
and “3. Paul the Judaizer”. Under the title
“The Free Church Vision and the Jewish Tradition”
Part II contains “4. The Jewishness of the Free
Church Vision”, “5. The Forms of a Possible
Obedience” and “6. The Restitution of the
Church: An Alternative Perspective on Christian History”.
Part III “Refusing Mis-located Dualisms of Judaism”
embraces “7. Judaism as a Non-non-Christian Religion”,
“8. Earthly Jerusalem and Heavenly Jerusalem: A
Mis-located Dualism” and “9. On Not Being
in Charge”. Part IV “Christians and Jews Seeking
the Shalom of the City” includes only one essay:
“10. ‘See How They Go with Their Face to the
Sun’”. To this last section one might add,
however, Cartwright’s afterword “’If
Abraham is Our Father...’ The Problem of Christian
Supersessionism after Yoder”, Appendix A “Salvation
is of the Jews - A Sermon by John Howard Yoder”
and his Appendix B “Mennonite Missions in Israel
and the Peacemaking of Mennonite Central Committee Palestine
(1949-2002): Two Contexts for Locating John Howard Yoder’s
Theological Dialogue with Judaism”.
Yoder’s notions are shaped by two leading paradigms:
first, the essential Jewish character of Christianity
from its beginning; and second, an ecclesiology which
is based on the teachings of radical Protestants in
the 16th Century. Yoder displays a Christian theological
approach to contemporary Judaistic Studies, especially
those of Jacob Neusner. As a result he describes Jewishness
since the times of Jeremiah as characterised by its
diaspora life and by the plurality of Jewish groups.
Following Jonathan Z. Smith the crucial step for constituting
Jewish lifestyle was the loss of the temple and its
compensation by establishing a community around reading
the Torah and around rituals performable in a family
without any priesthood or hierarchy.
The Mennonite theologian prefers, along with Jacob Neusner,
to speak of Jewish messianists as an appropriate description
of Early Christians: “instead of thinking of ‘Christianity’
and ‘Judaism’ as systems, existing primordially
in a ‘normative’ form, and instead of thinking
of ‘Christians’ and ‘Jews’ in the
early centuries as separate bodies existing over against
each other, we must think of two initially largely overlapping
circles. The circle ‘Church’ and the circle
‘Jewry’ overlapped for generations in the
persons whom we may call either messianic Jews or Jewish
Christians” (p. 69). These messianic Jews were
part of the widespread Jewish plurality at that time.
“There was no such thing as normative Judaism in
the first century of our era” (p. 47). As a result
of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and
the end of Bar Kochba in 135 CE, following Yoder, the
situation changed “only gradually”: “There
were the messianists, later called Christians, and there
were the rabbis. Both of these movements were Jewish.
... They differed from one another only about one very
Jewish but also very theological question, namely on
whether the presence of the Messianic Age should be
conceived of as future or also already as present.”
(p. 48f)
Although Yoder accuses common theological and historical
interpretations of reading historical events, in particular
the history of early Christianity, from their institutionalized
effect, and instead wants to look at the plurality of
historical possibilities, his view is not as unbiased
as he claims. Yoder just changes the vantage point and
looks at the history of Christianity in opposition to
the view of the established, state-compliant churches,
from his free-church-perspective. The theological preference
for the Jewishness and nonconformism of Christianity
leads to an underestimation of the impact of Hellenism
on the development of Jewish and Christian Religion.
In giving reasons for his ecclesiological framework,
Yoder continues an old theological controversy on matters
of grace, freewill, and the human ability after the
fall of mankind to offer strict obedience to God’s
Commandments. This controversy became classical in the
conflict between Augustine and Pelagius to which Yoder
refers when he argues for the possibility of obedience:
“Now I must walk a very narrow path”. Therefore
confesses Yoder: “On one hand, I must continue
to offend the Augustinians ... by seeming ‘Jewish’,
in the apparent pride of thinking it possible to do
the will of God. On the other hand I have to offend
my Jewish friends, by describing a possibility which
could only become real if in Jesus and Pentecost the
messianic age in fact began” (p. 123.) Avoiding
the allegation to use “an arbitrary scheme of my
own” Yoder seeks protection in “a text from
one of the radical reformation movements, the ‘fraternal
union’ of Schleitheim, February 1527, written largely
by the former Benedictine Michael Sattler” (p.
123.) Cartwright is aware of these intrinsic limitations
of Yoder’s ecclesiological account as he points
out in the afterword where he speaks of “the neo-neo-supersessionism
of Yoder’s project” (p. 229). “Christian
Supersessionism” is explained to the readers in
the helpful glossary included in the book as “the
theological claim that the Church has replaced Israel
as God’s people for the salvation and blessing
of the world” (p. 278.)
Countering the charge of being selective or eclectic
Yoder delineates his hermeneutical approach by specifying
six criteria which should guarantee a fairer handling
of history: 1. “criteria of literary coherence”,
2. “criteria of socio-historical viability”,
3. “mystical, doxological criteria of coherence”,
4. “criteria of narrative and causative coherence”,
5. “criteria of connaturality, congruence”
and 6. “modes of clarification through conflict
and contrast” (cf. p. 115f) “These six modes
of verification hardly exhaust what is available. They
do illustrate, even ‘prove’, that we are not
boxed into a dilemma between relativity, which permits
no firm statements and prejudice, which is subject to
no validation, or between ‘objectivity’ so
defined as to be unattainable and ‘subjectivity’
which abandons truth claims” (p. 116).
Yoder considers the division between Christianity and
Jewry as a process in which Christianity lost its Jewishness
and Jewry lost its missionary openness: Jewry became
Judaism and Christianity changed into Christendom. Therefore
Yoder speaks about “Judaism as a Non-non-Christian
Religion” (subtitle of essay 7) and about Rabbinic
Judaism as “a Post-Christian Phenomenon” (p.
152): “Whenever and why ever it happened, Judaism
slowed down and stopped its missionary openness before
the onset of serious persecution of Jews by Christians,...
This abandonment of missionary perspective on the part
of Judaism is an adjustment not to the Gentile world
but to Christianity. Non-missionary Judaism is a part
of, a product of, Christian history” (p. 153).
At the same time Christianity became the state religion
of the Roman Empire and closed the door to Jewry by
absorbing the state supporting philosophy: “What
Christians borrowed from Plotin through Augustine, and
from Cicero through Ambrose, nailed shut the door which
Justin had begun to close” (p. 81). With the connection
to Jewry and its horizon, which transcended the boundaries
of the Roman Empire geographically and socially, Christians
lost “some experimental base for the awareness
of ‘otherness’ ... when they settled into
provincial establishment”, explains Yoder “by
becoming imperially provincial” (p. 81).
This process of diversion was complete, but not necessary
(“It did not have to be”), in the fourth century
after the conversion of Constantine, and one could add,
following Yoder, that it is still not irreversible:
the Jews would just have to revitalize their missionary
openness and the Christians would just have to rediscover
their Jewish roots. To initiate this seems to be one
of the essential intentions of Yoder’s reasoning.
© Fritz Heinrich (2004)
