Yoder, John Howard: The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited


Marburg Journal of Religion: Volume 9, No. 2 (Dezember 2004)

Author: Yoder, John Howard

Year: 2003

Title:
The  Jewish-Christian  Schism  Revisited.  (Radical  Traditions.
Theology in a Postcritical Key)

Editor: Cartright, Michael G. and Ochs, Peter

Publisher: SCM Press

City: London

Price: $ 18,00.

ISBN: 0-334-02904-X 

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unpublished texts to prepare their publication, and collected them in the “Shalom Desktop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

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Marburg Journal of Religion: Volume 9, No. 2 (Dezember 2004)

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

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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-

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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)

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