Why should the blood of all righteous men and prophets be charged to first-century Jerusalem (Matthew 23:35-36)? Jerusalem didn’t even exist when Cain killed Abel, and “this generation” didn’t kill Zechariah. Isn’t it unfair for them to suffer judgment for the sins of their fathers? Doesn’t Ezekiel tell us that God doesn’t work like that? But it’s hard to see how it could work differently, so long as God works in time. We might construct a similar objection on an... Read more
Jesus condemns the scribes and Pharisees for building memorials for prophets and adorning the tombs of the righteous (Matthew 23:29). This is mere external honor, since they don’t actually follow the teachings of the prophets. It’s as insufficient as cleansing the outside of the cup. True; but Jesus says something more surprising and puzzling. He says that their actions of memorializing prophets and their words about their fathers is a witness against them that they are sons of the ones... Read more
Matthew 23:29-36 works out as a fairly neat chiasm: A. Woe to scribes, build tombs of prophets and adorn monuments of righteous, v 29 B. Blood of the prophets, v. 30 C. You are sons of murderous fathers; fill their guilt, vv 31-32 D. Serpents, brood of vipers, v 33 C’. They will treat Jesus’ prophets and wise men as their fathers treated earlier prophets, v 34 B’. Blood, blood, blood, v 35 A’. Curse on “this generation,” v 36... Read more
Craig Carter, one of the leading interpreters of Yoder’s work, says I got Yoder wrong in my post yesterday. He writes on his blog. He says that I “don’t understand what Yoder meant by the Constantinian Shift. Your mistake is actually a common one. This is not for Yoder an historical thesis as in: ‘Constantine caused the Church to become unfaithful by co-0pting it.’ “Constantinianism for Yoder is an eschatological heresy which tries to reach forward and pull the future... Read more
My forthcoming book on hermeneutics is available for pre-order at Amazon, Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture . Read more
Vinoth Ramachandra ( Subverting Global Myths: Theology and the Public Issues Shaping Our World ) acknowledges that there are “many shameful stories to be told of Western missionary complicity in colonial practices of domination,” but adds that “the more typical stories of missionaries and local Christian leaders in India, Africa or the South Pacific who courageously defended native interests and combated racist theories and stereotypes propagated by their fellow countrymen are missing from the anti-Orientalist corpus.” Specifically: “From the initial... Read more
If, as Yoder claims, the “Constantinian” compromise of the church with the world begins in the second and third centuries; if it begins when Christianity is still an illicit religion, persecuted periodically but savagely; if it begins when the church is still populated by martyrs – is it still a Constantinian shift? That is, is the shift attributable to the church becoming legal, official, the majority religion, the religion of the empire? Evidently not. Whatever shift there was in the... Read more
Yoder is a sometimes bizarre combination of profound insight and infuriating oversimplification verging on ignorance. He claims, for instance, that Augustine offers “a consensus kind of moral thought,” a moral thought based on “what everybody thinks.” He goes on: Augustine “does not radically ask, do you get that from the Bible? Can you get that from revelation? It does not ask, can you get that from Plato? It just asks, does that make sense to all of us? Is it... Read more
Yoder again: “What we are now doing is what leads to where we are going. Since the ‘this-worldly’ and the ‘otherworldly’ [are] not perceived in radical dichotomy, to be ‘marching through Emmanuel’s ground’ today is to be on the way to Zion. Terms like ‘hereafter’ are in that kind of context affirmations, not negations. They do not say that that to which we look forward is a radically different kind of world from the world in which we now live,... Read more
Yoder writes of the difference between theories of emanation and John’s Christology: “instead of tailoring Jesus to fit the slots prepared for him, John breaks the cosmology’s rules. At the bottom of the ladder, the Logos is said to have become flesh, to have lived among us as in a tent, symbol of mortality, and to have suffered rejection by us creatures. At the top of the ladder, the Logos is claimed to be coeval with God, not merely the... Read more
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