To Hear the Word - Second Edition. John Howard Yoder

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To Hear the Word - Second Edition - John Howard Yoder

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the Archives,” continues some of the topics addressed in part two. The Epilogue is Yoder’s rather sharp response to the quite positive treatment of his work by Richard Hays in his influential book The Moral Vision of the New Testament.12

      In reading these essays we discover the key themes in John Howard Yoder’s approach to Scripture—his hermeneutical program—but also many of the key themes in his overall theological project. That is, we learn both how to hear and what to hear. Each of these can be inspiring and instructive for contemporary readers, more than a decade after Yoder’s death—and for many years to come. We may begin briefly with the “what.”

      In the three exegetical essays, we come face to face with Yoder’s central ethical concerns, which are of course biblical. The essays are full of keen insight and creative theological reflection. Writing about new creation in 2 Corinthians 5, Yoder finds a much less individualistic and more social, or public, theology of personhood, conversion, and church. Exploring the Sermon on the Mount/Plain, he fights traditional readings that tempt us to set aside the Sermon; rather, he points us to the “counter-cultural newness and the concrete realism of the good news of the coming new regime” ([x-ref] 27) and its call for “concretely lived-out holiness” rather than “inner contemplation” ([x-ref] 32). Then, following the canonical trajectory of the prohibition of killing from its origins in Israel into the early Christian church, he concludes with great rhetorical and theological power that “For Jesus’ followers, to hold that the grounds for the exclusion of all bloodshed are revoked as soon as Christians have access to civil power is to relativize the finality of Christ is a way that jeopardizes far more than the Decalogue, and far more than the neighbor’s life” ([x-ref] 46).

      A Paradoxical Hermeneutic of Suspicion and of Trust

      A hermeneutic of suspicion is a reading posture of criticism and distrust. Unlike many who advocate such an interpretive strategy in reading the Bible, Yoder’s suspicion is not of the biblical text, but of received interpretations of the text, especially those interpretations in the Protestant tradition that have been shaped by Western individualism and privatism. “[T]he form of suspicion which is most valuable is not doubting the text but doubting the adequacy of one’s prior understanding of it” ([x-ref] 52). More irenically, he advocates “sitting loose to tradition” or “openness to alternative hypotheses” ([x-ref] 57).

      Straightforwardness and “Biblical Realism”

      Translation, however, does not mean watered-down paraphrase. In these essays Yoder is deeply concerned that the text of Scripture is often either ignored or interpreted in such a way as to sidestep its “straightforward” meaning ([x-ref] 23, 26, 31, 56 146–47, and chapter 12). He saw this happening both at the level of the individual believer and the local church and at the level of the most sophisticated theologians. Yoder’s solution is not, however, a fundamentalist reading of the text that ignores its historical setting and literary features. Rather, Yoder wants us to take the Bible seriously “on its own terms” ([x-ref] 74; chap. 11), “taking the texts as an ordinary reader would normally take them” ([x-ref] 56), striving to avoid misreading Scripture by importing the traditional or cultural prejudices noted above in the discussion of his hermeneutic of suspicion and trust. Yoder does not think that presuppositionless exegesis is possible, but he does believe that “the presuppositions that are brought to a text can become, by virtue of sustained self-critical discipline, increasingly congruent with the intent of the text’s author” ([x-ref] 75). The “tools of critical scholarship” serve to allow the Bible to speak “within its own world view” rather than being distorted by either conservative or liberal agenda (p[x-ref] 100–101)—but such tools are to be used with a healthy skepticism ([x-ref] 146). At the same time, Yoder finds unacceptable the Protestant “Scholasticism” that read (and reads) the Bible as an inerrant collection of fixed, timeless, dogmatic propositions ([x-ref] 98, 148–52).

      Yoder uses the term “biblical realism” to describe his approach to reading Scripture (e.g., [x-ref] 58, 61, 74, 100, and chap. 11). The term refers to a post-liberal movement in biblical studies especially in the 1950s that was dedicated to discerning and engaging the distinctive biblical worldview. Yoder names Paul Minear, Otto Piper, Markus Barth, Hendrik Kraemer, and George Eldon Ladd as its chief practitioners, with Karl Barth as one source of inspiration.

      Five pairs of adjectives can serve to characterize the approach of Yoder’s biblical realism to “hearing the word”:

      • canonical and “post-critical” ([x-ref] 89, 189): while attending to historical and literary issues, it deals with the final form of the text and its theological

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