Book
Peter Dula and Chris K. Huebner, eds. The New Yoder. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010.
Reviewer
Andy Brubacher Kaethler, Instructor in Christian Formation and Culture, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, IN
The New Yoder is a substantial collection of essays gathered to demonstrate the durability of John Howard Yoder’s theology and ethics beyond the particular contexts in which he thought, the immediate concerns about which he wrote, and the specific theologians with whom he conversed. No attempt is made to reinterpret Yoder for a new generation or to universalize him for a new context. Instead, the essays reflect a discernable trend among a newer generation of scholars to relocate conversations with Yoder further outside the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition.
The introduction by editors Peter Dula and Chris Huebner in which the “old Yoder” is distinguished from the “new Yoder” is key to understanding the nature of this collection -- as well as being a valuable resource itself. The “old Yoder” is characterized as pre-1990s work in theology and ethics set against the framework established by Troeltsch and embraced by Rauschenbusch and the Niebuhr brothers. Here Yoder defends the claim that Christian pacifism is realistic and effective (x-xii).
The “new Yoder” is about constructing dialogue between Yoder and post-structuralists such as Gilles Deleuze and Paul Virilio, deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and post-colonialists such as Edward Said and Jeffrey Stout on “larger constructive enterprise[s]” (xv).
These new interlocutors take for granted that Yoder challenged the terms of the debate rather than simply offering new solutions under the existing terms. Essays by Daniel Boyarin on diaspora ethics and Peter Blum engaging Yoder with Foucault and Nietzsche are apt illustrations. One outcome is that a broader understanding of peace emerges to encompass epistemology, aesthetics, and identity.
Only five of the fifteen essays are previously unpublished. The ten essays reproduced here have been diligently selected for the theme of new trajectories of engagement with Yoder, and it is handy to have them in one collection. But the real scholarly contribution is the original essays, where the conversation enriches the understanding of both Yoder and his interlocutor.
J. Alexander Sider discusses the politics of memory in forgiveness and reconciliation. He contends that Miroslav Volf’s “nontheoretical act of nonremembering” perpetuates the necessity of a modern subjective agent whereas Yoder concentrates on “communal memory as a necessary constituent of peaceable practice” and forgiveness as a doxological act, an approach more consistent with the core commitments in the Christian story (167).
Jonathan Tran, taking a cue from critical theorists Horkheimer and Adorno, compares Yoder with political and social ethicist Jeffrey Stout on the notion of laughter as a sign of hope. While Stout finds laughter and hope as Christians participate in the democratic tradition to refine it, Yoder finds them in the tension between promise and fulfillment, eschatology and ecclesiology (253-70).
The “secular character” of Yoder’s “breaching strategy” is explored in Daniel Barber’s essay on epistemological violence. Talal Asad, an anthropologist and post-colonial thinker who explores secularism and religion, is employed to discern in Yoder’s anti-universalism and epistemological nonviolence a non-totalizing secularity alongside his non-Constantinian Christianity (271-93).
Joseph R. Wiebe sees a tension between Romand Coles’s radical democracy and democratic process and Yoder’s radical discipleship and the person of Christ Jesus. Rowan Williams’s “penumbral vision” of a fractured socio-political center and non-coercive witness is a reminder that we often “fail to embody the politics of Jesus and that others suffer our failures” (316).
According to Nathan Kerr, Michel de Certeau helps flesh out Yoder’s claim that “the Christian community is from the outset and without remainder to be a missionary community”; Certeau’s “heterological account” of Christian exile, diaspora, and homelessness provides the “space” for politics of resistance (326). Kerr prefers Yoder’s understanding of Jesus as constitutive of the missionary community over Certeau’s view that Jesus is merely generative of Christian community but then he withdraws (327). In Yoder’s view exile is not a strategy, it is mission.
The notion of “the new Yoder” is somewhat misleading and presumptuous. As even the editors note, there is no significant shift in Yoder himself (ix). What is new is Yoder being brought into conversation with continental postmodern thinkers (Yoder himself did not choose to engage these contemporaries). Nor is the book even about new scholarship in this area, given that almost half the essays were published half a decade or more ago.
As already suggested, this book’s main contribution is the previously unpublished pieces. Of those, four of five represent writers theologically formed at Duke University (Nathan Kerr is the exception). Perhaps a better title would be “The New Duke Yoder,” since the book represents one set of new engagements with Yoder.
A second limitation is that despite the centrality in these essays of the witnessing community as the medium and message of Good News, most people in that community will find the book inaccessible. Deconstructionist and post-structuralist schools of thought are notoriously heady and complex while theological engagement with them is relatively new.
Nevertheless, for scholars already familiar with those schools of thought these scholarly pieces from and for academic contexts provide an important resource engaging Yoder’s Christian pacifism in ever broader theological circles.