The Old Testament and the Church after Christendom
Stephen B. Chapman
Duke University
Ongoing discussion about a “post-Constantinian” Christian church offers an opportunity
to revisit and reframe basic questions in biblical theology. In this discussion the term
“Constantinian” refers to the political and cultural dominance of Christianity in Western
civilization. The “Constantinian” era of the church is viewed as beginning with the final end of
Christian persecution in the Roman empire, thanks to Constantine and the Edict of Milan in 313
C. E.1 This shift quickly led to the official adoption of Nicene Christianity as the new imperially
authorized religion under Theodosius I in 380 C. E. State-sponsored persecution against the
practitioners of traditional Roman religions and non-Nicene Christians began promptly in 381 C.
E. This use of political power and violence to maintain Christian dominance is at the heart of the
contemporary critique against “Constantinianism.”
According to this view the basic cultural and political establishment of the Christian
religion, in various forms, survived the Middle Ages, the Reformation and the Peace of
Westphalia (1848), only to meet its demise in modernity. Oliver O’Donovan dates the end of
For a historical investigation into Constantine’s personal role in this development, see H. A. Drake,
Constantine and the Bible: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2002); David L. Dungan, Constantine’s Bible: Politics and the Making of the New Testament
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007); Peter J. Leithart, Defending Constantine: the Twilight of an Empire and
the Dawn of Christendom (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2010); Noel Lenski, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to the Age of Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
1
1
Constantinian Christianity to 1791 and the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution,2 which
prohibits any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” This date has the advantage of
maintaining a focus on an official act of policy, even if that act was more theoretical than actual
at the time of its adoption. However, many observers have located the effective shift away from
cultural Christianity in the second half of the twentieth century, at least for the U. S. and Western
Europe.
John Howard Yoder in particular highlighted the centrality of a Constantinian shift within
the early history of Christianity,3 and numerous books and articles have recently appeared,
confirming the loss of Christianity as the West’s “civil religion” and airing insights and
proposals regarding the future.4 These proposals concern new organizational structures and
strategies for Christian churches, new ways of thinking theologically about secular government
and society, and new understandings about the relationship between church and state. In other
words, this ongoing conversation embraces ecclesiology as well as political theology, and in both
instances there is evident a new wrestling with the Bible as increasingly disestablished Christians
Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge;
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 195.
3
See in particular John Howard Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources of Western Social Ethics,” in The
Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984),
135-47.
4
E.g., Jonathan Bartley, Faith and Politics after Christendom: The Church as a Movement for Anarchy
(Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006); Ryan K. Bolger, The Gospel after Christendom: New Voices, New
Cultures, New Expressions (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012); Craig A. Carter, Rethinking Christ
and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006); Rodney Clapp, A Peculiar
People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1996); Vigen
Guroian, Ethics after Christendom: Toward and Ecclesial Christian Ethic (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1994); Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? How the Church is to Behave if Freedom, Justice, and a
Christian Nation are Bad Ideas (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991); James Krabill and Stuart Murray, Forming
Christian Habits in Post-Christendom: The Legacy of Alan and Eleanor Kreider (Harrisonburg, Va.:
Herald Press, 2011); Alan Kreider and Eleanor Kreider, Worship and Mission after Christendom
(Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2011); Bryan P. Stone, Evangelism after Christendom: The Theology and
Practice of Christian Missions (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2007); Stuart Murray, Church after Christendom
(Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2004); idem, Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange New
World (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2004).
2
2
seek scriptural guidance.5 There is also some overlap in concern and approach with the recent
intensification of interest in “exilic,” “missional,” “post-colonial” and “anti-imperial” approaches
to scripture.6 It is perhaps worth noting that this heightened degree of interest does appear new,
but that the same conversation was in fact well underway in the 1960s and 70s.7 In retrospect it is
clear that the resurgence of religion in public life during the 1980s and 90s did not reverse but
In addition to O’Donovan, Desire, see Craig Bartholomew et al., eds., A Royal Priesthood? The Use of
the Bible Ethically and Politically – A Dialogue with Oliver O’Donovan (Scripture and Hermeneutics
Series 3; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002); Richard Bauckham, The Bible in Politics: How to Read the
Bible Politically (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1989); Antonio Gonzalez, God’s Reign and the
End of Empires (Miami: Convivium, 2012); Peter J. Leithart, Between Babel and the Beast: America and
Empires in Biblical Perspective (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade, 2012); J. Gordon McConville, God and Earthly
Power: an Old Testament Political Theology, Genesis–Kings (London: T & T Clark, 2006); Mira
Morgenstern, Conceiving a Nation: The Development of Political Discourse in the Bible (University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009); Lloyd Pietersen, Reading the Bible after Christendom
(Harrisonburg, Va: Herald Press, 2012); cf. Michael Walzer, In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew
Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
6
For example, Mark G. Brett, Decolonizing God: The Bible in the Tides of Empire (Sheffield: Sheffield
Phoenix, 2009); Musa W. Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (St Louis: Chalice,
2000); Neil Elliott, The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 2008); Michael Frost, Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture (Peabody, Mass.:
Hendrickson, 2006); Justin K. Hardin, Galatians and the Imperial Cult: A Critical Analysis of the FirstCentury Social Context of Paul’s Letter (WUNT 2/237; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); Richard A.
Horsley. ed., Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (Philadelphia: Trinity
Press International, 1997); idem, In the Shadow of Empire: Reclaiming the Bible as a History of Faithful
Resistance (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008); Wes Howard-Brook, “Come out, My People!”:
God’s Call out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2010); Seyoon Kim, Christ and
Caesar: The Gospel and the Roman Empire in the Writings of Paul and Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2008); C. Kavin Rowe, World Turned Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009); Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, The Power of the Word: Scripture and the
Rhetoric of Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007); Daniel Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of
Exile (Overtures to Biblical Theology; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002); Christopher D. Stanley, The
Colonized Apostle: Paul in Postcolonial Eyes (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011); R. S. Sugirtharajah,
Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); idem, The
Bible and Empire: Postcolonial Explorations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); idem,
Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: History, Method, Practice (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell,
2012); Tom Thatcher, Greater Than Caesar: Christology and Empire in the Fourth Gospel (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 2009).
7
Thus at that time Karl Rahner, The Christian of the Future (New York: Herder, 1967), already wrote of
a Christian “disaspora” and George A. Lindbeck described “The Sectarian Future of the Church,” in The
God Experience: Essays in Hope (ed. Joseph P. Whelan, S. J.; The Cardinal Bea Lectures 2; New York:
Newman Press, 1971), 226-43.
5
3
only camouflaged a fundamental trend toward cultural secularization that had already been in
place for some time.8
My specific aim in this paper is to investigate how the various approaches I have
summarized broadly as “post-Constantinian” treat the Old Testament. I particularly want to
explore what decisions are made about how the diverse traditions within the Old Testament
canon are weighted with respect to each other: which traditions move into the foreground of
interpretive concern and which ones recede into the background—how the shape of the biblical
story is construed. I am at the same time interested in how “post-Constantinian” interpretation
handles the relationship between the two testaments of the Christian Bible. The good news, I
think, is that a robust theological conversation has opened up among Christian theologians and
biblical scholars about the political implications of the Old Testament—both for the church and
wider society—in contrast to a previous stage in the discussion in which such attention was
sometimes focused on the New Testament and the early church to the virtual exclusion of the
Old Testament and the people of Israel.9
However, I want to argue that up to this point “post-Constantinian” theological
appropriation of the Old Testament has been inadequate on theological and scriptural grounds,
although the nature of its inadequacy again proves useful in illuminating certain basic issues and
challenges within Old Testament theology. A particular need at present is to provide biblicaltheological grounds for the priority being given to the exilic mode of Israel’s existence as a
8
Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper &
Row, 1970); idem, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Seabury,
1975); idem, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996); Steve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell,
2002).
9
This tendency can be observed even in the subtitle of Stanley Hauerwas, In Good Company: The Church
as Polis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), which forms the central thrust of the
critique found in Scott Bader-Saye, Church and Israel after Christendom: The Politics of Election
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999).
4
normative model; the other unfinished task is to offer an interpretation of the Old Testament’s
pentateuchal and monarchic traditions that goes beyond avoidance, denigration or rejection. I
will first discuss the exilic “turn” in the work of several biblical interpreters, both contemporary
and historical, and then I will explore the need to come to grips more successfully with Israel’s
so-called “theocratic” traditions.
The Exilic Turn
John Howard Yoder’s influential critique of “Constantinian” Christianity went hand-inhand with a powerful reinterpretation of church history in which the pattern of social
organization evident in exilic Judaism was held to be enduringly normative for the church.
Yoder’s theory is set out programmatically in several lectures, notably “The New Humanity as
Pulpit and Paradigm” (1994), in which he developed a notion of the church as diaspora, based on
1 Peter (which in turn evokes both Exodus 19 and Hosea 1, as Yoder noted),10 and “See How
They Go with Their Face to the Sun” (1995), a sustained meditation on the diasporic character of
Judaism, from Jeremiah onward, and how the contemporary church should be similarly
conceived as a “dispersion community.”11 He called this development the Jeremianic “model,”
“turn” or “shift.”
The title for this second essay comes from a poetic drama called “Jeremiah,” written by
the twentieth-century author Stephan Zweig. This drama represented for Yoder a quintessential
affirmation of what he considered to be the Jewish affirmation of diasporic identity, which also
1 Peter is addressed to “the exiles of the dispersion” (1 Pet 1:1); 1 Peter 2:9-10 draws on language and
themes from Exodus 19 and Hosea 1 in order to describe the character of the type of peoplehood”
pertaining to early Christians.
11
Both lectures now appear in John H. Yoder, For the Nations: Essays Evangelical and Public (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 37-50, 51-78.
10
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simultaneously represented how the biblical book of Jeremiah articulates “God’s negative
judgment on the Davidic project, after the failures of four centuries.”12 Drawing on Zweig,
Yoder boldly described exile not as a “hiatus” or “parenthesis” but as a permanent, Godmandated communal vocation:
The move to Babylon was not a two-generation parenthesis, after which the Davidic or
Solomonic project was supposed to take up again where it had left off. It was rather the
beginning, under a firm, fresh prophetic mandate, of a new phase of the Mosaic project.13
Subsequent criticism that Yoder based this conclusion more on Zweig than Jeremiah is accurate
but finally only superficial. At the outset of his address he did mention Jeremiah’s letter to the
exiles (Jeremiah 29), and in a footnote toward the beginning he conceded that other biblical
witnesses such Ezra, Nehemiah, Ezekiel and Second Isaiah each “have distinctive slants” on
exile, but also that he that did not consider them to be exceptions to his basic point.
Unfortunately, he did not argue this characterization of the other biblical witnesses but merely
asserted it, writing that their interpretation was not his “present concern.”14 Of course, that offhand statement then begs the question of just what his concern was.
Although Yoder would go on to mention Psalm 137, the Joseph narrative, Daniel and
Esther in the remainder the address, even referring to his theory of diaspora existence as the
“Joseph paradigm,”15 the details of his presentation suggest that his theory was at its core a
theology of history rather than an interpretation of the Old Testament per se. Perhaps Yoder
would reject too sharp a distinction between the two—yet he grounded both the enduring quality
and the theological normativity of diaspora in the course of history rather than in the Bible:
More than Christians are aware, Babylon itself very soon became the cultural center of world
Jewry until the time we in the West call the Middle Ages. The people who recolonized the “Land
12
Yoder, Nations, 52.
Yoder, Nations, 53.
14
Yoder, Nations, 53 n. 6.
15
Yoder, Nations, 56-57.
13
6
of Israel,” repeatedly, from the age of Jeremiah to that of Johanan ben Zakkai, and again still
later, were supported financially and educationally from Babylon, and in lesser ways from the
rest of the diaspora. Our Palestinocentric reading of the story is a mistake, though a very
understandable one. It was imposed not only on Christians but also on many Jews because of the
way the first-century events became legend.
What it meant to be Jewish on a world scale, from the age of Jeremiah to that of
Theodore Hertzl, depended more on the leadership in Babylon, where living without a temple
was possible and was accepted as permanent, than on the Palestinian institutions, distracted as
they were by the agenda of Maccabean rebellion and Herodian negotiation, and then by Roman
destruction.16
It is at this point in his argument that Yoder appealed to “experts in the history of religion” to fill
in the gaps of his thesis, another indication of the way in which he was formulating it.17
Later in his address, however, Yoder did return to Ezra and Nehemiah in order to make
the point that in neither book is kingship or statehood advocated.18 In this connection he
described the “Davidic project” as profoundly ambivalent and referred briefly to the monarchic
traditions of the Bible, particularly Jotham’s fable (Judges 9) and the rather non-committal
account of the monarchy’s rise (1 Samuel 8). He also devoted some time to exploring the Tower
of Babel account (Genesis 11), probably as much because he wanted to challenge Jeffrey Stout’s
reading of it in After Babel than anything else19—although in the process Yoder did interpret the
story to mean that dispersion in fact constitutes blessing rather than curse. But it would be closer
to Yoder’s own rhetoric to say that he did not find anything in these biblical witnesses that
denied his theory of history than to say that he constructed his understanding of diaspora’s
normativity directly from a biblical basis.
Indeed, as his address proceeded Yoder seemed to become more aware of this possible
weakness of his argument, returning to Ezra and Nehemiah, for instance, and characterizing them
16
Yoder, Nations, 57-58.
Yoder, Nations, 58.
18
Yoder, Nations, 60.
19
Jeffrey Stout, Ethics after Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1988).
17
7
as “inappropriate deviations from the Jeremiah line,”20 even though he had earlier claimed their
interpretation was not his present concern.21 Yoder critiqued historical-critical accounts of a
definitive conclusion to exile and Israel’s successful “return” to the land as naïve, both about
history (since Judaism’s diaspora existence did indeed continue in Babylon for centuries and not
all Israel was gathered again in Yehud) as well as about the biblical witnesses (since Ezra and
Nehemiah portray the Jewish community within the Persian empire instead of as a wholly selfgoverning people). It is at this point that Yoder insisted that a “more consistently Jeremianic
account” of postexilic Israel would need to attend “both to the events and to their theological
interpretation by prophets and by the several ‘priestly’ historians and redactors.”22 In other
words, Yoder eventually realized that he needed to offer more than a “history of religions”
approach, that his theology of history had to entail not only a recounting of events but also the
theological perspective regarding those events, as presented in scripture.
Yoder criticized Ralph Klein for being “blind” to the way that postexilic texts “gave a
long-term identity to the permanent diaspora,”23 yet his own argument was built primarily on
events rather than texts as well. There is a curious ambivalence within Yoder’s work concerning
the relationship between text and community—whether the biblical texts are to be treated more
as products or catalysts of the postexilic community, and whether finally the texts or the events
to which they refer are theologically decisive for contemporary theological reflection. This same
tension has been identified by Michael Cartwright and Jonathan Wilson,24 although they both
20
Yoder, Nations, 74.
Yoder, Nations, 53 n. 6.
22
Yoder, Nations, 74.
23
Yoder, Nations, 74 n. 55. The book of Klein at issue is Israel in Exile: A Theological Interpretation
(Overtures to Biblical Theology; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979).
24
Michael G. Cartwright, Practices, Politics and Performances: Toward a Communal Hermeneutic for
Christian Ethics (Princeton Theological Monograph Series; Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick, 2006); Jonathan R.
21
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criticize Yoder for locating theological meaning too much in the biblical text and not enough in
the performative community.25
By contrast, I want to fault Yoder for reading behind the biblical text, reading for its
witness to events,26 even as he claimed to employ a “biblical realism” that sought to understand
the Bible theologically “in its own terms, to think the way the Bible thinks, to use its thought
patterns rather than our modern thought patterns, to ask what questions the Bible is asking.”27
This same tension was exploited by the Biblical Theology movement of the 1940s and 50s, with
its emphasis on the “mighty acts of God,” but it has long since unraveled—partly due to its own
inconsistency28 and partly due to the widening gap in biblical studies between historical
reconstruction and textual depiction.29
Even other Mennonite scholars have judged Yoder’s work to be inadequate on historical
grounds. John Miller has written that Yoder’s “pejorative brushing aside of the whole second
temple period as portrayed in Ezra and Nehemiah” is “mind-boggling.” Miller adds, “John’s
notion that the canon and synagogue arose without there being centralist organization is
ahistorical and fantastical.”30 Such criticism reveals the historical vulnerability of Yoder’s thesis,
even as it suggests that “exile” became too broad a metaphor in his treatment, ceasing to denote
Wilson, “Biblical Realism in the Work of John Howard Yoder,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 40.2
(2013): 109-21.
25
Cartwright, Practices, 211; Wilson, “Realism,” 120.
26
John Howard Yoder, To Hear the Word (2d ed.; Eugene, Ore.: Cascade, 2010), 105.
27
John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution (ed. Theodore J. Koontz and
Andy Alexis-Baker; Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009), 311 n. 5, as cited in Wilson, “Realism,” 119.
28
See Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia; Westminster, 1970); Langdon Gilkey,
Reaping the Whirlwind: A Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Seabury, 1976).
29
See, e.g., Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision
of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Free press, 2001); Leo G. Perdue, The
Collapse of History: Reconstructing Old Testament Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), idem,
Reconstructing Old Testament Theology: After the End of History (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005);
30
John W. Miller, Letter to Herbert C. Klassen, March 3, 1998, as cited in A. James Reimer, “Theological
Orthdoxy and Jewish Christianity: A Personal Tribute to John Howard Yoder,” in The Wisdom of the
Cross: Essays in Honor of John Howard Yoder (ed. Stanley Hauerwas et al.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1999), 444-45.
9
exile in a literal sense but instead connoting a certain kind of faith community and a particular
characteristic stance on the part of that faith community toward other social structures and
institutions (“seek the welfare of the city,” Jer 29:7). Yoder described the Judaism that came into
being with the exile in sociological terms as “marked by the synagogue, the Torah, and the
rabbinate…[as well as] kashrut and circumcision.”31 But fundamental to this form of social
embodiment was the theological conviction that “there is no need…to seize (or subvert) political
sovereignty in order for God’s will to be done.”32 At the same time, what Yoder found so
inspiring about Judaism is the way in which it has consistently sponsored contributions to a
“secular well-being which is far more than mere minority survival.”33
To get the “full Yoder” it would also be necessary to review how he constructed an
Anabaptist ecclesiology or “free church vision” on the model of this diasporic synagogue. For
Yoder, the Constantinian synthesis of church and state represented something like the church’s
original sin. Early Christianity, or (as Yoder preferred to call it) first-century “Messianic
Judaism” maintained the synagogue’s social structure and form of political organization, only
abandoning “synagogue polity” when Christianity “fell” into “sacerdotalism and episcopacy.”34
Yoder’s views are more comprehensively set out in the collection of essays now appearing under
the title The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, with helpful critique and commentary by
Michael Cartwright and Peter Ochs.35 Ochs in particular is appreciative of how Yoder’s work
honors Jewish history and culture, even as he insists the Yoder’s move to make exilic Judaism
Yoder, “See,” 67.
Yoder, “See,” 67.
33
Yoder, “See,” 76. This is the force of the title For the Nations, which Yoder chose in order to contrast
his views with those of Stanley Hauerwas, who had published Against the Nations (Notre Dame:
University Notre Dame Press, 1992). See Yoder, “Introduction,” in For the Nations, 3.
34
Yoder, “See,” 71n. 48.
35
John Howard Yoder, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited (ed. Michael G. Cartwright and Peter
Ochs; Scottdale, Penn.: Herald Press, 2008).
31
32
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normative results in an improper narrowing of what Judaism has been and is. Rather than an
either/or, Ochs suggests, historical and contemporary Judaism both embrace exilic and landed
life.36
Other Takes on the Turn
It is instructive to compare Yoder’s “exilic” hermeneutic with two other interpreters who
have also stressed the importance of an exilic hermeneutic for Old Testament interpretation:
Roger Williams and N. T. Wright.
Yoder has a fascinating precursor in Williams, the seventeenth-century American Puritan.
Writing in opposition to those in Massachusetts Bay Colony who invoked Israel’s kings as a
warrant for their particular model of socio-political organization,37 Williams developed his own
“exilic” approach to the Old Testament. Historical scholarship once emphasized Williams’s use
of typology in drawing a thoroughgoing distinction between the two testaments, suggesting that
Williams rejected the Old Testament’s contemporary relevance for Christians. All of the Old
Testament’s prophecies and typologies had been fulfilled in Christ, and were therefore no longer
available for Christian application.38 For this reason, so the argument went, the Old Testament no
longer possessed any political relevance at all. However, James Byrd has conclusively
See especially Ochs’s comments in Schism, 119-20, 203-04. Of course, a key issue in this regard is
Zionism.
37
As in “A Modell of Church and Civil Power,” reprinted and interwoven with rebuttals by Roger
Williams in his “The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution” in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams,
Volume 3 (ed. Samuel L. Caldwell; New York: Russell & Russell, 1963).
38
Williams can certainly sound this way; see, e.g., his “Bloudy Tenent,” 3: “The ʃtate of the Land of
Iʃrael, the Kings and people thereof in Peace & War, is…figurative and ceremoniall, and no patterne nor
preʃident for any Kingdome or civill ʃtate in the world to follow.” For the thoroughgoing “typological”
interpretation of Williams, see Perry Miller, “Roger Williams: An Essay in Interpretation,” in The
Complete Writings of Roger Williams, Volume 7 (ed. Perry Miller; New York: Russell & Russell, 1963),
5-25.
36
11
demonstrated the inadequacy of this view.39 Byrd agrees that Williams had no use for the idea of
a “national covenant” with God, an idea that had great significance for the Bay Colony Puritans.
But Byrd goes on to show how Williams made quite a lot of use of the Old Testament, but
instead invoked parallels between the contemporary church and postexilic Israel. In fact, what
Williams did was to employ his typological approach in order to conclude that, post-Jesus, there
could no longer be any “chosen nation.”40 Indeed the problem with Constantine and other socalled “Christian emperors” was that they falsely thought they were spiritual fulfillments or
“Antitypes of the Kings of Iudah,”41 because only the Christian church holds that honor.42 This
typological judgment was also rendered in part on a reading of the New Testament, in which
Jesus and his disciples were viewed not only as keeping apart from armed resistance and nationbuilding schemes but as persecuted criminals under Roman rule. That interpretation of the New
Testament then led to a re-reading of the Old Testament in which the most appropriate parallels
for the contemporary church were discerned by Williams to be those postexilic stories in which
the people of Israel struggled to maintain their existence in the face of foreign domination.
In this fashion Williams’s interpretation of the Bible moves in two directions: forward
from the Old Testament to the New as prophecy and typology seek their fulfillment, but then
also “backward” or retrospectively as the Old Testament is re-read from the vantage point of
christology and Christian understanding. In this re-reading the Persian ruler Artaxerxes became
an abiding example of good civil power because he supported Ezra’s mission (Ezra 7), and
39
James P. Byrd, Jr., The Challenge of Roger Williams: Religious Liberty, Violent Persecution, and the
Bible (Baptists: History, Literature, Theology, Hymns; Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2002), esp.
53-86.
40
Or as Williams, “Bloudy Tenent,” 209, also expresses it, the “ʃhadowiʃh and figurative ʃtate” of the
“Nationall Church of the Jewes…vaniʃhed” with the appearance of Christ. Williams can also speak of
Jesus having “diʃʃolved” the Jewish “national church” (239).
41
Williams, “Bloudy Tenent,” 241.
42
Williams, “Bloudy Tenent,” 251. Cf. p. 297: “Chriʃt Ieʃus [is] the only King of his Church.”
12
therefore sponsored religious liberty.43 By contrast rulers like Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 3) and
Darius (Daniel 6) provided examples not only of historical instances of Jewish persecution and
the repression of religious liberty, but symbolized the contemporary impulses of those who (like
the Bay Colony Puritans) sought to combine church and state.44 Another text employed by
Williams was the (pre-exilic) story of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 21), which turned on Ahab’s
royal greed and abuse of power.
Williams’s approach to the Old Testament is ultimately framed by Christian theological
presuppositions, but in denying any direct political application of the Mosaic and Davidic
traditions, and by focusing theological attention on postexilic Israel, Williams closely
adumbrates the exilic turn of John Howard Yoder three centuries later.45 Williams even
anticipates Yoder in developing a “free church vision” on the basis of postexilic narratives about
the people of Israel. It bears noting, however, that Williams did finally hold to a “twofold state,”
largely based upon Romans 13.46 He did not argue against the need for the existence of a civil
state, only that it should be thoroughly secular: i.e., not exercising power over spiritual matters or
issues of conscience.47 He also believed that civil magistrates did not necessarily need to be
church members or Christians.48
See Williams, “Bloudy Tenent,” esp. 264-68. The Bay Colony Puritans also invoked Artaxerxes as an
example, but as a model for Christian magistrates who were to enforce the law. See Byrd, Challenge, 6569. In response, Williams stressed that Artaxerxes was not an Israelite king and therefore could not
function within the framework of a national covenant; his significance instead was that he allowed the
Israelites to worship their own faith rather than compelling them to subscribe to the Persian religion.
44
Writing about Daniel 3 and 6, Williams comments in “Bloudy Tenent,” 72: “Gods people were and
ought to be Nonconformʃitants, not daring either to be reʃtrained from the true, or conʃtrained to falʃe
Worʃhip, and yet without breach of the Civill or Citie-peace, properly ʃo called.”
45
Williams, “Bloudy Tenent,” 184: “Chriftianitie fell afleep in Conftantines bofome.” Williams archly
added that he had heard John Cotton affirm this point himself!
46
Williams, “Bloudy Tenent,” 147, 161-62.
47
Williams, “Bloudy Tenent,” 160.
48
Williams, “Bloudy Tenent,” 414-15.
43
13
One difficulty with Williams’s approach is the way in which his typological reading of
the Old Testament moves in the direction of supersessionism with regard to Judaism. Another
difficulty relates to his stark differentiation between “type” and “example,” in line with
Protestant hermeneutics of his day but no longer a common theological distinction today. 49 Must
this distinction be invoked? Is it not possible to draw theological analogies between persons and
events in the Old Testament and person and events today without necessarily stipulating the
extent of their applicability in advance? Could not Old Testament persons and events function
simultaneously as both types and examples?
Writing in the twentieth century, N. T. Wright has promulgated the influential and
heavily discussed view that the Babylonian exile continued as a historical reality for Judaism
throughout the Second Temple period, and that Jesus’s identity and mission is understood in the
New Testament precisely as the end of Israel’s exile:
Babylon had taken the people into captivity; Babylon fell, and the people returned. But in Jesus’
day many, if not most, Jews regarded the exile as still continuing. The people had returned in a
geographical sense, but the great prophecies of restoration had not yet come true.50
Here Wright partly falls prey to Yoder’s historical critique: not all the people had returned from
Babylon. But Wright’s larger claim supports Yoder’s contention to a degree, since Wright is
concerned to make the point that exile was a continuing reality within first century Judaism.
Like Yoder, Wright locates this reality in history rather than in the Old Testament texts as
such (“many, if not most, Jews”),51 and, like Yoder, Wright’s theory is therefore vulnerable to
historical debate and disqualification. Subsequent debate has in fact largely focused on how
49
For background, see E. Brooks Holifield, Era of Persuasion: American Thought and Culture, 1521–
1680 (ed. Lewis Perry; Twayne’s American Thought and Culture; Boston: Twayne, 1989), 46. I owe this
reference Byrd, Challenge, 62 n. 18.
50
N. T. Wright, Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 2: Jesus and Victory of God
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 126.
51
Cf. Wright, Jesus, 445: “the great majority of Jesus’ contemporaries believed that they were still in
exile, in all the senses that really mattered.”
14
widespread such a notion may have been in early Judaism. Yet even though Wright’s claim is
questionable as a historical characterization,52 as a characterization of the postexilic biblical
literature it has considerable force. In a major study, Brant Pitre charges Wright with making his
theory work by redefining the meaning of “exile,” and also overlooking the ongoing reality of
the loss of the ten northern tribes in the Assyrian exile for those who remained in Judah before
and after the Babylonian exile.53 A dual sense of loss and expectation is registered throughout
Israel’s postexilic literature, but this is a normative theological perspective that cannot be
confused with a poll of the “man on the street.” Also problematic is Wright’s attempt to ground
Jesus’ mission of restoration in Jesus’ own self-consciousness.54
On the other hand, Wright does provide ample textual evidence for a biblical view of
Israel’s story as being unfinished and in need of divine rescue. Wright can point not only to the
great prophetic visions of the future found in books like Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, but also to
the descriptions of Israel’s present circumstances as dire, as in Daniel 9, Ezra 9 and Nehemiah 9.
If Wright is correct about Jesus as the bearer of restoration, however, then his theory ultimately
undermines Yoder’s, since for Wright “exile” ceases to be a reality for the people of God postJesus. The question that Wright’s work poses in spite of itself, however, was also the question I
posed of Yoder: what is “exile” actually being used to mean?
See especially Maurice Casey, “Where Wright is Wrong,” JSNT 69 (1998): 95-103; Francis Gerald
Downing, “Exile in Formative Judaism,” in Making Sense in (and of) the First Christian Century
(JSNTSup 197; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 148-68; Carey C. Newman, ed., Jesus and
the Restoration of Israel: A Critical Assessment of N. T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God (Downers
Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1999); James M. Scott, ed., Restoration: Old Testament, Jewish, and Christian
Perspectives (JSJSup 72; Leiden: Brill, 2001).
53
See Brant Pitre, Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of Exile (WUNT 2/204; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2005), esp. 31-40.
54
E.g., Wright, Jesus, 428.
52
15
Exilic Priority for Biblical Reasons
Neither Williams’s typology nor Wright’s history provides a sufficient grounding for a
contemporary exilic hermeneutic, but they do cast further light on the nature of Yoder’s
approach and its internal tensions. While sympathetic to Yoder’s effort, I have attempted to
argue that his approach remains unclear in regard to its warrants and claims, particularly
concerning scripture. Needed in the whole post-Constantinian discussion instead, I want to
suggest, is a more consistently biblical argument for an exilic hermeneutic.
It is exactly at this point that historical-critical scholarship can be especially helpful by
calling attention to the difference between the actual course of Israel’s history and its biblical
portrayal.55 Regardless of the Maccabees and the Hasmoneans, Israel’s scriptures make Israel’s
exilic existence its default identity for the future. This theological move can be seen in the way
that Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles appear at the end of the Jewish canon, so that the final
words of the Hebrew Bible consist of an open-ended call to return to Jerusalem (“Let him go
up,” 2 Chr 36:23). Parallels can be located in the conclusions to the other main canonical
divisions. The Pentateuch ends with Israel outside of the land. The prophetic corpus concludes
with Judah “in exile out of its land” (2 Kgs 25:21), with a description of how “all” the remaining
55
See Rainer Albertz, Israel in Exile: The History and Literature of the Sixth Century B. C. E. (Atlanta:
Society of Biblical Literature, 2004); Ehud Ben Zvi and Christoph Levin, eds., The Concept of Exile in
Ancient Israel and Its Historical Contexts (BZAW 404; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010); Robert P. Carroll,
“Exile? What Exile? Departation and the Discussion of Diaspora,” in Leading Captivity Captive: The
“Exile” as History and Ideology (ed. Lester L. Grabbe; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 6279; Oded Lipschitz and Joseph Blenkinsopp, eds., Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period
(Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2003); Oded Lipschitz and Manfred Oeming, eds., Judah and the
Judeans in the Persian Period (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2006); Oded Lipschitz, Gary N.
Knoppers and Rainer Albertz, eds., Judah and the Judeans in the Fourth Century B. C. E. (Winona Lake,
Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2007); Oded Lipschitz, Gary N. Knoppers and Manfred Oeming, eds., Judah and the
Judeans in the Achaemenid Period (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2011); Jill Anne Middlemas, The
Templeless Age: An Introduction to the History, Literature and Theology of the Exile (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox, 2007).
16
people flee to Egypt (2 Kgs 25:22-26) and Jehoiachin winds up on the king’s dole in Babylon (2
Kgs 25:27-30). The historicity of these accounts is not my present concern; the way they
authorize an exilic perspective is. All three divisions of the canon depict an exilic Israel outside
the land, with the return as a hope and a prayer but not yet a reality.
This kind of depiction is particularly intriguing in the case of Chronicles, since the
expected narrative order would be 1–2 Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. Yet the Hebrew Bible
traditionally ends with 2 Chronicles, which is perhaps an indication that concluding with an
exilic perspective was important enough to violate the apparent order of the story. However,
even within Ezra and Nehemiah the exilic “default” is made apparent. Both books describe
Israel’s present existence as “slavery” (Ezr 9:8-9; Neh 9:36-37) rather than liberation. “Return”
in the sense of well-being and self-determination is not depicted in these books as a present
reality, or even an inaugurated reality, but rather as a supplication. Also significant is how both
of these books critique the monarchy (Ezr 9:7; Neh 9:33, 34-35), and the fact that neither book
exalts the kingship as an ideal or describes an initiative to reinstate it. For this reason it is
profoundly inadequate to style these books as simply representing the “religion of empire” or a
priestly “theocracy.”56
Still, one could argue that the Old Testament contains a variety of eras, each with its own
form of social organization. More to the point, there does not seem to be any particular political
structure or system that is given preference in the Old Testament, either politically or
For the label “religion of empire,” see Howard-Brook, Come Out, 250. Howard-Brook proceeds to fault
Ezra and Nehemiah with ethnic exclusion, economic exploitation and Persian complicity, implying doubts
about their inspiration and authority in the process (pp. 250, 264). It is telling that they become the
villains of his approach to the Bible. For a rejection of the characterization of the postexilic period as a
“theocracy,” see Jeremiah W. Cataldo, A Theocratic Yehud? Issues of Government in a Persian Province
(LHBOTS 498; London: T & T Clark, 2009). If such descriptions fail historically, they fail even more as
characterizations of the perspective rendered within the books as literary compositions.
56
17
theologically.57 So why should one be elevated over another in terms of its theological
significance? The reason is that all of these periods do not simply present equivalent alternatives
for social organization because they are now part of a single story, and that story not only depicts
variety but movement and direction.
George Lindbeck has acutely observed that, in scripture and church history, story is
logically prior to forms of peoplehood, for the simple reason that those forms have changed over
time:
Just as the story of the Quakers is more fundamental than descriptions such as “church of the
poor” or “church of the wealthy” (for they have been both), and the story of the French is more
fundamental than “monarchy” or “republic” (for France has been both), so it is also in the case of
the Church.58
Nevertheless, I would argue that the story-form of peoplehood within the Christian Bible does
still grant a certain priority to the exilic state of Israel’s existence, especially in the way that
diaspora opens up into, and becomes basic for, the characteristic vision of peoplehood found
within the New Testament (e.g., 1 Pet 1:1).
Yet this priority cannot function in isolation from the rest of Israel’s story either, or from
the other varieties of peoplehood narrated throughout the course of the Old Testament.
Interestingly, Lindbeck also calls for an end to “ecclesial pretension” in light of the
contemporary church’s post-Constantinian situation,59 and his interpretation of that pretension
precisely mirrors Roger Williams’s analysis, although without the same attention to the niceties
of seventeenth-century typological exegesis. According to Lindbeck, the church must learn to see
57
Jacques Ellul, The False Presence of the Kingdom (trans. C. Edward Hopkin; New York: Seabury,
1972), 111.
58
George A. Lindbeck, “The Church,” in The Church in a Postliberal Age (ed. James J. Buckley; Radical
Transitions; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 149
59
Lindbeck, “Church” 155.
18
its story as a “continuation: of Israel’s story, but not a “fulfillment” of it.60 This is an effort on
Lindbeck’s part to avoid Christian triumphalism, and he stresses firmly that being the church
means being in receipt of God judgment as well as God’s blessing. Being a “chosen” people does
not make the church more important than the world:
On the contrary, its role is instrumental: it exists in order to witness to the nations. It does this,
however, not primarily by striving to save souls or to improve the social order, but by being the
body of Christ, the communal sign of the promised redemption, in the time between the times.61
In its basic orientation, little here appears to separate Lindbeck from Yoder. But Lindbeck goes
on to argue that in order to accomplish this diaspora-like mission, the church will need central
leadership, robust traditions and unifying institutional structures.62 Although the diagnosis is
shared with Yoder, the prescription for a cure is quite different. One of the reasons why is that
Lindbeck pays greater attention to other parts of the biblical story.
Other Parts to the Biblical Story
At this point I want to affirm the view set out by Yoder and others to the effect that the
exilic situation of Israel becomes the default situation for the people of God within the Old
Testament—but also that the case for this view is stronger once it is made primarily on the basis
of scripture and not history per se. In other words, the theological warrant for an exilic
hermeneutic lies in canonical description, not history of religions investigation. Yet I do not wish
to invoke an exilic hermeneutic at the expense of other aspects of the biblical story either. To the
extent that the canon ascribes particular significance to exilic Israel, it also includes the earlier
parts of the story.
Lindbeck, “Church,” 157.
Lindbeck, “Church,” 159.
62
Lindbeck, “Church,” 160-65.
60
61
19
Some contemporary efforts to formulate an exilic hermeneutic have been made in such a
way that Mosaic and Davidic traditions have been unfairly denigrated or simply avoided.63 Even
if the decision is made to give exilic Israel a certain theological priority, as I have argued, one
cannot merely dismiss the Mosaic and Davidic traditions, which after all retain their place in the
biblical canon. Rather than exclusively negative, these traditions are nuanced and frequently
ambivalent about power, leadership and social organization. Their abiding significance arises not
only from the way in which they stage debates about these matters but also from their sheer
presence in the canon. These traditions are now scripture, and as such they have a presumptive
claim on our attention.
The debate between Gordon McConville and Oliver O’Donovan, for example, turns on
how to understand the royal tradition in particular, and how that tradition should be weighted in
relation to the other witnesses in the canon. O’Donovan begins his study of political theology
with a focus on divine kingship, hardly an innocent choice. Just to mark a contrast, Rainer
Albertz begins his history of Israelite religion with an emphasis on the egalitarian nature of
Israel’s identity as originating and characteristic.64 Unsurprisingly, both studies also conclude
with differing political visions. O’Donovan charts a historical trajectory from the YHWH malak
63
In Howard-Brook, Come Out, the Mosaic and royal traditions of the Old Testament are given
abbreviated treatment and the primary exposition moves from Genesis to Solomon. There is a short,
single chapter connecting the two (pp. 93-97), in which the historical books are said to describe how
“YHWH’s dream has turned to nightmare” (p. 95). Howard-Brook does articulate criticism of a view in
which royal Zion theology is conceived as replacing the more ideal character of the Mosaic covenant (p.
96), but his warrant for this stance comes from his reading of the New Testament and the Jesus tradition.
Later on he briefly explores the traditions found in Exodus (pp. 134-60), 1 Samuel (pp. 187-92) and
Joshua (pp. 192-97), but these are all treated as “allegory” (p. 190) about kingship. Howard-Brook is
ultimately critical of efforts to read the biblical narrative “in its linear, final form,” particularly when
combined with evolutionary assumptions (p. 198).
64
See Rainer Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period (OTL; trans. John
Bowden; 2 vols.; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994). For a detailed comparison of O’Donovan
and Yoder, see Paul G. Doerksen, Beyond Suspicion: Post-Christian Protestant Political Theology in
John Howard Yoder and Oliver O’Donovan (Paternoster Theological Monographs; Milton Keynes:
Paternoster, 2009); cf. J. Alexander Sider, To See History Doxologically: History and Holiness in John
Howard Yoder’s Ecclesiology (Radical Traditions; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 17-55.
20
psalms through the theopolitics of the monarchy, the deuteronomists and the prophetic tradition,
eventually connecting this reconstructed worldview with Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom.
For O’Donovan, Christendom, or as he puts it “confessionally Christian government,” again
becomes desirable—not as a project for the church but as an inevitable, indeed welcome, byproduct of the church’s mission.65
Yet for McConville this stance gives too much weight to pro-monarchic tradition in the
Old Testament and too little to its critique of kingship, especially in deuteronomic tradition.66
McConville not only highlights other biblical voices, he makes the case that Deuteronomy
contains a view of something like the “separation of powers,” in which political authority is
vested in multiple offices and roles in Israel, so that Torah authority in the human realm is
represented by shared and consultative, even “constitutional” decision-making rather than oneperson autocratic rule.67 In a printed response to McConville’s paper, O’Donovan gently chides
him for the anachronism of this idea, but other Old Testament scholars have offered similar
descriptions of Deuteronomy’s political vision,68 as McConville notes.69 My present purpose is
not to evaluate this debate in any detailed manner, although my sympathies lie more with
McConville than O’Donovan, but rather to use it in order to make a more basic point: that
interpretation of the Old Testament’s royal tradition is crucial for any political theology.
On the one hand, the view of civil power evidenced in the royal tradition is considerably
more ambivalent than O’Donovan allows. At the same time it is difficult to avoid the judgment
O’Donovan, Desire, 195.
J. Gordon McConville, “Law and Monarchy in the Old Testament,” in Bartholomew, Royal Priesthood,
69-88.
67
McConville, “Law,” 76-77.
68
O’Donovan, “Response to Gordon McConville,” in Bartholomew, Royal Priesthood, 89-90.
69
McConville, “Law,” 76 n. 17.
65
66
21
that the Old Testament grants high importance to political leadership, law and civil institutions.70
Needed is a theological wrestling with these matters, especially on the part of those who are
working from a basically “post-Constantinian” perspective. However, I also want to observe that
from my perspective the historical-critical foundation from which O’Donovan mounts his
argument turns out to be a weakness rather than a strength, since at certain points in his argument
he cannot defend his choices other than by reference to a particular historical reconstruction. The
problem, of course, as my earlier mention of Albertz was intended to indicate, is that there is
presently no “one” historical reconstruction of Israel’s history. To be sure, this means
O’Donovan’s argument is vulnerable to historical debate and possible disconfirmation. But that
is always true in history.
The greater problem is that by basing his argument on a historical reconstruction he is
turning a blind eye to the canonical depiction of Israel’s traditions, which has artfully and
insightfully given them a particular construal.71 Nowhere is this seen more clearly with respect to
the monarchy, I would suggest, than in 1 Samuel 8–12, in which “pro-monarchic” (1 Sam 9:1–
10:16; 11) and anti-monarchic traditions (1 Samuel 8; 10:17-27) about Saul are not only
combined but combined so that their introduction is anti-monarchic (1 Samuel 8) and their
conclusion (1 Samuel 12) frames the entire unit within a conditional understanding of kingship
(“if both you and the kings who reigns over you will follow the Lord your God, it will be well” 1
Lindbeck, “Church,” 160-65. This is true, I think, even if leadership is not a biblical “category,” as
maintained by John Goldingay, Old Testament Theology, Volume 3: Israel’s Life (Downers Grove:
InterVarsity, 2009), 708.
71
This failing is particularly striking and lamentable given O’Donovan’s declared interest in reading the
“narrative coherence” of scripture as “a decisive testimony for faith” in its own right; see his
“Deliberation, History, and Reading: A Response to Scheiker and Wolfterstorff,” Scottish Journal of
Theology 54 (2001): 140.
70
22
Sam 12:14).72 Here kingship is neither naively celebrated nor polemically demonized. Instead,
kingship is viewed as a form of political life that has the potential to promote social justice and
honor God, even as it carries with it fearsome responsibilities and dangers.
However, this kind of nuance does not emerge, I want to suggest, from comparing
reconstructed text-traditions against each other abstracted from their present narrative interconnectedness, but only from attending to how they have already been weighted in relation to
each other within the concrete, canonical form of the received text.
The Whole Story
Precisely this kind of nuance is needed in appraisals of the Old Testament and politics
more broadly. Thus, the Mennonite theologian John Reimer has argued that “we need a more
honest theology of law and civil institutions and their function in helping to shape and preserve
human and nonhuman life in a fallen world, as mandated in the Christian doctrines of creation,
redemption and reconciliation.” Such institutions can still be viewed, at least partly, in
Augustinian fashion as “themselves fallen and therefore as post-lapsarian,” but they are still “in
some sense ‘ordained’ by God and need to be given critical support as necessary for life.”73
Indeed, it is difficult to avoid such a conclusion if one is going to take the theological witness of
the Old Testament with full seriousness, and it is therefore no accident that recent debate about
72
Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 27778.
73
A. John Reimer, “‘I can not to abolish the law but to fulfill it’: A Positive Theology of Law and Civil
Institutions,” in A Mind Patient and Untamed: Assessing John Howard Yoder’s Contributions to
Theology, Ethics, and Peacemaking (ed. Ben C. Ollenburger and Gayle Gerber Koontz; Telford, Pa.:
Cascadia, 2004), 247.
23
political theology and Yoder’s legacy within Mennonite circles has focused on the need for a
reappraisal of the place of the Old Testament within Anabaptist tradition.74
One suggestive proposal comes from John Rogerson (not a Mennonite), who has
advocated approaching the Old Testament’s laws and civil institutions as “structures of grace,”
which he defines as “social arrangement[s] designed to mitigate hardship and misfortune, and
grounded in God’s mercy.”75 This designation is applied by Rogerson in the context of his
discussion to Exod 22:25-27, a section of the Covenant Code dealing with the lending of money
and enjoining due consideration of the poor.
What Rogerson is commending goes beyond simple imitation, approaching these laws
instead as real-life efforts to give righteousness a particular shape within ancient Israelite society.
That shape is ultimately based upon the character of God (v. 27, “I will listen, for I am
compassionate”; my emphasis), so that “secular law” and “theological principles” are blended. It
would therefore be a mistake to read such laws only for the “principles” or “values” they
enshrine, without also seeing that they attempt to put such “principles” and “values” to work in
society. In this vein Rogerson concludes:
If the Old Testament says anything to us today, it is that we need to devise theologically driven
structures of grace appropriate to our situation that will sustain those aspects of…life which,
from a Christian perspective, we deem to be most valuable, and which may be most under threat
from the state and powerful interests.76
Rogerson calls this hermeneutical stance reading for “example rather than precept.”77
Waldemar Janzen, “A Canonical Rethinking of the Anabaptist –Mennonite New Testament
Orientation,” in The Church as Theological Community: Essays in Honour of David Schroeder (ed. Harry
Huebner; Winnipeg, Manitoba: CMBC Publications, 1990), 90-112.
75
John Rogerson, Theory and Practice in Old Testament Ethics (ed. M. Daniel Carroll R., JSOTSup 405;
London: T & T Clark, 2004), 129.
76
Rogerson, Theory, 133.
77
Rogerson, Theory, 133.
74
24
It may be that recent historical-critical scholarship can again be helpful at this point with
its increasing stress on how the Old Testament’s legal material does not appear as a legal code in
any straightforward way, but amounts to something like a series of legal examples or a guide to
legal reasoning and just rule.78 From a more “canonical” perspective, it might also be observed—
and rarely is—that the Pentateuch presents its laws as rules and principles to be observed but
does not in fact depict them as fully operational within society. Indeed, the Deuteronomistic
History largely depicts the failure of the attempt to order Israelite society according to the
Mosaic mandate. The absence of a narratively depicted, fully operational, legal system within the
Pentateuch matches the absence of a narratively depicted, fully operational, legal system in the
Former and Latter Prophets, which is precisely why historical critics from Wellhausen onward
have argued that the prophetic traditions of the Old Testament preceded the legal tradition
historically.
However, my present point is that the canonical presentation of Old Testament law gives
it the character of something more like an ideal or even a prophecy. In keeping with this
canonical presentation, then, we might do better to ask less about the historical context of Old
Testament law and more about the kind of world it envisions—and how that world might
challenge, deepen or extend our own attempts at living justly within the church as well as secular
society.
This way forward seems sound, since the only other real alternatives are either to dismiss
the Christian relevance of Old Testament law and civil institutions after the fashion of classic
dispensationalism or neo-Marcionite liberalism, or to seek to replicate them in the manner of
78
Dale Patrick, Old Testament Law (Atlanta: John Knox, 1985);
25
“theonomy” and Christian Reconstructionism.79 Moreover, such an approach to the Old
Testament serves to focus attention on the unfinished business of post-Constantinian theology
with regard to the New Testament as well. There can be no mistaking how the central thrust of
Jesus’ ministry is the creation of alternative politics.80 Roger Williams once cited the scene in
the Passion Narrative in which the Roman soldiers mock Jesus with their parody of coronation
(“Hail, King of the Jews,” Matt 27: 27-31//Mark 15:16-20) as a quintessential illustration of how
his kingdom was “not of this world” (John 18:36; cf. Matt 4:8-10).81
Yet the “world” continues to have its own theological reality, its own divinely granted
authority, within the combined witness of the New Testament—not only in back-handed
concessions like “Render to Caesar what it Caesar’s” (Matt 22:21//Mark 12:17//Luke 20:25), but
in the mysterious providence that embraces Caiaphas and Pilate as well as Jesus and his
disciples. Jesus himself acknowledges this authority when he tells Pilate, “You would have no
power over me unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11), and Paul bequeathed a
this view as a challenge for the church’s ongoing theological reflection by describing secular
leaders as “God’s servants” (Rom 13:6; cf. v. 1).
For precisely this reason Gerald Schlabach has argued that the post-Constantinian model
needs reframing.82 It encourages thinking that is too oppositional and masks an even subtler
temptation for the church: namely, the “Deuteronomic” challenge of how best “to live in the
79
On the latter alternative, see Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics (Nutley, NJ: Craig, 1979);
idem, No Other Standard: Theonomy and Its Critics (Tyler, Tex.: Institute for Christian Economics,
1991); William S. Barker and Godfrey W. Robert, eds., Theonomy: A Reformed Critique (Grand Rapids:
Academie, 1990); Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus 21–23 (Tyler, Tex.: Institute
for Christian Economics, 1990); R. John Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law: A Chalcedon Study
(Nutley, NJ: Craig, 1973).
80
John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993).
81
Williams, Complete Writings, 3:374
82
Gerald W. Schlabach, “Deuteronomic or Constantinian: What Is the Most Basic Problem for Christian
Social Ethics?,” in The Wisdom of the Cross: Essays in Honor of John Howard Yoder (ed. Stanley
Hauerwas et al.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 449-71.
26
land.” Or, better perhaps, how best to live in a land, since exiles in fact always live somewhere,
and unless that place is credited in real terms, then “exile” and “land” become impermissible
abstractions. Indeed, “Constantinian” language can be insidiously deceptive, Schlabach
maintains: “We misconstrue the Constantinian temptation unless we attend not just to how
unfaithfulness and evil may surely lead to further unfaithfulness but also to how faithfulness
itself, and even the good that God gives, may become the occasion for temptation.”83 In other
words, a “Constantinian” focus can inhibit the venture, the risk, necessary for the church to
engage the world in real terms. However, Schlabach’s goal is not at all O’Donovan’s revival of
Christendom but rather a kind of church-based strategic witness than goes beyond the
embodiment of an alternative politics in order to speak to and interact with the secular world.
From this vantage point, Schlabach can actually say:
There is even something right about Christendom—as that societas in which right relationship
with God is rightly ordering and reintegrating every relationship and all of life. Although
Yoder’s followers have rarely noticed, the Christendom vision is itself a vision of shalom. If we
see the Deuteronomic rather than the Constantinian juncture as presenting our most basic
challenge, we can insist just as strongly and even more clearly than we have, that historic
“Christendom” represents a premature effort to grasp through faithless violence at the fullness of
life that is God’s to give fully at the eschaton. In other words, peace churches should be able to
witness even more forcefully and prophetically to the Constantinian “mainstream” if they do not
view it as utterly fallen. For it is precisely because orthodox Christianity has gotten some things
quite right that its misappropriation of God’s gifts for limited, selfish, tribal, and non-catholic
ends is so much the greater scandal to God’s saving purposes in history.84
Viewing Christendom’s chief failing as an unholy marriage between a realized eschatology and
state-sponsored violence provides a valuable starting point for charting a faithful ecclesiology for
the future. To the extent that a post-Constantinian approach to theology continues to have merit,
it will need to reflect more deeply on the “Deuteronomic” question that Schlabach has helpfully
highlighted: what does it mean for the church to live faithfully “in a land”?
83
84
Schlabach, “Deuteronomic,” 453.
Schlabach, “Deuteronomic,” 456 (italics in original).
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For a start, a faithful church will need to oppose all efforts to bring in the kingdom
violently (cf. Matt 11:12) and discern an effective way to reinvigorate the eschatological
dimension of Christian life within preaching and worship. There is certainly no need today for
additional idle speculation about the precise timetable for the end times. Apocalyptic theology
has frequently been used to discourage social engagement altogether. But a more eschatological
church could view its engagement with the world as being necessary, effective and hopeful, even
as that engagement is also of necessity modest, provisional, and sometimes even tragic, but
always embraced by the mysterious providence of God. If Yoder’s thesis continues to have
merit, and I believe it does, then the contemporary church needs to look more synagogal and
more Jewish, reclaiming its early identity as a Messianic form of Judaism that lives and works
and hopes “for the welfare of the city.” The church in fact shares this Messianic hope with (most
forms of) Judaism; what sets the church apart is that it also carries a Messianic memory from the
past and a Messianic identity in the present.
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