Volume 31, Issue 2, Fall/Winter 2011
Tommy Givens
Pages 75-92
The Election of Israel and the Politics of Jesus
Revisiting John Howard Yoder's "The Jewish—Christian Schism Revisited"
IN THE JEWISH—CHRISTIAN SCHISM REVISITED, JOHN HOWARD YODER gives an account of the Jewishness of the politics of Jesus and Pauline Christianity. He rightly claims that irresponsible historiography has presented early Christianity as a departure from the Jewish ways of its time, reading the later schism into the New Testament and belying the Jewishness of Christian ethics. He contends that living in the faithfully Jewish ways of Jeremiah, Jesus, and Paul, as many Jewish communities did up to the time of Jesus and many non-Christian Jewish communities and free churches have done since, is what it means to be the people of God. After an appreciative exposition of Yoder's account and a brief articulation of its theological and ethical stakes, I argue that the biblical witness to the election of Israel (neglected in his account) troubles his understanding of the people of God as presupposed and conveyed by his revisionist historiography of the Jewish—Christian schism.