Practices, Politics, and Performance: Toward a Communal Hermeneutic for Christian Ethics

By Michael G. Cartwright

Drawing on the hermeneutical reflections of John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Cartwright challenges the way twentieth-century American Protestants have engaged the "problem" of the use of scripture in Christian ethics, and issues a summons for a new debate oriented by a communal approach to hermeneutics. By analyzing particular ecclesial practices that stand within living traditions of Christianity, the "politics" of scriptural interpretation can be identified along with the criteria for what a "good performance" of scripture should be. This approach to the use of scripture in Christian ethics is displayed in historical discussions of two Christian practices through which scripture is read ecclesiologically: the Eastern Orthodox liturgical celebration of the Eucharist and the Anabaptist practice of "binding and loosing" or "the rule of Christ." When American Protestants consider "performances" of scripture such as these alongside one another within more ecumenical contexts, they begin to confront the ecclesiological problem with their attempts to "use" the Bible in Christian ethics: the relative absence of constitutive ecclesial practices in American Protestant congregations that can provide moral orientation for their interpretations of Christian scripture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Jun 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781630878627

Michael G. Cartwright

Michael G. Cartwright is Dean of Ecumenical and Interfaith Programs at the University of Indianapolis. He is the editor of 'The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited', 'The Hauerwas Reader', and 'The Royal Priesthood'.

Book preview

Practices, Politics, and Performance

Toward a Communal Hermeneutic for Christian Ethics

Michael G. Cartwright

PRACTICES, POLITICS, AND PERFORMANCE

Toward a Communal Hermeneutic for Christian Ethics

Copyright © 2006 Michael G. Cartwright. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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ISBN: 1-59752-565-0

EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-862-7

Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Cartwright, Michael G.

Practices, politics, and performance: toward a communal hermeneutic for Christian ethics / Michael G. Cartwright.

Princeton Theological Monograph Series 57

xvi + 260 p. ; 23 cm.

ISBN: 1-59752-565-0

1. Christianity and politics. 2. Church and state. 3. Religion and state. 4. Christian ethics. 5. Bible—Hermeneutics. I. Title. II. Series.

BJ1251 C35 2006

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Princeton Theological Monograph Series

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Preface

I am honored and deeply grateful to the staff at Wipf and Stock Publishers for the opportunity to have my dissertation published in the Princeton Theological Monographs Series. In retrospect, I can see a bit more clearly than I could at the time that I wrote this monograph how what I was trying to do was part of a wider body of work. In the 1980s a variety of Christian scholars were probing toward a renewed kind of theological interpretation of scripture centered in the life of the church. For many of us, John Howard Yoder’s Politics of Jesus and related essays provided a way to begin rethinking tired assumptions about what it means to read scripture theologically. Over the past two decades, the trajectories of those explorations have become more well-defined and the investigations much more mature and significant than my own efforts have been. I am also pleased to see that the vineyard of Yoderian scholarship has thrived in the years since I completed this study, and I suspect that also accounts for the continuing scholarly interest in my dissertation.

As some readers may know, this monograph was supposed to have been published by Duke University Press more than a decade ago, but was not due to my own inability to come to terms with the task of how to make the necessary revisions. Initially I thought that I could come to terms with the task of reducing the girth of the text to the specified level for publication, but as I worked with the text, I found that what I really wanted to do was to expand the argument by adding an additional set of examples of communal hermeneutics (from the history of the Black Church). Although I ultimately allowed the contract with Duke University Press to lapse—a decision that Stanley Hauerwas and others questioned—I remain very grateful for the interest that Reynolds Smith showed in my work. I am pleased that my friend John Berkman and I later had the opportunity to work with Reynolds on another project: the publication of The Hauerwas Reader.¹

The publication of a monograph originally written in 1988 calls upon the author to make careful judgments about the kinds of changes that are necessary for the intended audience. In this case, I have not attempted to update this study, but simply to make it available for those scholars who have continuing interest in the study as originally written. In keeping with that judgment, I have not attempted to identify all of the materials that have been published and/or republished during the eighteen years that have elapsed. As readers will discover, there is one exception to that judgment; in the Bibliography I have provided updated citations for articles and books by John Howard Yoder (see pp. 259–60) that have been published since I finished the dissertation.

For the record and the sake of scholars who may want to follow the trail of my sporadic explorations in the use of Scripture in Christian ethics, I would call attention to the following essays that were published subsequent to the completion of the dissertation. Portions of chapters two and three were incorporated into an article published in The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics.² Later I published another article that expanded on material from chapter one and chapter five to clarify the ways in which John Howard Yoder’s critique of Reinhold Niebuhr can be seen to be informed by the sixteenth-century debates between the the magisterial reformers and the Anabaptists in Switzerland.³ That same body of work informed the introduction that I wrote for The Royal Priesthood ⁴ where I again interpreted John Howard Yoder’s theological essays in relation to the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and H. Richard Niebuhr among others. Material from chapter two was reworked for a subsequent article that I contributed to a series of articles on the state of the question of Scripture and Ethics.⁵ With the exception of that particular essay, I have not attempted to publish any other material from that section of the dissertation although I have been encouraged by friends over the years to find ways to disseminate the material in chapter four about communal hermeneutics in the Orthodox tradition.

By contrast, the material in chapter five has spawned several projects. On several occasions, I have been invited to reflect on issues of church discipline that enabled me to use the material in chapter five to explore conundrums that are specific to the Wesleyan/Methodist tradition.⁶ In response to the invitation of The Mennonite Quarterly Review, I also provided an account of my involvement with Mennonites across the course of my lifetime.⁷ In this latter context, I provided a more explicit statement of my own disagreements with John Howard Yoder’s theology, particularly in matters of worship and sacrament. These were matters that were acknowledged but not developed in the conclusions of the dissertation. My afterword to The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited provides the most extensive statement that I have written of what I believe to be the flaws of Yoder’s hermeneutics.⁸

At various times, over the years I have tried to expand on the argument of the dissertation by looking at other exempla. For example, I had hoped to publish a book that focused on the communal hermeneutics associated with the practices of singing the spirituals and preaching in the historic Black church tradition of African-American Christianity. Unfortunately, I was not able to finish my own wrestling with the project that I had dubbed Wrestling with Scripture, but I did publish two essays from material that I developed for that purpose.⁹ More recently, this body of work has spurred my involvement as a member of the design team for the Sankofa Spiritual Formation Community being developed by Upper Room Ministries and the General Board of Discipleship of the United Methodist Church.

This is not the place to try to account for the continuities and discontinuities of my scholarly efforts in the midst of a life journey that has taken me to places that I had not anticipated going (Western Pennsylvania, central Indiana) and that has led to me playing roles (department chairperson and now dean) that I would not have been able to foresee. Another thing that I never dreamed would happen when I was writing the dissertation is that a group of us would found The Ekklesia Project in 1999, a venture that now includes a company of more than a thousand Christian pastors, scholars, and activists who advocate renewal of the church in the context of robust Christian practices. I don’t know how much ecclesial hermeneutics is being done in exemplary ways today, but I strongly suspect that some of it is happening in congregations associated with the Congregational Formation Initiative directed by Philip Kenneson.

Nor could I have imagined at that time that I would have the privilege of participating in the work of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning and collaborating with Peter Ochs in editing a second collection of John Howard Yoder’s essays. I am not sure that I can offer a satisfactory narrative of the ways in which my advocacy of ecclesial hermeneutics correlates with my participation in Jewish-Christian-Muslim scripture study trialogs¹⁰ except to say that in both cases I have experienced the delight of reading Scripture in ways that are sweeter than honey and more desirable than much fine gold (Psalm 19:10). Nor could I every say all of the ways that my commitment to interfaith dialog coheres with my commitment to ecumenical conversations displayed in various endeavors¹¹ across the years, but I continue to remind congregations of Christians of their collective responsibility to bearing public witness to the good news of Jesus Christ in the world every time they gather to praise and worship God.¹²

I conclude with a few personal notes: First, I remain grateful to Stanley Hauerwas, without whom I would never have been able to write this kind of dissertation, and to Greg Jones and Stephen Fowl, two scholars whose own studies of reading in communion and engaging scripture far exceed anything that I have ever written. I am also grateful for the encouragement and forbearance of Allen Verhey, one of the scholars whose work I critiqued in the dissertation. In retrospect, my characterization of Allen’s dissertation as methodologically ‘musclebound’ (see p. 71) was both uncharitable and unwise. Allen is one of the people in the Society of Christian Ethics who has encouraged me across the years, and I very much regret that line in my dissertation. Still, it remains the case that Allen Verhey and I continue to disagree about how to resolve several questions at the heart of the continuing debate about the uses of Scripture in Christian ethics.¹³

I am also grateful to my colleagues at the University of Indianapolis where I have spent the past decade after an eight-year sojourn at Allegheny College. I have had extraordinary opportunities during the time that I have been at UIndy and while my efforts to foster theological exploration of vocation on our campus have at times engendered opposition, they have also provided the opportunity to experience the delights of seeing a community of learning grow and mature while also discovering a tradition of inquiry that in its own way is exemplary and admirable.

Second, I am pleased to say that since I completed the dissertation in the season of Advent in 1988, three more children have been added to our household. Here I proudly add the names of Erin Rebecca Wilder Cartwright, James Patrick Wilder Cartwright, and Bethany Hope Cartwright to the company of family members that I named in the original acknowledgements for the dissertation. Thanks to them I am less self-absorbed than I would otherwise be, and daily I take great delight in their humor, musical talents, and zest for life. Their older sister, Hannah Charissa Cartwright, is now a student enrolled in Christ College of Valparaiso University where she is engaged in her own scholarly inquiries while continuing to display her own amazing gifts for organization.

Finally, I remain grateful to God for the Rev. Mary Wilder Cartwright, with whom I still share the yoke of obedience alongside the amazing responsibility of parenthood in the context of the bond of Christian marriage. Thanks for enduring times of darkness and grief with me as well as for continuing to make as many days as possible jolly holidays with Mary. I also owe Mary thanks for taking the time to retype portions of two chapters of the original manuscript.

Michael G. Cartwright Epiphany 2006

1 See Michael G. Cartwright and John Berkman; editors, The Hauerwas Reader (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).

2 See Cartwright, The Practice and Performance of Scripture: Grounding Christian Ethics in a Communal Hermeneutic, in The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 1988 (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1988) 31–53.

3 See Cartwright, "Sorting the Wheat from the Tares: Interpreting Niebuhr’s Interpretation of Christian Ethics," in The Wisdom of the Cross: Essays in Honor of John Howard Yoder, ed. Stanley Hauerwas, Chris Huebner, Harry Huebner, and Mark Nation (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 1999) 349–72.

4 See Cartwright, Radical Reform, Radical Catholicity: John Howard Yoder’s Vision of the Faithful Church, Editorial Introduction to The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical by John H. Yoder, ed. Michael G. Cartwright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1994) 1–49.

5 See Cartwright, "The Uses of Scripture in Christian Ethics—After Bakhtin," in The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 1992 (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1992) 263–76.

6 See Cartwright, The Discipline in Black and White: Conflicting Legacies of Nineteenth Century African-American Methodist and Euro-American Methodist Disciplinary Practices, in The Discipline and the Disciplines, edited by Dennis Campbell, Russell Richey, and William B. Lawrence, the United Methodism and American Culture series 3 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999) 105–35. See also Cartwright, Church Discipline in the American Methodist Experience, Wesleyan Theological Journal 34.2 (1999) 7–51.

7 See Cartwright, Sharing the House of God: Learning to Read Scripture with Anabaptists, Mennonite Quarterly Review 74 (2000) 593–621.

8 See Cartwright, Afterword: ‘If Abraham is Our Father. . .’: The Problem of Christian Supersessionism After John Howard Yoder, in The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, John Howard Yoder (London: SCM; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003) 205–40.

9 See Cartwright, Ideology and the Interpretation of the Bible in the African-American Christian Tradition, Modern Theology 9.2 (1993) 141–58. See also Michael G. Cartwright, Wrestling With Scripture: Can Euro-American Christians and African-American Christians Read Scripture Together? in The Gospel in Black & White: Theological Resources for Racial Reconciliation, ed. Dennis L. Okholm (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1997) 71–114, 170–81.

10 See Cartwright, Sharing the Table of Study: Jewish-Christian-Muslim Trialogue on Jonah Texts, The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning 3.1 (on-line journal edited by guest editor Rachel Muers).

11 See the two sets of Occasional Papers of the St. Brigid of Kildare Consultation on Methodist-Benedictine Spirituality (2002–2004) that have been published privately by The Crossings Project at the University of Indianapolis.

12 See Cartwright, Being Sent—Witness, in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, ed. Samuel Wells and Stanley Hauerwas (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004) 481–94.

13 For Allen Verhey’s published response to my critical assessment of his work and his own critique of my proposals for a communal hermeneutic for Christian ethics, see his essay Scripture and Ethics: Practices, Performance and Prescriptions, in Christian Ethics: Problems and Prospects, ed. Lisa Sowle Cahill and James F. Childress (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1996) 18–44. Verhey also discusses the work of Stephen Fowl, Greg Jones, and Stanley Hauerwas in this same article.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to a great company of friends, scholars, and institutions who have supported me over the past several years of graduate study and research. Stanley Hauerwas has been a constant friend, shrewd advisor, and true mentor for over four years. Although he would be the first to deny the accolade, I consider him to be a master teacher. His generosity with his time is matched only by his enthusiasm for the scholarly efforts of his students.

I am also grateful to those who served on my preliminary examination and dissertation committee: Professors Geoffrey Wainwright, David C. Steinmetz, Fredric Jameson, and Dean Dennis Campbell. Each of them has taught me more than they know, and I owe each of them a debt of gratitude that surpasses my ability to describe.

In addition to these members of my committee, several other scholars have contributed in important ways to the emergence and development of this project. Prof. Kenneth Surin of the Department of Religion at Duke University and my friend L. Gregory Jones, Dean of the Duke Divinity School, have both pushed me to dig deeper theologically and philosophically as I have struggled to articulate my proposal for a communal hermeneutic.

Given the ecclesiological character of my argument, it has been vitally important that I be in contact with scholars of the Anabaptist and Orthodox traditions. Several have read and commented on my work-in-progress. I am very grateful to Prof. John Howard Yoder of Notre Dame who patiently, yet firmly, corrected early drafts of chapter three where I begin my account of the Anabaptist communal hermeneutic. Prof. Stephen Boyd of Wake Forest University and Mr. Joel Kok, a graduate student in religion at Duke University, each offered helpful suggestions which improved a penultimate draft of chapter five.

Similarly, Professors Anthony Ugolnik of Franklin and Marshall College and Vigen Guroian of Loyola College of Maryland have proved to be congenial critics in offering responses to my appraisals of the possibilities and limits of Orthodox hermeneutics. In addition, my good friend Mr. Charles Harrell, also of Duke University’s Graduate Program in Religion, provided marvelous assistance in proofreading and commenting on chapter four of this study.

Stanley Hauerwas is fond of claiming that graduate school is the kind of environment where graduate students educate one another as much as professors teach students. In my case, this postulate has been proved over and over in my three years of graduate study at Duke. This study first began to take shape as part of a Field IV Christian Theology and Ethics Scripture and Ethics Seminar during the Spring of 1987. To the students and faculty who participated in that seminar, I owe an immense debt for constituting the critical mass in which these arguments could be presented, critiqued, and ultimately strengthened.

I am also grateful to the efficient library staff at the Divinity School Library of Duke University, particu­larly to the Reverend Ms. Linda Gard, who assisted me in obtaining materials at several points. More recently, the staff of Pelletier Library at Allegheny College, particu­larly Mr. Donald Vrabel and Ms. Cynthia Burton, has helped with various bibliographical details as I neared the completion of this project. Also, Prof. Gayle Gerber Koontz, of the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries, Elkhart, Indiana, and Prof. Theodore Stylianopoulos of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Seminary assisted me in locating bibliographical items that had previously eluded my research.

Looking back over the past several years of graduate study, I am aware of how much institutions have contributed to my fledgling attempts at scholarship. I am grateful to The Graduate School of Duke University for Departmental scholarships and to A Foundation for Theological Education for a three-year fellowship which enabled me to devote my full attention to graduate study from 1985 to 1988.

More recently, due to the generosity of Allegheny College in granting me a teaching-load reduction, I have been able to complete the process of revision of my disser­tation study. Provost Andrew T. Ford and Prof. James Sheridan, Chairman of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Allegheny College graciously agreed to this arrangement. To my colleagues in the Religious Studies program at Allegheny, Professors Carl Olson and Glenn Holland, I give my thanks for all their encouragement and humor in welcoming this rookie as their colleague. Finally, I am grateful to Mrs. Dawn Nelson, the departmental secretary in Ruter Hall, who consented to share a computer printer with me, despite some inconvenience.

Finally, there are debts which one can never fully articulate but which one recognizes with awe and humility as having been critical to one’s formation. My wife, the Reverend Ms. Mary Wilder Cartwright has nurtured my love of learning for over ten years now, since the time when we were both undergraduates. She has sacrificed more than she should in order that I have the opportunity to be a scholar. In addition, as a colleague in Christian ministry she has shared my work while also assuming far more than her share of childcare during the past two and one-half years.

To our daughter Hannah, I am doubly-indebted. First, in her boundless celebration of life, she has often forced me out of my scholarly preoccupation. Her curiosity about the world around her reminds me that fatherhood is a great gift as well as a profound responsibility. Second, Hannah has helped me understand better my relationship as a child of my own parents. To my mother, Mary F. Wilson, I am grateful for having instilled in me a love for reading books. To my father, Billy Cartwright, I owe a more complex debt; for though his dreams have often been disordered, his passion arises from that age-old desire for God. In ways he probably would not recognize, he has taught me that the service of God in the church is at once a gift not to be grasped and a difficult discipline to follow.

Finally, as I attempt these days to do ethics on Mount Hope in rural Pennsylvania, I am aware of those communities of Christ’s Church which have nurtured my own faith and theology. This study is dedicated to three very different communities of faith: first, to the saints of God at First Baptist Church at Mountain View, Arkansas where I was baptized; second, to the community of Corrymeela, Bally­castle, Northern Ireland which continues to embody the politics of peace in a land perpetually at war; and finally, to the (lay and clergy) members of the North Arkansas Conference of the United Methodist Church, with whom I am bound in the yoke of obedience. For all the saints, to God be the glory.

Advent 1988

Introduction

How is the Bible (to be) used in Christian ethics? Although not always in the foreground of discussion, in one form or another, this question has formed part of the methodological backdrop of American Protestant ethics in the twentieth century. How the gulf between Scripture and ethics has been bridged ¹ in the North American context is a story that is too little understood. Yet it is also clear that a kind of consensus about how Scripture is and is not to be used has emerged in American Protestant ethics during the twentieth century.

This dissertation challenges the regnant assumptions about how the issue of the use of Scripture in Christian ethics is resolved within this formalist consensus, and proceeds to offer a proposal for re-orienting the discussion of the uses of Scripture in Christian ethics by grounding Christian ethics in a communal hermeneutic. Proving my thesis requires not only that I show why the formalist consensus fails, but that I also show how it emerged, what its history is, and why the question of the use of scripture in Christian ethics must be approached with the question of the politics of interpretation in view from the beginning.

My argument proceeds by way of recounting a different history than the story told by formalist ethics. At first glance, the stories of Chrysostom and Orthodoxy (chapter four) and of Marpeck and the Anabaptists (chapter five) may not appear germane to the discussion of mainline Protestant ethics as explored in chapters one and two. But part of the contention of this dissertation is that we do not adequately understand the issues in dispute between Reinhold Niebuhr and John H. Yoder (chapter one) until we have taken into account the historical and constructive arguments of chapters four and five. For, as I will contend, these are chapters of a story which has been forgotten by mainline Protestant Christianity in the North American context, and when we attend to these forgotten chapters, we discover anew the viability of a communal approach to hermeneutics.

My study begins, however, with a more recent event: the publication of a book which called into question the regnant view of the use of Scripture in Christian ethics. John Howard Yoder’s book The Politics of Jesus (1972) appeared at a time when the United States was embroiled in political conflict.² Significantly, it was also published at a time when the question of the use of scripture was receiving renewed attention, although not always with questions of the politics of interpretation in view.

Among other things, Yoder’s study forthrightly called into question the authority of three hermeneutical assumptions³ which he contended pervade mainstream American Protestant ethics: a) the irrelevance of Jesus for Christian ethics; b) since Jesus himself is not normative for ethics, there must be some kind of bridge or transition into another realm or into another mode of thought when we begin to think about ethics⁴ ; and c) such reconstruction of a social ethic will derive its guidance from common sense and the nature of things.⁵

In retrospect, Yoder’s argument can be recognized to be political at several different levels, not the least of which was his refusal to stay within the confines of traditional academic disciplines. Thus, when Yoder show how New Testament scholarship is often used to justify the perceived irrelevance of Jesus, his argument has a political edge to it. Indeed, Yoder prefaces his challenge to these three presuppositions by offering summaries of six kinds of argument which undergird this claim of irrelevance.

1) The ethic of Jesus is an ethic for an ‘Interim which Jesus thought would be very brief. . . ."

2) Jesus was . . . a simple rural figure . . . . There is thus in the ethic of Jesus no intention to speak substantially to the problems of complex organization, of institutions and offices, cliques and power and crowds.

3) Jesus and his early followers lived in a world over which they had little control. . . . Now, however, that Christianity has made great progress in history . . . the Christian is obligated to ansers questions which Jesus did not face.

4) The nature of Jesus’ message of was ahistorical by definition. He dealt with spiritual and not social matters, with the existential and not with the concrete . . .Whatever he said and did of a social character must be understood not for its own sake but as the symbolic or mythical clothing of his spiritual message. . . .

5) Jesus was a radical monotheist. He pointed men away from the local and finite values to which they had been giving their attention and proclaimed the sovereignty of the only One worthy of being worshipped. [Therefore] the will of God cannot be identified with any one ethical answer, or any given human value, since these are all finite. . . .

6) "Or the reason may be more ‘dogmatic’ in tone. Jesus came, after all, to give his life for the sins of men. . . . How the death of Jesus works our justification is a divine miracle and mystery; how he died, or the kind of life which led to the kind of death he died, is therefore ethically immaterial.⁶

Among those Christian ethicists identified by Yoder as having contributed to this set of arguments regarding the irrelevance of Jesus to ethics we find the name of Reinhold Niebuhr. ⁷ Yoder does not single out Niebuhr for blame on this this score but it is clear from various references in his discussion that Yoder regards Niebuhr as having given expression to the central assumption which continued, for the most part, to guide mainstream American Christian ethics in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This was by no means the first occasion in which Yoder had found himself faced with the problem of arguing against Niebuhr’s position without getting a response.⁸ In fact, I have not been able to uncover any evidence that Niebuhr ever read Yoder’s arguments, much less responded to them. Given this circumstance, in Chapter One, I offer a revisionist account of Niebuhr’s interpretation of Christian ethics, one significant aspect of which is my analysis of how Niebuhr himself used Scripture in his ethical writings, and what narrative assumptions guided his use of Scripture.

The aim of this dissertation is to explore the range of questions which issue form Yoder’s initial critique of the prevailing presuppositions of Christian ethics. As I shall show in chapters one and five, it is by no means a mere coincidence that the primary question at issue between Niebuhr and Yoder centers on the politics of Jesus of Nazareth. As I shall try to show in chapter one, this is an issue which emerges in the context of early twentieth century American Protestant discussion. I will also argue that Reinhold Niebuhr’s powerful critique of the Social Gospel and its liberal pacifist-allied movements was the historical context which in turn creates the backdrop for a renewed debate between the heirs of the magisterial Reformers and the heirs of Anabaptist dissent.

In chapter two, I argue that the emergence of what might be called a formalist consensus in methodological debates about the use of Scripture in Christian ethics should be seen as a result of Niebuhr’s legacy. I argue that not only did exponents of the formalist models fail to take into account he politics of the interpretation of Scripture, but that they also failed to acknowledge that their formalism requires a normative position like that found in Niebuhr’s ethic. I then proceed to argue that the formalist models to not work for two reasons: 1) they fail to account for Niebuhr’s conception of politics upon which they tacitly rely; and 2) the formalist categories are ahistorical. These conclusions, in turn, lead to further exploration of the politics of scriptural interpretation. Thus, I conclude that this debate is a disappointment both because its conceptual models of use are too narrow and because they exclude the community of the church from the debate at all but the formal levels of discussion.

In chapter three I extend the argument in several directions. First, I examine recent developments in literary criticism which call into question the politics of transcendental models that formalist accounts often presuppose. Here, I make use of the works of Fredric Jameson, focusing on Jameson’s powerful critique of Northrop Frye’s model of anagogical criticism. Because Frye’s literary formalism focuses on the text of the Bible, this dispute suggests a different way of structuring the question of text and community which underlies the debate about the use of Scripture in Christian ethics with its very different discussion of ethical formalism.

Drawing from the results of this debate in political hermeneutics I then move on to develop a proposal of my own which shifts the debate from issues of text as such to explore issues of text-in-community. Here I make use of recent developments in New Testament scholarship which explore the social embodiment of interpretation in conjunction with performative analysis of text advanced by Nicholas Lash, a Roman Catholic theologian whose works also explore questions of the relationship of politics, ideology and interpretation.

In the process of developing this proposal, I test it against the recent works of Thomas W. Ogletree, James William McClendon Jr., and John Howard Yoder. Here also, I briefly allude to the very different pattern of use which is found in the context of Orthodox worship and theology. In the course of these discussions, the outlines of what I call a communal hermeneutic begin to take shape. Chapter Three concludes with a summary of my proposal and the way in which it contrasts to what in earlier chapters is referred to as the formalist consensus.

By this point in the dissertation, I will have achieved the first step in my constructive task. Namely, to announce and explicate the alternative hermeneutic that I am proposing and contrast it with the consensus model of mainstream Christian ethics in the American context. However, by its very nature my proposal for a communal approach to the issue of use of Scripture calls for examples. Thus, in Chapter Four and Chapter Five of the dissertation I present two such exemplars which also serve to give my discussion historical depth and ecumenical breadth. The second step in my constructive argument takes shape in the course of these explications of the communal hermeneutics of the two living traditions with very particular histories.

More precisely, by exploring the way in which a communal hermeneutic might work within the Eastern Orthodox churches, on the one hand, and the Anabaptist / Mennonite churches, on the other hand, I re-orient the discussion and thereby show what a renewed debate about Scripture and ethics among churches might look like. In each case, I present a revised account of hermeneutics by focusing attention on the particular set of practices, politics, and performance within each of these historic traditions of ecclesial community.

Furthermore, by taking the trouble to analyze each tradition, I am laying the groundwork for a third stage of my constructive proposal (which in this essay remains largely undeveloped). This last stage, I contend, emerges as a possibility when the kind of discussion I introduce in chapters three, four, and five has gotten to the point of identifying common problematics across the lines of ecclesial traditions. Therefore, in the conclusion to this study, I will show how my proposal for a communal hermeneutic suggests possibilities for ecumenical discussion of Scripture and ethics.

II

At the time it was published, The Politics of Jesus went unnoticed by biblical scholars for the most part. In fact, initially, very few Christian ethicists actually troubled themselves to review the book. Yet more than fifteen years later, not only is Yoder’s book still in print, it also represents the clearest alternative to mainstream Christian ethics in American Protestantism. Indeed, as James Wm. McClendon recently noted, Yoder is "the bête noire of contemporary moral theology, especially of mainline Protestant ethics."⁹ Confirmation of this claim can be found in a number of Christian ethics books published over the past decade. ¹⁰

During this same period of time, Yoder’s dissenting voice has been heard with increasing frequency, most recently in his 1988 presidential address to the Society of Christian Ethics, where Yoder restated his dissent by proffering a definitional statement of the discipline:

[E]thics, in the technical sense of our discipline, which analyzes the conditions of validation of dispositions, decisions and actions, is not an autonomous discipline. It always is and always properly should be in the service of some cosmic commitment or other. There is no nonsectarian scratch to start from, beneath or beyond particular identities, no neutral common ground which some sort of search for foundations could lay bare. To disengage the structure of the subjacent cosmology must therefore be prior to describing the conceptual mechanics of the moral discourse itself.¹¹

Although Yoder continues to represent a minority position within the ongoing discussion of Scripture and ethics, answers to his challenges have not always been forthcoming either from the guild of Christian ethicists, or from adjacent fields of study such as New Testament studies.

Yet, Yoder’s work has nevertheless stimulated renewed reflection about the relationship of scripture and ethics. Two recent books, Stanley Hauerwas’s The Peaceable Kingdom (1983)¹² and James Wm. McClendon’s Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 (1986)¹³ pay tribute to the significance of Yoder’s work. Other tributes could also be noted, but suffice it to say that Yoder’s work is having a growing impact at a time when it is not entirely clear where the discipline of Christian theological ethics might be going.

Although this dissertation