Найти книгу: "The New Yoder"

The work of John Howard Yoder has become increasingly influential in recent years. Moreover, it is gaining influence in some surprising places. No longer restricted to the world of theological ethicists and Mennonites, Yoder has been discovered as a refreshing voice by scholars working in many other fields. For thirty-five years, Yoder was known primarily as an articulate defender of Christian pacifism against a theological ethics guild dominated by the Troeltschian assumptions reflected in the work of Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr. But in the last decade, there has been a clearly identifiable shift in direction. A new generation of scholars has begun reading Yoder alongside figures most often associated with post-structuralism, neo-Nietzscheanism, and post-colonialism, resulting in original and productive new readings of his work. At the same time, scholars from outside of theology and ethics departments, indeed outside of Christianity itself, like Romand Coles and Daniel Boyarin, have discovered in Yoder a significant conversation partner for their own work. This volume collects some of the best of those essays in hope of encouraging more such work from readers of Yoder and in hopes of attracting others to his important work.

The Heterodox Yoder provides a critical rereading of Yoder's corpus through his own conviction that discipleship is, most basically, ethics. Tracing the development of Yoder's theological foundations through to their final role in redefining Jewish-Christian and ecumenical relations, this volume explains why the appropriation and use of the language of politics eventually constrains Yoder's ethical vision to the point that it reframes Christianity within the limits of social ethics alone. Because this vision self-consciously excludes or, at best, relativizes many of the claims of orthodox Christianity (including but not limited to the ecumenical creeds), Martens concludes that Yoder's Christian ethic is best described as heterodox.

This book argues that for John Howard Yoder both theology (in particular Christology) and ethics are expressions of the meaning of the narrative of Jesus. All such statements are relative to a particular context, which means that theology and ethics are always subject to reaching back to the narrative in order to restate the meaning in new and ever-changing contexts. This methodology is visible in Yoder's Preface to Theology, which has been little used in most treatments of Yoder's thought. Yoder has been characterized as standing on Nicene orthodoxy, criticized for rejecting Nicene orthodoxy, called heterodox, and designated a postmodern thinker to be interpreted in terms of other such thinkers. None of these characterizations adequately locates the basis of his methodology in the narrative of Jesus. Thus John Howard Yoder: Radical Theologian aims to go beyond or to supersede existing treatments with its demonstration that Yoder is a radical theologian in the historical meaning of radical–that is, as one who returns to the root. For Christian faith, this root is Jesus Christ. Parts II and III of the book explore the sources of Yoder's approach, and its application in several contemporary contexts.