Tuesday, 29 September 2015

We the People: Israel and the Catholicity of Jesus,
Tommy Givens, Fortress, 2014, page 36

Under the section heading "Yoder's Turn to the Jews", Givens shows how John Howard Yoder's work may be characterised as an attempt to recover the Jewishness of Yeshua. Yoder claims that "the people of God did not cease to be Jewish with Jesus or Paul but with Constantine", although there must have been a lot of slippage for Constantine to have had sufficient momentum to effect the change. Givens says:

The claim to surpass Judaism, to have broken out of its fleshly bonds by coming into possession of a more intimate, personal knowledge of the God of Israel - knowledge purified of historical and political contingency - has constituted a betrayal of Christianity. Consequently, Yoder attempts to exhibit the New Testament's claim to Judaism rather than overcoming Judaism and implies that much of the church's history has been a fall Judaism rather that its "fulfillment".