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Monday, June 01, 2009

Yoder, J. H. (2002). The Politics of Jesus. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 

Jesus was ... the bearer of a new possibility of human, social and therefore political relationships. Hs baptism is the inauguration and his cross is the culmination of that new regime in which his disciples are called to share. pp 52

The two parables of the merciless servant and the unfaithful steward thus confirm what the Nazareth discourse, the Lord's Prayer, and the Sermon on the Mount had already had already given us to understand. It is really a jubilee, conformed to the sabbatical instructions of Moses, that Jesus proclaimed pp 68

The believer's cross is, like that of Jesus, the proce of social nonconformity. It is not, like sickness or catastrophe, an inexplicable, unpredictaable suffering; it is the end of a path freely chosen after counting the cost... it is the socila reality of representing in an unwilling world the Order to come. 96

It is possible to argue , early Christianity turned out to be a far cry from the Kingdom he had announced. There must be a hiatus somewher between the human Jesus' proclaimed kingdom at Jerusalem and the worship of the heavenly Christ in teh Gentile churches and Asia Minor. 112

The Disciple/Participant and teh Love of God
Sharing the divine nature as the definition of Christian existence
Forgive as God has forgiven you
Love indiscriminately as God does

The Disciple/Participant and teh Life of Christ
Being in Christ as the definition of Christian existence
Having diewd with Christ and sharing his risen life
Loving as Christ loved, giving himself
Serving Others as he served pp 115 ff

Servanthood replaces dominion, forgiveness absorbs hostility 131

Omnipresent vulnerable enemy love and renuniciation of dominion in the real world. 132

Instead of asking what those texts mean in the modern world, scholars learned to ask first, more carefully, waht the writers, speaking to their own learned to ask first, more carefully, what th ewriters, speaking to their own age in its own language, were seeking to say then, by means of concepts not immeditaely undersatndable to us. 139

The church must be a sample of teh kind of humanity within which, for example, economic and racial differences are surmounted. Only then will it have anything to say to the society that suurounds it about how those differences must be dealt with. Otherwise preaching to the world a standard of reconcilitaion which is not its own experience will neither honest nor effective 151

What Paul doesn't say - is not, as some conservative religious groups would say, that the gospel deals only with personal ethics and not with social structures. Nor does he say that the only way to change structures is to change the heart of an individual, preferably the one in power, and then see that he or she exercises control of society with more humility. 154

We are now ready to affirm that the biblical understanding of teh powers in history can give us a more adequate intellectual framework of teh task of social discernment to which we are especially called in our age. This discernment is not simply a way of helping the neddy with their social problems, a kind of updated philanthropy, nor does it mean simply to guide individual Christian by helping them to do good deeds or to avoid sin. It is rather a part of Christians' proclamation that the church is under orders to make known to th ePowers, as no other proclaimer can do, the fulfillment of the mysterious purposes of God (Eph 3:10) by means of Jesus in whom their rebellion has been broken and the pretensions they had raised have been demolished. 156

Gal 6:15 - Paul is explaining why he no longer regards anyone from the humn point of view; why he does not regard Jew as Jew or Greek as Grek, but rather looks at every person in th elight of the new world that begins in Christ. "The old has passed away, behold the new has come" is a social or historical statement, not an introspective or emotional one. 222

Pauls desire - that there should come into being in Rome this kind of new community where the brokenness of humankind is set right and where persons who were not born under the law obey it from the heart... Pul's concept of justification as a social phenomenon centring in the reconciliayion of different kinds of people. 224

A church once freed from compuliveness and from the urge to manage the world might then find ways to suggest as well to those outside its bounds the invitation to a servant stance in society. 241

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