A Response to “In the Footsteps of Marcion:
Notes Toward an Understanding of John Yoder’s Theology,”
by John W. Miller (The Conrad Grebel Review 16 [Spring 1998]: 82-91

 by Mark Thiessen Nation

I cannot in this brief response respond in detail to John Miller's article. Put most directly: it is really quite far-fetched to suggest that John Howard Yoder walked "in the footsteps of Marcion." Quite the contrary. John Yoder tried to hold several things together simultaneously: a commitment to pacifism; a respect for the Scriptures, including the Old Testament; a belief in Jesus as "a canon within the canon"; a respect for ancient and contemporary Judaism as a "non-non Christian religion".

Even for a mind as brilliant as John's this was a challenge. Some of us who also try to hold these things together might wish he had said this or that a bit differently. Some might wish he had worked at a greater consistency among his various convictions, convictions that, at best, imply tensions. I, for one, am grateful that he offered considerable insight as he wrestled with these issues, including ways to avoid Marcionite tendencies in relation to the Old and New Testaments and Judaism.

But let me deal directly with the central claim, spelled out most specifically in section two of Miller’s essay. If my claims, below, are close to being right, then the whole article is fundamentally flawed because the set-up in this section provides a distorting center for the whole article.

I went back and re-read the quotations from Preface to Theology quoted in Miller's article. Nothing in the paragraphs within which the quotes appear indicates that Yoder was a Marcionite. Someone who knows Yoder's thought can make informed guesses about what he was doing. First, he is asking for an appropriate hesitation before offering affirmations of past judgments pronounced on someone, when all that we know about that person is what their enemies said. Second, he is suggesting a way of reading Marcion that tries to appreciate what Marcion might have been attempting to do (without endorsing the specifics of the attempts). Yoder apparently believes Marcion might have been attempting to correct some tendencies on the part of other Christians that were unfaithful tendencies (for example, embracing war), using arguments he (Marcion) thought would be persuasive. (See similar reflections on Marcion in Leonard Verduin, The Anatomy of a Hybrid, Eerdmans, 1976, 87-88, 126. Which is not to say Verduin and Yoder would have agreed on the details.)

Even if I am wrong in my guesses as to what Yoder was doing in his relatively positive comments on Marcion, nothing in the relevant pages in Yoder's Preface to Theology suggests Yoder agrees with the substance or form of Marcion's argumentation. In point of fact, many of Yoder's writings would demonstrate quite the opposite. (See Mark Thiessen Nation, A Comprehensive Bibliography of John Howard Yoder, Mennonite Historical Society, 1997, especially writings on war and the Old Testament and on Judaism.)

Fortunately, we also have Yoder's direct statement on the matter in his "introduction" to Millard Lind's Yahweh Is a Warrior (Herald Press, 1980, pp. 17-18): "Ever since Marcion, the idea has been widely circulated that the God of the Hebrews, in contrast to the Father of Jesus, was angry or belligerent in such a way that Jesus, although confessed as the expected Anointed One, must be seen as rather rejecting than fulfilling the main thrust of Hebrew and Jewish hopes. Yet that Marcion was rejected by other Christians did not ward off the danger. Majority Christianity, increasingly anti-Judaic as the centuries passed, appropriated the wars against Amalek, Sihon, Og, and the Canaanites as a model for just wars and crusades, while at the same time it felt no incongruity in interpreting Jesus' rejection by 'the Jews' as due to his message's being too spiritual to live up to their chauvinistic hopes . . . Dissent is often the captive of the language of the majority culture against which it rebels. Thus at least by the time of the fifteenth-century Czech Reformation, if not already in the age of Francis of Assisi and Peter Waldo, believers authentically drawn to and changed by the message of Jesus assumed that, as that message was novel and world-upsetting in their time, the newness of the message of Jesus in his time as well must have taken the shape of a near-Marcionite contrast between gospel love and old covenant nationalism. The sixfold “But I say to you” of the Jesus of the Mount could be taken that way. Huldrych Zwingli, heir to the political vision of Joshua, said of two imprisoned Anabaptists that they “negate the whole Old Testament”. In the history of Christian pacifism, this strand has been present ever since, heightened in recent generations by borrowing from dispensational Protestantism, which makes it easier to think that the same sovereign God may and does properly decree now this, now that. Outside the perfection of Christ, war was a fitting part of “the law”; with no surprise or apology, we confess in Christ a new moral possibility and demand. Without him the old is adequate."

In short, after writing three paragraphs, largely describing the mistakes of a Marcion-like approach, Yoder says: "The total interpretive Gestalt just sketched needs revision from every angle: the underlying anti-Judaism, the imperial establishment mood, the failure to perceive in the Hebrew scriptures the evolution from Joshua to Jeremiah, and in postcanonical Judaism the further evolution through Jochanan ben Zakkai to Judah “the Prince.’” (p. 18)

It was Miller's article that prodded me to remember this direct refutation of a Marcionite approach to the Christian faith, contained in Yoder's endorsement of Millard Lind's book. Though I had not read it for a while, nothing in it surprised me. Yoder worked for many years to offer an alternative to the dichotomies embraced by a Marcionite approach to the Christian faith. He argued for continuities between the Testaments and for continuities between Jesus and Paul, with all the ramifications thereby implied. He also wrote appreciatively of Judaism past and present, dedicating his 168-page Shalom desktop packet of essays, "The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited," to a rabbi: "I have been taught much by numerous Jewish friends, but by no-one else so much as by Steven S.Schwarzschild."

John Miller may disagree with John Yoder on many matters. But it is inaccurate and unfair to try to categorize Yoder as a Marcion-like heretic in order to encourage others to dismiss the basic thrust of many of his writings.

(As is indicated at the heading of this brief piece, this is a response to an article by John W. Miller on Yoder. I had hoped it would be published in the subsequent issue of TheConrad Grebel Review, as they often do publish responses. However, they decided they did not have space in the following issue to publish responses. I have lengthened it only slightly from the size I thought they might publish, by adding a bit more of the Yoder quote from Yahweh Is a Warrior. Mark Thiessen Nation)

Any comments welcomed.

Originally written September 1998; revised December 1998.