Occasional Papers

Occasional Papers (#28)

Constantinianism, Zionism, Diaspora

Toward a Political Theology of Exile and Return

by Alain Epp Weaver

Seek the welfare [shalom] of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.
—Jeremiah 29:

I have learned the words of blood–stained courts in order to break the rules.
I have learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one: Home.
—Mahmoud Darwish, “I am from There”

ABSTRACT:For over 50 years, Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) volunteers have lived and worked with dispossessed Palestinians in their exile, becoming sharply critical of Zionism in the process. This paper, rooted in MCC’s experience, outlines a theological critique of Zionism and sketches a vision of justice and peace for Palestinians and Israelis. Drawing on the work of John Howard Yoder, I attempt to articulate a non–supersessionist theological critique of Zionism from an Anabaptist perspective. In brief, just as Christians must reject Constantinianism as an unwarranted compromise of the church’s mission, so, similarly, must Zionism be critiqued as an abandonment of Judaism’s mission: both Christians and Jews, I argue, are called to an exilic, diasporic faith which embodies an alternative politics amidst the Babylons of the world. I conclude by examining whether or not this exilic political theology can a) present a vision of justice (e.g., for Palestinian refugees, for dispossessed Palestinian farmers, etc.) and b) articulate a positive political vision for the state(s) in Palestine/Israel instead of simply a negative critique of Zionist injustices.

I
Introduction

Exile. Diaspora. The dream of return. Such potent images form an integral part of the biblical heritage and have animated the life of post–Temple Judaism for centuries. Since the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”) of 1948, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees, exile and the corresponding dream of return have become essential markers of Palestinian existence as well.

Mennonite Central Committee workers have for the past 52 years lived and served in the Palestinian diaspora, in the refugee camps of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jordan, and Lebanon. These five decades have exposed MCC volunteersÐand, by extension, the broader Mennonite communityÐto the pain of Palestinian exile. Thanks in part to MCC’s efforts, many Mennonites have become active in the struggle to halt the progression of Palestinian dispossession and to promote visions for a just sharing of Mandate Palestine which would partially correct the injustices of 1948 and the continuing colonization of the occupied territories since 1967.1

This present study is grounded in MCC’s experience of solidarity with dispossessed Palestinians.2 As an exercise in practical theology, it seeks to articulate a theological critique of the colonizing dimensions of Zionism and a vision for a shared life for Palestinians and Israeli Jews in the land.3 This theological analysis, not surprisingly, is rooted in an Anabaptist–Mennonite understanding of the Christian faith, with its concerns for nonviolence and its rejection of a conflation of church with state power. One particular concern of the paper is to grapple with the question of whether or not the theology of John Howard Yoder, the most influential Mennonite theologian of the past century, can provide positive theological visions of justice and of life in the land. The theological perspective I articulate here, however, is not particularly Mennonite and, like all serious theological claims, is offered as a normative proposal for the church catholic.

The Christian relationship with and interpretation of Judaism. Christian history has tragically been distorted by arrogance toward and violence against Jews. Only after the Holocaust (Shoah), the most horrific event in the nominally Christian world’s bloody history toward the Jewish people, did Christian theologians begin to ask in earnest whether or not a flawed theology had underwritten the anti–Jewish acts of the official church, the governments of “Christian” nations, and individual Christians.4 Many theologians have described how standard Christian theologies have written Jews out of salvation history; countering the supersessionist theology of the past, they argue, is a vital part of the church confronting its anti–Jewish history.5 As will become clear below, I believe that these critiques of traditional theology are valid. A theological critique of Zionism, therefore, must not fall prey to the supersessionist theologies which have distorted the Gospel message.

Biblical interpretation. Throughout Scripture we find a complex interplay of voices around the themes of land, exile, and return. Many parts of Scripture, in turn, have been used to justify Palestinian dispossession. Even after rejecting dispensationalist theologies which dehistoricize and distort biblical prophecy and apocalypse into future prognostication of the emergence of the State of Israel as prelude to the final battle which will shortly follow, one is still left with vexing questions.6 How are we to interpret the experience of exile, the gift of landedness, and the promise of return in light of God’s revelation in Jesus? Need exile always be viewed negatively? Must return and the entry into the land inevitably mean the uprooting of others? Where is the voice of the dispossessed Other in Scripture? Where is the voice of the Canaanite?7

Contemporary debates in political theology. Christian theologians have slowly been coming to terms with the demise of Christendom. This post–Christendom reality is cited by some as an opportunity to rethink supersessionist theologies.8 Bader–Saye, in particular, links the task of overcoming supersessionism in Christian theology with the challenge of deconstructing political theologies which conflated church and state. What Bader–Saye and Soulen do not discuss, however, is the way in which Judaism has undergone its own “Constantinian shift” in the triumph of Zionism, even as the last vestiges of Christendom crumble in the West. A theological critique of Zionism from a non–Constantinian perspective will thus make a significant contribution to the debate over the church’s fate in a post–Christendom world.

• No reputable historian seriously defends the empty land thesis, Golda Meir’s claim that there is no such thing as the Palestinian people, or Joan Peters’ untenable assertion (warmly received in the United States while derided in Israel and in Europe) that most “Palestinians” were in fact recent immigrants to Palestine attracted by the economic bounties of Zionist settlement.9 Instead, several careful histories have appeared which detail Palestinian life before Zionism and which explore Palestinian nationalism as a phenomenon whose origins cannot simply be reduced to a reaction to Zionism.10
• Historians have documented how the Israeli military carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1948, demolishing at least 413 villages, conducting 33 massacres of civilians, turning over 700,000 Palestinians into refugees, denying those refugees their internationally–guaranteed right of return, and stripping those refugees in absentia of their property, property which was then slated for exclusive Jewish use. The Israeli army, these historians continue, was not some David scoring a miraculous victory against an Arab Goliath; its triumph, rather, was an accurate and expected reflection of the military balance of the time. While historians may debate about the extent to which the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was planned by Israeli military strategists prior to the war of 1948, their work as a whole decisively undermines nationalist narratives of an innocent and miraculous birth.11Instead, Israel, like most nations, was born in violence, or, theologically put, in sin. “Israelis seem to be haunted by a curse,” Benjamin Beit–Hallahmi observes. “It is the curse of the original sin against the native Arabs.”12
• In contrast to the picture of Arab intransigence painted by Israeli governments, Avi Shlaim has shown in detail that Israel time and again rebuffed Arab peace initiatives.13 Furthermore, whereas as early as 1974 the PLO had made a decisive choice for a two–state solution involving a Palestinian state in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip (23% of Mandate Palestine), Israel has refused to delineate its borders. A consensus exists among the major Israeli political parties that Israel should exercise de facto sovereignty and military control over all of Mandate Palestine, with internecine debate about the degree to which Palestinians in the occupied territories might be granted limited autonomy and quasi–sovereignty.14
• Related to the points above, Zionism has come to be understood by historians and sociologists as a specific form of colonialism.15Zionism in its colonialist form requires the dispossession of Palestinians. This process began in 1948, was solidified by the Absentee Property Law of 1950, and was expanded in the post–1967 era with the establishment of Israeli colonies (commonly referred to as settlements) throughout the occupied territories. Israeli–American proposals at the “Camp David II” summit of July 2000 did not constitute a decision to reverse this post–1967 process of colonization, but in fact represented an attempt to consolidate colonization’s gains.16At the time of this writing, the occupied territories have been dismembered into groups of disconnected bantustans by networks of roadblocks, checkpoints, and trenches. Palestinians live under an apartheid system which severely limits movement and separates Palestinian from Palestinian.17Israeli rule in the occupied territories has been far from benevolent, but has instead meant the systematic denial of Palestinian human rights and the violation of international law.18
• Finally, a recognition of the colonizing dimension of Zionism makes the standard recourse to clichés about Israeli security and Palestinian violence (“terrorism”) problematic. One recognizes that Palestinians, as a colonized people, live a tremendously insecure existence, and that the maintenance and expansion of the colonial system depends on the exercise of violent force. As followers of a nonviolent Lord, Christians, of course, cannot support the use of violence in an anti–colonial struggle and certainly must recoil at horrific attacks on civilians. At the same time, however, we must insist that the fundamental violence in the conflict is the occupation and its mechanisms of colonization and apartheid.19

To do justice to each of the interconnected areas listed above would require a book, not a paper. In what follows, broader discussions in political theology and post–colonialist histories of Zionism will be relegated to the background: I have treated them at some length in this introduction in order to highlight the real world context of the theological analysis which forms the heart of this paper. Specifically, I will now turn to two tasks: first, articulating a non–supersessionist critique of Zionism, drawing heavily on the work of the late John Howard Yoder; and second, asking whether or not this theological perspective can provide a positive account of landedness and justice for the dispossessed.

II
Theological understandings of Judaism

Any theological critique of Zionism is inevitably intertwined with theological understandings of Judaism, given the fact that Zionism has become one of the dominant forms of Jewish self–expression over the past six decades. How can one critique Zionism without succumbing to anti–Judaism in one’s theology? In order to approach this question, a survey of Christian approaches toward Judaism will be helpful. Roughly speaking, Christian theological interpretations of Judaism fall into two categories, supersessionist and non–supersessionist, to be defined below. Both approaches, incidentally, are represented among MCC’s supporting churches. I believe that the supersessionist approach is theological deficient; at the same time, some non–supersessionist theologies problematically abandon traditional christological claims.

What is supersessionism? Broadly speaking, supersessionism holds that the role of the Jewish people in God’s economy of salvation comes to an end in Jesus Christ. Kendall Soulen has helpfully outlined three distinct, and sometimes intertwined, forms of supersessionism. First, economic supersessionism makes the claim that “the ultimate obsolescence of carnal Israel is an essential feature of God’s one overarching economy of redemption for the world.”20The people of Israel of the “Old Testament” have become obsolete in God’s salvific plans for the world, obsolete because supplanted by Jesus and, by extension, the church. This claim surfaces time and again throughout Christian history. A more virulent form of the claim, called punitive supersessionism by Soulen, argues that “God abrogates God’s covenant with Israel (which is already in principle outmoded) on account of Israel’s rejection of Christ and the Gospel.”21Punitive supersessionism has often been found in conjunction with economic supersessionism, but is not logically entailed by it: one could hold that the people of Israel have become obsolete after Christ without claiming that this obsolescence is attributable to God's punitive action. The punitive form of supersessionism helped to shape the religious ideologies which underwrote the persecution of Jews in Christendom, god's punitive abrogation of the covenant taken as a model for human action against Jewish communities.

The final form of supersessionsim identified by Soulen, structural supersessionism, is, Soulen argues, embodied in the “standard canonical narrative” which informs the reading of Scripture. Any theology, Soulen contends, constructs a canonical narrative through which to read and interpret Scripture’s multiple strands. The standard canonical narrative which has animated the dominant theologies of Christendom, Soulen explains, “turns on four key episodes: God’s intention to consummate the first parents whom God has created, the fall, Christ’s incarnation and the inauguration of the church, and final consummation.” This narrative is structurally supersessionist “because it unifies the Christian canon in a manner that renders the Hebrew Scriptures largely indecisive for shaping conclusions about how God’s purposes engage creation in universal and enduring ways.” The narrative skips from creation and the Fall to God’s incarnation in Jesus: the patriarchal/matriarchal narratives, the dramas of exodus and exile, the struggle with kingship and prophecy play no role in the narrative.22

The horror of the Holocaust forced many churches to ask themselves to what extent Christian theological formulations had contributed, either directly or indirectly, to the persecution of Jews up to the point of genocide. Punitive supersessionism in particular has become morally problematic in the post–Holocaust era, with the way it can be easily used to legitimize violent acts against Jews as an imitation of or participation in God’s wrath against Jews. Beyond the dangers of supersessionist claims underwriting anti–Jewish actions, however, there are sound theological reasons to critique supersessionism. First, by claiming that the role of the Jewish people in God’s economy of salvation has come to an end, supersessionism calls into question God’s faithfulness, the faithfulness of the God who made a covenant with Abraham and his descendants. Second, supersessionism often depends on a spiritualization of God’s covenant promises. Carnal Israel is replaced by the spiritual church. This move demonstrates a fundamental discomfort with the idea of God acting in an embodied, material way in history, and, as such, leads to a deformed understanding of the incarnation and of ecclesiology.

If supersessionist theology is fundamentally flawed, then what are the alternatives? Non–supersessionist theologies will promote a theological understanding of Judaism which holds that God’s covenant with the Jewish people is still valid and which believes that the Jewish people can play a positive revelatory function. I stress positive: Karl Barth, in contrast, held that Jews were still in covenant with God, but were only providing a negative witness to God.23 Non– supersessionist theology falls into two broad categories: one type, the liberal, relativizes or rejects traditional christological claims that Jesus Christ is true God of true God; the second affirms traditional christological claims while insisting that Jews remain in an abiding covenant relationship with God.

Rosemary Radford Ruether’s constructive argument in her ground–breaking work exemplifies the liberal view. While correct in her critique of the way in which much traditional theology has read Jesus, in opposition to Judaism, Ruether goes beyond the proper bounds of her critique by insisting that the formulation of a theology which is not anti–Jewish involves a devaluation of traditional christological claims. Thus, for Ruether, Jesus like the Exodus, is an example of a broader underlying experience, namely eschatological hope.24Paul van Buren, meanwhile, explicitly rejects traditional christology. Jesus is not “true God of true God,” but “just a man.” Jesus is instead a window onto God.25

The christological reformulations of Ruether and van Buren are representative of broader trends within liberal theology generally, with its attempt to identify universal experiences (liberation, eschatological hope) of which Jesus is but one particular instance. Scott Bader–Saye accuses Ruether and van Buren of avoiding “anti–Judaism but at the expense of emptying Christianity of its distinctive witness to the identity of God.”26To support Bader–Saye’s claim by demonstrating why Ruether’s and Van Buren’s positions fail to do justice to Scripture’s witness to Jesus’ identity would be beyond the scope of this paper. For now, I will simply note two points. First, this liberal, christological devaluation is not unknown in Mennonite churches. Just as an inter–Mennonite agency such as MCC must acknowledge the presence of supporters of dispensationalist Christian Zionism among its constituency, so it must also recognize that some supporters of MCC would be uncomfortable with the confession that Jesus Christ is the full, normative revelation of God. Secondly, two Orthodox Jewish theologians have also critiqued the liberal theological reduction of christology. Michael Wyschogrod, for example, notes that van Buren offers a “Jesusology” rather than a Christology.27 David Novak, for his part, pairs up Ruether and van Buren with trends in Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism: “#145;Liberal Jews’ and #145;unprejudiced Christians’ can find common ground when Jesus is seen as superlatively human (contrary to traditional Judaism) and less than divine (contrary to traditional Christianity) … If this de–Christologized Jesus is accepted, it marks a break with both Judaism and Christianity to such an extent that dialogue between them becomes a new monologue containing them instead.”28

Simply noting that Ruether and van Buren make a break with traditional christology and that some Orthodox Jewish interlocutors object to this break does not, of course, constitute an adequate refutation of their position. Setting aside the task of showing why their position is scripturally inadequate, I will instead be concerned below with demonstrating that a devaluation of traditional christological claims is not necessary in order to affirm a continuing, positive role for the Jewish people in God’s economy of salvation: John Howard Yoder, I will contend, could affirm traditional christology while also being non–supersessionist. Revisionist theological positions are not required.

III
Theological understandings of Judaism in relation to Zionism

Before exploring Yoder“ non–supersessionist Dritque of Zionism in detail, however, let us briefly note that there is no necessary correlation between whether or not one is theologically supersessionist and whether or not one is a theological critic of Zionism. Various permutations can be identified:

Supersessionist affirmation of Zionism. Various dispensationalist and fundamentalist theologies in which the “in–gathering” of the Jewish people is a sign that the “final days” are upon us, during which some Jews will convert while others will perish, are both philo–Zionist, in that they underwrite outspoken support of the Zionist state, and supersessionist, in that Jews have no positive revelatory function in the economy of salvation. Jews are reduced to pawns in an apocalyptic endgame. The International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem is the most extreme form of this pro–Zionist, but anti–Jewish, theology.

Non–supersessionist affirmation of Zionism. Paul Van Buren, Roy and Alice Eckardt, and Franklin Littel all set aside traditional christological claims as part of their non–supersessionist insistence that God continues to be in covenant with the Jewish people and continues to reveal God’s purposes through them. Since God continues to speak through Judaism, and since Zionism has become the predominant expression of Judaism, Christians must affirm Zionism. Zionism is seen as a new thing God is doing through the Jewish people; this new thing, however, is not fitted into an apocalyptic framework.29

Supersessionist critique of Zionism. While this type is a logical possibility, I know of no particular theologian who defends it. This type of critique of Zionism would go thus: the standard dichotomy between carnal Israel and the spiritual church would be translated into a critique of Zionism as “carnal.” This dichotomy surfaced a couple years ago on the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) discussion on MennoLink. During the run–up to NATO’s bombing of Serbia and Serb positions in Kosovo, Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun magazine posted a question on the discussion board asking what CPT supporters, as Christian pacifists, had to say about Kosovo, implying that the pacifist position could not adequately account for the need to use force to bring about justice. One participant responded that it was not surprising that Lerner, as an adherent of the “old” covenant, would not understand the pacifist position, which has a “spiritual” basis: vehement discussion followed. While the participants did not touch on the Palestinian–Israeli question in this discussion, the carnal Israel/spiritual church dichotomy could also be brought to bear on the question of Zionism, with “spiritual” Christians critiquing yet another “carnal” manifestation of Judaism.

Non–supersessionist liberal critique of Zionism. Rosemary Radford Ruether, as we saw above, joined Paul van Buren in setting aside orthodox christology as part of a non–supersessionist theology. Unlike van Buren, however, Ruether proceeds to critique Zionism from the “universal” moral perspectives of prophetic Judaism and Christianity.30

Non–supersessionist “orthodox” critique of Zionism. the following section of this paper, drawing on the work of John Howard Yoder, attempts to trace the outlines of such a critique.31

IV
Exile and the critique of Zionism

John Howard Yoder, in his occasional (and for the most part, unpublished) writings on Judaism, offered a particular reading of the Old Testament and Jewish history which a) traced a trajectory within the Jewish experience into an acceptance of exile as a site of mission; b) was in continuity with the New Testament; c) allowed Jews an ongoing role in God’s salvific purposes (including as an embodied critique of Constantinian Christianity); and d) undercut theological justifications of Zionism.32

Before addressing the particulars of Yoder’s exilic reading of the Old Testament and Jewish history, it should be noted that his reading was, like all readings of historical phenomenon, inevitably selective. Yoder made “no apology for reading the vast melee of the Jewish experience in such a way that Yochanan is more representative than Menahem, Heschel than Ben Gurion, Arnold Wolf than Meir Kahane, Anne Frank than Golda Meir. What goes on here is not that I am #145;co–opting’ Jews to enlist them in my cause. It is that I am finding a story, which is really there, coming all the way down from Abraham, that has the grace to adopt me.”33That Yoder’s reading was selective, however, does not mean that it was arbitrary: his reading of the multiple strands of Scripture and of Jewish and Christian history was measured according to a christocentric norm.

Exile in the Old Testament

Any reading of the Old Testament will inevitably have to come to terms with the plurality of views and genres presented there. Yoder, for example, read the Old Testament as presenting a trajectory toward exile. In critique of this reading, other parts of the Old Testament might be cited (e.g., the conquest of the land of Canaan, Ezra, Nehemiah, the Davidic monarchy, Psalms and prophecies of return to the land) as problematizing this reading: Yoder, as we will see below, responded to such arguments with his own interpretations of the texts which appear to counter the exilic vision. A “postmodern” reading of the Old Testament could also object to Yoder’s move, claiming that it is a violence done to the text to try to read out of it a unified narrative; the postmodern valorization of a plurality of voices, however, none with more interpretive weight than the others, is itself a particular way of unifying the texts, one with its own implicit ethical and theological agenda.

The trajectory in the Old Testament, Yoder believed, points toward exile, exile not understood simply as punishment but as a new opportunity for mission in the world. Dispersion, he argued, is an act of God’s grace. Interpreting the Babel story in Genesis 11, Yoder wrote that “Diversity was the original divine intent; if God is good and diversity is good, then each of the many diverse identities which resulted from the multiplying of languages and the resultant scattering is also good.”34The exile to Babylon then becomes on this reading another act of gracious dispersal: while the false prophets preach a premature return to the land, Jeremiah calls on the exiles to “seek the peace/salvation of the city” (29:7). “The move to Babylon was not a two–generation parenthesis,” Yoder insisted, “after which the Davidic or Solomonic project was supposed to take up again where it had left off. It was rather the beginning, under a firm, fresh prophetic mandate, of a new phase of the Mosaic project.”35

If this is the trajectory of Scripture, one must concede that many parts of the Old Testament appear to make significant detours from that trajectory. How does this trajectory outlined by Yoder relate to scriptural texts which show the conquest of the land in a positive light? Describe the partial return to the land (Ezra, Nehemiah)? Bless the Davidic monarchy? Speak longingly of and prophesy a return to the land?

Yoder’s answers were varied and contextual. Again, an adequate treatment of each of these “problem” areasÐthe conquest of the land, the Davidic monarchy, return from exileÐwould require separate books. I do not pretend to do justice to or be competent in the scholarly literature on this subject; instead, I will simply sketch Yoder’s treatment of these matters without much comment on whether or not his readings can be supported by critical scholarship.

Yoder interpreted the holy wars (YHWH wars) involved in the conquest of the land as significant, not for the conquest itself, but for the act of complete dependence on Adonai. In The Politics of Jesus, Yoder thus interpreted YHWH war’s utter dependence on God as a forerunner to the nonviolent disciple’s reliance on God’s ultimate victory in the Lamb.36 “‘Holy war,’” Yoder asserted, “was an alternative to the wars of the king, differing from them in cause, means, and outcome.” The people of Israel were not to trust in their own strength, their own weapons, but in God alone: this radical, completely dependent trust in God ties together holy wars for the conquest of the land and the embrace of exile by Jeremiah. “‘Trust in JHWH[sic]/Adonai’ is what opens the door to His saving intervention,” claimed Yoder. “It is the opposite of making one’s own political/military arrangements. Jeremiah’s abandoning statehood for the future is thus not so much forsaking an earlier hope as it is returning to the original trust in JHWH.”37

Yoder’s recovery of YHWH war for pacifist Christians is notable for its determination not to abandon any part of the canonical witness. That said, what one misses in Yoder is any sense of being troubled by the fate of the native inhabitants of the land of Canaan. Yoder’s explanation that killing in YHWH war was sacrificial (the herem), not instrumental, does not alleviate the problem. Yoder would undoubtedly have noted that this problem is a modern one, one which it would be anachronistic to impose on the text. “It is a general rule of proper textual interpretation,” Yoder claimed, “that a text should be read for what its author meant to say and what its first readers or hearers would have heard it say.”38 Granted: but what Yoder did not then proceed to note is that the first readers/hearers of these texts would have heard that the Canaanites and others were outside of God’s concern. The voice of the Canaanite is silent in the text.39 Instead, their cities and lands are simply taken over, a vision of landedness which accords well with Zionist colonial practice. One can observe, of course, that other parts of Scripture, in both Testaments, clearly bring the nations, the Gentiles, within the orbit of God’s redemptive action: what Yoder did not do (but, I would contend, should have done) was to argue that other parts of the Scriptural witness correct for the partially defective understanding of God present in the narratives of YHWH war. Missing too is any sense that the author(s) and/or the first readers/hearers of the conquest/settlement narratives might be engaged in self–deception. Many Israelis after 1948 spoke of how the country had been “miraculously” emptied of Arabs, attributing to divine agency what in fact was executed by humans. Human beings have a well–developed capacity for self–deception, and the pious act of giving God the glory can in fact serve to mask human responsibility for atrocity. My point is not the reductive one of dismissing YHWH war as an ideological justification for genocide. Rather, I simply wish to expand the ways in which YHWH war narratives can be Scripture for us today: not only can we read them as part of a larger biblical theme about reliance on God, a reliance which culminates in nonviolence, but also as a warning to ourselves about our self–deceptive tendencies. *

The exilic vision of Jeremiah 29 highlighted by Yoder as the trajectory of the Old Testament also sits uncomfortably, at first glance, with the monarchical vision of I and II Kings and I and II Chronicles. Yoder would not have denied the presence within Scripture of psalms and narratives expounding the glory of the monarchy, particularly the Davidic and Solomonic kingships. Yoder also noted, however, that a thematic strand sharply critical of the institution of kingship runs throughout the Old Testament, a strand which subverts the hymns to the glories of kingship. Yoder cited Judges 9, I Samuel 8 and Deuteronomy 17:14ff as exhibiting “the antiroyal strand of the earlier history” of Israel.45 “Deuteronomy,” Yoder continued, “accepts kingship under conditions (17:14Ð20) which amount to a condemnation both of the Mesopotamian and Canaanite models and of the way the Israelite history actually worked out. Chronicles reads the whole history in this light.”46 Rather than exile being a brief hiatus between monarchy and return to the land, then, kingship is viewed as a problematic interruption in a history of dispersal as mission.

What, one might ask, of post–exilic biblical history? After all, some exiles did eventually return from Babylon to the land, and the authors of Ezra and Nehemiah tell their stories. Yoder did not consider this return as an end to the exilic vision, but rather as a premature and flawed attempt to return. Ezra and Nehemiah, Yoder asserted, “need to be seen as inappropriate deviations from the Jeremiah line, since each reconstituted a cult and a polity as a branch of the pagan imperial government.”47 Gerald Schlabach helpfully describes how the post–exilic period sets off a debate on the question of how to live faithfully in the land, with Ezra and Nehemiah offering an exclusionary, ethnocentric vision, God’s mercy to Nineveh in the book of Jonah a more open vision, the Maccabees dream of sovereignty free of foreign influence contrasted with a growing Diaspora which “argued with its feet that Israel might not need territory to be a people.”48 Yoder did not and need not have denied the diversity exemplified by this debate on how to live in the land (both the particular land of Israel and any other land); rather, Yoder’s argument was that the prophesied hope for return to Zion is not met in Ezra, Nehemiah, the Maccabees, or Bar Kokhba.49 The promise and vision of Zion, for that matter, is not, Yoder argued, one of sovereignty, with the violent control that almost always implies: “Even on earth, extraterritoriality was part of God’s self–definition. He chose as his seat a fortress to no–one of the Abrahamic line …The transcendence of the Most High is acted out in the fact that the place of His manifestation is not our own turf.”50

“How can we sing the Lord’s songs in a foreign land?” the Psalmist asks (Ps. 137). The Psalmist reminds us that exile, while an new opening in God’s salvific purposes for Israel and for the world, is also fraught with pain and anguish. “Painful as the question is,” Yoder responded, “that is what the Jews learned to do, and do well.”51 They learned the languages of exile, prospered, and often brought peace and well–being (shalom) to the cities of their exile, just as Jeremiah had exhorted them to do. This diasporic existence continued even after some had returned to the land and would continue after the Temple’s destruction in 70 C.E. There would be voices, both within Scripture and within post–Temple Judaism, which longed for a return to the land and which viewed exilic existence as more of a curse than as a blessing, a new opportunity to participate in God’s redemptive work. These voices need not be denied; what matters for Yoder’s argument is that throughout the debate there was a strand, at times dominant, at other times less so, which embraced exile and the call to seek the peace of the cities in which the exiles found themselves, a strand which would parallel the vision of a church gathered in discipleship to a nonviolent Lord.

Sociological and theological traits of the exilic vision

If a positive embrace of exile as “a new phase of the Mosaic project” forms a distinct strand of the biblical witness and post–Temple Jewish history, what did that exilic community look like? What were its sociological and theological markers? “What it meant to be Jewish on a world scale, from the age of Jeremiah to that of Theodore Hertzl,” Yoder asserted, “depended more on the leadership in Babylon, where living without a temple was possible and was accepted as permanent, than on the Palestinian institutions, distracted as they were by the agenda of Maccabean rebellion and Herodian negotiation, and then by Roman destruction.”52 Exploring Yoder’s outline of the shape of life in the Diaspora and his account of the theology which animated it will set the stage for understanding his critique of Zionism.

• • the phenomenon of the synagogue; a decentralized, self–sustaining, nonsacerdotal community life form capable of operating on its own wherever there are 10 households.
• • the phenomenon of Torah; a text around the reading and exposition of which the community is defined. This text is at once narrative and legal.
• • the phenomenon of the rabbinate; a nonsacerdotal, non–hierarchical, non–violent leadership elite whose power is not civil but intellectual, validated by their identification with the Torah.53

The “believers church” or “free church” vision of decentralized communities gathered around Scripture and animated by the Holy Spirit bore, Yoder believed, marked similarities to this exilic Jewish existence. Just as the synagogue gathers around Torah, so the believers’ church gathers around Scripture. Just as Jewish life in the exile is “nonsacerdotal,” with a “non–hierarchical leadership of rabbis, so the believers churches are organized not according to hierarchies of clergy who mediate between God and the laity, but are communities in which all are gifted by the Holy Spirit, with one particular gift being that of the teacher, or didaskolos.” These similarities led Yoder to speak of the “Jewishness of the free church vision.”54

The theological vision from exile is a vision of “not being in charge.” Yoder identified several interrelated markers of this vision and its interpretation of Jewish history. First, because “God is sovereign over history, there is no need … to seize (or subvert) political sovereignty in order for God’s will to be done.” Second, the task of “establishing the ultimate righteous social order among the nations will be the mission of the Meschiach and should be left to him; to do his work for him would be presumptuous if not blasphemous.” Attempts in the Jewish past to take control of history and make things come out “right,” such as the Maccabean revolt, the campaigns of the Zealots, and the Bar Kochba revolt had not been blessed by God, and had thus failed. Not bound to sovereign control over land, Jewish communities in exile became nonviolent in style and substance, this nonviolence even expressing itself in language. Note Isaac Bashevis Singer’s praise of the Yiddish language as “a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government; a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics.”55 Taking violent control of history was also problematic for this exilic vision for two more reasons: first, Yoder argued, Jews of the Diaspora “would have said that if an all–righteous God wanted to chastise us for our sins, our self–defense would interfere with that purpose.” Furthermore, “they would have said that the death of the righteous #145;sanctifies the Name,’ i.e., makes a doxological contribution, on the moral scales of history, which our avoidance of suffering (even if unjust) would obviate.”56

The parallels between this description of Jewish “quietism”/“pacifism” since Jeremiah and Yoder’s ecclesiology and political theology cannot be missed. “That Christian pacifism which has a theological basis in the character of God and the work of Jesus Christ,” Yoder famously claimed in The Politics of Jesus, “is one in which the calculating link between our obedience and ultimate efficacy has been broken, since the triumph of God comes through resurrection and not through effective sovereignty or assured survival.”57 The ekklesia of the New Testament is an exilic, missionary body, called to go out into the world, into diaspora (Matt. 25). The church is an elected body, a “chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (I Peter 2:9), one which embodies an alternative politics for the sake of the cities in which it finds itself. To seek to make history come out right through the use of violent force denies both God’s sovereignty and the conviction that the Meschiach has already triumphed over the powers, a triumph which will ultimately be revealed to all.

Constantinianism as abandonment of exilic vision and mission

The missionary church portrayed in the New Testament and the synagogues of the Diaspora led for more than two centuries a parallel, often intertwined, existence. Both adapted to the condition of “not being in charge,” treating that not as a deplorable limitation but rather embracing it as a way to participate in God’s work in the world. This parallel, sometimes interwoven, existence would, however, decisively come to an end with the elevation of Christianity to power under the Emperor Constantine. No longer was the church “not in charge;” now it could and did use state power as an instrument of church discipline and as a weapon against religious rivals. The church’s rise to power also roughly coincided with an increased Hellenization of the church’s understanding of God and Christ. James Carroll contends that in Nicaean christology “the Jewishness of Jesus was lost.”58 This would have negative consequences for the church’s relations with Jews. The effect of the “thoroughgoing Hellenization of the meaning of Jesus,” Carroll argues, “whatever positive results it had as an intellectual construction, was the final obliteration of the Jewish character of that meaning.” And “since there was nothing intrinsically Jewish about Jesus, there would be nothing to prevent Christians from defining themselves in opposition to Jews.”59

1. her vision of the whole globe as under God, with all the nations (e.g., even beyond the Roman empire) having their place and needing to hear the message;
2. her sense that Torah is grace and privilege, not a basis for recompense or an entrance requirement to the world to come;
3. readiness to live in the diaspora style of the Suffering Servant.

These very elements,” Yoder continued, “were the ones which the Radical Reformers reached back to retrieve.”60 Bader–Saye extends Yoder’s insight into the connection between Constantinianism and the church’s Jewishness by exploring how supersessionist theology went hand in hand with a spiritualization of ecclesiology. “The patristic claim that the church superseded Israel,” he asserts, went hand in hand with a fateful transaction. The material, bodily currency of election was cashed in for shares in a spiritual promise. The church did not realize at the time what was lost in this exchange—for without the materiality of Israel’s election the church was left with a sociopolitical vacuum. Constantinianism can thus be read as a logical correlate of the church’s de–Judaizing of election. Because Christianity did not carry forward Israel’s social and political embodiment of the covenant, because it no longer believed that election was a material matter, it possessed few resources to resist assimilation to the social forms in which it found itself.61

Diaspora Judaism as an embodied critique of Constantinianism

While the church was losing sight of the exilic vision as it entered the entanglements of Christendom, diaspora Jews continued to live in nonviolent communities seeking the peace of the new “Christian” cities where they found themselves. This, ironically, meant that the synagogue embodied more of what the church was called to be than did the church itself. “Occasionally privileged after the model of Joseph,” Yoder noted, “more often emigrating, frequently suffering martyrdom nonviolently, [Jews] were able to maintain identity without turf or sword, community without sovereignty. They thereby demonstrated pragmatically the viability of the ethic of Jeremiah and Jesus. In sum: the Jews of the Diaspora were for over a millennium the closest thing to the ethic of Jesus existing on any significant scale anywhere in Christendom.”62 Bader–Saye echoes Yoder’s claim, asserting that “Over the centuries since Constantine, it is in fact arguable that the people of Israel, with their diaspora faithfulness to the politics of the covenant, have been the ones most clearly witnessing to the peaceful ordering of God’s coming reign. Paul’s anticipation that the church would make Israel jealous has been ironically, and at times tragically, reversed.”63*

It should now be clear why I have classified Yoder as a non–supersessionist theologian. For Yoder, the role of the people of Israel in God’s redemptive plans for the world did not end with Jesus. In fact, God continued to reveal God’s purposes for the world through the faithfulness of diaspora Jewish communities amidst the complicity of the church with empire. Now that the last vestiges of Christendom are crumbling, some Christian theologians have joined Yoder in turning to the life of Diaspora Judaism for guidance on how to live as God’s people in a world indifferent or overtly hostile to God and the church. “It is not clear,” Bader–Saye believes, “that the churches know what to do with this new situation” at the end of Christendom. The call, therefore, “to #145;deconstantinize’ must be paired with a call to #145;re–Judaize.’ By returning to its roots in the people of Israel, the church can recover a doctrine of election that is not mere information (which can so easily become ideology) but rather formation or, better, conformation to the ways of the triune God.”65 George Lindbeck adds: “There are a number of familiar ways in which the present period is becoming more like the Christian beginnings than the intervening ages. Christendom is passing and Christians are becoming a diaspora. The antagonism of the church to the synagogue has be unmasked (we hope definitively) for the horror it always was … Some of the reasons for distorting and then rejecting the scriptural people–of–God ecclesiology are disappearing, and perhaps its original version is again applicable.”66 The demise of Christendom thus presents the church with an opportunity to learn anew how to live faithfully in exile, and to learn this from the history of diasporic Jewish communities. It also, perhaps, will make possible a rapprochement between church and synagogue, separated for centuries by a schism which, as Yoder put it, “did not have to be.”67

Zionism as an abandonment of exilic vision

Even as Jewish communities continued to embody much of the Jeremian vision of mission in exile, the dawn of Christendom, according to Yoder, also had implications for Judaism. Judaism gradually makes problematic accommodations to the Christendom order, contended Yoder, first in a loss of missionary vitality and later in a drive to assimilate. Under Christendom, wrote Yoder, “the outcome is that Judaism will be an ethnic enclave, less missionary than before, at some points in fact practically discouraging the accession of Gentiles to membership in the synagogue. This abandonment of missionary perspective on the part of Judaism is an adjustment not to the Gentile world but to Christianity. Nonmissionary Judaism is a part of, a product of, Christian history.”68 With the advent of modernity, the nonmissionary withdrawal into ethnicity became transformed into a drive among some to assimilate into the new, “secular” identities of the nation–state. The desire to assimilate, argued Yoder, was driven by “the refusal to admit a call to be different.” This refusal was, for Yoder, “a denial of the Jewish vision on religious and moral grounds. The whole point of hebrew (sic) identity since Abraham is a call to be something else amidst the world’s power arenas. It is only by being something different that Jewry in fact has survived; it is only in order to be something morally different that Jewry is called to survive.”69

On the face of it, Zionism, as a movement arising in the late 19th century, constitutes a rejection of assimilation: Jews, according to the Zionist vision, can never be assimilated into Western, latently Christian, societies. The only “solution,” then, to the Jewish “problem” is to establish an independent state where Jews constitute the majority. Yoder, however, recognized that, even as Zionism opposed assimilationist trends within Western Judaism, it also constituted an assimilation (albeit somewhat belated) to the rise of nationalism and the nation–state in the West. If nationalism can be described as a degenerate form of Christendom (with the nation coextensive with the state, religion playing a supporting role), Zionism can then be read as the culmination of a long process of Jewish assimilation to Christendom. “What happened in Israel in fulfillment under the nation–builder, the second David (Ben–Gurion) in 1948, and in its oppressive culmination under the zealot, the second Menahem (Begin), in 1982,” explained Yoder, “can be fittingly be spoken of as a new Fall into western state–centered nationhood, having much the same shape as that of the goyim. It could only have happened because of the foundational work of second Jochanan (i.e. Theodor), (Hertzl). But while Ben Gurion was a nationbuilder like the first David, and Begin was a zealot like the first Menahem, Hertzl was not the architect of a faith community like his namesake Jochanan.”70 Belief ceases to matter in Zionism (at least in its initial, secular form, the form still dominant in contemporary Israeli politics); what mattered instead was simply ethnic identification as Jews. “The culmination of the Christianization of Judaism, then, is the development of Zionism.”

On the face of it, Zionism, as a movement arising in the late 19th century, constitutes a rejection of assimilation:Zionism creates a secular democratic nation state after the model of the nation states of the West. It defines Jews, for the purpose of building the state, in such a way that it makes no difference if most of them are unbelieving and unobservant. In America the Jews are “like a church ” with a belief structure, life style commitments, and community meetings; in Israel Judaism is a nation and the belief dimension no longer matters. To be born in the state of Israel makes one less of a Jew, in the deep historical sense of the term, than to be born in a ghetto.71

On the face of it, Zionism, as a movement arising in the late 19th century, constitutes a rejection of assimilation:What Yoder did not say, but could have, was that Zionism was also a fall away from whatever remained of the nonviolent style of the Jeremian vision into the violent politics of a colonialist nation–state.72

Zionism denies everything. [It denies] the entire idea of election, whereby God chose us from among all peoples, and the entire idea of exile on account of our sins, and of redemption by God through our righteous Messiah. Zionism—which means, that we should have a state, freedom, and independence—may appear to go against no explicit commandment … and can even be made to seem attractive through various devious argument and confusions, and through justifications appealing to particular circumstances. This Zionism is the [most] terrible heresy … The great, basic question is: Are we—God forbid—a nation like all the nations of the world? Do we succeed and fail according to the same causes by which they succeed and fail? Will organizing a fighting force [of the sort] that has provided security to other nations of the world provide for us, too, security and strength in the land, national honor and respect in the world, retention of power and a secure future? Or are we something different from all other nations of the world, a chosen people whom God has elected from amongst all peoples, to be governed by manifest divine providence, under the divine order of the Torah’s commandments and warnings of punishment, exile and redemption …?73

We have to treat the local population with love and respect, justly and rightly. And what do our brethren in the Land of Israel do? Exactly the opposite! Slaves they were in their country of exile, and suddenly they find themselves in a boundless and anarchic freedom, as is always the case with a slave that has become king, and they behave toward the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, infringe upon their boundaries, hit them shamefully without reason, and even brag about it.74

Others, like Judah Magnes and Hannah Arendt, opposed an exclusivist Zionism in favor of a binational state in Palestine. The Reform Jewish theologian, Marc Ellis, has unflaggingly carried this tradition on into the present, critiquing how an empowered Jewish community in North America and in Israel draws on a heritage of suffering in order to deflect criticism of its actions against Palestinians. Ellis challenges “Jewish innocence” and rejects the “combination of claiming to be an eternal victim even within empowerment.”75 Ellis also draws out the parallels between Constantinianism and Zionism. “There are many Christians today who flee from Constantinian Christianity like people who flee from a burning building,” Ellis notes. It is therefore paradoxical and tragic, he continues “that Jews, who have suffered from Constantinian Christianity, have, at the moment when Christians have finally awoken to the devastating effects of that synthesis, plunged headlong into a Constantinian Judaism. Like Christianity in its Constantinian phase, Constantinian Judaism orients its texts and memory, and with that its religious rituals and intellectual endeavors, to serving the state, legitimating power, arguing in moral terms for policies that displace and disorient others, and silencing dissent. Like Christian reformers within Constantinian Christianity, in Constantinian Judaism, Jewish dissidents are dismissed as traitors and heretics. The proposal by Jewish dissidents that an alteration of unprecedented proportions is occurring in our time is met with an iron fist, the same iron fist that is turned outward toward those on the other side of Jewish power. An uncertain future is announced by the dissidents, by Jews of conscience who refuse the transposition of Jewish life into a Constantinianism that is Christian in its origins and yet seemingly universal in its application.”76

Daniel Boyarin affirms the comparison of Constantinian Christendom with the State of Israel, accusing Zionism of maintaining the particularism of Jewish identity without any of its ethical concern for the Other: in Israel, “ethnic/racial superiority has been conjoined with spatial, political domination and the constraint toward conformity in the discourse of nationalism and self–determination.” Boyarin continues that “For five hundred years we have seen the effects of such a conjunction in the practices of Christian Europe, and now we see its effects mutatis mutandis in many of the practices of the Jewish state.”77 Political dominion deforms communal practices: the legitimate diaspora concern “for feeding and housing of Jews and not #145;others’” becomes in today’s Israel “a monstrosity, whereby an egregiously disproportionate portion of the resources of the State of Israel is devoted to the welfare of only one segment of the population.”78 The way to resist this deformation of the Jewish vision, Boyarin suggests, the way for Jews to “preserve the positive ethical, political value of Jewish genealogy as a mode of identity,” is to preserve the “subaltern status” of diaspora Judaism.79

V
Exile, return, and living in the land

But I am the exile.
Seal me with your eyes.
Take me wherever you are—
Take me whatever you are.
Restore to me the color of face
And the warmth of body
The light of heart and eye,
The salt of bread and rhythm,
The taste of earth … The Mother land.
Shield me with your eyes.
Take me as a relic from the mansion of sorrows.
Take me as a verse from any tragedy;
Take me as a toy, a brick from the house
So that our children will remember to return.80

In the previous pages, I have sought to trace the outlines of a theological position which is non–supersessionist and which underwrites a critique of Zionism. This position has held up exile as a site of mission within which Christians and Jews are called to witness to God by forming communities which embody a different politics within the politics of empire. The motif of exile, thus, has critical power. Does it, however, provide the means to address outstanding questions of justice in Palestine/Israel? Can it provide a positive vision for political life in Palestine/Israel? For example, can Yoder’s exilic theology address the right of return for Palestinian refugees or provide a theological rationale for why Palestinian farmers whose lands have been confiscated for settlement construction should have their property restored? Can this exilic theology provide a positive theology of land? The Palestinian experience since 1948 has been one of being violently separated from land: refugees and others whose lands have been confiscated from them yearn for a return to land. Gerald Schlabach has poignantly observed that “we do no favor to any dispossessed people if we think of land only in a figurative rather than an earthy sense.”81 Does the Jeremian vision of exile stand in tension, or even contradiction, with a yearning and a struggle to return to one#146;s destroyed home or to regain stolen lands?

At the end of his essay, “See How They Go with Their Face to the Sun,” Yoder asked if there was “something about this Jewish vision of the dignity and ministry of the scattered people of God which might be echoed or replicated by other migrant peoples. Might there even be something helpful in this memory which would speak by a more distant analogy to the condition of peoples overwhelmed by imperial immigration, like the original Americans or Australians, or the Ainu or the Maori?”82 On the one hand, the answer is yes: the motif of exile takes on positive as well as negative valences among post–colonialist writers, including Edward Said, who valorize exile as a position from which the intellectual can speak truth to power while not becoming captive to it.83

On the other hand, however, return (al–Awda) is not a purely metaphorical desire for Palestinian refugees (including for Said), but rather a concrete hope.84 Yoder’s question of whether or not other dispossessed people can be animated by the Jeremian vision is incomplete. The question we should be asking is not simply, “Can other displaced peoples find something helpful in the exilic vision of scripture and Jewish history?” We should go further and celebrate Jesus’ proclamation of Jubilee for the captives and the landless.85 A nonviolent struggle for the return of refugees, for the return of confiscated land, is not incompatible with the exilic vision. The church can join forces with those who seek justice “in the land”; however, the nonviolence of the Jeremian vision, a nonviolence which continues in the community gathered around our nonviolent Lord, reminds us that violence used to secure justice and landed security constitutes a premature return to the land. Schlabach summarizes well the tension the church is called to live: “The life of Christian communities does not cease being one of eschatological exile, just because Christians are now living in this world’s land longer than either their first–century mentors or some first–century imitators expected . . . the ‘already’ of eschatological life means that the church can hold lightly to the goods that God gives in this life, and stake its life together on its trust that historical existence does not limit God’s promise.”86 The metaphor of “living lightly” in the land captures well the double element of a willingness to live without sovereign control over land and the promise of security and blessing that life in the land brings. “Jesus,” explains Walter Brueggeman, “embodies precisely what Israel has learned about land: being without land makes it possible to trust the promise of it, while grasping land is the sure way to lose it. The powerful are called to dispossession. The powerless are called to power. The landed are called to homelessness. The landless are given a new home. Both are called to discipleship, to be ‘in Christ,’ to submit to the one who has become the embodiment of the new land.”87

The Jeremian vision is thus, I believe, compatible with a nonviolent struggle for justice, for a return to and a reclaiming of land. Can the theology of exile, however, provide a positive political vision for the state, for political bodies beyond the polis of the church? Yoder argued throughout his writings that the church is the primary polis of Christian existence. By attending to its worship and corporate life, the church presents a political witness to the surrounding polis. The church can benefit the wider political order primarily by attending to its own internal affairs: here, too, the church learns from exilic Judaism: “Not being in charge of the civil order is sometimes a more strategic way to be important for its survival or its flourishing than to fight over or for the throne. In dramatic and traumatic cases the Jews were murdered or banished; in more, quieter cases they were needed and appreciated despite (or thanks to) their nonconformity.”88

This “body politics” of the church, I believe, is not silent on the question of how other political institutions should be ordered.89 The church’s practices can serve as analogies for practices which should be undertaken by the state.90 “The multiplicity of gifts,” Yoder suggested, “is a model for the empowerment of the humble and the end of hierarchy in social process. Dialogue under the Holy Spirit is the ground floor of the notion of democracy. Admonition to bind or loose at the point of offense is the foundation for conflict resolution and consciousness–raising. Baptism enacts interethnic social acceptance, and breaking bread celebrates economic solidarity.”91 This analogical approach is suggestive for imagining just resolutions of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. Just as baptism incorporates diverse peoples (Jews and Gentiles) into one body, so, by analogy, one could argue for a political solution to the conflict based on incorporation into one body, rather than a separation which is hard to distinguish from apartheid: this could mean either one, binational state solution in Palestine/Israel, or a two state solution with open borders and a return of refugees.92 Just as the Eucharist embodies economic solidarity, so, by analogy, should those who have been dispossessed be given (returned) the material wherewithal to live.

At a conference organized by the Anti–Defamation League, Yoder argued that the transcendence of the “heavenly Jerusalem” relativized human claims to sovereignty over “earthly Jerusalem.” The “touchstone” for whether the appeal to transcendence in order “to state the claims for one’s own sovereignty and possessiveness” is valid or not is “whom it excludes and expels; whether those we treat as our enemies are God’s enemies or his children. Those who enter Jerusalem’s gates sing that it is ‘built to be a city where people come together in unity’ (Ps. 122:3). Those people are qualified to work at the building of the city who build it for others; who recognize it as not their own turf but God’s.”93 The question for any polity, including in Palestine/Israel, then is whether or not it includes or excludes. Over 50 years of Palestinian dispossession have borne witness to the exclusionary character of Zionist polity. Any future political arrangements in Palestine/Israel should be judged according to whether they include or exclude the refugee, the family whose home has been demolished, the farmer whose land has been confiscated.

Throughout Zionism’s history, Jewish voices have protested against its exclusionary practice and have dreamt of alternative ways of living in the land which do not disenfranchise and dispossess Palestinians. Judah Magnes exhorted in the first part of the twentieth century that “We must once and for all give up the idea of a ‘Jewish Palestine’ in the sense that a Jewish Palestine is to exclude and do away with an Arab Palestine . . . Judaism did not begin with Zionism, and if Zionism is ethically not in accord with Judaism, so much the worse for Zionism.”94 Magnes’ prophetic cry, unfortunately, did not carry the day, and the road was paved for the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and the colonial settlements following 1967 and continuing until today. This violent grasping of land has meant dispossession for Palestinians and the nervous insecurity of colonial power for Israelis. Moving beyond this bleak situation means more than constructing a military “peace” which suppresses the anger of the colonized against the colonizer. Rather, as Beit–Hallahmi explains, peace must involve “a drastic change in Israel’s self–image and a readiness to atone for the sins of colonialism.”95

“Could it be,” asks Marc Ellis, “that Jews are called to side with Canaanites, participate in a Canaanite reading of contemporary reality, to be among the Canaanites as a sign of fidelity to Jewish history and contemporary reality?”96 Even amidst the escalating violence of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, new political communities are beginning to form in Palestine/Israel based precisely on this model of solidarity. Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Rabbis for Human Rights placing himself in front of military bulldozers, Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions rebuilding a demolished Palestinian home, Uri Avneri of Gush Shalom prophetically critiquing the illusions of a colonial peace, the activist–journalist Amira Hass diligently documenting Israeli abuses against Palestinians, the independent activist Neta Golan offering to live as a human shield in Palestinian homes bombarded by Israeli shelling: while a minority within Israel, these witnesses carry forward the Jeremian vision into the present. Today’s “exilic community,” argues Marc Ellis, “is composed of those who are fleeing from contemporary injustice and hope to build a world beyond what is known today.”97 As Jews like Ascherman, Halper, and Golan join “Gentiles” like Naim Ateek of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, Ghassan Andoni of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between Peoples, and Zoughbi Zoughbi of the Wi’am Conflict Resolution Center in the struggle for justice in the land, new political bodies are formed which embody alternatives to the politics of violence and domination, to the politics of a “Constantinian” Zionism. May Mennonites continue to be blessed as we join them in that struggle.

Notes

1. Mandate Palestine refers to the territory bounded by the Jordan River to the east, the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Rafah and Eilat (Um Rashrash) to the south and Ras an–Naqqura/Rosh Ha–Niqra to the north: this was the territory which the League of Nations asked Great Britain to administer after World War I. The British were to help its Mandate territories (which also included “Transjordan”Ðnow Jordan–and Iraq) on the road toward independence and self–determination. Instead, following the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Britain pursued a policy aimed at creating a Jewish homeland in Mandate Palestine. “Occupied territories” refers here to East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, occupied by Israel since 1967. Back to text

2. MCC workers have particularly been enriched by the witness of Palestinian Christians. Any authentic Mennonite theology of Zionism must be carried out in conversation with MCC’s Palestinian Christian partners. While I do not attempt to demonstrate it in this paper, I believe that the theological critique I develop is congruent with much Palestinian liberation theology, e.g., Naim Stifan Ateek, Justice, and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989) and Mitri Raheb, I Am a Palestinian Christian (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). See also “The Jerusalem Sabeel Document: Principles for a Just Peace in Palestine–Israel,” May 15, 2000, available at http://www.sabeel.org/. Having Naim Ateek, director of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, as a respondent at the MCC Peace Office meeting in Winnipeg, Canada in October 2001 where this paper was first presented was part of the accountability to our Palestinian sisters and brothers in Christ which we should be seeking.Christian theologians have slowly been coming to terms with the demise of Christendom. This post–Christendom reality is cited by some as an opportunity to rethink supersessionist theologies. Bader–Saye, in particular, links the task of overcoming supersessionism in Christian theology with the challenge of deconstructing political theologies which conflated church and state. What Bader–Saye and Soulen do not discuss, however, is the way in which Judaism has undergone its own “Constantinian shift” in the triumph of Zionism, even as the last vestiges of Christendom crumble in the West. A theological critique of Zionism from a non–Constantinian perspective will thus make a significant contribution to the debate over the church’s fate in a post–Christendom world. Back to text

3. I write “colonizing dimensions of Zionism” in order to indicate that some forms of ZionismÐe.g., the “cultural Zionism” of Ahad Ha’amÐwould perhaps not have been colonial in effect. In real, as opposed to hypothetical, history, however, Zionism has been a colonialist phenomenon. Back to text

4. The Jewish writers of the groundbreaking Jewish statement, Dabru Emet (Speak the Truth), observe that Nazism and the Holocaust were not Christian phenomena, not logical outworkings of Christianity. This is a gracious interfaith statement. Christians, however, should not let this absolve the church for its silence, at times bordering on complicity, in the face of pogroms and the Holocaust. For a Christian response to Dabru Emet, see Alain Epp Weaver, “Speaking the Truth in Jewish–Christian Dialogue, The Mennonite (October 31, 2000): 6Ð7. Back to text

5. The term “supersessionism” can have a variety of meanings, depending on the author. I will define the term in greater detail below. I observe for now that I do not believe that the claim that Jesus Christ is the Messiah and is the fullest, normative revelation of God is a supersessionist claim. Back to text

6. Dispensationalist readings of Scripture have, of course, made inroads into Mennonite churches. I will not engage these readings here, other than to note their defective reading of biblical prophecy and apocalypse and their distorted eschatology and christology. For a lively engagement with dispensationalist approaches to Israel and Zionism, see Donald E. Wagner, Anxious for Armageddon: A Call to Partnership for Middle Eastern and Western Christians (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1995), esp. chapters 7Ð9. Back to text

7. The challenge in answering these questions, as I see it, will be to avoid two temptations. The first is the Marcionite temptation to contrast the God of the New Testament with the God of the Old. A Marcionite approach, for example, could claim that the Old Testament God was one of violent conquest, while the New Testament God was one of nonviolent love. For Christians who confess that the God of Israel is the same as the God incarnate in Jesus, this approach is not an option. The second temptation will be to explain away morally problematic parts of the Scriptural witness through the tools of historical criticism. Thus, for example, historical–critical research argues against the historicity of the conquest of Canaan, viewing these narratives as the ideological/theological product of a much later time. I will discuss some of this scholarship below. It is my contention that while some of this critical scholarship can shed new light on Scripture, it cannot absolve us of the task of reading Scripture canonically, i.e., grappling with the whole of the Scriptural witness in its multiple voices. A canonical reading of Scripture, however, will not accord equal weight to all of Scripture’s different thematic strands. Back to text

8. See, for example, Scott Bader–Saye, Church and Israel after Christendom: The Politics of Election (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1999) and R. Kendall Soulen, “YHWH the Triune God” Modern Theology 15/1 (January 1999): 25Ð54. Not all theologians, one should note, are reconciled the Christendom’s passing: for a vigorous defense of a revived Christendom, see Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). One suspects that O’Donovan’s support of Christendom makes him less critical of Zionism (although O’Donovan does suggest that Israel is “a defensive, exclusive and militarily oppressive nation–state”Ðp. 287) than someone like Bader–Saye, who views Christendom’s fall as an opportunity for the church’s mission. Back to text

9. Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab–Jewish Conflict Over Palestine (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). For thorough critiques of Peters’ shoddy “scholarship” see the essays by Norman Finkelstein and Edward Said in Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, eds., Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (London, New York: Verso, 1988). For a sound discussion of Palestine’s population in the late Ottoman period, see Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Back to text

10. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal Palestinians: The Making of a People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Bishara Doumani, “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History,” Journal of Palestine Studies 21/2 (Winter 1992): 5Ð28. Back to text

11. See, for example, Ilan Pappe, The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947Ð1951 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1992); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947Ð1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Nur Musalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882Ð1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Walid Khalidi, ed., All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Back to text

12. Benjamin Beit–Hallahmi, Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1992), 216. Back to text

13. Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000). Back to text

14. See Nicholas Guyatt, The Absence of Peace: Understanding the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1998), esp. chapter 1Ð3. Back to text

15. Gershon Shafir, “Zionism and Colonialism: A Comparative Approach,” in The Israel–Palestine Question, ed. Ilan Pappe (London and New York: Routledge, 1999): 81Ð96 and Uri Ram, “The Colonization Perspective in Israeli Sociology,” in The Israel–Palestine Question, 55Ð80. Back to text

16. See, for example, “Ehud Barak’s ‘Generous Offers’” on the Gush Shalom website, http://www.gush– shalom.org/ and the essays in Edward W. Said, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (New York: Pantheon, 2000). traditional Judaism) and less than divine (contrary to traditional Christianity) . . . If this de–Christologized Jesus is accepted, it marks a break with both Judaism and Christianity to such an extent that dialogue between them becomes a new monologue containing them instead.” Back to text

17. For the comparison with apartheid, see Uri Davis, Israel: An Apartheid State (London: Zed Books, 1987). Note also this telling anecdote related by Israeli commentator Meron Benvenisti: “One day, more than 30 years ago, two Israelis who dealt with handling the Palestinian population one in Jerusalem and the other in the West Bank met a high–ranking South African official. At the meeting, the two explained their jobs and the way they were improving Israeli–Palestinian relations by letting the Palestinians manage their own lives. Suddenly, the guest said, ‘What would you say if I invited you to assist the new regime in the Transkei homeland?’ The Israelis were astonished. Their guest’s question insinuated that their tolerant and liberal activities were similar to the racist practices of apartheid rule. When they objected, he smiled at them. ‘I understand your reaction. But aren’t you basically doing the same thing? You and we both face the same existential problems, so we reach the same solution. The only difference is that your solution is pragmatic and ours ideological. Yes, we’re all in love with the compromises we make with ourselves.’ If that South African official were to return today, he’d shake his head in sorrow. ‘We reached the conclusion ten years ago that unilateral separation that keeps the monopoly of coercion in the hands of the white community simply won’t last and has to go. Your political thinking now is the same as it was back when we first met. True, as I said then, the existential problems are the same; we chose a united multi–racial state (what you call a “binational” state). Maybe there’s still the alternative of dividing the country with an agreement. If there is, grab it. Believe me, unilateral separation is not an option. It only will turn you into a pariah state isolated from the West, just as we were. We also thought the world didn’t understand us, wasn’t sensitive to our plight. You have it a little easier, because you can think it’s all anti–Semitism. Forget it. Learn from us.’”ÐMeron Benvenisti, “Unilateral Separation Leads Inexorably to Apartheid,” Ha’aretz English Edition, August 23, 2001. Back to text

18. For a systematic exposition of human rights abuses under Israeli occupation, see Raja Shehadeh, Occupier’s Law: Israel and the West Bank (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1985). For up–to–date reports on human rights abuses in the occupied territories, see the websites of LAW (http://www.lawsociety.org), the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (http://www.pchrgaza.org), and B’Tselem (http://www.btselem.org Back to text

19. Many Palestinians are critical of the use of violence in the current intifada. Bir Zeit University political science professor Saleh Abdel Jawwad is representative in this regard, calling armed attacks by Palestinians counter–productive, militarily ineffectual, and discouraging of mass participation in the uprising. Saleh and others believe that the only way to confront Israeli occupation is through a sustained campaign of nonviolent resistance. Even as MCC workers join Palestinian partners in discouraging violence and encouraging nonviolent resistance, we remember John Howard Yoder’s observation of the hypocrisy of critiquing the violence of the weak while overlooking the violence of the strong.ÐYoder, “The Wider Setting of ‘Liberation Theology,’” The Review of Politics 52 (Spring 1990): 285Ð96. Back to text

20. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 29. Back to text

21. Ibid., 30. Back to text

22. Ibid., 31. Soulen proposes an alternative canonical narrative based on blessing, curse, and consummation which would integrate Israel’s story more clearly into God’s salvific purposes. Back to text

23. For discussions of Barth’s approach to Judaism, see R. Kendall Soulen, “Karl Barth and the Future of the God of Israel,” Pro Ecclesia 6/4 (1997): 413Ð428 and Katherine Sonderegger, “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew”: Karl Barth’s “Doctrine of Israel” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). Back to text

24. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti–Semitism (Minneapolis: Seabury Press, 1974), 256Ð257. Back to text

25. Paul Van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish–Christian Reality, Volume 1: Discerning the Way (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), 85. Back to text

26. Scott Bader–Saye, Church and Israel after Christendom: The Politics of Election (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1999), 79. Back to text

27. Quoted in Bader–Saye, 70. Back to text

28. Quoted in Bader–Saye, 77Ð80. Back to text

29. Paul M. Van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish–Christian Reality. Part Two: A Christian Theology of the People Israel (San Francisco: Harper and Row: 1983), 177Ð209; Alice and Roy Eckardt, Encounter with Israel: A Challenge to Conscience (New York: Association Press, 1970); Franklin H. Littel, The Crucifixion of the Jews (New York: Harper and Row, 1975). Back to text

30. Rosemary Radford Ruether, with Herman J. Ruether, The Wrath of Jonah: The Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict (New York: Harper and Row, 1989). Back to text

31. The degree of Yoder’s commitment to Nicene–Chalcedonian orthodoxy has been hotly contested. I have argued elsewhere that while Yoder relativized the importance of creedal orthodoxy against the primary authority of Scripture and also insisted that Nicaea–Chalcedon omit elements vital to a proper christology (namely, Jesus’ life and ministry), he still was able to affirm Nicaea–Chalcedon in ecumenical conversations. While Yoder questioned the ongoing usefulness of Greek ontological categories for christology, he did believe that any proper christology must be a high christology, identifying Jesus and his life, ministry and death with God. Yoder, I would contend, thus stands much closer to creedal orthodoxy than do theologians such as Ruether or van Buren.ÐAlain Epp Weaver, “Missionary Christology: John Howard Yoder and the Creeds,” The Mennonite Quarterly Review 74/3 (July 2000): 423Ð440. Back to text

32. Yoder in his writings did not, to my knowledge, make much of a point of challenging the use of “Old” and “New” Testament as designations for different parts of the Bible. Neither will I. Other writers, fearing that supersessionism is encoded in this choice of words, have suggested alternatives: First and Second Testaments, for example, or “The Scriptures” and “The Apostolic Witness” (Soulen, The God of Israel). While I sympathize with the concerns behind these efforts at renaming, I do not think that “Old” necessarily means outmoded and obsoleteÐthink, for example, of the wisdom of age, or a properly aged wine. Back to text

33. John Howard Yoder, “The Jewishness of the Free Church Vision,” in The Jewish–Christian Schism Revisited: A Bundle of Old Essays (Elkhart, In.: Shalom Desktop Packet, 1996), 85. This self–published “bundle” of essays consists primarily of essays delivered at Bethel College, Kansas, Earlham College, Indiana, and the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, Jerusalem (the latter delivered while Yoder was on a short MCC assignment). Michael Cartwright and Peter Ochs are editing this packet of essays and will publish them in the Radical Traditions series of Westview Press. Back to text

34. John Howard Yoder, “See How They Go with Their Face to the Sun,” in For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1997), 64. For a more extended engagement with Genesis 11, see Yoder, “Meaning after Babble: With Jeffrey Stout beyond Relativism,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 24 (Spring 1996): 125Ð39. Back to text

35. Ibid., 53. Back to text

36. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994), chapter 4. Yoder drew heavily on the Old Testament scholarship of Millard Lind, scholarship eventually gathered together as Yahweh is a Warrior (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1980). Back to text

37. John Howard Yoder, “Jesus the Jewish Pacifist,” in The Jewish–Christian Schism Revisited, 48. Back to text

38. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 78. Back to text

39. For a fascinating essay dealing with the place of the Canaanite in the Exodus/conquest narrative, see Edward Said, “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution: A Canaanite Reading,” in Blaming the Victims, 161Ð78. Back to text

40. Michael Prior, Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 178. Back to text

41. Ibid., 180. Back to text

42. Ollenburger, “Review Essay: The History of Israel Contested and Revised,” Modern Theology 16/4 (October 2000), 531. Key titles in this “minimalist” or “revisionist” school of biblical scholarship include Philip R. Davies, In Search of “Ancient Israel” (JSOTSup. 148, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, second edition, 1995); Niels Peter Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition (Library of Ancient Israel, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1998); Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Back to text

43. Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 236. Whitelam does not argue that, for example, there were no Davidic and Solomonic monarchies, but that their geographical reach and political influence were not as extensive as the biblical narratives suggest. Whitelam’s general point that the search for “ancient Israel” has often been at the expense of the wider history of the region seems sound. What mars Whitelam’s presentation is the way in which he speaks about the silencing of “Palestinian” history, with “Palestinian” referring to the other inhabitants of the land west of the Jordan river at the time of “ancient Israel”: this move could lead an innocent reader to believe that Palestinian nationalism is some ancient phenomenon, rather than, like Zionism and European nationalism generally, a modern development. For a classic study of the modern origins of nationalism generally, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991). Back to text

44. Gerald W. Schlabach, “Deuteronomic or Constantinian: What is the Most Basic Problem for Christian Social Ethics?” in The Wisdom of the Cross: Essays in Honor of John Howard Yoder, ed. Stanley Hauerwas, Chris K. Huebner, Harry Huebner, Mark Thiessen Nation (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999), 463. Back to text

45. Yoder, “See How They Go,” 74Ð75. Back to text

46. Yoder, “Jesus the Jewish Pacifist,” 48. Back to text

47. Yoder, “See How They Go,” 74Ð75. A. James Reimer’s critique, borrowing from John W. Miller, that Babylon/exile never became the “exclusively normative symbol,” either in the Old Testament or in the post–Temple Diaspora does not mount an effective challenge to Yoder’s approach.ÐA. James Reimer, “Theological Orthodoxy and Jewish Christianity: A Personal Tribute to John Howard Yoder,” in The Wisdom of the Cross, 446. Yoder need not claim that the motif of a Jeremian embrace of exile was necessarily dominant, but merely a) that this strand continued both within the scriptural witness and within the history of post–biblical Judaism in the Diaspora and b) that this strand is the one most in continuity with the Gospel message. Back to text

48. Schlabach,”Deuteronomic or Constantinian,” 458n16. The debate continues in contemporary Judaism. While most Jewish groups, apart from the ultra–Orthodox, have embraced Zionism’s colonizing, military sovereignty, in practice most “argue with their feet” by choosing to live in the Diaspora. Back to text

49. Yoder, “See How They Go,” 74Ð75. Back to text

50. John Howard Yoder, “Heavenly and Earthly Jerusalem: A Mislocated Dualism,” in The Jewish–Christian Schism Revisited, 127. Back to text

51. Yoder, “See How They Go,” 56. Back to text

52. Ibid., 58. Back to text

53. John Howard Yoder, “On Not Being in Charge,” in The Jewish–Christian Schism Revisited, 138. “On Not Being in Charge” was previously published in War and Its Discontents, ed. J. Patout Burns (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1996), 74Ð90. I will cite the Desktop packet version. Back to text

54. Note the essay by this name in The Jewish–Christian Schism Revisited. Perry Yoder has also argued for similiarities between Jewish and Anabaptist visions, looking specifically at what Mennonite theologians can learn from Jewish methods of reading Scripture..ÐPerry Yoder, “The Importance of Judaism for Contemporary Anabaptist Thought,” The Mennonite Quarterly Review 67/1 (January 1993): 73Ð83. Back to text

55. Cited in The Challenge of Shalom: The Jewish Tradition of Peace and Justice, ed. Murray Poner and Naomi Goodman (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1994), 2. Back to text

56. Yoder, “On Not Being in Charge,” 138Ð139. The final parts of the Jewish diaspora vision outlined by Yoder, concerning an acceptance of God’s chastisement and a belief that unmerited suffering sanctifies the Name, while an integral part of observant Jewish theology for centuries, have come under fire in the post–Holocaust era. How can the deaths of six million Jews in the Shoah be viewed as either chastisement or as a sanctification of God’s name? I agree with post–Holocaust Jewish theologians who find such sentiments ghastly and immoral. Some ultra–Orthodox Jews, however, would defend a view of the Holocaust as divine punishment: Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual head of the Sephardic Shas party, created a major controversy in Israel by making precisely this claim. A general affirmation that God can and does chastise sin and that unmerited suffering can sanctify God’s name does not, I would argue, logically entail the offensive and morally untenable position that the Holocaust is a chastisement of sin. Back to text

57. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 239. Back to text

58. James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 587. Back to text

59. Ibid., 579. Carroll perhaps overstates his case: the Greek ontological categories of Nicaea–Chalcedon need not be read as inherently incompatible with Jesus’ Jewishness. However, by skipping over Jesus’ life and ministry, the creeds could and did facilitate the process of the church becoming separated from its Jewish context. Back to text

60. John Howard Yoder, “Judaism as a Non–non–Christian Religion,” in The Jewish–Christian Schism Revisited, 119. Back to text

61. Bader–Saye, 57. Back to text

62. Yoder, “Jesus the Jewish Pacifist,” 60. Sephardic Jews throughout the Arab world also lived in exilic communities, usually prospering and faring much better than Jews under Christendom. Back to text

63. Bader–Saye, 110. Back to text

64. Stanley Hauerwas, with Chris K. Huebner, “History, Theory, and Anabaptism: A Conversation on Theology after John Howard Yoder,” in The Wisdom of the Cross: Essays in Honor of John Howard Yoder,” ed. Stanley Hauerwas, Chris K. Huebner, Harry Huebner, Mark Thiessen Nation (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999), 396. Hauerwas in this essay also wrongly characterizes Yoder as having “imposed” his agenda at the ADL conference where Yoder presented “Earthly Jerusalem and Heavenly Jerusalem” in a way that would have made Yoder uncomfortable (404Ð405). If one actually looks at Yoder’s postscript to the essay, Yoder is in no way apologetic; he is surmising why his essay was not published in the ADL’s organ, Face to Face, and guesses that it may have had to do with the way his “reading of the meaning of the election of Jerusalem had (although only by tacit implication) relativized mainline Zionism” (132). Yoder’s dialogical integrity was such that he did not shy away from critiques of Zionism when speaking to Jewish audiences. Back to text

65. Bader–Saye, 69. Back to text

66. George Lindbeck, “The Church,” in Keeping the Faith, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 190. Back to text

67. “It did not have to be” is the subtitle of Yoder’s essay, “Tertium Datur.” Back to text

68. Yoder, “Judaism as a Non–non–Christian Religion,” 121. Yoder recognized, of course, that this withdrawal into ethnic enclaves was often a defensive move in the face of persecution and was reinforced coercively with the creation of ghettoes in which Jewish communities were contained and sequestered. Back to text

69. Yoder, “Jesus the Jewish Pacifist,” 64. Back to text

70. John Howard Yoder, “Tertium Datur: It Did Not Have to Be,” in The Jewish–Christian Schism Revisited, 44. Back to text

71. Yoder, “Judaism as a Non–non–Christian Religion,” 122. Note this similar claim: “If assimilation into pluralism signified the rounding out of the Christianization of western Jewry, the development of Zionism is its culmination. The State of Israel models itself on Western thinking. It defines Jews in such a way that most of them may be unbelieving or unobservant . . . In the state of Israel Judaism is a state but no longer a believing community. Once the state was created, the separateness of Jewishness as an ethnic body is no longer needed as a base for religion or vice versa. Religion in the State of Israel can be just as individualized, just as pluralized, as anywhere in the West. Committed Judaism, i.e., a discernible people ready thoroughly and sacrificially to order their lives around their convictions as to the substance of the Torah, is a minority sect in Israel.”ÐYoder, “The Jewishness of the Free Church Vision,” 76. One should note that some Zionists did and do undergird their practice theologically; the origins of Zionism, however, and its dominant expressions today, are thoroughly secular. Back to text

72. My claim is not that all forms of Zionism need necessarily have been violent or colonialist. “Cultural Zionists” like Ahad Ha’am and Judah Magnes had visions of a Jewish presence in a multicultural, binational Palestine which did not entail the violence of sovereignty over the land. This cultural Zionism, however, was and is a distinct minority voice within Zionism’s history. The real history of Zionism has been brutally colonialist. Back to text

73. Yerahmiel Domb, “Judaism and Zionism,” in The Jewish Political Tradition. Volume One: Authority, ed. Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, Noam J. Zohar and Yair Lorberbaum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 483. This collection of essays and source material, in its very diversity, problematizes any claim that the Jeremian, exilic vision was ever the exclusive (or even sometimes dominant) Jewish vision in the Diaspora. That, however, was not Yoder’s claim, as I explained above: what matters is the ongoing persistence of this one strand (and sometimes the dominance of that strand) within Jewish thought and life. Back to text

74. Ahad Ha’am, quoted in Schlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 123Ð124. Back to text

75. Marc Ellis, “Edward Said and the Future of the Jewish People,” in Revising Culture, Reinventing Peace: The Influence of Edward W. Said, ed. Naseer Aruri and Muhammad A. Shuraydi (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001), 48. John Murray Cuddihy affirms Ellis’ critique: “when Jews’ own historical actions, in the Middle East for example, create a stateless people who, in turn, blame the Jews and Israelis, what does Jewish theodicy do? It blames the victims, the Palestinians, and sees nothing irrational in this.”ГThe Elephant and the Angels; or, The Incivil Irritatingness of Jewish Theodicy,” in Uncivil Religions: Interreligious Hostility in America, ed. Robert Bellah and Frederick Greenspahn (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 24Ð25. Back to text

76. Marc Ellis, “On the Future of Judaism and Jewish Life,” unpublished paper presented at the conference, “Judaism, Christianity and Islam: The Next Fifty Years,” sponsored by the Department of Theology and the Center for American and Jewish Studies, Baylor University, held in Birmingham, England, Dec. 11, 2000. Back to text

77. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 235. Back to text

78. Ibid., 250. Back to text

79. Ibid., 242. Back to text

80. Mahmoud Darwish, quoted in Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Vintage, 1986), 150. Back to text

81. Gerald W. Schlabach, “Deuteronomic or Constantinian,” 463. An exilic theology must certainly guard against an inadvertent valorization of the rootlessness of late capitalism. For a telling description of rootlessness in contemporary life, see William Leach, A Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life (New York: Pantheon, 1999). Back to text

82. Yoder, “See How They Go,” 78. Palestinians could easily be included in this list (although their dispossession is notÐyetÐas advanced as that of the groups Yoder listed). Back to text

83. See, for example, Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 173Ð186 and Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1994). Back to text

84. Said’s talk of “a constantly postponed metaphysics of return” (After the Last Sky 150) does not mean an abdication of the right of return. See Said, “The Right of Return, At Last,” on the Media Monitors Net website: http://www.mediamonitors.net/edward6.html. For studies on how the return of refugees (besides being grounded in international law) would not mean the violent displacement of Israeli Jews, see Badil Refugee Resource Center’s website, http://www.badil.org/. Back to text

85. Yoder’s treatment of the Jubilee in chapter 3 of The Politics of Jesus thus complements his emphasis on the Jeremian vision: the call to live without sovereignty in the land should not be separated from the promise (which will, of course, only be completely fulfilled eschatologically but can and is realized even now) of landed security. Back to text

86. Schlabach 466. Back to text

87. Walter Brueggeman, The Land (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 180Ð181. Bader–Saye suggestively describes how the tension of landedness and exile is embodied in worship: “the church is enabled to embody a politics that does not require the violent defense of place precisely because the church is given a place in the Eucharist.” “The Eucharist,” he continues, “is not a replacement of Israel’s landed hopes. Rather, Christ’s body itself has become the beachhead of God’s restoration of the land” (Bader–Saye 144). Back to text

88. Yoder, “On Not Being in Charge,” 141. Back to text

89. I have argued this extensively in Alain Epp Weaver, “After Politics: John Howard Yoder, Body Politics, and the Witnessing Church,” The Review of Politics 61/4 (Fall 1999): 637–674. Back to text

90. John Howard Yoder, Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community before the Watching World (Nashville: Discipleship Resources, 1992). “Why Ecclesiology is Social Ethics: Gospel Ethics versus the Wider Wisdom,” in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, ed. Michael G. Cartwright (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994), 102Ð126. Yoder’s concept of analogy here builds upon moves made by Karl Barth in “The Christian Community and the Civil Community,” in Karl Barth: Theologian of Freedom, ed. Clifford Green (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 265Ð95 and paragraph 72 of the Church Dogmatics IV/3:2. Back to text

91. Yoder, Body Politics, 72. Yoder recognized that the church has resources of grace which should allow it to approximate the Gospel’s agape norm more closely than other political communities, such as the state. It should be underscored, however, that Yoder set no fixed ceiling for how close the state’s performance might approximate the norms of nonviolent love. See in particular the diagram in Yoder, The Christian Witness to the State (Newton, Ks.: Faith and Life Press, 1964), 72. Back to text

92. A Jeremian vision would certainly not be compatible with a two–state solution which insisted on denying refugees return to their land out of a desire to secure demographic superiority for Jews inside Israel. See Alain Epp Weaver, “Right of Return: Can Palestinians Go Back Home? The Christian Century (May 2, 2001): 8Ð9. Back to text

93. Yoder, “Heavenly and Earthly Jerusalem,” 131. Back to text

94. Judah Magnes, quoted in Marc H. Ellis, Beyond Innocence and Redemption: Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power, Creating a Moral Future for the Jewish People (San Fransisco: Harper and Row, 1990), 49. Back to text

95. Beit–Hallahmi, 218. Unfortunately, the various “Oslo” accords from 1993 on did not represent a turning away from colonialism, but an attempt to solidify its gains. Back to text

96. Ellis, “Edward Said and the Future of the Jewish People,” 65. Back to text

97. Marc Ellis, “On the New Diaspora: A Jewish Meditation on the Future of Israel/Palestine,” in Remembering Deir Yassin: The Future of Israel and Palestine, ed. Daniel McGowan and Marc H. Ellis (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1998), 92. Back to text

*Excursus: While Yoder did not adopt it as a strategy, one could also follow historical-critical scholars of the Bible who problematize or even reject the idea of a historical Exodus and a subsequent conquest of the land. Michael Prior, observing how the conquest and settlement narratives have provided ideological support for various colonialist enterprises, summarizes a dominant trend in biblical and archaeological scholarship thus: ‘The Exodus-Settlement accounts reflect a particular genre, the goal of which was to inculcate religious values, rather than merely present empirical facts of history . . . Israel’s origins were within Canaan, not outside it. There was neither invasion from outside, nor revolution within.’40 From Genesis to II Kings, he continues ‘the genre is not simple history, but the authors’ fabrication of the past, reflecting their own religious and political ideologies.’41 Ben Ollenburger encapsulates this scholarly trend thus: ‘Scribes serving the ruling elite, and perhaps also their own interests, produced (among other things) histories of Israel-the biblical Israel-that justified claims to the land and control of the cult.’42 Given the modern State of Israel’s tendency to cite biblical history as a warrant for its present existence and the conquest of the land as a model for its colonizing practice, a reading of these narratives as the ideological constructions of a mythic past provides a helpful corrective (even though exclusively reading these texts through an historical-critical lens would be reductive and prevent a canonical apropriation of them as scripture). As Keith Whitelam has argued, particular political interests ‘have motivated the invention of ancient Israel within the discourse of biblical studies,’ political interests which erase the broader ‘Palestinian’ past in its search for an ancient Israeli ‘state’ which might serve as model for the modern Zionist state. 43 Gerald Schlabach suggests that these historical-critical approaches can assist help in theological reflection which accepts the challenge of living in the land (what Schlabach calls the Deuteronomic challenge) without succumbing to exclusionary, colonizing temptations. ‘Israel’s actual occupation of Canaan was less of the conquest that the book of Joshua portrays and more of a social revolution from within, by which dispossessed Canaanites found a coalition, hope and identity with Hebrews who had come through their exodus.’ Schlabach continues that ‘A careful reading of the Hebrew Scriptures will find various ways in which God’s promise of land was sometimes fulfilled without exclusive territorial control. A respectful reading of Judaism will note ways in which God’s promise of communal blessing has been fulfilled even in Diaspora.’44 I will return later to discuss how insistence on struggling with living in the land poses a challenge to Yoder’s exilic theology.

Back to text