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Theology - Christology: “Independence” of Jesus

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Nathan Kerr (Christ, History, Apocalyptic) explains Yoder’s notion of Jesus’ “independence” by saying that Jesus “lives, concretely and in history, a life-story that is entirely free from and irreducible to any pre-given ‘historical’ coordinates, any general or ‘meta’ principle that might serve to range the complexities and contingencies of history within any universalizable scope or logic.” It also indicates how “his apocalyptic historicity happens concomitantly as the intensification and transformation of the historically contingent as such.”

Perhaps I’ve missed Kerr’s point, but I wonder:

Is Jesus so radically “independent” as Yoder suggests? Isn’t He come to fulfill the law and prophets? Doesn’t He come “under” the law? Granted that the incarnation is an “eruptive” new work of God with Israel, still isn’t the ground for the eruption prepared beforehand? Doesn’t that qualify Jesus’ “independence”?

A few pages later, Kerr discusses Jesus’ independence in the course of summarizing Yoder’s account of Jesus and the “powers,” concluding that “Christ challenges the pretensions of the powers by living a life that is irreducible to the powers at both an operational and constitutive level.” He is, in Yoder’s words, a threat to the powers because “he existed in their midst so morally independent of their pretensions.”

This clarifies to some degree, but still raises the same issues: Isn’t Torah among the “powers,” the “elementary principles” that governed the world before Jesus? And doesn’t Jesus come “under” that power? Perhaps Yoder’s point is that Jesus submits “freely” to the powers, rather than being under them de jure, as it were. That is, His submission to the powers is a willing subordination rather than a necessity.

If the point is simply that Jesus’ life is not “reducible” to the powers, or to any prior historical causation, then I think Yoder is correct. He is also correct to say, on the other side, that Jesus’ life is in “excess” of the historical causes that preceded him.

This also raises some questions about Yoder’s overall project: If history is as foundationally consistent as this, if Yoder really is as opposed to totalizing schemes of history as Kerr says, then doesn’t that mean there are limits even to Yoder’s “anti-Constantinianism”? (Kerr is quite aware of this question.)

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, May 2, 2009 at 8:53 am

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Theology - Christology: “Independence” of Jesus

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