Yoder and Apocalypticism: toward a “non-analogical” mode of theological reflection?

A growing number of books and articles have highlighted the centrality of “apocalypticism” in the theology of John Howard Yoder.  That Yoder frequently drew on apocalyptic imagery should not come as a surprise to any one with even a cursory knowledge of Yoder’s most famous work The Politics of Jesus. Indeed, Politics devotes a number of chapters to explicating the theological and sociopolitical import of the New Testament’s apocalyptic language of the “principalities and powers” and the “lordship of Christ.” Yet, only recently, it seems to me, has apocalyptic as such been identified as among the driving categories of Yoder’s entire theology.

In a recent discussion in Political Theology Daniel Barber and Nathan Kerr make the provocative suggestion that the work of John Howard Yoder provides an “exemplary test case” for a “non-analogical” mode of theological ontology.  Barber wonders whether Yoder has something of an ally in Gilles Deleuze insofar as both, according to Barber, attempt to think politics “along the lines of immanence.”  Contrary to Barber, Kerr, I think rightly, asserts that Yoder’s so-called “non-analogical” mode of thinking is not reducible to an ontology of pure immanence akin to Deleuze, but rather offers us an altogether different way of conceptualizing the operation of God’s transcendence.  In Kerr’s view, it is precisely Yoder’s apocalypticism that helps us overcome the divide between analogical accounts of transcendence and univocal accounts of pure immanence. In this perspective, Yoder’s non-analogical mode of theological reflection is seen as providing the necessary resources to resist “the ontological machinations of the analogia entis.”

Despite the fact that Yoder himself never entered into debates about the doctrine of the analogia entis, I find Kerr’s suggestion about the function of apocalypticism in Yoder compelling on this point. For, when seen in this perspective, Yoder’s apocalypticism and perhaps even apocalypticism more generally refers to much more than merely a retrieval and generous use of certain kinds of obscure biblical imagery—though it most certainly includes this. Indeed, it takes on something of a formal, or foundational, character. Or, perhaps, more to the point, apocalyptic comes to name a sort of anti-formalism—particularly, a rejection of the metaphysical formalism of the doctrine of the analogia entis.

Such an interpretation of Yoder should not strike one as entirely surprising considering the influence of Karl Barth on the theology of Yoder. I wonder whether what Barber and Kerr call Yoder’s “non-analogical” mode of theological reflection is similar to Barth’s rejection of the analogia entis. I wonder whether what Kerr means by apocalypticism in this context is perhaps akin to something along the lines of Barth’s analogia fidei or Eberhard Jüngel’s “analogy of advent.”  In other words, it is not analogy that Yoder is dispensing with tout court—but analogy as a tool for an ontological mediation between transcendence and immanence as such, that is, analogy as conceived of autonomously from the act of God’s apocalypse in Jesus Christ.

Whether or not one finds Barber and Kerr’s admittedly rather original appropriation of Yoder’s theology convincing in all of its details, there is certainly wide agreement that Yoder, following Barth, was deeply committed to seeking ways to avoid what they perceived to be the pitfalls of metaphysical systems that decide in advance the terms and mechanisms of ontological relation and mediation between God and creation. More precisely, Barth and Yoder were certainly both in the business of calling into question any and every philosophical or theological maneuver—whether it be under the dogmatic heading of “orders of creation” or “natural theology”—that eschews the definitive authority and normativity of God’s definitive self-revelation in Jesus Christ. When viewed in this perhaps more familiar context, I think the thrust of Kerr’s proposal—that apocalypticism generally, and particularly Yoderian apocalypticism, opens up the possibility of reconceiving the relationship between transcendence and immanence that in effect resists both the doctrine of the analogia entis as well as univocal accounts of pure immanence—becomes much less controversial.

Moreover, it should be noted that such a connection between apocalypticism and reconceiving the relationship between transcendence and immanence is not merely a speculative appropriation of Yoder for ends foreign to Yoder’s thought pattern. For instance, in the 1994 epilogue of chapter eight of The Politics of Jesus, “Christ and Powers,” Yoder explicitly states what I take Kerr to be maintaining: “It would not be too much to claim that the Pauline cosmology of the powers represents an alternative to the dominant (‘Thomist’) vision of ‘natural law’ as a more biblical way systematically to relate Christ and creation.”  Apocalypticism, for Yoder, then, provides an alternative framework for developing what has traditionally been called a “doctrine of creation.”  Yoder understands apocalypticism as a way of avoiding both Catholic Thomistic accounts of natural law and Protestant accounts of the “orders of creation.” For, in Yoder’s view, underlying both the traditional Catholic and Protestant approaches is the presumption that something called “creation” can be viewed on its own, that is, abstracted from redemption.