The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster by John Howard YoderMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
3 1/2 stars. The book said a great deal that makes excellent sense, and provided a lot of great insights to deepen the slightly Anabaptist leanings of my my own beliefs. However, detracting points were that he:
1) Spent entirely too much time in dialog with scholarly Biblical critics, thus wasting valuable opportunities to provide practical insights that the Christian could be living out today, and why. I suppose this is understandable, given that it was a quasi-scholarly book.
2) Went into a discursus concerning the writings of Paul that totally missed the boat in several areas too numerous to discuss here. In an effort to demonstrate that Paul and Jesus were saying the same things about practical, ethical discipleship, he missed the obvious progression of Paul's arguments in favor of reinterpreting them in ways that didn't make sense, and that do violence to canonical hermeneutics. In short, to make Paul say the "right" things (which he needn't have bothered to do; he was already doing that, if understood in proper context), he ended up attempting to make him say wrong things in other areas.
However, his work with the teachings of Jesus, and their validity as a disciple's model for concrete livability for today, were quite good in many areas. I didn't agree with all of it, but FAR more than his points concerning Paul's teachings. It was worth the read, but was also a hard and slow read, because of the dense material analyzing the work of other scholars, and the fact that I spent so much time arguing with it in my own notes.
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