A RESPONSE TO WAYNE MEEKS' THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY: THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES

John Howard Yoder, unpublished, 1995. Presented at Duke Divinity School, Durham NC, April 1995 in a colloquium on the use of the New Testament in ethics.

I welcome the author's choice of style and basic idiom. He says he understands moral discourse to be essentially communitarian (he cites MacIntyre and Hauerwas, omitting his neighbor Lindbeck). Therefore the genre he calls "ethnography" is the proper one. Even people who say that what they are doing is "The History of Christian Thought," and who attend less to the social settings than does Meeks, will be best understood if the reader puts the treatment in an ethnographic frame of reference. It goes without saying that Meeks' previous work amply prepared him for this synthesizing task. I shall not call the general framework into doubt, nor am I qualified to challenge him on any of the text-related details, or on the dialogue with the expert literature whether ancient or secondary. That limits me mostly to asking nontechnical, middle-range questions. I) Primarily I need to ask whether any of the gaps in Meeks' ethnographic portrayal might be important. Gaps there must be, even in an encyclopedia; even more in a work of synthesis under 220 pages. My question is whether the points of concentration which the author has chosen to provide the thread for his account have left aside any elements which could have made the ethnography still more adequate. Some of the items I shall identify here are common currency, and I shall allude to them minimally; others are matters to which I have had occasion to be especially sensitive in my own related work, which I suspect may have to do with why I was named to this panel. I/1) Ever since the medieval radicals like Joachim of Fiore and the "spiritual" Franciscans, the moral life of the early Christians was appealed to as a standard from which it was held that later Christendom had fallen short or fallen away. That appeal was radicalized by the Waldensians, the Czech Brethren, and then by the entire protestant movement. Sola Scriptura became the slogan for the claim that there exists an univocal criterion, above the ambivalence of the historically mutable, from which all of doctrine, but also the main lines of moral doctrine can be drawn. Ever since that foundational misfocusing of the meaning of a canonical appeal, hardened in scholastic protestantism and still with us in fundamentalism, historically informed studies of the thought of the ancient canonical (and early post-canonical) authors have had to preface their working with the historians' tools by offering a defensive response to the pressures of scholastic biblicism, and some affirmative argument in order to break free of that constraint without leaving the discipline. Various forms of words have been drawn on to make room to be serious about the text yet without being nave or laying oneself open to accusations of methodological

obsolescence. One can differentiate between "meaning then" and "meaning now," or one can identify an inner canon, or one can delegate or relegate concern for modern moral applications to some other discipline. Meeks is never unaware of this agenda, as is shown by occasional allusions to schools and styles, yet he speaks directly to these matters only in seven brief theses at the very end of the book. He alludes sensitively, along the way, to tense modern issues regarding Judaism, feminism, and other empowerment agendas, as they surface within the ethnographic review, but he offers neither a general recipe for how to manage major tensions between the "meant" and the "means," nor a handful of representative modern examples of good moral readings of the apostolic witness. The doing of modern ethics in the light of the early Christian heritage, says Meeks, should be characterized by the knowledge that God tends to surprise us. This awareness issues in the last sentence of the book's saying that Christian - and human - morality is something to be "invented." Invention, melding novelty with rootedness, is thus what we are supposed to do. "Inventing Christian Morality" was once announced as the title of the entire book. That would have been inaccurate. Most of the account in the book is not about novelty. Ethnography hardly can be can be that. Even within the ethnographic account, Meeks does not focus upon paradigm changes or invention, so much as he does on the way every new development he describes was at home in its setting. 2) Under each of the major headings Meeks walks through the several strands of early Christian literature. Sometimes, as chapter 8 (The Body) or Chap 11 (The Moral Story) the chapter is broken down more or less chronologically and by authors. Other times the chapter subheads are topical, but the spread of literature used is the same. Meeks regularly includes in addition to the NT a few writings from the second century, with special attention to the Gnostic writings of Thomas and Valentinus. This widening of the picture is illuminating. It becomes clear how those authors differ from the ones who made it into the canon. Yet one wonders why these texts on the gnostic "left" are not balanced by similar coverage of the judaizing "right," especially in view of the growing prominence of Qum Ran studies in this generation, and the increasing attention given to New Testament sources by contemporary scholars in Judaism. 3) Meeks describes the early Christian setting as "sectarian," in the sociological sense of the term. The faith community could not but be a minority, with identifiable membership boundaries, of which persons became members by virtue of a conscious decision (which he routinely calls "conversion"), in response to a word from beyond. The movement as a whole was however not "sectarian," in the older [i.e. early modern], narrower sense of reading others out of the movement or denying salvation to those who believed differently. Some took that step later, but Meeks describes it, I believe correctly, as the exception. As far as the ethnography goes, this is fine. Yet that is not quite enough to guide the modern use of his insights. We work, in an ecumenical setting where the fusing of the two meanings in a pejorative mood continues to be part of the dialogue, so that the early Christians would be accused of denying that their message was for everyone.(1) This ambivalence makes me aware that in Meeks' book there is no ethnographic description of "evangelism" or "adhesion" or

"proselytism" or even of "conversion." i.e. of the way in which, and the grounds on which, outsiders would come to adhere to these communities. Early writers, as he shows, with both Christian and pagan exemplars, describe what he calls "conversion" - moral, philosophical, religious - at some length, in terms (usually exaggerated) of how one is now a better person, but the description is retrospective and apologetic, not ethnographic. It does not defend them against the reproach of a J. Gustafson (pertinent in view of Meeks' citing Hauerwas) that the "sectarian" writes off the world as addressee, having no concern to make sense to her neighbors. It is obvious that this reproach is unfounded. Meeks could easily have added additional testimonies to how Christians in his period uninhibitedly addressed their pagan compatriots(2) (as well as nonmessianic fellow-Jews) with words of reproach and invitation. One need not await the second-century authors whom we call "apologetes" to see this happening. The Paul of Acts does it in Lystra (14) and in Athens (17), addressing those Gentile audiences in their own terms, yet swallowing up their hellenistic cosmology in his Hebraic one.(3) This omission by Meeks is not a flaw but a mere lapsus; to fill it in would have strengthened his basic case. When we speak of "conversion" we are usually thinking about how one person changes. To do justice to the early Christians, one would need to show how that change is enabled by the already present ethos of the group one joins, and validated by its view of its place in the world under God. 4) I trust that the same is true(4) for some other gaps in the coverage, which it is perhaps more my business to be careful about, to which I now proceed. Here too I sense rather inattention on Meeks' part, perhaps driven by concern to avoid excessive debate, rather than rejection. The "Household tables" of the Pauline corpus are mentioned only once by Meeks, (p.78) as representing a genre shared with the Stoics, but the far-reaching rejection of this material by our contemporaries, from the perspective of the modern freedom agenda, is not addressed, nor is the first-century thought pattern described. In fact, modern ideological challenges are generally not given much attention by Meeks, presumably on purpose. I can sympathise with the reasons the author of this kind of synthetic and descriptive account can have for not concentrating on the strongest challenges to the usability of the story he is so carefully reconstructing. Yet I would suggest that if he took more deeply the references I have already cited to a God who surprises us(5), he might give the old texts a better chance to say something we have not already written off. E. Schssler-Fiorenza(6) has shown more authoritatively than I could(7) how in the earliest setting these fragments of traditional moral guidance were not patriarchal. They were at home within Jesus' emancipatory impact, even though they very soon came to be used in the opposite direction. 5) The phrase I just used points me to another lacuna, namely the strangely apolitical picture Meeks gives us of Jesus. His characterization of the themes of Mark makes much of the disciples' dullness of mind but little of the contested public earthly ministry. When Meeks moves from Mark to Matthew, he discusses the moral teachings, which Matthew adds to Mark, where Jesus figures as a rabbi, but not the annunciation, birth, baptism, or temptation narratives where his historical mission is articulated.(8) The treatment of the passion narrative seems more concerned for whether Jesus' mendicant itinerancy was a model for later Christian apostles than

it is for the socio-political realism which led the leader of a popular movement to be executed on the high holy weekend by a coalition of Roman and Jewish authorities, and to be given given the title "king" by his executioners and kurios and christos by his followers. I quite understand Meeks' wanting to stay out of the thicket of "historical Jesus" studies.(9) I support his ethnographic wisdom in putting the earliest apostolic writings, i.e. those of Paul, first in his account (so that we encounter love of enemies in Romans 12 before we meet it in Matt. 5). I support his attending even to the deutero-pauline material before the Gospels. The Gospel as genre, and the narrative of Jesus' public ministry (including his passion) as substance, properly belong at the end not the beginning of the writing of the canonical literature. The first documentable source of the countercultural life style of the disciples' community was not Matt. 5 as Tolstoy and Niebuhr thought. Nonetheless: the events recorded in the Gospels, and the tradition units which they bring together, are neither much younger nor much less definitional than the texts written down first. In the case of Jesus, as might not need to be the case for many other instances of the genre "narrative," his being historical is not only a genre label but a truth claim.(10) The fact that the Gospel texts have undergone more phases of authorship than Paul's first letters should not make us less but rather more concerned for a thick description of what kind of public ministry it was that got Jesus killed. It might have mattered less for the rural cynic Jesus of John Dominic Crossan, or for the gnostic Jesus of Valentinus or the Thomas Gospel; but certainly it ought to matter more for us if, as Meeks rightly emphasizes, the substance of the Christian moral message is recounted by the early communities as a lived common story which claims to be in some sense like his. Meeks does report some of the ways in which early Christians saw themselves as called to share the suffering of Christ, whether it be the cosmic condescendence of Phil 2 (98, 206) or the model whom abused slaves emulate in I Pe. 2:20f (121). Yet he invests no sociological diligence in describing the event of the Cross which is so paradigmatically central. 6) Meeks' pattern of ranging broadly across the vast field of ancient literature for parallel traits does not tend to bring to the fore the more unprecedented strands of the story.(11) One ramaining lacuna, which for my present purposes it is worth mentioning here, is the network of metaphors spread through the Pauline and deuteropauline writings, in which the lostness and the salvation of the cosmos are portrayed in terms of "principalities and powers;" - created, rebellious, tamed, destined for restoration. I allude to this clump of images not as any kind of key in itself, although sometimes it seems almost to be that for the apostolic writers,(12) but only as one specimen for a kind of resource of which there might be more, namely a distinct set of concepts and a particular logic, whose importance in the apostles' thought world does not show up when the scanner one uses is set crossculturally. Paul's thought about the powers(13) ought to be especially pertinent in the light of Meeks' ethnographic mode, since the way they ask the reader to watch the world is much like that of the anthropologist. They summon the reader to look for patterns which are more than the sum of their parts, and for ways in which the faith community interlocks culturally with its environs.

7) The seven theses at the end of the book (213ff), concerning the modern use of the biblical message, are wise and helpful, but they do not digest all that went before. A defined community has borders. Before the Constantinian shift (which came long after Meeks' account ends around 200CE), those borders were marked in terms of defined ethical commitments(14). One who joins the community commits himself to abstaining from specified behaviors (15). Meeks reports more than once the lists of vices: "No one who does ..... can enter the kingdom"(esp. p 68), and the practice of the bann which "delivers the flesh to Satan so that the soul may be saved.(I Cor 5:5)." Shunning applied in particular to members who had failed to keep their covenant (5:11 cf Mt 18:17), as it did not to nonmembers who did the same things. By leaping p. 213 from his descriptive task in the first centuries to projecting very briefly a normative stance for today, Meeks left behind without saying so the notion of functional boundaries. We know what it means to be community, if it means being together, but not what it means to make boundaries function. Come Christians in our century have been able to speak of the possibility of status confessionis, where some transcendent issue laid on them by the world forces the choice between fidelity and apostasy into view(15), but we have seen it happen only in the face of apocalypse.(16) A discussion of where that loss of the border, which in turn is the prerequisite for the credibility of the community, first arises, would go beyond Meeks' study. Yet if Meeks' "ethnography" is to help us as it should be able to, it ought to yield at least in a rudimentary way the criteria whereby the impending loss of those borders could be discerned before it happens, or denounced when it has happened. Certainly the communities whose life Meeks maps thought they both should and could do that. II. Much more briefly, I note a question which by the nature of the case cannot be pursued in any depth. Why should we care this much about the early Christian communities, to make us study them this carefully? The many different visions of reform which used the appeal to origins for leverage to illuminate and critique the present, be it Francis of Assisi or Luther, the protestant scholastics, Alexander Campbell or Harnack, Filson or Wright, stated each in their own ways why the first century texts, which they studied with the tools of their time, should be authoritative. We have good reasons, which all of the authors in this colloquy agree about, for not making an appeal in any of those too-simple ways. Yet there must be good reasons for studying not only the writings but also the communities which produced them and were produced by them. There are good reasons for our description to be honest with the diversity in the early communities, and in our sources, more than the older biblicisms were, and not to hide the fact that as modern readers we like some themes and some genres better than others. There may be reasons, although by the nature of the case this kind of study cannot handle them head-on, for normative judgments to the effect that some strands of the heritage are more helpful or more binding than others, as do those who like Paul better than John or Matthew. There may be reasons for normative judgments to the effect that some strata or strands are more commanding than others. Some may claim authority for the pre-literary historical Jesus, others for the "Q" document or the passion story, as having more authority. For present purposes it is good that in The Origins of Christian Morality Wayne Meeks neither tipped his hand overtly nor let his biases tacitly skew the ethnography.(17) But for other purposes

- such as the doing of moral theological discourse in our day - the notion of canonical normativity cannot be eluded. Precisely because, as The First Urban Christians and Meeks' other works since then partly presuppose and partly prove, there is no Christian faith not borne down through time by a people, and since there are few Christian truths if any whose meaning is separable from the people confessing them, the rationale behind the entire project of retrieving the origins is itself one of the first challenges to which the book's response is not articulated. 1. Cf. Gustafson on "The Sectarian Temptation" in CTSA Proceedings critiquing Lindbeck and Hauerwas. Troeltsch and H R Niebuhr had made the use of the adjective descriptive, ethnographic. Gustafson reverted to the pejorative use. 2. They addressed non-Messianic fellow-Jews no less, though (as indicated above) Meeks attends less to this. 3. In my "But We See Jesus" in The Priestly Kingdom pp. 50ff. I draw attention to five of the more profound NT texts where the author addresses and so to speak engulfs a gentile cosmology within his/her hebraic witness. These two sermons of Paul fit the same description. 4. I.e. I trust that if Meeks had written more it would not have weakened his case. 5. As I demonstrated in chapter 9 pf The Politics of Jesus, the NT writers (not only Paul) transformed thoroughly their stoic or Jewish Vorlage. Cf. n. 7 below. 6. In Memory of Her, Crossroad, 183, pp 251ff. 7. "Revolutionary Subordination" in my The Politics of Jesus Grand Rapids Eerdmans (1772, revised edition 1994) 162-192. Eduard Schweizer made a similar point. 8. Of course the annunciation, the nativity, the baptism and the temptation narratives are all very different in how they got written, and perhaps in how we should read them. Yet they are all political, and all eschatological. 9. In the last half-dozen original works in the field, there appears to be an inverse correlation between the confidence each author has in her/his original reconstruction of "what really happened" and the degree of commonality with the results of the other colleagues doing the same thing. 10. I doubt that the same would be true of Buddha or of any of the figures in Hindu epic, or of Zoroaster. 11. Without naming the authors who a generation ago systematically contrasted Hebrew thought with Greek, Meeks calls them "romantic" and reports that James Barr refuted them. The landmark texts by Floyd Filson and G. Ernest Wright on the Bible against its environment are not mentioned.

12. Cf. Hendrik Berkhof Christ and the Powers and Walter Wink; the "powers" are also weighty in the throught of Jacques Ellul and William Stringfellow. The kind of concrete hermeneutic which Ellul and Stringfellow represent is hard to fit within Meeks' grid. 13. Readers differ about the extent to which the thought of Colossians and Ephesians on this theme differs from the clearly Pauline texts. In either case it is attested as an important set of concepts, and its survival into the second generation should be ethnographically significant. 14. In fact Christian "church order" texts long after Constantine persisted in proscribing various professions (not only that of soldier). Cf. my summary on early Christian disciplines in the collection of "Chapters in the history of religiously rooted nonviolence" elsewhere on this website. 15. I am aware of three majors experiences where status confessionis has been claimed by the people who turned out to be right: - the German "Church Struggle" in the 1930's; - the resistance of the Kirchliche Brudershaften against the nuclear militarization of Germany in the 1950's (cf my Karl Barth and the Problem of War 133ff); - the world Reformed and Lutheran bodies pressuring their sister churches in South Africa on the issue of apartheid. In each case the majority of Christians and of ethicists rejected that discernment until macro events had ratified it. 16. This phrase was used after the fact to describe the churches' confession under/against Hitler. It was claimed but widely rejected in 1958 to describe resistance to the (implicitly nuclear) rearmament of Germany. Still later it was claimed by Lutherans and Calvinists on the world federation level to articulate their condemnation of apartheid. 17. In an address to the Society of Christian ethics, heard in January 1995 between early and late phases of the drafting of this outline, Meeks avowed that he does not like the Johannine message. He would rather be a "catholic" (i.e. post-constantinian) and "pluralist" (i.e. post-enlightenment) Christian. So would I, if tastes and interests were decisive. All the more do I honor his objectivity in doing the ethnographic task despite his avowed tilt away from the texts.