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Comptes rendus / Reviews of books: The Politics of Jesus John Howard Yoder Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972. Pp. 260

Yoder’s preface presents his book as the ’rebound of a Christian pacifist commitment’ and as a protest against the current gap between New Testament exegesis and contemporary social ethics. He brings together scattered recent scholarly trends to challenge the assumption dating to Troeltsch (and still dominant in many circles) according to which Jesus is totally irrelevant to modern ethical problems since he preached either an imminent catastrophic kingdom or an inner individualistic one. A messianic ethic, claims Yoder, is possible and there are good indications that Jesus resisted social oppression. Eleven chapters gather evidence to establish, first, that Jesus was ’the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships’ and, second, that the early church developed ethical insights responsive to the new possibility. Two parts of the argument seem to me particularly interesting: the Gospel of Luke allows us to conjecture that Jesus proclaimed a Year of Jubilee: the famous Haiistafeln, far from being proof of dependence upon ambient moral wisdom, invent ’revolutionary subordination,’ the subordinate per-