On the Knowledge of God: John Howard Yoder, Peter Ochs, and the Limits of Communal Dialogue
Myles Werntz
Palm Beach Atlantic University
Since his death in 1997, the work of John Howard Yoder has been welcomed by a new generation seeking to critically appraise his insights and approach. While much of the appropriation of Yoder’s work has been intra-Christian, one of the more invigorating engagements with Yoder’s work has come from outside the Christian faith in the work of Peter Ochs. Ochs’ engagements with Yoder’s work has spanned across three books and numerous essays, responding in part to Yoder’s engagements with the nonviolent lineages within Judaism. In his posthumously published The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, Yoder sought to repair the breach between Christians and Jews by pointing to a common lineage of nonviolence, among other aspects. As Christians and Jews read their common histories and texts, Yoder argued, we can see a common heritage of nonviolent dispossession which is shared by both Jews and Christians.
While Ochs is largely appreciative of the reparative efforts of Yoder’s work, Ochs argues that they are not without their difficulties. Ochs names their primary disagreement as one of textual reasoning, that in attempting to repair the divide between Christians and Jews, Yoder has been selective in his reading of Judaism, assuming as normative some forms of Judaism over others in constructing a conversation between Jews and Christians. In this essay, I will be arguing that Ochs is correct in naming this central point of disagreement; for Ochs, describing Judaism is a complicated affair and cannot be short-circuited by appeals to certain ethical mandates. But, as I will argue, the differences present between Ochs and Yoder at the level of hermeneutics and textual reasoning open up deeper divides between them, namely how their respective communities speak of God. Differences in textual reasoning are rooted, I will argue, in deep differences as to how their respective communities are able to speak of God, difference swhich in turn generate serious questions for whether or not communities in Yoder and Ochs’ respective traditions can maintain an ongoing conversation at all.
My essay will proceed in three parts. First, I will lay out Ochs’ critiques of Yoder’s approach, showing how the hermeneutical error which Ochs identifies is not simply Yoder’s but is rather characteristic of the community of readers which Yoder attempts to put into conversation with Judaism. Secondly, I will argue that the differences of communities participating in their hermeneutical strategies producesdifferent modes of speaking of God, modes of speaking which are inseparable from the constitution of these communities. This will lead to my conclusion, where I will propose that because the divergent hermeneutics of Yoder and Ochs are rooted in envisioned community of readers, the possibility of dialogue between these two groups of readers, though not impossible, is decidedly limited.
Engaging Yoder’s Work: Peter Ochs’ Appreciation and Critique
Ochs’ engagements with Yoder began in full force with the posthumously published The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, edited by Ochs and Michael G. Cartwright.1 In this work, Ochs offered a running commentary to each of Yoder’s chapters. The early chapters of the work are met with great appreciation by Ochs, who praises Yoder’s desire to engage Judaism vis-a-vis their common Scriptures.2 This appreciation for a renewed dialogue between Jews and Christians is not, however, without its difficulties. As Ochs notes in the commentary to Yoder’s first chapter, while remaining open to dialogue about what Christians and Jews share in common, it appears that Yoder’s “openness to new forms of Jewish-Christian sharing is closed down when Yoder claims already to know in advance what that sharing should be.”3
This commitment to dialogue as having an ongoing and open character comes to the forefront as Ochs engages with Yoder’s re-narration of the Jewish-Christian divide. A central component of Yoder’s strategy to draw these two faiths together is the offering of a different account of what is central to both Judaism and Christianity, namely ethical life.4 It was a lifelong concern for Yoder that Christianity reject a split between its doctrines and its practices and that a unity of doctrine and practice be borne out in terms of the gathered community. As Yoder reads the life of Jesus, then, Jesus “the Jewish pacifist” is a fulcrum figure who both recapitulates the true nature of Jewish life and establishes what it means for Judaism and Christianity to be connected; if the Jewish-pacifist Jesus is the lynchpin between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, then a dialogue between Judaism and Christianity must conclude that 1) Jesus’ Jewish character, one of peace and dispossession, must define Christianity as a whole, and 2) Jesus’ Judaism defines authentic Judaism as well.5
Again, Ochs is appreciative for Yoder’s recovery of nonviolence as an authentic Jewish position, as well as his efforts to move beyond stereotypes of Judaism as simply a religion of holy war.6 But in naming nonviolence and a willingness to peaceably embrace diaspora rather than landedness as the deepest and most true Judaism, Ochs sees Yoder engaging in a kind of “modern and Greek” reasoning which is dialectical in terms of identity issues rather than engaging in a “Hebrew and Rabbinic” mode, which embraces ambiguity among competing options.7 What Ochs means by this critique becomes more clear in the fourth chapter, where Ochs explains that by attempting to draw an analogy between Judaism and the free church, Yoder has cut off other alternate, embodied forms of Judaism, gaining one Jewish conversation partner by cutting off other equally valid forms of Judaism:
[Yoder introduces] his vision of a profound overlap between the Exilic religion he sees within Rabbinic Judaism and his vision of the free church religion….however, Yoder’s readers could also take his claim as a warrant for delegitimating Mishnaic Judaism: judging its legal teachings and its protective care for the people Israel as mere reactions to the ascendancy of Christianity as first as missionizing religion and then a world-dominating mission… The Jewish sages recognized that Judaism could be characterized, at once, by the religious ideals of centrality and non-centrality, landedness and non-landedness.8
What begins as a dialogue around commonly held Scriptures, then, has in Ochs estimation, become something other than an open-ended dialogue:
Yoder appears to have replaced the ongoing practice of scriptural reading with an effort to generalize the conclusions to which his reading has brought him…If radical reformers and exilic rabbinic thinkers are to share in a community of interpretation that has not previously occurred and of which Yoder’s words may be the harbinger, then we cannot possibly know, before the fact how that community of study will read Scripture and what voice will speak from out of their reading.9
In contrast to Yoder’s vision of dispossessed pacifism as normative for Judaism, Ochs argues that “post-liberal Jews should, indeed, be ‘non-non-pacifists’. But there is a broad continuum of ways to do this, different ways in different situations, and situations in which the God of history has put the Jews are not the same as the situations in which he has placed the radical reformers.”10 Or to put it differently, while Jews and Christians may share the same heritage of Judaism—a heritage which Yoder seeks to restore to Christianity for its moral renewal—the problem remains that there are many kinds of Judaism which cannot be selected in an either/or kind of process. Because Judaism exists as a plurally-narrated faith for Ochs, Yoder’s strategy of selecting one strand of that Judaism to repair the Jewish-Christian schism only creates new schisms within Judaism.
For Ochs, as for Yoder, the validity of a strategy of reading Scripture is intertwined with the ability of that reading strategy to sustain a healthy, faithful body of readers. As Ochs noted in a later series of lectures, the open-ended reading strategy of Scriptural Reasoning, where the outcomes of reading remain unknown, enables a people to enter not “a set of good propositions, but a dynamic life”, a life which goes hand in hand with “the reading and performative re-reading of God’s spoken word into our immediate context of life.”11 This is not entirely dissimilar to how Yoder proposes to read Scripture, but there are certain important differences to which I will attend shortly. But Yoder agrees with Ochs that the Scriptures do not call forth the same kind of nonviolent practice every time from the community of readers; to make this claim, one need only look at the plurality of forms of nonviolence on which Yoder wrote and advocated throughout his career.12
But as Ochs has rightly identified, though agreeing that nonviolence may play a critical role in Jewish identity, he and Yoder disagreed on an appropriate strategy by which to read Scripture, a strategy which would repair the Jewish-Christian rift. For Ochs, only an open-ended strategy without pre-determined ends can create space for true reparation, whereas for Yoder, reparation occurs by naming certain strands within Judaism and Christianity as inauthentic versions of both. Without negating this important difference, I wish to go beyond it to explore what lies behind their divergent reading strategies: assumptions about how a community of readers of Scripture is able to speak about God. As I will argue in the remainder of this essay, it is this difference which calls into question the degree to which constructive conversation between Yoder and Ochs (or more broadly, between Jews and Mennonites) can continue.
Yoder on the Limits of Speech in the Christian Community
As outlined above, the dialogue between Ochs and Yoder founders on what Ochs described as “non-reparative” tendencies within Yoder’s work, tendencies which achieve a reunion between Judaism and Christianity at the expense of certain versions of both Judaism and Christianity.13 In this section, I will describe Yoder’s Scriptural hermeneutic and how this hermeneutic creates both the point of connection between Judaism and Christianity and the “non-reparative” tendencies which Ochs critiques. In sum, I will be arguing that Yoder’s hermeneutic can be summed up as “axiological Christology”. I mean by this that Scripture, for Yoder, is not open-ended, but is understood hermeneutically through the actions and witness of the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, this Christological approach to Scripture creates both the possibilities and problems which Ochs identifies.
For Yoder, the Scriptures are read through the lens of the person of Jesus of Nazareth, but to read the Scriptures in light of the person of Jesus is not to engage in speculative metaphysics about how God works in the world. Rather, for Yoder, it is to look to the ethics and work of the person Jesus as recorded in the Gospels of the New Testament. Repeatedly in his corpus, Yoder is at the minimum ambivalent about the more speculative direction taken by patristic and medieval Christianity, choosing instead to interpret Christianity vis-a-vis the practices of Jesus.14 The payoff for this in terms of how Christians approach the Scriptures of Old and New Testaments, then, is that issues of identity are governed by issues of ethics such that the ethical witness and “politics of Jesus” are central to understanding not only who Jesus is and what God is like, but what conclusions may be drawn from Scripture.
For the sake of space, one example from within Yoder’s 40-plus years of writing will have to suffice for illustration. In his famous essay, “The Hermeneutics of Peoplehood”, Yoder lays out how the community of readers gathers around the Scriptures to discern their present witness. After laying out what kinds of participants there will be in this conversation, Yoder confesses that this is not an open-ended process of drawing all sorts of equal examples, but that Scripture “for the radical Protestants [has] a canon within the canon: namely that recorded experience of practical moral reasoning in genuine human form that bears the name of Jesus.”15 Far from being the property of some radical sectarian group, Yoder takes this to be normative for most Christians, arguing that “in actual lived experience, I suspect that both ordinary Catholic believers and ordinary Jewish believers have actually gone about living a life of shared practical moral reasoning in a way not profoundly different from what I am talking about.”16 This way of reading Scripture—of the ethics of Jesus as the axiological and hermeneutical lens by which one reads the Old and New Testaments—is fully fleshed out in Yoder’s most famous work, The Politics of Jesus. After offering Jesus as the culmination of the Old Testament ethic, the remainder of Politics is devoted to exploring the various practices of the New Testament in light of acts seen first in the life of Jesus.
But central to this form of interpretation for Yoder is that the Scriptures are read in community. For Yoder, the identification of Jesus as the hermeneutical lens of a Christian reading of Scripture is intimately related to the community which is produced by gathering around Jesus. Thus, to take a Christological starting point in the reading of Scripture is to commit oneself to the community of Jesus, which attempts to live out the new social existence described by Jesus’ life and witness. As we have seen here, Ochs is thus correct and incorrect in his critiques of Yoder’s hermeneutics. Ochs is correct in identifying a non-reparative tendency in Yoder’s reading of Scripture in that Yoder does overcome the divide between Jews and Christians at the expense of certain metaphysical and non-pacifist varieties of both Judaism and Christianity, but what Ochs does not explicitly identify is the way in which this is not simply Yoder’s error, but an error which is manifested in the communities which participate in Yoder’s way of reading Scripture.
Because, for Yoder, Christians always approach the Scriptures through an a priori ethical lens of the witness of Jesus, two limits to a Yoderian approach to Scripture are always in play. First, there is not an endless range of reparations which can be made between Christians and Jews in that Christian hermeneutics looks at the Scriptures through the focal lens of Jesus of Nazareth. Because of this, there is a second limit placed on the conversation: there cannot be an endless range of reparations between communities. Only those communities who are identifiable through the ethical lens of Jesus can be rejoined to Christians as separated brethren.
What Ochs identifies as a non-reparative movement in Yoder’s hermeneutics is thus not simply an individual error, but a communal error. Communities committed to the Christological approach sketched out by Yoder speak of God. For Yoder, however, they speak only as their language is mediated to them via the Scriptures, and they read through the axiological lens of Jesus. This necessarily yields reparations with other communities, but not an endless range of reparations, as seen in Yoder’s dismissal of certain strains of Judaism. However, within this hermeneutical limit, there is for Yoder an expansive range of possibilities. One need only look to the range of pacifisms engaged within the pages of Nonviolence: A Brief History or Nevertheless to see that Yoder’s reading of how to embody the ethics of Jesus was not constrained to one mode of enactment.17 This is to say, in other words, that when Yoder’s community speaks of God, it does so via a hermeneutical lens which is restricted by a hermeneutical and ethical a priori which, in turn, opens up in a variety of directions as guided by that a priori. Some of these ways, as Ochs notes, correspond to existing modes of Judaism, but some do not. For Yoder, this does not appear to be a problem insofar as Yoder—and, by extension, Yoder’s community of readers—are not concerned with making statements about God which could encompass any and all eventualities, but rather with naming the world as seen through the lens of the ethics of Jesus of Nazareth.
Thus, the primary problem identified by Ochs is not simply that Yoder is placing limits on the Jewish-Christian dialogue before it begins, but that those communities which take Yoder’s axiological Christology as the hermeneutic by which Scripture is read will also be ill-fitting partners for Ochs’ project of Scriptural Reasoning. If Christians are able to reason about the meaning of the Scriptures from within communities which look to Jesus’ witness and ethic as the key to the Scriptures, then not every direction of conversation will be open to Christians. For Yoder, apart from the identification of God in the acts and ethics of this person Jesus, there is no fulsome identification of God. The Scriptures, in other words, do not appear for Yoder as an open text, but as one which is mediated to Christians via the witness of Jesus; if the Scriptures are the vehicle by which one encounters God, one does not have access to the Scriptures independent of the Jesus whose ethics and witness properly identify the God named by the Scriptures. Having laid out the deeper issue at stake between Ochs and Yoder—how communities speak about God—I will now briefly lay out the issue from Ochs’ end. Following this, I will then turn to ascertain what possibilities of conversation might exist between the two communities, as they stand, given the different assumptions of how communities speak of God.
Ochs on Communal Speech, and its Similarity to Yoder
For Ochs, speaking of God does not conform to certain ethical axioms, but emerges as a result of reasoning together around certain texts within plural communities seeking to repair their communal lives. For Ochs, like Yoder, the reading of texts is inseparable from the communities with which we engage in that we come to the text as a part of a reading tradition and community. But for Ochs, the same texts can yield any number of moral commitments or metaphysical claims, with scriptural reasoning leading to new formulations of these as various readers and communities of readers engage the texts together. As he says, “reading Scripture is abductive because all knowledge in this created world is abductive, and that includes our knowledge of God.”18 The payoff is that Judaism may or may not be pacifist, but this claim cannot be made beforehand and must be made as clarity emerges in discursive conversation with the text.
For Ochs, the community is able to speak in plurality, because the meaning of the texts is co-extensive with the identity of the community; the texts, when read over time, produce different communities in keeping with the knowledge of God as abductive. This abductive approach to reading is not due, however, to a lack of a priori ethical hermeneutics, which Ochs names as “caring for those who suffer by engaging in reparative non-binary behavior” such as Scriptural Reasoning. Ochs’ hermeneutical and ethical a priori, in contrast to Yoder’s, is not from within the text itself, but it is an assumption based on the kinds of behaviors which are known “by their fruits” to produce reparation.19 As such, the community cannot know before reading what might be called forth from the text for the task of reparation.
What should be clear at this point is that the difference is not that Yoder has an a priori and Ochs does not, but rather that both Yoder and Ochs have ethical a prioris in play in their reading of Scripture, and that where these come into play makes a tremendous difference. For Ochs, the community of readers has a necessarily unfinished word, which corresponds to understanding the text, as well as the possibilities for how a reconciliation of that community might take place, as ungoverned by a limit to what the text might mean. As such, Ochs’ hermeneutical-ethical a priori also turns out to be an ontological-ethical one, in that the hermeneutics which are required to rightly approach texts are those which characterize a healthy body of readers: patience, attention to suffering, and rejection of binary and exclusionary readings. This is in contrast to the community of Yoder, whose words about the texts are also unfinished but only as a matter of refinement and not as a matter of continual unfolding. Because, for Yoder, God can be identified through the actions of the person of Jesus, the ontology of the reading community is not one which unfolds, but one which conforms to an absolute measure. Wow that conformity plays out over time, however, will differ in some limited ways.
These differences, in turn, extend beyond the nature of the community envisioned by Yoder and Ochs to the ends for which Scripture is read as well. For Ochs, a proper reading strategy must embody and bring forth a kind of reparation of suffering; one cannot, in other words, read Scripture in a way which produces more suffering if Scripture is that vehicle by which suffering is overcome. For Yoder, however, because
Scripture is rendered intelligible not through desired outcomes but through the ethic of Jesus, then a right reading of Scripture is determined not by the community’s desire for an outcome—i.e. a reparation of suffering—but by how one’s reading of Scripture coheres to the “politics of Jesus”. These differences thus reveal two very different reading communities. One of Ochs’ aims is to repair the breaches among the Abrahamic faiths, meaning that the community which reads in Ochs’ proposal must be one which seeks a common aim (reparation), given that they do not share the same starting presupposition about what Scripture is or how it may be read hermeneutically (i.e. Christocentrically). To propose an ethical a priori as intrinsic to a right reading of Scripture, by Ochs’ argument, is to render impossible the task of reparative reading in that one has excluded certain reading companions beforehand. This is in contrast to Yoder’s envisioned community, who takes for granted that a certain kind of non-negotiable Christocentricism lest the community cease to be identifiably Christian.
Thus, Ochs’ community speaks of God in a manner quite different from Yoder’s, but yet similar. The primary difference between Ochs’ and Yoder’s communities is, as I have argued, the role of the ethical a priori; by relating the ethical value to the outcome of the community’s speech, Ochs’ community is able to invite a plurality of voices into speaking about God without excluding a conversation partner beforehand; the Abrahamic traditions, in recognizing a common Scripture and a common ethical a priori to their gathering, seek the God who will be rather than one who has been named prior to the conversation.
Conclusion
The claim that the difference between Yoder and Ochs rests at the level of textual reasoning is accurate, but is indicative of both deeper divisions on the issue of what a priori considerations are appropriate to textual readings—as both Ochs and Yoder have a priori considerations governing their textual readings—and how those a priori considerations affect the ways in which communities can speak of God. For Ochs, because the community’s speech is abductive and ongoing, the text seeks to speak of a reparative God in the world. So the community is to read in a reparative mode for the sake of the world, looking for that which it cannot name prior to engaging the text. For Yoder, the person of Jesus limits the words which can be said by the community about God, though these words are in the process of constant axiological refinement. The question which I will pose in conclusion, then, is whether the communities of Yoder and Ochs will ultimately be able to continue in their conversation.
As I have been arguing, the differences between Yoder and Ochs are ultimately differences which exist between reading communities. The issue here is not that one has an ethical a priori which governs his reading of the Scriptural texts, preventing further conversation. As I have shown, both Yoder and Ochs read their common Scriptures via a hermeneutical a priori. Similarly, the issue between these two readers is not that one wishes to appeal to metaphysical claims beyond the Scriptures; as I have argued, both Yoder and Ochs are committed to reading strategies which both assume certain metaphysical claims about the nature of Scripture and how communities engage those Scriptures. What divides the two is, rather, that they represent two different communities whose speech about God is limited in different ways and which expands in different ways. Yoder’s community, by emphasizing the knowledge of God via the person and witness of Jesus, is limited in its identification of God but expansive in seeking out conversation partners whose practices cohere to their own. In contrast, by emphasizing the abductive knowledge of God, Ochs’ community engages a broader range of issues and approaches than Yoder’s, but it lacks the immediate ethical specificity in its conversations that Yoder’s community has.
At a larger level, do the differences between these communities jeopardize the partnership between the communities by Ochs and Yoder respectively? On the one hand, the abductive approach of Ochs and the Christological a priori of Yoder appear to be incommensurable. As Ochs argues in an article on Christian naming of God, though Christians and Jews share the same narrative, Jews and Christians cannot come to agreement when Jesus is seen to reorient the narrative of the Old Testament in ways which do not have warrant within Judaism.20 This is not simply a matter of Yoder’s community issuing a conversation-stopper; Ochs’ abductive approach likewise would stop conversation with any group who proposed to think of God with a priori considerations similar to Yoder’s. On the other hand, there remains a commensurability and an openness between the communities of Yoder and Ochs on the level of ethics. As I have argued, Yoder’s description of the identity of God rests largely upon ethical axioms seen in the person of Jesus. Herein lies the irony of Ochs’ critique of Yoder in that the ethical axiomatic approach to Yoder’s reading of the Jewish-Christian schism, which Ochs criticizes, remains the only bridge that could possibly bring the communities of these two readers of Scripture together given that their communities’ identifications of the nature of Scripture, how one names God, and the ends toward which a community reads are not commensurable.
In sum, the future of conversation between these two communities is not bleak, but the communities exercising the reading approaches described by Yoder and Ochs respectively must understand that their conversations may be tangential. The communities following Yoder will need to (and have) found partners committed to the ethics of Jesus, albeit partners who may not themselves confess Jesus but who find his ethics amenable. Likewise, the communities following Ochs will need to (and have) found partners committed to an abductive identification of God, though this means the potential loss of partners who, like Yoder, hold to an a priori without which they are unable to approach the Scriptures. This is not a pessimistic assessment, but rather an acknowledgment that every conversation is not just a conversation between two people, but between two communities whose engagements continue to push one another to faithfully inhabit their common Scriptures.
Notes
1. John Howard Yoder, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, eds. Michael G. Cartwright and Peter Ochs (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003)↩
2. Ibid., 38-39.↩
3. Ibid., 68. This initial concern for Ochs derived in great part from Ochs’ early work in the pragmatism of C.S. Peirce, in whom Ochs detected a new way to engage not only religious texts, but the religious bodies gathered around those texts. For the most full exposition of this, see Ochs, Pierce, Pragmatism, and the Logic of Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).↩
4. Ibid., 69.↩
5. Ibid., 70-75. See in particular 72: “It is not enough, as we seek to understand the peace commitments of Jesus as Jewish, only to lift from the Gospel accounts those elements of Jewish heritage which throw direct light on moral decision-making. We shall yet see more if we proceed, unrolling the history from the perspective of the later non-pacifist (Gentile and Constantinian) Christianity, since it was in the process of becoming non-Jewish that Christianity also became non-pacifist.”↩
6. Ibid., 89-90.↩
7. Ibid., 92.↩
8. Ibid., 120, italics original.↩
9. Ibid., 159, italics original.↩
10. Ibid., 180.↩
11. Peter Ochs, The Free Church and Israel’s Covenant: The 2009 J.J. Thiessen Lectures (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Canadian Mennonite University Press, 2010), 22-23.↩
12. Yoder’s writings on nonviolence exhibit a wide range of appreciation for tactics, styles, and stances. The most prominent example is his 1973 Nevertheless: Varieties of Religious Pacifism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1992), though Yoder himself is usually read here as advocating “The Pacifism of the Messianic Community” option. Interestingly, however, this option (133-138) self-consciously draws insights from several other options explored within the book. Throughout his career, Yoder will advocate for a variety of nonviolent options, seeing the need to move beyond simply the “draft resistance” of an earlier generation. For this comment, see The Christian Witness to the State (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2002), 53: “Technical change has made conscientious objection irrelevant only in the sense that it has made military service irrelevant. It remains essential, though not sufficient, as a testimony to the abiding priority of simple personal obedience over calculations of obedience.”↩
13. Ochs treats both reparative and non-reparative tendencies in Yoder’s work in Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2011), 127-153.↩
14. See A Preface to Theology, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Alex Sider (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2002), 202: “So, although we can defend this definition as not strange of foreign to the substance of the Bible (the definition of Jesus vis-à-vis the creeds), and in fact as defending a biblical concern in nonbiblical language, it is clear that in form we are moving farther and farther away from the Gospel story The form of the confession is still used, but is has been so padded out with statements about the essence of Christ that one recognizes no narrative to it anymore.”↩
15. Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 37.↩
16. Ibid., 39.↩
17. Nonviolence: A Brief History, ed. Paul Martens, Matthew Porter, and Myles Werntz (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010); Nevertheless: The Varieties and Shortcomings of Religious Pacifism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1992).↩
18. Ochs, “Philosophical Warrants for Scriptural Reasoning”, Modern Theology 22 (2006), 465-482 (472).↩
19. Ochs, “Reparative Reasoning: From Pierce’s Pragmatism to Augustine’s Scriptural Semiotic,” Modern Theology 25 (2009), 187-215 (187). See also Ochs, “Scriptural Logic: Diagrams for a Postcritical Metaphysics,” Modern Theology 11 (January 1995), 65-92.↩
20. Ochs, “God,” Christianity in Jewish Terms, eds. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Signer (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 59-69.↩