Matthew Henry John Bartlett

Peter Lineman on trends in Kiwi churches
Chris Marshall on the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition

In The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder gives six reasons why Jesus is not the norm for mainstream Christian ethics today (well, in 1972, and probably particularly in America):

1. Jesus’ is an interim ethic because he though the end was nigh. So he paid no attention to societal structures or permanent institutions, which are passing away soon. “The rejection of violence, of self-defense, and of accumulating wealth for the sake of security, and the footlooseness of the prophet of the kingdom are not permanent and generalizable attitudes towards social values.” The world hasn’t ended, so Jesus is no help for long-term societal questions.
2. Jesus was a rustic who used simple metaphors for simple people. He saw all ethical problems as issues between individuals, which makes sense in a village but has nothing to say to “the problems of complex organization, of institutions and offices, cliques and power and crowds.”
3. Jesus and the early Church were a tiny minority in a world over which they had no control. They had no conception of wider social responsibility except for “being a faithful witnessing minority”. Now, though, Christianity has progressed, the West has Christian roots, and Christians have to handle “responsibilities that were inconceivable in Jesus’ situation.”
4. Jesus’ message was timeless, ahistorical. He dealt with spiritual not social matters; proclaimed a new self-understanding, not social change; atonement, not obedience. St Paul especially clarifies the importance of the inwardness of faith as over against the ‘social gospel’ misunderstanding.
5. [I don’t understand this one so will quote it in full:] “… Jesus was a radical monotheist. He pointed people away from the local and finite values to which they had been giving their attention and proclaimed the sovereignty of the only One worthy of being worhshiped. The impact of this radical discontinuity between God and humanity, between the world of God and human values, is to relativize all human values. The will of God cannot be identified with any one ethical answer, or any given human value, since these are all finite. But the practical import of that relativizing, for the substance of ethics, is that these values have become autonomous. All that stands above them now it the infinite.
6. Jesus came to give his life for the sins of humankind, to peform the atonement, which restores sinners to fellowship with God. “For Roman Catholics this act of justification may be found to be in correlation with the sacraments, and for Protestants with one’s self-understanding, in response to the proclaimed Word; but never should it be correlated with ethics. Just as guilt is not a matter of having committed particular sinful acts, so justification is not a matter of proper behaviour. How the death of Jesus works our justification is a divine miracle and mystery; how he died, or the kind of life which led to the kind of death he died, is therefore ethically immaterial.”

#1 is my temptation. #6 is the temptation of the churches I grew up in. It produced in my imagination a Jesus who was more of a term in a theological equation than a person.

This is one book I want to study rather than just read.