Yoder indeed insisted upon the catholicity of the radical reformation. I am realizing his roots in the post-WW II ecumenical flowering that he continued to pursue even as the concern for the catholicity of the church diminished in the face of contextual theologies in the 1970’s and on, represented, for instance, by various liberation theologies. It seems to me that Yoder finds himself genealogically firmly in the Barth/van Balthasar/Nouvelle Theologie trajectory coming out of the mid-20th century. Yoder, however, in some ways stubbornly resists the full implications of this return to the sources of the evangelical, catholic, and orthodox faith in which he participated.

It was Yoder of blessed memory who taught me that I have no business trying to be a “Nazarene” or a “Wesleyan” theologian. Yoder complained how Bender had made the “Mennonites” a Protestant denomination to make a space for them within the economy of the denominational framework of American society. It was my impression that Yoder viewed Bender's work as a fundamentally mistaken accommodation of the radical reformation tradition to American society because it gave up the Radical Reformations claims to catholicity.

What I want to argue, however, is that Yoder separated his notion of catholicity from the Eucharist, and therefore, from office within the church. While he wants to accept the church’s pre-Constantinian refusal of warfare and acceptance of martyrdom, he separates this from the Eucharistic theology in the church fathers. To read Zizioulas and Yoder together might be a very important task in a return to the sources that allows the Spirit to form us into a faithful remnant of the church in these days.

It seems to me that Yoder makes deeper sense, and avoids possible pitfalls, if one places him within the context of a Communio-ecclesiology. Without this grounding in Christ’s presence in consecrated Eucharistic feast of the body and blood of Christ at the gathering of the baptized, Yoder can be misread as, to quote Thom, “a works-oriented "militant" pursuit of social justice in the liberation theology sense of the term.” This, I want to tentatively assert, allows others to read “Yoder in service of their prior agendas rather than reading Yoder as the master who taught a Texan as violent as Hauerwas how to be patient, albeit imperfectly.” There is a modernist streak in Yoder’s thought that we can obscure, a Kantian impulse that comes from his refusal to pursue ontological questions within the framework of the Christian faith.

I think that this is most apparent in his refusal of Christ’s real presence in the consecrated elements of the body and blood of Christ. Yoder seemingly equates the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper to the social process of “breaking bread.” Yoder argues in “Sacrament as Social Process” that the meal that Jesus “blessed and claimed as his memorial was their ordinary partaking together of food for the body” (The Royal Priesthood, p. 365). He expounds this view in the next paragraph. “What the New Testament is talking about in ‘breaking bread’ is believers actually sharing with one another their ordinary day-to-day material substance. . . . bread is daily substance. Bread eaten together is economic sharing. Not merely symbolically but in actual fact it extends to a wider circle the economic solidarity that normally I obtained in the family. When, in most of his post-Resurrection appearances, Jesus takes the role of the family head distributing bread (and fish) around the table, he projects into the post-Passion world the common purse of the wandering discipline band whose members had left their prior economic bases to join his movement” (p. 365). One can therefore extend the Eucharist whenever Christians share food together or with others. Yoder draws a strong, Protestant line between the practices found in the New Testament and those in the early Church.

I think that there are serious, practical repercussions here. For Yoder here, it seems to me, the church makes the Eucharist. Christ becomes present in the world through the active work of Christ’s followers in their communal, social activity of sharing economic goods. The church is made by participation in a type of sociality that is found represented and encouraged by Jesus. While Yoder never explicitly divorces this activity from Jesus, Jesus is not necessary to such practices – the practces empirically are found separate from him. Jesus is not necessary to the coming of the Kingdom; Jesus represents the kingdom for his followers to show up where God already is in the world through economic activity. God’s activity in the world is brought about by a type of human work and economic arrangement. Socio-political, economic activity becomes that by which humans build the kingdom as the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, or the practice of breaking bread. It is thus that I think that those who read Yoder as advocating “a works-oriented ‘militant’ pursuit of social justice in the liberation theology sense of the term” do not entirely misread him. Without the personal presence of Christ as gift in the consecrated elements of the Eucharist, Yoder opens himself to being read “in service of their prior agendas” – as a type of progressive Christian communitarian.

In this way Yoder can be read, and maybe justly so, as what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger criticized: “The social dimension which de Lubac saw rooted in deepest mystery has often sunk to the merely sociological so that the unique Christian contribution to the right understanding of history and community has disappeared from sight. Instead of a leaven for the age, or its salt, we are often simply its echo. If previously there was a narrowing of the Christian vision to an individualism, we are now in danger of a sociological levelling down. Sacraments are often seen merely as celebrations of community where there is no more room for the personal dialogue between God and the soul—something many greet with condescending ridicule. And so there has been a kind of reversal of the previous individualism that itself has fundamentally constricted the theological perspective and has also spread from the central theological themes to the most concrete and practical applications” (“Foreword” to Henri de Lubac, Catholicism, 1988 ed). The joy of participation in God as Gift in Christ’s body and blood by the presence of the Spirit -- and therefore find that in surprising ways that we are part of others in Christ -- becomes lost. A type of leftist moralism can easily arise.

We must always remember that the Eucharist makes the church; or better, God the Father makes the church through calling believers to a common participation in the body of blood of God the Son by the presence of God the Spirit. It is by grace that we are saved, not by works, lest any person boast. Ironically, I would like to argue that it is the Roman Catholic de Lubac who preserves this Reformation concern much better than the Radical Reformation Yoder. Yoder therefore has to become more radically catholic in his Eucharistic theology or Christ’s presence ceases in the world as gift through the church; instead it becomes the work of a community to bring about the kingdom by human activity.

It is precisely this where Yoder needs placed within a broader Christian ontology, a deeper return to the Christians sources in worship as well as Scripture. I think that the Communio theologians can help preserve Yoder from such readings. David L. Schindler in an interview on Zenit.org (http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=70184) describes the difference as between the church as “communion” versus the “congregation”. He writes, “The notion of the Church as "communio" thus contrasts with the notion of the Church as "congregatio." While "communio" emphasizes the nature of the Church as a gift from God, established "from above," "congregatio" indicates a community that comes to be "from below," by virtue of the decision of the individual wills of the community, in the manner of a democratic body.” It is this concern for joy of the Gift, particularly the Gift that is Jesus Christ that we need to preserve amid the world of contemporary nihilism, in its despairing or happy form.