Commentary

John Howard Yoder, 1927-1997

John Howard Yoder, influential and widely respected Christian theologian, ended his earthly life December 30, 1997, just after celebrating his seventieth birthday at home with his gathered family. For the past 20 years an ecumenical member of Notre Dame’s theology department (his own denomination was Mennonite), Yoder was a frequent lecturer in widely varied Christian settings in this country and around the world. He was well known and often mentioned by religion scholars of every stripe but generally regarded as a contrarian thinker rather than a member of any accepted establishment. This reputation fit well with his lifelong intention, which was to call majority Christian and Jewish thinkers to re-evaluate their stance in light of his own radically catholic (small c) standpoint. Central to this call was his advocacy of nonviolence both as Jesus’ demand upon the heirs of the biblical legacy and as a policy to be judiciously recommended to others. For him Jesus’ nonviolent pattern of life was as relevant to today’s world as once it had been to ancient Palestine.

John Howard Yoder was born into a midwestern Mennonite family (in Smithville, Ohio, Dec. 29, 1927), who operated a chain of greenhouses, an origin that gave pattern to his life. Trained at home in Anabaptist pacifism, he nonetheless attended public schools and had hoped to enter Robert Maynard Hutchins’s accelerated University of Chicago program for gifted students. Instead, at his parents’ urging, he enrolled in denominational Goshen College, where he completed the four-year B.A. in two years, majoring in Bible, meanwhile editing the school paper, singing in the choir, and debating on the speech team. Remaining at Goshen an extra year, he received a master of theology degree from the college and then returned to Wooster, Ohio, to work for the family as a plant-growth researcher.

World War II with its total demands on all Americans had shaken Mennonites into a greater world awareness and a stronger sense of the distinctive role of the church. Thus the following year John Yoder joined a “peace team” traveling the country to speak in churches and youth assemblies for pacifism and to oppose the draft. Considering overseas Christian service, he enrolled for a year at the College of Wooster. At this time Yoder produced his first work of scholarship, a study of Amish Mennonite Meidung, or shunning, and its relation to civil lawsuits involving these traditional communities. This research foreshadowed his definitive later work regarding the relation of religion and the state.

In 1949 Yoder arrived in France to serve the combined Mennonite Central Committee in relief work that fed and housed children orphaned or displaced by the war. He became supervisor of two houses in Alsace-Lorraine that sheltered these children. There he met and in 1952 married a French Mennonite relief worker, Anne Marie Guth, to him, “Annie.” Meanwhile, he wrote a small book, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Pacifism, that was published by the World Council of Churches in 1952, the first of a long stream of publications from his hand. At about the same period (1950-51), in his spare time he attended seminars at the University of Basel, studying with Karl Barth, Oscar Cullmann, Walter Eichrodt, and Walter Baumgartner. After official residency at Basel (1954-57) and publication of his dissertation, a historical study of sixteenth-century debates between Reformed and Anabaptist leaders, he received his doctorate in 1962.

During the Basel residency, the problem of war surfaced twice in Barth’s lectures, and Yoder began the critique of Barth’s position that later issued in Karl Barth and the Problem of War. (Characteristically, Yoder presented a draft of this to Barth shortly before the Herr Professor was to conduct his oral doctoral examination.)

For The Nations: Essays Public & Evangelicalby John Howard Yoder Eerdmans 251 pp.; $28, paperback

At this time Yoder also filled two other roles. He administered Christian relief in Algeria following the 1955 earthquake and saw firsthand the beginnings of the violent Algerian struggle against the French. He also advised the Mennonite Central Committee in its discussions of pacifism and other issues with other Christian bodies. In retrospect, Yoder recalled the combination of concerns produced by these European years as formative for his later theory of the church, the proper use of the Bible, and Christians’ relation to pacifism and the state. Certainly by the midfifties he had acquired a transatlantic role as a “peace church” spokesperson on war and peace issues.

His scholarly engagement with Reformation and Anabaptist issues well launched, Yoder returned to America in 1957. He was to continue to publish historical studies throughout his career. Though he modestly returned to family greenhouse duties, his family was not content to see his schooling “wasted,” and he accepted an invitation to teach at Goshen College. During this creative postwar period in Mennonite thought, Yoder contributed to a series of “Concern” pamphlets that gained a wide circulation. In due course he also wrote a small volume on church and state relations, The Christian Witness to the State (1959). This and other booklets criticized both Protestant cultural complacence and Mennonite withdrawal from the environing culture.

The radical stance of these writings was disquieting for senior denominational leaders. Nevertheless, the “Concern” writers represented Mennonites’ best and brightest, and many were assigned positions in the denomination. Thus after a year’s teaching, Yoder went on to the Mennonite Mission Board in Elkhart as an administrator (1959-65); during that same time he began to teach in the newly formed Goshen College Biblical Seminary. He joined its regular faculty in 1965, teaching theological courses ranging from ethics to contemporary systematic theology and served from 1970 to 1973 as its president during that school’s merger with another to form the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries. He lived thereafter in a comfortable residence in Elkhart across the street from the newly combined seminary.

At about this time (1972) he published a book that quickly won the attention (and often the opposition) of a wider circle of Protestant scholarship. This was The Politics of Jesus (2nd ed., 1994), a book of loosely stitched chapters that considered afresh the relevance of Jesus of Nazareth to contemporary Christianity. On this issue, nineteenth-century scholarship had divided: Protestant liberals had invoked the teaching of Jesus but easily turned it into a bland endorsement of existing social and religious arrangements. Radical Protestants, on the other hand, had seen in Jesus an eschatological prophet of no comfort to today’s established churches, but one whose mistaken belief about the end of the age made his way irrelevant.

For neither side was Jesus’ radicality (e.g., his demand for self-sacrificial peacemaking and discipleship) the norm. So dogmatic theologians made Jesus a symbol whose life story, even if unknown, did not matter. In conformity, Christian ethicists pushed aside the aims and example of the human Jesus. Yoder’s Politics challenged all these conclusions. For him Jesus was indeed a revolutionary figure, but one whose revolution was social and enduring, demanding communal obedience in every generation. The book provoked the customary debate and dissent among scholars, but many younger Christians found its claim for an “original revolution” (another Yoder title) revolutionary for their own convictions and lives.

Since 1967, the University of Notre Dame in nearby South Bend had recruited theologians who were not Roman Catholics to teach in the regular faculty, and Yoder participated in this early, cautious experiment in ecumenicity, teaching a course on the Radical Reformation.

Despite his broad openness to others’ points of view (or perhaps because of it), Yoder’s relations with his own denomination were sometimes prickly. Though he was frequently recruited, his Mennonite employers and colleagues were not always reluctant to see him move on to another job. Perhaps these difficult relations were a price he paid for the prophetic and experimental style in which he taught and lived, exploring ways not taken or long neglected, but always in what seemed to him biblical light. In 1984, however, Notre Dame granted him tenure; it was there that he expired, working alone in his book-crammed study during the Christmas holidays just past. For the Nations, a powerful collection of essays, most of them previously unpublished, had appeared shortly before his death.

Special note should be taken of Yoder’s relation to Judaism: his historical foci upon first-, sixteenth-, and twentieth-century Christianity led him not only to study the New Testament but to investigate relations between early Christians and rabbinic Judaism. Deeply interested in the Jewish roots of Christianity, he was with others troubled by the enduring division between these two. While newer Catholic writers maintained that the Jewish-Christian schism was already present in the New Testament, differing with older ones only on whether this was a good or bad thing, and while some Protestants held that Christianity was only an illegitimate offspring of its Hebraic heritage, Yoder sought a third way of interpreting the division. His favored baptist (small b) style of communal Christian life, which sought to recover early Christianity, gave the clue: Might not Jewish-Christian relations return to an earlier, happier footing by a similar recovery of the actual past? For a few crucial decades, the paths of Christianity and Judaism had run in parallel; when these parted, Christianity had fallen into self-diminishing conduct from which it still suffered, but recovery was possible now. Much of Yoder’s work on this theme remains unpublished.

Yoder’s chief theological contribution to Christian thought (from which the preceding is not to be separated) lay in a twofold recovery: on the one hand, he argued, in the spirit of his Basel professors, that Christians could recover the narrative existence of a faithful people as displayed in both Old and New Testaments. On the other hand, this recovery did not lead him into an awkward biblical literalism; he found in Scripture a sense of church as a living human community that was to be worked out afresh, explored, tested in the crucible of contemporary life.

These convictions, together with his enduring and nuanced pacifism, led him (a second, related sort of recovery) to rethink Christian relations to the state and to society. These were not to be the old Constantinian power pacts between governments and hierarchies. A sense of the inevitably “political” nature of Christian existence in its own right, a deeply churchly yet by no means an in-turned social existence, informed Yoder’s interpretation of church and society. The Royal Priesthood (1994), For the Nations (1997), and another awaited volume present his extraordinary but persuasive account of these relations.

Perhaps his lasting legacy, though, is to be found in John Yoder’s steadfast rejection of violence as an acceptable alternative to Jesus’ own way in human relations. “The point is not,” he wrote early on, “that one can attain all of one’s legitimate ends without using violent means. It is rather that our readiness to renounce our legitimate ends whenever they cannot be attained by legitimate means itself constitutes our participation in the triumphant suffering of the Lamb.” Since today’s Christian world has not accepted this central point, being attached to capital punishment, justifiable homicide, just wars, and other challenges to the way of Jesus, John Yoder’s life work remains a serious but unanswered challenge for most Christian (and Jewish) thinkers. Perhaps it is the discomfort created by these views that explains why, despite his insistence that he was only declaring the truth of catholic Christianity, he remained at his death a largely unsung American theologian.

James Wm. McClendon, Jr., is Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Mote in the Eye of the Beholder

In an age of great leaps backward, one of the rare advances (along with the sowing of wildflower seeds in highway medians) is the trend toward providing a visitors’ book near the exit of a museum art exhibit. These are usually hardbound blank books, sturdy and sizable, with an attached pen; visitors are invited to record their reactions to the show.

Such a visitor’s book was provided at a recent exhibit of Ethiopian Christian art at the Walters Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland. As usual, the Walters had taken care to present the artworks not simply as intriguing objects but as expressions of a living faith. Ethiopian Christianity is very ancient (see Acts 8:27) and very intense; objects included healing scrolls, inscribed with prayers and fearsome scenes of struggle between angels and demons. The scrolls are made the length of a patient’s body, to cover him top to toe in prayer.

A wide range of visitors go through the Walters Gallery, brought by factors as varied as artistic appreciation, spiritual curiosity, and yellow schoolbuses. Comments in the visitors’ book reflected this, ranging from lively opinion to commonsense advice like, “You should have provided a map of Ethiopia.”

Some comments suggested more about the writer than about the exhibit. Here are five statements from the Ethiopian art exhibit’s visitors’ book. Can you match them with the imagined writer?

1. “Marvelous job mounting this exhibit. Lighting is exquisite. Intriguing to see how strongly the Byzantine influence is evident, right from the start. More, please!”

2. “Thank you for the very nice art show. It was very nice. I liked the pictures. The colors are pretty.” [Letter “i” in name dotted with a daisy.]

3. Scrawled at an angle: “I am the Great Cornholio. Give me T.P. for my bunghole.”

4. “Ethiopia has stretched out her hands, and the Ancient of Ancients has heard! Christ will return to defeat the Devil who rules this earth! Weep no more—for some it is already too late!” [Followed by a line in the ancient Ethiopian liturgical language of Ge’ez.]

5. “Very nice exhibit of African-American art.”

A. Thinks nose hair is funny. Thinks underarms are funny.

B. In her Volvo station wagon, the dial has been permanently set to National Public Radio.

C. Wears invisible ribbon: Visitor Most Likely to Get It.

D. One of those who could have benefited from a map of Ethiopia.

E. No room for socks; that drawer is full of My Pretty Ponies.n

Frederica Mathewes-Green is a commentator for National Public Radio and a columnist in Christianity Today magazine