People

John Howard Yoder

Professor of Christian Ethics, Department of Theology
Teaching Fellow, Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies

John Howard Yoder died unexpectedly on December 30, 1997. His family intends to keep this site open in order to facilitate access to--and the continuation of John's work.

Text from New York Times Obituary >
Unpublished Writings >

John H. Yoder, Theologian At Notre Dame, Is Dead at 70

John Howard Yoder, A Mennonite theologian whose writings on Christianity and politics had a major impact on contemporary Christian thinking about the church and social ethics, died on Dec. 30 at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind. He had turned 70 the day before.

The cause was a heart attack he suffered in his office at Notre Dame.

Like contemporary liberation theologians, Mr. Yoder argued that Jesus' life, death and proclamation of the Kingdom of God had political implications. But Mr. Yoder, who taught at Notre Dame and at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Goshen, Ind., developed this position in a distinctive way that reflected his Mennonite tradition.

First, he insisted that a central norm of Christian life, as revealed by Jesus, was nonresistant love, and therefore nonviolence and pacifism.

"After World War II and the criticism of pacifism by Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian nonviolence had lost credibility," said Stanley Hauerwas, a prominent Christian ethicist much influenced by Mr. Yoder.

"Yoder turned that around," said Mr. Hauerwas.

Second, Mr. Yoder stressed that the work of Jesus was not a new set of ideals or principles for reforming or even revolutionizing society, but the establishment of a new community, a people that embodied forgiveness, sharing and self-sacrificing love in its rituals and discipline. In that sense, the visible church for him was not the bearer of Christ's message; it was itself to be the message.
In keeping with Mennonite tradition, rejecting all forms of state-established religion and refusing to bear arms or strive for social success, Mr. Yoder understood the church as a creative minority that would always live in a way that contrasted with the surrounding society. He criticized all tendencies for the church to assume a blanket responsibility for the ethics of the secular world, a project that he thought would inevitably compromise the different standards by which Christians were supposed to live.

This insistence that the ethics of society in general are different from those of the Christian community led some theologians to dismiss Mr. Yoder's thought as sectarian, suited only for small groups determined to live apart from the world.
But he rejected their charge that he was calling for the church to withdraw into isolation, and he devoted much of his writing to demonstrating how neither his pacifism nor his sectarianism prevented the church from providing a crucial witness to the secular world or from combating a host of injustices.

Mr. Yoder's stance reached a wide theological audience when his book The Politics of Jesus was published in 1972. But his analyses of Christian attitudes toward the state, of pacifism and of major theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth had been gaining notice since the 1950's.

Mr. Yoder first drafted a 50-page critique of Barth's views on pacifism while a doctoral student under Barth at the University of Basel in Switzerland--and he gave a copy to Barth shortly before Barth was to be on the panel conducting Mr. Yoder's final oral examination.

This combination of precosity and intellectual boldness was not surprising. Born in 1926 in Smithville, Ohio, Mr. Yoder completed the four-year program at Goshen College in two years, earned a master's degree in theology at Goshen in the next year and spent a year in the family business.

In 1949, he went to France to serve in a Mennonite relief program for children orphaned or displaced by the war. David A. Shank, a fellow Mennonite relief worker in post-war Europe and a friend from Goshen College days, said Mr. Yoder had a revivifying influence on Mennonites in France and elsewhere in Europe.

In 1952, Mr. Yoder married Anne Marie Guth, a French Mennonite relief worker. Besides his wife, he is survived by a sister, Mary Ellen Meyer of Goshen; 4 daughters, Rebecca Yoder Neufeld of Waterloo, Ontario, Martha Yoder Maust of Indianapolis, Elisabeth Yoder Ayyad of Cairo, and Esther Yoder Strahan of Tiffin, Ohio; 2 sons, Daniel Yoder of Knoxville, Tenn., and John-David Yoder of Bluffton, Ohio, and 12 grandchildren.

Mr. Yoder administered a relief project in Algeria after the 1955 earthquake there and witnessed firsthand the beginnings of the violent Algerian struggle against French rule. He considered these European experiences important influences on his theology.

Mr. Yoder returned to the United States to work in the family business and then to teach at Goshen College. From 1965 to 1984 he taught at Goshen Biblical Seminary, which later became the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary. Mr. Yoder was president of the institution from 1970 to 1973.

He also began teaching at a Roman Catholic institution nearby, the University of Notre Dame, and became a full-time professor there in the late 1970's. Among the books and articles that he wrote in the last two decades were Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution (1983), The Priestly Kingdom (1984, University of Notre Dame Press), The Royal Priesthood (1994, Eerdman's) and For the Nations (1997, Eerdman's).

As a writer, Mr. Yoder was clear and direct, never skirting differences but always trying to represent his opponents fairly. A proponent of nonviolence, he nonetheless criticized many of the varieties of pacifism advocated by Christians as sentimental, resting on naively optimistic, utopian views of human nature or on strictly utilitarian calculations of pacifism's effectiveness compared with other forms of opposing evil.

Mr. Yoder's scholarly and linguistic gifts also led him to produce Biblical exegesis and historical studies of the radical 16th-century Protestant movement whose followers were known as Anabaptists for their insistence on adult baptism. But he kept his achievements subordinated to his faith.

Glen H. Stassen, a professor of ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., recalled congratulating Mr. Yoder after the scholarly papers presented at a session at the Society of Christian Ethics showed the deep imprint of Mr. Yoder's thought.

"Your influence must be really spreading," Mr. Stassen recalled saying.

"Not mine," Mr. Yoder replied. "Jesus'."

New York Times Obituary
by Peter Steinfels
January 7, 1998.
Copyright New York Times

Unpublished Writings

The most complete record of John Yoder's writings, A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Writings of John Howard Yoder, has been compiled by Mark T. Nation. Current through the beginning of 1997, it has 40 pages of bibliographic entries for Yoder's own work, plus 7 more pages of secondary sources that treat Yoder's work, as well as a brief general introduction. It is available for $5 plus $2 postage and handling from either of the following two sources. It is also in a couple of computer diskette formats direct from Nation. Photocopies of most unpublished writings are also available direct from Nation.

Mark Thiessen Nation
Associate Professor of Theology
Eastern Mennonite Seminary
1200 Park Road
Harrisonburg, VA 22802
Phone: 540.432.4962
E-mail: mark.nation@emu.edu

Mennonite Quarterly Review
Goshen College
Goshen, IN 46526

The Bible
"Cult and Culture in and after Eden: On Generating Alternative Paradigms"

Christology after The Politics of Jesus
"' Confessing Jesus in Mission."
"'The Politics of Jesus Revisited."
"'A Response to Wayne Meeks' The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries."
"'Twenty Years Later."

Church and State

'''Christianity and Protest in America."
"'Religious Liberty and the Prior Loyalty of the People of God."

The History of Christian Attitudes toward War, Peace, and Revolution

'"Early Christian 'Disciplines' or 'Church Orders'." (Chapter 1/B)
'"The Jewishness of Early Christian Pacifism." (Chapter 2)
'"The Nonviolence of Judaism from Jeremiah to Hertzel." (Chapter 3)
'"Anabaptists of the Sixteenth Century." (Chapter 5)
'"The Terror and the Power of the Light: The Roots of Quaker Nonviolence within the Puritan Reform." (Chapter 6)
'"William Penn's 'Holy Experiment'." (Chapter 7)
'"World Order Visions Since Early Modern Europe." (Chapter 8)
'"Chronology of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Civil Rights." (Chapter 9)
'"The Religious Origins of Ahimsa: A 20th Century Distillation." (Chapter 10)
'"Are the Tyrants Really in Charge? Realism and Radical Change." (Unpublished, 1993)
'"The Nonviolent Component of the February (1986) Manila Revolution." (Unpublished, 1987)
'"War Revisited: The Radical Reformation." (Unpublished, 1991)

The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited

Please note: all links in this section have been removed because the texts have been published elsewhere. The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited has been published by Eerdmans (2003), and can be purchased at, inter alia, Amazon.com.

"'Preface: What Needs to Change in the Jewish-Christian Dialogue and Why."
'"Prior Preface: Salvation is of the Jews."
'"Tertium Datur: It Did Not Have to Be."
'"Jesus the Jewish Pacifist."
'"Paul the Judaizer."
'"The Jewishness of the Free Church Vision."
'"Forms of a Possible Obedience."
'"Rabbinic Fragments."
'"An Alternative Perspective on Christian History."
'"Earthly Jerusalem and Jerusalem: A Mislocated Dualism."
'"On Not Being in Charge."
'"See How They Go with Their Face to the Sun . . . ."

The Case for Punishment

Philosophical or Systematic Theology

'"Antipedobaptism revisited: The Radical Reformation."
'"Karl Barth, Post-Christendom Theologian." (Unpublished, 1995)
'"Regarding 'Nature'." (Unpublished, 1994)
'"Trinity versus Theodicy: Hebraic Realism and the Temptation to Judge God." (Unpublished, 1996)

Department of Theology

News & Events

What's Happening in Faculty Research?

College of Arts and Letters