John Howard Yoder

Overview

John Howard Yoder (1927-1997) was an American Mennonite theologian and ethicist best known for The Politics of Jesus (1972), an influential argument that Jesus’s own teaching and example carry direct political implications for his followers, chief among them the renunciation of violence and coercive power.¹ Writing from within the Mennonite tradition’s historic pacifism, Yoder argued that the church’s calling is to embody, as a visible community, the nonviolent way of Christ rather than to wield or endorse coercive force, and he read the New Testament as teaching that consistently.¹

Life and Ministry

Yoder wrote as a Mennonite committed to that tradition’s historic peace-church convictions.¹ He pursued doctoral studies under Karl Barth at Basel in the late 1950s and went on to write a critical study of Barth’s own position on war.²

Theological Contribution

Yoder’s central claim, developed at length in The Politics of Jesus, is that Jesus’s teaching and example provide “significant political implications for Jesus’s followers,” chief among them “the renunciation of violence and coercive power.”¹ Reflecting on Jesus’s Gethsemane prayer to have the cup of suffering removed (Luke 22:42), Yoder argued that the temptation in view was not suffering itself but a return to violent, revolutionary methods:

The one temptation the man Jesus faced—and faced again and again—as a constitutive element of his public ministry, was the temptation to exercise social responsibility, in the interest of justified revolution, through the use of available violent methods.¹

Yoder read the whole of Jesus’s public ministry, not merely his death, as a sustained rejection of that temptation, and he took this rejection to bind the church rather than only Jesus himself.¹

Yoder gave the historical form of that rejection’s abandonment a name: the “Constantinian compromise of the church.” On his account, the early church’s nonviolence was the “faithful response to the gospel,” and the later acceptance and endorsement of military service and just-war doctrine, once Christianity gained imperial favor under Constantine, was a compromise with worldly power rather than a legitimate development of New Testament ethics.¹ Consistent with this reading, Yoder treated Genesis 9:5-6 (“whoever sheds human blood, by humans his blood will be shed”) not as authorization for capital punishment but as description: “It is a simple description of the way things already are, an accurate prediction of what does happen, what will happen, as surely as summer is followed by winter, seedtime by harvest.”³

Yoder’s pacifism was not, on his own account, passive. In The War of the Lamb he argued that nonviolent direct action is not merely a lesser evil to be tolerated but the more effective way of overcoming evil, “because it goes with the grain of the universe, and that is why in the long run nothing else will work.”¹

Historical Significance

Ken Magnuson calls The Politics of Jesus “influential,” and Yoder became a representative figure for the view that the church’s earliest, pre-Constantinian nonviolence was its most faithful form of political witness.¹ Evangelical ethicists have argued with his reading of the Gethsemane temptation directly. Richard Hays largely agreed with it, calling it “precisely the temptation to resort to armed resistance.”¹ Magnuson does not: he grants that Jesus renounced violence as a means of establishing his kingdom but judges Yoder’s further claim, that resisting violence was a “constitutive element” of Jesus’s whole public ministry and specifically what the Gethsemane prayer sought to avoid, to be “read[ing] too much into the text, using nonviolence as a primary interpretive lens.”¹

Related Doctrines

• Karl Barth
• Mennonites
• Stanley Hauerwas

References

1. Ken Magnuson, “15. Just War, Pacifism, and the Use of Lethal Force,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

2. Craig A. Carter, “Prologue: How My Mind Has Changed,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). ↩

3. Ken Magnuson, “14. Capital Punishment,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩