Theologian · Contemporary
John Howard Yoder
1927–1997 · Anabaptist social ethics; Christian pacifism
A Mennonite theologian, never a Catholic, who taught at the University of Notre Dame from 1977 until his death; between 1992 and 1996 his own church disciplined him for decades of sexual abuse and harassment of women, which Mennonite Church USA formally acknowledged and lamented in 2015.
An American Mennonite who studied under Barth at Basel and taught for twenty years at Notre Dame. The Politics of Jesus (1972) argued, against the consensus that Jesus had no social ethic, that His refusal of the sword and His cross are the normative pattern for Christian social existence, and that the New Testament's ‘principalities and powers’ name the structures Christ has disarmed. The Priestly Kingdom (1984) and Body Politics (1992) describe the church as an alternative polis whose practices (baptism, the shared table, binding and loosing, the open meeting) are its social ethic, and name the alliance of church and empire since Constantine as the fall from which Christian ethics must recover. He rejected natural law and just war alike as attempts to find a norm other than Jesus.
Why he matters: No one did more to make Christian pacifism intellectually serious: the US bishops' The Challenge of Peace (1983), Catholic peace studies at Notre Dame and the Catholic Worker tradition all argued with him, and Stanley Hauerwas carried his ecclesiology to a wide Catholic readership. The Catholic-Mennonite ‘Bridgefolk’ movement grew from his students.
Where to be careful
He rejected the just war tradition the Church holds (CCC 2309) and the natural law as a moral ground shared with non-Christians (Veritatis Splendor 40-53), and his critique of ‘Constantinianism’ excludes the duty of societies toward the true religion that Quas Primas and Dignitatis Humanae 1 affirm; his conduct toward women contradicted his own ethic of nonviolence. The common ground is the primacy of the cross, the church as a visible community with its own practices, and a shared suspicion of the nation as an idol.
Reading
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The Politics of JesusJohn Howard Yoder · The 1972 argument that the cross is a social ethic; chapter 11 on justification as the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile.
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The Priestly KingdomJohn Howard Yoder · Essays on the church as polis and on the ‘Constantinian’ turn.
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Unlearning Protestantism: Sustaining Christian Community in an Unstable AgeGerald W. Schlabach · A Catholic who came from the Mennonites and learned from Yoder asks what his vision needs from Rome.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each question the test asks.