John Yoder traces the arc of a life journey that takes him into worlds so far removed from his Amish boyhood that he could scarcely have imagined them. The journey would take him from Virginia's pastoral farmlands to the remote wildness of Ontario's far North, from the sands of Southern Africa's Kalahari Desert to Central Valley of California and the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains, then to the wide-open spaces of the Kansas prairies before returning "back east," nearer to the place of his ...

The ambitious and accessible essays collected in this volume were presented by John Howard Yoder during an extensive visit to South America in 1966. Reflecting and also subverting the acknowledged "faddish" attempt to address the revolutionary nature of Christianity, these lectures provide an illuminating snapshot of Yoder's vibrant initial encounter with Latin American Christianity. In these lectures, he thematically addresses the shape of the free church, the Christian practice of peace,...

Big business makes big money selling a phony notion of what we want and need as sexual people. Ads insist that certain products will make us more sexually appealing. But what we really want and need is true intimacy—the knowledge that we matter to another person and are loved for who we are. We all are sexual beings, all of our lives, and relate to each other sexually all the time. God marvelously made us this way. Using the metaphor of sexuality as a good gift from God, this book offers C...

At the center of all John Howard Yoder's thought is the scriptural witness, and at the center of the scriptural witness is Christ, the one who "came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near" (Eph. 2:17). This collection of short, accessible studies of key biblical texts provides a wonderful point of entry into Yoder's more difficult theological writings; it can also serve as a guide for a small group Bible study on the theme of Christian peaceableness.

Our purpose is to analyze whether it is truly the case that a Christian pacifist position rooted not in pragmatic or psychological but in Christological considerations is thereby irrelevant to the social order.-John Howard YoderThese words by John Howard Yoder set the course of his pathbreaking treatise, The Christian Witness to the State. Yoder's novel contribution to the debate concerning the church's and the Christian's calling is his starting point. He insists that Chr...

John Howard Yoder's classic book first published in 1971, includes a treatment of Jewish pacifism, bibliographies, an index, and three new appendixes: Speaking Truth to Power, Quaker Political Witness; The Spectrum of Nonpacifist Postures; and Nonviolent National Defense Alternatives. Yoder points out assumptions, strengths, and shortcomings of each pacifist position. He brings clarity to the many-sided conversations about peace, nonviolence, war, proliferation of arms, and power politics....

John Howard Yoder went to Europe after the Second World War as a young volunteer. Yoder worked as an aide in a children's home in Elsace, France and completed his doctorate under Karl Barth in Basel, Switzerland. Because of his incomparably clear and sharp thinking he quickly became one of the most sought after speakers on pacifism at seminars as he worked towards an Anabaptist renewal of the church.In this context Yoder succeeded in reopening the theological debate on Christians a...

Between 1971 and 1996 the late John Howard Yoder (1927-1997) wrote a series of ten essays revisiting the Jewish-Christian schism in which he argued that, properly understood, Jesus did not reject Judaism, Judaism did not reject Jesus, and the Apostle Paul's universal mandate for the salvation of the nations is best understood not as a product of Hellenization, but rather in the context of his Jewish heritage.This posthumous collection of essays is arguably his most ambitious projec...

In the historic meeting held in 1527 at Schleitheim, Switzerland, an ad hoc group of Anabaptists worked through fundamental disagreements and emerged with a consensus on seven points of faith that became known as the Schleitheim Confession. Also known as the Brotherly Union, this text constitutes one chapter from The Legacy of Michael Sattler.

Binding and loosing, baptism, eucharist, multiplicity of gifts, and open meeting; these five New Testament practices were central in the life of the early Christian community. Some of them are still echoed in the practice of the church today. But the full social, ethical, and communal meaning of the original practices has often been covered by centuries of ritual and interpretation.John Howard Yoder, in his inimitably direct and discerning style, uncovers the original meaning of th...

John Howard Yoder (1927-1997), who was a professor at Notre Dame University and Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, was one of the 20th century's leading theologians. Scholars continue to study his writings on pacifism and other subjects.The End of Sacrifice brings together four decades of Yoder's published and unpublished writings on capital punishment. He engaged in sophisticated biblical, sociological, and historical analysis in order to demonstrate that from ancien...

"Of very few people can it be legitimately said that their work fundamentally reconfigured the landscape of two theological disciplines. But if there is anyone in recent memory who would be worthy of such an accolade, it is John Howard Yoder. The two disciplines are, of course, theological ethics and biblical studies--though Yoder would cringe at their separation, and his work was both explicitly and implicitly a prolonged exercise in maintaining their indissoluble union. For him, to hear ...