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Discovering John Howard Yoder, a Genius too Relevant
to Dismiss
by Laura Yoder
Since June, I have spent my hours sifting through the papers
of John Howard Yoder, one of the Mennonite church's best minds
and one of theology's finest proponents of peace. His collection-published
and unpublished papers, research and lecture notes, letters,
schedules, and a walking stick-is stored at the Mennonite Church
USA Archives--Goshen in over 170 boxes, and there are more coming.
His long career and wide interests, combined with a propensity
for saving the thousand picayune germane to each project, make
for a rather unwieldy collection. The inventory makes navigation
through all of it a bit easier.
Each box is its own small collection, often containing a cross-section
of Yoder's research, correspondence, and thought development
on a variety of topics and issues. His wife, Annie, and their
daughter, Elisabeth, sort through the piles still in his basement
office; basic lists of contents are made, and the papers are
deposited in the archives and later inventoried in more detail.
Sometimes Yoder has files already in the boxes; in other cases,
piece by piece means page by page. Each section or pile of loose
papers is then given a reference number, a short description
and, if possible, a key phrase linking that individual file to
others on the same subject elsewhere in Yoder's collection. Because
the papers are as Yoder left them, and not arranged by topic,
chronology, or type, recurring themes must be connected via the
inventory. While leaving the papers as they are presents obstacles
from the organizational point of view, the preservation of that
order gives insight into Yoder's thought processes.
Yoder was better than most at untangling, without oversimplifying,
terribly complex problems. He worked with issues and ideas that
were and are, for him and the church, rooted in spiritual knowledge
and Biblical teaching. Yet, because of his personality and gifts,
Yoder pushed beyond that first circle of faith-based understanding.
As a systematic theologian, he drew on his intellect to understand
questions of faith through logic and so make them relevant for
people of other backgrounds, as well as illuminating recurrent
issues imbedded in his own. Though a broad idea such as peace
may be threaded through history and certainly present in contemporary
thought, Yoder recognized the importance of making such perennial
ideas applicable to very current, often volatile, dilemmas. The
Politics of Jesus, perhaps Yoder's most widely known book, published
in 1972, illustrates his ideas about the importance of finding,
in our culture, a place for a two thousand year old message of
peace and freedom.
There is no central thesis to the inventory-I am not trying
to isolate coherent themes, shuffling papers into prepared categories.
Rather, I focus on the specific-the pile of lecture notes, the
names on the letters, the central argument of a long memo to
colleagues. As more and more files are described and named, one
can look back through the inventory and begin to pick out patterns
of thought. Some are obvious: peace, war, the identity of the
Mennonite church, and so on. But within those topics are strata
that lie in every direction: peace and logic, peace in domestic
issues such as capital punishment, peace in Anabaptist history,
origins of concepts of peace. These are all knit together, even
as they are separate ideas, so that one belief is informed by
another opinion, one answer containing another question. Yoder
traced problems to a logical origin, articulating possible explanations
and ways to address them. This approach seems rare in these days
of speculation and hyper-media. Yoder gathered information and
thought deeply about an issue, drawing on his own strong beliefs
as well as information he collected for other issues. At times,
the collection seems to resemble a giant spider web with no definite
center; each box positions Yoder's mind on another thread of
that web, following the crooked trail from the edges of one problem
to its heart, only to locate in that problem another trail, leading
to another center of thought. One does not emerge from these
tangles satisfied, answered-indeed, one does not really emerge
at all. Rather, by grasping how one problem is connected to another
and how each answer, in part, the other's question, Yoder traded
a straight, doctrinal answer for an understanding of the interrelated
ramifications of belief, opinion, or action.
While Yoder was certainly aware of the esoteric web of dilemmas
and beliefs, his collection also belies interconnection on a
more personal level. Letters and memos fill an important space
in the collection; Yoder saved correspondence dealing with everything
from grave treatments of ministerial problems to a friendly Christmas
card from friends in Indonesia. To me, a recent graduate of Goshen
College, Yoder represents a time of concerted intellectual growth
within the Mennonite Church; I read correspondence to and from
men whose names, like Yoder's, seem legendary, like old baseball
players or former presidents-Guy F. Hershberger, Harold S. Bender,
Ross T. Bender, J.C. Wenger, and many others. A student and then
colleague of these men, Yoder echoed their beliefs, built on
their ideas, and furthered theology according to his own interpretation
of past teachings. Though Yoder's opinion of the Mennonite church
was not always the highest, it is apparent from his life's work
and from the lively correspondence in this collection that he
stayed firmly rooted in the Anabaptist ideology of his heritage.
In the 1950s, early in his career, Yoder produced letters, articles,
and memos exploring the basic tenets of recent Mennonite theology.
He revised the vision, describing what he saw as the basic tenets
of future Mennonite theology; he did not espouse rigid doctrine
but laid out and defended a logical argument for implementing
the beliefs of the early church-both Christian and Anabaptist-in
the Mennonite church, mid-twentieth century. As he established
his position in academia and in the Mennonite theological milieu,
Yoder wrestled with the tension inherent in the relationship
between church and secular society. One of the main points of
difference between the Mennonite church and the governments of
its many followers over the years has been the issue of war.
Drawing on the early Anabaptists' vision for a nonresistant
church that echoes the earliest Christian doctrines, Yoder applied
his genius to understanding the constant conflict between Jesus'
calling to peace and nonresistance, and the human and political
tendencies towards violence. His papers on the war in Vietnam,
for instance, show great emotional concern but do not allow this
to be the means by which he understands the problem; rather,
Yoder sought to realize the Anabaptist vision even in sticky
political situations where peace does not seem a viable-or sensible-option.
He did not generalize ideas of peace into some impossible goal;
rather, he broke it apart, separating and defining positions
such as nonviolence and nonresistance within the context of Jesus'
teachings as well as an academic theological setting. In a lecture
titled "The Lessons of Nonviolent Experience," written
for War, Peace and Revolution, which Yoder taught for years at
both Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries and Notre Dame
University, he points out the logical errors in positions that
allow war as a last resort. He writes that the discussion between
pacifists and non-pacifists "as it wrestles with the impossibility
of saying that nonviolence will usually or always work, and what
difference that would make for moral evaluation, largely set
aside the obvious point that military means as well fail most
of the time to reach the goals they promise, and that usually
their failure is more costly not only to the oppressors or aggressors
one seeks to restrain but also (and in fact usually predominantly)
to those victims one claims to be defending." In this, and
many other works, Yoder demands that the pacifist position be
understood through logic, that the same assumptions allowed for
violence be granted to a peaceful response.
Peacemaking continues to be a terribly relevant topic; as
our country fights one war and prepares for another, as violence
on a smaller scale disrupts daily life in countless regions around
the world, Yoder's clear-headed defense of pacifism only gains
significance. His lucidity of thought was not eclipsed but augmented
by his strong beliefs. In the same lecture as quoted above, he
writes, "If we hear it argued that organized military force
will achieve certain desirable goals, the alternative against
which we should test it is not doing nothing, or some improvised
nonviolent gesture, but rather what could be done if the same
amount of creativity, the same funds, the same advanced institutional
planning, the same strategy thinking, etc., were invested in
the nonviolent reaction as are currently being invested in preparations
for war." In this, I think he left a challenge for those
whose values are likewise rooted in pacifist teachings to work
towards understanding and thoughtful analysis of issues so that
they might be addressed with the same clarity and forcefulness
Yoder brought to his theology.
As I shuffle through Yoder's papers, I learn-about pacifism,
about theology, about the man himself. It is strange, in some
ways, to spend so much time with materials left by a person I
never knew. People tell me stories about him-his intelligence,
his social quirks, his ability to articulate not only an answer
or explanation, but also clarify the question itself. It is clear,
especially in his correspondence, Yoder knew his own mind; though
he did not, by any means, live in a matter-of-fact world, he
went about living in a very matter-of-fact way. Perhaps that,
more than anything, is what I find fascinating about Yoder-his
talent for analyzing unruly situations and esoteric ideas with
a straightforwardness that explained, but did not diminish, the
complexity of the problem, the beauty of the argument.
There is more to Yoder than logical gymnastics, however. I
enjoy getting in through the back door on a few of his classes,
studying his response to Just War theorists or the Persian Gulf
War. I am curious as to what he might have said about the current
war against terrorism the United States is currently spearheading.
I have learned from him how to navigate a little better the tricky
road of peace. Perhaps my generation, young adults in these strained
times, would do well to study Yoder's structure of thought and
belief, arguing so forcefully for peace. To be sure, he represents
the ivory tower of academia and enjoyed the more subtle privilege
of being a white male. But his ideas, his arguments, and his
genius are too important, too relevant, to dismiss.
The collection of Yoder's papers will take months to organize;
there are superfluous documents to be culled, fragments to be
pieced together into a coherent whole. But its contents as a
whole leave no doubt that Yoder's ideas should not be described
and stored in silence, but studied, implemented, and furthered.
Laura E. Yoder, originally of Kalona, Iowa, is a 2002 graduate
of Goshen College with a B. A. in English. At the archives, she
has become so absorbed in the past that her plans for the future
are quite ambiguous. |