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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 the word rightly was to do the word publicly. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

John Howard Yoder was born on December 29, 1927, and died one day after his seventieth birthday, on December 30, 1997. (A mutual friend—the wife of his college roommate—once told me that John believed that age 70 was the biblical time to die.) Yoder was a lifelong Mennonite, filled with an ecumenical spirit, whose influence ranged far beyond his own tradition. He attended (Mennonite) Goshen College in Indiana and then received his doctorate at the University of Basel in Switzerland, where he studied with such Reformed luminaries as theologian Karl Barth and New Testament scholar Oscar Cullmann.1 His teaching career began at the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries (now Seminary) in Indiana, but he is best known for his association with the nearby Roman Catholic University of Notre Dame, where he was both a professor and a fellow of the Joan Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.2

I first met Yoder in the early 1990s at the Kroc Institute at Notre Dame. He was the host, and I one of the participants, at an ecumenical conference on the church’s peace witness. He was a gracious but unassuming, even quiet, host, but his presence was nonetheless powerful. When I invited him a year or so later to speak at my institution, the Ecumenical Institute of Theology of St. Mary’s Seminary & University, his presence as a public lecturer was similar: not charismatic, but quietly forceful.3

Yoder is best known for his landmark book The Politics of Jesus, first published in 1972, with an expanded edition in 1994.4 That book was approximately his sixth, and he would write another ten, some published posthumously, including this one: To Hear the Word. That simple title says much about Yoder’s theological and hermeneutical program: to hear Scripture afresh as the Word of God spoken in the past and spoken again, now, to us, in new circumstances. Yoder was an early leader in what Joel Green has termed the “(re)turn” to theological interpretation,5 the deliberate reading of the Bible not only with historical and literary sensitivity but also, indeed primarily, as Scripture, as divine address.6 One would expect nothing less from a student of Karl Barth.

Unlike many other theological interpreters, however, Yoder heard in this divine address a persistent primary word, a meta-theme in God’s speech, and for that we must return to The Politics of Jesus and specifically to its Latin subtitle: Vicit Agnus Noster. These three words are the first half of an old Moravian creed: Vicit Agnus Noster, Eum Sequamur, or “Our Lamb has conquered; let us follow him.” The thesis of The Politics of Jesus is uncomplicated, if not uncontroversial: Christian faith is inherently social and political, and Jesus is normative for Christian social and political ethics. The words of the book’s subtitle, and its longer creedal form, encapsulate Yoder’s way of hearing of Scripture as a call to public, Christocentric, nonviolent, peaceable, missional discipleship. One would expect nothing less from a Mennonite.7

But this Mennonite did not merely write for other members of the Anabaptist tradition. His audience was broader, his intent grander, and his impact revolutionary. This impact was neither easy nor instant, and Yoder is certainly not universally hailed. He could be, and sometimes still is, dismissed as “sectarian.” His best-known disciple is fellow “sectarian” Stanley Hauerwas, of Duke, who was for a while Yoder’s colleague at Notre Dame.8 Hauerwas has passed on, and of course developed in his own unique ways, Yoder’s basic insights, applying them consistently not only to the issue of discipleship generally and peaceableness particularly, but also to other controversial ethical issues, such as abortion, that were not central to Yoder’s own interests.9 Yoder’s influence on the ecumenical church, on the field of theological ethics, and on how the church reads Scripture has no doubt been magnified by the efforts of Hauerwas, but Yoder himself left his mark in all these areas on his own, too.

While Yoder is not without his critics (though they number fewer today than when The Politics of Jesus first appeared), his influence is felt today across the Christian churches through the ongoing work of his Notre Dame students. It also persists indirectly through the students of Hauerwas. Many of their students now teach and/or preach in institutions of nearly every major Christian tradition, and their books and articles continue to reshape the disciplines of biblical studies, theology, and ethics. Not to be underestimated, as well, is the significance of Yoder’s impact on his less formal students, notably those who participated in ecumenical study and dialogue with him for several decades and, of course, those who have read his books for the last half-century.

It would be inappropriate, however, to talk about Yoder’s influence without allowing Yoder himself to have the last word. When he died, New York Times religion reporter Peter Steinfels spoke with several of his friends and colleagues, including Fuller Seminary professor Glen Stassen. Stassen told Steinfels that he had once congratulated Yoder after a session of the Society of Christian Ethics dedicated to Yoder’s work. Stassen told his friend John, “Your influence must really be spreading.” Yoder quickly replied, “Not mine; Jesus’.” One would expect nothing less from John Howard Yoder.10

Some Themes in To Hear the Word

To Hear the Word is a collection of essays from the early 1960s to the 1990s, grouped into three main sections.11 The first section, “Exegetical Exercises,” contains three studies of key biblical texts. The second section is a set of essays on various hermeneutical issues in the reading of Scripture and its “use” in Christian ethics. The third part, “From the Archives,” continues some of the topics addressed in part two. The Epilogue is Yoder’s rather sharp response to the quite positive treatment of his work by Richard Hays in his influential book The Moral Vision of the New Testament.12

In reading these essays we discover the key themes in John Howard Yoder’s approach to Scripture—his hermeneutical program—but also many of the key themes in his overall theological project. That is, we learn both how to hear and what to hear. Each of these can be inspiring and instructive for contemporary readers, more than a decade after Yoder’s death—and for many years to come. We may begin briefly with the “what.”

In the three exegetical essays, we come face to face with Yoder’s central ethical concerns, which are of course biblical. The essays are full of keen insight and creative theological reflection. Writing about new creation in 2 Corinthians 5, Yoder finds a much less individualistic and more social, or public, theology of personhood, conversion, and church. Exploring the Sermon on the Mount/Plain, he fights traditional readings that tempt us to set aside the Sermon; rather, he points us to the “counter-cultural newness and the concrete realism of the good news of the coming new regime” ([x-ref] 27) and its call for “concretely lived-out holiness” rather than “inner contemplation” ([x-ref] 32). Then, following the canonical trajectory of the prohibition of killing from its origins in Israel into the early Christian church, he concludes with great rhetorical and theological power that “For Jesus’ followers, to hold that the grounds for the exclusion of all bloodshed are revoked as soon as Christians have access to civil power is to relativize the finality of Christ is a way that jeopardizes far more than the Decalogue, and far more than the neighbor’s life” ([x-ref] 46).

In each of these three studies the cross appears—always briefly (or even implicitly) yet always centrally—as the hermeneutical key for Christians: from Paul as justification for the acceptance of brokenness and for the public character of faith; from Jesus as the potential cost of true, public faith; and from the commandment against murder as the grounds for Christians expanding their definitions of both “murder” and “neighbor.”13

In the exegetical section, and also of course in the book’s other two sections, we find also the “how” of Yoder’s interpretive strategy. Four of these key themes are indentified and discussed here.14

A Paradoxical Hermeneutic of Suspicion and of Trust

A hermeneutic of suspicion is a reading posture of criticism and distrust. Unlike many who advocate such an interpretive strategy in reading the Bible, Yoder’s suspicion is not of the biblical text, but of received interpretations of the text, especially those interpretations in the Protestant tradition that have been shaped by Western individualism and privatism. “[T]he form of suspicion which is most valuable is not doubting the text but doubting the adequacy of one’s prior understanding of it” ([x-ref] 52). More irenically, he advocates “sitting loose to tradition” or “openness to alternative hypotheses” ([x-ref] 57).

In effect, then, Yoder’s hermeneutic of suspicion toward the tradition is in fact a hermeneutic of trust toward the text. Or, more exactly, it is a hermeneutic of trust toward God. Yoder believes that we should seek a fresh reading of the text and expect a fresh word from God for our circumstances. “The hermeneutic task is never done” ([x-ref] 4). The questioning of old assumptions, and the invitation to a new, radical lifestyle, is in a sense the epitome of the reformational cry for the church to be semper reformanda—always reforming. Scripture has repeatedly been “subject to manipulation” ([x-ref] 83). “[T]he function of the Bible is to continue correctively to stand in judgment on our past failures to get the whole point” ([x-ref] 93). Yoder is therefore fond of a saying of the puritan John Robinson: “the Lord has yet much more light and truth to break forth from his holy word” ([x-ref] 4, 86, 92, 124, 137). Yoder sees this “more light,” not as something brand new, but as an extrapolation or expansion of a text’s original significance into new situations ([x-ref] 44–45, 103, 187). He sees this movement, which begins already within Scripture itself, as an organic process, which he compares to a trajectory ([x-ref] 112–13). Yoder’s confidence in this process means that for him exegesis is highly contextual and missional: “In the spiral movement whereby the mind of the church constantly links the world’s agenda and the canonical texts, one does find a degree of progress in any given context in becoming clearer both about what it is in the present challenge to which Scripture speaks and about what the answer is” ([x-ref] 92).15 On occasion, Yoder also compares this process to translation ([x-ref] 90–91, 103, 123).

Straightforwardness and “Biblical Realism”

Translation, however, does not mean watered-down paraphrase. In these essays Yoder is deeply concerned that the text of Scripture is often either ignored or interpreted in such a way as to sidestep its “straightforward” meaning ([x-ref] 23, 26, 31, 56 146–47, and chapter 12). He saw this happening both at the level of the individual believer and the local church and at the level of the most sophisticated theologians. Yoder’s solution is not, however, a fundamentalist reading of the text that ignores its historical setting and literary features. Rather, Yoder wants us to take the Bible seriously “on its own terms” ([x-ref] 74; chap. 11), “taking the texts as an ordinary reader would normally take them” ([x-ref] 56), striving to avoid misreading Scripture by importing the traditional or cultural prejudices noted above in the discussion of his hermeneutic of suspicion and trust. Yoder does not think that presuppositionless exegesis is possible, but he does believe that “the presuppositions that are brought to a text can become, by virtue of sustained self-critical discipline, increasingly congruent with the intent of the text’s author” ([x-ref] 75). The “tools of critical scholarship” serve to allow the Bible to speak “within its own world view” rather than being distorted by either conservative or liberal agenda (p[x-ref] 100–101)—but such tools are to be used with a healthy skepticism ([x-ref] 146). At the same time, Yoder finds unacceptable the Protestant “Scholasticism” that read (and reads) the Bible as an inerrant collection of fixed, timeless, dogmatic propositions ([x-ref] 98, 148–52).

Yoder uses the term “biblical realism” to describe his approach to reading Scripture (e.g., [x-ref] 58, 61, 74, 100, and chap. 11). The term refers to a post-liberal movement in biblical studies especially in the 1950s that was dedicated to discerning and engaging the distinctive biblical worldview. Yoder names Paul Minear, Otto Piper, Markus Barth, Hendrik Kraemer, and George Eldon Ladd as its chief practitioners, with Karl Barth as one source of inspiration.

Biblical realism is, for Yoder, a position between the extremes of dogmatic Protestant Scholasticism and fundamentalism, on the one hand, and liberalism and humanism, on the other ([x-ref] 74, chap. 11). Advocates of biblical realism affirm “the existence and usefulness of a straightforward grasp of the intended meaning of the ancient texts, without prejudice to the need for all sorts of critical disciplines in order to refine that understanding” ([x-ref] 61), and they do so without either liberal skepticism or conservative preoccupation with inspiration and authority ([x-ref] 158–59).16 Yoder saw his own work as an extension of biblical realism into the realm of the church’s life and social ethic. Biblical realism was also a position between an ahistorical biblicism and the “political realism” of those who largely rejected Jesus as the norm for Christian social and political ethics.17

Five pairs of adjectives can serve to characterize the approach of Yoder’s biblical realism to “hearing the word”:

• canonical and “post-critical” ([x-ref] 89, 189): while attending to historical and literary issues, it deals with the final form of the text and its theological message, it is aware of the problem of imposing alien hermeneutical frameworks on the text, and it employs a variety of interpretive strategies ([x-ref] 88) without being unduly preoccupied with critical issues and methods;

• narrative and coherent: it recognizes that the Bible’s contents are predominantly in narrative form and situated within an overarching narrative framework ([x-ref] 85, 88) that “contains a coherent testimony which it is the reader’s task to disengage” ([x-ref] 76), yet this coherence is a unity marked by diversity ([x-ref] 118–19, 190–91);

• pastoral and missional: it acknowledges that the biblical writings (especially the New Testament) reflect, and were intended to shape, a community that is “missionary, aggressive, and subversive” ([x-ref] 97);18

• ecclesial and eschatological: it is rooted in the ecumenical theological interests in ecclesiology and eschatology that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, with Yoder seeing his task as extending the movement into an ecclesial ethic ([x-ref] 181, 190);

• creative and critical: it sees throughout Scripture its “political potential . . . for cultural criticism and re-creation” ([x-ref] 137).

Elsewhere, therefore, Yoder calls biblical realism “holistic.”19

The Centrality and Lordship of Jesus

For Yoder the central theme of the Bible is not a theological concept or ethical principle, such as justification by faith or liberation, but the saving acts of God in Jesus ([x-ref] 85) and, therefore, the story of Jesus ([x-ref] 114): Jesus the teacher, the exemplar, the Lord. “The issue [about the “normativeness” of Jesus] is whether Jesus Christ is Lord” ([x-ref] 62). To affirm Jesus as Lord is to make a commitment in how to read the Bible—in the interest of discipleship ([x-ref] 58), “under the claim of a liberating Lord calling us to be the servants of our neighbors” ([x-ref] 65), in order to extend “in a compatible way the process of conforming to the foundational events” of the New Testament story, just as the New Testament writers appealed to those foundational events ([x-ref] 105).

Thus “the story of Jesus is the canon within the Christian canon” ([x-ref] 115). Throughout all of his writings, Yoder is especially keen to emphasize Jesus’ rejection of domination and his embrace of non-violence, not as the manifestation of political apathy but precisely as the true politics, the politics of God. The reality of Jesus’ non-dominating lordship, therefore, functions for Yoder both as the fundamental datum of the New Testament and, consequently, as the fundamental hermeneutical principle of Christian scriptural interpretation. The “what” and the “how” of Yoder’s biblical interpretation coalesce in the affirmation of Jesus’ servant-lordship.

The Church: Called to be Public, Political Witness

Inasmuch as Jesus the crucified servant-Lord was not “apolitical,” neither can the church be. A summary of Yoder’s project can be found in Nancey Murphy’s words: “The moral character of God is revealed in Jesus’ vulnerable enemy love and renunciation of domination. Imitation of Jesus in this regard constitutes a social ethic.”20 The “politics of Jesus”—his way of being in the world—becomes the way of his disciples, the church. Or, in an apropos line, not from Yoder but from Hauerwas: “The church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic.”21

With this basic conviction about the church, Yoder is again fighting against two closely related tendencies within the Christian tradition, especially among Protestants: individualism and privatism, or quietism (being “apolitical”). For Yoder, we hear the word and do the word not primarily as individuals but as the church, as a community ([x-ref] 121). And we do so, not merely to receive our own personal comfort or assurance of salvation, but in order to be constituted as an alternative way of being in the world. Thus to hear the word truly is to be transformed into a community that practices the way of Jesus in new circumstances; the church is, therefore, a public, social, political entity—a witness to its Lord. The church is thereby inherently “missionary” (Yoder’s term), or missional, not merely in its proclamation, but also—indeed first of all—in its very being. This mission is rooted in God’s activity attested in the canon, which speaks against “all apoliticisms” ([x-ref] 131) and is itself “a book about politics” ([x-ref] 132)—about a new humanity, a “cosmos . . . shaken by the cross,” “a universe being reordered by the Word of the resurrection” ([x-ref] 135).

Although the foundational events of the church provide the fundamental shape of the church’s missional witness, the church’s faithful embodiment of those events—like the canonical documents themselves—is always occasional and contextual ([x-ref] 108–19). This is the meaning, for Yoder, of his favorite quote from the Puritan Robinson about “more light and truth.”22

•••

When one reads Yoder speaking about Scripture, one cannot help but be impressed at how sophisticated—even prescient—he was in identifying some of the main currents of contemporary biblical study and hermeneutics. His interests in the narrative character of Scripture, the significance of orality in the formation of the canon and the church, and the particularity and contingency of the biblical documents are all very much in vogue at this writing. Moreover, his passion for a pastoral, theological, and missional reading of the text that is aided by, but not enslaved to, critical methods anticipates the growing contemporary vitality of theological and missional interpretation among biblical scholars. At times in this volume we see foreshadows, for example, of James Dunn (on orality), of N.T. Wright (on the overarching biblical narrative), of Stephen Fowl (on theological interpretation), and of George Hunsberger (on missional hermeneutics).

This is not to say that every detail of Yoder’s approach—or even every major theme—can be taken over uncritically by us. Nevertheless, in provocative ways the themes we have identified in this book can—and, I would argue, should—offer significant guidance to us who read the Bible as Scripture, for discipleship, after Christendom. Richard Hays agrees, concluding that

Yoder’s hermeneutic represents an impressive challenge to the church to remain faithful to its calling of discipleship, modeling its life after the example of the Jesus whom it confesses as Lord. . . . Yoder’s vision offers a compelling account of how the New Testament might reshape the life of the church.23

To summarize the themes from this book that we have considered, we may point once again to the words of John Howard Yoder himself. Before his death, he dedicated To Hear the Word to Paul Minear and Hans-Ruedi Weber. Minear had been a professor of biblical theology at Yale. Known for his studies of biblical imagery and language, Minear also wrote an important book called The Bible and the Historian: Breaking the Silence about God in Biblical Studies. Weber was a prominent leader in the ecumenical movement, serving for three decades on the staff of the World Council of Churches, and the author of studies on the laity and on biblical interpretation in the life of the church, including The Book that Reads Me and The Cross: Tradition and Interpretation.

In the dedication, Yoder describes Minear and Weber as people “who have molded for a generation the straightforward ecumenical, missionary, and pastoral reading of Scripture.” Yoder’s tribute contains words that we may now apply to him. He guides us toward a truly ecclesial yet missional reading of Scripture, with a profoundly Anabaptist yet ecumenical and catholic spirit, in historically astute and literarily sensitive ways that are nonetheless “straightforward” and pastoral. Or, as he would himself say, he guides us toward a reading of Scripture that proceeds from and focuses on Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, Eum Sequamur; “Our Lamb has conquered; let us follow him.”

1. For the influence of Barth and Cullman on Yoder, see Earl Zimmerman, Practicing the Politics of Jesus: The Origin and Significance of John Howard Yoder’s Social Ethics (Telford, PA: Cascadia, 2007) 101–39.

2. For a fuller biographical sketch, see Mark Thiessen Nation, John Howard Yoder: Mennonite Patience, Evangelical Witness, Catholic Convictions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006) 1–29. I am grateful to him for reviewing a draft of this foreword.

3. The lecture was published as “The New Humanity as Pulpit and Paradigm,” pages 37–50 in Yoder’s For the Nations: Essays Evangelical and Public (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).

4. The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994 [orig. 1972]).

5. Joel B. Green, “The (Re)Turn to Theology,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 1 (2007) 1–3.

6. Using the language of the day, Yoder sometimes identified this approach as “biblical realism.” See the prefaces to each edition of The Politics of Jesus and the discussion below.

7. This is not to say that Yoder saw eye-to-eye with the entire Anabaptist tradition or with all of his contemporary Mennonites, as he himself stated on numerous occasions, sometimes in order to defend himself against charges of sectarianism. Mark Nation describes Yoder’s treatment of his tradition as “creative reworking” that might be called ecumenical, catholic, or neo-Anabaptist (see John Howard Yoder, 27–29).

8. I am here only repeating the charge of sectarianism leveled against John Howard Yoder and against my friend and colleague Stanley Hauerwas; I do not share it.

9. However, Mark Nation has kindly shared with me a copy of a Yoder lecture from 1973, “The Biblical Evaluation of Human Life,” that argued for a biblically inspired mandate for the Christian community to protect the fetus as one of the “defenseless.” Yoder also expressed appreciation for the gift of my own book, Abortion and the Early Church, especially because of the book’s connections between the early church’s pre-Constantinian pacifism and its opposition to abortion.

10. This obituary may now be found at http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/07/us/john-h-yoder-theologian-at-notre-dame-is-dead-at-70.html?sec=&spon=&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink.

11. Some pieces are edited versions of earlier presentations or essays; approximately half come from about a five-year period centering on 1980.

12. The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996.

13. The theme of the cross is not as pervasive in this volume of largely methodological essays as it is in Yoder’s major works, but many studies of Yoder rightly refer to his cross-centered ethic.

14. This discussion is necessarily limited in scope and is not intended to be an exhaustive synthesis. Still less is it a comprehensive study of Yoder’s hermeneutic. Other brief studies of his hermeneutic include Hays, Moral Vision, 239–53, and Michael G. Cartwright, Practices, Politics, and Performance: Toward a Communal Hermeneutic for Christian Ethics, Princeton Theological Monograph Series (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2006) 217–33, esp. 217–22.

15. At this point Yoder interestingly mentions ecological concerns, both for the care of the earth and for the human race, as biblical mandates clarified by the church’s departure (at long last) from neo-Platonism.

16. Yoder also distinguishes biblical realism from the biblical theology movement (chap. 12), arguing that biblical realism never neglects the particularity of texts in its quest to discern the biblical message. Yoder seems to see biblical realism’s successors in the work of Paul Ricoeur, James Sanders, and Brevard Childs, and more generally in journals such as Horizons in Biblical Theology and Ex Auditu: An International Journal of Theological Interpretation of Scripture ([x-ref] 184 n. 10).

17. For a succinct summary of biblical realism according to Yoder, see the preface to the first edition of The Politics of Jesus, reprinted in the second edition (p. x). The description of it here, however, is taken primarily from various essays in the present volume.

18. These terms should not be understood as suggesting an ecclesiology that is characterized by either colonialism or Christendom, both of which Yoder would reject. “Aggressive,” for example, means something like “passionate” rather than practicing some sort of domination, which for Yoder was the exact antithesis of Jesus’ way.

19. John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution: A Companion to Bainton (Elkhart, IN: Mennonite Co-op Bookstore, 1963), cited in Cartwright, Practices, 217.

20. “John Howard Yoder’s Systematic Defence of Christian Pacifism,” 45–68, in The Wisdom of the Cross: Essays in Honor of John Howard Yoder, eds. Stanley Hauerwas et al. (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1999) 48.

21. Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Social Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983) 99 (emphasis added).

22. Yoder comments that this is a “much-abused” line ([x-ref] 137).

23. Hays, Moral Vision, 253.