To Hear the Word - Second Edition. John Howard Yoder
Given this reality, if John had lived longer, there is no doubt this collection would have evolved under several “fine tunings.” As it stands now, we have what we have. Hopefully readers will find clarification and needful edification in these essays.
Wipf and Stock Publishers
For further bibliographic assistance regarding John Howard Yoder’s approach to reading Scripture, we highly recommend:
Nation, Mark T. A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Writings of John Howard Yoder. Mennonite Quarterly Review, January 1997. This is also available from the London Mennonite Centre, 14 Shepherds Hill, Highgate, London N6 5AQ, England.
Foreword
Michael J. Gorman
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.