John Howard Yoder is amongst the prominent Christian scholars, who have argued that the ethics of Christian pacifism finds its foundation in the Hebrew bible. Himself, a pacifist from the Mennonite tradition, he was arguably America’s most influential pacifist theologian of the twentieth century.
Michael Cartwright and Peter Ochs are among a growing number of scholars who have studied Yoder’s huge corpus of writing. They discern an increasing insistence on the Jewishness of Jesus as his scholarship matured, together with an oft repeated thesis regarding the continuity between Old and New Testament pacifist ethical teaching.1
Now deceased, Yoder was also a man, who, like so many before him and since, has been publicly exposed as a serial sexual harasser of women. That this inexcusable behavior is without doubt sexual violence, reveals the egregiously fallen nature of Yoder’s own ethical practice.
Yoder draws two important conclusions from the Genesis myth narrative.
The question is; should such a person, however brilliant a theologian, continue to be read and taught in relation to pacifist biblical ethics? Should Yoder having failed appallingly at the ethics he proscribed, be forever banned from the public square. These are questions raised by Mark Oppenheimer in his New York Times article about Yoder’s fall from grace.
My own position is that a full knowledge of Yoder’s sexual misconduct toward women, in a bazaar and entirely unwelcome twist, adds weight to some theological arguments advanced by him in his extensive scholarly career. He becomes in effect a sad contemporary exemplar of the fallen-ness of man.
Of particular interest here is the fall of man narrative in Genesis 3:1-24. John Nugent, another fine scholar and Yoder devotee, shows that Yoder draws two important conclusions from this foundational myth narrative.2 First, a more commonly held theological position, that in some distant mythic past, humanity lived in perfect harmony with God and all the rest of creation, in a Garden of Eden like existence. This all goes pear-shaped, however, when Adam & Eve fall foul of God’s requirement not eat the fruit from a mysterious wisdom tree in the garden of paradise. Noncompliant, they’re expelled from the garden, and it is not long before violence explodes with the brother on brother killing of Abel by Cain, (Genesis 4:1-16.)
Everything that ensues after the fall, including state sponsored violence, directly results from this fallen state of being.
Yoder’s thesis is that everything that ensues after the fall, including state sponsored violence, directly results from this fallen state of being. And effectively, a return to a nonviolent paradise is the repeated promise that plays out in the rest of the bible, including the endgame of the pacifist Galilean God with skin on man, Jesus.
The second point; which is of equal interest, is that Yoder explores the idea that the pre-fall era was a time of matriarchy? Yes, that’s right, the ladies were running the whole shebang, in ‘matriarchy of peace.’ Adam, who represents men, received his marching orders from Eve, not vice versa, (Genesis 3:6.)
Of course Yoder, fully conversant with the use of myth in scripture, is not trying to set forth an undisputable historical fact here. That kind of literalist malarkey was not part of his modus operandi. Rather, he is embracing what myth in scripture intends, that is to inspire spiritual insight. Enduring myths, like the fall narrative, endure precisely because they consistently facilitate spiritual imagination at multiple layers of depth.
If one follows Yoder’s theological musings, using the two points made above. You end up with the inescapable conclusion that patriarchy, where the violent lad’s takeover, is as much a part of the fallen world we all inhabit, as state sponsored violence.
Did Yoder arrive at this position? Probably not, more likely, he became as his considerable fame took off, a self-justifying patriarchal power broker. Most feminist theologians assess him as definitively wedded to patriarchy.3
Who knows? Had he been able to cast aside the allure of fallen patriarchy, his reputation, shattered by the harm he inflicted on numerous women, might have been saved. Then again, in this fallen, patriarchal, violent world, there are no guarantees, because even the best intentioned pacifists are fallen too.
- Michael G. Cartwright and Peter Ochs, “Introduction,” in The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited: John Howard Yoder, ed. Michael G. Cartwright and Peter Ochs (Grand Rapids, Mich: Wm. B Eerdmans Publishing, 2003), 1-29. [↩]
- John C. Nugent, “THE POLITICS OF YHWH: John Howard Yoder’s Old Testament Narration and Its Implications for Social Ethics” Journal of Religious Ethics 39, no. 1 (2011): 75-79. [↩]
- Karen V. Guth, Christian Ethics at the Boundary: Feminism and Theologies of Public Life (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2015), 23-26. [↩]