"The value of Yoder’s work is that it lingers." I can think of no better reason for this book of essays on the work of John Howard Yoder than Chris Huebner’s observation that Yoder’s work "lingers."1 "Lingering" describes the effect that Yoder’s work has or should have on anyone that takes the time required to read John’s work. He "lingers" because Yoder is not easily received. He forces you to see the world differently. He lingers because after you have read Yoder, you are not asking the same questions you asked before you read Yoder. For example, you no longer think questions like "What is the relation between Christ and culture?" to be helpful.2 Of course that is also the reason reading Yoder is difficult. Who wants to be forced into new habits of speech? The acquisition of new habits, particularly when we are possessed by habits that seem to be working well enough, is never easy. Gaining new habits can be and usually is very painful. I do not believe John Howard Yoder meant to inflict pain on anyone, but he realized that what he cared about could not be considered just "another position." I often think there was an appropriate correspondence between John’s personality and his account of Christian nonviolence. Personally and intellectually Yoder took and continues to take some getting used to. John often seemed as personally austere as his prose. He was never tempted to win an argument by being "charming." You had and have to work if you want to understand him. John was a theologian all the way down, but he was one with the analytical skills of the most demanding philosopher. Advocate of nonviolence he certainly was, but that did not make Yoder "soft." Rather, it made him one of the most vigorous minds I have encountered. Yet just as he insisted that the gospel was not the gospel until it had been received, he worked hard to help us understand that such reception is never finished. That is why I believe this book is so important. This is not just a book of essays about the work of John Howard Yoder; this book represents the kind of work necessary if we are to receive the work of John Howard Yoder. That most of the essays in this book have been written by Mennonites is appropriate. But the Mennonite character of this book could give the impression that Mennonites are more likely to understand Yoder than those outside that community. As Mennonites know, however, Yoder is no less a challenge to Mennonites than he is to non-Mennonites. Because Yoder is equally challenging to everyone, non-Mennonites should not let the Mennonite "ownership" of Yoder deter them from reading this book. The significance of Yoder’s work is beginning to be acknowledged by those who do not come from the Mennonite world. Romand Coles’ recent article, "The Wild Patience of John Howard Yoder: ‘Outsiders’ and the ‘Otherness of the Church,’" is a wonderful example of the kind of attention John’s work is beginning to receive from those who are not Mennonite or professing Christians.3 That someone like Coles, a political theorist, can write so insightfully about Yoder makes clear that Yoder is beginning to have an effect in the "wider world."4 That "effect," as these essays exemplify, is to show that Yoder cannot be understood as a "representative Mennonite" because the politics of Jesus is not something peculiar to Mennonites or even Christians. This is a reminder that while it is quite appropriate to describe Yoder’s work as a "legacy" (as an early subtitle of this book did), such a description can suggest an attempt to domesticate what Yoder was trying to teach us. As I suggested above, Yoder was a "wild thing," not easily tamed. To engage Yoder forces us to learn to live out of control. We cannot, for example, fit him into our normal disciplinary categories. As the essays in this book suggest, he was at the very least an extraordinary reader of Scripture, a historical theologian, an ethicist, as well as a social commentator. Yet even these categories fail to do him justice because he brought a mental power to everything he did that made it impossible to label him. For example, recently I taught the first seminar on John Howard Yoder I have ever offered. The next year I taught a seminar on Ludwig Wittgenstein. Students who participated in both seminars were convinced that somewhere along the way Yoder must have read Wittgenstein. I assured them that Yoder rarely saw the need to read philosophy and, I suspect, he never read Wittgenstein. That he did not see the need to read philosophy (or Wittgenstein) could well be understood as one of the lessons you could learn from Wittgenstein, who was intent on helping us unlearn mistakes made all the more powerful by being given philosophical legitimation. The operative word for Wittgenstein and Yoder is "need." Yoder was not anti-philosophical, but he saw no reason to pursue philosophy in the interest of theory. Rather he read what he thought crucial to meet the task at hand. Even though I am sure Yoder never read Wittgenstein, I do think they are in many ways quite similar. Both are what I call "big-brained people." They simply possessed extraordinary intellectual powers. Yet their intellectual power was not what made Wittgenstein and Yoder different. More important was their equal determination to focus their lives and their work on the "important stuff." They were "severe," refusing to be distracted by issues they thought less than serious. As a result anyone encountering them now cannot help but find the clarity of their thought frightening just to the extent that they force us to challenge our cherished sentiments and conventions. Wittgenstein has been dead for fifty years, but the significance of his work is only beginning to be received. I suspect it will take us at least that long to understand what John Howard Yoder has to teach us. But this book is surely a good start for anyone who desires to understand what Yoder was up to. We will need to return time and again to what John wrote. We will need to do so because as with any significant thinker, changing circumstances help future generations to see what may well have been hidden to those who first encounter the kind of work Yoder produced. The "unsystematic" or occasional character of Yoder’s thought, moreover, will invite continuing attempts to see how it is all connected. A Yoder sentence—like a Wittgensteinian epigram—is an invitation to think further and harder than any one person may be able to do. To think "after Yoder" cannot be done alone; rather, just as nonviolence is not an ethic for heroes, so reading Yoder is best done in conversation with others. We are, therefore, fortunate that so many of the essays in this book put Yoder into conversation with interlocutors that he did not specifically engage. For example, Peter Blum explores how there may be some quite unexpected similarities between Yoder and Derrida. It must surely be the case that the significance of patience for Derrida is not readily apparent unless he is read through Yoder’s eyes. Blum rightly does not argue that Derrida and Yoder are in fundamental agreement, particularly about nonviolence, but he does help us see why recognition of difference can be understood as a form of patience. Equally interesting is Chris Huebner’s use of Paul Virilio’s work for helping us understand Yoder. Some years ago I was directing David Toole’s dissertation, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse.5 David had read Michel Foucault long before he encountered Yoder. I was insistent, however, that he read Yoder. After reading Yoder, particularly reading Yoder after Foucault, David reported that he was unsure if there was anything in Foucault you could not learn from Yoder. It may be the case, however, that the significance of Yoder’s work is best appreciated after having read Foucault. Huebner read Yoder before reading Virilio but as his essay wonderfully exhibits, Virilio’s understanding of the "violent logic of speed" helps us see the significance of how Yoder forces us to understand the violence that grips our lives. Particularly important is Huebner’s contention that Yoder’s commitment to pacifism can be obscured by those who assume we already know what peace is. Too often the order that shapes our fundamental habits, an order that may appear "peaceful," is an order that successfully hides from us the violence constituting the everyday. Because those committed to nonviolence must expose the violence called peace, they at times cannot help but appear as "disturbers of the peace." Exposure of the invisibility of the violence that grips our lives requires first and foremost that truth be said. That’s a "saying" that may appear, particularly to those who benefit from the hidden violence, to be anything but "passive." Alain Epp Weaver therefore rightly draws our attention to the similarities and differences between Yoder and (another disturber of the "peace") Edward Said. Reading Epp Weaver’s essay, you cannot help but have the sense that this was a comparison waiting to happen. Epp Weaver’s suggestion that Said’s appropriation of exile can be understood as a "distant analogy" to Yoder’s vision of exile in Jeremiah hopefully will be the beginning of an ongoing exploration of these themes.6 Never far from the surface of Epp Weaver’s essay is how John Howard Yoder’s work forces Christians to explore how we are and are not similar to Judaism. I think no aspect of Yoder’s work more important than the ongoing discussion of how he forces Christians to reconnect with the people of the promise. The question of how Yoder’s work repositions Christian understanding of Judaism cannot be separated from how he provides different reading strategies for the interpretation of Scripture. We are, therefore, very fortunate to have the essays by Harink and Swartley in this volume. Harink proposed that a reading of Paul in the light of Yoder’s stress on discipleship hopefully will invite others to explore Yoder’s significance for interpreting other biblical sources. Of course, Harink’s essay also is important for questions raised in Epp Weaver’s and Duane Friesen’s essays concerning the implications of Yoder’s work for helping Christians understand our relation to Judaism. Swartley’s suggestion that Yoder’s reading of the Jubilee be understood as a "performance" strikes me as particularly suggestive. The importance of the notion of performance is currently being explored in a number of disciplines.7 Swartley’s essay may even entice some who do not know Yoder to begin to read Yoder readings of Scripture not as "just another opinion" but as an invitation to enter into another world. Anyone who engages Yoder cannot avoid historiographical questions. Yoder not only forces us to consider what we mean when we say "history" but also how history is to be done. The essays by Sider and Heilke are particularly important not only because they raise serious questions about Yoder’s characterization of "Constantinianism," but because they also help us see—if we are to think "with" or "after" Yoder—that the hard and detailed historical work is unavoidable. Heilke and Sider remind us that questions about how history is done are inseparable from what politics that history is to serve. James Reimer’s attempt to provide a more positive theology of civil institutions, and in particular the law, is the kind of investigation Sider’s and Heilke’s questions about Constantinianism necessarily open up. I think Yoder would have found these attempts to provide a more nuanced understanding of Constantinianism promising as a first step to spell out how the church is to serve the nations. The essays by Sider and Heilke build on Gerald Schlabach’s important paper, "Deuteronomic or Constantinian: What is the Most Basic Problem for Christian Social Ethics?" that appeared in The Wisdom of the Cross: Essays in Honor of John Howard Yoder.8 Schlabach’s essay in the present volume continues his exploration of the theological politics necessary to sustain the exilic community that seems so central to Yoder’s account of the church. To suggest, as Schlabach does, that Augustine can be a crucial conversation partner in that task will no doubt appear to be counter-intuitive to many Anabaptists. Yet Schlabach’s reading of Augustine indicates an important direction that those persuaded by Yoder must go—that is, to read again the Catholic tradition in the hope of discovering that it holds resources there we need if we are to sustain the kind of commitments so central to Yoder’s work.9 I am not suggesting, of course, that Yoder can be characterized as having anything so grand as a "position." Harry Huebner’s essay is a wonderful reminder that we cannot separate the occasional character of Yoder’s work from the material convictions that shaped his work. Recent developments associated with postmodernism may make the way Yoder worked seem less odd; but as Huebner rightly argues, the way Yoder worked was first and foremost determined by his understanding of the gospel. Therefore the kind of questions Finger asks about Yoder’s work are perfectly appropriate, even as we need to be careful to acknowledge that Yoder’s hesitancy to "do" theology "straight" was not accidental. Rachel Reesor-Taylor is quite right to suggest that there was a mischievous side to John when he dealt with some of the standard Christian theological loci. Yoder’s mischievousness, however, did not derive from a cavalier attitude about doctrine. It is true Yoder seldom asked himself if his views on this or that doctrine were "orthodox." To ask if you are or are not orthodox from Yoder’s perspective would only reproduce the assumption that doctrines are sets of propositions. In contrast, Yoder was concerned whether the doctrine or motif did work that needed to be done if we were to be faithful witnesses. His "mischievousness," therefore, reflected his desire not to say more than needs to be said. Biesecker-Mast may well be right that for Yoder the desire for Christian unity cannot begin by privileging "orthodoxy," but neither can it be assumed on Yoder-like grounds that the resources God has made available to the church in the past do not remain significant resources for the challenges that currently face the church. I began this quick run through of these essays by observing how useful they are for putting Yoder into conversation with figures he did not explicitly engage in his work. The essays by Biesecker-Mast, Doerksen, and Hovey explore the relationship between Yoder and someone that he clearly at times engaged at least implicitly and sometimes quite explicitly: me. I am of course grateful that these authors find it useful to analyze the similarities and differences between myself and Yoder. Yet I find such comparisons embarrassing because I simply do not think my work has the scholarly status or conceptual power of Yoder’s extraordinary work. I certainly do not think it appropriate for me to use this introduction to respond to Biesecker-Mast’s, Doerksen’s, and Hovey’s extremely informative, at least for me, account of my appropriation of Yoder. But I do hope readers will find, as I did, that their accounts are helpful for raising issues that are more important than trying to understand in what way Yoder and I may differ. I hate introductions to collections of essays that summarize what each essay is alleged to be about. If such summaries are any good, you always wonder why you need to read the essays. So I have not tried to summarize the essays in this book, but rather to whet the reader’s appetite for discovering the interconnections between these essays and ways those connections suggest how fruitful John Howard Yoder’s work is for helping us think well "after Yoder." I believe these essays help us understand why Yoder’s work "lingers." And why is that? Because this most unsystematic of theologians pulls you into a network of connections that force you to rethink what you thought you had settled. To read one essay by Yoder usually means finding you need to read another essay, and before you know it, you discover that Yoder has taken over your life. Of course, John would say he has not taken over your life. Rather, if his work is helpful, it means that Jesus, not John Howard Yoder, has taken over your life. The lessons Yoder has to teach are hardwon because they so challenge our endemic laziness—a laziness that too easily accepts the assumption that the way things are is the way things have to be. The excellence of these essays, written largely by Mennonites, is a witness to the community that made Yoder’s work possible, a community that at least has a memory that its members can never rest easy with the way things are. John Howard Yoder cannot be understood without the background of the faithful witness of his Anabaptist forebears. It is, therefore, appropriate that these essays representing the beginning of the hard work of receiving John Howard Yoder are by "his people." Hopefully, however, these chapters are only the beginning of the many we will need to help us understand the what and how John Howard Yoder has to teach us. Only a beginning—but what a wonderful one.10 —Stanley Hauerwas Notes 1. Huebner not only makes this observation in his paper in this volume, but this description of Yoder’s work is the heart of Huebner’s dissertation, No Handles on History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 2002, Ph.D. dissertation). 2. I am, of course, alluding to Yoder’s now famous critique of H. Richard Niebuhr’s book, Christ and Culture. Yoder’s essays circulated for years in mimeographed form. That essay, "How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned: A Critique of Christ and Culture," is now published in Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 31-90. This book also has essays by Glen Stassen and Diane Yeager. James Gustafson has responded to Yoder’s critique, characterizing it as "laced with more ad hominem arguments and fortified with more gratuitous footnotes than anything I ever read by scholars in the field of Christian ethics." Gustafson acknowledges that he has not read the published form of the article, but I suspect that even if he had, he would not change his opinion. I call attention to Gustafson’s reaction to indicate the challenge Yoder presents to those who do not want to change the way questions are asked. Gustafson’s characterization of Yoder can be found in his "Preface: An Appreciative Interpretation," in H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (San Francisco: Harper/San Francisco, 2001), xxiii. 3. Romand Coles, "The Wild Patience of John Howard Yoder: ‘Outsiders’ and the ‘Otherness of the Church,’" Modern Theology 18:3 (July 2002): 305-332. 4. I think, however, it is not accidental that Coles and Thomas Heilke are both political theorists. They are able to see the significance of Yoder’s work because they have been trained to explore what political practices are required if we are to be able not only to survive but to flourish. Heilke earned his Ph.D. at Duke and Coles is in the Political Science Department at Duke, so some may think their interest in Yoder to be a "happy accident." Of course Heilke’s and Coles’ fascination with Yoder is a "happy accident," but an "accident" that would not have happened without their training as political theorists. 5. David Toole, Waiting for Godot in Savajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse (London: SCM, 2001). Toole’s book was originally published by Westview Press in 1998. 6. Yoder’s essays on Christianity and Judaism have been published in a volume ed. Michael Cartwright and Peter Ochs entitled The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). This book also contains fascinating critiques of Yoder by Cartwright and Ochs. Rosalee Velloso Ewell’s dissertation, The Politics of Scripture: Jewish and Christian Interpretations of Jeremiah (Duke University, 2003, Ph.D. dissertation) is a very important study of this aspect of Yoder’s work. 7. See, for example, James Fodor and Stanley Hauerwas, "Performing Faith: The Peaceable Rhetoric of God’s Church," in Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry: New Perspectives, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 381-414. 8. Gerald Schlabach, "Deuteronomic or Constantinian: What is the Most Basic Problem for Christian Social Ethics?" in The Wisdom Of The Cross: Essays in Honor of John Howard Yoder, ed. Stanley Hauerwas, Chris K. Huebner, Harry J. Huebner, and Mark Thiessen Nation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 449-471. 9. Schlabach, of course, had begun exploring this reading of Augustine in his For the Joy Set Before Us: Augustine and Self-Denying Love (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001). 10. I am indebted to Alex Sider for his critical comments of an earlier draft of this introduction. A Mind Patient and Untamed orders:
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