John Howard Yoder entered the chronology of my life at an age when I was too young fully to be aware of conversations that at later points would become central to my vocation. In my early grade school years, when my father John Lederach and uncle Ron Kennel were finishing course work at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, I remember some supper-table bantering about various classes and professors. One memory is particularly vivid: They seemed to have a deep respect or even awe for a particular classroom and a set of lectures that I understood later were the beginning drafts of The Politics of Jesus. I remember their laughing about how nervously they might ask John Howard a question. Inevitably if a query was posed, the response appeared to be, "That is not quite the right question." Then a new question would be provided that probed the subject matter at different level. A decade later, around the time my generation was beginning college studies, the name John Howard Yoder and his The Politics of Jesus were presented as fait accomplis. Here was work of such startling insight and importance that it not only recast the internal Anabaptist debates in social ethics and theology, it has done the same in wider Protestant and Catholic circles. For those of us born during or after the time when Yoder was working through his European postwar experience and embarking on his Ph.D. work, Earl Zimmerman’s Practicing the Politics of Jesus reads like novel. The cited correspondence, envisioning Yoder as a college and then a graduate student interacting with his mentors—the guiding figures of mid-century Anabaptism—and later doing the same with a range of key European theologians, casts a whole new light on the development of his thought. Zimmerman brings to life a creative mind, one that weaved seamlessly the history of Anabaptism, the relevance of lived experience—particularly during and after World War II—and direct interaction with the most important theological streams and theologians of Yoder’s time. Zimmerman provides insight into the dynamic process of how Yoder’s emerging thought developed. I found myself drawn into the narrative unpacking of how a book came to be written, the struggles and ideas that bounced off each other along the way, and ultimately the impact it had decades later. In my reading of Zimmerman’s book, The Politics of Jesus no longer felt like a well-fashioned product, an essay conclusively wrapping everything up, which of course was the way I absorbed it on my first reading a decade after its first drafts were penned. The journey behind the book came to life. The significance of Practicing the Politics of Jesus lies at several levels. The first contribution, and perhaps most important from the theological perspective for someone like me—a member of a rising younger generation of Mennonite scholars—emerges from the insight that Yoder’s contribution through Politics provided yet went beyond a less reactive and more ecumenically serious view of Anabaptism for the outside world. I think my generation always understood that Yoder helped recast internal Mennonite debates about social ethics, church polity, and engagement with the world. I think we intuited early on that he put our church history and views on a more equal platform of exchange with mainstream and dominant Christian traditions. What comes clear in Zimmerman’s book is the degree to which Yoder through Politics accomplished even more. He recast the very nature and framework of the questions and debate with just war proponents, social ethicists, and nonviolent strategists. This recasting made possible a new level of engagement, exchange, and dialogue that even now, some forty years later, provides all of us a platform of greater insight and understanding. The second contribution, perhaps most important from the standpoint of my vocation as peacebuilder, was the reminder that Yoder’s development of Politics created the guiding frame of reference for engagement in real world issues and situations by Anabaptist scholars, practitioners, and ethicists. For me, Politics did not ask whether I, and we as a wider Anabaptist church, should be engaged in the world of tough and inevitably messy social and political issues, but how as Mennonites we should engage, without retreat or rejection, the real challenges facing our local and global communities. I understand in new and more significant ways through Practicing the Politics of Jesus how Yoder’s framing of the questions and the platform he developed—a frame of reference we now take nearly for granted—emerged. Zimmerman’s book places us alongside both a great mind and an extraordinarily relevant and continuing set of challenges that include but certainly go beyond the arena of social ethics as discussed by those professionally engaged in the scholarly world. No matter our walk of life or professional journey, this volume plunges us into the wonderful challenge of how we bring the love of God as an active, incarnate, and relevant presence into our families, communities, and world. This journey does not simply represent the search for or the testing of the right words and beliefs. Practicing the Politics of Jesus requires something of our lives and life vocation. It asks us who we will be in this world, the ways we will find to be true to our deepest belief as Anabaptists and Christians, and how that translates into engagement with the real world challenges that surround us. —John Paul Lederach
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