Preface

This short story is dedicated to John Howard Yoder, a professor at Notre Dame for 30 years, known as a Mennonite and pacifist, and extremely well-respected from every corner of the Christian tradition. Yoder grew up in the Midwest and got his PHD in Basel, Switzerland in the 50s. At the height of the Vietnam Era, his Politics of Jesus [1972] became intensely popular in both conservative evangelical and liberal Protestant circles because of his unique dedication to both the authority of the Bible and nonviolent resistance. It was listed in the Top 10 Greatest works of Theology of the 20th century by Christianity Today Magazine [#5]. More and more, Evangelicals are finding Yoder's voice refreshing, demanding and illuminating for what it means to be faithful to the crucified and risen Lord in this ever-changing world. Evangelicals, noted by scholars for their anti-intellectual tendencies , should weigh and discern his voice, but need not agree with everything he writes.

In the introduction of the last book published before his death in 1997, a series of essays entitled For The Nations, Yoder wrote, ‘The themes I have been called to treat over the years overlap and interlock, each of them gaining significance from its connection to the others.’ What follows is my attempt to faithfully display Yoder’s thought, with all of its overlapping and interlocking, in a fictional dialogue format, showing how these themes connect and gain massive significance in our current North American context in the last half of 2008. This, in my opinion, is the best way to attempt to systematically portray both Yoder’s unique theology and method in a social location dominated by the language of mainstream Evangelicalism. Of course, much of what follows is autobiographical, borrowing [knowingly and unknowingly] from snippets of many conversations I’ve had over the past few years since I first encountered the writings of Anabaptists like Yoder and McClendon. The story is highly contextual. It attempts to portray the kinds of passionate conversations that erupt when conservative evangelical patterns of thought and action are confronted by the works of John Howard Yoder. Hopefully, what follows will reveal, holistically, the implications and confrontations that Yoder’s thought has had and will have on those, like me, paddling upstream from the turbulent waters of ‘conservative evangelicalism.’