Wikipedia Deep Dive

John Howard Yoder

12 min read

Here is a theologian who wrote one of the most influential books on Christian ethics of the twentieth century, a man who argued that the entire point of following Jesus was to reject violence and embrace a radical, self-sacrificing love. He spent his career teaching that Christians must never return evil for evil, that they must be willing to suffer rather than cause suffering. And yet this same man sexually abused more than one hundred women over the course of two decades.

John Howard Yoder's story is not just a tale of hypocrisy. It's a window into how institutions protect their stars, how ideas can be separated from the people who hold them, and how the gap between what we preach and what we practice can grow into a chasm wide enough to swallow entire communities.

The Making of a Pacifist Theologian

Yoder was born on December 29, 1927, near Smithville, Ohio, into the Mennonite tradition. The Mennonites are one of the historic peace churches, Christian denominations that have rejected warfare and violence since the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. They trace their origins to the Anabaptist movement, a radical wing of the Reformation that insisted on adult baptism, separation from state power, and a literal reading of Jesus's commands to love enemies and turn the other cheek.

To understand what Yoder would later write, you need to understand this heritage. The Mennonites were persecuted across Europe for centuries. They refused to swear oaths, serve in armies, or participate in the coercive machinery of government. They believed the church should be a visible community of committed disciples, distinct from the surrounding society, not a default identity you inherited at birth along with your citizenship.

Yoder studied under Harold S. Bender at Goshen College, a Mennonite institution in Indiana. He then traveled to Switzerland to earn his doctorate at the University of Basel, where he studied under some of the most important Christian thinkers of the twentieth century. Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian who had led Christian resistance to Nazi ideology, was among his teachers. So were Oscar Cullmann, a New Testament scholar, and Karl Jaspers, the existentialist philosopher. This was an extraordinary education, one that would equip Yoder to translate his Mennonite convictions into language that mainstream Christian theologians could engage with.

After the Second World War, before completing his doctorate, Yoder went to Europe to help direct relief efforts for the Mennonite Central Committee. The war had devastated European Mennonite communities. Yoder was instrumental in reviving them. He saw firsthand what violence had done to the world, and he would spend the rest of his intellectual life arguing that there was a better way.

The Politics of Jesus

In 1972, Yoder published the book that would make his reputation: The Politics of Jesus. It would eventually be translated into at least ten languages and ranked by Christianity Today magazine as the fifth most important religious book of the twentieth century.

The book was an argument, but to understand it you need to know what Yoder was arguing against.

The dominant voice in American Christian ethics at the time belonged to Reinhold Niebuhr, a Protestant theologian who had championed what he called Christian realism. Niebuhr believed that while Jesus's teachings about love and nonviolence were beautiful ideals, they could not be directly applied to politics. The world was fallen, human nature was corrupted by sin, and nations had to use power, including violent power, to restrain evil. Christians might hold pacifism as a personal ethic, but responsible leaders had to make hard choices. Sometimes they had to bomb cities to defeat fascism. Sometimes they had to maintain nuclear arsenals to deter Soviet aggression.

Yoder thought this was a betrayal of everything Jesus stood for.

In The Politics of Jesus, Yoder went through the Gospel of Luke verse by verse, arguing that Jesus was not some otherworldly spiritual teacher unconcerned with politics. On the contrary, Jesus was making a political claim. He was announcing the arrival of a new kingdom, one that operated by different rules than the kingdoms of this world. Where earthly powers maintained order through violence and coercion, God's kingdom would operate through love, service, and voluntary community.

Jesus rejected the temptation to use force. When the crowds wanted to make him king by force, he withdrew. When Peter drew a sword to defend him, he told Peter to put it away. He allowed himself to be arrested, tortured, and executed rather than call down legions of angels to destroy his enemies.

And here was the crucial point: the resurrection was God's vindication of this path. By raising Jesus from the dead, God was saying that the way of the cross, the way of suffering love, was not a dead end. It was the way to victory. Christians who followed this path might suffer, might even die, but they too would be vindicated.

The Constantinian Shift

Yoder developed a historical argument to go along with his biblical one. He coined a term that would become influential in theological discussions: the Constantinian shift.

Constantine was the Roman emperor who, in the early fourth century, ended the persecution of Christians and eventually made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. For Yoder, this was not a triumph. It was a catastrophe.

Before Constantine, Christians were a minority sect, sometimes persecuted, always distinct from the surrounding society. They could not serve in the army because they refused to kill. They could not hold most government offices because these required participation in pagan religious rites. They were, as Yoder saw it, a socially subversive community. Their loyalty was to the Kingdom of God, not to any earthly kingdom.

After Constantine, everything changed. Now the church had power. Bishops became advisors to emperors. Christianity became the default religion you were born into, whether you wanted it or not. And Christians started fighting in armies, blessing wars, and using the machinery of the state to enforce religious conformity.

Yoder called this arrangement Constantinianism, and he saw it as a persistent temptation throughout Christian history. Whenever the church allied itself with political power, whenever it tried to rule society rather than serve it, it betrayed its calling. The medieval church with its inquisitions and crusades was Constantinian. The Protestant state churches of Europe were Constantinian. American civil religion, which wrapped Christianity in the flag and blessed the nation's wars, was Constantinian.

The opposite of Constantinianism, for Yoder, was not withdrawal from the world but a different kind of engagement. Christians should not try to take over society and impose their values by force. Instead, they should simply be the church: a visible community living by different rules, sharing goods, caring for the vulnerable, refusing to return evil for evil. By their very existence, they would witness to the possibility of an alternative way of life.

The Theologian as Predator

For decades, rumors circulated about John Howard Yoder's behavior with women.

The abuse was widespread and systematic. During the 1970s and 1980s, while teaching at what is now called the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Yoder sexually abused more than one hundred women. He was a married man, a professor, an authority figure. His victims were students, colleagues, women who had come to him for spiritual guidance.

The institutional response was, for years, no response at all. Board members became aware of the accusations. Nothing happened. Yoder was too important. He was the leading Mennonite theologian of his generation, the man who had put their tradition on the map of serious Christian thought. Who would challenge him?

The pattern broke in 1992 when a group of victims threatened to protest at a conference where Yoder was scheduled to speak. The president of Bethel College, where the conference was being held, rescinded Yoder's invitation. The student newspaper reported the story. One of the victims said Bethel was "the first institution in the church that has taken this seriously."

The Elkhart Truth, a local Indiana newspaper, published articles detailing the allegations. The Mennonite church finally initiated a disciplinary process that lasted from 1992 to 1996. But even this process was compromised. Yoder wrote an unpublished book during this period called The Case for Punishment in which he portrayed himself as the innocent victim of a conspiracy. When the disciplinary process concluded, the church urged Yoder "to use his gifts of writing and teaching."

He died on December 30, 1997, one day after his seventieth birthday. His obituary in The New York Times made no mention of the abuse allegations.

It would take another sixteen years before the Times ran an article about the scandal. By then, one of the complainants, Carolyn Heggen, had documented more than fifty women who said Yoder had touched them or made sexual advances. A support group for victims had formed. Historians were beginning to piece together the full scope of what had happened.

Institutional Reckoning

In October 2014, the governing board of the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary released a statement acknowledging what had happened:

As an AMBS Board, we lament the terrible abuse many women suffered from John Howard Yoder. We also lament that there has not been transparency about how the seminary's leadership responded at that time or any institutional public acknowledgement of regret for what went so horribly wrong.

The seminary committed to an ongoing process of accountability. In March 2015, they held a Service of Lament, Confession, and Hope.

The Mennonite Church USA commissioned historian Rachel Waltner Goossen to produce a complete report on Yoder's sexual abuse and the church's responses to it. Her report, published in January 2015, documented the full scope of the abuse and the institutional failures that allowed it to continue for so long.

The Mennonite church and Christian peace theologians continue to grapple with what this means. How do you engage with the work of a thinker whose life so thoroughly contradicted his teachings? Can The Politics of Jesus still be read as a serious work of theology, or is it forever tainted by the fact that its author was a predator who used his institutional power to harm vulnerable women?

Ideas and Their Holders

There is no easy answer to this question, and perhaps there shouldn't be.

Some argue that ideas must be evaluated on their own merits, independent of the people who hold them. The Pythagorean theorem is true regardless of what Pythagoras was like as a person. The argument that Jesus calls his followers to nonviolence is either convincing or it isn't, and Yoder's personal failures don't change the biblical texts he was interpreting.

Others argue that this kind of separation is impossible, especially in ethics. How can we take seriously a theology that claims the Christian community should be a visible witness of self-sacrificing love when its most famous proponent used his position to exploit and abuse? If Yoder couldn't live by his own teachings, maybe there was something wrong with those teachings, something that created a gap between lofty ideals and practical reality that allowed harm to flourish in the shadow of beautiful words.

There is also the question of institutional complicity. Yoder's abuse continued for decades in part because he was protected by his status. He was the star theologian, the one who had made the Mennonite tradition intellectually respectable. Challenging him would have meant challenging the institution's investment in his reputation. This is a pattern we see again and again across different institutions and different kinds of abuse. The powerful are protected. The victims are silenced. Everyone who knows anything convinces themselves that the greater good requires looking the other way.

Yoder himself had written about this dynamic in his critiques of Constantinianism. When the church allied itself with power, he argued, it compromised its witness. It became more concerned with maintaining its institutional position than with following Jesus. The irony is almost unbearable: the man who diagnosed this disease was himself a carrier, and the institutions that promoted his diagnosis were themselves infected.

The Legacy

John Howard Yoder left behind a vast body of work. Beyond The Politics of Jesus, he wrote dozens of books on Christian ethics, Anabaptist history, and the relationship between church and state. The Original Revolution collected essays on Christian pacifism. The Priestly Kingdom explored social ethics. Body Politics examined the practices of Christian community.

He brought traditional Mennonite convictions to a wider audience. Before Yoder, the peace churches were often seen as a quirky sectarian remnant, interesting historically but not relevant to mainstream Christian thought. After Yoder, pacifism had to be taken seriously as a live theological option. You might disagree with it, but you couldn't simply dismiss it.

His debate with Reinhold Niebuhr's legacy continued after his death. Peter Leithart, another theologian, wrote a book defending Constantine and arguing against Yoder's narrative of decline. A collection of essays titled Constantine Revisited brought together Christian pacifists to respond to Leithart's challenge. The conversation Yoder started continues.

But now that conversation happens in the shadow of what we know about the man who started it. Every citation of Yoder, every classroom discussion of The Politics of Jesus, every invocation of the Constantinian shift carries with it an asterisk. The theologian who wrote so beautifully about the church as a community of self-sacrificing love was himself a predator. The man who argued that Christians must never use coercive power over others used his institutional power to abuse more than a hundred women.

Perhaps this is the most important thing to learn from John Howard Yoder's life and work. Ideas are not self-executing. Believing the right things, even writing brilliantly about them, is not enough. The gap between what we profess and what we practice is where the damage happens. And institutions, even institutions dedicated to the highest ideals, can become complicit in the worst betrayals when they prioritize their stars over their victims.

The Politics of Jesus remains an important book. The questions Yoder raised about violence, power, and what it means to follow Jesus remain vital questions. But the story of the man who wrote it reminds us that having good answers is not the same as living them.