UNITED STATES
The Other Journal

by David Cramer & Jenny Howell & Jonathan Tran & Paul Martens on Monday, July 7, 2014

In the years following, some say preceding, the 1972 publication of his monumental The Politics of Jesus, the celebrated Christian ethicist John Howard Yoder emotionally manipulated and sexually violated numerous women.[1] Yoder’s conduct troubles us on multiple levels. Because these behaviors strike us as profoundly dissonant with the ways in which his thought has deeply influenced us, we spent the last year attempting to find out all we could about his actions and to reflect theologically on what we found. In this essay, we first report what we know about Yoder’s manipulations and violations and their histories at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary and the University of Notre Dame. Next we consider inconsistencies and consistencies between those behaviors and his theology. Finally, we utilize one aspect of his…