Stanley Hauerwas presents Third Annual Yoder Dialogue

“John Howard Yoder sought to do nothing less than help Catholic Christianity rediscover itself in water that flows from the left wing of the Reformation,” said theologian Stanley Hauerwas. Hauerwas’ presentation, the 3rd annual John Howard Yoder Dialogues on Nonviolence, Religion and Peace, emphasized how Yoder’s Christology, though rooted in Mennonite tradition, has much broader implications for the Catholic tradition and Christian theology.

As a touchstone for understanding Yoder’s Christology, Hauerwas discussed a series of lectures Yoder delivered to young seminarians at Goshen Biblical Seminary during the 1960s and 1970s. When Hauerwas first became interested in the lectures in the 1980s, they were only available as mimeographed sheets sold at the seminary. Those collected lectures have now become Yoder’s Preface to Theology: Christology and Theological Method, which is being published by the American Academy of Religion with an Introduction by Hauerwas.

Like his teacher Karl Barth, Yoder always had a Christological focus, and he refused to separate Christology from discipleship. As Hauerwas observed, “Preface to Theology grew out of Yoder’s fundamental opinion that Christian discipleship was an open and respectful awareness of particular historical identity.” Yoder consistently taught that the Gospel must have implications for social ethics and modern life, a theme revived for modern Catholics by the Second Vatican Council, especially in its document, “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.”

In his book, The Politics of Jesus (1972), Yoder contended that the political implications of the Gospel could not be ignored and that we should understood Christ as “the radical rabbi Jesus.” “The emphasis on nonviolence is not nearly so prominent in Preface to Theology as it is in The Politics of Jesus,” Hauerwas noted, “yet I think of the two books as being of a piece with each other. Reading them together adds strength to both books.”

“Yoder was convinced that one of the reasons that Christians had lost the ability to read the Scriptures was due to the attempt to make Christianity intelligible without the Jews,” Hauerwas continued. “That (Christian) creeds do not mention the promise to Israel may be one of the reasons that Christians have developed a forgetfulness toward not only the Jews but also toward a major part of our own Scripture — the Old Testament.”

Hauerwas’ remarks to a capacity crowd attending the third Yoder dialogues had all the hallmarks of a homecoming address. The Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at the Divinity School at Duke University was a member of the theology faculty at Notre Dame from 1970 to 1984. Yoder, a Mennonite theologian and proponent of Christian nonviolence, was also a member of Notre Dame’s theology faculty from the late 1970s until his death in December, 1997. Yoder was a founding fellow of the Kroc Institute where he initiated courses on war, law and ethics and a Kroc-ROTC discussion group which continues to the present day.

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