We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers...against spiritual wickedness in high places. —Ephesians 6:12This small but important book by Hendrik Berkhof ushered in a wave of studies on the powers spoken of in the New Testament, profoundly influencing William Stringfellow, Jacques Ellul, Marva Dawn, Walter Wink, and many others. John Howard Yoder brought it to an English-speaking audience for the first time in this translation, and drew from ...

The ambitious and accessible essays collected in this volume were presented by John Howard Yoder during an extensive visit to South America in 1966. Reflecting and also subverting the acknowledged "faddish" attempt to address the revolutionary nature of Christianity, these lectures provide an illuminating snapshot of Yoder's vibrant initial encounter with Latin American Christianity. In these lectures, he thematically addresses the shape of the free church, the Christian practice of peace,...

Our purpose is to analyze whether it is truly the case that a Christian pacifist position rooted not in pragmatic or psychological but in Christological considerations is thereby irrelevant to the social order.-John Howard YoderThese words by John Howard Yoder set the course of his pathbreaking treatise, The Christian Witness to the State. Yoder's novel contribution to the debate concerning the church's and the Christian's calling is his starting point. He insists that Chr...

Big business makes big money selling a phony notion of what we want and need as sexual people. Ads insist that certain products will make us more sexually appealing. But what we really want and need is true intimacy—the knowledge that we matter to another person and are loved for who we are. We all are sexual beings, all of our lives, and relate to each other sexually all the time. God marvelously made us this way. Using the metaphor of sexuality as a good gift from God, this book offers C...

In A Pacifist Way of Knowing: John Howard Yoder's Nonviolent Epistemology, editors Christian Early and Ted Grimsrud gather the scattered writings of Yoder on the theme of the relationship between gospel, peace, and human ways of knowing. In them, they find the beginnings of a pacifist theology of knowledge that rejects strategies of empire while at the same time avoids a self-defeating relativism.

Binding and loosing, baptism, eucharist, multiplicity of gifts, and open meeting; these five New Testament practices were central in the life of the early Christian community. Some of them are still echoed in the practice of the church today. But the full social, ethical, and communal meaning of the original practices has often been covered by centuries of ritual and interpretation.John Howard Yoder, in his inimitably direct and discerning style, uncovers the original meaning of th...

Readers will discover that it is not possible to disengage John Howard Yoder's practice of ecumenical dialogue from his vision of the church. Yoder's approach to ecumenical dialogue correlates with his conception of the faithfulness of the church. His vision of the church poses challenges for Christians of all communions because he calls both for disciplined dialogue and for faithful servanthood that renders the confession of Jesus Christ's lordship meaningful.This collection of 17...

John Howard Yoder went to Europe after the Second World War as a young volunteer. Yoder worked as an aide in a children's home in Elsace, France and completed his doctorate under Karl Barth in Basel, Switzerland. Because of his incomparably clear and sharp thinking he quickly became one of the most sought after speakers on pacifism at seminars as he worked towards an Anabaptist renewal of the church.In this context Yoder succeeded in reopening the theological debate on Christians a...

"Of very few people can it be legitimately said that their work fundamentally reconfigured the landscape of two theological disciplines. But if there is anyone in recent memory who would be worthy of such an accolade, it is John Howard Yoder. The two disciplines are, of course, theological ethics and biblical studies--though Yoder would cringe at their separation, and his work was both explicitly and implicitly a prolonged exercise in maintaining their indissoluble union. For him, to hear ...

Many Christians have become increasingly sensitive to the destructiveness of war. They are recognizing war's limited ability as a public policy instrument. They are acknowleding the social, economic, and spiritual consequences of preparing to wage war. These concerns have begun to revive the conscience of the church in new ways.This text contends that peacemaking is essential to Christian discipleship. It is the vocation of the church as a whole. Moving beyond the traditional debat...

John Howard Yoder helps answer the age-old question—What would you do if someone was attacking your grandmother, husband, wife, daughter, or son? Yoder provides a variety of responses to this classic question: his own thorough ethical analysis along with the answers given by other writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Dale Brown, and Dale Aukerman and a variety of real-life stories of people who have discovered alternative responses to violence.

Between 1971 and 1996 the late John Howard Yoder (1927-1997) wrote a series of ten essays revisiting the Jewish-Christian schism in which he argued that, properly understood, Jesus did not reject Judaism, Judaism did not reject Jesus, and the Apostle Paul's universal mandate for the salvation of the nations is best understood not as a product of Hellenization, but rather in the context of his Jewish heritage.This posthumous collection of essays is arguably his most ambitious projec...