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John Howard Yoder, influential and widely respected Christian theologian, ended his earthly life December 30, 1997, just after celebrating his seventieth birthday at home with his gathered family. For the past 20 years an ecumenical member of Notre Dame's theology department (his own denomination was Mennonite), Yoder was a frequent lecturer in widely varied Christian settings in this country and around the world. He was well known and often mentioned by religion scholars of every stripe but generally regarded as a contrarian thinker rather than a member of any accepted establishment. This reputation fit well with his lifelong intention, which was to call majority Christian and Jewish thinkers to re-evaluate their stance in light of his own radically catholic (small c) standpoint. Central to this call was his advocacy of nonviolence both as Jesus' demand upon the heirs of the biblical legacy and as a policy to be judiciously recommended to others. For him Jesus' nonviolent pattern of life was as relevant to today's world as once it had been to ancient Palestine.

John Howard Yoder was born into a midwestern Mennonite family (in Smithville, Ohio, Dec. 29, 1927), who operated a chain of greenhouses, an origin that gave pattern to his life. Trained at home in Anabaptist pacifism, he nonetheless attended public schools and had hoped to enter Robert Maynard Hutchins's accelerated University of Chicago program for gifted students. Instead, at his parents' urging, he enrolled in denominational Goshen College, where he completed the four-year B.A. in two years, majoring in Bible, meanwhile editing the school paper, singing in the choir, and debating on the speech team. Remaining at Goshen an extra year, he received a master of theology degree from the college and then returned to Wooster, Ohio, to work for the family as a plant-growth researcher.

World War II with its total demands on all Americans had shaken Mennonites into a greater world awareness and a stronger sense of the distinctive role of the church. Thus the following year John Yoder joined a "peace team" traveling the country to speak in churches and youth assemblies for pacifism and to oppose the draft. Considering overseas Christian service, he enrolled for a year at the College of Wooster. At this time Yoder produced his first work of scholarship, a study of Amish Mennonite Meidung, or shunning, and its relation to civil lawsuits involving these traditional communities. This research foreshadowed his definitive later work regarding the relation of religion and the state.

In 1949 Yoder arrived in France to serve the combined Mennonite Central Committee in relief work that fed and housed children orphaned or displaced by the war. He became supervisor of two houses in Alsace-Lorraine that sheltered these children. There he met and in 1952 married a French Mennonite relief worker, Anne Marie Guth, to him, "Annie." Meanwhile, he wrote a small book, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Pacifism, that was published by the World Council of Churches in 1952, the first of a long stream of publications from his hand. At about the same period (1950-51), in his spare time he attended seminars at the University of Basel, studying with Karl Barth, Oscar Cullmann, Walter Eichrodt, and Walter Baumgartner. After official residency at Basel (1954-57) and publication of his dissertation, a historical study of sixteenth-century debates between Reformed and Anabaptist leaders, he received his doctorate in 1962.

During the Basel residency, the problem of war surfaced twice in Barth's lectures, and Yoder began the critique of Barth's position that later issued in Karl Barth and the Problem of War. (Characteristically, Yoder presented a draft of this to Barth shortly before the Herr Professor was to conduct his oral doctoral examination.)

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