A praxis of peace: The 'politics of Jesus' according to John Howard Yoder

Christians are shaped by the stories, practices, and virtues of the church, but also share the language and mores of the societies into which they are born. The significance of the theological ethics of John Howard Yoder (1927--1997) is the way he wrestled with this tension in his construction of a distinctive peace theology which he called the "politics of Jesus." His work responded to social issues in the decades following World War II, including the emergence of the United States as a superpower, a new global economic order, and the onset of the Cold War.; In this dissertation, I trace the development of Yoder's notion of the "politics of Jesus" after World War II and assess its influence on the just-peacebuilding praxis of religious communities. Yoder's theology is rooted in the experience of North American Mennonites who struggled with the tension between their traditional religious separatism and their emerging social engagement throughout the twentieth century. The first chapter is an introduction. In the second chapter, I study how Mennonite experience shaped Yoder's theology and how he, in turn, influenced Mennonite thought and practice. He was also responding to Reinhold Niebuhr, the prominent Protestant social ethicist during that era.; In the third, fourth, and fifth chapters, I study the relationship between his European experience (1949--1957) and his theological ethics. In Europe he was involved in postwar reconstruction efforts; he related to European churches; he did his doctoral studies at the University of Basel, where he studied with Oscar Cullmann and Karl Barth; and he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the sixteenth-century disputations between the Anabaptists and the Protestant reformers in Switzerland.; In the sixth chapter, I concentrate on understanding Yoder's mature formulation of the "politics of Jesus." To that end, I categorize Yoder's theological language, identify and discuss the components of his constructive thought, and raise some critical issues in his theology that need further work. In the seventh chapter, I assess the influence of Yoder's theology on the thought and practice of contemporary religious just-peacebuilding initiatives.