Foreword

John Howard Yoder entered the chronology of my life at an age when I was too young fully to be aware of conversations that at later points would become central to my vocation. In my early grade school years, when my father John Lederach and uncle Ron Kennel were finishing course work at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, I remember some supper-table bantering about various classes and professors. One memory is particularly vivid: They seemed to have a deep respect or even awe for a particular classroom and a set of lectures that I understood later were the beginning drafts of The Politics of Jesus. I remember their laughing about how nervously they might ask John Howard a question. Inevitably if a query was posed, the response appeared to be, “That is not quite the right question.” Then a new question would be provided that probed the subject matter at different level.

A decade later, around the time my generation was beginning college studies, the name John Howard Yoder and his The Politics of Jesus were presented as fait accomplis…