Brian Hamilton

Yoder on the Fathers

“Perhaps a Calvinist or a Lutheran needs, for reasons which he can define theologically, to be faithful to his founder. The descendants of churches once led by Menno do not. By the nature of the case the tradition of the sixteenth century is not normative in the free church style. The free church traditions is also a tradition, so that guidance is also received from the past. But the way that guidance is received is much less firmly structured, and much less concerned for fidelity to any particular father.”

—John Howard Yoder, quoted in Mark Thiessen Nation, John Howard Yoder: Mennonite Patience, Evangelical Witness, Catholic Convictions, p. 41–42.

I don’t have access to the source of this quote—another one of Yoder’s terribly obscure publications—so I can’t fill out his understanding any more than this. But it seems that he wrote on this question at least two other times: a bit in “Anabaptist Vision and Mennonite Reality” (Consultation on Anabaptist-Mennonite Theology, ed. A.J. Klassen [Fresno, CA: Council of Mennonite Seminaries, 1970]) and in an essay called “The Ambivalence of the Appeal to the Fathers,” in Practiced in the Presence: Essays in Honor of T. Canby Jones, ed. Neil Snarr and Daniel Smith-Christopher (Richmond, Ind.: Friends United Press, 1994), 245–55. I need to make time to pursue these references, because this question has been on my mind with some frequency lately: what kind of authority ought we grant the ‘fathers,’ in Anabaptism but also in the whole church?

25 February 2007 |
tags: John Howard Yoder, Tradition