In defence of "our respectable culture": Trying to make sense of John Howard Yoder's sexual abuse - ABC Religion & Ethics

In defence of "our respectable culture": Trying to make sense of John Howard Yoder's sexual abuse - ABC Religion & Ethics


ABC Religion & Ethics

In defence of "our respectable culture": Trying to make sense of John Howard Yoder's sexual abuse


Stanley Hauerwas
Wednesday 18 October 2017 9:46am


In her sobering and well-researched article, "'Defanging the Beast': Mennonite Responses to John Howard Yoder's Sexual Abuse," Rachel Goossen reports on a response Yoder made to Marlin Miller's attempt to convince Yoder his "experimentation" with "non-sexual" touching was wrong. In a memo to Miller, Yoder observed that Miller's arguments:


"represent simply an appeal to the consensus of our respectable culture. I know what that consensus teaches, for I am its product and its victim. I knew its teachings before I began testing an alternative set of axioms."

I call attention to Yoder's use of the phrase "consensus of our respectable culture" because I will argue that his assumption that such a consensus exists was a profound and costly mistake. Even more surprisingly ― at least, surprising to me ― I will suggest that there can be some quite positive aspects for Christians in the "consensus of a respectable culture."

Before developing that argument, I need to make clear that for me to write about these matters fills me with sadness. I do not want to try to "explain" John's behaviour. I find even thinking about that aspect of John's life drains me of energy and depresses me. And I am not a person given to depression. But Goossen's article stunned me. I had no idea that John's engagement in his "experimentation" was so extensive both in terms of time and the number of women he seems to have involved. I am not sure, moreover, if I ever recognized how troubling it is that John refused to acknowledge that his views about what is possible between brothers and sisters in Christ were just wrong.

I partly hesitate to write about John's abusive behaviour because I know John's family and I do not want to add to their pain. John was by all reports a loving father, though one that was often absent. Annie, his wife, is a wonderful person who was a bulwark for John in the last years of his life. I count a number of his children as friends and I know something of the complexity of what it means to be John Yoder's child. The Mennonite world is just that - a world - and his children must find their way, as they have, through that world without anything I might say adding to that challenge.

I also find it hard to write because I must respond to those who have wondered about what I think about "all this" because they worry that I have not appreciated the seriousness of what John did. I tried to depict my relationship, my indebtedness, to John in Hannah's Child. I also report in Hannah's Child what and when I learned of John's behaviour, as well as my own involvement in the process of John's disciplinary proceedings. I see no reason to repeat what I said there, but what I must do is acknowledge that I did not appropriately acknowledge how destructive John's behaviour was for the women involved.

As I've already noted, I simply did not understand the extent of the activities. I think before I left the University of Notre Dame to come to Duke Divinity School I had been told by a graduate student that John had some questionable relations with women, but I did not have any idea what that meant. I think the next development was the series of articles that ran in the Elkhart Truth, but I did not read all of them because I did not have access to them having moved to Durham. It was not until 1992 that I learned how catastrophic a situation John's behaviour was creating.

In 1992 Al Meyer, his brother-in-law, and Mary Ellen Meyer, his sister, told me about John's behaviour. I was at Bethel College to give a lecture I seem to remember John was to deliver, but had been disinvited because of his behaviour. I realized I was getting the straight story from Al and Mary Ellen but for some reason I assumed the behaviour they were reporting had ceased and that we were not talking about that many women. I thought maybe three or four women might be involved. Of course, one woman would have been too many, but at the time I could not imagine what seems to have been the large number of women who had been abused by John. Nor did I appropriately appreciate at the time how traumatizing John's actions were for the women involved. For that I can only say I am sorry and I have learned an essential lesson.

One of the aspects of this whole sad story that saddens me is that I have had to recognize how much energy John put into this aspect of his life. His attempt to maintain these multiple relationships would have exhausted any normal person. But John was not normal - intellectually or physically. When I think about the time he dedicated to developing justifications for his experimentation, I feel depressed. Of course, John gave us the great gift of the clarity of his mind, but that same analytic ability betrayed him just to the extent that he used it to make unjustified distinctions ― such as those about the significance of different ways of touching that could only result in self-deception.

In Hannah's Child I also gave a far too positive account of the disciplinary process by the church. It is true that Glen Stassen, James McClendon and I made the phone call to urge John to participate in the process. McClendon was the person that told John no matter how flawed John thought the process might be, he should submit. But it is clear from Goossen's account that, though he submitted, he was anything but cooperative.

Another reason I find it difficult to write about these matters is, like most of us, I do not want to acknowledge my mistakes. But I learned from Yoder that such an acknowledgement is necessary if we are to be people for whom speaking truth matters. I hope in some small way writing this article may be a small example of Matthew 18, because at least one of the reasons I am writing is that I have been told by many that I need to do so.

Yet I must say, in spite of my hesitancy about writing this, I am glad to have written it. The paper gives me the opportunity to confess: I was too anxious to have John resume his place as one of the crucial theologians of our time. I thought I knew what was going on, but in fact I did not have a clue. In my defence ― and it is not a very good defence ― I think it is true that I simply did not understand what was going on. However, in truth, I probably did not want to know what was going on.

I also find it hard to write this because I do not know what to say. I do not know what to say to "explain" John's behaviour. Like anyone grieved by John's behaviour, I cannot resist trying to give some account of why John Howard Yoder of all people got into such a bizarre pattern of abuse. Of course he had a theory, but this is John Howard Yoder. Surely anyone as smart as Yoder should have known better. But what he did speaks for itself. Whether he may have had some form of Asperger's may be true, but it tells us little. My general assumption that his behaviour betrayed a deficit of empathy may be closer to the mark, but I think even if that is true we learn little from such a judgment.

I do not know what to say, though I must say something about the relation of a person's moral character and what and how they think. Given my emphasis on the virtues, I obviously cannot deny that there is, or there should be, some relation between who we are and what we say. But that is clearly not a straightforward correlation. I will make some tentative judgments about this question toward the end of this article. But even if I had the time or space I could not claim to know how to parse this heady matter.

Finally, I have to revisit Yoder's life and work because I do not want what he has taught us about how we should and can live as Christians and how we think theologically to be lost. Many of my friends who are former students, students who have written quite insightfully about Yoder, feel that they can no longer have their students read Yoder. They rightly worry that the very shape of Yoder's arguments for nonviolence may also inform his view about sexual behaviour between men and women in the church. I think the question about the continued use of Yoder's work for instruction is not quite the same among Mennonites as it is for non-Mennonites, but I have no stake in defending that view. What I do know, however, is that we cannot avoid the question of whether his justification for his sexual behaviour is structurally similar to his defence of Christian nonviolence.

So I do not want to write this article, but I think I have to write about this part of John's life, because I owe it to him. John Yoder changed my life before I knew it needed changing. I am often credited with making John Howard Yoder better known among those identified as mainstream Protestants. True or not, it is nonetheless the case that I am rightly closely identified with Yoder.

That being the case, I regard it as a responsibility to try to say why Yoder's behaviour was so wrong, and yet why he remains such an important theologian for those who, like me, are at best about half-Christian. I owe John Yoder the truth about his abusive behaviour and why such truth cannot help but implicate him in a way of life from which I am sure that God is now giving him all the time he needs to repent.
What was wrong with Yoder's "experimentation"

In an insightful article entitled "Scandalizing John Howard Yoder," David Cramer, Jenny Howell, Jonathan Tran and Paul Martens argue that Yoder's ongoing experimentation with what he claimed to be nonsexual relations with women was inconsistent with his commitment to nonviolence. They begin their article with a quote from Carolyn Holderread Heggen that describes an encounter with Yoder. Heggen was a new mother. She had received a letter from John inviting her and her infant to meet him at a conference. In the letter, Heggen recounts that Yoder:


"went into this bizarre, long, detailed description of what it would be like for him to sit in a chair and watch me sit on his bed, take off my clothes and nurse my baby. He described in vivid detail my breasts and other body parts. When I read the letter, I felt I had been raped. The thought of this dirty old man sitting at his seminary desk fantasizing about my nude body was terrifying to me, and I felt extremely violated and angry. I had never done anything to communicate to him that I was interested in anything but a mentor-protegee relationship."

There only needs to be one such report to establish the violent character of Yoder's behaviour. But there is clear evidence that many of the women Yoder invited to participate in his "experiment" experienced the same reaction that Heggen reports. Of course, Yoder maintained that he never forced any women to participate. That sense of non-coercion appears to have preserved his presumption that what he was about was nonviolent.

But it is hard to avoid the assessment that he was repressing the violence inherent in the structure of the event. For god's sake, he surely should have recognized that he was John Howard Yoder, the most prominent Mennonite theologian in recent times, and that these women he tried first to seduce intellectually in the hope it would lead further ― and I think seduction is the right word ― wanted his approval.

The authors accordingly argue that Yoder's understanding of violence as the violation of the dignity or integrity of some being is an appropriate description of Yoder's own behaviour. They conclude that given Yoder's configuration of Christian discipleship as nonviolence and the kingdom of God with the church's peaceableness, it is "unclear how he, given his behaviors (even if occasional), could consider himself faithful as a disciple of Christ or as a witness of the church." A judgement I find hard to deny.

If anyone wonders if I ever discussed with John what I had learned from Al and Mary Ellen Meyer, the answer is "yes." I am fairly sure my encounter with John about this matter took place at Notre Dame. I had already moved to Duke but I had returned to Notre Dame for a conference. I visited John in his office in the basement of the library. As usual, the office was stacked high with paper John collected so that nothing would be wasted. Cleaning off a chair I sat down and told him what I had learned from his sister and her husband.

I had read for many years John's unpublished papers such as "When Is a Marriage Not a Marriage" and "When is Adultery a Marriage," so I had some idea of how he challenged, for example, the presumption that for Christian marriage to be Christian the partners had to be married and prepared to bring children into the world. I did not know about his further justification for his "experiment" with nonsexual forms of touching, but I assumed that, because he thought Christians were first and foremost called to singleness, he must also think there needed to be ways of men and women to touch one another without those touches implying more. I assume that is why he only associated marital sexuality with ejaculation. He also had a paper that explored homosexual behaviour as no more serious than mutual masturbation. I had no idea at the time that he actually had intercourse with some of those he was trying to buy into his crazy project.

So I told him what I had learned and I made it clear I was not in the least persuaded by his "arguments." I pointed out that everything depends on how you understand "mutual masturbation" as it can be understood as more intimate than intercourse. I told him, moreover, that I was extremely doubtful about his assumption that what he was about could be described as "nonsexual" behaviour. But clearly, I thought what he was doing could not be right because it could not be shared by the whole community. For it must surely be the case that, whatever it means to be a Mennonite, it must mean that you cannot keep your "experiments" secret. John did not respond other than to express concern about the effects his behaviour was having on others.

Cramer, Howell, Tran and Martens also observe John's refusal to cooperate with the accountability processes was inconsistent with his ecclesiology. As Goossen makes clear, he simply tried to out-argue Miller and the others associated with the process in the seminary. His argument that the process was inherently flawed because he was not allowed to confront his accusers was a reading of Matthew 18 that is, at best, question-begging. He seems to have positioned himself as above the process, which meant he did not respect those he identified as the "Mennonite women's posse."

That Yoder's abusive behaviour was inconsistent with his deepest commitments is not the most challenging aspect anyone concerned with his actions needs to consider. The most challenging question is raised by the authors: "What do we do with the places where Yoder's actions were consistent with his theology?"

In particular, they have in mind Yoder's eschatological convictions that the church is the manifestation of the "original revolution" which entailed the "creation of a distinct community with its own deviant set of values and its coherent way of incarnating them." They observe that this understanding of the new age in which the church lives is the framework that informs Yoder's defence of nonviolence. That does not mean that only Christians can practice nonviolence. Yoder always insisted what is a duty for Christians is a possibility for anyone. All people, whether they are Christians or not, have the possibility of living nonviolent lives.

In a similar fashion, Cramer, Howell, Tran and Martens suggest that Yoder understood his exploration of "non-genital affective relationships" to be an expression of the "revolution" inaugurated by the new age. As I have already suggested, and the authors make the same point, given Yoder's account of singleness, such touching could be seen as a way the church has found to meet the needs of the "whole person."

I certainly feel the power of the authors' suggestion, but as they also suggest, Yoder's account of "non-genital" affection is bizarre. They rightly call Yoder's actions "demonic" which invites a very suggestive account of Yoder's behaviour as a manifestation of the power of the powers over our lives. Not only is Yoder's concept bizarre, but I do not think it can in any way be commensurate with his defence of nonviolence. Yoder's suggestion that Jesus's "touching" of women provides precedence for the abuse with which he engaged is clearly not justified by any of the Gospel stories of Jesus's interaction with women. Jesus may have touched some women but not in the way Yoder was touching women. In marked contrast to nonviolence, there are simply no texts in the New Testament to support Yoder's claims about what is sexually possible between Christians.

Nor is there any precedence in Christian tradition to underwrite Yoder's account of nonsexual touching. This is in marked contrast with nonviolence. Even the presumption that the majority of Christian tradition has entailed justifications for just war has always had nonviolence as its bad consciousness. If Christians did not presume nonviolence, why would they need to provide justification for the use of violence? These are complicated matters, but I do not think Yoder could have written a book like Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution about his views concerning non-genital sexual relations between brothers and sisters in Christ. To be sure the new harmonies could exist for a few years, but they never last.
The "consensus of our respectable culture"

This brings me to Yoder's claim that Miller's criticism of his behaviour and justification of that behaviour reproduced the "consensus of our respectable culture." You can almost hear by the use of that phrase Yoder's disdain for what he would identify as middle-class morality. Yet if that is what he heard or read as the basis of Miller's criticism, he was profoundly mistaken.

It is as if Yoder had not lived through the sixties. If anything, given the sexual revolution, the "consensus," particularly among the children of the middle class, was closer to Yoder's view than that of Miller. Yoder's experimentation could be seen as but one form of the changing sexual mores and behaviour of Americans. From such a perspective his views and behaviour were anything but radical. Rather, what he was doing could be understood, just as the "new morality" could be understood, as quite conventional. Given the changing attitudes toward sexual expression, it was just another step to conclude that you can do what you want sexually as long as you have the other's consent.

Yoder, of course, argued that he never acted without consent, but had he never explored how ambiguous the notion "consent" is when it involves such power dynamics? How would women know if they had given consent when they were confronted by that "intellectual giant" with the name John Howard Yoder? It is, moreover, quite possible that a woman may well look back on what had happened between Yoder and herself and judge that, though at the time she may seem to have given consent, retrospectively she cannot believe she acted freely.

There is, however, another way to read Yoder's disdain for the "consensus of our respectable culture" which I think is more substantive and important. That "consensus" can be understood as the hard-won wisdom and still ongoing challenge of maintaining the habits necessary for the sustaining of marriage as the institution of life-long fidelity. To be sure, there are perversions associated with those habits and practices, but the discovery of marriage as such a commitment for the sustaining of hospitality for new life is a profound discovery.

Such a discovery owes much to Judaism and Christianity, but it is not restricted to those communities. In fact, such an understanding of marriage as the appropriate home for sexual intimacy may be thought to be grounded in natural law. I have no objection to it being so located. But that is a move that Yoder may not have had the resources to develop and, even if they were available, he clearly did not use them.

The point I am trying to make - a point not easily made - may entail a criticism of Yoder's work that I am only beginning to understand. I worry that Yoder may have made too extreme the duality between church and world, particularly when it comes to dealing with our everyday relations with one another. I need to be very careful in making such a criticism because Yoder, contrary to many superficial criticisms of him, never restricted God's redemption to the church. He was always ready to acknowledge that God was doing a new thing among those who were not church - thus my insistence that Yoder always assumed what is a duty for Christians is a possibility for those who are not.

The critical question, however, is whether his emphasis on the distinctive behaviour that is constitutive of what it means to be the church presumes we are capable of being more than we are. The question is whether Yoder failed to understand that, when all is said and done, baptism does not make us angels; we remain human beings.

There are methodological issues at the heart of theological ethics entailed in these issues. The question of "the natural," the characterization of the natural, as well as the status of the natural can be one way these questions can be addressed. Yoder had little use for, or at least he seldom addressed, questions about the status of natural law. He quite rightly worried that appeals to natural law invited modes of moral reflection that were in tension with the Gospel imperatives. But some account of the natural - or, I would prefer, "creation" - is required in order to acknowledge that by the grace of God we exist. That means that nature is the concept that affirms that God has willed that there exist that which is not God.

That reality makes possible reflections of practical reason that offer wisdom to guide our lives. Though I doubt that there needs to be any hard-and-fast distinction between the natural or moral virtues and the theological virtues, it is nonetheless the case that the distinction not only can be made but must be made. This is not the context to develop these issues, but I raise them to suggest that I have long suspected that I hold views about such matters that may put me in some tension with Yoder's general perspective.
What is missing from Yoder's theology

Let me try to put these issues in a register that is more directly relevant to the challenge of Yoder's behaviour. Entailed is what I think may be missing in Yoder that led him to engage in such destructive behaviour, not only for the women he abused but for himself. As I have already noted, I am not trying to provide an explanation or a cause for John's experimentation. There can be no explanation that does not sound like an attempted justification. And, obviously, there can be no justification. Rather I am trying to help locate what I think his behaviour - and even more, his justifications for that behaviour - may provide to help us understand some problems with his work.

Of course, I write as one deeply shaped by and beholden to what John has taught me. But what I think is missing in John's theology is quite simple. What is missing is insight and wisdom about learning to live well as a human being.

The point I am trying to make is at the heart of Alex Sider's article, "Friendship, Alienation, Love: Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder." In this article ― an article with which I was at first not sure I was in agreement ― Sider argues that my account of friendship provides an opening to psychological insights that are absent in Yoder's work. Sider calls attention to passages in Yoder's work ― passages, indeed, I have celebrated ― in which Yoder resists any exploration of what Sider identifies as "the affective registers of desire and delight in others and oneself." Sider suggests Yoder is so intent on the primacy of the social dimension of the Gospel that he ignores the personal and psychological dimensions of practices such as baptism.

Of particular importance, given the subject of this article, is Sider's argument that Yoder should have attended to how guilt after baptism continues to be a shaping psychological force in many lives. A focus on baptism that relativizes guilt, Sider argues, still needs to attend to the guilt that people feel even if we have been inducted into the new humanity. Sider illustrates what he is calling for by focusing attention on Sebastian Moore's reflections on guilt as withdrawal into isolated selfhood. According to Moore, such a withdrawal:


"may be a sense of robbery, of stealing my private life from the whole in which I am a participant. It may be a sense of the inferiority, the unworthiness, of this privatized life in respect of the life as a whole."

Sider suggests that this is the kind of insight about our human condition that is simply missing in Yoder.

Sider summarizes his analysis of Yoder's texts by observing that in each instance, at the point where practices ― as basic as nonviolence ― shape the psyche, Yoder turns away from providing a rational psychology in favour of pointing to the task of the community. As a result, Yoder refuses to entertain any notion that Christians have any use for or stake in being happy. Happiness, after all, does not have to be understood in the superficial way that is so characteristic of modern social orders, but rather can be, as Aquinas taught, a way of displaying what it means to be befriended by God.

Sider notes that I have at times identified with Yoder's disavowal of thinking it important that we be happy. Yet he also observes ― a suggestion I hope is true ― that in the actual practice of friendship I manifest the patience with and sensitivity to the alienation and anguish that bedevils our complex relationships. That said, I think my written work displays some of the same psychology Sider thinks missing in Yoder, insofar as the virtues have been so crucial for me.

Yoder always thought my emphasis on the importance of the virtues was a distraction. That he had little use for the virtues is indicative of what Sider is getting at by suggesting John did not have any stake in our being happy. The virtues reside in wisdom traditions because they require insight about the human condition. Desires and passions must be accounted for because the virtues are the form of the passions. Desire and passion are missing in Yoder's work, but they were clearly present in his behaviour.

Moreover, the focus on the virtues requires consideration of how the virtues are related and how they are acquired. Those considerations entail judgments derived from traditions of reflection about what makes life worth living. John, however, never saw the need to engage any of those questions. There is, for example, no account of moral formation in Yoder's work. He seemed to see no reason he needed, to use his terms, to provide an account of how we might become nonviolent. He assumed if you were brought up right, if you were part of a community of nonviolence, you would simply become what it meant to be nonviolent.

Yet it is surely the case that nonviolence can become a subtly manipulative form of passive-aggressive behaviour. Yoder, of course, was quite well-aware that could be the case, but he never explored how questions of formation were necessary if we are to be people of peace. Yoder was so fixated on the social process he seems to have forgotten - or had methodological doubts - that we need to be trained to be a Christian.

Another, rather tendentious, way to make the point Sider and I are trying to make is to observe that Yoder had no interest in novels. He seldom read novels, nor did he think novels to be morally important. It is not that he did not like to read. But he saw little reason to engage in the kind of literature represented by the novel. Yet the novel is all-important for me exactly because it forces one to imagine other lives. In short, novels are an exercise in the enrichment of the imagination through which we develop the empathy that is crucial for the acquisition of the virtues.

What one cannot help but wonder is, like his encounter with Carolyn Holderread Heggen, how Yoder failed to appreciate how his suggestion about her joining him in his hotel room could only be received as a form of violence. Something was missing in Yoder, and I think the name for what was missing is called the moral imagination.
Life and work

I must finally address the question of the relation between morality and the intellectual life - a question that is obviously raised by Yoder's behaviour. Does the immorality of a person invalidate what they have had to say? I certainly do not intend at this point, even if I could, to develop a general response to that question. What I can do, however, is at least suggest that if you think that theology is not simply "thought," but rather a form of wisdom, then lives matter. That does not mean that everything a person has had to say must be rejected because they have turned out to be immoral or even evil. But it does mean how their work is read will require a particular hermeneutic of suspicion.

In the first chapter of his wonderful book on Edith Stein, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that the lives of philosophers cannot help but be of philosophical interest. They are so because philosophy is the way "in which a life informed by the activities of philosophical enquiry and guided by its conclusions will be significantly different from the life of someone in other respects like the philosopher, but untouched by philosophy."

MacIntyre observes that this understanding of the relation of a person's life to philosophical inquiry now seems strange because philosophy has become a specialized and professionalized academic discipline that makes possible the assumption that the character of the philosopher's life has no relation to their work as a philosopher. What is now characteristic of a philosophical life has the same kind of status and role-playing games that are characteristic of any professionalized academic discipline. Accordingly, the compartmentalization so characteristic of modern life ― the kind of life that found its most perverse form in Adolf Eichmann ― now determines the lives of philosophers.

Even so, MacIntyre argues, those engaged in philosophical work often embody a very different conception of the relationship of action to their philosophy. They do so because, if philosophy is to be recognizable as philosophy, it must always be recognizable as a continuation of Plato's enterprise. That enterprise MacIntyre identifies as a radical critique of everyday life which will require the philosopher to distinguish themselves from that which they are subjecting to critique. Thus the philosopher cannot help becoming different because:


"the very language that we cannot avoid speaking, our everyday vocabulary and idiom, is itself not philosophically innocent, but to a significant degree inherited from and still informed by past philosophical theories whose presence in our modes of speech, belief, and action is no longer recognized."

A philosopher, therefore, cannot avoid the reality that their philosophical work will or should make a difference in how they live.

MacIntyre's way of putting these matters I think has direct implications for how a theologian's life and work cannot be separated. Plato may be unavoidable for the philosopher, but the theologian must operate with "a language we cannot avoid speaking" that will make or should make a difference in how one's life is lived. That may be true just to the extent that the failure to lead a life commensurate with our language indicates something has gone wrong. That something has gone wrong is a testimony to the necessity that there must exist an interrelation between theology and how the theologian lives.

I have suggested that to read Yoder is not to look for mistakes he has made in what he has said, though such a reading is not without reason. It is, however, a reading that is required of any serious text. What I have tried to suggest, however, is that it is not what John has written that is the problem. Instead, the problem is what is not there. I am not suggesting that if John had a better understanding of our psychology, he would have been less likely to have engaged in his extremely troubling "experimentation." We have no means to know that. Rather, I am suggesting that if we continue to read and learn from Yoder, we must do so by attending to what is not "there."
Where does this leave us? What do we do now?

I do not have ready answers to either of these questions. Much depends, of course, on who the "us" or the "we" may be that asks the question. As I've mentioned, I have friends who have decided in deference to the offence against women by Yoder they will no longer have their students read Yoder. I respect that decision, but it is not one I can take. I need John's clarity of thought if I am to try to think through what I think I have learned from him.

I think Gerald Schlabach puts the matter well in his reflections on his relation to Yoder in his wonderfully titled essay, "Only Those We Need Can Betray Us." He observes that "there is simply no way to tell the story of 20th century historic peace church theology ― much less to appropriate it ― without drawing on Yoder's thought." Schlabach acknowledges that he can understand how younger Mennonite scholars can try to do peace theology without relying on Yoder, but he confesses, "I just don't see how they/we can do without him." Nor do I see how we can do without him.

In particular, I need his readings of Scripture which seem to me ever fresh and powerful. Yet I cannot deny that this cannot be the decision others can or should make. In particular, I think women would have trouble reading Yoder. But "trouble reading" is not the same thing as "not reading." For it is surely the case that there are aspects of Yoder's work that are of constructive use for the concerns of women.

Karen Guth has suggested, for example, that Yoder might be "redeemed" by attending to his positive commitment to some forms of feminism. Guth obviously thinks my close relationship with Yoder should make me follow her advice to engage feminist theologians. My first response to Guth's proposal was to stiff-arm the suggestion that those Guth identified as "witness theologians" should take "feminist theologians" more seriously. I did so because I objected to what I took to be Guth's presumption that I held a position that was an alternative to a feminist position.

I sent my response to Guth, who wrote an extremely informative reply. She observed she used "witness" and "feminist" only as conceptual placeholders, not as names for clearly identifiable positions. What she was suggesting ― a suggestion with which I wholeheartedly agree ― is the feminist critique of patriarchy and the attending violence or at least coercion associated with the male gaze is an insight that those committed to nonviolence ought to credit.

I have a very ambiguous relation with feminist theology because I often agree with their criticisms of the male behaviour but disagree with the basis for those criticisms. That I have not been prepared to discuss feminist theology in principle does not mean, however, that I do not think it important to take into account what women have to say. I should like to think that I have done that, at least to the extent that women like Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Martha Nussbaum, Marie Fortune, Catherine Pickstock and Ellen Davis, among others, have been crucial for how I have tried to think. But I engaged with them not because they were women, but because what they were doing was so interesting.

I certainly have deep sympathies with the feminist challenge to paternalism. Even more, I think feminist critiques of masculinity to be extremely insightful. Stan Goff's book Borderline is a model of how feminist insights can illumine what any Christian should think. The work Goff does in his book makes clear that the feminist challenge to "maleness" is a gift to men.

I also think the feminist challenge to the assumption that marriage is necessary for the fulfilment of women to be right and important. Yoder's account of singleness can be read as a feminist argument. I also think we owe feminists a debt of gratitude for their critique of romantic love. For years in the core course in Christian Ethics, I assigned the work of Marie Fortune because I thought her exposure of the violence present in romantic love to be a crucial insight. Fortune was not only important for exposing the violence occluded in romantic ideals of love, but she also helped make clear that nonviolence is not just about war. Yoder would and did think similar thoughts, but he did so because he thought they were commensurate with the Gospel.

Yet the issue remains how to receive Yoder's work without that reception seeming to imply that his behaviour does not matter. That surely would be an injustice to the women he harmed. He was the President of the Society of Christian Ethics. Should some notation be put next to his name when past presidents of the society are named? Pete Rose will not get into the Hall of Fame, but Yoder is already there. We cannot act as if he was not the president of the Society. Or what does it mean that Yoder was President of Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary? I obviously cannot speak as a Mennonite, for which I thank God since I have no idea what to say, but they surely must say something.

Nor do I think it helpful to call attention to the misconduct toward women by Martin Luther King, Jr., Karl Barth or Paul Tillich. Each in their own way seem to have engaged in misconduct toward women or a woman, but I think it does little good to suggest that they help us understand Yoder's behaviour. To call attention to these men invites the general claim that when all is said and done "we are all sinners." That is a way to excuse each of us, with the result that Yoder is left off the hook. That is clearly a mistake, not only because Yoder should not be left off the hook, but, just as importantly, sin should never be used as an explanation.

That is it. That is all I have to say about this troubling matter. It surely feels like I am ending with a whimper. That is the way it should feel, because I have ended with a whimper. I did not want to write this article, but I have done it. I am not happy that I have done it, but then nothing about this situation is happy.

Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke University. His most recent books are The Work of Theology, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life and The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson.

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