Also Glen does not document his claims about Yoder and the book very well in his solo performance in the introduction (take note: Mark Thiessen Nation did not put his name on the introduction. That must have significance). Most of these essays are very old. I have read most of them previously before. The contexts from which the original essays came are missing. But that would be important to understand Yoder’s thought a little more fully. It is not at all clear that Yoder would have ordered them in this way, included all of these, left out specifically theological and biblical essays in favor of “ethics” or subtitled it in a way that seems to bifurcate theology and ethics.

I edited one of Yoder’s recent post-humous books. Ted Koontz and I tried very hard not to impose any scheme on the work that was not already latent within the work and we tried to use Yoder’s own words for headings and all that (even if we pulled them from notes). The very scheme of this book is set up to give Glen Stassen himself a big pat on the back.

Yet there are some more essays from Yoder that are more widely accessible, so I am glad for that.

http://www.jesusradicals.com/power-and-practices-engaging-the-work-of-john-howard-yoder/

I just read the revised version of Yoder’s When War is Unjust, which I think is a great book. He clearly takes the just war tradition extremely seriously and reads it way more sympathetically than just warriors such as James Turner Johnson do pacifism (even when Johnson is trying to be sympathetic). But I read the sum of Yoder’s argument in that book to be that a consistent just warrior will end up being a practical pacifist.

That’s the difficulty of these sorts of projects. Yoder’s skeleton of a project not only gets meat put on the bones, but the line between that and changing out the bones altogether becomes blurry.