1. Stanley Hauerwas, in his preface to Wisdom, refers to them as “something of a ragtag bunch, ranging from Mennonite ‘insiders’ to free-floating intellectuals.” (xi)

2. Yoder's debt to Bender did not keep him from rigorous disagreement with his old teacher. Hauerwas writes that he “went after Bender with a ferocity that he later thought was maybe not useful. I bet he never took it back, but he may have felt bad about it.” Wisdom 407. The Yoder paper on Bender to which Hauerwas refers was apparently not published.

3. Mark Thiessen Nation's biographical contribution to Wisdom (24-42) provides this charming picture as well as other useful biographical information on Yoder. See Steinfels, Peter, John H. Yoder. Theologian At Notre Dame, Is Dead At 70N.Y. Times A17 (01 7, 1998)Google Scholar.

4. (1972 2^nd ed., Eerdmans 1994).

5. Wisdom begins with a heretofore unpublished essay by Yoder, on what he counted as the nineteen kinds of patience. The Yoder family and the editors took a draft off his computer, after his death. Mark Thiessen Nation's biography and then, scattered throughout the book, about a third of the papers take up and explore Yoder's thought. The other two-thirds takes up, without significant explication of Yoder's thought, subjects that were important in Yoder's teaching. (I write “teaching” and avoid the words “theory” and “doctrine,” neither of which Yoder found, to use his usual evaluative adjective, useful.)

In the first category are Nancey Murphy's essay on Yoder's pacifism (which does not mention Nations); Anne Rasmusson's analysis of his ecclesiology; Grady Scott Davis on Yoder's “biblical realism”; James Wm. McLendon Jr.'s discussion of Yoder's thought on congregational discernment; Harry J. Huebner on moral agency; Sister Jane Elyse Russell's comparison of the traditions of Anabaptists (per Yoder) and Franciscans on love of enemy; and a dialogue between Hauerwas and Chris K. Huebner, a graduate student at Duke who is working on a dissertation on Yoder.

The other and longer part of Wisdom will wear well as essays on the subjects addressed, whether or not they set up an agenda, or part of one, for future study of Yoder's theology. These include Reinhard Hutter on Lutheran just-war thinking; Tobias Winright (a Canadian policeman) on how a Mennonite can be a police officer; Ernest W. Ranly on nonviolence; William Klassen on the Zealots; Glen H. Stassen on the Sermon on the Plain; Marva J. Dawn on the principalities and powers; Mark Thiessen Nation on Bonhoeffer (one of three Nation contributions to Wisdom); Gayle Gerber Koontz on moral discernment; Michael G. Cartwright on Reinhold Niebuhr; J. Denny Weaver on James Cone's theology; A James Reimer on the primitive Jewish Christians; and Gerald W. Schlabach on the emperor Constantine.

Mark Nation provided, as a sort of appendix, a supplement to his 1997 bibliographies of Yoder's writings, A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Writings of John Howard Yoder (Mennonite Historical Socy 1997)Google Scholar, a version of which was published at 71 Mennonite Q. Rev. 93 (1997)Google Scholar.

6. Yoder, as much as anyone outside legal education, was fond of using “legalistic” as a pejorative reference. (We lawyers usually say “metaphysical” and, sometimes among the insensitive, “theological”). In his essay in Wisdom Yoder uses “legalistic” to mean assertions of lethal force: “There is nothing more legalistic than the statement in principle that the government of any state has the authority to order me to kill people.” (36) Rasmussen shows him referring to law as force (as a fact, as if he were a Liberationist talking about class warfare). But he often spoke of law as a way to change the world—as Nancey Murphy shows in comparing Yoder and Rene Girard (circa 59)—and in that connection as a form of grace. (42) Hauerwas says Yoder saw “careful argument” (and so, perhaps, legal argument) as an alternative to violence. (400) Yoder parted company from, say, the late Paul Ramsey, on citizenship as some sort of apostolate (what Ramsey called being a “lesser magistrate”); Yoder saw that version of patriotism as the subjection of the church to the state, and a jurisprudence that would make the law an idol.

7. I have compiled, with generous cooperation from John's family, a manuscript of his letters and memoranda to me, mostly about my own work in what might be called Christian legal ethics, and of his memoranda to law teachers ranging from Emily Hartigan to Cathleen Kaveny and Robert E. Rodes, Jr. Tentative title: “Byproducts of Faithfulness: John Howard Yoder to a Hoosier Lawyer.”

8. Nation refers to this as Yoder's “ecumenical neo-Anabaptism.” (1) One of Yoder's nineteen kinds of patience was what he called “ecumenical patience. (Wisdom, 28) In some ways it was one of two themes in Nations, the other being what Yoder saw as the biblical use of power—he sometimes said “force”—in non-violent social witness.

9. He did not hew stubbornly to categories, or, as he sometimes called them, principles. This fact underlay, I think, his teaching on pacifist creativity (Wisdom, 32), on freedom from academic categories (Wisdom, 345), on alternative history (Wisdom, 236), on the distinction between nature and history (Wisdom, 204), on the modern use of the distracting noun (adjective) “sectarian” (e.g., Wisdom, 189-190), on fundamentalism, and on an array of dualisms, (e.g., Wisdom, 403).

10. (3^rd ed., Herald Press 1999). Initially issued as Nevertheless: A Meditation on the Varieties and Shortcomings of Religious Pacifism (Herald Press 1971)Google Scholar.

11. He had a deep sympathy for the Palestinians, so much so that he pondered and struggled for ways to find their rock-throwing consistent with pacifism. (This is a personal memory.) He contributed richly to my thinking on Christians being lawyers. Winright's essay in Wisdom shows how Yoder might have tried to think the same way about the daily life of a police officer. Dawn's discussion, in Wisdom, of how he thought with her about the need for doctoral training for her work in ministry among Christian congregations (185) parallels the way he thought with me on the question of whether a Christian can be a lawyer.

12. What follows is an adaptation of an essay of mine, published as The Jurisprudence of John Howard Yoder, 22 Legal Stud. Forum 473 (1998)Google Scholar, and is used here with permission.

13. (Eerdmans 1972).

14. Steinfels, supra n. 3, at A17.

15. A theme discussed in Wisdom 171, 240, and in The Politics of Jesus as “revolutionary subordination.”