War of the Lamb by John Howard Yoder

I recently finished reading John Howard Yoder’s latest book The War of the Lamb. I sent a full review to Mennonite Quarterly Review, which will come out later this year. This is perhaps Yoder’s best book to date because of the way in which Yoder ties nonviolent peacemaking completely to Jesus and theological analysis. For Yoder, theology is ethics, and ethics is theology (he learned this from his teacher Karl Barth). The publishers chose to write a bizarre claim on the back of the book that states Yoder believed that just war and pacifism were “basically compatible.” This contradicts Yoder’s own words in the book, which could not more clearly reject just war.

I don’t dialogue with the just war tradition because I think it is credible, but because it is the language that people, who I believe bear the image of God, abuse to authorize themselves to destroy other bearers of that image (116).

Yoder rejects it because it does not conform to the reality of the cross. He makes his strongest case yet that Jesus has changed reality, and it is those who work against the grain of the universe and resort to violence and war, who live in unreality. I highly recommend this book.