John Howard Yoder was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on February 25, 1927, the son of a University of Pittsburgh professor. He completed his undergraduate education at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where he also completed his M.A. degree. He taught at Earlham College from 1950 to 1954 and then was an assistant professor of theology at Goshen College for two years
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He married Mary Ann Stahl Yoder on July 14, 1955.
He attended Union Theological Seminary in New York City where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1963 with a dissertation entitled "The Epistemology of Theism." He served as editor of the Journal of Christian Ethics from 1963 to 1965 and as editor-in-chief from 1965 to 1974.
He served as professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1974 until 1979 when he accepted a call to be the theologian-in-residence at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. He was named Henry Bredemeyer Professor of Systematic Theology in 1977 and served in that position until his retirement in 1995.
During his career he published more than one hundred articles and several books, including Honest to God: A Guidebook for Personal Witness (1973); Love and Justice: A Challenge for Christians (1976); A Theology of Biblical Law (1979); Jesus as Bridegroom: New Testament Marriage as the Heart of Christian Faith (1984); Jesus Christ and His Emerging People (1985), All Things Work Together for Good: A Christian View of History (1989), Jesus Christ and the Living Church: Recovering Our Lost Roots (1992); and Beyond Violence: Christian Peacemaking (1993).
Yoder died on December 13, 2004 at the age of seventy-eight after a long illness.