Recovering from the Anabaptist Vision

New Essays in Anabaptist Identity and Theological Method

Laura Schmidt Roberts, Paul Martens, Myron A. Penner, Laura Schmidt Roberts, Paul Martens, Myron A. Penner

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780567692733
• eBook ISBN: 9780567692757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

This volume performs a critical and vibrant reconstruction of Anabaptist identity and theological method, in the wake of the recent revelations of the depth of the sexual abuse perpetrated by the most influential Anabaptist theologian of the 20th century, John Howard Yoder. In an attempt to liberate Anabaptist theology and identity from the constricting vision appropriated and reformulated by Yoder, these essays refuse the determinative categories of the last half century supplied by and carried beyond Harold Bender's The Anabaptist Vision. While still under the shadow of decades of trauma, a recontexualized conversation about Anabaptist theology and identity emerges in this volume that is ecumenically engaged, philosophically astute, psychologically attuned, and resolutely vulnerable. The volume offers a Trinitarian and Christological framework that holds together the importance of Scripture, tradition, and the lived experience of the Christian community, as the contributors examine a wide variety of issues such as Mennonite feminism, Anabaptist queer theology, and Mennonite theological methods. These essays interrogate the operations of power, violence, exclusion, and privilege in methodology in this changed context, offering self-critical constructive alternatives for articulating Anabaptist theology and identity.

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Challenge and Opportunity

The Quest for Anabaptist Theology Today

Paul Martens

In recent decades, Anabaptism has gained a level of fame—and not mere infamy—far beyond what it enjoyed in the last five hundred years. Yet increased scrutiny has accompanied this newfound attention; the contestation of “Anabaptist” has increased relative to its rise in popularity. In this chapter, I engage just one adjectival application of Anabaptist—Anabaptist theology—to question and volatilize what I take to be the dominant North American understanding of the term.

Among the past generation or two of theologians and ethicists in North America (and especially for non-Mennonite theologians during this time), John Howard Yoder was the dominant and almost de facto voice of Anabaptist thought. With the recent unmasking of his sexual violence, however, his role as the authoritative arbiter of Anabaptist theology has been destroyed. The ascription of the term “Today” in the subtitle of this chapter is, therefore, conditioned by both the constructive role Yoder played in creating the context of contemporary understandings of Anabaptism and the virtual vacuum left within the discourse after Yoder’s public reckoning. This chapter aims to (a) illuminate why Yoder’s theological vision was so tempting and (b) call into question the legitimacy of the contextual demands that gave his vision so much explanatory power with the goal of (c) illuminating how Yoder’s theological vision is unable to address some of the most critical questions up for debate in contemporary Anabaptist theology. Before justifying this damning conclusion, however, it is necessary to reexamine the basic category assumed thus far: “Anabaptism.”

Anabaptism Is Not Anabaptism—or Is It?

To unpack the power of Yoder’s theological vision, it is helpful to look briefly at the historiography of Anabaptism. In other words, it is always helpful to remember that the way the term “Anabaptism” is used today is a theological reconstruction employed to address the current context and thus reflects a select appropriation of history for a normative end. This is not necessarily a critique, but it is an acknowledgment that a methodological choice has been made. It is also highly unlikely that any of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists counted under this umbrella understood the term to mean what it meant in most contemporary appropriations.

In the beginning of the story—in the sixteenth century—the theological world was not formless and void on the eve of the Protestant Reformation, despite the popular image that the first Anabaptists appeared as “meteors against the night.”¹ In previous centuries, reform movements like the Waldensians, Jan Hus, John Wycliffe, and the Brethren of the Common Life within Roman Catholicism served as forerunners of the Protestant Reformation and had much in common with early Anabaptism. All of the first-generation Anabaptists, whether vocational theologians or not, learned doctrines and practices that were not self-consciously Anabaptist per se in their Christian formation. Their eventual Anabaptist theological identity—the term tied to their voluntary adult rebaptism—was therefore adopted through difference in relation to Catholic, Lutheran, and eventually Calvinist theological positions.

Unsurprisingly, the term Anabaptist is merely one of the many denigrating designations used by their sixteenth-century enemies. They were also referred to as Donatists, heretics, Schwärmerei (enthusiasts), Cathars, and restitutionists—the list, often also tied to historical precursors, goes on. Since the sixteenth century, the debate has continued, with the basic question being: Is the group of reformers that emerged after Luther and Zwingli sufficiently unified to fall under one umbrella and, if so, what should it be called: radical reformers, the second front, or the left (or even communist) wing of the Reformation? Leonard Verduin’s The Reformers and Their Stepchildren is but one example of how this question was asked and answered by historians half a century ago.² Another more sympathetic form of this debate within Mennonite historiography came to the conclusion that polygenesis—and not monogenesis—is the best way to understand the emergence of sixteenth-century Anabaptism.³

My point in raising this historical question is fairly simple and absolutely pedantic to Mennonite historians: we must recognize that whatever is referred to as Anabaptist theology today is a reconstruction that is, at best, either loosely or selectively tied to the sixteenth century. Each reconstruction entails two elements that can be queried. The first element concerns designation: Why this particular term and not others, especially when rebaptism ceases to be a significant marker in later centuries? Harold Bender himself acknowledged that “the Anabaptists themselves used no common name,” and perhaps the closest thing to a unified self-designation would be the use of “Brethren.”⁴ The second element concerns description: What are the criteria by which one stands within the boundaries of Anabaptism? Certainly, generally recognizable communities within the radical reformation emerged; the Schleitheim group, the Marpeck circle, the Mennonites, and the Hutterites are but a few examples. The theology that guided and emerged from these communities was also unique and contingently tied to the identity and practices of these communities. For example, it is difficult to read the Schleitheim Confession’s condemnation of popish and re-popish works and its demand for separation from the world as a theological position apart from the kind of exilic community it represents.⁵ Likewise, it is difficult to read The Mirror of the Martyrs and its defense of believer’s baptism (and those that suffered because of it) as anything but a defense of and exhortation to a specific community that understood itself as the faithful remnant, literally the ana-baptists, the “Christminded,” the “Apostle-minded,” or the “Gospel-minded,” to use the language of the text itself.⁶ But looking outside the various communities that have remained relatively stable because of their communal separateness from the world (e.g., the Holdeman Mennonites, the Hutterites, and the Amish), appeals to a kind of pan-Anabaptism always take on a description that is novel and shaped at least as much by twenty- and twenty-first-century contexts as the sixteenth.

How Harold Bender Anchored Anabaptism

As I see it, nearly the entire contemporary debate around Anabaptist methodological questions is indebted to the work of Harold Bender. His Anabaptist Vision provided a positive and constructive response to the deepest yearnings of the Mennonites of his day and, in the process, launched North American Anabaptist theology on a trajectory that we are just beginning to recognize and recover from. In the words of John Roth, Bender’s Anabaptist Vision

served as a symbolic theological anchor within the Mennonite Church. In the tumultuous era following Second World War, as Menno­nites became increasingly acculturated into the mainstream culture of North America, Bender’s summary of Anabaptism’s essential features became a lodestar for leaders throughout the church, a source of identity and renewal amidst the buffeting forces of change.⁷

Beginning in the late nineteenth century and increasingly in the early twentieth century, the world that Mennonites encountered—particularly in North America—had become quite different. In short, the Industrial Revolution, colonialism and global trade, the rise of technology and all its social entailments—including and perhaps especially social mobility—and the temptation of the American dream gradually but radically altered the communities and the world in which Anabaptists found themselves. This assimilation of Anabaptist communities into a rapidly changing world quickly generated significant sociological attention,⁸ but it also required theological attention. J. C. Wenger’s prefatory comments in his Introduction to Theology gesture in this direction:

During the last century, when Mennonites in North America made the transition from German to English, they suddenly found themselves cut off from the writings of Menno Simons, Dirck Philips, T. J. van Braght . . . as well as their confessions of faith, catechisms, and devotional literature. This brought about a certain disorientation, a cutting loose from the historical moorings. Although the brotherhood was saved by the introduction of the Sunday school, and was greatly revived by the ensuing interest in Bible study and missions, there arose a generation of leaders who were but superficially acquainted with the fundamental doctrines and insights of their Anabaptist forefathers. These new leaders attempted to formulate singlehandedly the outlines of a theology which would give our people a renewed sense of mission and thus prevent the further exodus of the ablest young people, and subsequent disintegration of the group. These formulations tended to cluster about nonresistance, nonconformity, and the ordinances: but nonresistance was thought of too exclusively in terms of a rejection of military service in time of war and little effort was made to develop a broad social ethic in terms of New Testament Christianity.⁹

From this moment onward, Mennonite theology could not help but become deeply invested—both intentionally and unintentionally—in the maintenance or reconstruction of an Anabaptist identity. A decade earlier, in the uncertain days of the Second World War, Harold Bender also appealed to history—to a specific strand of the sixteenth century—to describe a synthetic Anabaptist identity that served the purposes of being both summarily descriptive of the sixteenth century and normative for the twentieth:

Although the definitive history of Anabaptism has not yet been written, we know enough today to draw a clear line of demarcation between original evangelical and constructive Anabaptism on the one hand, which was born in the bosom of Zwinglianism in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1525, and established in the Low Countries in 1533, and the various mystical, spiritualistic, revolutionary, or even antinomian related and unrelated groups on the other hand, which came and went like the flowers of the field in those days of the great renovation. The former, Anabaptism proper, maintained an unbroken course in Switzerland, South Germany, Austria, and Holland throughout the sixteenth century, and has continued until the present day in the Mennonite movement, now almost 500,000 baptized members strong in Europe and America. There is no longer any excuse for permitting our understanding of the distinct character of this genuine Anabaptism to be obscured.¹⁰

Bender’s tone is not nearly as pessimistic as Wenger’s; his range of vision is also not nearly as broad. In essence, Bender selected Anabaptism as the appropriate nomenclature for the purpose of selecting one preferred historical strand that would then be distilled into three easily accessible themes by Bender: discipleship, voluntary church membership, and nonviolence. On this foundation, he then set about inducting young Mennonites into this new Anabaptist world, introducing them to the true understanding of the sixteenth century, and sending them out beyond the Mennonite world to get world-class educations. On this foundation, he energetically committed himself to reinforcing and building Mennonite institutions. And while not strictly speaking a theologian himself, he believed that the basic tenets of the early Anabaptists could be understood in English as well as in the original languages. The classic example of this can be found in the opening lines of his Vision. Citing Rufus Jones, he enjoins that the Anabaptist movement

must be pronounced one of the most momentous and significant undertakings in man’s eventful religious struggle after the truth. It gathered up the gains of earlier movements, it is the spiritual soil out of which all nonconformist sects have sprung, and it is the first plain announcement in modern history of a programme for a new type of Christian society which the modern world, especially in America and England, has been slowly realizing—an absolutely free and independent religious society, and a State in which every man counts as a man, and has his share in shaping both Church and State.¹¹

And so, against the threat of acculturation and loss of theological identity, Bender provided a synthesized Anabaptism that anchored the Mennonite church by appropriating what he took to be the best of the sixteenth century to affirm the best of the modern (i.e., American and English) world.

Yoder and the Sinking of the Mennonite Ship

One of the young Mennonites who Bender inducted into his version of the Anabaptist world and then sent globetrotting for the purposes of gaining greater experience and a world-class education was John Howard Yoder. Yoder fulfilled the promise pursued by both Wenger an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Series Preface Malinda Berry and Paul Martens
• Preface Myron A. Penner
• 1 Challenge and Opportunity: The Quest for Anabaptist Theology Today
• 2 Contours and Possibilities for an Anabaptist Theology
• 3 Refiguration, Configuration: Tradition, Text, and Narrative Identity
• 4 Mennonite Women Doing Theology: A Methodological Reflection on Twenty-Five Years of Conferences
• 5 Queering Anabaptist Theology: An Endeavor in Breaking Binaries as Hermeneutical Community
• 6 On the Need for Critical-Contextual and Trauma-Informed Methods in Mennonite Theology
• 7 The Ecumenical Vocation of Anabaptist Theology
• 8 Dialogue as Theological Method: Mennonite Missionaries, West African Churches, and Twenty-First-Century Anabaptist Identity
• 9 Restlessness as Theological Method
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright