The Activist Impulse

Essays on the Intersection of Evangelicalism and Anabaptism

Burkholder, Cramer

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781630876210
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Anabaptists have often felt suspicious of American evangelicalism, and in turn evangelicals have found various reasons to dismiss the Anabaptist witness. Yet at various points in the past as well as the present, evangelicals and Anabaptists have found ample reason for conversation and much to appreciate about each other. The Activist Impulse represents the first book-length examination of the complex relationship between evangelicalism and Anabaptism in the past thirty years. It brings established experts and new voices together in an effort to explore the historical and theological intersection of these two rich traditions. Each of the essays provides fresh insight on at least one characteristic that both evangelicals and Anabaptists share--an impulse to engage society through the pursuit of active Christian witness.

Part I

Intersecting Stories

Historical Reflection on the Nexus of Evangelicalism and Anabaptism

Introduction to Part I

Reflecting on the past is a fitting place to begin an exploration of the intersection of Anabaptism and evangelicalism and the activist impulse found in both traditions. A strong sense of history has been a significant part of Anabaptist and evangelical identity, and narratives of the past continue to play an important role in shaping their respective communities. Not only can we observe significant points of intersection within the past, but the telling of their stories has significantly affected the way Anabaptists and evangelicals have viewed each other. Steven M. Nolt’s engaging essay both opens this initial section and serves as a foundation for the volume as a whole. Nolt begins by offering a clear description of Anabaptism’s and evangelicalism’s activist impulse, setting it in historical context. Nolt then offers several short case studies, which illustrate patterns of evangelical-Anabaptist interaction.

John D. Roth then offers a historical assessment of evangelical-Anabaptist encounter, including a critical overview of Anabaptist historiography on the matter. He highlights the shortcomings of the traditional story and proposes a new paradigm for future conversation—one that reminds us that evangelicals and Anabaptists are both children of the Reformation and therefore share certain tensions and possibly even internal contradictions. Roth finishes by turning our attention to Pilgram Marpeck, the sixteenth-century lay theologian, whose sacramental theology and views on the church offer a model for healthy dialogue between Anabaptists and evangelicals.

John Fea concludes the section with reflections on the limits of the activist impulse for the faithful study of history, arguing that evangelicals and Anabaptists alike often have trouble understanding the past on its own terms as their views can become clouded by political or theological agendas. Fea argues for a method of historical inquiry that seeks more nuanced and empathetic understanding by extending “intellectual hospitality” to the past and the individuals we find there. In so doing, we embrace virtues, such as humility, that both evangelicals and Anabaptists value, and in the process become better Christians as well as better historians.

1

Activist Impulses across Time

North American Evangelicalism and Anabaptism as Conversation Partners

Steven M. Nolt

In the last five decades, Anabaptists and evangelicals have engaged in a conversation, both literal and figurative, that has been enlivening and engaging, cautious and contentious. Consider the following:

• Thousands of Mennonite youth, packing their denominationally-sponsored convention, sing “Come, Now is the Time to Worship,” “Your Love is Amazing,” and other songs by contemporary Christian artist Brian Doerksen—who in his own youth had left the Mennonite Brethren church for John Wimber’s Vineyard Fellowship.1

• Connections made at the 1989 National Prayer Breakfast, a Washington DC event often seen as blending evangelical faith and crass nationalism, pave the way for Mennonite peacebuilding work in apartheid-era South Africa.2

• During the 1960s, Brethren in Christ educator Arthur M. Climenhaga becomes the second executive director of the National Association of Evangelicals, and Wilbur D. Benedict, who was raised in an Old German Baptist Brethren family, serves as the publisher of Christianity Today.3

• In a 1991 fundraising letter, evangelical radio speaker and author John MacArthur appeals to supporters for help in presenting the gospel in creative ways to unsaved people groups, such as the Amish.4

• In 1974 more than a dozen Old Colony Mennonite families living near Osler, Saskatchewan, organize Osler Mission Chapel, a church championing assurance of salvation and embracing evangelicalism as liberation from Mennonite tradition.5

• In 2007, after participating in a Mennonite conference on ministry in contemporary society, Greg Boyd, an evangelical writer and megachurch pastor, tells readers of his popular blog, “It turns out I’m a Mennonite!” As Mennonites explained their “conviction that the Kingdom of God is radically different from all versions of the Kingdom of the World,” Boyd was “excited, because I felt like I found a tribe I could passionately embrace,” and “on a deep level, it kind of felt like coming home.”6

These examples illustrate not only the diversity of the evangelical-Anabaptist conversation, but also some of the distinctive voices, connections, tensions, and choices that exist at the center of this ongoing, historically-rooted relationship. Both traditions, in different ways, are at home in North America, and both share an activist impulse—a desire to convert their Christian convictions into lived religion and a refusal to regard faith as private or merely otherworldly. At the same time, evangelicalism and Anabaptism embody somewhat different emphases and inclinations, even as each stream encompasses a degree of diversity within itself.

By many measures, Anabaptists and evangelicals are religious kin—although whether the metaphor runs more in the direction of supportive siblings or fraternal feuding is not always clear. What is clear is that members of these branches of the Christian family tree have carried on a vital conversation during their years in North America and especially so in recent decades. If that conversation sometimes took the form of argument and dispute, it was just as often a discourse of shared convictions, imitation, or mutual longing.

To be sure, the shape of this relationship has often been asymmetrical: A numerically small and “sectarian” tradition, on the one hand, and a wide and socially influential movement, on the other. Large numbers of North American evangelicals have little knowledge of Anabaptist theology, nor any direct contact with the Mennonites, Brethren, or Amish who represent it. In contrast, most Anabaptists find themselves in regular interaction with evangelical neighbors, institutions, and ideas, and often have to define themselves religiously in relationship to evangelicalism. Perhaps this asymmetry explains the suspicion and misunderstanding that has sometimes marked this conversation, even as it suggests that the conversation is sure to continue.

Moving past such misunderstanding requires listening to one another’s stories. Several years ago Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary president J. Nelson Kraybill said, “I have resolved to stop comparing the best of my Anabaptist heritage with the worst of evangelicalism.”7 In that spirit, the stories here introduce both traditions and then heed specific exchanges between them, seeking the outlines of the conversation by listening for common and prominent themes.

The Activist Impulse in American Evangelical History

In theological terms, evangelicalism is a stream of Protestant Christianity marked by emphases on religious conversion, active and overt expression of faith, the authority of the Bible, and Christ’s death on the cross.8 These hallmarks, as British historian David Bebbington has shown, were common across the north Atlantic world among those ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1: Intersecting Stories
• Introduction to Part 1
• Chapter 1: Activist Impulses across Time
• Chapter 2: Anabaptism and Evangelicalism Revisited
• Chapter 3: Intellectual Hospitality as Historical Method
• Part 2: Intersecting Challenges
• Introduction to Part 2
• Chapter 4: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and a Mennonite “Third Way”
• Chapter 5: “I Submit”
• Chapter 6: A Cord of Many Strands
• Chapter 7: Misfits and Fundamentalists
• Part 3: Intersecting Concerns
• Introduction to Part 3
• Chapter 8: Practicing Peace, Embracing Evangelism
• Chapter 9: “Pool Tables are the Devil’s Playground”
• Chapter 10: Re-Baptizing Evangelicalism
• Chapter 11: The Evangelical-Anabaptist Spectrum
• Part 4: Intersecting Trajectories
• Introduction to Part 4
• Chapter 12: “Go Tell that Fox!”
• Chapter 13: Beyond Anselm
• Chapter 14: Evangelical Hermeneutics, Anabaptist Ethics
• Afterword