Holmes County, Ohio—where Gerald Biesecker-Mast spent his formative childhood years—is home to a remarkable variety of interrelated Anabaptist groups. In the late 1970s, a local historian listed no less than eighteen distinct Amish and Mennonite fellowships scattered throughout the county’s thriving hamlets and rolling hills, a number that has undoubtedly increased in the intervening years. To the outsider looking in, it may seem strange indeed that a tradition so committed to the gospel of peace and the principles of nonresistance would be so fragmented. What can account for this perplexing diversity? And is there anything that these disparate groups—spanning a colorful spectrum from the distinctive lifestyle of the Old Order Amish to the more acculturated Mennonites—actually hold in common? In this remarkable book, Gerald Biesecker-Mast offers a creative reinterpretation of Anabaptist history and theology that goes a long way toward answering these questions. The Anabaptist movement of the sixteenth century, he argues, was forged within a cauldron of theological, sociological and political tensions that shaped its very identity. At the heart of these tensions was the Anabaptist commitment to a defenseless ethic of love and nonviolence consistent with the life and teachings of Christ. The Anabaptists understood the church to be an alternative community—one that rejected not only sins of unredeemed humanity but also the "respectable" violence that often seems necessary to maintain civic structures and the broader social order. The commitment to nonviolence, more than any other teaching, set the Anabaptists apart from other reformers. But it also gave rise to a series of complicated, and sometimes paradoxical, understandings of their relationship to the state, to fellow Christians, and to the "fallen world." Thus, for example, Anabaptist rhetoric called on followers of Jesus to lay down their weapons, even as it acknowledged the sword to be an "ordering of God" that served a useful social purpose of "protecting the good and punishing the evil." In a similar way, the uncompromising and dualistic language that divided the "redeemed church" from the "fallen world" was always moderated by a desire to live peaceably and civilly with their Catholic and Protestant neighbors. The persistent paradox of Anabaptist rhetoric—a tension that Biesecker-Mast carefully traces across four centuries of Anabaptist thought—is that the nonresistant church is always "dependent on that from which the community is said to be separated": the church is always "in the world" even as its witness depends on it not being "of the world." Whereas some interpreters have dismissed this ambivalence as theologically incoherent or evidence of an irresponsible political ethic, Biesecker-Mast regards it as intrinsic to Anabaptist-Mennonite witness and identity. By refusing to be fully at home in the world, even as it seeks to survive and thrive in the world, the defenseless church testifies to the hope that all of humanity might someday be liberated from the burden of violence. More than some abstract standard of theological orthodoxy, this ethic of nonresistant witness, lived in the tension between separation and civility, is the most crucial indicator of Anabaptist faithfulness. At the same time, however, the inherent dynamism implicit in an ethic of being "in the world, but not of the world" meant that Anabaptists committed to nonresistance would never be able "to fully fix or to finally settle the social or spiritual identities of their defenseless communities" (233). Which brings us back to the remarkable variety of Anabaptist-Mennonite groups now flourishing in Holmes County, Ohio. At a time when congregations, conferences, and denominations are anxiously asking questions about their "identity," when boundaries of all sorts seem fluid, and whirl threatens to be king, this book offers an exceedingly helpful understanding of Christian faithfulness in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition. It does so by anchoring the principle of nonresistant love at the very center of the gospel, while acknowledging the diverse ways that a community might engage God’s larger creation even as they are "separated unto Christ." At a time when those of us in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition find ourselves deeply divided over our understandings of the state, the nature of our involvement in the political process, and the substance of our witness to the world, we would do well to step back and reflect carefully on this book. It is a gift to the church! —John D. Roth, Professor of
History Separation and the Sword orders:
|
|||||||
| Click here to explore joining InnerCircle readers club and receiving occasional updates and special discounts. | |||||||
