This book is a personalized account of my believers-church odyssey, within our crumbling Christendom, during the second half of the twentieth century. Being fully human—at once a member of society generally and of the distinctly Christian faith community particularly—remains irreducibly paradoxical. Absence of that tension signifies not the triumph of Christianity in society but more likely its dissolution. According to the biblical story, salvation, begun here and now, will be realized fully only at the end of the present age: "Then comes the end, when he [Christ] hands over the kingdom to God the Father . . . " (1 Cor. 15:24). What that fulfillment entails is beyond present human comprehension.

Medieval Christendom, to which legacy our American saga is deeply indebted, mistakenly assumed otherwise. During that era, human affairs rested on the ostensible belief that in the fourth and fifth centuries the imperial political order had accepted, and thereupon been incorporated into, the reign of Christ. Efforts by the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation fundamentally to disengage the two domains were abruptly aborted. Only at the persecuted margins did the believers free-church project survive.

In the eighteenth-century American context, however, church and state, both constitutionally and institutionally, once more separated. But the reasons for that separation were merely practical, not fundamental. As a result, the ambience of Christendom remains comfortably embedded in the American ethos, even though formally church and state now are separate. Despite the United States constitutional separation of church and state, our nation was deeply involved in the two World Wars that emerged among the peoples of Christendom, for the most part with Christian (and church) support on both sides. Despite all this, the forces of secularization long advanced.

That advance permitted in the twentieth century, for the first time, the free and full publication of the sixteenth-century Anabaptist (believers church) writings, along with the legal records of their political prosecution. With the collaboration of European and North American scholars, that publication project peaked during the mid-twentieth century, even as the alternatives for conscientious objectors to military service were being fleshed out fully for the first time. Though these two developments unfolded independently, they became mutually reinforcing, particularly for the military draft-age generation during and after World War II.

Only after that war ended formally was service abroad for conscientious objectors permitted. Given the importance of the pacifist commitment in sixteenth-century Anabaptism—(for example, "the sword is an ordering of God, outside the perfection of Christ," as Amabaptists put it at Schleitheim in 1527)—the publication of the early documents during the World War II era had a bracing effect at that time and even more later, as we will see in pages that follow.

While these interactive influences affected the churches of Anabaptist descent generally, both church leaders and young draftees were most directly stimulated by the publishing of these historical materials. Not surprisingly, however, differences of reading also emerged between the older and younger generations. Church leaders looked to those publications for renewing support for prevalent modes of faith and practice in their communities. The younger generation, thrown abruptly into new alternative service experiences, whether at home or abroad, was more attuned to new challenges than to older customs. Those differing experiences added to the normal intergenerational ferment.

Born in 1918, I grew up in a conservative Anabaptist enclave in Pennsylvania. By early adolescence, I had become a personally committed Christian. After delayed college, some graduate school at home and abroad, and five years of Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) relief and service in Europe, in the early 1950s I completed a doctoral dissertation at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Written in German, it was published in Germany in 1954. The topic was a sociological study of the original Swiss Anabaptists, 1525-1540. The primary data were the court records of some eight hundred Swiss people, mostly men but also women, arrested during that period in Switzerland for joining this illegal movement.

For me, the impact of that study became life-changing. It caused me to concentrate on my own century rather than to pursue a career in sixteenth-century studies. The return to contemporary denominational contexts led in the course of the next decade to a midlife career change. That change was occasioned not by disillusionment with my faith but by the deepening that the explorations of earlier roots had brought. In keeping with the physicians’ Hippocratic Oath, "First do no harm," I chose to continue explorations in wider contexts. This autobiographical account tells that story and the discoveries resulting from that career change.

The possibility of confusion is inherent in the mode of writing here described as an autobiographical account. The intent and design is not that of a complete autobiography. Until part 4, the narrative is autobiographical, hence chronological. But interpretive cross-referencing occasionally intrudes. Suddenly there may be mention of an earlier or later event or concept than the date of the immediate chapter. At times this approach leads to repeated citings of examples as agenda treated in context reappears in another context or stage. If the reader is aware of the design at the outset, this will hopefully minimize any difficulties.

Observe also that notes as well as index have been avoided. I intend to keep the reader’s focus on the emerging thread of insights in their event-settings, mostly leaving pertinent literature aside for the moment. There is little attempt to cite or assess current literature on the many issues that emerge in the course of the pages that follow. While a listing of Acknowledgements precedes this Introduction, it does not include the pool of contributors, named and unnamed, to whom I am indebted in the experiences here sketched. Nor do the chapters that follow presume fully to name or account for all the events that impinged on my life journey.

A Summary Outline

As the contents page indicates, this narrative-based account falls into four parts:

Part 1 consists of an introductory chapter, followed by a second one that briefly sketches my family history and upbringing until I came of age.

Part 2 treats what can be regarded as an overview of the first half of my adult life: college (which came late after age twenty-one); wartime and postwar experiences; graduate training; early college teaching; and involvement in peace/war discussions in Europe, Japan, and America. The last two chapters in Part Two summarize the development of those experiences and their unfolding in a midlife career change.

Part 3 is a descriptive account of the second half of my life, including retirement. It begins in chapter 9 with the story of how that repositioning emerged: my appointment at the Catholic University of America; my extracurricular involvement in bridge-building into the Soviet world during the Cold War; and finally my post-retirement participation in a wilderness haven for study, dialogue, and retreat.

Part 4 summarizes the findings of the redirected portion of my life. These chapters take the form of essays. Yet even so they are based more on living experience than theoretical abstraction, at times more attentive to both/and tensions, than to either/or oversimplifications. Listening respectively to the grandeur and misery of both life and abstraction, and to the informing and judging Word transcending both, is hardly part of the professional canon—or of an outwardly successful career.