Author's Introduction
Anabaptist Ways of Knowing
A Conversation About Tradition-Based Critical Education

Remember Who You Are

by Sara Wenger Shenk

I don’t know when it began, but it became a frequent practice in our home. As the children left for school, I would say to them, "Remember who you are!" I never said it without feeling a quiet joy, grateful for knowing something about who I am. And I said it thinking that perhaps our children would also be reminded that they are "somebody"—somebody with a special history, with an identity worth celebrating.

I am intrigued that they didn’t ask me, "What do you mean, Mom? What am I supposed to remember about who I am?" An unspoken potency was bound up in the understanding we shared. "Remember who you are!" seemed to suggest that who we are is worth remembering and has everything to do with how we carry ourselves into the wider world.

As I reflect on why I would remind our children of this, I think I was inviting them to call to mind several aspects of their identity. I was reminding them to remember what family they belong to—that they are Wenger Shenks and that we have a unique history, special practices, and core commitments that shape who we are as family. I was also reminding them that we belong to a distinctive community of faith, a community that shares a special history of pain and hope, recognizable practices, and a confession of faith which define us as "in the world but not of the world."

The times in which we live may be particularly suited to remember who we are and draw enormous energy from that memory. These are exciting times—times when persons who draw strength and identity from a particular peoplehood may be uniquely prepared to "seize the day." Postmodernity and its disenchantment with "scientific certainties" and universal explanations, offers us a splendid opportunity to speak truth out of our own history as a minority people. In my case, that special history derives from the Anabaptists and their radical identification with Jesus Christ and the early Christian church. "Communities of conviction," as educator Craig Dykstra calls us, bear within ourselves a long historical tradition that is deep and rich, a potent legacy that equips us to be an oasis in the desert of this age.

We live in a time of great foment and shifting loyalties. "Postmodernity," some call it. "Post-Christian" or a "culture of disbelief," others call it. Whatever one chooses to name the current era, it seems clear that we in the so-called West are at a turning point in how we choose to construe our reality. Much of what is called "postmodern," suggests Nancey Murphy, is actually nothing but a recognition of the failure to find indisputable foundations for universal knowledge.¹ Foundationalism, as a philosophical approach to knowledge, demanded certainty and decontextualization simply not available to most human endeavors.

Among theologians and philosophers there is more and more widespread acknowledgment of the importance of taking context into account. Nonfoundationalist theologians speak about confessing Christian affirmations as uniquely and finally true, but they acknowledge that this truth must be confessed or professed as there is no such thing as absolutely secured knowledge. Knowledge is "particular and perspectival," and as such is always contestable. Truth, then, can be lived, believed and witnessed to only from a specific perspective or point of view.² And so, in "remembering who we are" we actively own our perspective and offer its unique texture to the fabric of our world.

Postmodernity and
Tradition-Based, Critical Education

The discussion in this book can be thought of as a table conversation about how to remember who we are; a conversation about education, and about personal and communal formation. I will serve as the primary host of the conversation, though I am really serving on behalf of the contemporary heirs of the Anabaptists, most specifically the Mennonites. As the host of the conversation, I have invited multiple guests to share their perspectives, particularly as they relate to educational approaches.

I feel a profound urgency to engage in this conversation. The urgency grows out of a nagging concern that narratives and practices, which in earlier generations were deeply formative for our community life, are rapidly and uncritically being discarded. In the conversation, I will share the distinctive confessional priorities that, in my view, relate most directly to educational priorities. And then, keeping those distinctive priorities in mind, I will invite interaction with the other voices at the table, hoping to shed light on ways to reformulate an educational vision and give direction for the educational mission of other particular Christian communities like my own Mennonite community.

Questions of how we come to know move to the forefront in discussions about education—what can we know, how do we know it; and the related ethical question, what is it good to know? The emerging awareness in many circles is that we are far more limited in what we can know rationally or empirically than the Modern era led us to believe. Education theorists are giving evidence that questions and answers about how we come to know are more multi-faceted than previously thought, breaking us out of the narrow tunnel vision of rationalist thinking ushered in by the Enlightenment.

As is characteristic of unstable, dynamic times, when basic assumptions about truth and how we know truth are open for reevaluation, attempts are being made to provide new conceptual frameworks to examine the questions. Some of the most fruitful attempts take us back to a tradition-based community in a critical, dialectical relationship with the individual and his or her needs and visions; a faith community that knows itself to be a distinctive, minority group with unique practices and purposes in relation to the larger society; a community that while attempting to faithfully steward a living tradition, is open to ongoing prophetic critique.

My contention in this conversation about education will be that the early Anabaptist stance toward knowing truth resonates with much of the current thinking about how we come to know in its emphasis on the traditional, spiritual, ethical, communal, bodily, and practical ways of knowing. Such a stance can provide important insights for guiding us in envisioning educational and formational priorities for the coming years.

An approach to education from within a tradition-based community will underscore the social nature of human life with particular focus on life practices. Community practices express a basic appreciation of the importance of a personal, participatory knowing that must be nourished by tradition and communal experience. Central importance will be given to narratives and practices as providing identity and meaning to the community and its members.³

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that knowledge and truth are rooted in culture and need a narrative context to become intelligible. "Narrative history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions," he asserts. An action requires a context to be intelligible. Behavior, he claims, can only be characterized adequately when we know its setting, the beliefs that informed it and the long and short term intentions of that behavior. Behavior and communication, according to MacIntyre, only become intelligible by finding their place in a narrative informed by the past, living in the present, and moving toward the future.⁴

In trying to make sense of the future toward which we’re moving, a human is essentially a story-telling animal, argues MacIntyre, a teller of stories that "aspire to truth." Deprive children of stories and "you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words."⁵ The story of a life is always embedded in the tale of the communities from which we derive our identity, he continues, suggesting that in this way possessing an historical identity and a social identity coincide. And he notes that what a person is is in large part what the person inherits. MacIntyre argues convincingly that for our human communities to thrive, we must give vigilant attention to the tradition of the virtues and the narratives and practices that sustain our community life together. To put it bluntly, our salvation lies in our traditions and it is the exercise of the relevant virtues that sustains and strengthens our traditions.⁶

Murphy suggests that no philosopher has done more to show a helpful way beyond the current crisis about truth claims than MacIntyre and the tradition-based rationality and morality he outlines in his work. She claims that MacIntyre provides an alternative to the demand for universal reason and to the cynicism and relativism that show up when such a search is found to be futile. It is our traditions that give us the resources for justifying our actions as well as our truth claims, he argues. Outside of all tradition one is morally and intellectually destitute. He also believes it is possible for traditions to compete meaningfully with one another, and occasionally to argue, in the public forum, that one tradition is rationally superior to its rivals.⁷

The work of George Lindbeck has also been helpful in recognizing the value of concrete religious traditions and reclaiming the value of particular and local traditions and practices. He has stressed the formative power of language and the liturgy of the church, as well as the regulative role of doctrine and argues that "to become religious involves becoming skilled in the language, the symbol system of a given religion. To become a Christian involves learning the story of Israel and of Jesus well enough to interpret and experience oneself and one’s world in its terms."⁸

Lindbeck argues (along with many others), that followers of Christ have something to say to the world only to the extent that they can produce communities which embody a distinctive way of life. He claims that religious communities are likely to contribute more to the future of humanity if they preserve their own distinctiveness and integrity than if they yield to homogenizing tendencies. Thus the primary task of the church is to be faithful to the Christian narrative to preserve its own distinctive integrity. But, and here is a cautionary note, it is also important to remind ourselves that the quality of our knowing will depend on whether our community participates in a larger reality than its own life-forms. If we don’t remember that the language we speak is capable of referring to realities beyond the language itself, our truth claims may collapse into "mere convention, opportunistic instrumentalism, and sectarian ethnocentrism."⁹

If we accept the assertions of Lindbeck and other scholars of religion and culture that particular, traditional communities of faith can provide the most potent resource for embodying a distinctive Christ-like life in postmodernity, what must characterize a given church community so it can actively remember its own story while becoming a community "for the world?"¹⁰

How can we draw strength from a particular tradition, a particular story, while cultivating a lively critique of that tradition so as to keep it vital in changing times? It is timely to re-vision education as both tradition-based and critical.¹¹ As followers of Christ we must come once again to understand ourselves as a resourceful minority. It is in embodying a distinctive way of life modeled on the teachings of Jesus that we will recapture the missional and transformative purpose that has characterized educational endeavors during some of its most generative eras. And we will observe that critical reflection on the ways in which the traditions are embodied is essential to keep them vital.

A Particular Faith Community

The Anabaptist-Mennonite approach has been to expect its traditional narratives and practices to serve a central formative function in the life of the community. While they seldom expressed themselves with elaborately formulated, explicit theology, they have been guided by an implicit theology, a set of firm convictions and practices for which they have risked, and sometimes paid, their lives.¹² They sought to model their communal, social and personal practice according to Jesus’ life as the norm with the assistance of the Holy Spirit.

The ethical and philosophical concerns of their approach have been to maintain a unity of faith and practice because it is in following Jesus more closely that we come to know God and God’s purposes more truly. Mennonite theologian Tom Finger notes that the early Anabaptists stressed Jesus’ teaching and example far more than did other religious groups of their time.¹³ They affirmed that only one committed to following Jesus in concrete practices of daily life can know the truth about God’s purposes. This affirmation has been called a distinctive emphasis within the sixteenth century on the nature and method of knowing.¹⁴

Heirs of the Anabaptists have emphasized the need for unity of faith and practice. Their traditional church-centered communities have maintained a degree of strength in large part because of a profound commitment to maintain the unity of faith and practice and also to remain distinct as a church community from the larger society.¹⁵ It is their distinctive emphases in conversation with early Greek notions of paideia and recent philosophical thinking that will guide my construction of a tradition-based and critical approach to education for postmodern, particular Christian communities.

Fayette Veverka, a Catholic educator, raised the question which is central to my sense of urgency about the need to formulate an approach to education for Mennonites and for other particular Christian communities: "If education is a community building enterprise, how do we educate when the very definition of what it means to be a people is at stake?" Out of her Catholic context, she was suggesting directions for education that resonate with where my own thinking is going as a Mennonite. She spoke of educational strategies that include cultural practices that "embody" and "enact" religious traditions.¹⁶

I approach this conversation about education from the vantage point of my own personal history as a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a neighbor, a teacher, a pastor and as a woman involved in theological education. I approach it as a practical theologian who wants theology to help make sense of everyday, down-to-earth realities. And I approach the topic in an informal sense as an ethnographer, one who loves to study people amid their lives and the complexity of their relationship; to look, listen and observe people within the web of forces that impact their lives—their walls, their loves, their enemies, their celebrations and work, what they wear and what they long for.

I also come from many generations of Mennonite families who originally emigrated to the United States from Switzerland and Germany. My family has for several generations been deeply involved in education. My own experience has included relating to educational realities cross-culturally, in Ethiopia, the former Yugoslavia and in a variety of different cultural and educational settings in the United States. This conversation about how we come to know and about education represents for me an opportunity to reassess some of the strengths and limitations of the traditions that have largely formed me. I will hope to critically retrieve those aspects of the traditions which continue to have potential for shaping a vital educational vision able to address present communal and cultural challenges.

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