Clone of CGR Vol. 23, No. 2 (Spring 2005)

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles | Book Reviews

Radical Orthodoxy and the Radical Reformation: What is Radical about Radical Orthodoxy?

Forum with John Milbank

The Conrad Grebel Review 23, no. 2 (Spring 2005)

Participants

A. James Reimer, Conrad Grebel University College and Toronto School of Theology, Chair
John Milbank, University of Virginia

Panelists

Chris K. Huebner, Candian Mennonite University
Laura Schmidt Roberts, Graduate Theological Union
Gerald W. Schlabach, University of St. Thomas
Malinda E. Berry, Union Theological Seminary (NY)
P. Travis Kroeker, McMaster University

Jim Reimer:
Today’s conversation with John Milbank on Radical Orthodoxy is another instance of the attempt of the Toronto Mennonite Theological Centre to further ecumenical dialogue. We are pleased and honored that John Milbank is with us, to talk and converse with us, about the relation of Radical Orthodoxy to the Radical Reformation.

John Milbank:
It’s a great pleasure and honor to be with you this morning. My remarks are going to be of a very general and suggestive nature – nothing terribly well worked out, and I’m going to base them largely on a response to Jim Reimer’s own book on the Mennonites and classical philosophy [Mennonites and Classical Theology: Dogmatic Foundations for Christian Ethics (2001)]. The first thing, and perhaps the most important thing, to say is that I completely agree with the comments by Stanley Hauerwas on the back cover of Jim’s book: that one of the most important issues facing theology and the Church today is the relationship between Catholicism, in the broadest sense, and the Radical Reformation.

I’d like to make a footnote, from somebody coming from a British perspective. I think there are two things that are interesting. One is the idea that there’s a sort of dialectic between the Radical Reformation and Catholicism. This is actually borne out socio-historically in Britain. The very Yorkshire valleys where the pilgrimage of people marching down in protest against the dissolution of the monasteries (this is also associated with social radicalism) – those very valleys that produced that reaction by the end of the seventeenth century were dominated by Quakerism. It’s as if they completely rejected the individualism of the magisterial reformation. First of all it’s Catholic, later it’s a Radical Reformation. So I agree about this dialectic.

The second comment from a British point of view is that for a long time such a dialogue has existed in Britain. . . . The Catholic wing of the Anglican Church at the end of the nineteenth century developed a radical socialist wing. Perhaps the most famous among the members was the great Sinologist, Joseph Needham, who was an Anglo-Catholic and for some time a communist, and always a socialist and always a supporter of Chairman Mao. But Needham was also very interested in the British radical reformation, and wrote articles about the Levellers and Diggers and the relationship between science and radicalism in the English Civil War. So already there’s that tension and dialogue between Catholicism and the Radical Reformation; it’s very much in the tradition that I come out of and it ultimately lies behind Radical Orthodoxy.

Why, though, is this relationship now important? I think that it’s best illustrated by Reimer’s work itself. On the one hand, we need to recover the idea that classical orthodox doctrine has the most radical implications for human transformation and social transformation; on the other hand, we need to conjoin that to a radical practice. We need to find almost a kind of monasticism for everybody, a way for the laity more to manifest, in a radical, social, and personal practice, the implications of Christianity. Reimer is right to slightly modify at times the utopianism of the Anabaptist tradition, the idea that somehow now suddenly on earth there is already realized the perfect kingdom at the end of time. He’s also right to insist on a little less duality between utopianism and eschatology. Augustine certainly does allow that progress is possible, but he’s sometimes a little too static about the possibilities of actually transforming social and personal structures that embody sin and allenness. We need a little more of the idea of an anticipation of the eschaton, and at this point we can learn from the Radical Reformation.

So I broadly welcome the direction that Reimer’s work is taking, and it represents the work of other people as well. I’d certainly like to see an even stronger engagement with modern Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox thought in its best representatives. That’s a little more [valuable] than attention to Tillich. I understand the reasons for attending to Tillich, and why Reimer wants to balance Barth in that way. I would rather get authors other than Tillich, but that’s a relatively minor point.

Much more important, and one of the main challenges I intend to pose, is this: If you’re going to say, We’re going to appropriate the mainlines of the tradition and accept the formulas of the Church councils, the mainlines of Christian belief, Anselm and Aquinas and so on, is it really consistent with that to remain non-Episcopalian? I want to suggest that it isn’t, and that the best road forward for a movement like the Mennonites is to rejoin the main Episcopal tradition. The reason it’s inconsistent is that embracing doctrinal orthodoxy is linked, in Reimer’s thought, to a recognition of the importance of what is always being believed everywhere, and therefore to a kind of democracy of time, if you’d like to put it that way. Therefore, it is related to what I call the “educative hierarchy of time.” Christian hierarchy, the hierarchy talked about by Dionysus, is not a kind of static, spatial hierarchy. We’re born as children, we have first to learn. If we’re going to be good democrats in the end, we have to first learn virtues; that’s why education is linked to democracy. There’s something about transmission through time that is linked to this idea of hierarchy. Really, that’s what episcopacy is about, although it’s been distorted. That’s what it should be about. Also, if you don’t embrace episcopacy, you don’t embrace the hierarchy that’s actually linked to the Eucharist. It’s like Jean-Luc Marion says: the bishop is the true theologian. Why? Because the bishop celebrates the Eucharist, not because Marion is some kind of authoritarian.

The point, then, is that it’s the Eucharist, the sacramental signs, that are at the top of the hierarchy. The bishop’s position is linked to the celebration of the Eucharist, the fact that he represents a particular place, the Cathedra, the seat of tradition, and continuity in time and place. He stands for that, and then it’s an interplay between the democracy of time and the transmission and, finally, the authority of the congregation. By far the best place to look for all this – I think Oliver O’Donovan agrees with me – is Nicholas of Cusa’s great work, The Catholic Concordance, where he blends this raditional Dionysian hierarchy with a kind of proto-modern democracy in a most remarkable way, so that in the end it’s always the whole church that’s most authoritative (from a point of perspective, because human beings in body rank below the angels). Within that, there’s a certain guardianship of the real whole unity of humanity in time, by the bishops and by the church hierarchy.

One of the great problems about radical thought is that we don’t think through the problem of hierarchy. In liberal societies, in socialist societies, hierarchy never disappears. It can’t disappear. So, if you don’t think through the positions for a good hierarchy, you always get bad hierarchy, and Presbyterianism and Congregationalism tend to generate worse tyrannies. What we really need is a right thinking through of the role of episcopacy. You have to understand the Radical Reformation historically. By the end of the Middle Ages, the whole business of episcopacy and so on had been totally debased into a formal hierarchy. The whole primacy of the Eucharist . . . had been lost sight of. In those conditions, one needed to make that protest.

The direction of Reimer’s thought is towards understanding the contextuality of the Radical Reformation. But once you’ve done that in relation to doctrine, then you have to do it in relation to church hierarchy and sacrament mentality. It’s also quite significant that in Britain and Europe you increasingly find movements like Methodism have moved back. Most Methodists like myself (I was brought up a Methodist) have rejoined the Anglican church; my parents became both Methodist and Anglican. In Europe, where secularization has gone further – and that’s the way it’s going eventually here (don’t be deluded by people who tell you otherwise), you get more realism. Sometimes America is like a museum, a museum of Thomism, a museum of Anglicanism, a museum of the Radical Reformation, a museum of whatever. . . . Because it’s so big and wealthy you can afford all those kinds of luxuries. But in the end secularization will get worse and Christians will have to unite. I suspect that the direction of unity is going to be the rejoining of the episcopal churches, the churches with a threefold order of ministry. You’re [now] getting a kind of duality between the mainline hurches all catholicizing and outside that, the house churches and mega-churches, and so on.

I welcome Reimer’s interest in the relation of the Radical Reformation to questions of univocity, ominalism, and voluntarism in the later Middle Ages. . . . Just a quick remark about Oliver O’Donovan’s interest in Wycliffe: The really significant thing about Wycliffe is that he wasn’t a nominalist; he was a realist but also a very Platonic thinker. Wycliffe’s social thought, which was also very radical, had him saying things like you could only have property by grace but if you stop acting charitably, your property could be taken away from you. He thinks of grace in terms of participation, and his belief in universals is strongly linked to his belief in commonality. So, [there is a] link of a kind of social radicalism, a kind of continued neo-Platonic legacy, and at the same time a radically integrous theology of grace in Wycliffe. . . . He is another interesting aspect of the complexity of the reformation legacy, both in Britain and in Czechoslovakia, where you get the Wycliffe-Hus influence. You get a great qualification of the total nominalism. The mainline reformation is nominalist and voluntarist from beginning to end. It is qualified by elements in the Radical Reformation, and it also picks up on this older Wycliffe-Hus legacy.

Let me wind up with a few remarks about pacifism. Reimer’s view about the need to accept policing is absolutely right, but here again I suggest you need to shift a little further. I agree that most modern wars can’t be justified as police actions, they’re way beyond that. Just War Theory is going to rule out-of-bounds most modern wars, not quite all of them. But in the Middle Ages, war often was really and truly a police action. I don’t think the close distinction between war and policing holds up in the end. Once you’ve accepted some sort of coercion, you’re no longer a pure pacifist. A pure pacifist is an anarchist. And that is an illogical position.

Of course, war is dangerous, it goes totally to the limits, but so does policing! The same dialectic is in danger in relation to policing. One of the problems (if you endorse policing) is that war is being described by our masters as “policing.” So we need a discourse about minimal justified violence. If we don’t have that, we won’t be really radical. We have to stick to the idea that violence should be always minimized, that we need to develop nonviolent codes of resistance. Without the discourse of the minimal justification of violence, we don’t really have a radical handle for criticizing what’s going on at the moment.

I must say that the slight overdominance of peace in American radicalism, as compared to justice, is linked to American individualism and slight American over-purism. It’s about the purity of individual motives in the end. . . . It seems that the thrust of Reimer’s thought is away from these dangers, and I’m just urging him to push a little further. In some ways this whole pacifist thing is a kind of non-issue. I don’t think that the early church or Jesus were pacifists in our sense; this is an anachronism. They don’t really even pose the question. It’s important to push further here. The first Quakers [and] the Münsterites weren’t pacifist. In many ways, pacifism was for the radical church – let’s be frank – a tactic of survival. It was safer, if you were going to be so radical and go your own way, to say you were pacifist. That allowed people to leave you alone. So, I have a real problem. A real radicalism can’t be dogmatically pacifist. Here it needs a little push in the direction Reimer is already going.

In what follows, Milbank was responding to presentations by panelists Chris Huebner, Laura Schmidt Roberts (a paper not printed here), Gerald Schlabach, Malinda Berry, and Travis Kroeker. –Editor

Reimer:
I’d like to allow Professor Milbank to take fifteen minutes to respond, which is almost an impossible task, I grant you. So do your best and select what you need to select, and then we can maybe have a few questions from the audience.

Milbank:
Thanks very much indeed to all those profound engagements with my book and the thought of some other people. . . . Obviously, as you can imagine, I tend to agree with some of the responses more than with some of the others.

First of all, [Chris Huebner’s] question about the voice of the theologian. I now think the opening to [The Word Made Strange] is too hyperbolic, but I did say there that I thought it was tragic theology had become too important. In the Ecclesiology chapter in my new book, I try to explore the kind of aporia the church has legitimated by theology. Yet theology is always a reflection of the practice of the church. I’m unapologetic about trying to go beyond an over-simplistic priority of practice.

The point was raised that I don’t say enough about the collective authority of the church. I talk about reason and tradition and the scripture. However, in fact I’m at pains to insist, especially when I’m talking about Nicholas of Cusa, that reason can only be collectively possessed in the end, that it is embodied. Also, my point about tradition is linked to the authority of the community. Community always exists in time as well as in space, and this has certain social and political implications. So I am trying to say a lot about the voice of the community.

The question about continuity. I fully accept I need to talk more about discontinuities and the need to link to, and to look back to, the origin.

[The issue of consensus.] I agree that you shouldn’t too easily go for consensus. . . . Sometimes one individual who’s really thinkingthe voice the voice of the community. of the community clearly is the embodiment of the ecclesia rather than the apparent democratic consensus. The point about individual protest is very important. It’s quite difficult to think all that through, and I’m not pretending I’ve done it adequately. Perhaps I could have said more about the sort of interaction between the official hierarchical guardians and protesters like the Franciscans or Dominicans, for example, calling the church back to its authentic vocation.

[In reference to Gerald Schlabach’s criticism of Milbank’s stance on pacifism.] I thought [those remarks were] an oversimplification of my critique of pacifism, which had many more strands. . . . I don’t think anybody’s a pacifist, to be really honest with you. It is important to look at the situation where somebody is threatened who should be protected, where somebody is being threatened in an unjust way. You don’t stop to think. Nobody does. You intervene, even though at some level you know that if you can’t control your intervention, it may go too far. My point about looking/non-looking is that if you go on looking, you do in fact intervene. If you don’t, it becomes monstrous, and there’s no way you could then have community afterwards with this innocent person whom you have not intervened to defend. Obviously, one can’t turn away. You mustn’t be sentimental. This has nothing to do with the real, strong record of the radical churches in all kinds of fields, and they may well have made a much greater contribution than mainline churches. I salute them for it. It doesn’t effect the tough intellectual argument that I’m trying to make.

Another part of that argument is that I try to qualify what I said earlier in Theology and Social Theory, that it’s absolutely true you can’t really fight for the ultimate; in the end, you have to go the way of the cross. The things that we fight for are in a sense not the ultimate things, they’re not worth defending— this is a point made by Augustine. On the other hand, all of the ultimate is only mediated by utterly fragile things. . . . To deny that we need to protect the fragile is like iconoclasm, so there’s an exact parallel between pure pacifism and iconoclasm. [They both] miss the point that everything is always mediated. Yes, it’s true that the unbreakable is what matters, and that’s why it’s ultimately the witness of the cross that counts. But the unbreakable for us is always mediated through the fragile.

Nobody who has read Charles Peguy’s Christian Socialist treatise about Joan d’Arc, an incredibly serious engagement with the difficulties and the ambiguity of this [issue], can make the sort of slightly self-righteous, pietistic comments we heard at the end. You cannot upbraid Peguy’s Mystery of the Charity of Joan d’Arc – it’s one of the profoundest Christian works written in the twentieth century. It also engages profoundly with the question of the relation of Christianity to Judaism, and the critique by Judaism of Christianity. One thing Peguy does is ask, Would Christ have been rejected in every age? On the other hand, would Christ have been accepted by anybody than the Jews? What he’s engaging with here is the radical contemporality and contingency of the situation. He says we can’t say a priori the way of the cross would be the right way in every circumstance. It is tied radically to history.

Donald McKinnon made rather similar points about this: There is a moment when the right way is the way of the cross. Yes, it’s the ultimate eschatological moment, but in time you have to judge, you mustn’t turn it into a Kantian a priori. This is why pure pacifism will too often take the mode of a kind of Kantian formalism. I’m not a Niebuhrian in any way. There aren’t these two options. . . . This tends to be an American perspective: either pacifism or Machiavellian realism. I’m not saying like Niebuhr that there’s no possibility of ever overcoming the necessity for violence. Collectively we can do that, in theory at least, and in fact we can get rid altogether of the necessity for violence. We can produce a perfect peace.

[Schlabach’s] point about the laity was about what happens in the meantime, where people are not just involved in war but are [for instance] judges, or engaged in trade, or in policing processes. In the Middle Ages it was often said that by doing these things you’re imperiling your soul and the safest thing is to stay outside them, in the monastery. Lay critics – people thinking about codes of chivalry, for example – said, You can’t say there can be just wars yet people fighting these just wars are imperiling their souls more than monks. What kind of God sets things up that way? They made the same argument about sex. How can you say it’s superior to be chaste, but it’s okay to be involved in sex and you need it for the perpetuation of the human race? The argument of the chivalric writers is, How can God both will the perpetuation of the human race and say the way of celibacy is superior? This is my point about the laity’s being mixed up in the bodily, in the erotic, and also at times – what the church is admitting – in the need for the coercive.

I was a little puzzled about getting into the details of the history of slavery, because I wasn’t sure Malinda Berry’s comments really ran against what I was saying. I was trying to stress the role of gender in all this. Unless you see the role of gender and see that slaves have been defined in America as children of black women, you’re missing how this came into being. One of the writers cited, Kathleen Brown, says that initially the definition of a slave has more to do with religion and the apparent rejection by Africans of Christianity than with color. The switch towards the color factor was strongly going on in the later seventeenth century. My point is something like this: There are awful things going on; the Klu Klux Klan wasn’t there originally; and the fully-fledged most extreme and terrible racist ideology is something that emerges incrementally. The same applies to Nazism. I agree . . . that to ignore the fact that imperceptible steps may not seem so bad in themselves but [lead] to something really horrific is to ignore the links between the really terrible and our everyday awfulness. To mystify this as an unimaginable positive evil that’s completely out of continuity with how we ordinarily behave – that’s the point I’m getting at.

If evil is privative, obviously women cannot possibly be evil by nature, because that would be one example of a positive theory of evil – unless you’re thinking of femaleness as itself a privated condition, a notion inherited from Aristotelian biology, which we should absolutely forget and reject. The interesting thing is that Aristotle asks, Is being male and female just like being like black and white? Is it accidental to humanity itself? Then he says the problem is that all animals are either male or female, or maybe a mixture of the two. So it seems as though sexual difference is generic. At that point he should become like Luce Irigaray and develop an ontology of sexual difference [as] I allude to near the end of my book.

[In reference to Travis Kroeker’s remarks,] which I had some problems with, I nonetheless profoundly agree with the idea that the contribution of the Radical Reformation is that we have to think about our social organizationand practice in this world in totally theological and christological terms.

Questions from Panelists and Audience

Tom Finger:
I’d like to go back to a point you raised at the beginning, that if Mennonites are into appropriating classical theology and the creeds, this leads, if we’re consistent, to the acceptance of the episcopacy. For many of us that is the problem with the creeds. . . . In a Mennonite understanding of the church, the church comes more from love, not just through people but the movement of the Holy Spirit, which moves where it will. This is often in continuity with tradition but not always, and sometimes rejects or rebukes what’s in the tradition. This is where it comes from. So, if we do appropriate classical theology in some way, it is sometimes for different reasons. For instance, Nicea and Chalcedon [are] in many ways subversive of hierarchy. If Jesus is the normative human being, this means that his entire way of life, including his pacifism, is normative for everybody. One can say that in other ways. One can say that in Eastern Orthodoxy, one can recapitulate Lordship as kenotic lordship that subverts all other kinds of lordship. . . . A great deal of classical theology can be appropriated but, I think, critically.

Milbank:
I think hierarchy is kenotic. Even the neo-Platonic hierarchy is somewhat kenotic, because it’s not our modern idea that [hierarchy means] you’re a kind of “ruler.” On the contrary, the idea is that to rule is to give the gift of ruling, that you have to share. This is the way Aquinas thinks; it’s a gift. You have to delegate. The only real way to rule is to give ruling. This is, if you like, a kind of kenotic descent. . . . You can say, Hierarchies sound awful. But there are always going to be some kind of hierarchical structures. . . . I agree that all this is very paradoxical: the more you think about God, the more hierarchy is also levelled, totally levelled. It’s relativized in relation to God.

Finger:
I’m not critiquing all hierarchy [but only when taken as] an ontological principle. . . . I believe that since Jesus was raised, he is Lord of all. It is a hierarchy, but a very different hierarchy, of a servant Lord.

Milbank:
I totally agree.

[Unidentified Questioner]:
I’m not sure you escape Niebuhrianism when you say no one is a pacifist. To be sure, I don’t think pacifism in that sense is an ontological state. Pacifism is a practice. So, no one is a pacifist; people try, as it were, to live peacably and engage in peaceful practices. On the other hand, you go on to say we must intervene. . . . It seems you have a notion of intervention that is so thin and univocal you can’t imagine an intervention that might be something other than coercive.

Milbank:
Oh, yes. The principle of absolute minimum coercive means is important.

[Questioner]:
But don’t you see yourself setting up these opposite purities? You say no to the pacifist, but then your countervailing state of facts says you must intervene. These seem to me totally pure opposites.

Milbank:
Only in extreme circumstances. In circumstances of immediate crisis, and these paradigmatic examples do have a certain valency, this is where I disagree with Stanley Hauerwas.

[Another Questioner]:
You commented that there’s an exact parallel between iconoclasm and pacifism, and you went on to say that everything is always mediated with the fragile. I was struck by Travis Kroeker’s example of the letter of the martyr to her daughter, and I’m puzzled as to why the martyr does not have iconic value for monasticism. You started out saying we need a kind of monasticism for everybody. In the early church, the monks did regard the martyrs as having iconic values, and I’m not quite sure how you can have a monasticism today that doesn’t recognize the iconic value of martyrs in the church.

Milbank:
There are many different kinds of martyrs, but you could say that all martyrs are dying for the truth in some way. Like the cross itself, it’s an interesting sort of an icon because it’s a breaking of the icon. This is exactly why it’s the ultimate icon, because it’s a picture of  both  a fragile human life, Christ’s life or the life of a martyr’s, and the breaking of that life in witness. The witness says there is something beyond the fragile human things to which they point. The icons of the martyrs aren’t the only kind of icons, they aren’t the only kind of pictures. That the martyr is a martyr because he has lived a fragile huma n life in a certain good way points back to the importance of fragility. If you take the position, dogmatically and a priori, that no fragility is worth defending, sometimes with a relatively necessary degree of coercion, because this fragile thing is not of ultimate importance (God can do something else) – even though there’s a truth in that – it is indeed like iconoclasm. . . . If someone is going to destroy all the parish churches in Britain and the cathedrals, would there be no point at which you should defend them, even with arms? I would say you should, because there is something irreplaceable about the mediation of these little buildings. You can’t just say if we lost these things, it will be all right. This is to despise time. I’ve got a much more radical valuation of temporality than some of the criticisms that have been thrown at me.

I do want you to ask yourselves, Why is pacifism so dominant in America? [Audience murmurs: “It’s not, it’s not.”] No! No! Listen to me! You’ve got to listen! You’re taking this too simplistically. Amongst American radicals, it’s more dominant than among European radicals. There’s something significantly American about it.

Katrina Poetker:
It seems to me that there’s a conflation of pacifism and passivity. In my understanding of pacifism, another word might be “peacemaking,” and that is almost the opposite of passivity. When I hear you talk about intervention of any kind, Mennonites are among those who have intervened in many, many situations of violence but have chosen to do so without choosing violence. That is what the Mennonite understanding of pacifism is.

[Unidentified Questioner]:
We were told that you ground your objection of pacifism in part [because] it’s counter-intuitive with respect to both our fallen nature and our animal nature, self-defense, and those kinds of things. That came out in your response. But it seems like not a very good ground for justifying the rejection of a position, to say that it’s counter-intuitive with respect to our fallen nature or animal nature. From a pacifist perspective, I think counter-intuitiveness is a mark of the truth of the position. If something is counter-intuitive with respect to our fallen nature, perhaps that’s a sign we ought to have our intuitions reformed.

Milbank:
What I said was that [pacifism is] counter-intuitive in relation to our created nature, trying too much to jump out of our animality and the limited range of our responses like the instinctive protection of those close to us. We’re not angels. We can’t quite, we shouldn’t try to, jump out of that kind of animality, because it belongs to our created nature.

Travis Kroeker:
Could you specifiy which of our intuitions are created and which ones are fallen?

Milbank:
A lot of theological debates are about that, aren’t they? . . . .

Kroeker:
The notion that one would try to intervene in a situation where an innocent life is threatened is one kind of intuition; the question of how to do that is another. It seems to me that thought is required in making that transition.

Denny Weaver:
It was stated several times that you’re really wanting to recover a prefourteenth century orthodoxy as the response to modernity and so on. You [can] look at history from both ends. You [can] look at it from the front, from where we are, and then go back to the point where you think it was right but since then it’s a disagreement. So, some people have criticized Anabaptists for having this bad view of history [or for saying that] it was corrupt and then got recovered. In one sense, you’re just moving the line back to where the fall was. That’s what happens when you look at it front-back. What are the criteria for coming down there? If you come from the other end, starting with Jesus and the incarnation, then there is no standard. Every single doctrine, every single treatise, every single position, is a choice. What are your criteria for deciding that decisions from the thirteenth century bind us? Secondly, when, as Malinda Berry pointed out, people like James Cone and Delores Williams do not see themselves represented in that theology but handicapped by it, why is that foundation the basis to speak to our modern situation?

Milbank:
I don’t like James Cone’s theology at all, and I think the best Black theologian in America is Jay Carter at Duke. His book is coming out soon and contains, I think, a devastating critique of Cone’s theology. A very different kind of black, more radical, and orthodox theology is now emerging. So, no, it’s not the [thirteenth century] thing. It has to be a question of an authentic development of the gospel tradition that is the real test. I’m trying to say you can’t separate reason, scripture, and tradition. That is [only] a way of looking at it that we have, partly as a result of the advent of printing. It’s not just that, but we tend to think of the Bible as a single-bound book that is different from the movement of human beings in time. In the Middle Ages, the Bible was a much more oral reality, it didn’t exist just in written form, literally. It’s not that tradition was added to the text. If you read those catholics, you know that the Bible itself is tradition, it’s a moving thing. Gregory the Great says, when he comments on the Bible, that it grows bigger. They just didn’t have the Bible invented by protestants, in a certain sense. . . . Likewise, they didn’t separate reason from grace [and] they had the idea that this Bible/tradition thing is fundamentally christocentric. . . . If you’re an analytic philosopher, this will seem fantastically unsatisfactory, because there are no clear foundational starting points that we can point back to. . . . My sense is [we have lost] a kind of integral way of looking at things that is more authentic.

I and other people in Radical Orthodoxy are still fleshing out this ‘what went wrong’ account. It’s not just Duns Scotus, it’s a whole movement going back to Avicenna, in a way. Nor are we talking about – I say this in my new book and will say even more in my next book – simply reinstituting something. On the contrary, we need a much stronger sense of democracy, of consensus, of human-poetic-cultural formation of this process. This is the modern element, the renaissance element. I’m much more interested in a kind of countermodernity represented by thinkers like Vico, Hamann, Cudworth, Jacobi, and Coleridge. . . . I’m much more interested in this counter-modernity – a nonaligned, orthodox, liberal, Kantian, epistemological-cum-politically liberal modernity – than in simply going back.

ANABAPTIST WITNESS IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE

Note on Contributors

Jeremy M. Bergen is a doctoral student at Emmanuel College, Toronto School of Theology, and is currently serving as interim director of the Toronto Mennonite Theological Centre.

Peter C. Blum is associate professor of Sociology and Social Thought at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan.

Peter Dula is Iraq Program Coordinator of the Mennonite Central Committee.

Ted Grimsrud is associate professor of Theology and Peace Studies at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, VA.

Matt Hamsher is a doctoral student in Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA.

Scott Holland is associate professor of Peace Studies and Cross-Cultural Studies at Bethany Theological Seminary.

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles | Book Reviews

Public Theology and Democracy

Scott Holland

The Conrad Grebel Review 23, no. 2 (Spring 2005)

I have suggested in a much debated essay that the tragic events of 9/11 created a discursive crisis in the contemporary American Anabaptist and Peace Church communities of faith (see “Peace and Polyphony: The Case for Theological and Political Impurity,” CGR 20.2 [2002]). Indeed, in the aftermath of the attacks on the Twin Towers, some Anabaptist peace activists were trying to out-God-talk Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in the public square with commands from Jesus rather than directives and demands from Allah.

Certainly, persons of faith can and must fiercely protest war and passionately pursue peace. This is not the critical discursive question  lurred by the fire and smoke. Rather, the question is, How do persons of particular faith communities enter into public and political discourse? Do those of us who are Americans enter political dialogue and debate as citizens of a pluralistic democracy or as religionists representing a God’s-eye-view and command? Unless we are prepared to be a kinder, gentler, Anabaptist Taliban, I contend we must enter the conversation as citizens and public intellectuals. Hence, it is important to make an artful distinction between our personal loves and convictions and our broader public responsibilities to a common good and to the peace of the city. Can faith communities, colleges, seminaries, institutions, and agencies formed and informed by Peace Church values produce an interdisciplinary rhetoric and pedagogy of peacemaking inspired and empowered by the values and practices of faith, yet beyond the God-talk of confessional and communal discourses? I believe the answer is yes.

My evolving work explores the possibilities of a constructive public theology that enters into solidarity with the project of peacemaking as a public and pragmatic vocation. This desire to compose a practical, public theology is not a mere academic interest. Indeed, it evolved from my many years of pastoral ministry as I attempted to preach and teach in ways that inspired and equipped my parishioners to embody the Gospel as a living peace church in the world, and for the world, rather than become yet one more sectarian, sacred reservation of spirit in a blessed fallen world. I first articulated my passionate, pastoral concerns for a public theology capable of addressing the church, the academy, and society in a formal way in “God in Public: A Modest Proposal for a Quest for a Contemporary North American Paradigm” (CGR 4.1 [1986]). These concerns have since evolved and found expression through several publications, including “Give Me Prophecy and Joy” in Brethren Life and Thought (Summer and Fall 2003). My proposals for this evolving theology are explored in Prophets, Poets & Pragmatists: Toward a Public Theology (in progress). My concern is how particular traditions might contribute to a public good. More specifically, I am very interested in the polyphony of questions around religion in democratic culture and the role of faith in  public discourse. Thus, I welcome Professor Ted Grimsrud’s fine essay,  “Anabaptist Faith and American Democracy.”

I could write several pages of appreciation for the ways Grimsrud’s work challenges Anabaptists to reconsider and re-imagine our dual vocations in the world as Christians and citizens. Here I will focus only on a matter that both conservative and liberal Anabaptists should consider: the confusion about a necessary distinction between personal morality and public ethics.

I suspect this confusion is at least one reason so many Mennonites, Brethren, and Quakers voted for George W. Bush in the November 2004 elections. Conservative or traditional members of these faith communities were attracted to the Republican accent on personal faith, morality, and values, and thus carried their domestic and churchly tastes and dispositions to the polls with little regard for the complicated demands of seeking the common good. Considering this matter of personal morality and public justice, I fear that Grimsrud’s quick dismissal and deconstruction of Ted Koontz’s important paradigm of first and second languages for doing Christian social ethics only perpetuates this confusion. This dismissal of the necessity of a private-public distinction in ethical discourse invites a situation in which persons of deep faith and strong personal convictions vote on the basis of personal morality – whether that morality is liberal or conservative – rather than in the interests of the broader common weal.

Koontz’s model of first and second languages for doing religious ethics intersects with Walter Brueggemann’s understanding of biblical prophetic discourse being different on the wall (in the public square) and behind the wall (within the gathered community of faith). It links up nicely with  philosopher Richard Rorty’s metaphor of “Trotsky and Wild Orchids” on the value of private-public distinctions in ethical language in pluralistic societies. It also reflects John Howard Yoder’s use of middle axioms in Christian ethics and witness. In addition it coheres with the long history of many Christian imaginative theological constructions of “the two kingdoms” as a way of noting a duality between personal confessions of faith and the demands of affirming secular justice as well as civil and social order in a blessed but fallen creation.

My response to Grimsrud’s apparent longing for a consistent Christian language or confession in the public square will accent three themes: Anabaptism and Liberalism, Personal Passions and Public Responsibilities, and Seeking Cultures of Peace.

Anabaptism and Liberalism

Stanley Hauerwas has critically yet correctly charged that my work seems to care as much about “the liberal project” as it does about Jesus and the Anabaptist Vision. For the task of composing “a public theology” or a theology that engages both church and culture, this is indeed true. My project seeks to bring the creative energy and eros of Anabaptist and Peace Church movements into solidarity with classical liberal commitments to creative democracy, personal liberty, ethical individualism, civic virtue, and human desire. (The reference to “liberalism” here is not to a contest between liberal and conservative theologies but to the philosophical and political traditions of democratic liberalism.)

I am distressed by a new, sophisticated wave of illiberal resistance to the friendship between discipleship and democracy in the Anabaptist academy. Inspired by illiberal theological thinkers such as Hauerwas, MacIntyre, and Milbank, this resistance tends to take on two different forms in the nabaptist guild: the conservative communitarian and the counter-cultural  radical. While both forms of religious cultural critique claim some prophetic unction, the true prophet committed to a public peace, rather than to his own personal or communal ideological purity, must likewise master poetic and pragmatic discourses. In the composition of a theology of culture in a pluralistic society, the person of faith would do well to read both Jesus and Jefferson, and to quote Emerson and Whitman as freely as Menno and Mack in the public square.

Walt Whitman, the strong poet of democratic vistas, knew how to make the poet, the pragmatist, and the prophet dance together with joy in the public square. Whitman, as a creative public intellectual, understood the importance of poetic and transcendent visions and voices beyond mere morality and tribal confessions for the well being of the common weal. Righteous calls to social ethics or personal morality become flat and rule-based without soulful transcendence. Remember Whitman’s “Mystic Trumpeter”?

Sing to my soul – renew its languishing faith and hope;
Rouse up my slow belief – give me some vision of the future;
Give me, for once, prophecy and joy.

Like Grimsrud, I believe Peace Church work in public theology must be in conversation with some of the best academic work in the field, including the pragmatic religious social criticism of Jeffery Stout (Democracy and Tradition, Princeton, 2004) and the prophetic religious criticism of Cornel West (Democracy Matters, The Pilgrim Press, 2004). After all, if we care about the peace of the city we must catch a vision and speak in a voice that is more reflective of the polyphony and pluralism of the New Jerusalem than the serenity and solitude of Eden. Along with Grimsrud and Whitman, I believe we must “invite a multitude to speak.” However, Whitman also reminds us that we each contain a multitude and thus our  voices carry the sounds of many communities simultaneously.

Personal Passions and Public Responsibilities

On April 19, 2004 I preached a sermon from my familiar pulpit of the Monroeville Church of the Brethren in suburban Pittsburgh. That afternoon I heard a sermon in Pittsburgh that almost made me regret I had said anything about “God” that day. The occasion was the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association at the downtown Convention Center. Rocker and gun-lover Ted Nugent actually preached a sermon to the NRA delegates entitled “God, Guns, and Rock’n’Roll.” (See Nugent’s book by the same title published by Regnery, Inc. in 2000). Nugent’s sermon was public God-talk at its worst. He freely and passionately linked the American Dream to the trinity of God, guns, and rock’n’roll. In his theology God signified national morality, rock’n’roll represented our freedoms, and guns were gifts from both God and the Constitution to insure that the ungodly would dare not tread on our rights as Americans. Not surprisingly, Nugent also suggested that God endorsed current United States foreign policy and our brave war president.

When I hear God-talk like this, I find myself more and more drawn to the public philosophy of Walter Rauschenbusch’s backslidden grandson, Richard Rorty, who offers a thoughtful analysis of a necessary distinction between our personal passions and our public responsibilities in a pluralistic, secular society. Let me summarize this point from my essay on Rorty’s work,
“The Coming Only Is Sacred” (Cross Currents [Winter 2004]). Rorty calls
this distinction the case of “Trotsky and Wild Orchids,” which is also the title of his most autobiographical essay. There he tells the story of his boyhood conviction, acquired from his parents and their circle of New York friends and colleagues, that all decent people were, if not Trotskyites, at least socialists. Even as a boy Rorty had a deep concern for social justice. Yet he was a precocious kid and loved many things, including wild orchids. He learned to identify, by their Latin names, the forty species of orchids found in the mountains of the northeast. This personal obsession with rare, beautiful flowers made him feel uneasy, because he doubted that Trotsky would approve of such a passionate interest and involvement that did nothing to ease human suffering.

At age fifteen Rorty escaped the bullies who beat him up on the playground of his high school and entered the University of Chicago with a problem on his mind: how to reconcile Trotsky and wild orchids in some kind of metaphysical, theological, or philosophical system. This problem occupied him for the next twenty years and displayed itself in various thought experiments and proposals. Finally, Rorty reached the conclusion for which he is now famous in some circles, infamous in others: We need not harmonize the personal and the public.

This is not to suggest that at times the personal and the public cannot
and do not come together in satisfying ways. They indeed do. Nevertheless, Rorty suggests it is good to resist the temptation to systematically reconcile our private obsessions, whether they are wild orchids, confessional poetry, metaphysical speculations, or tender lovers, with our public responsibilities to others in a pluralistic, democratic society. This proposal is not merely funded by Rorty’s philosophical rejection of grand systems; it has much to do with his political commitment to freedom, tolerance, and a resistance to human cruelty imposed by what he calls bullies, oligarchies, and bosses.

Following Rorty’s private-public distinction, in private one is free to follow one’s bliss or tend to one’s personal ethic of self-creation. However, in public, there is a need for a broader set of ethical distinctions and political obligations to others and to social institutions. Rorty is convinced that the ultimate synthesis of love and justice may be found in the creative dance steps of a partnership of self-creation and social solidarity.

Seeking Cultures of Peace

Rorty’s public philosophy can be very attractive to persons of faith. His Jeffersonian celebration of a secular state, coupled with his contempt for theocracy, should satisfy both conservative Anabaptist advocates of a two-kingdom theology and progressive Peace Church members who have made anti-Constantinianism the rage even in the mainline churches of the west. His resistance to bullies, bosses, and oligarchies must cheer the hearts of Free Church believers and liberal persons of faith from many traditions.

Yet there is something incomplete about Rorty’s insistence that religious discourse or the language of faith must always by its nature be placed in the category of “the private.” Rorty’s grandfather Rauschenbusch understood that faith was not simply centered in privileged or provincial rites and rituals, doctrines, and dogmas, or creeds and confessions; religion or faith can be a way of seeing the world. It can be a way of imagining oneself in relationship to others and to ultimate concerns, and to the process of meaning-making. As such, religion as imaginative composition or construction finds its closest analogue in art. Thus, like art, the religious imagination helps many of us participate in that mysterious and social reality we call “culture.” Whether pondering classical categories of the good, the true, and the beautiful, or attempting to define cruelty and compassion within a postmodern linguistic turn, it is rarely possible or helpful to completely exile the discourses, images, and practices of faith from the conversation. The pragmatist committed to social transformation and concerned about cultures of peace in a violent world would do well to discern the cultural effects of religion for the hopes of personal and public reconciliation – as well as for their potential to damage and destroy.

Keeping in view my suggestion that art is religion’s nearest analogue, consider Joyce Carol Oates on “The Faith of a Writer”:

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called “culture” – and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born. The individual voice is the communal voice. The regional voice is the universal voice.
– Oates, The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art
  (Ecco, HarperCollins, 2003)

What I am suggesting is that individual and regional voices, particular voices, together contribute to a more public or universal voice. There is no generic public voice. The multitude of particular voices in a great society finds a public coherence not in an easy harmony but in a complex, creative polyphony. This includes religious voices. Whether the social critic or public philosopher believes these religious voices are inspired by God, the Muse of art, emotional needs, psychological projection, or the longing for social cohesion, they are nevertheless a profound, powerful part of culture and the human art of meaning-making, and thus cannot be exiled from public debate and discourse. (This is why, in conversation with my colleagues and co-editors, we chose a culturally-conscious title for our book on international peacemaking: Seeking Cultures of Peace, ed. Fernando Enns, Scott Holland, and Ann Riggs [World Council of Churches, Cascadia and Herald, 2004].)

In a public theology, the concern is not with seeking mere doctrines or theologies of peace but rather “cultures of peace.” This concern was recently addressed at an international peace conference held in Nairobi in August 2004, for which Bethany Theological Seminary was the host planning and fundraising institution. The conference, called Watu Wa Amani or “People of Peace,” brought together members of the Historic Peace Churches with ecumenical representatives from the World Council of Churches to address the conflicts in Africa in light of an active call to peacemaking and reconciliation. The conference did theology in a cross-cultural and contextual style, and was especially attentive to how theology, worship, and spirituality contribute to the formation of a social vision. In the spirit of public theology, local or communal concerns were never pried apart from the cosmopolitan realities of the global village. Yet this social vision requires an artful translation in its movement from the sanctuary into the streets.

In this setting, African colleagues told us how the sokoni, the market, can serve as a metaphor for the rules of public discourse. The African market is a common ground where members of a village, town, or city gather not only for commerce but for conversation that is truly public about the ordinary and extraordinary slices of shared life. Those who gather there, whether Christian or Muslim, recognize that the rules for communication in the market are different from the grammars of space that is merely domestic, tribal, or religious. The creation of hospitable space in the market requires a public philosophy and discourse that differs in tone from the particular theology and personal confessions appropriate to the church or mosque.

Personal Dreams and the Public Good: A Case Narrative

I do much of my writing in an old tavern converted into lovely living and
studio space in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Yellow Springs is a progressive, leftleaning village where artists, intellectuals, social activists, young professionals, and old hippies still dare to discuss religion and politics in the public square. I recently had a conversation about a political poster with a couple of village residents in Dino’s Coffee Shop. My table-talk conversation partners were smart, cynical men who seemed to mix an eclectic blend of anarchism, neo-Marxism, and sixties counter-cultural values into their politics.

Our discussion and debate about the message of the poster made me think of many quarrels I have had with Anabaptists and radical Christian peacemakers about public and political responsibility. With the November 2004 election quickly approaching, the poster presented two side-by-side
drawings of the presidential candidates, George Bush and John Kerry. There was an identical text under each candidate: Middle-Aged, Yale Educated, White Christian Male. Then there was this message: “If you like corporate power, special interests, free trade, war, and the security state . . . then this election is for you! Because this November, you can have your way regardless of who wins.” Under the poster text a detachable bumper sticker declared, “DON’T just VOTE because our dreams will never fit in their ballot boxes.” My companions liked the poster very much.

I told my new acquaintances that although I valued political dissent and vigorous social criticism, the political sentiment of the poster struck me as terribly sectarian and even flirting with totalitarianism. Our debate began! I cannot report here all we exchanged in our conversation, but I will identify concerns I expressed that arc from that very secular coffee shop table to some of my theological conversations with self-professed “Christian radicals.”

I of course took issue with the politically naïve notion that there is no substantive difference between the two candidates and the resulting “so why vote” attitude. Yet the center of my critique was directed to the resistance to compromise and to the desire for purity or utopia implied in the poster, which is language alien to the possibilities of deep democracy and rhetoric more akin to totalitarian dreams. The bold declaration, “DON’T just VOTE,” really diminishes and even mocks the value of voting, and thus disrespects the bloody struggles for civil rights by the disfranchised. But it is the stated reason for this resistance – “because our dreams will never fit in their ballot boxes” – that is so disturbing, because it is profoundly anti-democratic.

I challenged my sectarian political critics to consider the language of their ballot box. I made the case that these men had graduate degrees from major public universities, they drank public water, used public utilities, carried their personal dreams from place to place on public roads that took them safely home at night. If in the twilight hours the rare robber or rapist might be suspected of prowling the placid streets of Yellow Springs, a call to 911 would bring the Village Police, who truly understand their vocation to be peace officers, speeding to their doors. “It is not their boxes,” I insisted. “It is your ballot boxes because we all share this impure, imperfect, gritty yet graced public space together.”

With too much caffeine pulsing through my head and heart, pointing dramatically to Xenia Avenue, the main drag of the village, I said, “Hell, yes, this might be the boulevard of broken dreams, but it’s where we live!” I continued, “Do you really think that in a pluralistic society the public ballot box is supposed to hold our personal dreams without compromise? In a deep democracy or in a strong democracy, the ballot box strives to collect the vision of the common good, the dream of a beloved community beyond mere private interests, the commitment to justice and safe public space for all.” Happily, this is a conversation that can never end in an anti-totalitarian society.

Conclusion

Political thinkers as diverse as Rorty, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Camus remind us of the dangers of imposing one ideology, theology, dogma, or dream onto the public sphere. Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism demonstrates that when a personal dream is substituted for a broader public good in the political process, a dangerous flirtation withtotalitarianism begins.

This critical difference between personal convictions and public goods is often misunderstood in radical Anabaptist and Peace Church communities. Grimsrud’s article is marked by this misunderstanding. Yet a very orthodox, normative Anabaptist theologian does carefully outline this distinction in one of his works. John Howard Yoder offers his views of the two kingdoms, church and state, Christian and citizen, in The Christian Witness to the State. There he makes a clear distinction between an ecclesiology and a more public political philosophy for Christian thought and practice. The Christian of course is called to follow the way of Jesus, Yoder argues. The church through its own body politics – discipleship, community, and peacemaking – is a living witness to the reign of God. Yet the church is not the world. Only the Constantinian, theocrat, or totalitarian would be tempted to confuse the functions and identities of church and state.

The Christian witnesses to the state by embodying the practices of the Gospel in and through the community called church and, quite importantly, by actively calling the state to be true to its own highest ideals in the practice of justice. The Christian is not seeking to baptize the secular state as an agape community. Instead, according to Yoder, the thoughtful Christian may point to middle axioms that are points of mediation or compromise between the perfection of Christ as the church understands it and the brokenness of the world. The Christian appropriately expects mutual, brotherly-sisterly love in the redeemed community, yet speaks prophetically for justice in the public square. Granted, some Mennonite scholars contend that Yoder later abandoned the middle axiom paradigm for a more uncompromising “politics of Jesus” as normative for all of life. One scholar recently told me, “It is not surprising that liberal Brethren are so drawn to Yoder’s earlier language of compromise!” In my view, Yoder’s constructive use of established middle axiom ethical language was his attempt to re-imagine classical two-kingdom theology in a democratic culture.

Although Ted Grimsrud and I are perhaps informed by different theological imaginations on this matter of two languages or private-public distinctions, I think we agree that the church is indeed in the world for the world. I am grateful for Grimsrud’s intellectual gifts to the church, the academy, and society. His ongoing work in biblical studies and social ethics truly embodies what it means for a Christian intellectual to love God and the neighbor with all one’s mind.

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles | Book Reviews

Global Anabaptist Faith and North American Democracy

Jeremy M. Bergen

The Conrad Grebel Review 23, no. 2 (Spring 2005)

I will respond to Ted Grimsrud’s paper as a Canadian, a Mennonite, and a student of systematic theology. At the outset, I will make three brief observations. First, the Canadian Mennonite history of negotiating specific privileges with the government, serving as senior civil servants or as members of provincial or federal parliaments, and testifying before parliamentary committees and Royal Commissions has been based on, and has resulted in, a relatively positive view of government and democracy. I recognize all this in contrast to the visceral reactions of many American Mennonites to the 2004 United States election. Second, there is a danger that Canadians are let off the hook too easily with regard to American hegemony. We have the luxury of distancing ourselves from US policies. Further, we can present our apparent involvement in the domination these policies might cause as evidence that we have been forced or duped into complicity. This can obscure the fact that we are active partners with the US in the inequalities of the economic globalization system, have often joined the US in military initiatives, and actively reproduce many assumptions of American culture. Third, there is a converse danger that we will be lumped together with the US discussion. This denies real cultural and historical differences. That Canadians do not have a constitutional separation of church and state, yet practically have a most minimal civil religion, is but one example.

With these observations in mind, I venture a positive response to Grimsrud’s article. Below I will try to extend his argument and to cast the net wider for resources with which to do that. Whatever the Anabaptist Story is, it obligates its participants to engage in the pursuit of the common good, even and especially to reject and resist oppressive configurations of worldly power, and to make practical, though not ultimate, use of democratic institutions for this end. I welcome Grimsrud’s appeal to Mennonites to continually discern how convictions and practices, and especially our peace position, can be an effective witness in the world.

The Anabaptist Story

In order to get to the essence of the Anabaptist Story, Grimsrud offers a
parallel with how scholars of the historical Jesus point to a fact that is independent of biased reports – namely that Jesus was executed as a politica lcriminal – as the lens through which to assess whatever is said of his life and teaching. Grimsrud proposes that what the various sixteenth-century Anabaptist groups had in common was their being viewed with suspicion and hostility by civil and religious authorities.¹ Viewing Anabaptist diversity in light of this commonality allows us to appropriate their core legacy for today: a free church, the conviction that Christians should not fight, an upside-down notion of social power, and a commitment to economic sharing.

The elements Grimsrud identifies are crucial aspects of the Anabaptist
Story, but I question whether this approach is an adequate way of leveraging an Anabaptist core. In the first place, it assumes that the difference is the essence, i.e., that the identity of Anabaptists is rooted in what they did not share with Catholics or Lutherans. This is an inadequate view of the church and renders inaccessible to us the rich depths of the Christian tradition. It also overlooks the fact that Anabaptism was arguably a movement of spiritual renewal, calling for faithfulness to Christ, which issued in some specific, indispensable social-political-ecclesial consequences. We ought to understand our core story in significant continuity with the Christian tradition where that is the case, but also as one that dissents on the issues Grimsrud identifies. Secondly, the isolation of principles obscures the fact that the Anabaptist Story is always an already-embodied set of beliefs, practices, precedents, and interpretations. What an “upside-down notion of social power” is cannot readily be isolated from attempts to instantiate it. This does not mean that what is, is what ought to be. But it does imply turning attention to specific experiences in Anabaptist-Mennonite history and assessing a mixed record of faithfulness and unfaithfulness, without a clear set of theoretical principles to do the sorting.

Does this make a difference? Does a turn to a more complex historical and global record give clues for taking Anabaptist convictions into the public square? I believe the answer is yes, because it will draw attention to the Anabaptist Story as already engaged in the Democracy Story or the Empire Story. Here I draw from the experience of my own Dutch-North German-Russian-General Conference tradition. In the last three centuries, these Mennonites often sought special privileges and exemptions, and in return provided their host with specific agricultural services and otherwise exemplary citizenship. In seeking exemption from military services, Mennonites have often found that autocratic rulers – William of Orange, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia, Lt. Gov. John Graves Simcoe of Upper Canada, William Penn of Pennsylvania – were willing to grant these requests.² Moreover, these Mennonites were often settled on land to the disadvantage of those already there. This should be an occasion for serious self-reflection and confession, since it suggests that insofar as our pacifism has been of a strongly two-kingdom variety, it has at times sought the shelter of empire and shared in its spoils. We are not in a position simply to choose to engage the Democracy Story, the Empire Story, both or neither. Rather, we are already embroiled in the complex dynamics of their interplay. What is open to us is how we understand the complexities and compromises of our history, and how we retrieve it for the purpose of present engagement. I am not claiming that the Anabaptist Story gives way to the Empire Story, though perhaps there is something about how our Anabaptist identity has been remembered and articulated that led, at times, to an alliance of nonresistance and empire.

Recognizing the need for confession in light of aspects of unfaithfulness, we should also seek constructive lessons from elements of faithfulness in those same experiences. What can we learn from the nineteenth-century Mennonite commonwealth in Russia, where Mennonites effectively ran their own large-scale municipal governments within the Russian system? What about the current experience of the Colombian Mennonite Church, involved in high-level peace negotiations, targeted by government, paramilitary and rebel groups, and effecting the inclusion of conscientious objection options in the constitution? What do the efforts of Mennonites in Indonesia to be agents of reconciliation within a Muslim-Christian dynamic show us about nonviolence in an ostensibly democratic yet deeply divided public space? What about the issues of involvement in public life which the Mennonite Church in Asuncion is facing, given that the president of Paraguay attends that church and that his wife and several cabinet ministers are members?

Answers to these questions may help us see how the larger question of which of the two languages to speak in public is answered in practice in different circumstances, especially if we ask these communities how they understand their public witness in light of Anabaptist identity. This strategy reflects that our tradition is a living one and we must learn how to draw on a range of experiences in order to provide ourselves with an orientation, as Anabaptists, for the future. We should certainly continue to appeal to the sixteenth century, but we must also “thicken” the tradition to which we can refer for handles on our identity. I am suggesting that US Mennonites consider how global experiences may help to fill in what it means to Anabaptist and/or Mennonite, and I commend the same thing to Canadian Mennonites.

Empire and Democracy Stories

Grimsrud draws attention to Stanley Hauerwas’s concern that participation in democratic practices not inhibit the capacity of Christians to speak Christianly. With regard to the Empire Story, I suggest that our capacity to keep our political discussion theological and to address arguments specifically against the logic of empire, rather than that of order, the state, or democracy per se, might be enhanced by listening to someone like Augustine. Though Augustine is known for his founding contributions to the Just War Theory, it is his diagnoses of the pathologies of empire that might be useful here. He devotes much of the City of God to showing how the pagan ethic of glory was rooted in a fear of death. Fear as a foundation for political ideology masks itself by self-deception and issues in political deception. Robert Dodaro argues that while several Catholic ethicists argued that the first Gulf War met just war criteria, they were collectively un-Augustinian by neglecting to consider whether the rhetorical deception and self-deception of empire renders the facts so inaccessible as to make a just war calculus unintelligible.³ This charge applies doubly to the web of deceptions around the recent Iraq war.

I hope that we as Mennonites might bring a set of practices and convictions about truth-telling into the public sphere in a way that engages both just war Christians and citizens in general for whom a truthful rendering of circumstances is a condition for applying pragmatic reasoning. Grimsrud’s argument may be extended only slightly to say that a free-church epistemology allows us to name the lies of empire and that we ought to speak this analysis to all who will listen. Lies, says Augustine, are intrinsically evil and cannot be justified. Furthermore, political lies are practically destabilizing and effectively preclude a just social order.⁴ An indispensable condition for a just social order is its capacity to bear the search for truth, and to be a forum for truth-tellers. This then serves both as a criterion for any political arrangement, including democracy, and as a condition for the reception of our truthful witness as Christians. My brief engagement with Augustine presupposes that we must participate in the public sphere first and foremost as members of the Body of Christ. This means learning from aspects of the Christian tradition that may guide us, challenge us, or provide common language with which to engage fellow Christians who see questions of democracy and empire very differently.

Providence and the Holy Spirit

Central to Grimsrud’s paper is his claim, following Jeffrey Stout, that democracy can consist in a set of practices for a substantive good (though for Grimsrud, not a final good), and is not merely a set of procedures reducing public discourse to its lowest common denominator. Rather, it is about removing certain constraints so that insightful, eloquent, and even spiritual arguments and practices can be freed for the benefit of the common good, and, insofar as these arguments are accepted, form social norms that give shape to a common good.⁵

Phrased pneumatologically, Stout is suggesting that democratic practices can free gifts for circulation in the community. The possibility that these gifts are both within and without the church is something to take seriously. Regarding this exchange of gifts, Grimsrud points out that “Hauerwas called on the church to [be itself] by making sure to hear the voice of the ‘weakest member’. . . .”⁶ Yet, when the church models listening to its weakest members, it might hear surprising things. I suggest that the attempt of the Mennonite Central Committee Peace Theology Project to hear the experiences of Mennonite lawyers, police officers, social workers, and civic officials – those who have not usually been heard in Mennonite discussions of the church’s witness in the world – may turn our attention to diverse ways that Anabaptist engagement in democracy is already implied.⁷ I hasten to add that what Mennonites in fact do need not be what they should do. However, the requirement of the church to be the church, and to take seriously the accounts its various members give of what it means to be Christian in the public sphere, must be considered as a possible movement of the Spirit within the Body of Christ. This is especially true if our free-church ecclesiology affirms that members of the covenant community bear the witness of the Holy Spirit.

We must also ask about the movement of the Spirit outside the church. The debate about whether and when to speak one or both of the “two languages” likely reflects our underdevelopment of a doctrine of providence. While the tradition of Schleitheim affirms that magistrates are “ordained by God, outside the perfection of Christ,” we have not often considered the providential arrangements by which God orders power in the world. We are ambivalent about whether power falls under the doctrine of sin or the doctrine of creation.⁸ If it is under sin, then our attempts to speak a “second language” will always be a tragic compromise. But if it is under creation, then we might hope that our convictions about the arrangements of that power, expressed in either a first or second language, need not be compromised in order to be intelligible. That we might work in ad hoc coalitions with non-Mennonite, non-Christian, or non-religious groups with similar specific convictions about power arrangements need not mean betraying our calling to be radical disciples of Jesus. I am not suggesting that the state is itself redemptive or that democracy be identified with God’s providential purposes. Rather, God’s ongoing creative activity manifests itself outside the church, in concrete though often veiled ways, and all God’s work is coordinated towards God’s redemptive purposes.

Our theological attention has often been rightly turned to questions of Christology – to the nature of the Lordship of Christ in the church and in the world, to the abiding activity of the Holy Spirit to realize this Lordship within the church and without. Implicit here is a strong understanding of the Holy Spirit as proceeding from the Father and the Son, and thus of the church as the prime or sole bearer of God’s redeeming activity in history. What has been neglected is the specific relationship between the Father and the Spirit (while of course being disciplined by Trinitarian logic) – and thus the role of institutions, such as democratic practices, in God’s redeeming work outside the church. If the church finds its witness is effectively received in the world, it will not be because of its own efforts but because God is already at work there. Our active efforts to “be church” must be accompanied with humility, confession, and patience, and the vision by which we see God at work in myriad ways must be sharpened. Thus, Grimsrud’s contention that Anabaptists can show the idolatry of the Empire system in concrete, accessible ways based on our confession of Christ presupposes that the Spirit is at work in the world. To bring pacifist commitments into democratic conversations is to trust that God’s Spirit may use them for redemptive ends.

Notes

¹ Ted Grimsrud, “Anabaptist Faith and American Democracy,” MQR 78 (2004): 343.

² T. D. Regehr, Peace, Order & Good Government: Mennonites & Politics in Canada (Winnipeg: CMBC Publications, 2000), 15-16.

³ Robert Dodaro, “Eloquent Lies, Just Wars and the Politics of Persuasion: Reading Augustine’s City of God in a ‘Postmodern’ World,” Augustinian Studies 25 (1994): 95-104.

⁴Ibid., 87-89.

⁵ Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 150-51, 167.

⁶ Grimsrud, “Anabaptist Faith and American Democracy,” 353.

⁷At Peace and Unafraid: Public Order, Security and the Wisdom of the Cross (Scottdale: Herald Press, forthcoming).

⁸ Cf. John D. Rempel, “Tentative Postulates for Speaking Truth to Power: The Case of the United Nations,” paper presented at Mennonite Central Committee Peace Theology Conference, Akron, PA, August 1-4, 2004.

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles | Book Reviews

Anabaptism and Democracy: A Constructive or Deconstructive Relationship?

Matt Hamsher

The Conrad Grebel Review 23, no. 2 (Spring 2005)

I thank Ted Grimsrud for his insightful article and for continuing the conversation on the issue of Anabaptist engagement with the wider culture and with the political process in particular. The relationship between the Anabaptist, Democracy, and Empire Stories is crucial for contemporary Christian discipleship and ethics. I doubt whether anyone would argue with placing the Anabaptist Story and the Empire Story on opposite ends of the continuum, but I have reservations about the placement of the Democracy Story. On the basis of that Story’s advocacy of noncoercive participation, Grimsrud seems to be placing it without qualification closer to the Anabaptist Story on the continuum, in opposition to the Empire Story’s “conquest, domination and widespread violence.”² Yet the Democracy Story, even in its radical form, has much more in common with the Empire Story, as both share presuppositions about the depravity of human nature and the need for violence to guarantee the social contract. While Grimsrud acknowledges in a footnote that “we should also offer critiques of the Democracy Story itself insofar as it sometimes allows for the use of violence,”³ what if the Democracy Story no less than the Empire Story is founded upon the violence of self-assertion at the expense of others?

This is not to deny that “Mennonites have experienced (and even helped to foster) the American ideals of tolerance, freedom of religion, economic opportunity, protection of rights, free speech – the stuff of the Democracy Story.”⁴ However, two questions must be asked before we assume too close a connection between the two stories: Is the rationale for supporting these ideals the same? Do these ideals really constitute the “stuff” of the Democracy Story? Our response to these questions will depend largely upon our understanding of the Democracy Story and our definition of its core values. Grimsrud draws, for example, from Walter Karp, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Schell, and Jeffrey Stout to differentiate the Democracy Story from the Empire Story by separating a peaceful, participatory, republican civic America from an imperial, militaristic, nation-state America.⁵ While this distinction is eminently helpful for Anabaptists seeking to distinguish their support for civic America from complicity in the violence of imperial America as they become more involved in political advocacy, I am not so sure it allows Mennonites to embrace all of civic America without reservation. Can America as Empire exist without at least the complicit support of civic America?

Furthermore, are Karp, Chomsky, et al. the best representatives of the Democracy Story as understood and practiced on Capitol Hill, on Main Street, or even in the academy? How helpful is this portrayal of the Democracy Story for understanding the political climate in the US today? Does the Democracy Story really offer a powerful alternative to the Empire Story, or does it only offer an opportunity to hold it accountable to its own professed values? I propose that viewing the development of the Democracy Story through the work of Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls offers another insight into the values of that story, or at least points toward the need for greater critical engagement before it can be embraced so wholeheartedly.

At the root of political philosophy as espoused by Hobbes, Kant, and Rawls lies an analysis of the nature of human social interaction as essentially one of perpetual conflict. Infamously described by Hobbes as being “nasty, brutish, and short,”⁶ human social reality understood this way is also foundational for both Kant and Rawls. Other persons are assumed to be enemies, or at least potential competitors, for the satisfaction of personal ends that ultimately are mutually exclusive. For Hobbes, the only rational solution to this unhappy state of affairs resides in an appeal to the external force of law.⁷ So too Kant, in Perpetual Peace, asserts that

A state of peace among men who live side by side is not the natural state (status naturalis), which is rather to be described as a state of war: that is to say, although there is not perhaps actual hostility, yet there is a constant threatening that an outbreak may occur. Thus the state of peace must be established. [original emphasis] For the mere cessation of hostilities is no guarantee of peaceful relations, and unless this guarantee is given by every individual to his neighbor – which can only be done in a state of society regulated by law – one man is at liberty to challenge another and treaty him as an enemy.⁸

An egoistic pursuit of individual ends inevitably resulting in conflict is also apparent in Rawls’s attempt to return to an “original position” in order “to derive satisfactory principles from the weakest possible assumptions” in which “a deep opposition of interests is presumed to obtain.”⁹ Although significant advances in reducing the potential abuse of this power are made in the transitions from Hobbes’s monarchy to Kant’s republic to Rawls’s modern liberal democracy, the necessary exercise of violent coercive power remains, and so does the temptation for elected leaders or even a democratic majority to wield that power unjustly in order to advance their own interests.

Indeed, as Alasdair MacIntyre has described the contemporary moral experience, the external application of force as the security of morality results in using force or manipulation to achieve one’s own ends.

Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no way open to us to do so except by directing toward others those very manipulative models of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case.¹⁰

This dependence upon coercive power and manipulation in order to protect the egoistic pursuit of one’s own life and liberty transforms moral debate into a struggle for power. It also works against the development of internal sources of motivation for benevolent action on behalf of others, something that I believe is an essential core value of the Anabaptist Story.

Might the recent US presidential election, for example, demonstrate how many Christians (and possibly Mennonites, too) voted for George W. Bush’s “family values” platform out of a desire to manipulate others into moral agreement rather than out of a compassionate concern for those suffering as a result of immoral and unjust laws and policies? A democracy is always in danger of being transformed into a theocracy whenever control of the government becomes a substitute for Spirit-empowered witness that always holds out hope for the conversion of one’s neighbors. If fellow citizens cannot be trusted to discern the truth together, then they must be manipulated into moral action, by force if necessary. While the tradition of radical protest against injustice within the larger Democracy Story appears to reflect a greater openness to dialogue, part of its legacy is not mutual cooperation or commitment to dialogue but co-option of power and the ability to manipulate others in a new, albeit more just, direction.

The appropriate parallel to the core Anabaptist conviction that Grimsrud
identifies as the refusal to fight in wars¹¹ and the belief that violence is not necessary to resolve conflicts of interests is the conviction from the Democracy Story that violent coercion is necessary to limit the violence that occurs as a result of a natural state of war between human individuals. I therefore disagree that only the Democracy Story “raised for the first time the possibility that violence and human government need not be inextricably linked” (my emphasis).¹² Does this statement not marginalize (even if unintentionally) Jesus’ teachings on nonviolent human social interaction, and the subsequent organization of the church as a polis that could exist as a political body without resort to violent coercion?¹³ It was not the Democracy Story that first raised the possibility that violence and human government need not be inextricably
linked, but Jesus and the New Testament church – a vision that was caught and given new life in the Anabaptist Story.

Other parallel but nevertheless distinct convictions may include these: (1) the Anabaptist conviction of the church as free from state control, against the liberal democratic conviction of the state as free from church control; (2) the Anabaptist affirmation of upside-down social power (which John Howard Yoder calls “a theologically mandatory vesting of the right of dissent”), against a democratic affirmation of equality (which Yoder describes as the idea “that most people get to talk or that everybody gets counted”);¹⁴ and (3) an Anabaptist commitment to an alternative economics, against the close identification of the Democracy Story with free-market capitalism (at least in the United States).¹⁵

I do affirm with Grimsrud that the emergence of the secular Democracy Story offers new possibilities for nonviolent cooperation and demonstrates a greater openness for critique. The need for engagement is obvious not only because we must proclaim Jesus as Lord over all areas of life but because, as Grimsrud cautions:

If we do not have a clear sense for how our theologically-based convictions link with pragmatically- and humanistically-grounded convictions we will be more likely to toss them aside when they are challenged. We all know stories of people who “lose their faith” when they encounter a wider world that their narrow “first language” has not prepared them to deal with.¹⁶

This seems to be one of the parallel dangers presented by Anabaptist opportunities for engagement in the wider culture. If we withdraw, we may become unable to speak to competing claims to “lordship.” But the twin temptation is equally dangerous – to become engaged uncritically. That there is no single source or definition of the Democracy Story may demonstrate the validity of arguments by Ted Koontz and Stanley Hauerwas on needing to be clear about the distinctive beliefs of the Anabaptist Story. We must deconstruct which parts of the Democracy Story we are advocating and which ones we must challenge. Thus, as Yoder writes in “The Christian Case for Democracy,”

[I]f we claim for democracy the status of a social institution sui generis, we shall inflate ourselves and destroy our neighbors through the demonic demands of the claims we make for our system and we shall pollute our Christian faith by making of it a civil religion. If on the other hand we protect ourselves from the Constantinianism of that view of democracy, we may find the realistic liberty to foster and to celebrate relative democratization as one of the prophetic ministries of a servant people in a world we do not control.¹⁷

The crucial variable is not democracy, but a supererogatory concern for others that is both central to the Anabaptist Story and shared by some within the Democracy Story.

Finally, I would like to put forward Just Peacemaking Theory as one example of a strategy of engagement that attempts to be both biblically based and practically viable in the public square, i.e., both faithful to the Anabaptist Story and supportive of the positive features of the Democracy Story.

One of the ten practices of Just Peacemaking Theory is to “Advance Democracy, Human Rights, and Religious Liberty” in recognition of the fact
that “the more democratic the states are, the more peaceful their relations are likely to be. In their disputes with each other, democracies are more likely to employ democratic means of peaceful conflict resolution.”¹⁸ Moreover, the development of democratic reforms can be linked with a greater respect for human rights and religious liberty, the “stuff” of democracy to which Grimsrud refers. The particular strength of Just Peacemaking Theory as it relates to the Anabaptist Story, however, is that it does not rest upon advocacy of democracy and human rights alone. Encouragement for democratic forms of government is joined by four principles that stress the need for peacemaking initiatives: supporting nonviolent direct action; taking independent initiatives to reduce threat; using cooperative conflict resolution; and acknowledging responsibility for conflict and injustice, and seeking repentance and forgiveness. These transforming initiatives follow closely from those taught by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and they affirm what I have referred to as central
to the Anabaptist Story – a supererogatory ethic in human social relationships that goes beyond traditional understandings of social contract or covenant theories. Just Peacemaking Theory thus allows us to “celebrate relative democratization” while at the same time challenging the coercive violence of both the Democracy Story and the Empire Story.

Notes

¹ I am grateful to Glen Stassen and Rob Muthiah for their constructive suggestions for improving earlier drafts of this essay.

² Ted Grimsrud, “Anabaptism and Democracy,” MQR 78.3 (2004): 342.

³Ibid., Note 52, 360.

⁴Ibid., 346.

⁵Ibid., 346-51.

⁶ Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Parts I and II (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1958), 106-07.

⁷ John Howard Yoder seems to make a similar point in his essay, “The Christian Case for Democracy,” in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 169: “Some of the contract theories are relatively pessimistic in that they see the purpose of the contract to be reciprocal control over the threats which we represent to each other.”

⁸ Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, trans. M. Campbell Smith (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1948), 9.

⁹ John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 456-57.

¹⁰ Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, second ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 68.

¹¹ Grimsrud, 344.

¹²Ibid., Note 4, 344.

¹³ Cf. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, second ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 52-53; Yoder, The Christian Witness to the State (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1964), 17.

¹⁴ Yoder, “The Christian Case for Democracy,” 168.

¹⁵ The Anabaptist core convictions are those given by Grimsrud, 344-45.

¹⁶ Grimsrud, 357.

¹⁷ Yoder, “The Christian Case for Democracy,” 164-65.

¹⁸ Bruce Russett, “Advance Democracy, Human Rights, and Religious Liberty” in Glen Stassen, Just Peacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing War (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1998), 97.

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles | Book Reviews

In Praise of the Least Oppressive Oligarchy

Peter C. Blum

The Conrad Grebel Review 23, no. 2 (Spring 2005)

Of all the forms of oligarchy, democracy is the least oppressive, since it provides the strongest language of justification and therefore of critique which the subjects may use to mitigate its oppressiveness.

– John Howard Yoder¹

My response to Ted Grimsrud’s paper, “Anabaptist Faith and American
Democracy,”² is thoroughly positive. While I intend to spell out this response in a substantive way, it is important to begin by describing some of the personal background I bring to this discussion. I grew up not knowing anything about Mennonites, in a family that took for granted what Grimsrud calls “the Democracy Story,” never worrying about its being intertwined with an “Empire Story.” I attended a Mennonite high school, went on to a Mennonite college, married Mennonite, and have now been Mennonite all of my adult life.

My early immersion in Anabaptist thought in the late 1970s and early
’80s at Goshen College gave me the general impression that Anabaptist convictions imply an antipathy towards the Democracy Story, now seen as little more than a mask worn by the Empire Story. This was wedded to an impression that, given the political spectrum in the US, Anabaptist convictions regarding peace and justice are generally more compatible with the left than with the right. My pilgrimage away from these impressions has taken me through a series of tempestuous affairs with various kinds of “conservative” political and social thought, and into employment at an academic institution often associated with the right, where I regularly follow Jesus’ example by “eating with Republicans and sinners.”³

Though I remain thoroughly confused and mostly disgusted by politics, broadly speaking, it has become increasingly clear to me that liberal democracy is emphatically not, as some would have it, “a bad idea.”⁴ It has also become clear that my own understanding of Anabaptist ecclesiology, rather than being in tension with my liking for liberal democracy as I have often assumed, is in some ways fully consistent with it. Grimsrud’s reflections help confirm that growing conviction. In what follows, I first call attention to the continuity between Grimsrud’s relatively positive assessment of democracy and a similarly positive, though somewhat neglected, assessment advanced by John Howard Yoder. I then turn to brief critical reflections on the notion of multiple “stories” or “languages.” I conclude with some remarks on the urgency of the issues in question in a North American Anabaptist-Mennonite context.

In the essay, “The Christian Case for Democracy,”⁵ we find John Howard Yoder’s most explicit discussion of whether, and in what sense, democracy should be considered the best form of human government. At one level, Yoder’s response to this question, though affirmative, is far from final or unqualified. He wonders aloud if perhaps we need to “keep the question open” in order to maintain a “realistic” perspective. It is no surprise that he emphasizes the Constantinian character of the question, noting that it is raised against a backdrop of “mainstream” assumptions about moral tdiscourse – assumptions that Yoder has questioned throughout his writings. But his answer is still ultimately affirmative. If we can remain vigilant regarding the Constantinian temptation, “we may find the realistic liberty to foster and celebrate relative democratization as one of the prophetic ministries of a servant people in a world we do not control” (166).

“But it shall not be so among you; you shall be servants because I am your servant.” After having described realistically both the fact of rule and the fact of value claims being made for that rule, Jesus locates himself and his disciples in a different ethical game. They are not to take over that game of “rulersmaking-a-case-for-their-benevolence” nor are they to attempt to interfere with it. They are called simply to do something else. The meaning of that “something else” is the alternative answer to the question of government which is represented by the servant Messiah. (156)

The difference of discipleship is not opposed to, but otherwise than, the facticity of domination and the legitimating language of beneficence. “Since Constantine,” Yoder says, “we have fused those three levels. . . . This mixes the descriptive and the prescriptive, interweaving the language which justifies coercion with that which guides voluntary discipleship” (157). As is so often the case in Yoder’s analysis, the discussion is dominated by the assumption “that we are talking about government of Christians and by Christians” (157).

The crucial point from Yoder’s discussion that makes contact with Grimsrud’s essay is that the alterity of the politics of Jesus does not imply anything like silence or mere indifference with regard to the politics of the nations. As cautious and appropriately provisional as Yoder’s endorsement of liberal democracy is, it is an endorsement. Pace standard characterizations of Yoder’s thought as “sectarian” (read “apolitical,” or worse, “quietistic”), a clear thesis of his essay is that democracy appears as preferable from the viewpoint of a disciple of Jesus. This preference, I take it, is based on the same general rationale that underlies Grimsrud’s essay. Liberal democracy is committed to a legitimating story with which we may express carefully qualified agreement, and on which we may freely draw in prophetic calls for the mitigation of oppression.⁶

Neither Yoder nor Grimsrud is advocating a simple acceptance of the substance of democratic legitimacy claims as true. Yoder especially takes pains to underline this:

When I have the good fortune to find myself in a situation where part of the rulers’ language of justification is the claim to have the consent of the governed, then I can use the machinery of democracy and am glad to do so. But I do not therefore believe that I am governing myself or that “we” as “the people” are governing ourselves. We are still governed by an elite, most of whose decisions are not submitted to the people for approval. . . . The consent of the governed, the built-in controls of constitutionality, checks and balances, and the bill of rights do not constitute the fact of government; they only mitigate it. . . . It remains the nature of the civil order itself that its coercive control is prior to any justifications or qualifications thereof. (158-59)

Nevertheless, Yoder’s insistent “realism” regarding the facticity of domination does not detract from his inclination to see democracy as most compatible with “the dignity of dissent; the ability of the outsider, the other, the critic to speak and be heard. This is not majority rule; it is minority leverage” (167). Though Yoder does not emphasize the point through his choice of terms, it is not just democracy in the abstract that is under consideration here, but liberal democracy in particular, democracy that is consistently fearful of what Tocqueville called “the tyranny of the majority.” In terms I have employed elsewhere, a trope shared by the languages of liberal democracy and Christian discipleship is that of “openness to the Other.”⁷

For Grimsrud, the discussion of democracy and Anabaptist faith is explicitly cast in terms of distinguishable, competing “stories.” The issue is the compatibility or incompatibility of the Anabaptist Story, the Democracy Story, and the Empire Story. This way of framing the discussion raises a problem (or perhaps a nest of problems) that is also implicit in Yoder’s discussion. At the most general level (and at the risk of a certain academic clumsiness), I believe the problem(s) may be characterized by reference to the specter of “systemic incommensurability.” The idea of alternative and potentially conflicting stories or languages recalls thorny discussions across academic disciplines about “rationality” and “relativism.” Simply stated, it seems that our talk of stories or languages implies two options for how stories or languages are related to each other. We might think, on the one hand, there is a metanarrative or metalanguage that provides a final or “absolute” frame of reference for adjudicating questions of truth, rationality, validity, etc. Or we might think, on the other hand, that claims regarding access to, or even the existence of, such an absolute framework are not credible. One way lies an “absolutism,” the other way lies “relativism” (and its even more frightening sibling, “nihilism”). Many of us are increasingly unable to accept either apparent option. The real question, in the end, is not which option is correct but whether this way of setting up the problem is fundamentally misleading.

This nest of problems has been addressed from various directions in recent philosophy, in both its European and Anglo-American streams. Though a number of perspectives have arguably contributed to rethinking these issues, careful discussion of such contributions in theological contexts is relatively recent. In Anabaptist-Mennonite contexts, where academic or “theoretical” modes of inquiry have often met higher-than-average levels of suspicion, these contributions are only beginning to receive serious consideration. I raise this especially in relation to Grimsrud’s way of framing his essay, but not to suggest that it undermines his arguments. My concern, rather, is that these problems must receive more explicit attention if further discussion among Anabaptist-Mennonite scholars is to bear substantial fruit. (Elsewhere I have made a start towards exploring this point, in connection with Yoder’s work in particular⁸ as well as more generally.⁹)

Some final words are in order regarding the urgency of the general discussion encouraged by Grimsrud’s essay. It is a dual urgency, arising from both current national politics and current denominational politics in the United States. At the level of national politics, the ongoing possibility of publicly advancing claims that arise specifically from Christian discipleship is radically and unavoidably problematic. If we wish to proclaim, or even simply to live, our understanding of what it means to follow Jesus, we cannot escape the fact that the very notion of “following Jesus” is essentially contested. Grimsrud’s call to active, critical, but friendly engagement in democratic political discourse is arguably a necessary prerequisite to the intelligible communication of what Anabaptists take to be the good news in contemporary North America. Liberal democracy is committed to holding open a space where we may noncoercively but passionately contend with others whose magisterial definitions of Christianity become de facto definitions of us, hence often drawing us toward the frigid extreme of one or another pole where discourse is potentially drowned out by the chattering of teeth.

Of even greater concern is the level of denominational politics. I take it as a central emphasis of Anabaptist ecclesiology that discernment – including discernment of the meaning and application of scripture – should take place at the level of the local, gathered community. Here I will be most audacious in the interest of stimulating further conversation, even though I am least able in this context to provide substantial support for my claims. Reflecting on the meaning and importance of this emphasis has been a central element of my own intellectual and spiritual struggles in recent years. As the results of congregational discernment become more diverse, I am disturbed by the ease with which some Mennonites seem to abandon this emphasis in the interest of a “Truth” to which they ostensibly have access apart from such a discernment process. Since “the Bible is clear” on certain issues (a current favorite in the US is homosexuality), it seems obvious to some that positions on those issues should be defined at a higher level, as the “teaching positions” of the denomination.

As I have explored the emphasis on local community discernment in the Anabaptist tradition, I have come to see a tension between the submission or yieldedness (Gelassenheit) of the individual to the community, and the individualism so often associated with liberal democracy. But when discussions of individual and community remain vague and superficial, they too readily assume a binary opposition, an all-or-nothing choice between the two. “Old Order” Amish and Mennonite communities are widely viewed as illiberal and authoritarian, as anti-democratic. Yet even in these cases, however imperfect the practice may be at times, the underlying principles (both implicitly presupposed and explicitly appealed to) are those of a discernment process in which all the members have a voice; those in leadership are, in principle, servant facilitators of the shared discernment process.¹⁰

As far as I have been able to tell, the Anabaptist ideal of the discerning
local community is basically indistinguishable from the idea of direct participatory democracy. I suspect that it is only in such a local community, small enough for all its members to know each other well, that the full participation of individuals in their own governance is a real possibility. This is emphatically not to make any “utopian” claims as to the inherent goodness of the small community; the shadow cast by the facticity of dominion is never absent even at the local level.¹¹ My suggestion, rather, is that there may be a significant difference in the ability to manage our implication in that facticity at any level of social reality above the local community. In sociological jargon, the Anabaptist ideal of local discernment may entail a relational context dominated by primary relationships (oriented toward persons as ends) rather than secondary relationships (oriented toward persons as means).

Ted Grimsrud has done us a great service by encouraging and contributing to the discussion of Anabaptist faith and democracy. My comments here are intended primarily as supportive of his general position, but also as further contributions to this urgent conversation.

Notes

¹ John Howard Yoder, “The Christian Case for Democracy” in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 151-71, at 158-59.

² Ted Grimsrud, “Anabaptist Faith and American Democracy,” MQR 78.3 (2004): 341-62.

³ Though it may have other origins ultimately, I owe this phrasing most directly to Ned Wyse.

⁴ In addition to Anabaptist-Mennonite colleagues and friends with whom I have discussed these issues, I am deeply indebted to several students who participated with me in a recent seminar on the concept of community at Hillsdale College. I am especially grateful to Elizabeth Crepeau Ehlen for her stubborn suspicions regarding the perspectives of John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas, and for passionately but lovingly challenging a number of my more illiberal tendencies.

⁵ Yoder, “The Christian Case for Democracy.” Parenthetical page references in the following discussion are to this essay.

⁶ Consider the thoroughly “liberal” texture of Yoder’s own phrasings, at times. An example that many of us – recalling the essay originally dates back to 1977 – will find remarkably prescient: “We are more likely to fall into international anarchy (i.e., war) or into domestic war when people do take over the government with too strong a sense of divine calling to set things right, with the national order as instrument” (159).

⁷ See Peter C. Blum, “Community, Totality, and Hospitality: On the Openness of Anabaptist
Community,” Brethren Life and Thought. 48.3 & 4 (Summer and Fall 2003): 159-75.

⁸ See Peter C. Blum, “Foucault, Genealogy, Anabaptism: Confessions of an Errant Postmodernist” in Susan Biesecker-Mast and Gerald Biesecker-Mast, eds., Anabaptists and Postmodernity (Pandora Press US and Herald Press, 2000), 60-74; Blum, “Yoder’s Patience and/with Derrida’s Differance” in Ben C. Ollenburger and Gayle Gerber Koontz, eds., A Mind Patient and Untamed: Assessing John Howard Yoder’s Contribution to Theology, Ethics, and Peacemaking (Cascadia Publishing House, 2004), 75-88.

⁹ The specifically Anabaptist discussion in Peter C. Blum, “Heidegger’s Shoes and Beautiful Feet: Ritual and Cultural Portability,” MQR 79 (January 2005): 89-107, draws theoretical substance from “Overcoming Relativism? Levinas’ Return to Platonism,” Journal of Religious Ethics 28.1 (Spring 2000): 91-117.

¹⁰ See the nuanced discussions of Old Order Amish decision making in Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture, rev. ed.(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

¹¹ Here I am inclined to be critical of Yoder’s discussion, insofar as its phrasings often seem to imply that the phrase “facticity of dominion” describes a reality found outside of the community of disciples and not within it. Yoder’s primary reference here is to an imperative regarding a
church’s self-understanding, as opposed to the empirical distance of churches from that understanding. Yoder surely would have claimed (justifiably) to be fully aware of this empirical distance, and there is evidence throughout his writings of this awareness. But I do not intend to dismiss claims that Yoder may underemphasize problems of power and oppression within the community of faith, and in ways that may be deeply problematic

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