CGR Vol. 36 No 3 (Fall 2018)

Title of Contents

Foreword | Full article (PDF) 

Articles

Being Formed in the Time of Jesus Christ: Towards a Renewal of Footwashing in a High-Speed Age
Jason Reimer Greig
Full article (HTML) | Full article (PDF)   

Telling Tales Out of School: Scholars of Amish Life and the Tourist-Book Market
David L. Weaver-Zercher
Full article (HTML) | Full article (PDF) 

Political Theology and Apocalyptic: Introduction
Philip G. Ziegler
Full article (HTML) | Full article (PDF) 

To See and to Inhabit
Nancy Elizabeth Bedford
Full article (HTML) | Full article (PDF) 

Apocalyptic, Anabaptism, and Political Theology
Elizabeth Phillips
Full article (HTML) | Full article (PDF)  

Metaphysics, Desire, and the Challenges of Embodied Apocalyptic
Paul Martens
Full article (HTML) | Full article (PDF)  

Agonism, Aesthetics, and Apocalyptic
Kyle Gingerich Hiebert
Full article (HTML) | Full article (PDF)  

Messianic Theology and Apocalyptic Political Economy
P. Travis Kroeker
Full article (HTML) | Full article (PDF)  

Book Reviews

Going Global with God as Mennonites for the 21st Century
Karl Koop
Full article (HTML) | Full article (PDF) 

Inhabiting the World: Identity, Politics, and Theology in Radical Baptist Perspective.
Jamie Pitts
Full article (HTML) | Full article (PDF) 

Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant Reform
Christina Moss
Full article (HTML) | Full article (PDF) 

Living on the Edge of the Edge: Letters to a Younger Colleague
Carol Penner
Full article (HTML) | Full article (PDF) 

Understanding Bonhoeffer
Preston D.S. Parsons
Full article (HTML) | Full article (PDF) 

Reflections

Mennonites and the Media: Telling Mennonite Stories Today
Johnny Wideman, Sherri L. Klassen, Katie Steckly, Sam Steiner
Full article (HTML)

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles |  Book Reviews | Reflections

Being Formed in the Time of Jesus Christ: Towards a Renewal of Footwashing in a High-Speed Age

Jason Reimer Greig

The Conrad Grebel Review 36, no. 3 (Fall 2018)

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles |  Book Reviews | Reflections

Telling Tales Out of School: Scholars of Amish Life and the Tourist-Book Market

David L. Weaver-Zercher

The Conrad Grebel Review 36, no. 3 (Fall 2018)

Introduction

The production by scholars of Old Order Amish life of short, illustrated books and booklets aimed largely at tourists has characterized the field of Amish studies from its earliest days. Long before his first edition of Amish Society appeared in 1963, John A. Hostetler, the most prolific Amish studies scholar in the 20th century, published Amish Life, a 32-page booklet written for non-specialists that in its various editions sold nearly a million copies.[1] Hostetler's Amish Life had come out in 2052. In the fifteen years that followed, another university-trained sociologist, Elmer Lewis Smith, published three tourist books of his own, two of them general treatments of Amish life and one devoted largely to Amish bundling practices.[2] Such efforts continued through the 20th century and into the 21st, most recently with Donald B. Kraybill's Simply Amish, published in 2018 and subtitled "An Essential Guide from the Foremost Expert on Amish Life."[3]

This essay explores the propensity of scholars of Amish life to package information about Amish life into descriptive, tourist-oriented books. When did this practice begin? Why has it continued over the years? Who have been the primary players, and what stories about the Amish have they told along the way? Because these popularizing endeavors emerged in a particular context, I begin my consideration with a brief history of what I call the "Amish culture market." I then outline a case for popularization—five interrelated factors that compelled scholars of Amish life to enter the culture market—before finally, in the last section of this essay, outlining their " habits of popularization." In many respects this essay is a defense of these popularizing efforts, which I consider a reasonable response to the cultural marketplace. At the same time I want to highlight the constraints, predilections, and compromises inherent in packaging Amish life for popular consumption. Taking one's message to market inevitably shapes the story one tells, not simply altering the message's breadth and depth but also modifying its contours and even its essence. At the very least these popular treatments have pushed beyond explaining Amish practices to offering a defense of these practices against critiques. In that respect, popular treatments of Amish life have tended toward apologies for the Amish lifestyle, a rhetorical approach that sets the stage for lesson-oriented sections that frequently conclude the works.

Some definitional clarity is in order. First, by “scholars of Amish life” I mean university-trained scholars who are not Amish themselves but have studied and written academic works on Amish or Mennonite life. Incidentally, these scholars have mostly been sociologists, though not exclusively so; they have mostly been Mennonites, but again not exclusively so. What links them together is their academic training, their scholarly productivity, and their determination to translate their expertise into the tourist book genre. Second, by “tourist books” I mean relatively short nonfiction books or booklets that, for purposes of the market, assume little or no knowledge about Amish life, are simply written, generously illustrated, attractively packaged, and free of footnotes. Of course, the publishers of tourist books are happy to sell them to anyone, including people who never leave their homes; in any case, the target market is ordinary people who want straightforward, accessible information about the Amish—and not too much of it. To narrow my scope even further, I will limit my analysis to tourist books published in the United States that seek to provide a general overview of Amish life, as opposed to those that focus on a single feature of Amish life, such as bundling, quilting, or the Pennsylvania Dutch language.

Before I begin, self-disclosure is also appropriate. First, as a scholar of Amish life, I have myself undertaken popular writing about the Amish, books and articles aimed at a readership that extends far beyond the academic community. Second, I have co-published books with Donald B. Kraybill, whose tourist books I explore in this essay and who, more importantly, I consider a friend. [4]Third, my spouse is a book editor at Herald Press, which has published many of the materials I consider below.

Scholars of Amish Life and the Amish Culture Market: A Short History One hundred years ago, the Old Order Amish were not a renowned religious group, let alone a precious cultural commodity. Journalists produced occasional stories about them in the 1910s and 1920s, and a few local merchants produced Amish-themed postcards, but as a distinct cultural phenomenon, the Amish were largely ignored in the first third of the 20th century.[5] This relative anonymity began to wane in the late 1930s, partly because of a conflict the Amish themselves incited. In 1937, a group of Amish leaders in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania sought to defend their communities’ one-room schoolhouses against the forces of school consolidation. The conflict, covered by The New York Times and other national media outlets, awarded the Amish a new measure of attention and, in some circles, heightened esteem.[6] Publishers and other merchants were quick to capitalize on this clash between the proponents of social progress and those who would preserve an icon of America’s rural past. In 1939, for instance, a New York City publisher released Ella Maie Seyfert’s children’s book, Little Amish Schoolhouse, that, with other popular publications, set the stage for a full-blown Amish culture industry to emerge in subsequent decades.[7]

The first book-length academic studies of Amish life appeared shortly thereafter. In 1942, Walter M. Kollmorgen, a researcher for the US Department of Agriculture, produced a 100-page study titled Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community: The Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.[8] That same year, the Reformed minister Calvin George Bachman published The Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, a 294-page monograph published by the Pennsylvania German Society.[9] These two works, both concerned with the persistence of Amish life in an age of assumed assimilation, anticipated the production of other full-length books: Elmer Lewis Smith’s The Amish People: Seventeenth-Century Tradition in Modern America (1958); Smith’s The Amish Today: An Analysis of Their Beliefs, Behavior, and Contemporary Problems (1961); William Schreiber’s Our Amish Neighbors (1962); and John A. Hostetler’s Amish Society (1963). [10]All of these monographs had their strengths, but it was Hostetler’s Amish Society, more than the others, that would become the standard reference work for decades to come.[11]

Although Hostetler, who had grown up in an Amish family but opted not to join the Amish church, was not the first writer to perceive a market for an Amish-themed tourist book, he was the first university-trained scholar to produce one. [12]His publication of Amish Life in 1952, when he was three years into a graduate program in rural sociology at Pennsylvania State University, came at the urging of both his professors and his academically-minded friends in the Mennonite Church. [13]Reluctant at first—academics without tenure popularize their scholarship at their own risk—Hostetler eventually gave in to their advice. In an article published in the Pennsylvania Dutchman in 1951, one year before Amish Life appeared, he made a case for people like himself occupying exactly the right position for interpreting Amish life to the larger public. In his view, his dual identity—Amish farm boy, university-educated sociologist—helped him chart a safe route between the Scylla of “superficial interest” demonstrated by mainstream social scientists and the Charybdis of “idolization” demonstrated by untrained aficionados.[14]

Hostetler’s decision to write Amish Life had an adversarial impetus as well: the seemingly endless series of Pennsylvania Dutch-themed booklets produced by A. Monroe Aurand Jr. Beginning in the late 1920s, Aurand, who operated a bookstore in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, produced more than two dozen such booklets, which he eventually sold by the thousands to travelers along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Although he cast his cultural net wider than the Amish per se, his Pennsylvania Dutch booklets (especially after 1937) often highlighted Amish people and their practices. [15]Aurand showed a particular interest in bundling, a traditional courtship practice in which a courting couple enjoyed one another’s company in bed. This practice, more widespread in Amish communities in the 1940s than it is today, piqued the interest of outsiders, who found it curious that Amish church leaders would tolerate a practice so rife with sexual temptation. That Aurand would feature this phenomenon, link it to the Amish, and season it with salacious details irked Hostetler, who knew there was much more to Amish life than this. [16]When Hostetler failed to get vendors to stop selling Aurand’s booklets, he decided to enter the Amish culture market himself. Amish Life was the result.

Chances are good that Hostetler would have entered this market even if Aurand had never published anything. By the early 1950s, popular interest in the Amish was ascendant, as was the willingness of outsiders to offer their interpretations of Amish life, some more serious-minded than others. Plain and Fancy, a Broadway musical that followed a sprightly New York City couple as they explored Lancaster County’s Amish region, debuted in 1955 to enthusiastic audiences and strong reviews. Amish Farm and House, the first Amish-themed tourist attraction in Lancaster County, opened that same year, paving the way for what became by the mid-1960s a thriving Amish-themed tourist industry. These entrepreneurs, drawing on a long tradition of cultural tourism, knew there was money to be made by selling information about exotic people, regardless of the information’s accuracy. Not all these endeavors played fast and loose with Amish reality, but some clearly did. Perhaps more upsetting to Hostetler, many portrayals demonstrated a dismissive attitude toward Amish spiritual sensibilities. Even as he praised Plain and Fancy’s theme song, “Plain We Live,” as the “best statement of Amish credo coming from a secular source,” he must have noticed that the musical’s urban protagonists held deeper reserves of moral wisdom than did its boorish Amish patriarch.[17]

In the decade following the debut of Amish Life, Hostetler was joined by other scholars who used popular modes of expression to disseminate their own interpretations of Amish life. In contrast to Hostetler, who downplayed bundling in his Amish Life booklet, a Madison College (Virginia) social scientist, Elmer Lewis Smith, addressed the practice head-on with Bundling Among the Amish.[18] Smith’s goal was apparently to woo the same audience that Aurand had captured but then provide them with a more nuanced interpretation of bundling.[19] In a similar fashion, Franklin & Marshall College folklorist Alfred L. Shoemaker tried to capitalize on the marketing successes of others—Lancaster County tourism entrepreneurs—to provide an informed interpretation of Amish life. Shoemaker entered this market with A Peek at the Amish in 1954, but his most creative interpretive vehicle was the Dutch Harvest Frolic, a weeklong potpourri of lectures, demonstrations, and activities that debuted in Lancaster in 1961.[20] Much like Aurand in the 1920s and 1930s, Shoemaker was interested in a range of Pennsylvania Dutch groups and practices, but given the Amish’s rising celebrity, he increasingly devoted his efforts to the Amish slice of Pennsylvania Dutch ethnic pie.

The popularizing efforts of these scholars—Hostetler, Shoemaker, Smith, and eventually Hostetler’s protégé, Donald Kraybill—were both creative and effective at reaching wide audiences, but their work could scarcely keep pace with other endeavors that educated people about Amish life. By the late 1970s, three million tourists were flocking to Lancaster County annually, with other Amish-absorbed travelers heading to Holmes County, Ohio, and Elkhart County, Indiana. In each locale, tourists were greeted with a plethora of informational sources, from tour guides to films, and from “working farms” to glossy pamphlets. Not coincidentally, other entrepreneurial media began to pop up and multiply. In 1985, Paramount Pictures released the Amish-themed feature film Witness, a star-studded action flick that filled cinema seats from coast to coast and, in the course of two hours, introduced moviegoers to certain features of Lancaster County Amish life. Other Amish-themed movies and television shows would follow, including Harvest of Fire, which aired on CBS in 1996, and For Richer or Poorer, which debuted in theaters the following year. By the early 21st century, two other popular media—reality television and romance novels—had enfolded the Amish in their warm and lucrative embrace. [21]Some reality offerings, most notably the Discovery Channel’s Amish Mafia, stretched reality to the breaking point, but they did exactly what their producers hoped they would do: they attracted wide audiences. Not unlike Aurand’s booklets in the 1930s, they succeeded in shaping at least some people’s perceptions of Amish life—and in rankling scholars who held accuracy and nuance in higher regard.[22]

As with any quick survey of Amish-themed media in the 20th and 21st centuries, this sketch is incomplete, but it suffices to show that the dilemma Hostetler faced in 1950 only grew more complicated over time. In 1950, he could start with the relatively reasonable goal of stanching the flow of bad information (by convincing vendors to stop selling Aurand’s booklets) and replacing it with something better (i.e., his books). No scholars of Amish life would be so optimistic today. Still, some continue to share Hostetler’s conviction that shaping popular perceptions of Amish life is an integral part of their work. Producing tourist books continues to be one way to advance that objective.

The Case for Popularization

The case for scholars of Amish life to disseminate their ideas in popular media, including tourist books, cannot be separated from the foregoing contextual considerations. In particular, this case hinges on five interrelated factors.

First, outsiders have long found the Amish both fascinating and confounding, a curiosity that made the emergence of an Amish culture industry practically inevitable. Touristic forays through Amish regions date to the early years of the 20th century and, along with journalistic accounts that reported about Amish life, set the stage for commercial endeavors that burgeoned over time—from Aurand’s booklets in the 1930s and Amish Country tourism in the 1960s, to Witness in the 1980s and Amish romance novels and reality television in the 2000s. Near the end of his life, Hostetler wondered if his scholarly output had contributed to the growth of the Amish culture industry, but there is no reason to think that the commodification of the Amish was dependent on the work of Hostetler or any other scholar. To the contrary, America’s free market, multiplied by its commitment to free speech, provides plenty of room to make money by telling other people’s stories. In this environment, it was only a matter of time until an Amish culture industry would develop.

Second, the Amish themselves have not been major players in this industry, refusing (for the most part) to explain themselves to the larger world.

There are exceptions to their informational reticence, to be sure, but these have been modest in scope, late in coming, or both. [23]One needs only to spend a day in Salt Lake City, Utah to see what is possible in terms of an exceptional religious group taking control of its own story and mediating it to outsiders. There are many reasons why the Amish have not gone the way of the Latter-Day Saints and their theatrical Temple Square, but for our purposes the reasons for this reticence are less important than the plain fact of it, which has created considerable space for others to enter the informational marketplace.

Third, the chief aim of the Amish culture market is to produce representations of Amish life that sell, an objective that has sometimes run roughshod over other representational values such as close correspondence to reality. Granted, many of these productions have demonstrated both accuracy and nuance, but many have not, and this deficiency has contributed to some scholars’ willingness to enter the informational marketplace. This can be seen most clearly in the case of Hostetler, who produced Amish Life in direct response to Aurand’s pamphleteering and later provided ameliorative commentary to a host of media outlets in response to Witness. [24]For Hostetler, allowing others to control the marketplace was to forsake his scholarly vocation, which was to advance people’s understanding of Amish life. [25]Hostetler may be the most obvious example, but other scholars have felt similarly responsible to counter deficient portrayals of Amish life, especially when those portrayals can potentially reach wide audiences.

Fourth, 24/7 news coverage about everything, including events that affect real-life Amish people, means that opportunities abound for both good and bad information to circulate. The cocaine trafficking arrests in 1998, the Nickel Mines Amish school shooting in 2006, and the strange case of Amish men forcibly cutting other men’s beards in some Ohio Amish communities in 2011—each of these events was reported widely in the media. More significantly, each event raised questions that begged for answers. Do Amish young people buy and sell illegal drugs? Can Amish people forgive grievous wrongs in just a matter of minutes? Are there rival Amish groups that despise one another so much that they resort to violence? Journalists from many quarters sought to answer these questions, and although some did an excellent job, others missed the mark. Even the best journalistic accounts raised additional questions about Amish life, ones that scholars thought they could answer, even as they realized most people would not want to read long, dense academic treatises.

Finally, the production of much popular literature, and especially tourist books, rests on the assumption that many consumers have short attention spans.

To be sure, there are many points along the reading spectrum between a five-hundred-page treatise and a tourist booklet; and there are many other media besides print by which people can learn about Amish culture. Nevertheless, there continues to be a market for explanatory books that can be stuffed into purses, backpacks, or glove compartments, and that can be read quickly or even on the run. Publishers of Amish romance novels have recognized this ongoing reality and have thus sought to enter the tourist book market themselves, sometimes drawing on their most popular authors to compose the text. [26]Still other publishers are looking to scholars to produce this sort of literature.

These five factors have convinced some Amish scholars to devote themselves to producing popular works on Amish life. This endeavor is entirely reasonable to undertake if one is convinced that (a) ideas matter; (b) filling the minds of ordinary people with accurate information is a public good; and (c) one is well-positioned to produce that kind of information. This is not to deny that other motives, including public recognition and financial gain, may influence a scholar’s decision to produce a popular work. Still, if scholars of Amish life are convinced that they have the ability to advance the public’s understanding of Amish life, entering the tourist book marketplace makes more sense than standing on the sidelines and lamenting what they see.

That said, entering this marketplace comes with particular constraints. Putting one’s ideas into an accessible form necessarily requires the sacrifice of nuance, a sacrifice that runs counter to the academic enterprise. In addition, people who seek to merchandise their ideas need to be attentive to consumer desires, a reality that can sometimes lead to other practices, tendencies, and even compromises. To these habits of popularization we now turn.

Habits of Popularization

By referring to “habits of popularization,” I do not intend to be either prescriptive or pejorative. My intent is quite straightforward, namely to ask what representational practices characterize the tourist books produced by scholars during this period. These practices may ensue from an author’s own sense of what it takes to capture the Amish culture market, or may emerge at the behest of the publisher, whose marketing staff may shape the product in ways the author did not conceive—and perhaps does not like. Indeed, authors who sign publishing contracts agree to relinquish some degree of control over the final product, a deal they strike on the assumption that their publishers can reach wider markets than they could reach themselves. For some authors this contractual relationship feels like a deal with the devil. For others it feels like a blessing from above. For most it feels like a combination of the two.

The first habit of popularization is answering the questions about Amish life that ordinary people are asking (or at least are perceived to be asking). In the original edition of Amish Life, Hostetler cast many section headings in the interrogative, posing questions such as “Are They Flush with Money?” and “Do They Know World Affairs?” [27]Forty years later, Kraybill and his publisher titled his first tourist-oriented work The Puzzles of Amish Life, underscoring that it took seriously the questions of ordinary folk. [28]Taken as a whole, outsiders’ questions are legion, but tourists are most apt to be curious about what they see as they travel through Amish regions—horses and buggies, people in plain dress, farms and farming practices—topics that, along with courtship and marriage, appear almost without fail in tourist booklets.

Of course, some questions gain more prominence in certain eras than in others. In his early tourist book offerings, Hostetler devoted attention to bundling, a topic altogether absent in later tourist booklets. [29]As for Rumspringa, the period in Amish teenagers’ lives when they “run around” with other teens, early tourist booklets mention it only in passing, if at all, whereas later booklets, especially in the aftermath of the cocaine trafficking arrests of two Lancaster County Amish men in 1998, award it significant space. [30]Similarly, information about the forgiveness of evildoers appeared in these booklets only after the 2006 Amish school shooting in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, a horrific and internationally reported event that was followed by gestures of forgiveness from the local Amish community. In the case of Kraybill’s Simply Amish, published in 2018, a section on “Forgiveness at Nickel Mines” runs to nearly six pages.[31]

The second habit is making Amish life visible, an inherently challenging endeavor given the Amish aversion to being photographed. In some cases, this aversion seems not to have troubled the booklets’ producers. Both Shoemaker’s A Peek at the Amish (1954) and Smith’s Among the Amish (1959) were little more than photo essays, with the scholars providing captions or short paragraphs to accompany the images, many showing Amish people at close range. In Shoemaker’s Peek at the Amish, the first nine pages are devoted to Amish dress, with fifteen close-up photographs by Charles Rice filling the 5.5 x 8.5-inch pages. For his part, Smith worked with photographer Melvin Horst to produce an 8.5 x 11-inch spread, advertised on the cover as “a pictorial presentation.” Both booklets were produced in black-and-white, and neither offered any justification for photographing Amish subjects. Consumer interest in “the bearded and bonneted people” inhabiting an “American fairyland” was assumed to be justification enough.[32]

Compared to both Shoemaker and Smith, the Amish-raised Hostetler took the Amish taboo against photography seriously. In the first edition of Amish Life (1952), nearly half of the images featuring Amish people were ink drawings, not photographs. Of the thirteen photographs that appeared in the thirty-two-page booklet, six were entirely devoid of human subjects, focusing instead on animals, farmsteads, and technology. Of the seven photographs that did include Amish people, only two included adults: one of a barn raising and one of a horse-drawn wagon, both taken so remotely that individuals are hard to identify. The other five human-subject photographs were photos of children: two candid shots showing children doing farm work, and three close-ups, clearly posed, including a cover photograph of Hostetler and his brother Jacob.

Here, then, we see the genesis of a representational ethic that some publishers and scholars would adopt in the years ahead: the determination that, despite the Amish taboo against posing for photographs, it was permissible to publish close-up photos of Amish children and teens. This halfway covenant had some basis in reality—Amish adults were more likely to avoid or even scold potential photographers than were Amish children—but in many ways it was more exploitive than snapping pictures of reluctant adults. In time, scholars and publishers would find other ways to justify using intimate Amish photographs, including the photographer’s sensitivity to his or her subjects, the fact that a given photograph was already in circulation (it hadn’t been taken for this particular book), or both. Of course, the ultimate reason for such photographic images was economic: consumers would more likely buy books that included such images than those that did not. Just as important from an economic standpoint, the Amish were known to abstain from filing lawsuits. Gaining permission from an Amish subject to publish a photograph may have been possible, and perhaps even ideal, but without the threat of lawsuits it was never really necessary. In sum, the Amish were—and remain—an easy target.

The third habit is making Amish life appear rational, even defensible. Many questions that these books seek to address are the why-questions of ordinary people, some of which carry implicit charges of irrationality, even hypocrisy. Why do the Amish ban telephones from their homes, a ban they do not apply to their barns or shops? In Puzzles of Amish Life, Kraybill suggests it is because overreliance on telephone talk would in time “remove conversation from the rich symbolism of face-to-face interaction.” More specifically, “body language, facial expression, and dress codes—all so important in Amish culture—would be stripped away in phone conversations.” [33]Why do the Amish refuse to own cars, even as they are happy to ride in them? In Lessons for Living, a trio of Amish scholars notes that cars “make people go in opposite directions, and by doing so, people spread out and no longer need neighbors.” [34]Answers such as these, clearly and confidently stated, do two correlated things. First, they conceal the simplest explanation behind a particular practice: because the Amish community have always done it that way, and defying a community tradition can be socially ruinous. Second, they suggest that Amish life operates according to a deep logic that many fail to see.[35]

More than just giving rational explanations, however, tourist booklets are prone to suggest that the Amish approach to a given feature of life has more to offer than the standard American approach, the latter of which can thus be cast in a negative light. Take, for instance, the Amish practice of limiting personal dress options. What contemporary North American has not fretted over his or her wardrobe, wishing for more options to choose from? The Amish live free of that consumerist angst. In fact, community-imposed fashion restrictions make them freer than their faddish neighbors, whose limitless aspirations lead to becoming “arrogant, conceited, and self-destructive.” [36]As for the Amish rejection of modern technologies, readers are reminded that these technologies often have adverse effects on their users. Here again the Amish have wisdom to offer. “By restraining the trends toward large and costly machines,” wrote Hostetler in Amish Life (1983), the Amish have escaped “the disintegrating aspects of modern society—haste, waste, aimlessness, and violence.”[37]

The fourth habit flows logically from the third: urging readers to learn from the Amish and bend their lives in the Amish direction. The lessons presented to readers vary widely, but include valuing “communal wisdom” over the will of the individual, [38] taking control of technology, [39]fostering personal, face-to-face relationships, [40]slowing down one’s pace of life, [41] and placing more value on “self-reflection about who we are, why we are here, and where we are going.” [42] These lessons almost always come near the end of the book, introduced by dramatic chapter titles or section headings, such as: “What Good Are They?” in Hostetler’s first edition of Amish Life (1952) and “Joys and Satisfactions,” in his revised edition of Amish Life (1981); “The Amish Challenge,” in the tri-authored Lessons for Living (1999); “Amish Wisdom,” in Kraybill’s The Amish: Why They Enchant Us (2003); and “Hope for the Future,” in Hostetler’s posthumously revised Amish Life (2013). In all these cases, scholars seek to remind readers that the Amish are more than a curious feature on the North American landscape, more than a people frozen in time. They are thoughtful critics of modern life, with reservoirs of wisdom that could benefit their less critical neighbors.

Conclusion

These four habits of popularization—answering readers’ most pressing questions about Amish life, making Amish life visible, making Amish life rational, and commending Amish wisdom—are not necessary to writing a tourist book on Amish life. In fact, Smith’s early contributions to this genre, Among the Amish (1959) and The Amish (1966), were descriptive but not apologetic, and rather than leading readers to consider the lessons the Amish had to offer, they concluded with sections on “An Amish Funeral” (1959) and “Death” (1966). While concluding a book on Amish life with a consideration of Amish death has a certain logic to it, in the scholar-produced tourist books produced since then, Amish death and dying have received relatively little attention and certainly do not provide the last word on Amish life. To the contrary, the last word has increasingly trended toward answering this question: How can the Amish help the rest of us lead more satisfying lives on this side of the grave? In this light, Hostetler was ahead of his time, concluding his first edition of Amish Life—published in 1952, just seven years after Hiroshima, at the dawn of the nuclear age—with an open-ended sermon, yet a sermon nonetheless: “Perhaps the modern hurried, worried, and fearful world could learn something from the Amish.”[43]

Using the Amish to remedy non-Amish people’s lives comes with built-in drawbacks, even conundrums. How does one draw benefits from a comprehensive way of life without adopting that way of life in toto? How does one secure the blessings of a peculiar way of life while also avoiding its pitfalls? More to the point, how does one distinguish between what Kraybill generously calls “communal wisdom” and a communally sanctioned authoritarianism that quashes people’s spirits, the latter of which is cited in nearly every narrative written by people who left the Amish church? [44] Tourist booklets cannot begin to answer these questions in a few concluding paragraphs, and for this reason, it is fair to criticize the habit of celebrating “Amish wisdom” as a final, takeaway point. That said, cultural tourism has always been about the desires of tourists, who inevitably use the Other as a mirror by which to reflect on their own lives. [45]Although some Amish-themed tourist books abstain from that sort of reflection, most scholars who have spent time in Amish communities have become unsettled by what they have seen. As they have witnessed the ebb and flow of Amish daily living, they have also wondered about the patterns and assumptions of their own lives. In that sense, their musings about Amish wisdom are just as much autobiographical as sermonic. Indeed, when Hostetler wondered in 1952 about a “hurried, worried, and fearful world” learning from the Amish, he was thinking about more than a world with the recently acquired ability to blow itself up. He was also thinking about himself.

David L. Weaver-Zercher is Professor of American History at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

---

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles |  Book Reviews | Reflections

Political Theology and Apocalyptic: Introduction

Philip G. Ziegler

The Conrad Grebel Review 36, no. 3 (Fall 2018)

Introduction

As part of its program during the 2018 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature (AAR/SBL) in Denver, Colorado, the Explorations in Theology and Apocalyptic working group hosted two book discussion panels. The three independent responses to Travis Kroeker's Messianic Political Theology and Diaspora Ethics and Kyle Gingerich Hiebert's The Architectonics of Hope—as well as the authors’ replies—arose from one of these sessions.[1] It is delightful to see them published here for the benefit of the wider readership of The Conrad Grebel Review.

For almost a decade now, the Explorations in Theology and Apocalyptic group has facilitated conversation among a group of scholars on the theological and ethical significance of the phenomena of biblical apocalyptic in general, and of recent accounts of "Pauline apocalyptic" in particular. The work of J. Louis Martyn has provided a specific and continuing impulse to our work, as have essays on the theme by Walter Lowe.[2] At the heart of the conversation is a running exchange between theologians and New Testament scholars. One of the chief joys and benefits of our work is to facilitate close collaboration between scripturally-minded theologians and theologically-minded exegetes. While our ambition has chiefly been to stimulate the diverse range of scholarship undertaken by individual members, nevertheless several collaborative publications related to our program have emerged over the years.[3]

Critical discussion of new books is a regular feature of our activity. Previous book panels have considered a diverse array of works, including: James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree; Theodore W. Jennings Jr., Outlaw Justice: The Messianic Political of Paul; Stanislas Breton, A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul: Samuel V. Adams, The Reality of God and Historical Method: Apocalyptic Theology in Conversation with N.T. Wright; and Philip G. Ziegler, Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology. The panel discussion of the new volumes by Kroeker and Gingrich Hiebert published below maintains this tradition of wide-ranging, searching, and constructive conversation. The material questions of theological ethics and theopolitics at the core of these two fine books have been integral to the group's program from its inception; so too has engagement with contemporary philosophy, especially as it concerns the rediscovery of Paul as a provocation to thought. Such engagement is an important feature of both these new works as well.[4]

For reasons that remain obscure, at least to me, Canadian theologians have played an outsized role in our group and its discussions, not least Douglas Harink, whose book Paul among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology beyond Christendom and Modemity has provided many young theologians with their entrée into J. Louis Martyn's interpretation of the apostle Paul and its significance. It is very good to see this trend continued here: Kroeker has been involved in the conversations of the working group since the beginning, and this book by Gingerich Hiebert happily presses into the terrain of our ongoing dicussions.

On behalf of the convenors of the Explorations in Theology and Apocalyptic working group, allow me to express my gratitude once more for the contributions of Nancy Bedford, Elizabeth Phillips, and Paul Martens to this rich session, as well as my thanks to Travis Kroeker and Kyle Gingerich Hiebert for their willingness to engage with, and offer replies to, the three reviewers' important comments and questions.

Philip G. Ziegler is Professor of Christian Dogmatics at the University of Aberdeen in Aberdeen, Scotland

Table of Contents | Foreword | Book Reviews | Reflections

To See and to Inhabit

Nancy Elizabeth Bedford

The Conrad Grebel Review 36, no. 3(Fall 2018)

Thank you very much to both authors for sharing their work. I found much to ponder in both books. They challenged me to engage fruitfully with thinkers who, for different reasons, I sometimes feel that I would rather dispense with yet cannot help encountering again and again, such as Carl Schmitt and John Howard Yoder. They also dealt with the writings of people I do enjoy engaging with, such as Paul and Augustine.[1] They provided theological categories I find insightful, in particular the notion of seeing or vision in Kyle’s Architectonics, and of disincarnation in Travis’s Messianic Political Theology. I’ll organize my remarks loosely around those two themes.

Vision in The Architectonics of Hope

I loved the title of this book, and therefore opened it with anticipation. The first surprise I experienced as I began to read was that the author takes “architectonics” not in a spatial direction, but in a visual or optic one by the construction of a “theological metaphorics of vision” (6). From the very title of the first chapter onwards, he links political theology to reading the signs of the times (4) and thus to the task of seeing. What he hopes we will be able to see is the relation of violence with the apocalyptic, through the lens of political theology, in a variegated, multifaceted manner. For the author, though the scopic is not neutral or innocent, it is not necessarily implicated in an abusive exercise of power; it can also function as part of the economy of grace (cf. 5). The author ultimately wants us to “see” in order then to “speak,” that is, to give an account of our hope in the midst of a violent world (6).

We encounter various modes of seeing throughout the book. Carl Schmitt’s vision of an “apocalyptically inflected aesthetics of violence” haunts the pages throughout, as it does in much of political theology—a term that Schmitt himself coined (16). For Kyle, Johann Baptist Metz’s vision of a new political theology ultimately lacks clarity because Metz cannot see how imbricated his approach is with the categories of modernity and secularization (31). Significantly, Schmitt and Metz have visions that cannot be described as simply in opposition to each other (48)—in part because both see violence as necessary (50), something Kyle frames as “an apocalyptically inflected aesthetics of violence” (51). Metz’s theopolitical vision thus ultimately cannot help us see the way beyond Schmitt (53). Hans Urs von Balthasar moves the discussion of vision toward the dimension of the contemplation of the Trinity (55) and consequently to aesthetics. In turn, David Bentley Hart and John Milbank want us to discover new “vistas” for political theology in ways that do not reify violence, though they do not fully succeed (56ff).

Milbank “considers himself an apocalyptic seer of the highest order” (83), yet his polemical approach does not allow him to see the points of view of others with sufficient subtlety. Nonetheless, he makes the important point that as “watchers of violence” within the logic of modernity we are not removed from violence (97) and that beauty has its own violence, one that can muddy our vision of Christ (101). Hart, who elaborates a metaphysics of vision by which the beauty of God can be seen even in the midst of creaturely sinfulness and imperfection (108), is limited by his incapacity to distinguish between passivism and pacifism (114). John Howard Yoder also provides a vision, for his account of political theology allows us to “see” the power of nonviolence more clearly than the visions of the other political theologians discussed (119). Yoder’s approach can thus be described as a doxological way of seeing history that integrates patience and nonviolence into its vision (128). The title of the final chapter of the Kyle’s book once again refers to vision: “Retrospect and Prospect.” Each of the visions described in the author’s genealogy of political theologies is complex, and none is to be discarded wholesale: each sheds light on the others (cf. 161).

The theme of vision is very rich and is one that I personally love, for instance as it appears in the Gospel of John and in the contemplative traditions of the Christian mystics. As I pondered the thinkers and theologians in Kyle’s generous and careful account, I found myself thinking of a saying we have in Spanish: no hay más ciego que el que no quiere ver—there is no one blinder than the person who does not wish to see (this folk saying is coincidentally—or not—similar to some of what the Johannine Jesus has to say, e.g., John 9:41). What is it that these variations in political theology do not significantly consider in their “optics” or their “architectonics?” What is it that they do not see, though they seem to posit their visions with such confidence as trustworthy lenses for looking at reality? Two blind spots came to mind immediately: on the one hand, the “wound of coloniality”[2] and, on the other, the reality of the lives of women.[3]

The first blind spot has to do with the ease with which certain North Atlantic thinkers (à la Milbank) ignore or scornfully dismiss thinkers who are from and/or write from the perspective of the global South—more specifically from a Latin American and Caribbean context—often without even having read or engaged their work in Spanish and Portuguese. How can one be so blind to the shadows cast by one’s trajectory and tradition? Kyle lays some of the groundwork for needed repairs in this direction in his awareness of thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau,[4] as well as in his critique of Milbank for not grasping Gutiérrez’s engagement with Blondel (73).[5] But more needs to be done. North Atlantic political theology has to be able to “see” its imbrication with coloniality more clearly if it is not to remain trapped in an infertile (and arrogant) solipsism: a kind of theologia politica incurvata in se that is sinful and death-dealing.

The second blind spot—the effect on the lives and bodies of women of a given political theology—is one salient reason why Yoder’s particular vision of a “peaceful political theology” (including his notion of “revolutionary subordination”) in the end has very little traction with me, though I am an Anabaptist theologian and therefore inevitably influenced by his work.[6] It is not just about Yoder’s incapacity to embody fully his own insights (119), something of which we are all culpable. What I am speaking of is a kind of willful blindness to the fact that one cannot truly give glory to God (doxology) while sinning against or taking advantage of one’s brother or, in this case, of one’s “sisters in Christ.”[7] What is it about a particular theopolitics that so readily closes its eyes to the way the bodies of concrete human beings—for instance, young women—are treated by (usually male) theologians or other academics who claim to speak for peace? If the criterion of how a given vision affects people in its material consequences is not addressed head-on, the material result of its “architectonics” (not just what one sees but where one lives in the quotidian) will inevitably be noxious or uninhabitable for many.

In pondering Kyle’s visually-oriented architectonics I was left wondering about the spatial, material dimensions of our lives. What does all of this that we “see” mean for materiality, for concrete lives, for incarnation (especially that of the subaltern subjects Jesus so often puts at the center of his ministry and teaching)? Incarnation is a theme I encountered throughout my reading of Travis’s book.

Disincarnation in Messianic Political Theology and Diaspora Ethics

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a problem I call “Protestant docetism,” which is manifested in many ways in American society, but perhaps lately most notably in the cult of the toxic white Jesus that seems to undergird much of white supremacy and white nationalism in the United States. [8]I was therefore immediately struck, a few pages into Travis’s book, when I encountered his notion of disincarnation alongside his use of “messianic materialism,” the “quotidian embodiment of divine love,” and similar concepts (11, et passim). I find that his diaspora ethics turns out to be a consistent (and to me, helpful) attempt—on whatever front he is dealing with in a given essay—to push back against moves toward disincarnation and to tease out what incarnation means for a particular time and place.

I was struck by several themes in the book that are traversed by the question of incarnation and disincarnation. Three strands are particularly worthy of mention and are ultimately intertwined:

1. A Pauline strand, including Paul’s dynamic of an emptying that leads to fullness (predicated on the paradox of the incarnation), the Pauline instruction from 1 Corinthians 7 to live “as if not” (32, 78, 167, 184), and the related idea of “weak messianic power” adapted from Walter Benjamin and likewise deployed throughout the book (e.g., 75);
2. A hermeneutical strand, namely the retrieval and re-reading of sources such as Plato (e.g., Chapter 2), Augustine (Chapter 3), Paul, and the Hebrew Bible, incorporating an existential incarnational hermeneutic and, when relevant, Apocalyptic categories (e.g., 68);
3. A strand dealing with cultural embodiment, such as the embodied cultural testimony of Amish communities (88). [9]In tension with such options are the parallel problems of conformity and acculturation to hegemony as well as the dehumanizing consequences of a technological utopia of disembodiment.

One aspect of incarnation—of our bodies, of our particularity—that I often ponder is that it is necessarily constrained in space and time. There is something humble and small about it that is beautiful. It is itself and no more or less than that. It is not a generic, abstract, and thus inhuman and even diabolical (disincarnate) generality. To engage in disincarnation means to try to be free of the demands of the body, something increasingly acceptable and indeed seen as desirable in much of mainstream understandings in an age of robotics and artificial intelligence. So much of that is deeply antithetical to a faith anchored in the incarnation, the particular life of Jesus, and resurrection of the body, and yet we are deeply colonized in our imaginations and our habits by what we tell ourselves are simply neutral tools to help us achieve our ends. Disincarnation ends up being a false, alternative incarnation that is violent and manipulative.

Of course, to commit to an incarnational or embodied, particular, and faithful way to be in the world means figuring out how to do so honestly, meeting head-on the ways in which our traditions (e.g., Mennonite traditions) may have become distorted, unfaithful—indeed, disincarnate. This leads me back to my concerns about the concrete implications of these ideas for the bodies of the vulnerable. For instance, when I think both about the life of rural Amish girls in Indiana and that of my own daughters, Latinas in an urban Mennonite church in the Chicago area: What kinds of ways of embodying the Christian faith are life-giving for them? Will discourses of living “as if not” truly allow them to experience life abundant in the way of Jesus? Do we ask those kinds of concrete questions (which are also questions of incarnation) often enough as we construct our theologies and our ethics?

Next Sunday

One final question to both authors: What else might you say about the role of the (particular, localized, embodied) community of faith in all of this? Both of you mention church at various points but in somewhat general terms, not so much as active and very particular sites for doing theology in community in the here and now. I wonder what the insights in these books might mean for specific churches, such as my own Mennonite community in Evanston, Illinois. I’m imagining a scene next Sunday. Folks will ask: “Where were you last week?” I might answer: “Oh, in Denver at a panel talking about the apocalyptic and about political theologies from an Anabaptist lens.” “Huh …” they might respond. They like to know what I’m up to theologically and what the point of it is. Will they at least get a decent sermon out of it eventually? Or an insight about how better to do ministry in our community? I was thinking that perhaps one take-away for my own church community might be the challenge to remember the log in our own eyes as we try to refine our visions of the world (Kyle), whilst also finding the courage to cultivate our “scandalous oddities” (Travis) in the face of technologically driven erasures of embodiment and particularity.

But I still wonder: Are either/both of the authors thinking of church as a locus theologicus or not so much? And in what concrete (insightful, incarnate) ways might the vision of an architectonics of hope and the incarnational emphasis of diaspora ethics respectively be expressed as good news for specific communities of faith?

Nancy Elizabeth Bedford is the Georgia Harkness Professor of Theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois.

---

[1] It would be rewarding to examine further how both authors converse with Augustine. I’d be interested in exploring how their insights might shed light on my own Latin American/Latinx reading of Augustine as a “Latin-African,” considering Gingerich Hiebert’s emphasis on vision/optics/contemplation and Kroeker’s thoughtful treatment of Augustine, especially in chapter 3. His comment on page 54 contra the notion of Augustine’s sense of inner selfhood as disembodied is a key one. I make a similar point from another angle in my essay “Liberating Augustine: Rethinking Augustine’s emphasis on interiority” in Theology Today 74 (2017): 149-56, but I hadn’t thought of the matter from the perspective of Augustine’s apocalypticism.

[2] By “coloniality” I’m thinking specifically of the distinction Walter Mignolo (alongside other decolonial theorists) makes between the historical colonial period (the time of Iberian colonization in the Americas) and the coloniality of power (meaning the kind of colonialism still at work in the current processes of capitalist globalization). Any consideration of European or North Atlantic (i.e., “Western”) political theology is incomplete without taking seriously the “colonial wound” of Latin America, which is also in the “West.” Cf. for instance Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

[3] Of course, these are not really two discrete topics, as they intersect at many points: thus María Lugones can speak of “The Coloniality of Gender” in Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise (Spring 2008): 1-17.

[4] Ernesto Laclau is influenced by Carl Schmitt, as Gingerich Hiebert points out (page 48) and in turn influences North Atlantic theory, an example of the circularity of intellectual influences between Latin America and the North Atlantic. It is not only a matter of the shadows cast by the European tradition, but of the light emitted from the direction of the Global South, one that Eurocentric approaches are largely blind to.

[5] It might be fruitful to bring the work on political theology of thinkers such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos into the conversation; cf. for instance “If God Were a Human Rights Activist: Human Rights and the Challenge of Political Theologies,” in Law, Social Justice and Global Development Journal 1 (2009): 3-42. De Sousa Santos argues that the subaltern God, the God of the subalterns, clashes with the God invoked by oppressors—and imagines a “monotheistic God pleading for a polytheistic set of Gods” (29) in order to respond to what in this context we might call the apocalyptic dimensions of the present. I don’t agree with his premise as stated, and he doesn’t claim to be a theologian, but I think it is important to listen to his underlying concerns (the distress of the world and the importance of complex thought experiments), putting it in conversation with trinitarian political theology. From a confessional Christian perspective, it is also worth paying attention to the political theology (teología pública, as they usually prefer) of the group of thinkers around GEMRIP in Latin America, such as Nicolás Panotto.

[6] As Gingerich Hiebert points out, Yoder had direct knowledge of Latin American thought, unlike most of the other thinkers reviewed in the book (117, footnote 9), thus falling less readily than some into the first blind spot I mention. This covered a multitude of sins for me, until it didn’t any more, given the way Mennonite (and other) institutions long enabled his abuse.

[7] Cf. Rachel Waltner Goossen, “Mennonite Bodies, Sexual Ethics: Women Challenge John Howard Yoder,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 24 (2016): 243-55 and Rachel Waltner Goossen, “Defanging the Beast: Mennonite Responses to John Howard Yoder’s Sexual Abuse,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 89 (2015): 7-80.

[8] Cf. my essay “A Narrow Gate? Proceeding along the Way of Jesus by the Spirit,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 92 (October 2018): 43-55.

[9] I don’t quite know what to make of the “identity politics” dimension of this (e.g., 216). My encounters with ethnic Mennonites in Latin America (for instance in Paraguay) have not been reassuring; the “urban Mennonites” I knew in Argentina growing up (in La Falda, Córdoba) and now living in Evanston, Illinois have been invested in a counterhegemonic, non-assimilated approach to faith, and have been quite creative liturgically as well. Their (our) Anabaptist particularity has been quite clear in matters having to do with both Mammon and the cult of the military. But I do see the problem in the kind of assimilation to evangelicalism and neo-charismatic forms among many Latin American Mennonites and Latinx Mennonites in the United States. I wonder how a relationship to the “land” (even in the form of the urban community gardening some of us do in Evanston) and of course to economics (frugality, intentional community) connects to all of this.

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles |  Book Reviews | Reflections

Apocalyptic, Anabaptism, and Political Theology

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles |  Book Reviews | Reflections

Metaphysics, Desire, and the Challenges of Embodied Apocalyptic

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles |  Book Reviews | Reflections

Book Reviews

---

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles |  Book Reviews | Reflections

Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant Reform

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles |  Book Reviews | Reflections

Living on the Edge of the Edge: Letters to a Younger Colleague

---

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles |  Book Reviews | Reflections

Understanding Bonhoeffer