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Communal Ecclesiology: The Power of the Anabaptist Vision
By Dale W. Brown

"In a world in which weapons in the hands of any may trigger a holocaust, the option of prophetic, witnessing, suffering, supporting communities may become more necessary and viable. Consistent with its message that the church needs to be reborn in each generation, the Anabaptist vision will continue to become flesh in places where it may be least expected."

ONE of the legacies of the New Left that emerged during the sixties may be the continuing attraction of the old left radicals of the sixteenth century. Contemporary evangelical radicals with a social conscience and countercultural stance appreciate discovering historical prototypes of their style and mission. There are increasing numbers of cadres in theological circles who reflect the influence of Anabaptist theology as up-dated by John Howard Yoder. ¹ A young scholar from Australia, who represented a number of communities from varying traditions, stated in one of his commissioned visits to Anabaptist scholars: "I have discovered that some of you within the left-wing stream are not at all aware of the world-wide interest in

Dale W. Brown is Professor of Christian Theology at Bethany Theological Seminary, and during 1977-78 he served as Visiting Lilly Professor of Theology at Berea College. He is the author of numerous articles and books, the most recent of which are Simulations on Brethren History (Brethren Press, 1976), Understanding Pietism (Eerdmans, 1978), and Flamed by the Spirit (Brethren Press, 1978).

This is the first in a series of essays on the place and purpose of the church in contemporary culture. It continues the proposal made in the April 1978 issue of THEOLOGY TODAY, in the series "Christian Doctrine," to re-examine some of the basic doctrines of Christian faith. Two additional articles on the church, one on the Reformed tradition and one on recent Catholic developments, are scheduled for future issues. As Dr. Brown notes in this present discussion, there is a curious but promising current interest on the part of many, including searching seminarians, in the radical Reformation and the so-called peace churches.

¹ See The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids, 1972); among the best of other contributions to the theological understanding of Anabaptism are J. R. Burkholder and Calvin Redekop, eds., Kingdom, Cross, and Community (Scottdale, Pa., 1976); Robert Friedmann, The Theology of Anabaptism (Scottdale, Pa., 1973); and Walter Klaassen, Anabaptism: Neither Catholic nor Protestant (Waterloo, Ontario, 1973).

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Anabaptism." Because of our minority status and theology of martyrdom, such acceptance evokes mixed feelings of both satisfaction and suspicions about our present witness when others speak this well of us.

Such interest in the recovery of the Anabaptist vision has been made possible by a remarkable reversal in church historiography. Up to a half-century ago, the radical reformers were primarily known through the writings and interpretations of their persecutors. It was a small group of Mennonite scholars, of whom the foremost was Harold Bender, and ecumenical collaborators such as Roland Bainton, Franklin Littell, and George H. Williams who reconstituted a more propitious view of the Anabaptist vision from original sources. Among other discoveries, they discerned a pluralism among the sixteenth century radicals which exposed the invalidity of many of the diatribes and stereotypes of the mainline reformers being equally applied to all. The forerunners of contemporary Mennonites, labeled as "evangelical Anabaptists," were monogamists instead of polygamists, nonresistant instead of violent in strategy, more biblical than spiritualist in their epistemology, more Hebraic than individualist in anthropology, more ecumenical in their constant seeking of disputations than their antagonists who tortured, burned, drowned, exiled, and imprisoned them, and more like Luther than anarchists in their understanding of the function of the state.

I. Current Compatibilities

The break of the radical reformers with the establishment in positing the corpus Christi against the corpus Christianum knows many parallels with our current situation. The problem with the Constantinian vision of the church as the empire at prayer has been that coterminous membership in church and state can only be maintained by the use of the sword. The early free church leaders were considered seditious in their practice of believers' baptism, which implied voluntary membership, religious freedom, and separation of church and state. The dream which had regarded Constantine's conversion as the beginning of the Christianization of the world was replaced by the suspicion that the fall of the church occurred with its alignment with the interests of the empire.

The Constitution of United States provided religious freedom, and we have not experienced the most blatant fruits of state church mentality. Nevertheless, the equation of Christianity with American society has been pervasive enough to describe current disaffections with the myth of a "Christian" America as post-Constantinian. In an attempt to oppose the tendency to wrap both the big gun and the Bible in the Stars and Stripes and unfurl all before the world, the founders of Sojourners community first presented their message under the rubric, Post American. Such prophetic witness against the degenerations and extremities of American civil religion finds rootage in the left-wing tradition. Though Anabaptists have often been accused of anti-state bias, their theology has neither articulated anarchism or hatred of the

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state. Rather, the call to love all people, even one's enemies, and to place faithfulness to the way of Christ above all other allegiances so challenge jingoistic attitudes that it evokes the wrath of those with narrow nationalistic identities. One becomes countercultural not primarily out of a desire to be different, but as a result of affirming love for other cultures. This often leads to feelings of alienation from our highly self-centered culture.

Though this accent of Anabaptist witness will not readily gain popular acceptance, it continues to be needed in a culture which displays too few signs of repentance from greedy consumerism or idolatrous devotion to making weapons of death. We also live in a time of a growing challenge to the notion of the Christian west and its mission to the atheistic east and the pagan south. Colonialism, the great missionary advance, and the subsequent economic imperialism of giant corporations need to be supplanted by mutual partnership in mission to paganism found in every nation, the necessity to make major readjustments in the grossly unequal control of the world's resources, and the psychological conversion necessary to take our place modestly as one nation in a family of nations. In this we can continue to be informed by the radical commitment which gives priority to the vision of the kingdom over national and tribal loyalties.

The painful revelation that America has often meant bad news for many has been accompanied by growing numbers who seek basic identity in something other than the "melting pot." This interest in roots, the new pride of the "unmeltable ethnics," has spawned fresh affirmations of pluralism. Though Anabaptist ecclesiology has stressed the necessity of working to a consensus and seeking to maintain the unity of the Spirit within the body, the opposition to coercing such unity through legal, state, or other hierarchical structures offers a theology for our present pluralistic situation. Our quest for one baptism and one faith should be in the context of persuasion, understanding, and love. Anabaptist theology, at its best, offers an ecumenical style which opposes on the one hand any easy amalgamation and acculturation of traditions lest we lose distinctive gifts, while on the other hand the centrality of the great commission calls us from isolationism to dialogue and witness. There is probably no historic position which affirms as strongly the possibilities of the presence of the Spirit in the struggles and sufferings of minorities. The interest in roots of oppressed peoples extends to the Bible itself. Radical rootedness in the Bible combines with a radical challenge to the status quo to provide an attractive option for those who wish to transcend the present rerun of the fundamentalist-liberal debates of the twenties. Anabaptists have never felt entirely comfortable with either the individualism of American conservativism or the maneuvers for power of many liberals.

The hunger for rootedness in a messed-up world is intimately related to the current search for models of community. Our era may be the first in human history lacking the benefits of extended families. We may

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discern vestiges from earlier decades when most people on our planet were a part of a tribal entity, a farm community, an ethnic neighborhood, a family church, or a clan of kinfolk. With the scattering of the extended family due to the subservience of our destinies to the technological society, the nuclear family has inherited the obligation to meet practically all of our existential and emotional needs. Previously, parental deficiencies were buttressed by grandparents, aunts, and kissing cousins to provide supplementary resources for identity. Caught in the network of giant institutions, there is a new hunger for warm, intimate relationships. Because the nuclear family cannot bear all of the needs carried by the extended family of the past, there exists the contemporary yearning for community. Much of the popular experimentation with group living in the sixties failed due to the dearth of moral and spiritual underpinnings. For this reason many have turned to the rich experience and wealth of resources available in free church communal ecclesiology.

II. Theology of Community

Because they insisted on a visible concretion of the body, evangelical Anabaptists, unlike other sixteenth century radicals, were not spiritualist in their understanding of the church. Nevertheless, they did focus on "peoplehood" more than any concept of institution. The church is a fellowship of persons participating in the fellowship of the Spirit, the resurrected body of Christ. Though the people do not understand themselves as an institution, the people have institutions. People do not go to church as much as people are the church. The church is not the building; rather, the church gathers in a meeting house to point to the presence of God in the sanctuary of life. One submits to discipline not because one is joining together in any illusion of perfection, but because sinners acknowledge that God's help is mediated through a sister or brother. One participates in being a disciple for others because one cares deeply and such caring should extend to all of life including material possessions. The work of the Holy Spirit, symbolized by the laying on of hands, means that we do not come to God apart from a brother or a sister. Baptism involves a response to the mediation of God's message and grace through the community. The death of the old and birth of the new means making a covenant with God and the body for ministry and mission. Instead of choosing sides in the traditional debate concerning the presence of Christ in the bread, the Anabaptist focus has been on the real presence of Christ found in his visible body, the people, as they break bread together. For Anabaptists the correct translation is in fact: "You are my body (Matt. 26:26)."

In its pre-Constantinian myth about the early church, the Anabaptists adopted a different style of primitivism or apostolicity. Here was a biblicism which held up models of community relationships and faith for our appropriation rather than propositional statements or models of historic continuity. In hermeneutics the locus of infallibility

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shifted from the text itself, the technically qualified theological experts, or official interpreters of the church to the committed and listening congregation gathered around the word. The myth of the pristine early church is not without historical problems. We are not dealing with one early model of the community but with many. The early Christians were not above reproach. One has only to examine Paul's Corinthian correspondence to sense that the early church was neither morally pure, doctrinally sound, or organizationally stable. Nevertheless, it can be argued that it is the style of life in struggling, believing, disciplining, and loving that is to be imitated rather than any static models of moral purity. In recognizing that the paradigm of the early church cannot be defined legalistically and precisely without violating its pluralistic and dynamic nature, one approaches Bonhoeffer's conjoining of act and being in seeing the church as something we might have but not manipulate.

Early Anabaptist theology combined its primitivism with eschatological expectations. Early left wing radicals did not stop with a backward look but appropriated the biblical apocalyptic in such a way as to call for the death of the old and the birth of new creation, which was seen not only as salvation for the individual but as the restoration of right relationships in all of life. Menno Simons wrote of two opposing kingdoms, of two overlapping aeons, one pointing backward to life lived apart from Christ, the other pointing forward to the fullness of the kingdom. This dualism between the kingdoms of this world and the kingdom of our Lord is something other than a dualism which regards the material creation as evil, in contrast to the non-material which is spiritual. Nor is it a dualism which separates sharply this life from the next one to come either in heaven or in the millennium. Rather, the Anabaptist dualism is one of the now and not yet, of the present and the coming.

The social manifestation of the old aeon is often named "world," a Johannine designation for the fallen creation. Though not entirely limited to it, the new aeon is manifested visibly in the community of faith. The tension with the old aeon, the world or society, accounted for the Anabaptist attraction to biblical metaphors for the people of God such as "pilgrims," "sojourners," "strangers," and "aliens." Their citizenship is in the kingdom which is not yet of this world but which should begin to break into the world as an explosive force. The posture of the pilgrim is not one who is running away from the world as much as one who wants to begin to live now the not-yet of the transcendent vision of what the world will become. The eschatological community experiences the first fruits of the coming harvest. The church is that part of the world which in small ways begins to make visible and point to what God intends for all. For this reason Anabaptists have shared the biblical realism and theocentrism of the premillennialists, but have parted company whenever the premillennialists attempt to remove the Christian way from the present to the future. The Anabaptist vision

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shares somewhat the same pessimism and biblical realism about human engineering, but affirms more about the Spirit's power to work God's future in the present.

III. Another Way To Be Political

In the past decade it has not been difficult to find justifications to be angry at the establishment. It was, however, in circles of the most alienated that we began to hear the refrain: "Amazing Grace … that saved a wretch like me." The growing recognition of our corporate situation led some radicals to echo the confession of Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us." Being angry at began to shift to an anti-establishment mood which focused on the attempt to be something different in lifestyle. It was this different way to be against the establishment which found antecedents in the radicals of the sixteenth century. Being the church itself was judged to be a powerful political act. Pleas to the world for justice and brotherhood remain hollow apart from those who themselves are a part of communities experiencing some first fruits of love and justice. Being the church, however, involves preaching and witnessing in word and in deed, and such a style extends beyond the church.

John Howard Yoder in The Politics of Jesus poses two assumptions which run counter to major popular options. In contradistinction to some revivalist, pietist, and fundamentalist tendencies to mistranslate biblical pronouns as singular, as well as some liberal judgments that Jesus either did not have a social ethic or if he did it is not relevant to our situation, Yoder asserts that the gospel is political. Documented by a wealth of biblical allusions, Yoder demonstrates that the pericopes about Jesus as well as the theology of Paul speak to issues of justice and peace. Yet, Jesus was political in a radically different way. Yoder criticizes the strategy which assumes that if Christians could control the right power structures, everything would be right. Instead he features the style of patience, love, persuasion, service, suffering, teaching, and preaching rather than coercive violence as the way to goals of the kingdom. After centuries of dependence on weapons of death, the world needs the mind-blowing affirmation of the power of meekness, the ultimate triumph of the way of suffering love because of God's demonstration and promises of how resurrection follows the cross, victory arises out of suffering, and the death of the old foreshadows the coming of the new.

The current neo-Anabaptist revival suggests options other than staying home from the power centers altogether and going to Washington and adopting the lobbying style of everyone else. Without repudiating completely the traditional legislative activity of the mainline churches, we need to learn new ways to be political. One of the attractions of Sojourners community in Washington, D.C., may be its search for different ways to relate to the powers and principalities without relinquishing its keen political interest. Some of these involve

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creative interpretations of what it means to preach, pastor, prophesy, and teach the political message of the gospel to those in high and low places.

In examining the nature of Christian responsibility, it might be instructive to look at the development of Anabaptist thought. Under sentence of death, the early radicals were not in a position to decide where and what structures were compatible with their understanding of discipleship. Free from the threat of persecution, later communities struggled more contextually with the degree of involvement in societal structures. Anabaptists posed the criteria of faithfulness in dealing with the issue of whether to be in or outside the structures. Sometimes faithfulness was judged to offer the kind of participating which could serve as leaven in the dough. This may have been possible because of the greater openness of some institutions which have been more permeated by the Spirit of Christ. In other times and places, however, Christians have had to so struggle against the powers and principalities that faithfulness has led them to shake the dust off their feet. Faithfulness may produce the fruit of transforming power. But it may lead to the cross of confrontation with a system of death.

IV. Priority of Faithfulness

The free church tradition offers simple obedience as a primary evangelistic and social strategy. A community which cares and shares with one another and which is hospitable to the stranger and enemy possesses more real evangelistic power than those which adopt the media and manipulative techniques of Madison Avenue. The Niebuhrian assumption that all ethical decisions deal with shades of gray and therefore necessitate compromise has been replaced by a mood which defines some ethical issues more sharply. It is wrong to bomb secretly a country with whom we are not at war, to torture citizens, to rob present and future generations of basic resources through continuing escalation of the arms race. Greater clarity as to the content of witness has been combined with greater skepticism about our ability to calculate utilitarian decisions. In our inter-dependent and complex world it no longer seems as easy to calculate consequences. Rather, it is probably more realistic to recognize the impossibility of ever knowing the total context of our actions and thereby being able to predict accurately the results of our actions. Such reasoning does not preclude an interest in effectiveness or suggest that one forsake all rational calculation. It does give greater credence for shifting the weight in any agape calculus to the priority of faithfulness as discerned and checked by the community of faith. In relation to an eschatological stance which promises the ultimate victory of the Way, the Anabaptist call for clarity and simplicity of witness has become more relevant to many contemporaries with radical propensities.

At one of the Thanksgiving gatherings of Evangelicals and Social Concern, a brother from South America reported that in his part of the

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world there were only two options for the Christian. One was Marxist, namely, the choice of becoming a part of the movement to overthrow oppressive regimes by force. The other was Anabaptist. By this I gathered he was referring to a faithful, suffering, countercultural movement which points to the coming kingdom of righteousness in word and in deed. Intensely interested, I drew him aside after the session to discover where he had picked up his assumption. What had he been reading? What was his connection? He answered "none" and added: "It is simply the way it is in our present situation." His choice may be a paradigm for more and more situations in the future. In a world in which weapons in the hands of any may trigger a holocaust, the option of prophetic, witnessing, suffering, supporting communities may become more necessary and viable. Consistent with its message that the church needs to be reborn in each generation, the Anabaptist vision will continue to become flesh in places where it may be least expected.