Gospel Nonviolence: An Anabaptist-Baptist Approach

A guest-post by M. L. Westmoreland-White

When Halden asked me to contribute to this series, I suddenly felt as if I was failing to heed the Petrine command to “always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands an accounting of the hope that is in you (1 Peter 3:15b).” Do I really know what “my tradition” of Christian pacifism looks like?

The problem is that I was not raised in a peace church tradition, and my denomination, the Baptists, have never been a “peace church,” though we have always had a pacifist minority. That minority has been larger or smaller, less influential or more, in various times and places–but always a minority. (For a survey of this tradition see Paul R. DeKar, For the Healing of the Nations: Baptist Peacemakers[Smyth & Helwys, 1993.]) I came to gospel nonviolence from the U.S. military, so my “pacifism” may be a reaction, a rebellion, as much as a theological tradition. I was not formed in nonviolent virtues like a Mennonite, Quaker, or member of the Church of the Brethren would have been. So, I feel unworthy to participate in this series. But here goes, anyway.

Baptists began as radical Puritans who were influenced at key points by Dutch Anabaptists. The General, or more Arminian, Baptists began earlier (1609-1611) with John Smyth and Thomas Helwys and were influenced by Waterlander Mennonites from Amsterdam. The Particular, or more Calvinist, Baptists (who were to become the dominant strand) began a generation later (1638-1644) and were influenced by Collegiant Mennonites (and a translation of Menno Simons’ Foundation-Book) from Leiden. From the Anabaptists, we took a radically Christocentric orientation and an emphasis on a visible church and active discipleship. From the Reformed/Puritan heritage, we took a strong emphasis on God’s Sovereignty and Christ’s Lordship over all of life (thus rejecting either Lutheran or Anabaptist “two-kingdoms” thinking).

Both those strands inform my pacifism. Because Christianity is “following after” Jesus Christ, I must love my enemies and be an active peacemaker. The Anabaptist heritage (mediated to me especially, but not only, via John Howard Yoder) keeps my pacifism centered in the Sermon on the Mount and the rest of Jesus’ teachings. It means that my refusal to kill is part of a larger pattern of non-conformity to “the world.” That pattern includes simplicity of living (striving against materialist consumerism), radical egalitarianism in home, church, and society (resisting the heirarchies of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation), mutual servanthood, economic sharing. The Anabaptist orientation means that I cannot separate my love of God (my “spiritual life” or piety) from my love of neighbors–and that I must continually recognize personal, communal, or national enemies as tests of the seriousness of that neighbor love.

Because God is Sovereign and Christ is Lord over ALL of life (not just Lord of the Church or of some “inner realm”), then my nonviolent witness cannot be apolitical. The Baptist defense of “separation of church and state” is not out of any Lutheran “two-kingdoms” theology in which God works through the state with a radically different ethic (the Left hand of God, as Luther put it) from the ethic of personal relations in which the Gospel is to be followed. The idea that “religion and politics have nothing to do with each other” is heresy. Rather, we Baptists (at our best) defend the institutional separation of church and state precisely so that the church is free to give prophetic witness to the state.

Baptists, at least, non-fundamentalist Baptists, are fond of self-descriptions that use a set of principles, axioms, or “identity markers,” rather than by reference to a formal “creed” of confession of faith. Though, unlike our “cousins” in the Stone-Campbell movement, we Baptists have often written confessions of faith, we have seldom treated them as creedal “tests of orthodoxy,” but as guides to biblical interpretation and witnesses to outsiders of our faith. We have often given these statements elaborate “preambles” that deny their creedal status and explicitly claim that they are not to be used as substitutes for simple faith in Christ and that they are always subordinate to biblical authority. Many Baptists have identified with the Restorationist motto of “No Creed but the Bible,” whatever other disagreements we have with those we often term “Campbellites.”

Consider one widely popular such list of “Baptist identity markers”:

• Biblicism, understood not as preference for one or another theory of inspiration (or “inerrancy”), but as the humble acceptance of the authority of Scripture for both faith and practice and accompanied by a Christocentric hermeneutic. (This is related to the Baptist “primitivism” which desires to replicate “New Testament churches.”)
• Liberty, understood not as the overthrow of all authority for an anarchic individualism, but as the church’s God-given freedom to respond to God without the intervention of the state or other Powers. (Related themes are intentional community, voluntarism, “soul competency,” and separation of church and state.)
• Discipleship as normative for all Christians and so understood neither as a vocation for the few nor an esoteric discipline for adepts, but as life transformed into service by the lordship of Jesus Christ. (Signified by believers’ baptism–usually by immersion to signify the believer’s identification with Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection to new life; related themes are “the rule of Christ,” and “the rule of Paul.)
• Community, understood not as some group’s privileged access to God or to sacred status, but as sharing together in a storied life of witness to Christ exercised in mutual aid and in service to others. (Signified by Communion or Holy Eucharist, most often called by Baptists the Table or Supper of the Lord; a related theme is the regenerate or believers’ church, i.e., the concern for churches of “visible saints.”)
• Mission or evangelism, understood not as an attempt to control history for the ends we believe to be good, but as the responsibility of all Christians to bear witness to Christ–and to accept the suffering that such witness often entails. (The deep missionary impulse is connected to claim that all true faith is voluntary and uncoerced and thus leads back again to the defense of liberty of conscience for all–including for those whose views we deem wrong or even wrongheaded.)

Now, I do not claim that pacifism or gospel nonviolence is entailed or demanded by such any vision formed through such principles. That claim is too strong considering how many non-pacifist Baptists there are! Rather, my (slightly more humble) claim is simply that gospel nonviolence fits such a vision, such principles and that each of these “identity markers” are strengthened and their unity more apparent in pacifist perspective. If space permitted, I could run through each principle and spell out the pacifist implications, but I leave that to the reader’s own reflections. It is my rather audacious claim that the pacifist minority among Baptists for our 400 years have had it right: That gospel nonviolence makes us more authentically Baptist, as well, of course, as more authentically Christian.

So “my” pacifism has a deeply “Baptist” shape as well as ecumenical influences. It is informed by the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch and the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (both Baptists), as well as from the nonviolent strands of liberation theologies. I deeply adhere to a saying from Pope Paul VI, “If you want peace, work for justice.” Biblical peace, shalom, is a product of justice–of right relationships throughout society. So, “my” pacifism, must always be an activist peacemaking: Engaging in nonviolent struggle for a better world–not in a vain attempt to “bring in the Kingdom,” (God does that–although God may use us as instruments), but to bear witness of God’s character and actions for redemption–and, to prepare the way for the Ultimate realization of God’s Reign by penultimate actions for a relatively just and peaceful world. (See Bonhoeffer’s Ethics).

It has been said that Baptists are “practical idealists.” Insofar as I belong to a tradition of Christian pacifism, it is one informed by the practical idealism of the Anabaptists of the 16th C., the “democratic” impulses of early Baptists like Thomas Helwys, Roger Williams, John Bunyan, and Richard Overton; the Levellers of the 17th C., 19th C. abolitionists and evangelical feminists, of Social Gospel and Civil Rights radicals, and of nonviolent struggles for justice globally. With such “practical idealism” I try to bear witness to the nonviolent Christ who is my Lord.

Ten Stations on My Way to Christian Pacifism

A guest-post by Kim Fabricius

1. I graduated from Huntington High School (New York) in 1966 and Wesleyan University in 1970. The Cold War and the nuclear arms race; the brutal reactions to the Civil Rights Movement and racial integration; the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, and of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King; the executions of Caryl Chessman and Adolf Eichmann; the riots in Watts, Detroit, Newark, and other major American cities; the war in Vietnam; the shootings at Kent State: these images of death were an inescapable and invasive reality of the years of my youth, even though my rather privileged upbringing provided a shelter, if not a bolthole, from the storm.

2. At Wesleyan I majored in English. My teachers included Ihab Hassan and Richard Slotkin. Hassan, through Freud and Norman O. Brown, introduced me to the psychic god Thanatos; Slotkin, through his work on the myth of the American frontier, to our national god Mars: violence – its appropriation and legitimation so central to American self-identity. The Power of Blackness, the title of Harry Levin’s seminal study of the leitmotif running through the fiction of Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, sums up the Augustinian take on the human condition that was shaping my spiritual formation, for, pagan that I was, the Confessions too had made a powerful intellectual impact.

3. And then there was Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: I discovered that Kurtz’s heart was my heart. Although all through adolescence I never got into fistfights, I was aware of an aggressive streak running like a coal seam through my character, safely, indeed rewardingly, sublimated into a fierce competitiveness in study and sport. “The horror! The horror!” of it only became deeply personal during several ugly experiences at the tail end of the sixties and the spring of 1970. The grim months between the murders of King and Bobby Kennedy and the invasion of Cambodia were a national nadir that aptly coincided with my sense of self-defeat and depression.

4. Eventually Jesus Christ, armed only with his word, launched his attack on me, and, exposing my situation as infinitely more hopeless than I had ever suspected, rescued me from behind enemy lines – though to this day I continue to skirmish and resist. As, of course, does the world. It never occurred to me that, with the peace of God, the personal isn’t the political – and vice-versa. II Corinthians 5:16-19 was a key text and force as I headed off to Oxford for my ministerial training. While Martin Luther King was a role model (his collection of sermons Strength to Love were inspirational), it was above all Karl Barth to whom I turned during my three years at Mansfield College, as I tried to think through and work out a personal and political theology that I could live – and preach.

5. Barth seriously engaged the ethics of war, considered the “inflexible No of pacifist ethics”, and judged that it “has practically everything in its favour and its position is almost overwhelmingly strong.” However Barth rejected “absolute” pacifism, allowing for what he called the Grenzfall, the exceptional case, where war-making is not only permitted but commanded. While Barth himself did not directly cite classical just war theory (not surprisingly given his rejection of casuistry, not to mention the theory’s origins in the philosophy of natural law), nevertheless I had enough respect for Augustine, Aquinas, and modern revisionists, and sufficient scruple about the staple example of the Second World War, to factor it into my thinking. Result: about the time of my ordination in 1982, I was an “almost pacifist”.

6. Nuclear pacifism was a whistle stop. In the face of WMD, just war theory buckled and collapsed. I am proud to say that my own United Reformed Church (UK) passed a resolution on unilateral nuclear disarmament by a two-thirds majority at its 1983 General Assembly – a position, alas, not reflected in local congregations where the realpolitik idol of deterrence was – and is – widely worshipped. Such grass roots Reformed recalcitrance, and the dithering of the Church of England, as well as Margaret Thatcher’s rout of the Labour Party in the 1983 General Election (Labour’s election manifesto was unilateralist – and was dubbed “the longest suicide note in history”), only hardened my resolve and drove me further to radicalise my thinking.

7. I should say that at no time did I have any truck with two kingdoms doctrine, in spite of clarifications and fine-tuning by theologians like Pannenberg. My thoroughly Reformed understanding of the universal Lordship of Christ over church and world (or state) precluded any such Lutheran “compromises”. On the other hand, Reformed theology (pace Barth) gave little guidance to my developing pacifism. Ironically, here it took a Lutheran to keep me on the straight and narrow – and a Mennonite to take me the rest of the way.

8. The Lutheran was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I had already discovered and dismissed the four traditional interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount: as a “counsel of perfection”, reserved for the monastery; as a “mirror of sin” (Luther’s usus pedagogicus legis), driving us to despair and the sola fide; as an “impossible ideal”, inspiring us to high moral endeavour; and as an apocalyptic “interim ethic” (the thesis of Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer). However it took Bonhoeffer, in The Cost of Discipleship, to resurrect the perfectionist conception – what he called the “extraordinary” – only now understood as gospel, not law, and for all disciples, not just the few. It was also Bonhoeffer who taught me to take “activist non-violence” (Ronald Sider), which he admired in Ghandi and would be deployed to such effect by Martin Luther King, not just as a tactical ethic, the answer to the “realist” utopian critique, but as a divine command to be obeyed irrespective of results.

9. The Mennonite, of course, was John Howard Yoder (with a nod to the then Methodist Stanley Hauerwas as a sandal-bearer). The Christology of The Politics of Jesus deepened my imitatio Christi pacifism and added an eschatological context with resurrection power to its cruciform shape. Yoder’s kingdom-centred ecclesiology combined with his ecumenical vision re-energised my commitment to a Just Peace Church. Then Karl Barth and the Problem of War pinpointed several major inconsistencies in Barth’s ethics of war, suggested a failure in Barth’s theological nerve as well as his political imagination, and resolved any lingering suspicions that Christian pacifism might be a hubristic occlusion, rather than an obedient expression, of the freedom of God.

10. Finally, if Christian pacifism has – and it has – its basis in Jesus, the non-violent one whose power is perfected in weakness, and if Jesus is – and he is – the human hermeneutic of God, and, further, if theological construction begins with the economic Trinity and works back to the immanent Trinity as its eternal source and substantiation – in short, if God is non-violent, and in him there is no violence at all – then, clearly, not only urgent ethical, but also major doctrinal reconfigurations are in order, not least in soteriology, which should be very high, as a pacifist’s Christology should be very high. And pneumatology too. And that takes me back to – me, the violent me, the reluctantly peaceful me – the me thus so suitably equipped for pacifism. Because (purloining Barth), pacifism is an impossible possibility, and because (purloining Jüngel) pacifism is not necessary but more than necessary, at the heart of Christian pacifism lies prayer, the prayer: “Veni, Creator Spiritus!”

Postscript:

There is, of course, no single variety of Christian pacifism, and several typologies have been suggested delineating various historical and normative positions. You will find a recent, helpful classification in David L. Clough and Brian Stiltner, Faith and Force: A Christian Debate about War (Georgetown University Press, 2007). In their “scales”, my own brand of Christian pacifism is principled rather than (merely) strategic (calculative and consequentialist); classical rather than absolute (the former allowing for legitimate domestic and, in theory, international policing functions, the latter entailing anarchism); politically engaged rather than separatist; and universal in intent rather than (merely) communal (because Christ is Lord not just of the church but of the world).

A Pacifist Cambellite?  Contradicting the Contradiction

A guest-post by Thom Stark

I am a pacifist.

I was born and raised in what’s called the “Restoration Movement” (RM), a “non-denominational” movement for Christian unity born primarily out of Anglicanism and Presbyterianism, originally headed by Alexander Campbell, his father Thomas Campbell, and Barton Stone. Over time the movement split off into three branches–the more conservative Churches of Christ (non-instrumental), the theologically liberal Disciples of Christ (which among other things adopted a kind of hierarchical ecclesiology over against the ostensible congregationalism of the others), and the increasingly evangelical Independent Christian Churches (from which tribe I hail). The RM was born in the 19th Century and arose out of a widespread frustration with the endless doctrinal disputes that plagued and divided the denominations. The Campbells, Stone and others sought to build Christian unity by systematically refusing to make any “man-made” doctrine a test of fellowship. Its mottos were “No creed but Christ” and “No book but the Bible.” The RM ideal (as implied in the name “Restoration”) was the retrieval of apostolic Christianity. Only what the Bible, and particularly the New Testament, expressly forbids should be forbidden. Only what it expressly commands should be commanded. The principle was an old one: in essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.

Yet charity did not always mark the inevitable disputes over what was “essential” and “non-essential.” Indeed, there are a host of problems with the RM’s vision. Its principles were heavily indebted to Enlightenment philosophy, especially Baconian “common sense,” and the scientific worldview, in which light the Bible is read as a textbook and the meaning of the text is its “plain sense.” The RM vision was rooted in the myth of objectivism in which the only right reading of the text is the reading not shaped by any man-made tradition or human interpretation. Stanley Hauerwas once quipped to me that a “non-denomination” was just a denomination-in-denial. Nonetheless, for all its philosophical flaws, the RM rightly taught me to see denominations as a threat to the unity of the catholic body of Christ (cultural diversity of course is another question). Granted, I also learned that Baptists were going to hell because they didn’t believe Baptism was necessary for salvation, and that Roman Catholics weren’t really Christians even if there could be a real Christian or two hiding inside a Roman Catholic Church. Still, parochialisms and inconsistencies aside, the RM made me an ecumenist. Unfortunately, the RM did not make me a pacifist. That I learned (like many people in the past three generations) from Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder.

While Hauerwas opened my eyes to a world of cultural and political criticism I never knew existed, and in which I now live and move and have my being, it was Yoder who sealed the deal for me, of course with The Politics of Jesus (which I read right after Resident Aliens back in the Summer of 2004). I quickly followed Politics with He Came Preaching Peace, The Christian Witness to the State, What Would You Do?, The Priestly Kingdom, and others. What was the most important thing for me was Yoder’s commitment to making primarily biblical arguments. This is due in part of course to Yoder’s occasionalism. He often reasoned from the Scriptures because he was speaking to audiences who thought it important to reason from the Scriptures. But it is also due to his own deep commitment to the Scriptures. One could call this his “Barthianism,” of course, because his commitment to the Scriptures is probably better defined as a commitment to making Christology primary in theology and ethics. (We are of course talking about narrative Christologies and not the so-called “high-Christologies” of the Nicene and Post-Nicene councils. Of course, Yoder argued that even the “high-Christologies” served a narrative function and were only later abstracted from those narratives.) That is something that resonated with me, as a product of the RM. If the Scriptures give it to us as part of the “grammar” of being Christian, then we ought to have no other practice. I discovered I was able to take RM principles and turn them against the widespread commendation of “just-war” theory in the RM.

Yoder also taught me, however, that to be committed to the Scriptures does not mean one has to be opposed to tradition as such. The question is not whether tradition should or should not guide our faith and practice, but whether our traditions are faithful or unfaithful. According to Yoder, if it makes sense to talk about tradition that is faithful to the Apostolic teaching, then it must make sense to talk about tradition that is not faithful. Primarily in The Politics of Jesus but really in various ways throughout his entire corpus, Yoder has convinced me that to be a faithful participant in the so-called Restoration Movement, I cannot be anything other than nonviolent. (Whether I have been thus faithful since I proclaimed myself “nonviolent” is another question, and an irksome one.)

Little did I know, however, that I was not the first Restoration hound down the pacifist trail. Actually, I was delighted and mortified this year when I discovered that every single significant early leader in the Restoration Movement was not only pacifist, but taught that Christian nonviolence was part of what needed to be “Restored” after the fall of the church. I was delighted, of course, because now I had traditional pacifist precedent on my side whenever I found myself in debate with the (majority) non-pacifists in my little non-tradition. (I find myself in such debates frequently, and so my delight has grown exponentially.) But I was mortified because I felt betrayed–betrayed that I had been born and raised in the RM, trained for more than four years in an RM Bible College, without once having heard that our movement at its inception was practically a pacifist movement.

It all fell into place, especially after I read Craig Watts’s Disciple of Peace: Alexander Campbell on Pacifism, Violence, and the State. I discovered that the call to Christian unity upon which our movement was founded was also in part a call to do away with war. As Alexander Campbell himself put it, when Christians go to war they are in fact dividing in the name of America or Britain, North or South, what God has joined together in the name of Christ. The rejection of the doctrine of the invisible body of Christ in favor of the pursuit of actual Christian unity was seen by the Campbells, by Stone and by over a dozen other RM leaders in the first two generations as (certainly more but no less than) the renunciation of all violence. What’s more, Alexander Campbell called patriotism a “pagan’s virtue” and taught that Christians can have only one allegiance, that to the kingdom of God. I saw all the connections. Our rejection of infant baptism and our adoption of adult immersion. Our rejection of denominationalism and our adoption of what might be called “biblical catholicity.” These two staples of the RM which have been sustained were in fact once indistinguishable from a renunciation of war and violence, and a commitment to the separation of church and state. Turns out that the RM isn’t Evangelical after all. It’s the kid sister of the Radical Reformation. (Just don’t tell the RM!)

That reminds me. I once heard George Lindbeck say that the best way to be ecumenical is to be radically committed to one’s own tradition. That’s a very Wittgensteinian thing to say. That’s why, as a Wittgensteinian myself, I’ve decided to study for the next few years at Eastern Mennonite University, in order to become a more committed Campbellite. . . in order to become a better servant to my non-tradition.