Are Evangelicals Cult-hero Worshippers? (Part 3 of 3)

Steven Wall with Rev. Randy Smart 
with contributions from Anne-Marie (Goertzen) Wall

    Traditional Mennonite Evangelicals maintain a consensus-style, congregational intellectual process that is antithetical to the concept of hero-worship.  

    The EMB have always been on the intellectually engaged side of Mennonite culture.  The historic Brüderthaler often assumed leadership roles in establishing schools in pioneer North American communities.  Isaac Peters, the senior Bishop of the EMB, is commended by P. M. Friesen and Delbert Plett for his intellect, his scholasticism and for his understanding and valuing of traditional Mennonite intellectual sources.  John Funk befriended Peters and enticed him to repeatedly contribute to Herald der Wahrheit.

    In Peters’ shadow, the EMB were noted for pursuing intellectual careers as educators, missionaries, pastors, nurses and writers, rather than farming.  Lacking a school of their own, they adopted and contributed to the success and growth of Moody Bible Institute, Grace University and Briercrest Bible College.  In 1911, Evangelical Mennonites established der Evangelisationsbote as the universal intellectual organ for Mennonite Evangelicalism.  Early EMB conferences were attended by the intellectual leadership of both Russian and American Anabaptism and much of the impetus behind the failed Evangelical Mennonite Conference of the 1950s was an attempt by EMB intellectuals to cure a shortage of available pulpits and possibly found a united Evangelical Mennonite seminary.

    Unlike other Mennonite groups which depend on conference schools and seminaries for educational development and leadership, the engines of the Mennonite Evangelical intellect are, and have always been, the Sunday School, congregational dialectic, the unified conference and workshops, and arguably, the pastoral library.  From our Kleine Gemeinde roots, we also retain a strong sense of Pietist reflection on the everyday and the lessons God places within the simple living of simple lives.  Outside resources such as newspapers, literature and books of science and politics circulate freely and commonly amongst congregations and between churches, informing both personal studies and group dialogue.  Intellectual fellowship is definitive of the culture and a constant activity.

Are Evangelicals anti-intellectual? (Part 2 of 3)

Spinoza courtesy samefacts.com

Steven Wall with Randy Smart

    Concepts of the intellect, the intellectual and the anti-intellectual are very complicated.  Airey’s essay might not set us up to deal with these topics properly.  

    We will first champion the new regard recently opened to Evangelical intellectualism and then discuss the Evangelical intellectual process (in Part 3).

    Intellectually, Evangelicals have often been their own worst enemies.  While thinking persons of faith have tended to be highly regarded in the 20^th Century, the traditions they represent have not (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, C. S. Lewis, Corrie ten Boom).  In Anglo-American culture, uncontested faith in an unchanging, personable God arguably stalled with the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, which opened the way for a secular explanation of the universe sans God and thereby birthed the "godless" Enlightenment.  Faith as a living process anchored by a rational God (including the basis of the Mennonite gemeinde) began to falter in 1914 with the beginning hostilities in World War I and the horrors which followed.  Arguably, the entire spectacle over the Scopes’ Monkey Trials of the 1920s were symptomatic of these stumbles, and not their cause.  Soviet atheism did not disprove God, but sought rather to replace God and inhabit (perhaps even control) that realm of the transcendent.

Family and Cultural Legacies

Elvina Neufeld Martens (1926 - 2012)

en Denkjmol

    Elvina Martens passed away 05 April in Goshen, Indiana.  While much has already been written about her family, and more will continue to be written about Martens' place in our collective narrative and cultural identity, it is important to mark her passing at this point and to reflect on how her life reflects the Golden Age of Mennonite culture, cooperation and inter-connectivity in the United States.

  

    According to her obituary in the Elkhart Truth (13 April, p A6), "Elvina graduated from the University of Illinois Medical School in 1950.  She served as a missionary doctor in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for 18 years.  After retiring from the mission field, she practiced medicine in Illinois and Indiana.  She was a member of the Silverwood Mennonite Church and the Mennonite Medical Association."