In response to Scot McKnight's "So
What's an Anabaptist?"
blogpost and subsequent article in Mennonite World Review (see link)...
blogpost and subsequent article in Mennonite World Review (see link)...
Link to Scot McKnight, "So What's An Anabaptist?"
 |
| Yoder and the Patriarchs (edited) |
I generally enjoyed
this posting. It is a thoughtful
reflection on Bender's thought and bias.
On the other hand, I
am unsettled by the increasing use of only certain persons, only certain writings and only
certain resources in presenting answers to general questions such as "What
is an Anabaptist?"
Reading this post,
one gets a very specific view of Anabaptistism that is rather ahistorical,
leaves out 90% of today's practicing and non-practicing Anabaptists, and
highlights only those perspectives that support the "new" Anabaptism
out of UC/ND/GC (one of which is Baptist, the second Catholic and only the
third of actual Mennonite-heritage).
Similarly,
McKnight's assertion that Bender's relatively liberal Anabaptism has been the
most impactful in the 20th Century, could be easily questioned. Has Bender impacted the same number of
persons world-wide as has Tolstoy? If
the answer is no, then he must acknowledge the impact Hutterite Anabaptist
thought has had on the world through their impact on Tolstoy. What about Spinoza and the Dutch Mennonite
impact on him? Or similarly
Rembrandt? Lenin? Czeslaw Milosz? What about the significant interaction and
mutual impact between Evangelical Mennonites and D. L. Moody and with Moody
Bible Institute in Chicago? What about
the lessons learned by Dutch and subsequently by British democrats regarding
the treatment of religious minorities?
Was William Penn Anabaptist or not?
Did the Speedwell Anabaptists,
who co-founded Plymouth Colony, have any subsequent impact on the emerging
United States?
Truth is, one often
encounters a certain bias from writers who are trained in the Yoder – Bender –
Kaufman – Hauerwas School of Anabaptist interpretation. This bias has certain readily apparent
characteristics – it is very Swiss-Mennonite-centric, it is often
anti-Evangelical, it tends to respond not to historical Mennonite experience
but as an apologetic to Protestant Modernism, the proponents are often in
dialogue not with their fellow Anabaptists, but with the Modern Protestant
intellectual elite, and it tends to focus rather narrowly only on those aspects
of Anabaptism that further an interest in social activism. In an environment wherein one church feels
free to call itself “THE” Mennonite Church, these characteristics might
eventually lead to a misleading sense of empowerment, elitism and
non-accountability towards other Anabaptists.
At best, it just makes too many of us feel unnecessarily excluded.
