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.

Wer War Menno Simons?

Wer War Menno Simons?

 

Who was Menno Simons? by Isaac Peters (1911)

    He was one of the great reformers of the Christian church in the 16^th century at the time of the great Reformation, the time of Luther, Calvin and Zwingli in Holland.  From the pulpit, all three attacked the secular authorities, and the secular church of Rome while taking shelter in their own state churches to avoid severe persecution.  Menno Simons and his associates made a decisive break with these Reformers.  They determined to base their faith on the rock or foundation of Jesus Christ, testifying as their motto, “No other Foundation can any man lay than that which is laid, that is Jesus Christ.”  I Cor. 3: 11.  For this, Simons was willing to risk everything – loss of property, life and exile.  For this risk, he found plenty of opportunity, facing persecution not only from Rome but also from the other more newly-established state churches who were just as quick to stain their hands in martyrs’ blood. 

    Luther, the main Reformer, called these simple, quiet followers of Christ swarms (Schwärmer), of which he wrote to Duke Albrecht of Prussia:  “Wherefore do I have to ask why it pleases your highness to suffer such people in your country.  Why would you allow such factious spirits and suffering?  Prussia’s conscience should complain against this credible threat against Her soul, lest this swarm seduces the Holy Church (of Luther), against which their leader preaches.  It is not just I who fear this swarm, but all emperors and princes fear them.  Suffer just a little of this heresy and you will see what comes of it.”  Luther further advised Albrecht to overcome this monstrous threat with fire and sword.  All this was in pursuit of Menno and his companions in their following of the Lord’s leading.  But Luther wanted to please man, not God, to re-establish Rome, not God’s Truth.

119th Anniversary Hansen's German Edition

    Today is the 119^th Anniversary of the publication of the Georg Hansen Volume in Elkhart, Ind.  To celebrate this anniversary, I submit the editorial exhortations from this publication in defense of our need to be aware of and to study the traditions of the past.  Please forgive my overly under-qualified attempts at translation.

Henderson, Nebraska, ca 1876

    These are images of the early Petersgemeinde (EMB or Bruderthaler) and Mennonite Brethren pioneer settlements in Henderson, Nebraska. Henderson includes Mennonite settlements five to twelve miles north/northeast of Sutton.  The images easily invoke an aura of Courier and Ives -- note the windmills and buggies.  The images are from Daniel Kauffman's archive at the Mennonite Church USA Archive in Goshen, Indiana.  Note that all images are (c) copyright to the Mennonite Archive and may not be republished without their express written permission.

    For those of us from a Bruderthaler heritage, these are the villages of Isaac Peters, Bernard Kroeker and Cornelius M. Wall, just to name a few early leaders.  This would have been the time that the Evangelical Mennonite Brethren or Petersgemeinde were being incorporated into the Nebraska and Minnesota Conference of the Mennonite Church.  The Petersgemeinde or EMB joined the English-speaking American Mennonite conference rather than affiliating with their fellow German-speaking Russlander refugee-immigrants.

Some thoughts regarding Pietism:

  It is not entirely clear that Pietism predated Anabaptism – in as much as Zwingli is considered to be an Anabaptist antecedent, and Dirk Philips is considered an Anabaptist founder, so would any reformer that displayed the key ingredients of the pietist theo-philosophy be by definition worked into the Radical Reformation as an Anabaptist or at least, heavily and perhaps fatally suspected of significant Anabaptist-leanings.  Just as the Mennonite and Hutterite Anabaptists built on the traditions of Zwingli, Huss, and the Waldenses, and even, for that matter, on Luther and Calvin, the Pietists represent a distinctive moment in time, separate but probably heavily influenced by Anabaptism – especially the Anabaptist strains from the Netherlands and Danzig.

  Most notably, Spener was, and remained, a Lutheran born about 100 years after the death of Menno Simons.  Of the Pietist precedents, none shines out more clearly than Johann Arndt.  In The Pietist Theologians, Carter Lindberg puts forth a pretty strong case that while Arndt was definitely a contributor to Pietism, he was not in the end a true Pietist and that the honorific of  “Father of Pietism” should remain on the faithful shoulders of Spener and his Pia Desiderata.  Arguably, both Arndt and Spener contributed significant personal and new content to the shaping of Pietism and peculiar approaches to the combined influences of the Luther Reformation, the Dutch-German Mystical traditions dating back to the Middle Ages, and the spirited Anabaptism that those men saw around them.  In fact, we know from his biographical narrative that Arndt was acquainted with and probably influenced by Mennonite neighbors and business connections.  Interestingly, his exclamatory exclamation contra his Mennonite neighbor leaves room for being both influenced by the Mennonites as well as sharing a new discovery with them  -- that they, the Mennonites, would want to keep such a wonderful things to themselves.

Here I Raise Mine Ebenezer

    One of my favorite authors has published a nifty little Postmodern religious primer on what those of us in the Evangelical world coyly refer to as Protestant Latin.  Protestant Latin is perhaps not as different perhaps as traditional Russländer Plautdietsch, but infinitely more complicated.

    In Amacing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, Kathleen Norris takes Protestant Latin head-on, detailing her vocabulary of faith, while expounding on why those definitions are pertinent to her rich spiritual life.  One of the terms that she explores, Ebenezer, comes to her from a popular hymn, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” which begins the second stanza, “Here I raise mine Ebenezer; Hither by thy help I’m come,” (Norris, p. 251).  While many would recognize the term Ebenezer as the Christian name of Charles Dickens’ most memorable Christmas character, Ebenezer Scrooge, Norris reveals its deeper pedigree:  “The word Ebenezer is found in a passage in First Samuel, one of the historical books of the Hebrew scriptures.  It describes an event, the celebration of Israel’s victory over the Philistine army, a victory that came against the odds, when the thundering voice of God threw the troops into confusion, and they fled.  The passage reads: ‘Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the Lord helped us’ (1 Sam 7:12, KJV),” (Norris, p. 251).