In some post-war
Mennonite circles apolitical nonresistance was transformed into tacit
uncritical endorsement of the world system. The war was a crisis for these
movements which fragmented them and sent the various factions in different
directions and yet both liberal and conservative groups (perhaps for different
reasons) embraced secular education.
For the one group it
was to engage the world on an activist basis and yet for conservatives the age
of a viable semi-Primitivist farm economy was coming to an end. It's possible
to live off of a small farm but not while living a 20th century
lifestyle. The Amish can make the numbers work because they keep things small
and have a cheap labour base. Their overhead is low because of the way they
live and yet even they are struggling as large numbers of their community are
all but compelled to move out into the wider economy.
For Mennonites who are
willing to pay electric and phone bills, to drive cars and in many respects
live a reduced-mainstream technological life, the math doesn't work. Such farms
end up becoming hobby farms while the family is supported by someone working
full time outside the home – which is not conducive to the family-oriented
agrarian values they would retain. And thus the farm has been slowly abandoned
leading their community to embrace education as a means to financially survive
and even flourish in the wider world. And yet as they knew, this would change
them.
The crisis of
secularisation (which if understood correctly need not be a crisis) and the
fact that this process became acute during the 20th century – the
very period Mennonites were venturing out into the world – led to an internal
crisis and change. It's shocking to step out into the world and it engenders
crisis and struggle – all the more when you've been sheltered from it. It's
understandable that Christians would seek to find a coherent working model that
guides such interactions and provides a narrative. I also believe in such a
model. I just happen to believe that few will accept what the New Testament
teaches on this point and to live it and follow through on it – it's literally
an act of faith.
The holistic-monistic
theological philosophical structures of Dominionist thought have made inroads
as Mennonite businessmen have sought to find meaning, value and virtue in their
work – in the pursuit of the coin. It's one thing to raise food to put on the
table. It's far more complicated to generate cash for that same food but also
cash begets cash and in the business world, one is not just thinking about the weather
and soil chemistry – but markets, trends and protection. The business world
means liability, investment, usury/interest and much else and Mennonites have
been shifting on these points over the past several decades. While at one time
they rejected all interest as usury, many conservatives have come to embrace
it. Insurance remains a problem for them as do the judiciary entanglements
associated with it. To stand your ground means to be relegated to the business
backwaters and as I've argued for many years to be faithful on this point is
tantamount to relative poverty. There are so many arguments that can be made,
slippery slopes and traps that quickly catch the aspiring businessman and pull
him into the mire. You may want to avoid insurance and other investment
protections but when you build a huge organisation it's hard to just let it out
'sit out there' in the realm of exposure and high risk. For many the dilemma is
solved by the argument that jobs are at stake – perhaps dozens or even hundreds
of jobs are dependent on the viability and stability of the business and thus
the answer presents itself. Join the mainstream and behave as other businesses
do. The end justifies the means.
The newly minted
Sattler College in many ways represents the culmination of this trajectory. Situated
in the centre of Boston (itself a value statement) the school promotes a
pro-business and investment ethos within the Mennonite framework. And the
changes wrought by 20th century acculturation are on full display.
Feminism has been embraced as there are not a few women on the faculty who
being professors and academics have obviously eschewed the traditional
homemaker role.
I have read some of
the faculty materials and listened to interviews and I was frankly appalled by
what I was hearing. They have fully embraced the investment-capitalist ethos
even while pretending to reject it. By pointing to the extreme mercenary and
exploitative practices of Wall Street they can argue that their
Christian-oriented investment strategies glorify God. They pray for their
competitors rather than wish to merely destroy them and they argue that they
can with good ethics still run successful flourishing businesses which they
(like the good Dominionists they've become) glorify God and advance His Kingdom.
The ignorance on this
point left me somewhat flabbergasted. First, we could talk about the ethics of
interest and the notion of generating money by means of financial alchemy or
through the exploitation of others but it would seem that the desire to enter
the mainstream has ended the historical debate. For indeed a rejection of
interest means a rejection of mainstream investment and the virtual
impossibility of functioning within the mainstream of the economy or building a
substantial business. Once again the high-rise location in the centre of Boston
makes a statement as to the ethics and vision of the school.
I'm not sure how
investing in pharmaceutical companies is somehow ethical. As Mennonites they
surely want to avoid Defense Contractors and weapons manufacturers and yet the
quagmire of modern medical ethics not to mention the US medical system is such
that I cannot see how investing in it – one can escape the charge of exploitation
– literally profiting on the pain and suffering of others.
They encourage
investment in tech-firms, companies involved in mobile phone technology and the
like – I know I'm in the minority here and I am well aware that many in the
developing world benefit from this technology but from a sociological
perspective I'm not convinced these technologies are for the benefit of society
or the flourishing of mankind. I certainly wouldn't want to invest in them –
all the more as company profits are bound to rely on cheap sweat-shop labour in
the developing world.
While there is a
safeguard-regime in place to ensure overseas sub-contractors are complying with
labour regulations there have been multiple investigative reports that
demonstrate these companies regularly circumvent these requirements and often
have 'for show' facilities which are paralleled by the real factories where the
abuses continue. It's complicated as many of the workers actually desire to
work obscenely long hours but this is due to economic strains. It's a vicious
circle and I'm afraid those who attempt to put a moral veneer on their
investments are only fooling themselves.
Additionally there's a
kind of stunning ignorance at work in failing to understand the nature of the
relationship between the sword and the coin and a forgetting of Christ and the
apostle's warnings concerning mammon. Riches deceive, they choke faith and
Caesar's coin belongs to the realm of Caesar- the Babel realm of empire and
sword. The coin is bound up in that. Since we live in the world we render the
coin to Caesar as it's his anyway. We just use it as pilgrims living in
Caesar's realm.
Dominionism says no,
the coin is sacred and part of God's kingdom, even though the treasures of Zion
are clearly expressed as being heavenly and not of this world. Dominionism in
seeking to counter secularism sanctifies the coin and everything else and yet
in seeking to make the Kingdom of this world – secularises it too – to the
point of even downgrading the Church and making it an equal to worldly
pursuits. They're all building the Kingdom and thus it follows that those
serving within the Church hold no particularly special office or calling – they
are but cogs in a large Kingdom-civilisational machine – a machine in which the
banker, mayor, artist and in some cases even the soldier and police officer are
just as important.
The Mennonites (at
this point) still reject the war machine and the institutions associated with
state violence – but when you're seeking to play in the world of high-rise
buildings and capture that culture – you're going to be supporting and relying
upon the sword that undergirds the whole system. They just haven't come to
realise that yet or are being willfully blind.
Some Mennonites it would
seem have fallen into this trap or are in the process of it. One professor
associated with Sattler, Finny Kuruvilla who has plugged himself into both the
medical and financial sectors actually employs the Dominionist conflation of
the so-called Cultural Mandate of Genesis 1 with the Great Commission of
Matthew 28. This mandate or imperative to transform culture is as Charles
Colson put it 'another gospel' that the Church is called to. I guess he missed
the irony of this statement in light of Galatians 1. He argued that while we're
called to evangelise the world, we're also called to culturally transform it
and under that reading 'discipling the nations' is not about bringing the
gospel of salvation to them and converting people from all nations and not just
Israel – rather, it argues that discipling
the nations means Christianisation, a process of converting the cultures
and sanctifying everything within them.
Needless to say I was
stunned to hear a Mennonite echoing the likes of Kuyper, Rushdoony and other
Dominionists as he argued for sanctifying all aspects of life in the world.
While the watchmen were sleeping, Constantine has (it would seem) crept in
their back door.
The aforementioned naiveté
and ignorance really comes into play when these same figures fail to understand
that the world financial system plays no small part in how nations wield their
power. Both governments and corporations use finances to twist arms, threaten
and out of financial interest they foment war, back rebellions and in extreme
cases wage war themselves by means of militaries and mercenaries. These
Mennonites are conscientiously avoiding investments and business relationships
tied to these actions and they're trying to avoid deep ties to Wall Street – but
they're fooling themselves. They're invested in it, profiting from it and
riding the market waves associated with it. They try and limit their deep ties
and in the case of Sattler College they reduce tuition and other expenses but
as they've become middle class folk (itself the antithesis of the separatist-pilgrim
identity) they're already blind to the numbers and the larger spectrum they're
caught up in. You can't be a separatist when you're embracing the middle class
values of security and respectability. They are incompatible.
Even as they're
demonstrably being influenced by the Calvinist heritage which was always
antithetical to Anabaptist thought and ethics, there is a reaction taking place
and this is where the story turns even worse.
Augustine of Hippo has
ever been the villain to the Anabaptist heritage. Augustine is of course a
complicated figure and they blame him for the anti-chiliastic eschatological
shift that took place in the mainstream Catholic Church which (it is argued)
led to a formalising of Christianisation and the Church's embrace of state
coercion in the name of the Kingdom. Augustine it is argued also wed Platonism
with Christian doctrine resulting in his beliefs in election and predestination
along with his visible/invisible Church ecclesiology and the sacramental
system. Augustine to them is the embodiment of the medieval heresy, the
capstone of the Constantinian Shift.
As one who also
embraces the narrative of the Shift and as one who believes Constantine was a
proto-anti-christ figure and probably the worst thing to ever happen to the
Church – I can nevertheless dispute this narrative. While Augustine's record
regarding state power and even money is pretty appalling, his overall record is
not what they make it out to be.
While Augustine did
utilise Platonic terms and categories, he did so as a means to express and
vocalise Biblical doctrines. Election and predestination are not born of some
kind of Platonic syncretism but are truths found in Old Testament Judaism and
within the New Testament itself. Have some parties abused these doctrines,
absolutised them and systematised them at the expense of other Biblical
doctrines? Of course, but this doesn't mean that they're not Scriptural
concepts and doctrines. To explain them away is to consciously embrace a
philosophical position over and against the text – the very thing they seem to
accuse Augustine of doing.
Augustine's
sacramental system runs parallel to and in tension with his understanding
Divine Sovereignty. In this respect he is considered both the father of
medieval Roman Catholicism and the Protestant Reformation. Election and grace
are at the heart of his system as are a robust belief in sacramental efficacy
and indispensability. A seeming contradiction, the position actually represent
a kind of unresolved Biblicism – not to suggest that Augustine was a Biblicist,
because he wasn't and yet he did not view the seeming contradiction as
troubling. Both sides of the coin were true and yet historical movements would
emphasise one at the expense of the other.
One group that
actually retained something of the balance or tension (at least from what we
can tell) was the Waldensians. While their understanding of Divine Sovereignty
was viewed as deficient by the Reformers they nevertheless had an appreciation
for Augustine and there are reports of them generating pocket-sized manuscripts
of his work alongside their copies of their Scripture. No baptists, their
testimony is abundantly clear – they held to sacramental efficacy and retained
paedobaptism.
While I personally am
more favourable toward the Donatists on certain points vis-à-vis Augustine I am
nevertheless troubled by his constant demonisation and caricature.
As far as chiliasm,
Charles Hill in his laudable Regnum
Caelorum has convincingly demonstrated that there was a robust non-chiliastic
faction within the Early Church and their essentially amillennial position was not
viewed as unorthodox. The argument that the Church was universally
premillennial prior to Constantine and Augustine is manifestly untrue.
That said, we will freely
admit that non-chiliasm when wed to Constantinianism took on a particularly bad
character. The additional abandonment of imminence wed to the
Constantinian-Dominionist redefinition of the Kingdom led to many evils and
while I believe paedobaptism to be Scriptural, under the aegis of
Constantinianism the doctrine was perverted as the covenant-Kingdom concept of membership
was syncretised to include not just the Church but the larger society and
state. It represents an abuse and distortion of the Visible/Invisible
distinction – a trajectory which Rome would permutate into an eventual
actualising of the Visible Order – which ironically is (in some respects) very
similar to Baptist doctrine even though they arrive at this point from opposite
poles. Both actualise the visible order – Rome through an objective sacramental
regime and the Baptists through a subjective experiential (but no less
sacramental) one.
Both groups
functionally reject the doctrine of the Invisible Church – even though it's
found in the New Testament and was even embraced by various medieval dissenters
– who also retained Kingdom doctrine and ethics that are remarkably similar to
the later Anabaptists.
While the Mennonites
at Sattler College have in many respects moved toward Augustine and Calvinism
at the same time as I said, there's been a reaction. Augustine is still the
villain. This position is found in the writings of Yoder and in the
commentaries of Sattler's Kuruvilla and David Bercot.***
Kuruvilla in a manner
reminiscent of what I've encountered among those in the Stone-Campbell Churches
of Christ has taken his anti-Augustinianism to the extreme of embracing
Pelagianism and he's not the first to make a robust attempt to revitalise the
legacy of 19th century Evangelist Charles Finney.
Finney was in conflict
with the Calvinism of his day and while one can appreciate some of his comments
– such as denouncing the Westminster Confession as a 'paper pope', his legacy
is nevertheless troubling. A Pelagian through and through, Finney had a very
low view of the Fall, man's depravity
and of saving faith. A merely intellectual act, saving faith could be brought
about creating the right conditions in which men could make the necessary
decision. His Anxious Bench was the forerunner of the modern Altar Call and in
many respects the Finney-led Second Great Awakening (so-called) helped set the
stage for modern Evangelicalism and its whole ethos and methodology. While he
can't be held responsible for all that came after, his legacy is nevertheless fairly
dubious.
He also embraced the
Wesleyan doctrine of Christian Perfection and as a postmillennialist he strived
to morally improve and transform society. In addition to his watered down
gospel, Finney promoted temperance, education and other social reforms. His
legacy is the Burned Over district of Western New York – an area that is
largely secular and seemingly inoculated to the Biblical Gospel. The spiritually
exhausted and corrupted region would also fall prey to cultism – the rise of
Mormonism and occultism as the region was one of the centres of Spiritualism
and still is to this day. †
Kuruvilla has in some
respects (I would argue) taken Dominionism's necessarily low view of the Fall
to its logical end in the embrace of Pelagianism – hence his appreciation of CG
Finney. The call to transform society and Christianise it, is to diminish the
necessity of regeneration as a necessary component of the Christian life and
ethics. By regeneration I'm not referring to revivalist-sensationalism or some
kind of Charismatic-Evangelical emotional experience connected to an altar call.
Rather I'm speaking about the inner person reborn as evidenced by sanctification,
a living faith and active repentance, a life lived in submission to and in
communion with Christ by means of the Holy Spirit.
Dominionism relies on
Christian Ethics divorced from regeneration. It assumes that unbelievers can
think and act like Christians if properly educated, trained or in some cases
compelled or coerced. This is why they can speak of 'cultural' Christians and
Christianity – which actually rely on a redefinition of the Biblical concepts –
literally another gospel.
Capitalism which is
cautiously embraced by Kuruvilla and embraced with abandon by many Evangelicals
and Confessionalists relies on the assertion that people are basically good by
nature and that they'll follow the rules. And even when secularised capitalism
glories in selfishness as a means of regulating the market – everyone seeking
his own interest keeps the market and society in check – the system necessarily
(and naively) assumes there will be not only a degree of honesty in advertising
but in the means and reporting of accountability. The idea that people are
actually evil and that men will manipulate consumers, products, marketing and
the data concerning their products seems to be absent.
And that these profits
will not then be used to manipulate markets and even whole societies seems to
range into a macro-realm that few (including Kuruvilla) seem willing to
entertain.
The truth is this Pelagian
reaction is to be expected and indeed there are Pelagian undercurrents at work
in the larger Evangelical and Confessional worlds as well. The post-1990's libertarian
shift and its consequent ethics come to mind but these are trends still far
removed from Mennonite circles – though perhaps not as far removed as they
might think.
----
***Bercot's
presence on the Sattler board is not a little troubling to me. Bercot
affiliates with Mennonites and yet his Early Church studies reveal a theology
which is patently un-Mennonite. And while I haven't exhaustively imbibed
Bercot's works I find he has a tendency to sometimes distort the record. He
ignores paedobaptism even though there is abundant evidence for it. He follows
the universal chiliast assumption even though this is simply not the case. With
it is the debate over the intermediate state which Bercot also misrepresents to
some degree. What he says is true enough about some in the Early Church but
painting with a broad brush and insisting the views he advocates was 'the' view
held by Early Christians – he ends misrepresenting the record.
He seems to
acknowledge that with regard to sacramental efficacy the Early Church's views
were far more resonant with someone like Augustine than the later Anabaptists
but then through some less-than-impressive deductive gymnastics he tries to
make the Early Church view harmonise with Mennonite Anabaptism. It doesn't
work.
More than anything
Bercot seems to be a devotee of Christian New Testament primitivism – which is
why I keep coming back to him. But I'm baffled as to why he would associate
with Kuruvilla and the likes of Sattler. Dominion theology (even if it is the
naive 'lite' version) and the embrace of capitalism and usury are not
commensurate with Early Church primitivism and for Bercot to affiliate with
these folks is in this author's view a fatal compromise.
†In
addition to the many sites around Rochester, I often think of Finney and the 19th
century revival as we drive through the southwest corner of the state. The
Chautauqua Institute, today dominated by liberal theology represents one
indirect outworking of Finney's influence and the nearby Lily Dale (which as an
occult centre would have certainly been opposed by Finney) also indirectly
represents a fruition of his aberrant and flawed Christianity which fostered religion
and spirituality divorced from the sound moorings of Scripture. There's a reason
why Lily Dale is centred in Western New York, it's the bastard step-child of
The Burned Over District.