Brian Hamilton

Mennonites and the Holy Spirit

There was some conversation last weekend, at the Inheriting John Howard Yoder conference, about whether the work of the Holy Spirit is sufficiently foregrounded in Yoder’s work. While Yoder undoubtedly does not ignore the Spirit, he does seem occasionally to consign the Spirit to the functional role of making discipleship possible, ignoring the more active work of the Spirit both ecclesiological and eschatological. Even the eschatology of “Peace without Eschatology?”, for example, is thoroughly Christological, with few references to the Holy Spirit if any at all. And this absence, it has often seemed to me, corresponds to an absence in Mennonite theology more broadly.

What a wonderful surprise, then, to find a section in David Ewert’s essay “The Covenant Community and Mission” (in the Consultation on Anabaptist-Mennonite Theology) a section entitled “The Charismatic Structure of the Church,” which stresses that the whole church is a “creation of God’s Spirit,” who is “God’s eschatological gift for the ‘last days.’” On Ewert’s account, it is the Spirit particularly that gives the church her apostolic character, indeed that makes the church into mission itself, “‘the living outreach of God to the world.’” Perhaps a closer look at other 20th-century Mennonite missiology would reveal more treatment of the Spirit?

1 June 2007 |
tags: Holy Spirit, Mennonite, Missions