Brian Hamilton

Why We Need Guy F. Hershberger

(Last week’s hiatus corresponded with my spring break from Notre Dame, which was a true break from reading and writing. Regular posting resumes.)

“The longfelt need for a comprehensive and authoritative work on nonresistance in Christian faith and history is ably met by the volume which now appears under the title, War, Peace, and Nonresistance. Its worth is enhanced by the fact that it adds to a clear presentation of the Biblical teachings on war and peace, not only a detailed report on the application of nonresistance in history and contemporary life chiefly as the Mennonites have practiced it, but also a sound analysis of the contrast between biblical nonresistance and modern pacifism, together with practical suggestions for a vigorous program of nonresistant teaching and practice in the future. In scope, clarity, and thoroughness, in practical sense, in loyalty to the Scripture, and in ardor of personal commitment and appeal, the treatment is deeply satisfying. This volume should become the standard handbook in the field.”

—Harold S. Bender, foreword to the first edition of Guy F. Hershberger’s War, Peace, and Nonresistance.

I haven’t read this book yet, but already: are not 21^st-century Mennonites in desperate need of exactly this sort of volume? Hershberger’s work has fallen quietly out of favor, along with language of nonresistance more generally, for fear of being ‘apolitical.’ But I fear that the disappearance of this language, inextricable from Mennonite history and the plain text of the Sermon on the Mount, has also meant the disappearance of our usual, wholeheartedly Christological vision of the way of peace. I fear that we’ve lost ourselves in progressive political circles, where a rejection of violence needs no apology, and in the same movement lost our capacity to present anything like ‘a sound analysis of the contrast between biblical nonresistance and modern pacifism.’

What we need is another work like this one, or perhaps a renewed interest in Hershberger’s work itself, that situates the peaceable vision of the Christian church within Scripture, within history, and within contemporary political questions. After a century of rapid transformation—from farm to city, from schoolhouse to university, from the Martyr’s Mirror to Noam Chomsky, from ‘quietism’ to activism*—do we still have the grounding to write another work like Hershberger’s?

* I’ll admit that not all of these shifts seem good to me. Also, I’ll flag that I leave ‘quietism’ in scare quotes to signal a certain caricature of historic Mennonite practice that might correspond to a loss of a certain mode of theological imagination.

19 March 2007 |
tags: Mennonite, Peace