Power, Authority, and the Anabaptist Tradition (review)

"Once we acknowledge the ubiquity of power and the myriad ways in which it can operate," writes co-editor Benjamin Redekop, "it becomes more difficult to pretend we can somehow live beyond its reach in communities of pure love, and hence it also becomes more difficult to overlook and allow abuses of power within the faith community" (p. 43).

Redekop's words function not only as a thesis statement but as an explication of the rationale for pulling together this collection of diverse, sometimes heart-wrenching essays on power and authority in Anabaptist/Mennonitism. As the editors note, while several other texts over the last decade have addressed peripherally questions related to Anabaptism and power, this is the first text to "explicitly thematize" the issue (p. x).

As with any edited volume, this one includes an array of essays that vary in style, provocation, and quality. Though episodically redundant, to the authors' and editors' credit, the chapters are appropriately cross-referenced and appear moderately coherent. Providing the first word is J. Lawrence Burkholder, former professor of Harvard University and president emeritus of Goshen College. Those familiar with Burkholder's thought will recognize his life themes of power, justice, ambiguity, and complexity emerging from theological reflection on his years of administering relief programs for Mennonite Central Committee, Church World Service, and the United Nations in post-World War II China. In his chapter on "Power and Religion in the Western Intellectual Tradition," co-editor Benjamin Redekop offers a thirty-five-page, occasionally pedestrian primer on classic and contemporary theories of power, beginning with Plato and Aristotle and concluding with Foucault, postmodernists and feminists. Building on his earlier analyses, historian James Stayer addresses the sixteenth-century "Ana-baptist Revolt," paying most attention to perspectives on "the sword" and relationships with political authorities. Lydia Harder analyzes Menno Simons' perspective on power and authority, then leaps to the twentieth century with commentaries on the work of Guy F. Hershberger and John Howard Yoder.

For Anabaptists, the two most poignant—even painful—chapters to read are those by co-authors Jacob A. Lowen and Wesley J. Prieb regarding the abuse of power among Mennonites in South Russia between 1789 and 1919; and sociologist Joel Hartman's case study of responses to one Conservative Amish/Mennonite couple's experience with HIV/AIDS. The former chapter was astounding in its recitation of power abuses, offering convincing evidence that Anabaptist/Mennonites need a clearer appreciation for power; the latter chapter nearly (and uncharacteristically for an academic text) brought this reviewer to tears. Together these two chapters were worth the price of the book.

Rounding out the text is an essay by sociologist Stephen C. Ainlay that draws on the "culture wars" language to examine the frequently addressed modernist-fundamentalist controversy among early twentieth-century Mennonites; and a thoughtful and provocative chapter by Dorothy Yoder Nyce and Lynda Nyce on power and authority in Mennonite ecclesiology. Writing from feminist prospectives, Nyce and Nyce argue ardently against the practice of ordination in believers' churches, and for a model that holds that all are ordained. Co-editor Calvin Redekop concludes the volume by developing what he calls a "pro-humana view" of power, drawing (perhaps ironically, given the saint's own power) on Augustine's view of power as being limited for the common good. Redekop also identifies some of Anabaptist contributions to the paradoxes of power, though he acknowledges that it would be "churlish to expect Anabaptist/Mennonites to completely 'solve' [these] issues" (p. 191).

Overall, the text makes abundantly clear that the Anabaptists' "theological restraints on power were not translated into the basic social parameters regarding how power can be limited to its legitimate sphere in mundane and domestic life of the Anabaptist fellowship" (p. 191). It addresses unabashedly Anabaptist/Mennonite abuses of power throughout history, and it makes some initial steps toward theologizing and philosophizing about power from within...