Anabaptist Evangelism in the Context
of Modernity and Postmodernity

Lois Barrett

Executive Secretary, Commission on Home Ministries, General Conference Mennonite Church

We are living between the times. We are living in the transition from the modern worldview to the understanding of the nature of things that is being called "postmodern," which is a euphemistic way of saying that we don't know yet what to call this new worldview except that it is different from what went before. The dominant culture in North America, in which power belongs primarily to the white, wealthy, and educated male, has both modern and postmodern elements, so it is important for us to look at both as we survey the context in which we want the church to proclaim and to be a sign of the reign of God.

Modernity began in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe out of a desire to assert and foster individual freedom. It was an alternative to the authoritarian constraints of monarchies and church hierarchies. In order to achieve personal freedom, the theorists of the Enlightenment proposed that one's individual identity should be the self-construction of a rational, autonomous self (rather than drawing identity from the communal whole).

Secondly, they said this self can decide what is truth through reason and the scientific method. This tended to limit truth to what could be experienced through the five senses. Only that was fact, and therefore objective and true. Values were not fact, revelation was not fact, and therefore were less true. Technology dictated that what is efficient is more desirable and must necessarily replace what is only workable.

Thirdly, the way to explain the nature of society was through social contract theory. The thinkers of the Enlightenment suggested that society or government came to be because freely choosing, autonomous individuals decided, out of rational self-interest, to build a progressive society. In the United States the tradeoff for individual freedoms has been pressure to take one's identity from the nation-state as a "neutral" identity into which all other identities were to dissolve. In Canada, the notion of rights and freedoms has also been deeply woven into the culture, but without a melting-pot mentality, with the result that there is more of a possibility for the nation to fly apart.

Modernity has had a great influence on church life in North America. Both fundamentalism and liberalism have been Christian attempts to respond to modernity and its understandings of truth attained through reason and the five senses (one through demythologization, the other through claiming that biblical truths are true according to the Enlightenment definition). Both applied social contract theory to the church and made the individual the center for religious experience and the church the association of freely choosing, autonomous individual Christians. Both liberalism and fundamentalism have been willing to trade being in the service of the nation-state for religious liberty.

Modernity, though it began in Europe, has affected virtually every nation of the West and, to some degree, all the nations of the world. Lesslie Newbigin in Foolishness to the Greeks has called modernity the most pervasive culture of the world and one of the most resistant to the gospel.

In the postmodern understanding, the individual is not rational and autonomous. We cannot look inside ourselves and find a common core of values or decency or worldview. Social norms, early experiences, and the subconscious shape who we are. The postmodern worldview also values the "now" as the primary reality. Thus, it is possible to recreate oneself without a sense of history or morality, except as one invents it. Robert Bellah in Habits of the Heart tells of a woman named Sheila who had constructed her own private religion out of bits and pieces from here and there and had named her new religion "Sheila-ism."

The postmodern worldview also questions objective truth. It recognizes that there is no neutral, objective place from which to stand and judge truth. There is no general; all interpreters of truth are particular. Context, culture, gender, race, and history always influence the way we perceive. Some would go even farther to say that all truth is relative, subjective, and at core unknowable.

Moreover, society and culture are plural. Multiple ethnic cultures and traditions live in the same neighborhood. The structures that used to shape a common national identity, or a common sense of public civility, are disappearing. Families change; neighborhoods change; community must be sought. New forms of virtual community do not satisfy people's desire for a face-to-face community "where everybody knows your name."

Modernity and postmodernity are the worldviews of the dominant culture in North America. But outside and on the edges of this dominant culture are many subcultures with other worldviews: ethnic groups, people of many faiths, Christian "sects" (meaning groups that don't subscribe to Constantinian understandings of Christian faith). All these communities are "extramodern," that is, they are outside the categories and assumptions of modernity.

The churches that claim the Anabaptist tradition are one of these subcultures. Anabaptism is, at its roots, extramodern. Anabaptist communities have been influenced by modernity (and postmodernity) and have been in conversation with modernity. But the tradition has been mostly outside modernity. From its beginnings, Anabaptism understood the church as intended to provide an alternative society that brought people into the reign of God and itself pointed toward the reign of God.

How shall we define the Anabaptist tradition? At the beginning of this century, partly under the influence of fundamentalism, there was an attempt to name Mennonite "distinctives," or "restrictions" (what you called it depended on which branch of Mennonites you were with). The assumption was that the fundamentals of the faith were the same for all Protestants, e.g., doctrines about the Trinity, salvation, the Bible. Anything else was an extra, a distinctive. It was as if you were buying a new car and you could choose the basic model, or get the options such as power windows or air conditioning. So, conscientious objection to military service or not swearing oaths or discipleship in general were the distinctives, important for us, but not really necessary for salvation.

At mid-century Mennonite historian Harold S. Bender attempted a rescue from the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, which was tearing apart churches and colleges, by formulating the Anabaptist vision. Anabaptism was a third way, he said, different from both fundamentalism and liberalism. The driving forces of Anabaptism were defined as discipleship, the church as brotherhood [sic], and an ethic of love and nonresistance. A later generation has faulted Bender for not saying much about the atonement or revelation or the nature of God, but these subjects were omitted from his statement of the Anabaptist vision because they were precisely the topics on which fundamentalists and liberals were fighting, and Bender wished to sidestep that fight.

What is needed now, as we move into a new century, is a more comprehensive understanding of the Anabaptist tradition. Such an understanding must recognize some diversity, but must also clearly define a center. I will condense my description of the Anabaptist tradition to four points that try to go beyond naming Anabaptist distinctives and to describe an Anabaptist understanding of the Christian worldview.

1. The Anabaptist tradition as "extramodern" understands the church as a "holy nation," an alternative political and social community, a people that lives under the rule of God. Through their worship, they pledge their allegiance to God alone, rather than to idols or to other rulers and authorities (principalities and powers). Their mission is to proclaim and to be a sign of the reign of God. Such nonconformity goes hand in hand with engagement with the surrounding society, but living by a different set of assumptions than the dominant culture. To pull this off, it is necessary to develop the ability to be different and to stay connected. This stance recognizes that being different, for righteousness' sake, may bring persecution and rejection.

2. The church is the reconciled and reconciling community following Jesus Christ. The message of reconciliation is to be both announced in the world and practiced in the church. Thus, peace is both a matter of doing and being, of being peacemakers among others and becoming transformed into the image of the One who loved his enemies, even to the end. The church is called to share in the sufferings of Christ, that it may also share his resurrected life. How can one separate knowing Christ and keeping in step with Christ? There is thus a close connection between salvation and discipleship.

3. The church is the community of the Spirit that values both knowing and doing. The church is called to affirm the Spirit's guidance in the past, especially through the Scripture, as well as the possibility of present revelation in continuity with the norms of the past, discerned in the community of believers. To affirm this is to break the rules of modernity, which often limits facts to its own definitions. The community of the Spirit recognizes that real "knowing" involves not a detached stance but a commitment. The church affirms the possibility of knowing and discerning the old and the new word of God.

4. The church is the eschatological community, the preview of the age to come, the community living now according to the pattern of God's future. The early Anabaptists, before 1535, in all branches in Europe, were convinced that God would intervene in history someday to bring in a new heaven and a new earth. A belief like this is threatening to the powers that be because it relativizes their control. The dominant culture, beginning with Augustine and the era of Constantine, has much preferred an eschatology that deals only with the fate of individual souls immediately after death, rather than dealing with a cataclysmic break in history, the resurrection of the dead, and the fulfillment of the reign of God. The hope in such a future is essential for a consistent peace theology and for dealing with suffering in the present.

This Anabaptist worldview, this theology lived out in the Christian community, is extramodern because it is outside the dominant culture's understandings of the way things are.

How might there be conversation between an Anabaptist worldview and a postmodern worldview, in the context of the evangelistic task of the church? Notice, I am not asking how Anabaptism might adapt itself to postmodernism. I want to go beyond contextualization (at least, as it is sometimes construed) to talk about how we might be both nonconformed and engaged with the dominant culture around us.

1. Both Anabaptism and postmodernism have a commitment to allowing plural and diverse traditions to live peaceably side by side. Not everyone has to be the same.

2. Both recognize experience beyond the five senses and reason. This allows room for intuition, emotional intelligence, and revelation.

3. Both believe there is no neutral place from which to perceive truth. Truth is always from a context. In Anabaptist thought, that context is the unity of knowing and doing.

4. Both recognize the importance of praxis. Reason is not enough.

5. The postmodern collapse of confidence in the modern, rational, autonomous self has led to a search for new communities of belonging.

1. All truth is subjective and relative vs. truth is revealed in Jesus Christ and known by doing it.

2. Transient, secondary, partial communities vs. an alternative primary community under the rule of the triune God

3. A meet-my-needs mentality vs. worship that focuses on God.

4. The moral neutrality of violence, promiscuity, and other "sins" vs. naming sin and offering salvation from sin—sins that I commit, as well as sins committed against me.

How can we create communities of knowing and doing as a response to the breakdown of other communities? How can persons find a new identity of the individual-in-community that is different from self-created identities and nation-state-created identities? How can we affirm knowing other than through the five senses and reason, but expand understandings of spirituality beyond the individual and private, to the ethical and the communal? How can we help people move beyond knowing about Jesus or thinking certain things about him, to knowing Jesus? How can we explain and demonstrate truth, as the biblical languages define it, being true to the facts and true to relationships? How can we help people make sense of suffering, find healing, and have hope beyond the present, hope in God's new future?

If we can carry on this conversation, it will enable us better to proclaim the reign of God and to be a sign of the reign of God as extramoderns in an increasingly postmodern context.

Taken from Anabaptist Witness in a Postmodern Society (© 1998 New Life Ministries). Permission to reproduce for local church use only is granted. Provided by New Life Ministries, 6404 S Calhoun St, Fort Wayne, IN 46807, through its web site at www.NewLifeMinistries-NLM.org

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