Good and Bad Ways 2

Robert Benne is the Director of the Roanoke College Center for Religion and Society who explores for a living the relationship of religion and politics. He’s a Lutheran and puts him in disagreement with the Anabaptists in his new book: Good and Bad Ways to Think about Religion and Politics. Our last post looked at his analysis of the liberal separatists and this post looks at the religious/Christian separatists.

The gospel is transcendent in a number of ways. It transcends culture and politics, rendering the gospel world holy and separate, and this leads many to political separation.

His contention is that the Anabaptists, and for some odd reason he avoids the term, see themselves as “besieged enclaves in a world gone to hell” (19) as they seek to create a “true believer’s church” (19). They tend toward the pacifistic teachings of the Sermon on the Mount.

But he sees a slightly different group in Stanley Hauerwas – where o where is John Howard Yoder in this discussion? They are to “expose the world for what it is” as the world is trapped in coercion and violence. He calls this “principled pacifism” (20).

Do you think the Anabaptist tradition surrenders too much? Has it withdrawn too much? Or, do you think the Anabaptist approach is a political theory, or that it a different politic?

His major criticism is that the religious separatists — the anabaptist tradition — tend to make “creation and history” as something “no longer under the sovereign will of God” (20). It’s been turned over to Satan, he says.

He interlopes some of this discussion with a Lutheran view, but one of his major points is that “Christians cannot give up on the world” (21). Which is a massive misunderstanding of the anabaptist tradition. It is not giving up on the world that is the issue; it is the how to influence the world/State that is the issue.

He reminds us that the separation of classical faith from politics led to a passivity that led to Nazism — and the irony and paradox of Benne’s statement here is that Germany was Lutheran! It is a Lutheran passivity that was able to ignore Nazism because it justified secularistic politics.

Benne knows that much of the separationism in the Church does not derive from theology but is the accidental result of pragmatics: it is the dualistic structures of our culture, of our lives, etc, that lead one to see the Church on Sunday and the State on Monday-Friday, with Saturday off. I suspect he’s got this right, but I’d also say there was something that led to that dualism, and I would say those causes are more Lutheran — with their two realms theory — that paved the way for dualism in our world.

I would contend that Benne’s treatment of religious separationism lacks nuance in understanding anabaptism’s theological perspectives. Anabaptism offers a radical politics and not an absence of politics; it thinks the way to change the world is not through the State but through witness of an alternative community. For anabaptism the church is a politic.

In other words, Benne’s analysis here assumes a Lutheran/Reformed politic and shows how the anabaptistic view lacks what the Lutheran has to offer, while the Anabaptist tradition has a completely different — an ecclesial — politic. It’s politics are radically pervasive of all they do and cannot lead to the sort of dualism I see in the Lutheran theory and in American culture.