Jesus Creed
From David Fitch, announcing the theme of his next book:
[SMcK: David Fitch and I agree that JD Hunter both mis-represents Anabaptism and, seemingly unknowingly, ends up offering something quite close to an anabaptist theory of engagement.]
Hunter, however, in my opinion, does less than stellar work on his engagement with Neo-Anabaptism (I distinguish Neo-Anabaptist from historical Anabaptism). Over against the conservative right (“defensive from” – Dobson) and liberal left (“relevance to” – Wallis) engagements with culture, Hunter says there is a third option (“purity from”- Yoder/Hauerwas) in Neo-Anabaptism. In his account of Neo-Anabaptism however, he gives what I call the standard account of Anabaptism. In other words, he chastises Neo-Anabaptists for their sectarian refusal to engage the world. He specifically chastises their allergy to engaging ‘power’ on the world’s terms. Hunter argues power is pervasive and unavoidable. It is the way the world works and even the church cannot be immune from the exercise of power (there are echos here of a Reinhold Niebuhrianism). Yet, for Hunter, the Neo-Anabaptists neuter themselves. They see ‘powerlessness’ as the Christian posture in the world (181-183). Neo-Anabaptists refuse to become complicit with the structures of power that rule the present age. Therefore, in their purity, Neo-Anabaptists end up withdrawing from any meaningful engagement in culture.
This, for me, is a misunderstanding of Yoder and Hauerwas if there ever was one. For these two thinkers, there will be times when the church must refuse to cooperate with the powers when such powers are in rebellion towards God. This will be an activist withdrawal drawing attention to the injustice by refusing participation. But there will be times we also will cooperate. The difference between Hauerwas/Yoder and Hunter is for Hauerwas and Yoder this must be discerned each time, for Hunter this cooperation is (in some ways) assumed.
Hunter argues that it is inevitable that power will be wielded wherever we go. But then he says “But the means of influence and the ends of influence must conform to the exercise of power modeled by Christ.” (p. 254) Here he sounds strangely neo-Anabaptist (again). But in the end a dose of (H. Richard) Niebuhrianism hangs over Hunters’ analysis such that he cannot ultimately go the Anabaptist way. By this I mean he refuses to see the church as a political entity unto itself with its own cultural integrity and way of living in power. For Hunter, politics seems to be entirely the arena of the nation-state. The church itself does not embody a politics. The church therefore is persona non-gratis as a political reality for Hunter. This is seen for instance in his ways of talking about the church’s “post-political Witness” in the world (p. 184-186) as if politics itself is something the church can’t engage in. For Hunter “Politics is just one way to engage the world, and arguably, not the highest, best, most effective, most human way to do so.”(185). At this point, what Hunter has said about the Anabaptist’s antiseptic attitude towards worldy power has somehow become true of him in regard to his attitude toward politics. He sees politics purely in terms of nation-state processes and doesn’t see how the church itself can provide an alternative politic and by so doing become the incubator for new ways to see and engage the world that the world has not yet encountered. And although there are numerous overtures by Hunter that this indeed is what he wants to see, he seems to neuter the church’s wherewithal to be such a body by refusing its political nature because he cannot escape the Niebuhurian frame (described most clearly in Yoder’s essay on Niebuhr found in Authentic Transformation).
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