Splendid Post, Splendid Blog, Add It To Your Reading

David Cramer, at Anabaptist Revisions, is not only a pastor and professor but a careful historian of all things Anabaptist. His new post on what distinguishes an Anabaptist from a Neo-Anabaptist is worth careful reading.

Anabaptist Revisions is the official blog of David C. Cramer. David is managing editor at the Institute of Mennonite Studies at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana, where he also lectures on Christian theology and ethics. In addition, he is teaching pastor at Keller Park Church, a small, urban, evangelical Anabaptist congregation in South Bend, Indiana.

Anabaptist Revisions is devoted to all things Anabaptist-Mennonite, including theology, ethics, history, church life, preaching, nonviolence, and more. To learn more about the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition, check out the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (GAMEO).

A little bit from this most recent blog post:

If Anabaptism describes the groups of people descending from the radical Reformers, then neo-Anabaptism severs that historical lineage by “looping back” directly to the Swiss Brethren, drawing its vision from them, and trying to recover that vision in the 20th century. Although Yoder could be critical of his mentor Bender, he nevertheless latched onto Bender’s understanding of Anabaptism by describing the “original revolution” in terms of a vine that loops back on itself rather than a tree with branches the grow off a common trunk. And so, by the late twentieth century, what we get is a family tree of flesh-and-blood Anabaptists (Anabaptism) defined over and against a vine looping back on an earlier vision of radical Christianity (neo-Anabaptism).

Then in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century there came an interesting, though not entirely unsurprising, twist to the story. Yoder’s writings started to gain traction outside the Anabaptist world due in large part to his Notre Dame colleague Stanley Hauerwas, a then-Methodist theological ethicist who became a pacifist by reading Yoder. Once Yoder’s writings took flight outside of the Anabaptist fold, a number of non-Anabaptists realized that they, too, were drawn to the vision of radical Christianity described by Yoder and Bender before him. If the Anabaptist vision just is radical discipleship, radical community, and radical love (exemplified by nonresistance or nonviolence), then one need not be an Anabaptist in order to be a neo-Anabaptist!

After a couple generations of neo-Anabaptism as a renew movement within Anabaptism, then, neo-Anabaptism took on a distinct life of its own outside of Anabaptism. Today most of the names associated with neo-Anabaptism come from other ecclesial traditions: Stanley Hauerwas (Methodist turned Anglican), Scot McKnight (evangelical turned Anglican), David Fitch (C&MA), Greg Boyd (evangelical), and Shane Claiborne (evangelical turned new monastic).

With this wonderful twist at the end:

At the end of the day, Anabaptists may need neo-Anabaptists to continue holding their feet to the fire, but neo-Anabaptists also need Anabaptists to provide feet for the movement.