War, peace, and nonresistance

Abstract: War, Peace, and Nonresistance, written by Mennonite social scientist and ethicist Guy F. Hershberger and published in 1944, was an uncommonly important work. In it, Hershberger both articulated a broad consensus among Mennonites about their nonresistant convictions in the middle decades of the twentieth century and applied those convictions to an expanding range of social questions. This essay offers a careful and analytical reading of Hershberger's historic book, with highlights and nuances that illuminate Hershberger's treatment of various issues that recur in Christian, pacifist and Mennonite ethics. ********** By 1944 Mennonites in North America were producing some genuine and mature scholarship. Half a century or more had passed since they had founded their first colleges, such as Bethel in Kansas, Bluffton in Ohio and Goshen in Indiana. By the 1940s at least some among those institutions' faculties were well trained in American or European universities and gaining recognition among their professional peers. In 1942, for example, Harold 5. Bender of Goshen served as president of the prestigious American Society of Church History, a position that lent academic respectability to the new generation of Mennonite scholarship that Bender came to embody. Less visible, though no less important to this flowering of Mennonite intellectual life at midcentury, was the work of Guy F. Hershberger, Bender's fellow historian and close associate at Goshen College. In 1944, the same year that saw the publication of Bender's groundbreaking address The Anabaptist Vision, Hershberger published War, Peace, and Nonresistance. (1) Arguably it was the most influential statement of Mennonite social ethics in the twentieth century. At its core and throughout, the book articulated a persistently biblical--as compared with theologically liberal--version of pacifism. Hershberger rooted his kind of pacifism, or nonresistance, in the Old Testament as well as in the New, and rejected the arguments from Fundamentalists and others that used the Old to justify war. He offered what he considered a biblicist's critique of theologically liberal forms of pacifism and of Gandhian nonviolent resistance. Meanwhile he took Mennonite well beyond rejection of war and military service, to offer what amounted to a self-consciously biblical social gospel. For at least a quarter-century War, Peace, and Nonresistance won wide acceptance in his own Mennonite denomination (the so-called M.C. (2)); among various other Mennonites who were interested in a biblicist kind of pacifism; and here and there with others. Ethicists and commentators who dealt with pacifism, whether approvingly or not, often treated War, Peace, and Nonresistance as if it were the definitive statement of Mennonites' pacifist thought. (3) CONTEXT Like Bender, Hershberger was a student of church history; but his deeper interest was pacifist ethics. Born in 1896 and reared in an Amish Mennonite congregation in Iowa, Hershberger became an adult during World War I, when Mennonites and other pacifist churches struggled not only with the military draft but also with widespread pro-war fervor. Thereafter, to be sure, a pacifist movement had flourished among Protestant thinkers, especially between World Wars I and II; however, the tone of that movement--resting on liberal theology and pursuing overtly political strategies--was quite different from the nonresistance of Hershberger's church, which aimed to be rigorously biblical, often to the point of fundamentalism. (4) Hershberger was in tune with his church. In 1935, in a doctoral dissertation on Quaker rule in colonial Pennsylvania, (5) he argued that for governing a society of non-pacifists, pacifist principles could not succeed, no matter how well-intentioned. And in an article from the following year whose title asked Is Modern Religious Liberalism a Force for Peace? his reply was a firm No. …