Guy F. Hershberger vis-à-vis J. Lawrence Burkholder : Irreconcilable approaches to Christian ethics?

Abstract: At mid-twentieth century North American Mennonites enjoyed a broad consensus concerning their pacifist ethics, a concensus articulated best by Guy F. Hershberger at Goshen College. But in the 1950s new voices, chief among them Hershberger's colleague J. Lawrence Burkholder, challenged that consensus. In the background to the debate which ensued was Reinhold Niebuhr's all-too-rigid dichotomy between responsibility and sectarian withdrawal. Hershberger and Burkholder reached a standoff that surely has been unfortunate for Mennonite ethical discussions since the 1950s. Scholarly literature has accepted a body of lore about the conflict, but this article attempts to apply broader evidence and more careful historical method. It also suggests some of the strengths and some questionable features in the thought of each scholar and asks whether ultimately some reconciliation, or some new consensus, might have been possible. ********** The story is one of tragedy. In the 1940s and 1950s two gifted Mennonite scholars, Guy F. Hershberger and J. Lawrence Burkholder, developed different views about the nature of Mennonite pacifism. Unfortunately they did not develop a healthy dialogue, even though both were members of the MC Mennonite denomination, Burkholder had studied with Hershberger as an undergraduate, and from 1949 to 1961 the two were colleagues at Goshen College (albeit with some years of interruption while Burkholder finished graduate work in theology and philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary). They kept their relations civil, yet the disagreement brought a degree of personal alienation. Overall, the tragedy did much to pre-empt a healthy discussion of ethics. Such discussion might have provided Anabaptist-related churches with broader consensus about ethics and less fragmentation of ethical thought than has actually emerged in the last half of the twentieth century. (1) If broader consensus had developed, Mennonite ethical thought might have expanded and deepened via healthy critique and ideas gained from the larger Christian church yet have retained greater appreciation than Mennonites now have for their own ethical traditions, including the persistent Mennonite vision of the faithful church. At mid-century hardly any Mennonite could match Hershberger's leadership and prominence as both a theoretician and a practical strategist of Mennonite pacifism (or nonresistance, as Hershberger and others often preferred to call it). In 1944 at the depth of World War II Hershberger had published a substantial book titled War, Peace, and Nonresistance. In it he systematically set forth the biblical basis and the historical grounding for Mennonites' pacifism. He also applied Mennonite pacifism in fresh ways, not only to military issues but also to such matters as labor relations, race relations and the principles and structures that he hoped would help keep Mennonite community life and corporate Christian witness strong. He and his publisher revised and republished War, Peace, and Nonresistance in 1953 and again in 1969. Meanwhile, along with various other writings, in 1958 he added The Way of the Cross in Human Relations--a less systematic book designed especially to stare the case for Mennonite pacifism vis-a-vis other schools of Christian ethical thought. In 1991, one knowledgeable writer judged that Hershberger's War, Peace, and Nonresistance had earlier been so definitive that it had functioned as a foundational peace theology for all the major Mennonite bodies in North America. According to J. Richard Burkholder (no kin to Lawrence), peace-related Mennonite denominational resolutions and position statements from the 1940s to the 1960s all reflect the Hershberger consensus with no significant deviations. (2) Richard Burkholder went on to quote historian Paul Toews to the effect that Hershberger's version of radical two-kingdom theology enabled a whole range of social and political activity. …