Review Questions Anabaptist Pacifism in Pastor Nathan Scot Hosler’s Book on Peacemaking

A new book by Nathan Scot Hosler, co-pastor with his wife of Washington City Church of the Brethren on Capitol Hill, takes the work of theologian Stanley Hauerwas as a starting point for contemporary “peacemaking” and “peacebuilding.” The book, titled *Hauerwas the Peacemaker?*, has the subtitle *Peacebuilding, Race, and Foreign Policy*. The reviewer, J. Daryl Charles, a contributing editor of Providence, describes Hosler as “born, raised, and baptized into the Church of the Brethren, one of the historic peace churches.” Hosler writes that “the person who follows Jesus cannot participate in war,” since “war has been abolished in Christ.”

Hosler places Hauerwas alongside Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, who died in 1997. According to the review, Hauerwas’s criticism of “militarism” in American foreign policy shaped his career at the University of Notre Dame and later at Duke University, where he retired. Charles notes that Hauerwas wrote relatively little on peacemaking in a narrow sense, but that his commitment to nonviolence runs through much of his work. Hosler, the review says, treats Hauerwas’s writings on peace as a basis for developing peacemaking as public policy, and most of the book considers those possibilities.

The review states that Hosler identifies three streams of thought informing peacemaking in Christian ethics: the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, the black church’s experience and liberation theology, and the activity of the historic peace churches as found in Yoder’s writings. Charles observes that, despite the subtitle, much of the book concentrates on this third stream. He also notes that Hosler does not discuss the Schleitheim Confession of 1527, which set out early Anabaptist commitments to separation from “the world” and to nonviolence.

Charles gives historical background on these positions. He writes that the magisterial reformers held that retribution belongs to rulers rather than to the church, and that Anabaptists from early on regarded the two spheres of authority as opposed, so that a Christian could not serve as a magistrate or use the sword. He reports that the Reformed-Anabaptist debate came to a head at the Frankenthal Disputation in May and June of 1571, and that by the second generation of Anabaptists, pacifism had become normative among Mennonites. He also says that many contemporary Anabaptists avoid professions such as politics, the military, police work, law, banking and policy analysis, and that the reasons “remain essentially theological.”

Charles writes that most contemporary Anabaptists resist the charge that they are “separatistic,” a charge that angered Yoder, and that some have also made that charge against Hauerwas. The reviewer states his own position plainly: historic Christian faith has not accepted pacifism as normative, and he cites Elizabeth Anscombe’s essay “War and Murder” and C.S. Lewis’s reading of the Sermon on the Mount as sources for that view. He also reports that George Orwell admired Mahatma Gandhi’s character but criticized his pacifism, particularly Gandhi’s advice to European Jews during the Second World War to accept martyrdom rather than seek rescue. Charles says Orwell’s anger “was well placed.”

Source: Read the original report