HUU Sermon Archives

Mennonites: Four Centuries of Advocacy for Peace

by Harvey Yoder
June 15, 2003

It’s good to be with you again, this time to talk about peace. And I must say its good to have a hospitable environment like your congregation to do that in.

To review a bit from the last time, we Mennonites are a pitifully small denomination (with many subgroups) who are spiritual descendants of the sixteenth century Anabaptists, a believers church, or free church, movement which began in Switzerland in 1525. Anabaptists, or re-baptizers, represented an active minority of people who felt the reforms of people like Martin Luther of Germany, Ulrich Zwingli of Zurich, Switzerland, and John Calvin of Geneva, Switzerland, didn’t go far enough. For example, they did not support freedom of religion, the right of every person to choose what religious faith, if any, to identify with.

But another major issue was whether the church should have the power of the state behind it to enforce church policy, like the requirement that parents must have their babies baptized, or that folks may not teach or practice anything contrary to the state sponsored church, whether that be a Catholic or Protestant. This close alliance between church and state included, of course, the church’s support of whatever wars were being waged by their governments, including the Peasant Wars and the Thirty Years War - one bloody conflict after another in which Protestants could be killing other Protestants, and of course, Protestants were busy killing Catholics, and vice versa.

Martin Luther, like many others before and after him, taught that Christians should love their enemies, turn the other cheek, when it came to personal relationships, but when called upon to be a soldier they were to see themselves as instruments of God’s judgment. He said, “...In war, where in defense one has to hew, stab, and burn, there is sheer wrath and vengeance, but it does not come from the heart of man, but from the judgment and command of God.” In other words this wasn’t a matter of personal vengeance against ones own enemies, but a part of the strong arm of God against his enemies. So you simply separated your personal life and actions as a member of the church from your behavior as a citizen of the state. The statue of reformer Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich has him holding a sword in one hand and the Bible in another, and interestingly, Zwingli himself was killed in a battle against Catholic forces.

And he and other Protestant (and Catholic) leaders didn’t hesitate to urge the powers that be to execute heretics by drowning, burning at the stake, or beheading, and Anabaptists, later known as Mennonites, were among the most hated and the most frustrating of the heretics they had to deal with.

So I find it remarkable that members of this persecuted and maligned movement, nicknamed Anabaptists as a term of contempt, and later nicknamed Mennonites after Menno Simons a Catholic priest from Friesland who joined them in 1536, that they almost unanimously preached and lived a life of non-violence. There were a few unfortunate exceptions, like the Muensterites who had fanatical plans for restoring God’s kingdom on earth by force. But those movements were soon crushed, and the majority held to their pacifist convictions in spite of being tortured and persecuted and killed by the thousands.

Where did that idea come from?

They would have said they get their pacifism straight from Jesus, and from the life and practice of the early church, at least the church until pretty much right up until the reign of the Emperor Constantine in the early 4th century, after which things changed radically. Rather than the official position of the church being that Christians shouldn’t take up arms — although some individual Christians had joined the army by that time — Constantine had whole armies marched into the river to be baptized en masse. It was a major turning point in Christian history and Christian thinking. So the earliest Anabaptists, led at first by some young, university graduates Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz, who had learned something about church history, saw themselves as going back to the church’s pre-Constantinian roots.

Its also almost certain the original Anabaptist leaders in Zurich were influenced by some of the Christian humanists of their time, especially their contemporary, Erasmus, who had been a powerful influence on Ulrich Zwingli, earlier a mentor to Grebel and Manz. Erasmus had written to the king of France in 1514 chiding him for his engaging in a preemptive war in Italy (preemptive wars happened back then, too), and he said to king Francis I, but note how this could have been written to King George W. regarding the invasion of Iraq: “You say you make war for the safeguarding of the common good; yes, but no way sooner may the common good perish than by war. For before you enter into the field, you have already hurt your country more than you can do good by getting the victory. You waste the citizen’s property, you fill houses with lamentation, you fill all the country with thieves, robbers and ravishers. For these are the relics of war... If you love your subjects truly, why do you not bear in mind these words: why should I put so many in their healthy, flourishing youth, in all mischief and peril? why should I part so many honest wives from their husbands, and make so many fatherless children? ... It would be the mark of a prudent Christian man to have withstood so fiendish a thing, and so far from the life and doctrine of Christ.”

Interestingly, the term, “the life and doctrine of Christ” is one that came up frequently in Anabaptist writings, who based their consistent rejection of war pretty much on the question, “What did Jesus say, and what would Jesus do?”

The Anabaptists were also no doubt influenced by monasticism, its own kind of separatist peace movement. One prominent Anabaptist leader, Michael Sattler, had been a member of the Benedictine order, in fact a prior at the St. Peter Monastery at Freiburg. When Sattler was on trial in court in a Protestant jurisdiction, not Catholic. He was accused of, among other things, advocating Christians not taking part in war, even against the Moslem Turks who were the Islamic terrorists of their day, and who were seen as major threats to the Christian world. When he was asked, “Is it true that you said that if the Turks should come, we ought not to resist them, and that it would in fact be better to fight on their side than on the Christian side?” he responded, “Yes, for it is written, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ (And) We must not defend ourselves against the Turks and others of our persecutors, but are to beseech God with earnest prayer to repel and resist them. (But) what I said is that , if warring were right, I would rather take the field with Turks against so-called Christians who persecute, capture and kill (other) pious Christians... for the following reason. The Turk is a true Turk, knows nothing of the Christian faith, and is a Turk after the flesh. But you ... are Turks after the spirit!”

Needless to say, the members of the court were furious, the clerk called him “a desperate villain and arch heretic,” and said if there were no hangman there, he would hang him himself, and think he had done God a service. Sattler’s actual sentence was having his tongue cut out, his body mutilated with red hot tongs a specified number of times, then being burned at the stake as a heretic, all in the name of God, of course.

Then there was Menno Simons, who in a piece called “Reply to False Accusations,” wrote, “They say we will not obey the magistrates... We have obeyed them when not contrary to the word of God... (But) Love compels us to respectfully and humbly show all high officials what the Word of God commands them, how they should rightfully execute their office ... to punish the transgressors and protect the good; to judge rightly between a man and his fellows;” [now notice how progressive these words are] “to do justice to the widows and orphans and to the poor, to rule cities and countries justly by a good policy and administration, not contrary to God’s Word but to the benefit of the common people.

(But) We who were formerly no people at all, and who knew no peace, are now called to be a church... of peace. True Christians do not know vengeance... Their hearts overflow with peace. Their mouths speak peace, and they walk in the way of peace.

The regenerated do not go to war or engage in strife. They... have beaten their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and they know no war. Since we are conformed to the image of Christ, how then can we kill our enemies with the sword? Spears, swords and muskets made of iron we leave to those, alas, who consider human blood and swine’s blood as having well nigh equal value.

Strong words, remarkable for their time.

The result was a terrible persecution in which thousands of Anabaptists fled for their lives, and thousands more were imprisoned, tortured and executed. This was certainly one of the reasons so many Mennonites migrated to this country at the invitation of Quaker William Penn. My own ancestor, Christian Yoder, likely a widower, came to the port of Philadelphia in 1742 with his 17 year old son Christian, quite obviously because Junior was of the age to be conscripted into the Swiss army. And on my mother’s side, Christian Nusli, sailed to that same port at age 17, coming alone in 1804, or perhaps with some relatives on the same voyage, leaving the rest of his family behind in the Rhine River Valley forever.

But for Amish and Mennonite descendants of the Anabaptists their troubles weren’t over with respect to the military draft, especially during the Revolutionary War. They were, by conviction, opposed to fighting with either rebels who wanted to overthrow the government of King George III, or with the Tories who were loyal defenders of the monarchy. But because of their belief that existing governments should be respected and obeyed where possible, their sympathies were generally more with the Tories. All of these non-English immigrants, after all, had signed a declaration of loyalty as a condition for their emigration to this country, but under repeated harassment and pressure from local patriot Committees of the Revolution (set up under what we might think of it as the first Patriot Act) many members of peace churches ended up paying some amounts of money for humanitarian purposes in lieu of military service, money which in many cases ended up in coffers of the Revolutionary Army. Many lost their right to vote because they refused to deny their former pledge to King George III — who was no saint, but not a Saddam Hussein either — and they were by conviction opposed to swearing allegiance to the new government, and so were sometimes forced to pay double their normal amount of taxes.

In the fall of 1779, a Berks county Amish, Isaac Kauffman, was tried and convicted as a Tory because he refused to give his horse to an militia officer who demanded it. “You are rebels,” he said, “and I will not give a horse to such blood spilling persons.” The court charged him with being a “person of evil and seditious mind,” and in spite of his having eight young children and his apologizing for some of his “improper expressions,” he was sentenced to prison for the duration of the war and had half of his land taken from him.

The Civil War created a similar dilemma for Mennonites and Brethren, especially for those in this area who had moved to the Valley from the North, and so tended to be Union sympathizers, in addition to the fact that they were consistently opposed to rebellion, succession, military service and to slavery. So here in this area, until there was the possibility of an exemption on the basis of paying a $500 fine, many Mennonite and Dunkard, or Church of the Brethren, either went into hiding, went to live with family members in the North or to Canada, or reluctantly joined the Confederate army and drove teams or did other noncombatant work or in some cases took up arms but refused to aim their rifles at another human being. The story is told of young Christian Good, who when asked by his Confederate officer why he didn’t shoot his rifle, said he saw only people on the battlefield, and that he couldn’t shoot people.

In the First World War, the War to End All Wars, there were no provisions made for U.S. conscientious objectors, and most Mennonite young men were sent to army training camps where many of them refused to put on a uniform or to do any military related tasks. As a result, some went through extreme hardships, some were sent to prison, a few even died from the treatment they received. As a result of that experience, at the beginning of the Second World War, Mennonites, Brethren and Quakers made a united appeal for the right of exemption for reasons of conscience, and this time were granted the right to do Civilian Public Service, in settings like mental hospitals (contributing to significant reforms in the way mentally ill persons were treated in the mental health care system), and as smoke jumpers and fire fighters, and working on civilian projects like the Blue Ridge Parkway, with the churches providing food and allowances for the duration of the War. During the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Conscientious Objectors could get a I-W classification and either work in voluntary service programs sponsored by the church or could get jobs in civilian hospitals or other approved places in lieu of military service. It was during the Vietnam War that Mennonites became deeply divided between those who wanted to just quietly do alternative service and those who increasingly felt the war should be protested and resisted, some of whom became a part of the radical opposition to war in the 60's and 70's. When the draft ended, but registration for the draft continued, a few Mennonite young men refused to register, including my oldest son, who had to find other ways to get loans for college, including a church loan fund set up for that purpose, because he was denied any federal education loans.

Today Mennonites are divided three ways. As we become more inclusive and welcoming of new members, we have more and more Mennonites, newer and older ones, who aren’t so committed to the idea of opposing war any more, and who, like most other Americans, think some wars, especially our own, might be justified after all. At the other end of the spectrum there are those in a radical minority who make their voices heard, who demonstrate, who write letters to the editor protesting things like the recent Iraqi war, who may even withhold the military portion of their Federal taxes that goes for military purposes. And in between there are many Mennonites who continue to give a quiet witness against war because they are carrying on a long held tradition that war is wrong and contrary to anything Jesus would engage in, no matter what the cause, believing that no truly good end, in the long term, can ever be accomplished by an evil means.

This isn’t always an easy position to defend, especially when patriotic fervor in support of a war runs high. Is it realistic? What if everybody took that position? How do we respond to an evil dictator like Hitler? To which I would ask, where were all of the potential war resisters in Germany, where he should have never been allowed to rise to power? Regrettably, by the 1930's many German Mennonites had lost much of their peace witness and joined the German army.

I still believe that somewhere, sometime, there needs to be a minority of people, at least, who say, We will no longer wait for the time to be right, for it to be finally practical or permissible for us to beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, and to study war no more. We will just say No. We will stop defending it, stop waging it. It’s too important a position to be chosen by just a few Mennonites and Brethren and Quakers and Unitarians. Why not have nonviolence be considered the norm, the civilized way for people to behave and to resolve their differences, certainly if they claim to be followers of Jesus, or followers of God by any name, or of no name at all.

Soon after the 9/11 attack I wrote the following for our house church congregation newsletter:

Terrorism. We must rid the world of it, we are told, using every means necessary, including violent ones,

The only problem is, even the deadliest military force in the world is not strong enough to root out violence and bring about peace. In fact, the more of it we use, the more of the world’s majority of moderate millions will join the present minority of radical militants dedicated to destroying us. Even the use of nuclear weapons would be far too weak a response to accomplish our goal, and would only cause us to be seen as being worse than the terrorists who have attacked us.

What force then is powerful enough?

For too long many of us have ignored the words of our own sacred scriptures, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, that teach us not to take vengeance into our own hands, but to turn that over to the one who says, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” We have failed to “Do justice, love kindness and to walk humbly with our God.” We have not taken seriously passages that admonish us to “Be still (literally, stop fighting) and know that I am God,” and in that same Psalm, “He (God) will make wars to cease to the ends of the earth,” will “break the bow and shatter the spear; burn our shields with fire.”

For too long we have considered irrelevant Biblical commands to love our enemies and to feed them if they are hungry. As a result of choosing force instead, we have contributed to the escalation of violence and genocide, even on the part of so-called Christian countries. Heeding such words today would mean blanketing impoverished countries like Afghanistan and Iraq with bread, medical supplies and other forms of aid instead of with deadly weapons. This kind of incredibly powerful response, carried out with civility and resolve (and coupled with working with the U.N. and as many nations as possible to bring the actual perpetrators to justice) may be the only way the world’s moderate millions might join us in truly rooting out terrorism. It should cause no American lives to be lost, and would cost a fraction of what it would take to carry out another war.

Will any other approach really “rid the world of evil-doers?” I don’t think so.

I close with a reading from a book edited by Mary Lou Kownacki called A Race To Nowhere: An Arms Race Primer for Catholics, a piece called “The Weight of Nothing”:

“Tell me the weight of a snowflake,” a titmouse asked a wild dove.

“Nothing more than nothing,” was the answer.

“In that case I must tell you a marvelous story,” the titmouse said. ”I sat on the branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow, not heavily, as in a raging blizzard, no, just like in a dream, without any violence. Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3, 741, 952. When the next snowflake dropped on the branch — the 3, 741,953rd — nothing more than nothing, as you say — the branch broke off.”

Having said that, the titmouse flew away.

The dove, since Noah’s time an authority on the matter, thought about the story for a while, and finally said to herself: “Perhaps there is only one person’s voice lacking for peace to come about in the world.”

Harvey Yoder is the pastor of a small home-based church which is part of the Virginia Mennonite Conference, the most progressive division of the Mennonite Church in the Shenandoah Valley. He is a counselor at Family Life Resource Center.

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