Toward an Anabaptist Political Theology: Law, Order, and Civil Society

By A. James Reimer and P. Travis Kroeker

A. James Reimer's (1942-2010) theopolitical project, intended to be a fully theologically conceptualized political theology, offers a constructive and creative contribution to this burgeoning field of theological inquiry. Reimer's thesis for this theologically derived politics focuses on the necessity to take seriously the biblical-Trinitarian foundations for all Christian social ethics, but also on the importance of astute and faithful engagement by Christians in public institutional life, including the political realm. While Reimer understood himself to be working as an Anabaptist, and hoped to invite that tradition to embrace a more positive view of civil institutions than has historically been the case, he was not limited by that tradition or beholden to take only its sources into account. Ever alert to the problems inherent in every kind of reductionism, and especially so in cases where theology is reduced to either ethics or politics, Reimer's political theology pursues the investigation of theological realities that are to serve as the engine, the generative force of a political theology that seeks to articulate both a critical and a positive-constructive approach to public/political life and institutions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Oct 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781630875176

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TOWARD AN ANABAPTIST POLITICAL THEOLOGY

Law, Order, and Civil Society

Theopolitical Visions 17

Copyright © 2014 Paul G. Doerksen. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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ISBN 13: 978-1-62032-920-7

EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-517-6

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Reimer, A. James

Toward an Anabaptist political theology : law, order, and civil society / A. James Reimer ; edited by Paul G. Doerksen ; foreword by P. Travis Kroeker.

xx + 194 p. ; 23 cm. —Includes bibliographical references and index.

Theopolitical Visions

17

ISBN 13: 978-1-62032-920-7

1.

Political theology.

2

. Anabaptists—Doctrines. I. Doerksen, Paul G. II. Kroeker, P. Travis. III. Title. IV. Series.

BT83.59 .R39 2014

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Toward an Anabaptist Political Theology

Law, Order, and Civil Society

A. James Reimer

Edited by Paul G. Doerksen

With a Foreword by P. Travis Kroeker

7618.png

Theopolitical Visions

series editors:

Thomas Heilke

D. Stephen Long

and C. C. Pecknold

Theopolitical Visions seeks to open up new vistas on public life, hosting fresh conversations between theology and political theory. This series assembles writers who wish to revive theopolitical imagination for the sake of our common good.

Theopolitical Visions hopes to re-source modern imaginations with those ancient traditions in which political theorists were often also theologians. Whether it was Jeremiah’s prophetic vision of exiles seeking the peace of the city, Plato’s illuminations on piety and the civic virtues in the Republic, St. Paul’s call to a common life worthy of the Gospel, St. Augustine’s beatific vision of the City of God, or the gothic heights of medieval political theology, much of Western thought has found it necessary to think theologically about politics, and to think politically about theology. This series is founded in the hope that the renewal of such mutual illumination might make a genuine contribution to the peace of our cities.

forthcoming volumes:

David Deane

The Matter of the Spirit: How Soteriology Shapes the Moral Life

For Margaret Loewen Reimer

Foreword

Jim Reimer’s passionate theological voice was taken from us early, and it is good to be able to hear him speak again in these posthumously published pages. Fittingly, in a concert performed the night before he died, Jim sang with his beloved bluegrass band Five on the Floor; his remains a distinctive and compelling voice (lift me up, beat those wings, I’m going flying with the king of kings), unmistakably and uncompromisingly his, yet in harmonious engagement—even when in counterpoint—with those around him. Jim was the one who brought me back, fiercely and yet oh-so-gently, generously, into the Mennonite theological world. The vigorous conversations with Jim, each of us occasionally breaking into our flat German mother tongue for added emphasis or needed nuance, remain cherished memories for me.

Jim’s legacy, however, is best honored and served here not by reminiscing but by engaging some of his claims in this work. As always, they are provocations to critical reconsideration—aimed in at least two directions: (1) his Anabaptist-Mennonite community of faith, whom he provokes to honest self-critical retrieval of a more positive account of political, legal, and civil institutions; and (2) the wider world of mainstream Christianity, his Muslim interlocutors, and secularist theorists, whom he provokes to take universal claims seriously in the particular religious and cultural forms they (and he) inhabit. Paul Doerksen’s introduction provides an excellent account of the basic orientation and constructive trajectory of Reimer’s distinctive contributions to political theology. Let this preface, then, be a counter-provocation to Jim’s bi-directional provocations, in the service of what I want to call a messianic political theology that is neither Catholic nor Protestant, neither Mennonite nor secularist, neither orthodox nor heterodox—in keeping with a Pauline economy (oikonomia, sometimes translated commission; 1 Cor 9:17) that inhabits the mysterious freedom of messianic slavery in order to build up (oikodome; 1 Cor 8:1, 10:23) the common world that is nevertheless passing away (1 Cor 7:31).¹ I hope this is resonant with the bluegrass gospel of which Jim was both doxologist and theorist.

In keeping with the New Testament and classical Anabaptist theologies, Reimer wants to retain an apocalyptic two kingdom political theology, and he rightly sees that this apocalypticism (Jim sometimes calls it mysticism) requires a strongly Trinitarian doctrine of God if it is to avoid sectarian (purist) separation from the world or the straightforward translation of theology into politics (or political ethics). For Reimer, as for Yoder and Barth, this entails a highly exegetical approach, a particular incarnational interpretation of biblical revelation rooted as much in liturgical doxology as in formal and substantive theological conceptualization. This is as it should be if, as Jim argues, the personal character of Trinitarian and incarnational divine revelation precludes both liberal individualist construals of conscience and virtue, and purely procedural and juridical conceptions of law and civil institutional life.

I begin with Jim’s emphatic focus on the importance of natural law (the nomos of creation). I wonder if the nomos of economic language here might not help break down the Aristotelian (and Arendtian) sharp distinction between oikos (household) and polis that has long prevented the exploration of a more radical biblical political theology in which domestic (or indeed private) relations and institutional orders may not be separable or opposed to public or political forms of governmentality and authority. It would also open up the entire Bible to a more figural political-ethical interpretation of the sort that Jim is calling for. It would require the church, as an institutional ordering—the particular embodiment of the messianic body—to relate itself actively and critically to all aspects of the economy of divine government that presides providentially over all things. This might enable Mennonites, with their long-term preoccupation with land and family (as Jim points out), to become more openly and critically engaged with the ways in which these orderings are implicated in the wider principalities and powers of fallen created existence. It would also make it more difficult for mainstream Christian political theology to marginalize the Anabaptist perspective as a-political or sectarian.

Again, Paul’s language relates these levels of ethical and political agency in interesting ways. In Ephesians, Paul speaks of the new messianic peace that breaks down the hostile dividing walls of old juridical boundaries and that builds up a whole structure in which former enemies are now sympolitai (fellow citizens) and oikeioi (fellow householders) in a creaturely dwelling place for the divine Spirit (Eph 2). Paul calls this the very heart of the Gospel of the unsearchable messianic riches (3:8ff.), which enables the church to make known the oikonomia (household law/order, or economy) of the mysterion hidden for ages by the God who created all things. And to whom does the church make this known? To the archais and exousiais (principalities and powers, political language) in the heavenly places. In this cosmic context, the church cannot by definition isolate itself from anywhere, either on earth or in heaven. As the new Moses of Matthew’s messianic Gospel also makes clear regarding the fulfillment and completion of the law and the prophets, that is, justice in its broadest and deepest senses (Matt 5–7, so central to Jim’s project), this messianic process is a matter of the internalization of divine presence, not only institutionally and socially but also in the heart, and in a love that exceeds knowledge (Eph 3:14–19; cf. 1 Cor 8). Thus the eternal messianic purpose enacted in kyrios Christos (Lord Messiah, political terminology) is represented as the internalization of created order in the human heart, a cosmic spiritual motivation that is right now, according to Paul, remaking all things.

Jim’s work rightly emphasizes that for biblical revelation as a whole and for the Trinitarian Christian tradition, Torah or nomos (law) must be construed in personal terms, in keeping with the personal God whose image it bears. The ordering of creation (see Jim’s representation of Barth’s exegesis of the creation narrative) is the dynamic ordering power of grace, which means no fixed orders of creation but a contingent economy of salvation. For Christians, then, there can be no sharp division between the immanent and the economic Trinity. Servants of the Messiah are also by definition economists of the messianic economy of divine mystery (1 Cor 4:1–2; Eph 1:9–10; Col 1:24–29), which is the process of reconciling the temporal created order to the eternal God. If this is so, then perhaps the process of manifesting this economy in personal and political terms is more a parabolic practice (middle axioms as messianic enactments of the divine mystery) than an institution-making science. Perhaps the embodied living sacrifice as the rational worship (latreia logike; Rom 12:1) that frees the messianic mind from conformity to this age has something in common with the closing words by the Chorus Mysticus in Goethe’s Faust: All things passing away / are but parable; / here insufficiency / becomes fulfillment; / here the unspeakable / becomes the accomplished.² I think Jim would have seen something of the bluegrass gospel that he loved in this, and I hope he’ll forgive me if not, especially since he’s flying with the King.

—P. Travis Kroeker

1. At the same time as I have been reading Jim’s manuscript, I have been reading Giorgio Agamben’s provocative book The Kingdom and the Glory, and these reflections are indebted to both.

2. My translation of Goethe’s lines:

Alles Vergängliche

Ist nur ein Gleichnis;

Das Unzulängliche,

Hier wird’s Ereignis;

Das Unbeschreibliche,

Hier ist’s getan.

Introduction

Paul G. Doerksen

Several months before his death on August 28, 2010, A. James Reimer called me to engage in what can only be called a sobering and difficult conversation (at least for me). We talked about the political theology project he had been working on for a number of years, an interest and focus that coincided in many ways with my own research.³ Jim requested that were he to die before completing his political theology book, I was to see the project through to its publication, a humbling prospect for me. I agreed to his request and am now bringing my promise to fruition. My wish, of course, is that he was still with us, and that he could have completed not only this but other projects that had been broadly conceived. Jim’s formal retirement from Conrad Grebel University College was hardly the end of his productive and constructive work; it is far more accurate to say that his publishing activity continued apace, compromised only by his terminal illness and/or its treatment. He continued to travel, write, and bring to completion a number of projects he had taken on.⁴

This book is on the one hand a logical extension of Jim’s involvements and interests, and on the other a transition into further exploration of theological investigation. That is, Jim hoped to write three connected volumes, roughly corresponding to the Trinitarian structure of Christian theology. The first volume was his impressive Mennonites and Classical Theology: Dogmatic Foundations of Christian Ethics, the second is this book, and the third was to be titled Theology as Doxology: Spiritual Formation and Ethics, in which he hoped to engage Eastern Orthodoxy and the mystic tradition in general in order to give a more holistic view of the religious life.⁵ The two completed volumes of his projected trilogy extend a life’s work that is remarkably wide-ranging. His body of work includes systematic theology, ethical reflection, engagement with Scripture, investigation of the Anabaptist tradition, analysis of modernity, ecumenical initiatives, dialogue with Iranian Muslims, and political theology.⁶

Now to the present book. Given that Reimer worked at sections of this book over a number of years, and that he had published a number of the essays that were intended to be part of this monograph, it is not surprising to find evidence of some change and development along the way.⁷ To provide just one example, the proposed title of the book itself has gone through a number of changes, from When Law and Civil Institutions Are Just: Honesty in Pacifist Thinking, to Political Theology: Law, Order, and Civil Society, to A Theology of Law, Order, and Public Life in a Multicultural World. I have elsewhere described Jim’s political theology project as attempting to offer something like an Anabaptist version of Oliver O’Donovan’s Desire of the Nations. Reimer’s project was intended to be a fully theologically conceptualized political theology that would serve as an alternative Anabaptist vision to that of John Howard Yoder, perhaps even a more orthodox version of Yoder’s Politics of Jesus.⁸

Reimer’s thesis for this theologically derived politics focuses on the necessity for those in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition to take seriously the biblical-Trinitarian foundations for all Christian social ethics, but also on the importance of astute and faithful engagement by Christians in public institutional life, including the political realm.⁹ He understood himself to be working as an Anabaptist, as embracing Anabaptist sensibilities, but not limited by that tradition or beholden to take only its sources into account. However, it is important to note his relationship to the work of John Howard Yoder, that most prominent Anabaptist thinker, a relationship that includes significant ambivalence on the part of Reimer, as will be obvious throughout this book. In my view, it would be a mistake to see Reimer’s project as being shaped primarily as a response to Yoder—it is much more broadly conceived than that—although at several points in this book Yoder serves as a primary interlocutor, especially regarding the thorny issues surrounding Constantinianism.

My concern here is to recognize the constructive nature of Reimer’s work. He intended to develop a fully conceptualized political theology, by which he meant that it was to be fully conceptualized in its theological dimensions. He was ever alert to the problems inherent in every kind of reductionism, and especially so in cases where theology is reduced to either ethics or politics. This perpetual concern resulted in his investigation of theological realities that were to serve as the engine, the generative force of political theology. Reimer was not afraid to use the language of foundation or presupposition, despite the suspicion of many that such an approach—a search for foundations—has no place in theological reflection.

In the first three chapters of this volume, Reimer embarks on the task of identifying those foundations and/or presuppositions that undergird his theologically conceptualized political theology. It is accurate to say that the first chapter provides the most sustained and clearly identified framing of the larger project, while the second chapter, titled I came not to abolish the law, gives fuller scriptural support for the direction of the work, and the more informal third chapter, Trinitarian Foundations, paints with a broader brush than either of the first two chapters, giving a theological account without the exegetical work being made explicit. It seems clear that Reimer’s intent for the book, had he completed it according to his own vision, would have been to draw these three essays into one chapter that would have integrated his hermeneutical stance, his way of reading both Testaments, along with the theological presuppositions that serve to anchor the entire project. These opening three chapters display Reimer’s ongoing emphasis on the Trinity as pivotal for Christian theology no matter what kind of work is being attempted—pivotal in the sense not only of being foundational but also dynamic. To misunderstand or underestimate Reimer on the weight of this point would be to distort his entire project. So, these foundational essays provide an explicit description of the project in terms of method and content, starting points and trajectory.

Because Reimer provided such specific details, we know that he completed almost all of the pieces he had planned for this book, with the exception of one chapter that he did not write, even though he had done some background work for its composition. That is, Reimer projected a final chapter in which he would construct a proposal for an Anabaptist-Mennonite political theology in conversation primarily with John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, and Oliver O’Donovan. Such a constructive position would fundamentally grow out of the Yoder-Hauerwas orientation to social ethics while appropriating some of the important insights of O’Donovan.¹⁰ Sadly, this chapter was never written. Nonetheless, what is perfectly clear is that Reimer intended to find a way to develop "a systematic political theory in which the positive role of civil institutions outside our church is elaborated from the perspective of our Historic Peace Church heritage,"¹¹ a theory that could be described as theological, realist, honest, and appropriately ambiguous.

The fourth chapter of this book continues with an essay in which Reimer treats the issue of the Constantinian shift in a way that seeks to show the ambiguity of Constantine’s conversion and its attendant political and ecclesial implications, as well as drawing fairly positive direction from the theological work of Lactantius. Reimer believes that this work can be of assistance since Lactantius had an ostensibly Christian vision of civil constitution and laws based on natural laws, themselves grounded in divine law, which was partially actualized in the life and policies of Constantine. But Reimer’s use of Lactantius is not that of a simple, unquestioning embrace. Reimer wonders if the Lactantian vision is currently possible or even desirable after the collapse of Christendom. Further, Reimer continually expresses his concern about the possibility of peaceful coexistence of religious and nonreligious communities with diverse, even mutually exclusive, religious worldviews. He envisions the church working at the task of contributing to the peaceful coexistence of society, a phrase that is often repeated in his descriptions of his project.¹² This is precisely the kind of positive role for political theology that Reimer is searching for in his investigation of the ancient church’s place in Roman society, both before and after the Constantinian shift.

Reimer’s treatment of Revelation, Law, and Individual Conscience (chapter 5) as these elements apply to political theology is especially revealing of the confluence of several streams of his involvements and interests. That is, his political theology, developed as it was in the midst of his life’s work, was often pursued as part and parcel of other interests and pursuits. Reimer prepared this chapter as part of his ongoing involvement in Mennonite and Muslim dialogue. Thus these critical elements of his political theology find their place as part of an exploration that is situated within that specific and ongoing conversation between Canadian Mennonites and Iranian Muslims. Reimer’s contribution to the conversation is explicitly Anabaptist-Mennonite in its orientation, as he seeks to represent that tradition of thought, but such a commitment nevertheless does not restrict him to Anabaptist sources as he seeks to retain eternal, universal principles that have been established by revelation, and then show the importance of connecting conscience with a robust concept of law. He traces the changing relationship between law and conscience from Platonic roots through the medieval era (via Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, and William of Ockham, primarily) and the Reformation to what he calls the modern eclipse of the conscience, a development he laments and wishes to correct, using Thomas as a constructive source for this retrieval of a necessary connection between law and conscience. Reimer also draws on twentieth-century theologians Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer for his task of retrieval. The explicitly Anabaptist-Mennonite dimension of this chapter comes in a detailed engagement with the theology of Balthasar Hubmaier. Reimer’s use of Hubmaier is important, as it allows him not only to make appropriate distinctions between Anabaptism, magisterial Protestantism, and Catholicism regarding their respective notions of law and conscience, but also to carefully distinguish the Anabaptist emphasis on personal decision-making from the radical autonomous rationality and freedom that underlies modern democratic, liberal, and pluralistic societies; that is, this form of freedom is a freedom and moral accountability before God as revealed in Christ. It should also be noted that while Reimer makes this important distinction, he is also keenly aware of and ambivalent about his earlier characterization of Anabaptists as harbingers of modernity.¹³

The following chapter, titled Law, Freedom of Conscience, and Civil Responsibility: Marpeck, Mennonites, and Contemporary Social Ethics, takes this ambivalence toward Mennonite heritage further. As Reimer notes, his analysis of the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition acknowledges both the possibility that this tradition is a radical critique of modern liberal culture as well as a harbinger of modernity, reinforcing its major assumptions. Therefore, Reimer is keen to register his unhappiness with the basic assumptions of the modern period, since (following Stanley Hauerwas) the modern democratic liberal state is intrinsically dependent on violence to sustain itself. All of this means that the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition faces a strange antinomy: it has itself contributed to and is theologically committed to the emergence of modern freedom of conscience and belief, while at the same time rejecting the violence that is intrinsic to it.

In fact, it is in this essay that Reimer makes ones of his most important interpretive moves regarding Anabaptist-Mennonite political theology, turning to the writing, and just as importantly, the example of Pilgram Marpeck. In Reimer’s words, I contend that of all the early Anabaptists, Pilgram Marpeck and his circle offer Mennonites perhaps the most fruitful theological and ethical way into the future. By drawing on Marpeck, and even putting forward what he calls a Marpeck model, Reimer is able to embrace a more positive view of natural law than is often the case in Anabaptism, and also gain purchase on his ongoing dialogue with Yoder, whose view of natural law is not nearly as positive.¹⁴

As Reimer moves further in his attempt to provide shape to his theopolitical vision, we see him doing constructive work, again within the context of Mennonite and Muslim dialogue, in chapter 8. That is, he attempts to find a way for religious minority groups to have a place in modern society. For such a society to be a sustainable reality, Reimer develops the related and constructive notions of public orthodoxy, civic forbearance, and concord. Drawing on a number of modern thinkers (Gavin D’Costa, Jon Levenson, Mohammed Legenhausen, and others), Reimer shows that a liberal state’s putative tolerance is, as a matter of function, an intolerance that manifests itself in persecution, oppression, and violence against those that disagree with us. As an alternative, Reimer, drawing again on Lactantius, puts forward notions of forbearance and concord, being careful to distinguish between these practices and that of liberal tolerance.

The final chapter of this volume returns to the concept of universality, but now with a view to clarifying the relationship of the particular to the universal. Reimer argues that "agreement on universal moral and religious principles cannot be arrived at in abstraction but emerges through particular encounters between different communities of belief. In other words, one gets to the universal through the particular." Agreement is simply not available or accessible through initiatives such as globalization, the dropping of metaphysics à la Jeffrey Stout, but via transcendent norms that come to us through revelation, divine command, and a modest, theologically grounded natural law.

In assembling this volume, I have included several pieces from Reimer’s work that were intended to be part of his proposed book but were worked out in specific situations as he was asked to address particular audiences. However, I lament the fact that he was not able to complete the chapter that he described conceptually regarding Anabaptist political theology in conversation with Yoder, Hauerwas, and O’Donovan. Nevertheless, we have enough of Reimer’s work to see his theological foundations and presuppositions, his hermeneutical stance toward biblical material, his understanding of the Constantinian shift, his notions of revelation, law, conscience, and public orthodoxy, and his constructive vision of forbearance and concord. I consider this project an important contribution within the burgeoning field of Christian political theology.

To conclude, a few remarks about editing a manuscript of this kind for posthumous publication. I’m very grateful to Dr. Margaret Loewen Reimer, Jim’s wife, for helping me think through these matters.