Why Am I a Christian? [An answer from 1976]

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Ted Grimsrud

[This sermon was preached at Orchard Street Church, Eugene, Oregon, October 3, 1976. It was the first sermon I ever preached. The timing notable. I wrote it shortly after I graduated from college but before I began to read Mennonite theology.]

Our pastor, Stuart Smith, asked me a couple of months ago to share about my experiences this past summer of driving across the United States and back. Since then I decided that I would take this opportunity to share about what I have learned in this past year and a half since I began attending Orchard, with the learnings of last summer being only the latest.

I would like to challenge everyone seriously to think through the question I ask in my sermon title. We hear many one-line, simple, pat-type answers to this question of why we are Christians. By sharing the evolution of my own attempted answers to this question I would like to show how it is a very complex question and one, which, when wrestled with can reveal a lot about where we are at in our relationship with God.

So, I would like to share with you the development of my own thinking regarding why I am a Christian. It is a person testimony of sorts, so please bear with me.

I think we can divide this question into two separate aspects – why did I become a Christian and why do I remain a Christian? Continue reading →

The Anabaptist Vision and Mennonite Life

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Ted Grimsrud

[This is a sermon preached at Trinity Mennonite Church in Glendale, Arizona, December 28, 1986. I post it at PeaceTheology.net on July 6, 2020. For more of my sermons see the collection under “Ted Grimsrud Sermons.”]

It’s a real privilege to be able to share with you this morning. It has been awhile since the last time I gave a sermon—that was when I last preached here almost 2½ years ago. But I feel good about being here and very grateful to have the chance to reflect—with you—on the relationship between the “Anabaptist vision” and our lives as Mennonites in the 1980s.

A Mennonite in the city

The past 2 ½ years, I’m pleased to report, have been very good for Kathleen, Johan, and me. For all of us, our lives have been centered around our education—Kathleen doing graduate work in theology at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California; Johan beginning pre-school; me in my doctoral program in Christian ethics. And we’ve all had very positive experiences. It helps also to be in Berkeley with its beautiful scenery and wonderful climate (imagine twelve months of Phoenix Decembers).

And I would have to say that even though our environment there is definitely not a Mennonite one, I have been only strengthened in my commitment to the Mennonite church and the Anabaptist/Mennonite perspective on the Christian faith. It is certainly challenging to be thrown into a context where the faculty and students are from a wide range of traditions—many Catholics, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, evangelical Christians, not to mention Unitarians and Jews.

In such an environment, one is forced to come to terms with one’s own tradition, one’s deepest beliefs and values. I was helped to do so myself by taking a class on Anabaptist theology and ethics in which I was the only Mennonite. In this class we studied the 16th-century emergence of the Anabaptist movement in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland—and looked closely at the account of this movement given by historian Harold Bender, the long-time professor and administrator at Goshen College who died about 25 years ago.

Harold Bender’s “Anabaptist Vision”

Harold Bender was responsible, more than anyone else, for turning the eyes of Mennonites and many others to the 16th century, and to the relevance of the early Anabaptist movement for understanding how 20th-century Mennonites can better be faithful Christians. In 1943, Bender was named president of the American Society of Church History and in his presidential address gave a speech that was later published with the title, “The Anabaptist Vision.” This article is still an exciting summary of that vision. In “The Anabaptist Vision,” Bender asserts that the two major emphases of the early Anabaptists were: (1) Christianity is primarily a matter of Christians experiencing and living out the transformation of life through discipleship, through following in life the teachings and example of Jesus of Nazareth; and (2) that this transformed life takes place in the context of the church as a fellowship of love in which the fullness of the Christian life ideal is to be expressed. Continue reading →

Why God doesn’t intervene

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Ted Grimsrud

[Sermon preached at Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalist Fellowship—December 1, 2019]

You would think that given how important God is to so many people, that we’d find it easier to talk about God. But it seems that even though people act as though, of course, God is real and we all know what we mean by God, very few people are all that articulate when they actually try to talk about God. It’s even difficult to find good jokes about God—when I searched the internet, this is the best I could do: God was talking to an angel and said, “I just figured out how to rotate the Earth so it creates this really incredible 24-hour period of alternating light and darkness.” The angel said, “That’s great. So, what are you going to do next?” God says, “Well, I think I’ll call it a day.”

I suppose for many of us, our understanding of God has evolved quite a bit as we have gone through life; mine has. One of the things I now believe is that we too easily forget that our language about God is always metaphorical. All that humans can say is what we think God is like, not what God for a fact is. It is our concept of God that we talk about. But we have the habit of saying simply, “God is this or God is that.” I will share today about the evolution of my thinking about God—and it seems more authentic to use the kind of language about God that I have used in the past. But I recognize that all I say here is metaphorical, even if I don’t use qualifiers such as “God is like…”.

I was stimulated to reflect on how my thinking about God has changed when I heard the sermon here on God by Paul Britner in October. Paul made me ask, What do I think about God? As a starting point, I think most people actually agree that God does not usually directly intervene in the affairs of human beings. Even most pious Christians have experienced enough tragedy to know that God simply does not step in and stop bad things from happening. My buddy Rod getting killed in a car wreck at age 17. My dad dying suddenly of a brain aneurism at age 67. My mom’s sister having a fatal appendicitis attack when she was four. Not to mention wars, famines, pestilences. So, the question, then, is: Why? Why does God allow so much terrible stuff to happen?

Let me summarize one common notion: the idea is that God has a plan for the world and its inhabitants. But God keeps God’s own counsel. We can’t know what this plan is since God’s ways are not our ways. God does intervene when it suits God’s purposes and our job is to trust God and rest in the confidence that God works all things together for good—even when in the moment we can’t see how. So, God doesn’t intervene because God chooses not to, for God’s own unknowable purposes. Continue reading →

A review of Mark Douglas, Christian Pacifism for an Environmental Age

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Mark Douglas, Christian Pacifism for an Environmental Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019) viii + 269pp.

Ted Grimsrud—July 3, 2020

Mark Douglas, Professor of Christian Ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary, has written an interesting book that addresses important issues. Most of the book focuses on Christian pacifism and its history, offering a highly critical analysis of how Christian pacifists have presented their tradition. Douglas suggests that the climate crisis provides a challenging context for reconsidering Christian pacifism.

Douglas summarizes “the conventional narrative” of the history of Christian pacifism. It begins with Jesus, the New Testament and early Christians until Constantine as universally pacifist. This all changed with the first Christian emperor who oversaw the aligning of the church with imperial power and signaled the end of pacifism as a core Christian conviction. A just war ethic, especially as articulated by Augustine, replaced pacifism and “constitutes not only a change but a fall away from fidelity to a Jesus-centered ethics” (p. 3).

In much of the book that follows, Douglas uses this summary as a foil for a sharp critique of the narrative of Christian pacifism by recent pacifists (he actually only picks up, briefly near the end of the book, the theme of our current environmental crisis; the book’s title is thus misleading). He portrays the Christian pacifist narrative as being centered on that problematic construal of early Christianity—what he calls, disparagingly, the “myth of return” (pp. 7-10) where pacifists seek to recover the supposed purity of the early Christians. Continue reading →

Explaining Christian pacifism

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I had a great conversation about peace theology on the Libertarian Christian Podcast. The host, Doug Stuart, did an excellent job of asking questions and making comments that helped me say what I wanted to say.

We didn’t talk about capitalism, though….

[The link below goes to the podcast. I hope to post a written transcript before long.]

THE LIBERTARIAN CHRISTIAN PODCAST, episode 134

Biblical interpretation: Anabaptists, Gadamer, and Latin American liberation theology

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Ted Grimsrud—July 29, 2019

[This essay was published in Ted Grimsrud, Embodying the Way of Jesus: Anabaptist Convictions for the Twenty-First Century (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2007), 57-71. The chapter title in that book was “Biblical Interpretation: Anabaptist Theology and Recent Hermeneutics.” It was drawn from one of my comprehensive exams in my PhD program at the Graduate Theological Union entitled “Philosophical Hermeneutics in Conversation with Latin American Liberation Theology” (1986).]  

Historians have proposed that 16th-century Anabaptist theology and practice pioneered many changes now embraced by Christians throughout the world – believers baptism, separation of church and state, and conscientious objection to warfare among them. This pioneering dynamic may be seen with regard to biblical interpretation as well. The Anabaptist approach to the Bible has many affinities with recent developments.

My concern with this chapter is to use these convergences as a way of articulating an approach to biblical interpretation that builds on the insights of our 16th-century forebears and broadens them with help of philosophical hermeneutics and Latin American liberation theology.

Our age is not friendly to the authoritative use of writings from the past. We breathe the air of a skeptical, individualistic, and ahistorical worldview characterized by radical doubt regarding revelation, by suspicion of claims for loyalty and duty to people and communities outside our selves and maybe immediate family, and by a sense that only the present matters and that how we got to where we are today is irrelevant if not undiscoverable anyway.

Nevertheless, many believe that these issues, though daunting, are not insurmountable. In fact, their existence only underscores the need to construct and enact a biblical hermeneutics that makes available the immensely helpful resources of the biblical materials for Christian ethics.

One recently emergent tradition that has accepted this challenge and thereby made it much more real to the rest of the world is what has become known as “liberation theology.” This movement’s main center has been Latin America, but the label “liberation theology” has been used much more widely of groups such as blacks, feminists, Africans, etc. I will focus on Latin American liberation theology from its “classical” period, the late 1960s through early 1980s.

I will explore the close affinity that liberation theology has in its attitude toward and use of the Bible with another recently emergent “school” of thought – “philosophical hermeneutics.” In particular, I will consider the thought of German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. Continue reading →

Practice-oriented vs. doctrine-oriented theology: An Anabaptist proposal

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Ted Grimsrud

[This article is a substantial revision of an earlier article that was published as, “Whither Contemporary Anabaptist Theology,” in Ted Grimsrud, Embodying the Way of Jesus: Anabaptist Convictions for the Twenty-First Century (Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2007), 23-26. It was written in 2011 but has not been published in this form.] 

Is there such a thing as “Anabaptist theology” for the present day? Is seeking to construct a distinctively Anabaptist theology an appropriate task for the 21stcentury?

I will suggest that there is—and that is takes the form of what I will call “practice-oriented” as opposed to “doctrine-oriented.” To help understand the practice-oriented approach, and why it’s an exemplary model for those of us engaged in the work of constructive Anabaptist theology for the 21stcentury, I will first look at a somewhat different model for contemporary Anabaptist theology and reflect on the differences between these two models.

Tom Finger, like many other Mennonite writers wrestling with the challenge of working within the Anabaptist tradition (notably a marginal perspective in the history of Christian theology), seeks to find links of commonality with more mainstream traditions. In doing so, he takes an approach I will call “doctrine-oriented” theology.

Finger’s work has many characteristics unique to his own perspective, certainly, yet in relation to the key points I will focus on, his approach is at least somewhat representative of the general approach taken by Anabaptist-Mennonite theologians seeking rapprochement with mainstream theologies.

I understand the central characteristics of “Anabaptist theology” to be centered in an integration of theological convictions with ethical practices.  The ethical commitments of the sixteenth century Anabaptists such as their pacifism, their emphasis on economic sharing, and their rejection of the subordination of the church to nation-states, reflected a distinctive theology that placed central importance on commitment to the way of Jesus in costly discipleship. Continue reading →

Violence as a theological problem

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Published in Justice Reflections: 2005, Issue 10

We live in a world where too many people “purposefully contribute to the harm of another human being, either by action or inaction” (my working definition of violence). In such a world, an unavoidable moral question arises, how do we respondto violence, or more generally, how do we respond to evil?

Despite widespread occurrences of inter-human violence, the case may be made that most human beings tend to want to avoid lethal violence toward other human beings. If this were not true, the human race could never have survived to evolve to the point it has. In human experience people need some overriding reason to go against the tendency to avoidlethal violence. To act violently, especially to kill, other human beings, is serious business, undertaken because some other value overrides the tendency not to be violent.

Almost all violence emerges with some kind of rationale that justifies its use. Psychiatrist James Gilligan, who worked in the criminal justice system for many years, argues, based on his extensive work with extremely violent offenders, that even the most seemingly pointless acts of violence usually nonetheless have some justification in the mind of the perpetrator.[i]

Other more obviously rational or self-conscious uses of violence (for example, warfare, capital punishment, corporal punishment of children) generally follow a self-conscious logic. At the core of this “logic” rests a commitment to the necessity of retribution. When the moral order is violated by wrongdoing, “justice” requires retribution (that is, repayment of violence with violence, pain with pain).

The legitimacy of retribution is widely accepted in the United States. Where does this belief in retribution come from? One key source is Christian theology, the belief that retribution is God’s will, or that the need for retribution stems from the nature of the universe. That the nature of the universe requires retribution is a part of what most WesternChristiansbelieve, leading to strong support for retribution (that is, for justifying violence as the appropriate response to violence). Continue reading →

Trump as “Anointed One”: But who’s the anointer?

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David L. Myers—February 27, 2018

[I am happy to welcome my old friend, David Myers, to Thinking Pacifism and to Peace Theology as the author of this guest post. David served a number of year as a Mennonite pastor in Kansas and Illinois and as a social service administrator in Chicago. He also worked in the Obama administration for about eight years. We attended the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary together in the early 1980s and before that both grew up in Oregon. He is especially interested in public theology.]

Okay, Evangelicals of a certain type; let’s play a little game of mix and match.

First, a little about the game itself, whose genesis was a headline: “Why is it so hard for Trump to say that evil things are evil?” (Washington Post, February 15, 2018)

Hmmm…why, indeed, I wondered. How can so many (though not all) Evangelicals, who believe someone like Trump has been anointed or been put in the presidency by God, have such a difficult time condemning what they themselves believe to be evil? (I’ll save you the mind-numbing list from Trump’s own twittering fingers and prevaricating tongue—it’s in the public domain.)

Then a series of thoughts fell into place, as if the right key finally unlocked the tumblers. God’s anointed. That’s the key—but not in the way you may think.

The root of Jesus the Christ means Jesus the Anointed One. Here’s the recently deceased R.C. Sproul, a leading Evangelical theologian, commenting on the Gospel of Matthew’, chapter 16:

Then Jesus asked the disciples, “But who do you say that I am?” (v. 15b). Peter answered with what is known as the great confession, a statement of his belief as to the identity of Jesus: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God” (v. 16). With these words, Peter declared that Jesus was the Christos, the Mashiach, the Anointed One.

Jesus: Tempted in the wilderness

A seminal moment in the life of Jesus was his baptism in the River Jordan. It was then that the Holy Spirit announced his Sonship, his anointing. The life of Jesus the Christ, the life of the Anointed One, was publicly inaugurated. And what happens immediately thereafter? The Synoptic Gospels agree: he was led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to be tempted by the Slanderer (The New Testament, A Translation by David Bentley Hart).

There were three temptations and there are a variety of interpretations of their respective meanings. I’ll go with Mennonite theologian Ted Grimsrud’s take on Luke 4:3-13 (from personal email correspondence).

Temptation #1—Command the stones to become bread. This could be seen as a temptation to put one’s own comfort and wellbeing above devoting your life to serve others. Jesus said “one does not live by bread alone.” I think he means, among other things, placing the priority on our own desires and pleasures and not recognizing that a full life involves care for others, especially those in need. Jesus refused to make his own comfort and self-aggrandizement central but to instead be the servant of all.

Temptation #2—Worship Satan and he will give you all the kingdoms of the earth to rule. This could be seen as a temptation to seek power over others even at the cost of making such power one’s highest value. “Worshiping Satan” is equivalent to embracing power that is based on domination and coercion and is not concerned with empowering others. Jesus refused to become a mighty king type of messiah but to embrace a politics of compassion, decentralized power, and generosity.

Temptation #3—Jump off from the top of the temple and the angels will save you. This could be seen as a temptation to seek the acclaim of the religious leaders through wonderworking power rather than through putting into practice the core values of Torah—concern for the vulnerable, generosity, and compassion. Jesus saw the temple structure and religious institutions as secondary to true faith. He did not seek their support but rather appealed directly to the people who were on the margins by addressing their needs.

Jesus refused to be seduced by, refused to succumb to, the temptations. Not that they weren’t real possibilities with real appeal. After all, for something to be a temptation it must have a vortex of attraction that swirls our appetites and imaginations. And not all temptations lead toward darkness and destruction. Not all are lies. As a good friend once said, grace is a temptation. It has a seductive power and when we succumb to it, we are better people and the world is a better place. But not so the Slanderer’s temptations titillating Jesus the Anointed One. Jesus said no to his own comfort (choosing no place to lay his head), to ruling the world by domination (choosing to be a servant), and to religious acclaim (choosing ridicule by the religious powers).

Trump’s temptations

So back to Trump and certain Evangelicals. Let us say, for the sake of illumination, we somehow agree Trump was anointed to be the president. And let us say that after his inauguration he was immediately tempted by the Slanderer with the same three temptations as Jesus the Christ. The temptation to think of himself first; the temptation to rule by domination; and the temptation to seek the acclaim of the religious powers.

We come now full circle to the game of mix and match. Take Trump’s first year of policy decisions; of statements spoken and written; and of actions known first-hand and measure how he did with the three temptations. I’ll give you that no president of the United States of America will come out with a clean bill of health on this test. But then most presidents haven’t been proclaimed as an anointed one, as a chosen one.

That’s an exceptionally high standard. Even starting just from January 20, 2017, when his anointing took place, Trump has been habitually seduced by and succumbed to the three temptations. Indeed, it would be difficult to find an example when he did not give into them. Mix in anything he’s written, said, and done and there’s likely a match with at least one of the temptations.

So then, what shall we say to the question asked by the newspaper headline: Why is it so hard for Trump to say that evil things are evil? Perhaps it is because he daily succumbs to the temptations and therefore he cannot see and name evil because it is through the Slanderer’s eyes he sees and ears he hears? Perhaps that is the reason it is so very, very difficult for him to call evil, evil.

Jesus, the Anointed One, warned about false prophets: From their fruits you will know them. If Trump is an anointed one, we then must ask, based on his fruits: Who has done the anointing?

Wrapping up Boyd’s CWG [chapter 25; Postscript; Appendices]

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Ted Grimsrud—January 24, 2018

[This is the 27th (and last) in a long series of posts that have worked through Greg Boyd’s important book, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress, 2017). The 26th post may be found here—and an index of the series here.]

In Chapter 25, “Mauling Bears and a Lethal Palladium” (pages 1195–1248), Boyd discusses his final category of violent divine portraits, what he calls “The Principle of Semiautonomous Power.” He then has a short “Postscript” (pages 1249–61), subtitled “Unlocking the Secret of the Scroll,” that is essentially a summary of the core argument of CWG as a whole. He concludes the book with a series of “Appendices” (pages 1263–1301) that elaborate on various issues that have arisen in the book.

Misusing God’s power

Boyd discusses several stories that tell of God giving someone superhuman powers—and then having those individuals use the powers to do violence. Examples are Samson and the prophets Elijah and Elisha. It what sense should we attribute such violence to God? Boyd coins the term “semiautonomous power” to describe how the violence should not be laid at God’s feet. “When God gives someone divine power, he … places [it] under the control of their own power” (1196).

These stories don’t seem particularly important to me, partly because they are rare and peripheral. More to the point, to me the question is why these stories were told. What contribution do they make to the Big Story? The story of Samson seems relatively easy to deal with since Samson is presented as a less than exemplary character and to a significant extent, his violent deeds illustrate the chaos that the book of Judges shows—“when there was no king in Israel.” The violence of Elijah and Elisha seems to make a less obvious contribution to the story. Certainly, though, the violence is not normative.

Boyd asserts, regarding Samson, that “the immature, immoral, and violent ways Samson used the power of [God’s] Spirit can only be understood as reflecting Samson’s will and character, not God’s” (1230). But I wonder—isn’t God the one who gave Samson this power? Doesn’t that make God in some sense responsible for the consequences of how it was used? Again, it seems that Boyd is too focused on keeping God’s hands clean. That focus seems to follow from Boyd’s problematic view of inspiration. In a move that may make things worse, Boyd wants to turn God’s seeming irresponsibility into a virtue: “We can only marvel at the humility of a God who, out of covenantal solidarity with his people, would stoop to work through legends of a man who was as infantile and degenerate as Samson” (1231). I’m not sure what I think we should learn from the Samson story, but I do think it shows God in a pretty bad light.

Boyd’s point with the principle of semiautonomous power is that “God is not implicated in the violent way his servants sometimes used his power” (1197). I find this argument to be unpersuasive—the stories themselves don’t seem to tell us this. They celebrate God’s involvement. The power for violence seems unambiguously attributed to God. So, Boyd’s principle seems like another convoluted effort to leave God with clean hands. Continue reading →