Editorial
May/June, 2024
Volume 59, Number 3
At the 2023 BRF General Meeting, the focus was on “Brethren Values: What Are They and Why are They Important?” Brethren ministers, Nathan West and Nathan Rittenhouse, spoke to those questions. Brother West’s message was documented in a BRF Witness at the end of last year (Vol. 58, No. 6). Brother Rittenhouse’s message will be broken into two parts and covered in the next two BRF Witnesses.
As brother West pointed out, values are beliefs and practices that are important to us because they help shape our sense of identity, both individually and as a community. When we think about Brethren values historically, we can certainly see the importance of scripture shaping what we believed and how we lived. That is, the desire to have scripture literally speak to every area of our lives. We were “people of the Book.” As a result, we placed value on nonresistance and simple living.
But as we consider the current landscape of the church, we may be tempted to lament the loss of these values on many fronts. We may even conclude that all is lost and irrecoverable, save for pockets here and there.
But the questions addressed in this article are: “Is there a way for the values of our past to shape our future?” “Is there value in our values, beyond simply looking at them historically and saying, ‘Those were good values’?” “Can they help us today?” Or, “Are we simply left to look at them, like people standing in a museum, and celebrate what once was?” “Are they relevant today?”
We certainly can’t return to yesteryear. But the argument of this article is that the values that we had then are the values that we must have now and they will help guide us in the path forward. Therefore, they are important. They are not “Brethren” per se, but rather, none other than pure New Testament Christianity. We live in challenging times. The foundations are shifting (Psalm 11:3) and people are asking big questions. The church has the answers, but it must embrace and claim and lay hold of the fact that it is the “church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15). Please read brother Nathan’s insightful and informative article and look forward to the next edition of the BRF Witness for PART-2.
— Eric Brubaker
——————————————————–
BRETHREN VALUES
WHY ARE THEY IMPORTANT?
By Nathan Rittenhouse
(PART – 1)
As we think about Brethren values, we can look back in our history and see that they were important “back then.” Brethren values played an important role historically. But what about now? Do Brethren values have relevance today? Are they important? In what sense can they shape our path forward? This will be the focus of this article.
BRETHREN VALUES MUST BE BIBLICAL VALUES
The book of Romans gives us direction when it begins by saying, “Through Him and for His name’s sake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith” (Romans 1:5). Just in case we were unsure about what the book is about, Romans concludes in very much the same way, by saying, “Now to Him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey Him – to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen” (Romans 16:25-27).
Paul reminds us in this kind of analysis of Christian theology that the goal is obedience that comes through faith, and this is made possible through the work of Jesus Christ – that all the Gentiles and all the nations would believe and obey Him. That’s a pretty comprehensive vision, is it not, when we consider this subject. I think it is important for us to start here because when we ask, “Why are Brethren values important for today?” this is bigger than just historically what has been called the Church of the Brethren or the German Baptist in the past. This is about the future of Christ’s Church and the role that we play in it. So, we do play a part in this, but it’s bigger and broader than us. We have been running well, hopefully. But Lord willing, we remember that we are running only one leg in a broader race. We want to remind ourselves that it’s part of this phenomenal mission for the gospel to be preached to all nations and for those of us who are Gentiles to rejoice that salvation is available even to us.
500 YEAR CYCLES OF DISRUPTION AND UPHEAVAL
Phyllis Tickle was an American academic and writer. I disagree with her on many things but she wrote about American religion and spirituality and was one of the main introductory voices in the idea of what became known as the Emergent Church Movement and the Emerging Church. She wrote a book called “Emergence Christianity” in which she points out that about every 500 years, the church encounters significant disruption and upheaval. Every 500 years there’s some turbulent feature in culture that changes the way and the format in which the church operates. Her thesis is that some big event happens and then there is about 100 or 150 years when everyone’s asking the question, “Okay, who’s in charge?”, “Who’s the authority?”, “What’s going on here?” After that, the church somewhat gets things figured out, and there is about 250 years of stability. But then things start to change, and there is about another 100 years of everything falling apart. Finally, there’s a decisive or cataclysmic moment, and then we jump back into this renewal and reformation series.
AD 0 – 500: For example, the birth of Jesus was around the year zero (roughly speaking), and then the early church was formed. People were asking the, “Who’s in charge?” question. The New Testament was being codified and the early church fathers were writing. We have the example of the apostles, and the church was formed out of that. Time goes on for awhile and then things start to shift and happen in culture. There was the conversion of Constantine and then the fall of Rome. By the time you get to about AD 500, Rome has collapsed. The church has sort of been swallowed up into the Roman state. Around that time there was a cultural collapse, a great falling apart.
AD 500 – 1054: Then came the Dark Ages. The next 500 years ended with the great schism of AD 1054, when the Eastern and Western churches split. During that time there was Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox, the popes and the patriarchs hashing it out and going separate ways.
AD 1054 – 1517: The next 500 years end with the Reformation in the AD 1,500s. There was trouble leading up to it and there were some decisive and divisive moments, but again, people were asking the question, “Says who?”, “Who’s in charge?”, “What’s the authority here?”
AD 1517 – 2001: This brings us then to the year AD 2000 (a new millennium). Phyllis Tickle says AD 2001 (9/11) is one of these great global shifting moments. I don’t know if that is necessarily true, but around that time we see the fruition of a technological advancement in which humanity is connected like never before and we’re aware of each other globally in a way that we never have before.
These are moments and shifts in history that she sees. People tend to get hung up on the questions of, “What led up to it?”, and “What comes out of it?” But the part that I think she might be right on is that whenever you have these massive cultural moments, the big question for the next 100 years after these big shifts is, “Where does authority lie?” Essentially, “Says who?”, will become a cultural question for about 100 years.
Now if we were to put ourselves into the outline she proposed, then we would find ourselves about 20 years into the 100-year period of answering the questions, “Where does authority lie?”, “Says who?” These are not just religious questions, they are collective across our globe. People are asking, “Who’s in charge?”, “Who gets to decide?”, “What are the moral dictates?”, “What is the foundation of ethics?”, “How is it that we ought to be operating?”, “How should we structure our lives?”, “How then should we live?”
Everybody in every institution in every category is asking these questions and there is massive upheaval. You can look at your own family and communities and neighborhoods and a lot of the change is good. This is not an anti-change statement. It is just to say that when things are changing, people start asking big questions, consciously or subconsciously…”How are we going to put something back together here?” “What does it mean for us to be one of what it is that we are?”
SAYS WHO?
When we ask the question, “What is the importance of brethren values today?”, I am suggesting that we have a role to play in answering the cultural and the theological question of our time, which is, “Where does authority lie?”, “Says who?” Brethren have a little bit of a rebellious streak embedded in our nature (in our history) regarding this. One of my Baptist friends has said that he always liked the Anabaptists because we are rebels who don’t end up hurting anybody. In fact, historically, we are the ones who end up getting hurt. That’s not usually how revolutions go, but I like that. If we then specifically look at the Church of the Brethren, if the Reformation happened in the AD 1,500 – 1,600’s, why is it that the Brethren didn’t show up until AD 1708?
BRETHREN BEGINNINGS: PROTESTANT +
I think it’s partly because when the older Anabaptists looked at the Protestant Reformation, they said, “That is a neat idea…but you’re not really very good at it, are you.” “Watch this, this is how you do it.” And then the radical Reformation added on to what was seen as a neat idea, salvation through grace, or Sola Scriptura, that it’s the scripture alone.
But then the Anabaptists started critiquing the Protestants by saying, “Look, at your reformation…in an attempt to get rid of the Pope as the one who tells you what to do…you have now substituted the Pope with the professor. Now we need the professional theological academic to tell us what scripture says, and you’ve just switched the mode of authority from the papacy to the scholar, but what about the rest of us? Is scripture not accessible to us?” Even within pure Anabaptism, the community became perhaps at times a higher authority than it was intended to be from within scripture. There was a sense in which the Brethren paralleled the Protestant Reformation. There’s a sense in which we were somewhat Protestant, but not necessarily because we wanted to add this extra little thing to it. What’s going on there?
OUR DISCONNECT with AMERICAN EVANGELICALISM
Even today we don’t fit in with American evangelicalism that has, over the last couple of centuries, taken some sort of odd Christian approach. It filters scripture through its political lenses and through the historical context to which it thinks scripture was written and takes our modern individualistic liberal democratic ideals and ends up with some kind of wild idea that scripture is inerrant, but it’s also sort of irrelevant to how I live my life. It holds up the Bible and says, “This is God’s word, but what it says about what we do…” there’s a disconnect there. But I’m not just pointing fingers at everyone else. We see this in our own lives and in our own congregations. We are living in a time in which even those who are religiously interested are seeking a god but not wanting a Lord. We want to connect with something bigger than ourselves. We need a divine slot machine that we can stick our coin into and pull the lever whenever we have a problem. We want to be able to ask a prayer, but we don’t want that connection with the Transcendent to have any moral implication or bearing on me and my life and what I do. You see people spending time in nature or art galleries, which is fine. But a lot of that is out of a desire to connect with something bigger than ourselves that doesn’t have the ability to speak back into my life to actually make me change or feel responsible or duty bound to something bigger than me.
OUR CONTEXT: OUR QUESTIONS
If that is our context, what do our Brethren values have to say to it? Now, if we look at this obviously extremely simplistic outline of the last 500 years, it brings us up into a moment. In 2016 I was living and studying up in Massachusetts at a modern evangelical seminary. Christians started getting a little antsy in 2016, and particularly for the richly Protestant New England. They started asking, “What does it mean for us to be a Christian people in a nation that doesn’t have clear Christian leadership?” “What happens when we lose the, ‘moral majority,’ or when our Christian faith is expressed in the higher echelons of society in a way that does not exactly jibe with our understanding of Christian.” The broader evangelical church was antsy during that time, feeling like it was losing its grip.
Then the question started to come up, “Well, what are the expressions of orthodox Christian faith that have flourished within the North American context that have not had or didn’t seek political power and authority?” There are two options there: (1) The African American church, which didn’t have political power for most of its existence, (2) and the second one is the Anabaptist churches.
The African American church has done a phenomenal job of producing scholars and academics and if you’re interested about that there’s a myriad of resources and courses and studies and systems and schools of thought at different seminaries. There are books published, wonderful PhDs and research dissertations. The Anabaptists have not played in that same stream in the same way. But suddenly, starting around 2016, people started asking this big question, “What does it mean to be a church who isn’t in charge of the culture?” That is a big question that’s going down. And so, when we think about the value of Brethren values today, the Brethren values are only valuable today to the degree in which they glorify and honor Christ. The goal of my life is not to be Brethren, it’s to be a faithful disciple of Jesus, and I gather around me and seek to be in fellowship with other people who are trying to do that in the same way and therefore the Brethren are formed.
We gave my great grandmother a hard time about believing there were five gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the Messenger, right? No, it doesn’t work like that. There are four gospels. When people talk about the old Brethren, the most impressive thing about them is that they weren’t trying to be Brethren. They were trying to follow Jesus. But they were trying to follow Jesus in the same way because they had the same values, because they had the same style of biblical interpretation.
THE NEW TESTAMENT: WE ARE THE AUDIENCE
We might ask the question, “What is the key Brethren value today?” It is simply this, and this is my thesis and my claim here, we are the context to which the New Testament is speaking. Now, that flies in the face of almost all interpretive analysis of what you’re supposed to do with the New Testament. I understand that. But it’s the foundational and the fundamental Brethren value: when scripture speaks, it speaks to us. So, when we read those passages from the beginning and end of Romans, we understand it is speaking to us. When Paul writes in Romans 12:1, “I beseech you therefore, brethren…” we all slide forward in our seats, right? Because we understand he’s talking to us right here. He talked about dress. When Paul is writing in 1 Corinthians 11, we don’t say, “1 Corinthians 11 is only to the Corinthians at that time.” It says at the beginning of 1 Corinthians, “together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ – their Lord and ours” (1 Corinthians 1:2), and we say, that’s us.
Some people might say, “Oh, that’s a bunch of backwards, fundamentalism and navel gazing.” People say, “Well, you’re not taking into account the cultural context.” But the question is not, “What is the cultural context in which scripture is written?” Rather, it is, “Are we the context that scripture is trying to build a Christian culture out of?” Yes, it’s cultural, but it’s cultural because it’s the foundation and the formation of what it is that we’re supposed to be doing with our lives, not some ancient lens that we have to figure out how to interpret this.
A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
We might balk at that. But the phenomenal value of that as a Brethren value moving forward is that there’s a leveling of the playing field when it comes into the interpretive framework and who gets to have a participatory role in the interpretation of scripture. This means challenging ourselves and collectively in community to be more faithful to Jesus. We have always believed that you can pick up the Bible and read it and that God can speak to you and by the power of the Holy Spirit that He can work and transform and change your life. That’s the Pietist flair that needed to be added into Anabaptism…that its personal. Your salvation is personal, between you and God, but it isn’t individualistic. It is worked out in community, and we get that right out of the scriptures. The language is often plural. We’re doing this together, but it’s because God is working in us individually. This idea that we see ourselves as the proper audience for the New Testament is the thing that makes us weird in a healthy way and hopefully in a way that honors the Lord because that’s ultimately the goal there. That’s the logical outworking of it.
Now as we lean into this idea and the implications of it, it speaks to “Who can go to the scriptures?”, “Who can understand it?”, “Who are the ministers?” Answer, “We all are.” The purpose of the church is to equip the saints for ministry. We are all trying to work to be faithful in the communities and the context in which God has given us. He has given us gifts and skills and abilities, not for ourselves, but for everyone else. These are not novel thoughts. They are written down and have been for a long time in the New Testament. So, there’s a sense in which the Brethren have a head start on answering the question, “Says who?” We have an actual history that we can point to of trying to live that out.
GRACE AND OBEDIENCE
As we get into this, it all needs to be fleshed out. But the pitfall for us moving forward is twofold. There is a lot we can appreciate about the Protestant Reformation. But the fact of the matter is that we aren’t Protestants in the modern sense of what a Protestant is. We’re not. Most of the time Anabaptists say, “We’re Protestant,” in the sense that we are not Catholic. But there are significant theological differences as well, particularly in its modern expressions…there is in particular a disconnect between grace and obedience. We have to be careful there. Titus 2:11-12 says, “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age.” It’s the grace of God.” I’m not preaching anything other than the grace of God.
But if we’re going to be serious about reading the New Testament as if it’s talking to us, then we need to broaden our definition of the grace of God to see that the grace of God is not just about our eternal salvation. If we believe that God loves us enough to save us for eternity, it shouldn’t surprise us that He would love us enough to teach us how to live until that time. That’s the grace of God also. So, I’m talking about a big grace here. That is a point which we can draw from the rich history of the Protestant Reformation.
But we can encourage our Protestant brothers and sisters by saying, “Keep going, you’re headed in the right direction. Come join us.” I don’t think that’s arrogant. I think that’s being faithful and is an invitation that we need each other to grow well. That’s one pitfall. There is a subsidiary of that pitfall, of aligning ourselves too closely with Protestant thinking, not just in grace, but in some broader structures of theology.
BE CAREFUL WHERE YOU DRINK: AWKWARD ALIGNMENTS
As I noted earlier, the Anabaptists have not produced a phenomenal amount of academic research and literature. We by and large don’t have a good out-facing interaction academically. So, what we have done, since we haven’t produced many of our own resources, is that many individual congregations look outside our own tradition for biblically conservative teaching resources or guides or literature or Sunday school programs. In so doing, I think out of a right heart to look for things that are biblically conservative or faithful, have also adopted some other ideas that have come in through the doors with that other curriculum. Those other teachings have put particular political flares on our Christian understandings, or things that historically we would have disagreed with theologically. And so we have ended up swallowing more than we bit off because of our interactions and our reliance on theological educational materials outside of our own tradition and our own style of interpreting scripture. The pitfall is that we have to be careful with our alignment theologically.
“MY KINGDOM IS NOT OF THIS WORLD”
But then in a secondary sense, we have to remember (I will put the pitfalls as two P’s: Protestants and politicians), that we have a very rich tradition of understanding what Jesus said to Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were so, my servants would fight…” (John 18:36). It is my observation over the last 10 years that even among the conservative Anabaptist churches, political discussions have become such a key part of our conversations and our narratives and our interpretations and our attitudes toward other people and toward our country. I’m not saying that you can’t be interested in it, but you dare not worship there. Just be careful and recognize that you have a theology that has allowed you to disconnect yourself from the hopelessness that comes from the shenanigans of humanity in the political realm. The Gentiles lord it over each other, not so with you (Matthew 20:25). So just tread carefully there. That is perhaps one of the biggest temptations and dangers for the future of what it is that we are…to allow ourselves to be too aligned with (I’m not saying left or right) any of it. Just be careful there. Tread carefully. Worship the Lord. We must be reminded of what Paul said, that a soldier doesn’t get involved in civilian affairs (2 Timothy 2:4). If we’re following Christ, let’s try not to get involved in civilian affairs of this kingdom. Let’s be careful there.
———————
The article above was adapted from a message delivered by brother Nathan Rittenhouse at BRF’s 2023 Annual Meeting held at the Blue River Covenant Brethren Church in Indiana. If you would like to discuss any of this with him in further detail, you can email him at [email protected]. Please see the next issue of the BRF Witness for PART-2 of the article.
