The Witnessing Body in Anabaptist Ritual

The Witnessing Body in Anabaptist Ritual

Gerald Biesecker-Mast

Bluffton College

“Ritual in Anabaptist Communities” Conference of the Anabaptist-Mennonite Scholars Network and the Anabaptist Sociology and Anthropology Association

Hillsdale College

Hillsdale, MI

June 26-28, 2003

In 1527, a beleaguered and fractured body of mostly Swiss Anabaptists gathered at Schleitheim to hammer out a statement of self-understanding that could serve to unify their movement. The result of that meeting was a text that we know as the Schleitheim Brotherly Union, a text that emphasizes the separation of the brothers and sisters from the world and that is usually regarded as the beginning of Anabaptist withdrawal from active engagement with their society. I have argued elsewhere that this separation-focused text, far from being an act of withdrawal or apoliticism, constitutes a creative and improvisational act of protest against and liberation from the enslaving civil-religious structures of Reformation-era Christendom.[1] In other words, separation does not necessarily mean withdrawal—at least in the sense of avoiding engagement—any more than a boycott or a strike means withdrawal from engagement. What I wish to argue today is that the ritual life of Anabaptist communities can be read as the repetition, or better yet, iteration (to borrow a term used by Jacques Derrida which I will define later), of that inaugural act of separation, meaning a variety of things over the years—including withdrawal but also including resistance and critique. Because of limited time I am going to focus on the argument that early Anabaptist rituals of separation were more acts of public witness than they were practices of withdrawal. I will for now merely concede that separation came to be practiced and experienced as withdrawal in most European and North American Mennonite communities at some point. To make the argument about early Anabaptist separation I will first of all read the Schleitheim Brotherly Union as an illocutionary speech act that established a separated Anabaptist body (I’ll define what I mean by illocutionary in a minute). Secondly, I will engage in a discussion of speech act theory that advances our understanding of the relationship between the body and the text in religious ritual, focusing on the engagement between Judith Butler on the one hand and Jacques Derrida on the other hand with traditional speech act theory. Thirdly, I will draw on the work of Michael Aune on Lutheran reformer Melanchthon’s theories of rhetoric and ritual to set the context for Reformation era ritual practices. I am especially interested in Aune’s explanations of how ritual shapes human subjectivity both in the Reformation and more generally. Finally, I will use an early account of Anabaptist worship, as well as some Anabaptist hymn texts and writings about baptism and the Lord’s Supper to support my claim that a public and engaged form of separation came to be a dominant discursive and performative frame for early versions of Anabaptist worship and discipleship.

SEPARATION AT SCHLEITHEIM

We begin where the Schleitheim Brotherly Union begins, with the separation of the believing body from the disobedience of the world:

Dear brothers and sisters, we who have been assembled in the Lord at Schleitheim on the Randen make known, in points and articles, unto all that love God, that as far as we are concerned, we have been united to stand fast in the Lord as obedient children of God, sons and daughters, who have been and shall be separated from the world in all that we do and leave undone…[2]

This statement can be understood, I think, as what J. L. Austin called an illocutionary speech act; that is, an act that is accomplished or performed in the speaking of the statement.[3] Examples of illocutionary speech acts are “I pronounce you husband and wife” or “I hereby sentence you to death” or “I promise to tell the truth.” At Schleitheim, the Anabaptists said “We hereby declare ourselves separated from the iniquities of the present political-religious system.” They did not say that “we will no longer have anything to say to that system” or that “we will abandon them entirely to their own devices”; in fact, the Schleitheim pact acknowledged that God was at work within the civic order as enforced by the sword. But they did regard that system as incompatible with the mission of the church, and thus they sought to establish a community that did not accept the civic order as a significant frame of reference; put differently they established themselves as an other of that order, a group that didn’t really fit there.

According to Austin, an illocutionary utterance—one in which action is accomplished in the speaking—is supported by conventions of performance to which it conforms.[4] In order for the statement “I pronounce you husband and wife” to accomplish the action of marriage, it must be made in a context that looks like a marriage ceremony to the audience. The act of separation at Schleitheim took place in a context shaped by biblical precedent: it looked to the people there like a gathering of Christians following the New Testament pattern of meeting, decision-making, and confession-writing. In a text like the Schleitheim Brotherly Union, that precedent is acknowledged through the citation of scriptures that support the speech act in question—in this case, the articulation of separation. Not surprisingly, then, the accomplishment of separation is in the Brotherly Union said to be a response to “the commandment of the Lord…whereby He orders us to be and to become separate from the evil one, and thus He will be our God and we shall be His sons and daughters.”[5] Also, not surprisingly, the naming of this commandment is supported by the authority of Scripture, specifically the citation of II Cor. 6:17, a text whose recitation was to become a ritual act of valorizing Mennonite difference: “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty (KJV).”

Thus far, it might be argued, I have not described a ritual, at least if being a “repetitive act” is part of the definition, but I have at least described what Austin calls a performative utterance—speech that is more about doing something than it is about representing something.[6] I do want to argue that this performative utterance or illocutionary speech act constitutes a significant symbolic horizon for Anabaptist-Mennonite ritual. Before I do that however, I want to complicate the speech act theory I’ve just invoked by turning to the work of two writers who both affirm and revise speech act theory.

THE BODY AND THE TEXT

Judith Butler has called attention to the role of the body in the speech act and has noted how the bodily character of the speech act makes it surpass the limits of intention or reason alone.[7] Drawing on the work of Toni Morrison and Shoshana Felman, Butler argues that the act of speaking is always to some extent an act that is out of control, that exceeds the intention of the speaker, and that subverts the distinction between the mind and the body. The “speaking body” described by Felman and Butler is a body that is sustained by language and also threatened by language. This body cannot exist apart from the language that circumscribes or limits the body. The body, in short, is a subject of precisely the speech acts in which it participates as a speaking body. While Butler’s primary interest is to use this revised speech act theory to understand the effects of hate speech on human beings and bodies, I am interested in understanding how the discourse and performance of separation positions and subjects the bodies of radicalized Christians. Put succinctly, how does the performance of separation through Anabaptist-Mennonite ritual constitute the witnessing subject of Anabaptism? For example, even though I am not focusing on martyrological texts in this presentation I do want to understand the habits of speech and communal practice that could bring Anabaptist bodies to endure torture and execution. How is the Anabaptist body prepared for the public witness made in suffering and death?

That Anabaptist practices of separation and suffering are not simply the result of personal will or determination is reinforced by Jacques Derrida’s critical reading of speech act theory in his well-known essay “Signature Event Context.” There Derrida argues that the performative characteristics that speech act theorists like J. Austin attribute to some kinds of speech—such as illocutionary speech—are in fact true of all kinds of communication and that the misfires and failures that speech act theory recognized in some performative speech occur in all communication practices.[8] In other words, speech of all kinds is more a performative event than it is a representation of reality or as a reflection of meaning. So we can look at a confessional text like the Schleitheim Brotherly Union more as an event that took place than as the mirror of an idea. Furthermore, we can examine the text itself as containing a series of events, not necessarily consistent with one another. I have argued for example, that in the Schleitheim Brotherly Union there is a rhetorical movement from an antagonistic posture in which Christ and Belial are posed against each other, with the sword clearly on the side of Belial, to a dualistic posture in which the sword is acknowledged to be an ordering of God outside of Christ’s perfection, and then back again to an antagonistic posture in which the sword is absolutely evil. This movement back and forth from uncompromising antagonism to muddy dualism is recognized best not as a kind of contradiction in meaning but as an improvisational performance that shows up anytime there are people who seek to separate from the world while at the same time remaining in it. And the movements I am describing whether within a text or in response to a text are not simply the result of a subject’s mastery of meaning or of the body. Anabaptists found themselves shaping and being shaped an array of signifying practices that opposed them to the religious establishment at one moment and that negotiated with it or even compromised at another moment. Thus, for example, the same Anabaptist (like Hubmaier, for example) could hold fast for one moment, recant the next, and then on another day hold out to the bitter fiery end.

If Derrida is correct, such textual or ritual movement is on the one hand experienced as definitive because of precedents for its practice; at the same time, Derrida argues, textual or ritual events are never simply repeated, they are rather iterated, compromised in their repetition by history, temporality, and absence. While traditional speech act theorists ask the question “why do some speech acts not work or take hold” Derrida asserts that all texts are compromised by at least some failure. We can best recognize or notice those slippages and failures when we read a text precisely as a happening, an act, a performance. To be sure, our continued attempts to repeat practices in a ritual fashion can perhaps be seen as precisely the failure of all signifying practices. To recall an example from Grimes’s presentation yesterday, while a second funeral might produce more closure, Derrida’s argument here would support the acknowledgment in the closing lines of that funeral narrative that we are always left finally on the slippery banks of Jordan, that the meaning or closure of any text is always giving way at some point to slippage and loss of footing. For the purposes of this study, the important point is that practices of separation are iterated texts; therefore, we should expect the positioning or identity of the separated body to change over time, and that these shifts and movements can be detected both over a long stretch of time and actually within a text itself.

I have brought Butler and Derrida into this discussion because I want to suggest a relationship between the reading or writing or speaking of texts and the practices more traditionally considered under the rubric of ritual. Butler demonstrates how bodily experiences and practices are related to or impacted by speech performances. Derrida helps us see how all texts, not just illocutionary ones, can be productively interpreted as more performative than representational. The movement through what is traditionally considered a text is thus construed as a bodily ritual, and the movement through what is traditionally considered a bodily ritual is thus construed as a text. Whether we are reading the Schleitheim Brotherly Union or we are singing a familiar hymn or we are participating in the Lord’s Supper, then, we are partaking of what we might call a ritual text. The text part of a ritual text emphasizes the movement of meaning or the act of signifying while the ritual part of the ritual text emphasizes the bodily dimension of the practice. I think this is a good example of what our speaker last evening called helpful fuzziness.

How then are we to evaluate the impact of a ritual text on those who are the subjects of such rituals? Specifically, what sort of subject is produced in Anabaptist-Mennonite ritual texts?

Michael Aune has asked this question with particular attention to the production of religious subjects in Lutheran ritual. Aune has called attention to the way in which ritual functions not so much to produce meaning as it does to constitute subjectivity; that is, a social experience of the self.[9] In his study of the rhetorical theories of Lutheran reformer Philip Melanchthon, Aune highlights the way in which Melanchthon promoted forms of liturgy and preaching that were designed to “move the heart” in Christian faithfulness. On this view, Lutheran ritual and preaching as conceived by Melanchthon was less concerned with right beliefs as it was with right motivations. The subject of such discourse was an interactive and relational subject capable of “construing the world in ways that envision and empower.”[10] Shaped by the revival of the rhetorical tradition in the Renaissance, Melanchthon’s approach focused on the desires and needs of complex human subjects whose actions resulted not only from intellectual decisions but also emotional experiences. Liturgical and homiletic practices were construed to address not only the intellect but also the desires and feelings of Christians. It is clear from Aune’s research that the subject of Lutheran ritual and rhetoric as conceived by Melanchthon is one controlled by the “heart,” a subject whose conversion or faithfulness is identified with the experience of emotional arousal or intensity of commitment, a subject, in short of persuasion.

Aune’s discussion of Lutheran ritual theory and practice is useful for understanding Anabaptist rhetoric and ritual because of the impact on Anabaptist texts and communities of the Reformation movements that reshaped liturgical and practical theology along the lines of the rhetorical tradition. For example, Aune’s list of the “major characteristics of humanism’s affective, practical theology,” drawn from the work of Siegfried Wiedenhofer, includes the following aspects which also seem to characterize Anabaptist texts and rituals: a reform-focused theology that is more rhetorical than logical-systematic, a Christocentric theology that poses a critique of tradition, a scriptural theology that understands itself as true revelation, a practical theology concerned with the Christian life and the question of salvation, an existential theology communicated more through personal witness than correct doctrine.[11] This sounds like much Anabaptist writing and argment to me. Yet, while Anabaptists were shaped by these forms of Reformation discourse, I argue that their primary rhetorical goal was less to “move the heart” than it was to move the body in obedience to Christ. This observation in its general implication might be seen as quite commonsensical by now. For example, a recent book by ritual theorist Catherine Bell remarks that Amish-Mennonites constitute an obvious example of an orthopraxically-focused group within a broader Christian orientation toward orthodoxical rituals.[12] For her an orthopraxically-focused group is defined as one concerned more with correct behaviors than with correct beliefs.[13] Now while this observation has already been popularized and then dismissed as passé within the world of Mennonite studies, I want to return to this claim that Anabaptist-Mennonite groups have stressed orthopraxy over orthodoxy and test it more thoroughly through the study of those ritual and textual practices in which Mennonite separation was shaped and iterated. Because our knowledge of early Anabaptist worship is very limited we will need to infer a great deal from texts that described Anabaptist assumptions about worship, as well as texts that were used in worship such as hymns and accounts of baptism and other practices.

SEPARATION AND SPECTACULAR SUFFERING IN ANABAPTIST RITUAL

That Anabaptist worship following the Schleitheim declaration stressed separation as the experience and purpose of worship is supported by one of the few accounts of early Anabaptist worship that is available to us. In 1576, a Lutheran vicar by the name of Elias Schad covertly visited an Anabaptist meeting near Strasbourg and reported on the experience. The account is thus written from the perspective of an unsympathetic person and no doubt stresses those dimensions of worship that he found problematic. At the meeting attended by Schad around 200 Anabaptists were present, five of whom presided as preachers. Schad characterized the sermons as having “as much power as if chopped straw had been sprinkled over them.”[14] I’m not sure what that means but it seems to suggest that he didn’t think these sermons had much power. According to Schad the sermons invariably focused on the distinction between the world and the redeemed, having “much to say of the Fall and that our fathers had eaten sour grapes that set the children’s teeth on edge; also the suffering of Christ, who redeemed them. They emphasized especially that they should thank God for choosing them out of the world, for they were not of the world.” Here Schad could not resist a wry aside, “they were truly not in the world but in the forest.”[15]

Schad’s allusion to the context of the meeting is significant, for the experience of ritual is, like many theorists have observed, construed through multiple dimensions of context and precedent. Here clearly the experience of separation is reinforced by the setting for the meeting: in the woods apart from the commerce and risk of social life in the villages and cities. Also, significant, in my view, is Schad’s observation that the sermons were not particularly eloquent or effective in his view. No doubt Schad was evaluating the sermons from the perspective of a Lutheran concern to arouse emotions and to “move the heart.” As far as Schad could tell, these Anabaptists did not show evidence of having their hearts moved. He noted that during the preaching “some were standing, some were leaning against trees, many were seated, many lay on their sides, some lay face down, some were napping and some even sleeping.” Moreover, he noted the rather undignified strategy for keeping people awake: “One man was appointed to walk constantly among them with a candle like the cupper in the public bath and shake the sleepers and nap-takers, saying, ‘Get up, Brother,’ or ‘Wake up, Brother, and hear the Word of the Lord!”[16] Now, while this approach to maintaining consciousness during worship may have seemed rather crass to a Lutheran minister who was no doubt concerned with symptoms of personal motivation and emotional arousal as criteria for authentic worship; for the gathered Anabaptists, the appointment of a waker-upper could be read as a simple iteration of their habits of mutual correction as a strategy of maintaining obedient bodies and group solidarity.

And while Schad’s account can provide us with a surface sketch of the apparent techniques of Anabaptist worship ritual and the central role of separation as a theme, it does not provide evidence for the particular experience of separation that might have been evoked or produced in such a worship service, apart from the apparent nonverbal feedback to the sermon observed by Schad. Nor does Schad’s account really deal with the subjective experience of simply having joined one’s own body to this alternative social body, of having chosen Christ through showing up in a clandestine meeting. To fill in that texture of subjective experience, I turn to what apparently became a central feature of Anabaptist worship—hymn-writing and singing. Here I will draw on the songs found in the earliest edition of the Ausbund—that well-known collection of martyr hymns still used by the Amish in their worship, edited recently into a critical edition of English translations by Robert Riall and Galen Peters.

The songs of the Ausbund are a rich resource for ascertaining the contents of early Anabaptist self-understanding and religious experience. Perhaps especially because they are hymn texts designed for bodily and communal experience of singing, do these hymn texts provoke a greater appreciation for Anabaptist spiritual experience. Rebecca Slough has argued that hymn singing “can create a sense of communal unity, cohesiveness, or esprit de corps that is palpable.” While one way of understanding the particular kind of unity and cohesiveness that is created might be to study either the tunes or practices associated with group singing, I will focus—rhetorician that I am—on the texts themselves. What kinds of ritual claims were made in these songs and what experiences of separation are articulated?

In a song by Michael Schneider, one of the prisoners at the Passau castle where the core collection of songs in the Ausbund was written, we find an articulation of separation that is repeated again and again throughout these texts. “Give heed, you peoples altogether here on this earth,” proclaims the song, “If you would be saved, then you must leave your sins, follow Christ the Lord, and live according to his will.”[17] Furthermore, “Whoever wants to have fellowship with him…must also do like him here on this earth…(and) must have much pain here for the sake of the name.” [18] The basic call here is simple: to be saved, you must turn away from your sins and follow after Christ, which if you do will lead to pain and suffering. Note that this proclamation is not made to a withdrawn few, but to the peoples of the earth; it is an act of witness. All are called to leave their sins and follow Christ. Because I read this text as a performance or a ritual event, the order of the events in this proclamation are important. The first event is not a moved heart, but a leaving of sins, followed by a following of Christ, and then by a living according to his will, and finally by the expectation of pain and suffering. This conversion sequence appears again and again in Ausbund hymns, in this order. I suggest that the singing of such hymns with the particular call to repentance, following after Christ, and expecting suffering, profoundly shaped the experience and self-understanding of early Anabaptist communities.

In other hymns this salvation sequence is placed in a context that emphasizes the centrality of suffering to an even greater extent. For example, another text attributed to Michael Schneider begins with the expression of a desire to sacrifice—meaning a desire to make a witness through martyrdom: “Lord God Father on your throne, we, your dear children, want now to bring you the sacrifice to praise your name, just as you have prepared it to your honor and glory.”[19] In this hymn, the sacrifice of martyrdom is construed not so much as an act of self-denial as an act of liberation from the powers of the world: “Lord God Father, Pharaoh has long hindered us and has not wanted to let us go to bring you the sacrifice. But now the sea is dividing. Help us, O Father our Lord, to press through with joy.”[20] Following this allusion to the liberation of the Hebrews from Egypt, the song offers a prayer for persecutors: “Lord God Father, we pray to you for all who afflict us that you would graciously forgive them all their sin. Since they do not understand what they have done to us, may you grant them your grace.” The movement here from an identification with the Hebrews against the Pharaoh that God is about to destroy to an appeal for God’s mercy on the persecutors who do not understand what they are doing (clearly an allusion to the crucifixion of Christ) suggests something of the sometimes contradictory experiences or emotions produced by the posture of separated suffering, as well as the use of contrasting biblical materials to account for or give meaning to these experiences of intense pain. The persecutor is both an enemy from which one is about to be liberated as well as a sinner who needs God’s mercy. The Anabaptist subject is both a believer separated from evil of the persecutor and a witness to the persecutor: “Lord God Father, open up their heart that they may recognize what is the right faith, by which we now are fulfilling and by which we are giving testimony with our blood—your word, which is the good truth—and by which we are confessing your name.”[21] Here I suggest we have the characteristic form of Anabaptist witness and persuasion—a bodily identification with Jesus Christ that leads to the kind of spectacular public suffering in which is found liberation from the powers and by which the word of Christ—the good news of the gospel—is persuasively proclaimed. Far from a morbid desire for death, what is articulated here is a decision to claim the victory over death’s “sting” that is proclaimed in the gospel. These texts announce inner experiences and feelings such as praise and joy, but such inner experiences are the result of more than the motivation for the act of turning toward Christ and identifying with his suffering. We might say, in other words, that by contrast with a ritual practice that seeks to move the heart so as to empower the body, Anabaptist worship is the articulation of the body into solidarity with Christ, so as to move the heart. As Riall, the translator of the recent critical edition of the early Ausbund hymns, puts it in his characterization these texts, “(Christ) does not dwell in bread and wine and cannot be appropriated by eating or by observing rites. Such was not only valueless but a delusion and idolatry. The place instead where Christ was truly received was in the pursuit of holiness and the experience of suffering.”[22] Of course, the reception of Christ and his suffering and the joy which follows, is not a settled accomplishment. It must be named, performed, and asserted again and again. The fact that Michael Schneider, the author of the texts just discussed, apparently recanted his Anabaptist convictions, reminds us of the temporality of such ritual texts and experiences. What largely works one day, does not necessarily work as well the next. Indeed, as we’ve seen, what seems to work at one moment in a text is not necessarily consistent with what apparently works at the next moment in the text. One moment the persecutor is Pharaoh about to be destroyed; the next he is a sinner who does not know what he is doing. One moment the point is separation from evil; the next moment the point is witness to the persecutor.

That changing versions of this partly ambiguous and sometimes contradictory experience of separation through spectacular suffering shaped the reception of practically all Anabaptist liturgical practices is a hypothesis that remains to be tested. However, I would offer anecdotal evidence concerning the practices of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

My example of how the experience of baptism was reshaped through the expectation of spectacular suffering comes from the way in which the Hutterite Chronicle tells the story of the first baptism. In that account the decision of the Zurich circle of radicals to rebaptize one another is framed as a decision to expect and to accept suffering. Furthermore, the account states that “This was the beginning of separation from the world and its evil ways.” Clearly this account reads back into that first rebaptism ceremony a commitment to separation that was not present in that circle at that time. But it does suggest the power of the ritual text of separation as a spiritual practice by the time this account was written.

This sense in which baptism was a decision that led one into a life of suffering separation is continued in accounts and descriptions of baptism by numerous Anabaptist writers. As late as 1744, American Mennonite minister Henry Funk could restate the standard Anabaptist view, found also in Ausbund hymns and many early Anabaptist writers that baptism involved three dimensions—baptism with water, with the spirit, and with “the passion of Jesus.” This third baptism with blood and suffering is named by Funk as that baptism by which Jesus “conquered and overcame the devil, and sin, and triumphed over them, and thereby opened a way into his everlasting kingdom…”[23] That baptism of suffering is to be shared by Jesus’ disciples, according to Funk: “And in this manner also is the affliction and suffering of the disciples and followers of Christ, which they endure for his sake, in bearing his cross after him, called a baptism.”[24]

Likewise, we find in Anabaptist descriptions of the Lord’s Supper a similar overwriting of the ritual by the expectation of suffering separation. In the Schleitheim Brotherly Union, for example, the bread and the cup are said to pose a stark choice for participants between mutually exclusive loyalties: “We cannot be partakers at the same time of the table of the Lord and the table of devils…thus all who follow the devil and the world, have no part with those who have been called out of the world unto God.”[25] The well-known Anabaptist tendency to identify with the crushed grains that are made into one loaf also confirms this orientation to the Lord’s Supper.

Perhaps we can best summarize the posture of the Christian body in Anabaptist ritual and rhetoric by recalling a statement made in an early Anabaptist tract entitled “On the Satisfaction of Christ” that contrasts Anabaptist views on the atonement with those of Catholics and Protestants. Addressing the Protestants, the text argues that “they would like to obey God with the soul and not also with the body, so that they might be without persecution.” This text articulates clearly what was at stake for Anabaptists in framing separation as spectacular suffering: through suffering separation not only the soul, but also the body, could be moved in obedience to Christ.

That form of separation that stressed suffering was clearly replaced in later Mennonite practice by other iterations or framings. In my research, I want to examine how separation is experienced during the shift to humility theology, where the primary opposition in Mennonite rhetoric is between the proud and the humble. Further changes could no doubt be identified in the emergence of a doctrinal era, where separation is defined along fundamentalist lines. But that is a project for another day.

In the meantime, I want to speculate about three effects of this kind of separation rhetoric and ritual that I have identified—both in its earlier form of suffering and in its later forms. To my way of thinking, separation is a Mennonite ritual posture that has persisted despite changes in theological identity, even during the adoption of theological or doctrinal forms that contradicted separation. Separation is less a claim than it is a ritual text, a habit of reading, speaking, acting, and witnessing that provides a distinctive challenge and particular resources for those who are its subjects. Among those resources are 1) an increased capacity to sustain loyalties and identifications discrepant with conventional wisdom and ideology; 2) an increased tendency toward starting over with a newly separated community of believers as a way to deal with church conflict (often experienced by separation-minded people as a choice between apostacy and faithfulness); 3) an ability to appropriate spiritual and theological resources from traditions that contradict basic Anabaptist convictions while overwriting those contradictions with habits of life and discipleship that follow from Anabaptist convictions that are now performed more than articulated. In other words, separation helps explain why some Mennonite young men became C.O.’s during the first two world wars, even though they couldn’t explain why. It might explain why people in my parent’s conservative Mennonite church who have practically no interest in anything that goes by the name Anabaptist theology would at the same time never dream of including members of the military in their church. In a world where Anabaptist convictions so contradict conventional wisdom that it becomes difficult for many Mennonites to explain their Christian commitments, rituals or performances that reassert the otherness of the believing body without requiring explanation or elaboration can enable ordinary people to manage the struggle to be faithful to defenseless gospel of Jesus, even while they are reading spiritual and devotional materials that neglect to advocate for an upside-down kingdom.

Rather than search for new forms of spirituality that can sustain Mennonite commitments, this analysis suggests that the best way to sustain radical Christian commitments in the Mennonite tradition is to cultivate practices that situate members as the bodily witnesses of a separated, exiled (not necessarily withdrawn!) community, liberated to identify with Jesus and with Jesus’ sufferings, and thus moved to the experience of joy and praise.