Mennonite Spirituality: A Reassessment of "Humility Theology" in North America in the Nineteenth Century (2011)

Abstract: Historical interpretations regarding the spiritual state of the Mennonite church in the nineteenth century varied over the past century. In seminal essay of 1983. historian Theron F. Schlabach argued that the traditional, and authentically Anabaptist, emphasis on among Mennonites in North America was supplanted during the course of the nineteenth century by new focus on humility, thanks largely to Pietist influences. By examining the deeper history of the motif in the western monastic spiritual tradition, and the way it was absorbed in early Anabaptism, this article challenges the view that there was shift from to and offers an alternative interpretation of nineteenth-century North American Mennonite The nineteenth century was particularly significant era in the history of Mennonite spirituality in North America. Mennonite scholars in the twentieth century frequently identified the period as time when the Mennonite Church was in decline, weakened by outside influences, above all by Pietist impulses. One historian, for example, Samuel F. Pannabecker, called it the Dark Ages in American Mennonite history.(1.) Robert Friedmann's Mennonite Piety Through the Centuries (1949) identified the nineteenth century as period of spiritual decline from the pristine sixteenth-century Swiss Anabaptist beginnings characterized by strict obedience, brotherhood, discipleship, suffering, and radical world-changing witness.(2.) In its place, he argued, came gradual shift to the inward emotional warmth of Pietism. Several decades of thorough historical research by Theron Schlabach, professor emeritus of history at Goshen College, provided somewhat more sympathetic view- of nineteenth-century Mennonite Central to Schlabach's argument was his identification of shift in Mennonite theological vocabulary from an Anabaptist-inspired suffering to humility shaped by Pietist influences, which he identified as occurring around the end of the eighteenth century.(3.) For century, from the 1770s and 1780s until the so called Mennonite 'Great Awakening' or 'Quickening' of the 1880s and 1890s/' Schlabach argued, humility would be constant and overriding note in American Mennonite theology and outlook.(4.) This essay will suggest that these historical assessments of nineteenth-century Mennonite spirituality should be reevaluated. One major problem with the traditional analysis of Mennonite spirituality in the nineteenth century is that most interpreters, as church historian Dennis Martin has noted, have used Anabaptism and Pietism as the two poles for analyzing Mennonite spirituality. Thus they juxtapose interiorizing Pietism against externalizing Anabaptism.(5.) This approach dominates Friedmann's analysis and is still present, although more muted, in later interpreters. This inner versus outer argument has led historians to equate the spiritual theme of with the inwardness of Pietism. The question arises, however, as to whether there were also overlapping and complementary views between Anabaptism and Pietism.(6.) Another problem with dichotomous analysis is that it often fails to appreciate the richness of in its long development within the history of Christian Martin notes that Mennonite historians tend to assume post-Reformation version of without investigating its earlier meaning and function. A closer examination of in the monastic tradition, he argues, confirms that it cannot simply be equated with an inward piety, but was a comprehensive attitude related to ascetic discipline, martyrdom (both literal and figurative), and cross bearing. ...(7.) This broader understanding of suggests alternative conclusions about the origin and role of in the North American Mennonite Church in the nineteenth century. …