Kalamazoo Mennonite Fellowship
March 1, 2009
Will Fitzgerald
I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. (John 16:12-13)
The early Anabaptists often took this verse literally–that is, they believed that the Spirit would continue to speak new truth to the followers of Jesus, and they expected this to happen. Before they settled down and became “the quiet in the land,” they were contemptuously called the Schwärmer, or enthusiasts, swarming around every new idea. On the one hand, this desire to listen for the immediate leading of the Holy Spirit allowed the early Anabaptists to go beyond the church-state compromises of most other protestants to a ‘new’ truth about the independence of the church from the state. This sense of gave them courage to face martyrdom together, and to build a new kind of life together. It also, unfortunately, led some early Anabaptists to extremes in places like Münster, which gave a bad name to all Anabaptists (to this day among some I have met) and, one might say, to much of the inter-Christian violence of the sixteenth century.
In much smaller ways, I have seen “Spirit-led” or “Spirit-filled” Christians in the Mennonite churches of today. I would like to believe that “the Spirit of truth” still comes to enlighten the people of God, although I have, frankly, seen more evidence of how this has harmed me and the church than has helped it. The basic problem is this, I think. This verse promises that the Spirit will give us new truths. But it is too easy to turn this on its head: if we believe we have a new truth, then it must be a gift of the Spirit. This is the most basic of logical fallacies.
Evangelical Mennonites and other “Bible-believing” Christians get around this problem, in theory, by limiting Jesus’s promise to those truths introduced in the New Testament, which, of course, hadn’t been completed when Jesus made this promise. And then they will discuss how the Spirit will illuminate the Scriptures and provide limited divine guidance to individuals (and, perhaps, the church). But the Spirit will not introduce anything truly “new.” These Christians, too, can fall to the same logical fallacy, however. From “Only scripture can provide true beliefs,” it is too common to leap to “I believe this, so it must be scriptural.” I’d claim this is what happened to the nineteenth century doctrine of dispensational premillennialism so prevalent among American Bible-believing churches today, including some Mennonites.
Frankly, I don’t know where to end up on this matter. I suspect the answer is something like this: The Spirit will use the Scriptures, our experiences, and (at times) direct communication to speak to us what is on God’s heart for us today. The Spirit will never contradict the teachings and example of Jesus, but seeks to deepen our understanding of his teachings and example, and guide us into new applications. If we are wise, we will look to the mistakes of our ancestors (sorry, Münsterites, you were wrong about polygamy; sorry, early Lutherans, you were wrong to slaughter those who disagreed with you) to help us discern whether this new thing is consistent with Jesus’s teaching and example.
As a positive example within the Mennonite family, I think an understanding of what it means for us to be a “peace church” has changed from an understanding of this primarily being about “non-resistance” to a more active proclamation of a good news of peace. This feels, in general, like a deepening understanding of Christ’s peace teachings, just as the early Anabaptists began to understand non-resistance as the way of Christ (partly in reaction to the errors of the Münsterites). It is also true that the Mennonite Church USA is in danger at times of preaching “peace and justice” as a replacement for, rather than as a consequence of, the good news of Jesus Christ, so even this positive example needs to be tempered a bit. So, let us cry out,
Come, Holy Spirit, come;
Let Thy bright beams arise;
Dispel the darkness from our minds,
And open all our eyes.