 Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with Steven Russell and you've written a book about non-resistance. You've studied an awful lot of church history. You teach here at Faith Builders. We can kind of see some of your work here. Just did a class. And let's just have a kind of off-the-cuff conversation about church history and non-resistance and what we can learn from that. And I know that you've written about the Mennonites in Germany becoming Nazis, so why don't we think about that? So yeah, I did, I graduated from Sharon Mennonite Bible Institute. I did my my graduating thesis on the Mennonite Nazis. So it sounds very strange to say that in the same sentence, but you had Mennonites who basically over the course of time lost their values of the two kingdoms of of non-violence. Yeah, there's quite an interesting piece of history that went into that. Mm-hmm. I know a Mennonite guy who was, I knew him when I was about your age, who then was, he had been in the military. He was one of the Nazis. Really? A Mennonite guy. Wait, wait, where did you meet him? He was in southern Germany. Wow. Now it's long enough ago. I don't know that I remember his name. Mm-hmm. I also, in our own community, we have a young man who was 16 and was not Mennonite, but was drafted at the very end, has a very sad story. Wow. They were taking him across, I think they were sending him from the eastern part of Germany to the west to fight the Americans and Canadians and British and he was just outside of Dresden when the allies fire-bombed it. And to this day, he says, he says, why did they do that? We were beat. It didn't help anybody, but they bombed in such a way. They had actually come to realize they bombed a certain way. It kind of makes like a tornado and draws in air and just makes this wild fire and kills everyone. If it doesn't burn you, it asphyxiates you. And he saw that he was just, he was fortunate. He was just outside of Dresden and the next day they were going to move through there and go to the to the western front and you know, that's something he experienced. And then I, when I was 23, I had an opportunity to work with a tent crusade in Germany, all German, and Lutheran minister who got me the job had also been in the military. I don't know if he was Nazi, but he fought for Germany. On the German side. He fought on the German side then. Wow. And his sister, his sister was, he was a minister and his sister was a minister and she told me she said, we could have known. She said, we closed our eyes. We were afraid. We could have known what was happening. You know, stories like a train might come to, there was a place in one of the cities where they bring handicapped children and they never left. She said, we could have known that they were being killed. This is at the early point when they were killing people. The generation that either was teenagers or 20-something and fought for Hitler, a lot of them were very, very sad about it. A lot of them became Christians because of the realizing how bad it was. But, you know, they felt like the allies in World War One had mistreated them and that's one reason they that Hitler could get them to fall. Stir up the population. Yeah, exactly. Wow. There's a there's a family here at our winter term and the won't the wife's great-great-grandfather or something like that left the Alsace because of the impending war between Prussia and France in 1870 and there weren't many but but he was non-resistant. He was in a Amish home and they sent him here. They just sent their son who was eligible to be drafted and they didn't want to be drafted if there were. So the ones who still believed it left in the late 1800s and there were just none left. When Germany came together, Germany is one of the last states in Europe to unify and it's after that war with France. 1870. Yes. And then that war is used as the way to unify the the German states and they did try to unify about 30 years before that and it didn't work. But they did get a conference together and they were talking about a constitution and at that conference one man said where I'm from there are Mennonites and I think that they don't go to the military. There were at least two Mennonite representatives and they were from another part of Germany and they said we don't want any special privileges. We want to be Germans just like anyone else. So here was a non-Mennonite saying maybe we should put into the constitution a provision for those that are COs, conscientious objectors and then two Mennonites that were part of this whole thing said no, no, no. We're good. We're just good. Wow. So right there you have a very deep root of nationalism, like nationalistic pride. Yes, you have nationalism and you have like I said those Mennonites and Amish that really held tightly to it they many of them had left in the previous century and then after the Napoleonic Wars many more left. During the Napoleonic Wars it was hard to get out, but as soon as the Napoleonic Wars were done a lot of Amish came to the US and those were the ones that still held to this. So once you get rid of them there's just a scattering. It's a long slippery road down and by the time you and then World War I you start having a lot of Mennonites are joining then World War II was wholesale. All the men you can go find the magazines or the newspapers that the Mennonite churches in Germany had during World War I and they're just full of here are our brave boys that died the last month fighting for their homeland. Okay, so then here's the here is one question at that point. Would you still say they're Mennonites because like that's such a core value is non-resistance and for them to be sent. Yeah. They conceive of themselves as that. Now here's what I would say I would say it's not that that non-resistance is not just a core value for us. It actually is a core value of conversion. Wow. But I'm not gonna say Christians who don't believe in this are not Christians. So I would say yeah, they have lost a good a tremendously important part of what Anabaptism teaches, but they still self identify that way and I guess I would say I hope there's a little bit more of a germ there that we could or a little ember that we could you know Yeah, we could we could fan it and bring it back to a flame. But I also think we are in a time when we can be talking to our brothers and sisters outside of the Anabaptism who are saying things aren't going right. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, and I'm a Christian and I'm seeing it and in my church is allowing things that historically have not been allowed. Mm-hmm. Oh, everything seems to be going to pot and I think we have an opening to talk about believers, a believer's church that is a discipling church and as a discipling church it expects separation from the world, not isolation, separation. And I think separation has three aspects. There are three nones and three positives. The nones are non conformity, non accumulation and non resistance. The positives are in the same order faith, hope and love. Wow. And and those are those are those are meant for everyone. And but what has happened is especially in American, I'll speak of that because I'm an American, in the American setting for so many of us Christians, our Christianity is more American than it is biblical or Christian. Over in Europe, mm-hmm, all the churches except for the Anabaptist were state churches. Mm-hmm. And every state had its own religion. So if you wanted to live in England, well, England was a little bit different, but if you wanted to live in France, there was a little bit of a allowance for a few Protestants, but it was essentially Catholic. And if you lived in Saxony, you were going to be a Lutheran. And if you lived in Bavaria, you're going to be Catholic. And the church and state worked together. So the church supported the state and then the state would get rid of heretics, etc. That's what what it was over there. When you came to the New World, some of the English colonies had state or colonial churches. Mm-hmm. But you know what? If you didn't want to, if you were a Puritan and you didn't want to submit to the Congregationalist state church, what do you do? You go into the frontier, you get away from civilization. So the United, first the British colonies and then the United States because of the vast area. And also in the Constitution, it was written in that this federal government cannot have, cannot support the church. It's to allow all churches their freedom. State governments could still have state churches, but not the federal government. And then the last state to get rid of its state church was Massachusetts. But my point is here there was so much land, there was so much freedom, there was so much space. If you didn't like what the people were telling you, you just went somewhere else. Then the revivals hit and they split almost every church. And so you had the the more conservative people, probably resisting revivalism, and others saying, no, this is giving us more life. And so you have churches splitting. And so what you have is a vast multiplication of churches, but it's all because there's so much freedom. And that's what we Americans really worship is freedom. And so we love it. We want to worship God, but we love it that we have this freedom. We can do what we want. We can start our own church, however we want to do it. We can be conservative. We can be liberal. We can be anything. And I think that it's the freedom and the because of the immense land that we lived in and the possibility of going anywhere you wanted to and doing what you wanted to. You could remake yourself into whatever you wanted to be. And that's the American dream. So we are more many of us are more American than we are Christian. We're Christian, but we're more and that's a creeping problem among us. Conservative Anabaptists that we're we are also in danger of letting the American dream and being an American overwhelm what our forefathers said. And that's one reason when they first came here, they published the first really big book published in the United States was The Martyr's Mirror to teach the Mennonite and Amish boys and that what what their forefathers had died for over in Europe. There was so much freedom here. It was so appealing to think maybe we should help out and you know things like that. Yeah, this is my history is so important though. Oh, yes. Yeah. Oh, yeah, because because our especially my generation is super confused right now, you know because they're like, I don't know what to do with this polarization that they're seeing and where where do we fit in? You like are we or aren't we in it? Yeah. Well, one of the big questions today is what is a human being and one of the issues that comes out of that is is our sexuality and how we express that and So the question of same-sex marriage and all that kind of thing is is I think the key issue is what does it mean to be a Human and that's what the church has to address these other things come out of that But one of the things we have to be careful about is we always have to love that other person And I think sometimes the way they are young people here. Some people talk about these situations They hear these people as haters and demonize the other person. They demonize it. That is not what we're called to We're called to to embrace and love the other person and call them to what they're meant To be as a human being and that may mean struggle, you know All of us if we're Christians, we if we're really Christians we struggle, you know There's there's always something in me that that isn't quite yet in line with what God wants and so there is going to be a struggle Unfortunately for some people it may be in this area of sexuality and just telling them it doesn't matter doesn't help them and if We are right and if the if God really expects a certain approach to that and they're encouraged to do whatever they feel like In the end they're going to end up at the very bottom and they're going to crash And if that happens people like us need to be around to help them. It's not going to be easy Yeah, yeah. Oh, that was interesting. Wow. Maybe we need more and about this historians. I agree. Yeah Well, we just we did just interview Kyle and he is getting a master's degree in that field So that's that's wonderful. I tell some people one of the most frustrating things to me is that the people that graduate here That go on to finish their college elsewhere and sometimes go to grad school like Kyle They tend to go for English and I said what is it? Why haven't I been able to get anybody to go for history church? Yeah, that's been very frustrating. Well, maybe this this will help inspire a few people to To go do it to go for that. Wow. Wow. Well, that was fun. Thanks for okay to following that rabbit trail Yeah, I really enjoyed that actually