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This thesis exposes a deep tension within the historical understanding and practice of pacifism i... more This thesis exposes a deep tension within the historical understanding and practice of pacifism in the Mennonite tradition. Beginning with early Anabaptist understandings of the union of the believer with Christ I show that the Martyrs Mirror is a transposition of this union-with-Christ tradition into post-martyrdom settings. However, alongside this spiritual understanding of pacifism there has always also been the reality that pacifism is a form of civility. Anabaptist practices of pacifism partially fit with emerging early-modern concerns about ordering the masses, laicizing the faith, ending barbarity, and constructing secure, productive societies. Secularity, as Charles Taylor has shown, takes over aspects of the church’s gospel of peace and re-deploys them as instrumentalist techniques to further thisworldly human flourishing. In the twentieth-century this creates a continuity between the secular trajectory and forms of Mennonite peacemaking that seem not to depend on the churc...
This thesis exposes a deep tension within the historical understanding and practice of pacifism i... more This thesis exposes a deep tension within the historical understanding and practice of pacifism in the Mennonite tradition. Beginning with early Anabaptist understandings of the union of the believer with Christ I show that the Martyrs Mirror is a transposition of this union-with-Christ tradition into post-martyrdom settings. However, alongside this spiritual understanding of pacifism there has always also been the reality that pacifism is a form of civility. Anabaptist practices of pacifism partially fit with emerging early-modern concerns about ordering the masses, laicizing the faith, ending barbarity, and constructing secure, productive societies. Secularity, as Charles Taylor has shown, takes over aspects of the church’s gospel of peace and re-deploys them as instrumentalist techniques to further thisworldly human flourishing. In the twentieth-century this creates a continuity between the secular trajectory and forms of Mennonite peacemaking that seem not to depend on the churc...