Reckoning in Mennonite Peace Theology: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Realism and Four Waves of Development

This article sketches four waves of Mennonite peace theology—nonresistance, transformation, reckoning, and responsibility—by recapitulating the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism in their development. The first wave accepted Niebuhr’s distinction between nonresistance and nonviolence and chose the former (Guy Franklin Hershberger). The second wave was realistic about the self-interest of the state but tended not to be realistic about Christian pacifist groups, at least not in the Niebuhrian sense of accepting sin as a permanent factor in history in the Christian communities they conceptualized and the vision inspiring peacebuilding beyond churches (John Howard Yoder and John Paul Lederach). The third wave is realistic about the church, interrogating and reckoning with sin in Anabaptist church histories, institutions, and communities (Malinda Berry). The emerging fourth wave carries forward elements of the three other waves in the course of developing movements exercising self-critical responsibility. The grassroots movement Mennonite Action is a “front light” of this fourth wave.