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Goshen president calls for new school of thought
By Jodi H. Beyeler Goshen CollegePage:
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GOSHEN, Ind. — The time for “yes” is here, said Goshen College President Jim Brenneman.
Goshen College President Jim Brenneman, right, talks with J. Lawrence Burkholder, Goshen’s president from 1971 to 1984, after Brenneman’s Jan. 15 sermon, which credited Burkholder for pioneering a “culture of assent” at the college. — Photo by Jodi H. Beyeler/Goshen College
In his Jan. 15 chapel sermon, “Getting to Yes and Amen! The New GC School of Thought” — based on 2 Cor. 1:20-22 — Brenneman juxtaposed the prior school of thought of a culture of dissent with a new culture of assent, and affirmed that both are needed.
He credited President Emeritus J. Lawrence Burkholder, who was recognized in person during the service, with much influence.
From the mid-1920s to late 1980s, the college’s dominant way of thinking was one of “radical dissent, nonconforming idealism and prophetic disestablishmentarianism,” Brenneman said.
He pointed to the earliest Anabaptists as inspiring dissent.
“They said ‘no’ to the fundamental religious and civil order of the time,” he said. “They rejected the church-state union, which had dominated Christianity for some thousand years. They championed human freedom and the separation of church and state, and they were persecuted and executed for beliefs which have since been enshrined in all Western democracies.
“These early Mennonites-Anabaptists were also idealists and perfectionists for whom the word compromise was considered sinful… . Unfortunately, because so many of them were silenced and killed during those early years, they never really had the opportunity to try to put into practice a social or political model of how their beliefs might actually have played out in the world of nations and cultures where compromise can be seen as a positive norm.”
This understanding, Brenneman said, led to being on the side of prophets, rather than political leaders; on the side of protesters, rather than the establishment. But, he said as an Old Testament biblical scholar, that understanding doesn’t include the full view of the biblical prophet.
“They came down on the side of the prophetic dissenter largely based on a somewhat narrow understanding of biblical prophets as primarily naysayers and exclusively critical,” he said.
Examples of Goshen’s culture of dissent include the publications of The Anabaptist Vision by H.S. Bender, Goshen dean, which called for Christians to “withdraw from the worldly system and create a Christian social order within the fellowship of the church.”
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