Unity in Difference: Hans Urs Von Balthasar's Christology as Resource for a Mennonite Theology of Peace

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 this-worldly 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 church’s confession of faith. I discuss James Reimer’s concern with the worldliness of contemporary Mennonite theological ethics and show how he used Paul Tillich’s Protestant principle to envision a trinitarian pacifist ethic that was both immanent and transcendent. I discuss the limitations of Reimer’s use of principle to solve problems in Mennonite peace theology. I then go on to show how Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s Chalcedonian Christology provides a dogmatic momentum for pacifism in a secular age. By the active contemplation of the descent of God into the world the church mingles spiritually and ethically in Christ’s on-going and Scripturally revealed overcoming of evil in the world. The church assumes a Christic unity in difference in the world that is nonresistant both to the Father and to the human community even in its evil manifestation. It takes to itself Christ’s embrace of the human and offers it as a return of thanks to God. Believers absorb the collision of a world that kicks back against the goads, refusing the incarnation’s synthesis of its deep fissures. The solidarity of Christ with his enemies is the soul of the church, issuing in peaceful judgement of the world.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD