The American Mennonite Story, 1730-1930 - Edsel Burdge

The connection between the redeemed—between the individual and the redeemed community—is not intrinsic as it was among American Mennonites in the 18th and early 19th century, and of course early Anabaptists as it is in the German Awakening. But this German Awakening gave rise to new groups like the United Brethren, like the Evangelical Association, and so on. And it's these groups that began to make an impact on Mennonite communities as they tried to woo their young people away from their communities into into this new community and so on. And that's what Christian Burkholder is writing against.

Welcome to Anabaptist Perspectives. We are here to discuss theological concerns of Mennonites in America from 1730 to 1930. Our guest is Edsel Burge. So welcome, Edsel. Can you introduce yourself to our audience? Yes. My name is Edsel Burge Jr., and I live in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania.

And I'm married. My wife, Jennifer, and I have been married for 42 years. And I have six children. My oldest is teaching at Faith Builders. My youngest lives in Hagerstown. And I have four—and those are both girls—and I have four boys in between. And I also have seven grandchildren. All right, so there's the familial data out of the way. I'm a member of Shippensburg Christian Fellowship, an unaffiliated conservative Mennonite congregation here in Franklin County.

I did not grow up in a Mennonite home. I started attending a Mennonite church when I was 15 years old and was baptized and joined the church when I was 17. And I have been part of a Mennonite congregation ever since.

I attended Eastern Mennonite College and graduated with a BA in history there. I also got a master's degree in history from Villanova University. I taught school for 12 years. I worked on a number of research and writing projects. And in 2012, I started working at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pentist Studies at Elizabethtown College. And one of my primary duties there is tracking statistical data for various playing groups, particularly the Amish.

When people ask me, "What do I do for a living?" I somewhat jokingly tell them, "I count Amish." And it's sort of a joke, but it's actually not a joke because it is actually what I do. And I've been interested in Mennonite and Anabaptist Mennonite history really since my college years.

I wrote a co-authored a book called Building on the Gospel Foundation, The Mennonites of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, Washington County, Maryland, 1730 to 1970. And that's part of the studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite history series. I also helped to edit the third volume of Documents of Brotherly Love: Dutch Mennonite Aid to Swiss Anabaptists, which came out in 2023. Currently, I'm involved in another project, a new translation of The Martyrs' Mirror. And I'm on the editorial committee for that. And my primary task there is to write the footnotes.

So does that cover the bases? Certainly so. Thank you for that introduction. In 2024, how many Amish are there? Almost 400,000. That includes members and unbaptized children. Yeah. And they are located primarily in the United States, some in Canada, and a very small group in Bolivia.

I mean, that does not include the various Amish, Mennonite groups, any of the car driving groups. And of course, that also doesn't include the horse and buggy old order Mennonites.

The horse and buggy old order Mennonites are probably around 40,000. The various conservative Mennonites and Amish Mennonites, probably around 75,000. So that kind of gives you—and of course, all those groups would have come out of the Swiss Brethren tradition, started in Switzerland. And as people moved into the Palatinate and, of course, migrated to North America at various points, many in the 18th century, some later on in the early 19th century.

But they all have that Swiss background as opposed to what we colloquially refer to as the Russian Mennonites, who actually have a Dutch Mennonite background by way of Prussia and then to then to Russia and then finally to North America here. So what I have focused on is mainly groups that have this Swiss Palatinate background rather than the Dutch Russian background.

Yeah. And that's the stream or the tradition that we are here to talk about today. Specifically, from 1730 to 1930 are the parameters that we are setting. And by setting those, that may seem a bit arbitrary, but what I was aiming to catch was the range soon after Mennonites arrived in America until the point where now living memory is very much fading.

So by setting at the beginning of our range in 1730, we are only 11 years after the construction of the Hansher house, and we're between the time that Christopher Dock settled in Pennsylvania and he wrote his book on school management. So in 1730, America was still somewhat fresh for Mennonites.

And the end of our range being 1930, this is the year that John F. Funk died and two years after Daniel Kaufman published Doctrines of the Bible. And it's also at the edge of living memory. Few of us are still old enough to remember the times before 1930. Well, I think that even people born in 1930 would be scarcely able to remember it. I mean, that's a fair point. You're talking about people now in their upper 90s, and I suppose a few souls are still around in their hundreds and so on, but they would have been children during that era. It is interesting to note, however, that within my living memory, I was able to talk to people in various points in my research who lived in the 1890s, who I mean, who were born in the 1890s.

And they did have memories of the latter end of this period we're talking about. Those interviews were always very interesting. So yeah, so in a sense, if we had talked to the generation before that's now has passed off the scene and so on, there is sort of a connection there that we could have made if we made it. Technically speaking, the first Mennonite to arrive in North America and Pennsylvania was in 1683, a man by the name of Jan Linssen, a weaver.

He was one of 13 families from northern Germany, Krefeld area. And most of the rest of them were Quaker. Some of them had been raised Mennonite, but had left the Mennonite church to become Quakers. And so we have this one lonely little person. We're not even sure if his wife was still living.

There's record of him being married in Europe and so on, but no reference related to his wife here in once he gets here to North America, which is not, yeah, it's not surprising. So we know virtually very little about him other than that he was part of what became the Germantown Mennonite congregation. As over the next dozen years or so on, more Mennonites, most of them actually from northern Germany and from the Netherlands. And so there was kind of a Dutch North German, low German kind of quality to the Germantown congregation, which is a little bit different than the later migrations, the later migrations starting in 1709 when we first have a set of Palatinate persons from the Palatinate who have this Swiss Brethren background migrate here to Pennsylvania.

Initially, there was some tension between these two groups, but they were able to work it out. And then in the subsequent decades up to, let's say, the 1780s, there's around, it says maybe between 3,000 to 5,000 Mennonites, maybe around 500 Amish who migrate from Europe to North America, settle in Pennsylvania. During the 18th century, some of them began to move down into Maryland, into Virginia, and so on, established small communities down there. So that's the—and so they're bringing with them, for the most part, an understanding that is formed by that early Swiss background. But the other thing that enters into the picture is that in the—well, actually starting in the late 16th century, in 1575, Menno Simon's writings were translated.

His Fundament book was translated from Dutch into German. And other Dutch Mennonite sources were translated from Dutch into German. Dirk Philips's first, the first edition of Dirk's writings came out in 1715 in German. And then, of course, the very, very important statement, the Dirk reconfession, which was a Dutch Mennonite confession and was a confession that was drawn up to bring a number of Dutch Mennonite groups together to reunite them in 1632. In 1660, a group of Swiss Brethren leaders in Alsace at Odenheim adopted that confession. And it was translated into German and became a very important, very important document. And in 1725, at a gathering of Mennonite church leaders in Pennsylvania, they too adopted it, made a statement that this is our confession of faith.

And so Dirk, even though it's Dutch, has had a very significant impact on Swiss Brethren background, North American Mennonites and their theological understandings. It was used in catechism to instruct new converts and still among the old orders, both the Amish and the Mennonites. It is used as kind of a basis.

I know that there are still some Beachy Amish who use it in that way. So it's a very, very important document. And any understanding of the American Mennonite scene theologically always has to go back to what Dirk says. Though the Dutch seem to—I mean, the North American Mennonites seem to have read it kind of through their Swiss Brethren lenses. For example, when it talks about leaders, it refers to the role of deaconesses. Well, the Swiss Brethren really didn't pick up on that very much. There was an odd case in the late 19th or early 20th century where a bishop down in Virginia actually did ordain deaconesses. But that was kind of an anomaly.

And the other thing was the whole question of the ban. Of course, Dirk does advocate the practice of avoidance. And that became a controversial issue even in Europe, gave rise to the Amish division in which Jacob Amen, probably reading Menno Simons, maybe Dirk Philips, but the Dirk reconfession, all of which advocated the ban. And in his viewpoint, as he looked around him, I think particularly in Alsace there where the Brethren were facing some threats of acculturation, he perceived that part of the problem was is that they had departed from what these earlier sources said. Of course, he didn't have the historical awareness of knowing that this was what was happening there, that these were actually Dutch things that Swiss Brethren people were using.

But I think using kind of in a, how should we say, reading them through their Swiss Brethren lenses and kind of glossing over the parts that really didn't fit with that. So anyhow, my point though is that decide that Dirk is very important for understanding American Mennonite theological understanding and so on. Okay?

All right. Yeah. That's very helpful context. So I want to make sure I caught the timeline right that you were describing. Did I hear correctly that the Swiss Brethren had already adopted the Dirk confession prior to the migration to North America? At least in the Alsace and probably in the Palatinate. I'm not sure so much up in Switzerland if all of them did.

That's always a question. Though in 1702, a samoband or a collection of writings was published and probably by the Merkel press in Basel. And this included letters of Michael Sattler and also well-known Dutch Mennonite martyr, Thomas van Imbroich, and so on. And interesting enough, included the Dirk reconfession. But it's a Dirk reconfession that is adapted. I mean, it's the basic text of Dirk, but there's additions to it. One particular addition is an extra article. It actually has not 18 articles, but 19 articles, but an extra article on the Holy Spirit, which is very interesting. The other thing that is interesting is that in talking about marriage, it seems to come down much more strongly against the whole idea of divorce and remarriage than, let's say, the Swiss Brethren or even the early Dutch Anabaptists did, even the Hutterites, all of which, using Erasmus's Latin annotations of the New Testament, had held to the idea that adultery broke the marriage bond and thus divorce and remarriage were permissible for the innocent party.

Now, that's not a viewpoint I hold to. I think if Golden Opels is moving it toward that direction, I think that's a good thing. But that is the historical reality. The Dirk does have a niche there, has a place there for helping to understand what are the theological underpinnings of our faith. And that was actually why the Pennsylvania Mennonites in 1725 adopted it, because still in the popular imagination, the Wiedertäufer are Anabaptists, which is people like to use the term Anabaptists today. I think it's an awful term. I'm not sure why we all got stuck with it, but we've got stuck with it.

It's inaccurate etymologically. So we're not rebaptizers. That's something that our opponents accused us of. But it was still kind of a term of approprium. And so the American Mennonites, one of their purposes in adopting it was so that they could give it to the English authorities to say, "This is what we believe. We're peaceful. We aren't rebellious or anything like that." And interesting enough, in 1712, the Germantown Mennonites had asked the Dutch Mennonites to translate the Dirk reconfession into English so that they could essentially—they weren't reading English. They were using Holland Dutch or maybe Lowland German or even High German—so that they could give it to their English neighbors and to the authorities so they could see, "This is what we believe."

And the 1725 gathering or some people refer to it as a conference of leaders adopted it. And then it was published in—then the Dirk reconfession was again published in English in 1727. Now, it was published in German, okay, a number of different times.

And like I said, was often used as kind of a framework for catechism or instruction of converts before baptism.

Oh, and the other thing I should just mention is here I'm blathering on, but the term Mennonite, when did these Swiss people become Mennonites? Well, that happened in the Palatinate in the 1650s and '60s because as Swiss Brethren people moved into the Palatinate and into Alsace, being pushed out of Zurich primarily. And this is on the end of—at the end of the termination of the 30 Years' War, in which the Palatinate was a major battleground. It was devastated. The elector of the Palatinate, Karl Ludwig, needed warm bodies to farm his lands. And so he was not picky. And so he actually granted—in 1664, he granted a concession to these folks. But to get around the Holy Roman Empire's ban of Anabaptists or Wiedertäufer, he didn't call them Wiedertäufer.

He referred to them as Mennonites. And he did that because the Dutch Mennonites were these very prosperous, peaceful. Evidently, everyone could know they had a good reputation. And so by—this is not guilt by association. This is innocence by association. These are folks who are Mennonites.

And so that's when these Swiss Brethren people became known as Mennonites. It was there in the Palatinate. And of course, they carried with—and they accepted that. They accepted that nomenclature and carried it with them here to North America. So that's how we Swiss Brethren background folks became Mennonites. It's all because of Charles Ludwig.

This is excellent context. Thank you for walking us through those things. And so with our subject today being Mennonites in North America, what you're describing happened only decades prior to the migration to North America. Yes. So can you highlight some of the theological concerns among Mennonites in North America during this era?

Well, okay. One of the things that—one of the things you have to keep in mind is that the sources for that are very scarce. There's not very much being written. In fact, most of what we know about folks, where they are and where they're located, when they came, and so on, are actually in public documents and so on.

There may be family Bibles that have a family registry in, maybe some comments and so on. Not many letters. Though there were letters, okay, there were letters that survived, but not many of them. We have sort of a hint that there were more, but they were lost over time. Not much theological writing. In 1744, Heinrich Funk, a bishop in the Franconia area, wrote a mirror of baptism. He wrote it in German. And he wrote it in response to the efforts of a new group, a relatively new group, what's sometimes referred to as the Schwarzenauer Brethren, what we would refer to as the German Baptist Brethren, the Alexander Mack people, who were a very, very small group in Germany starting in 1708.

Most of them migrated to Pennsylvania starting in 1719, set up congregations here in Pennsylvania. But they were also very evangelistic. And they considered the Mennonites to be decayed täufer. They had lost—and one of their main critiques was that they didn't baptize the right way because the Schwarzenauer Brethren, through reading Gottfried Arnold's church history, came to the conclusion that immersion baptism was the correct mode. And of course, Mennonites baptized by pouring. And so there was a—okay, what's his name? His last name's Price, but he's a German Baptist leader in Heinrich Funk's community. And he is working zealously to convince young people from Mennonite homes that really, if they want to be where it's going, they ought to join the Brethren.

And baptism is one of the main issues. And so Heinrich Funk writes this mirror of baptism as kind of a counter or as a defense of the Mennonite practice of pouring. And it's actually a very well-argued treatise. It's not very long, but it's the most significant, probably one of the most significant things written by an 18th-century Mennonite. But in the course of it, he does explain to us what his understanding of conversion is, what his understanding of salvation is, how what Jesus did for us on the cross connects to how we're supposed to live. And he does a very clever job, in my mind, of defending pouring. And of course, the German Baptist argument for pouring, other than the supposed argument that Gottfried Arnold gave, that that was the practice of the early church, was based on how they read the various metaphors.

And so Heinrich Funk uses essentially different metaphors from scripture to demonstrate that pouring is a legitimate way of doing water baptism. So it's a very interesting argument. But I think more importantly, in the course of his arguments, he does talk about what does it mean to—how does one become a Christian? How is salvation implemented? What's our response? And so on. And so he actually talks about the baptism of the Spirit, the baptism of water, and the baptism of fire. The baptism of the Spirit is foundational. And there he talks about the work of the Holy Spirit on a person's life, bringing conviction, convicting them of sin, the necessity for repentance, and then, of course, the pouring out of the Spirit.

There's this imagery that he likes to really use, the pouring out of the Spirit and the whole process of conversion and the new birth, the Wiedertäufer. And that's a very, very important concept in a baptism, is the new birth and the impact of the new birth, the change that happens.

And then, of course, he talks about the baptism of water. And of course, he sees it as a symbol. He sees it as not that the water changes you, but it's not just a symbol. It's also a witness, a testimony of a good conscience. It's a declaration of commitment to Christ. It's an open declaration of commitment to Christ. And of course, it is also the means by which one is united or incorporated into the physical body of Christ, into the church. So I think that some people, and particularly, it seems to be kind of popular these days to talk about baptism. And I know some early church advocates have really brought in and have even criticized Mennonites' symbolic understanding of baptism.

But I think that's because they only pick up on the idea of the symbol. And it is symbol. It is symbolic. It is representative. But it's more than that. But it is, even as the early Anabaptists would have argued, okay, it is the blood of Christ that washes away our sin, not the water of baptism. Okay?

And it is the Spirit of God that makes a change in us. And that's conditioned on our response. And baptism is a testimony. It's a commitment. It's a sign. And it's also an act of obedience. And of course, all that is tied into it. And of course, with them, they don't see salvation as being the event. They see it as being a process. And so one could say, "Okay, well, baptism is part of that process of salvation," which has a beginning when one first says yes to God, but then has a continuation until the final day when—well, until our last breath, until the final day when everything is wrapped up as it should be.

But then there's the baptism of fire. Now, that's an early Anabaptist concept. And they normally connected it with the whole idea of suffering, of being persecuted, being martyred, and stuff like that. But with Funk, he's moved now. Now, there was some straightening. There was some sanctioning in 18th-century Europe, particularly in the Palatinate and still in Switzerland and so on. And that's part of the push that, as far as I can see, actually pushes most of the Mennonites in the Palatinate over across to North America over the course of about half a century.

But even though there's some economic straightening and some legal straightening and so on there, narrowing and crimping and so on, they aren't being persecuted like they were in the 16th century, even in Switzerland in the 17th century, which was part of what pushed a lot of them out of, particularly, Zurich and then out of Bern during the 17th century into the Palatinate and into the Alsace.

Here they are in North America. Things are relatively good. This is a good land. As James Lemmons called it, it's the best poor man's country. This is a land where they can buy land. This is a colony where they can buy land. They can farm with relative no interruption. Now, later on in the 1750s, you're going to be facing the French and Indian War and then, of course, the American Revolution. But in 1744, things are looking pretty good. So how do you take this theology of baptism by fire? And what do you do with it? Because that's an early concept. Well, what he does with it is that he describes it as essentially the baptism of self-denial.

Now, that is part and parcel of the earlier understanding too. Okay? It's part and parcel of it. But experientially, existentially, here in North America in the 1740s, Mennonites are not being persecuted. So is the whole baptism of fire still legitimate? And Funk says, "Yes, it is," because we all have to fight against the evil one. We all have to fight against our own lust. We all have to say no to whatever is bad. Okay? And that is a purging, a growth, and so on. And he describes it as this is the baptism of fire. It's the baptism of self-denial. And that's all part of the salvation process. So as I say, he doesn't see salvation as simply an event, but sees it as a process to the end.

And of course, the interesting thing is he brings in all the things about non-resistance, about church, and everything like that in this little book. It's really a lovely little book. And you can read it today. I mean, the Church of Christ Mennonites Publishing House keeps it in print. Then in 1804, there's another really important book written by a Lancaster conference bishop by the name of Christian Burkholder.

And he himself was a migrant, came here when he was 18 years old with his mother, a widowed mother and older siblings, settled in Lancaster County. And he wrote a book, which in English we can translate as An Address to the Youth, An Anrede Jungen. And he actually wrote it in 1792, but it wasn't published until 1804.

And it addresses a different situation. Again, we have Funk's writing is a response to German Baptists' proselytizing efforts. And in a sense, Burkholder's An Anrede to the Youth is also a response to efforts of another religious movement's efforts to essentially win the children or even the adults of Mennonite families here in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

In this particular case, it's a new religious movement starting in the 1770s that historians refer to as the German Awakening. And it was a generation later than the "great awakening" that swept through essentially the Calvinist churches here in North America associated with people like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield and stuff like that. But it's a similar kind of thing in the sense of how it talks about conversion, how conversion happens, and so on. And then at the same time, we have the first Methodists coming to North America and working and so on. And then we just have also this immigrant Pietist tradition, okay, that every German-speaking group in Pennsylvania in some way or another was impacted by Pietism.

The Lutherans, the Reformed, the Brethren, of course, were very much formed out of Pietism and so on, the Moravians and so on. But even Mennonites were impacted by Pietism, even back in the old country. And this is reflected primarily in some things that they're reading and they're singing. They're singing Pietist hymns and so on. They're not just singing the Ausbund hymns, but they're also singing these new hymns, these Pietist hymns. And so it has an impact on it and so on.

But one of the things that the German Awakening emphasizes is a particular kind of conversion experience, okay, a crisis conversion experience, in which one is very much in the kind of this pulls from the Pietist thing of it, very much emphasizes feelings, emotions, affectations, and so on. And it's not that that isn't present among in Anabaptism and so on, even early Anabaptism. But it is very much this idea that one is brought through anxiety and anxiousness and a sense of dread, that one is brought to a place where you are undone and you simply have to cast yourself on Christ and his merits and what he did. The theological understandings that undergird this are essentially Protestant.

And it's very much concerned with justification, which is really not an Anabaptist concern, really not an early Mennonite concern here in North America and so on. That is pretty much a Protestant thing. They're much, much more concerned with the idea of regeneration, of salvation being connected with the idea of the new birth and the creation of something new. And of course, it does tie in with the whole thing of what Jesus did for us on the cross, that his work on the cross has washed away our sins and so on.

And the other interesting thing is that in these early Anabaptist writings, you're not going to see anything referencing the idea, the very Protestant idea that somehow or another, it's not just Protestants, also Roman Catholic, that Jesus satisfied the wrath of God. That's not really there. They talk about Jesus giving his life as a ransom for many. They talk about the fact that he paid the price of our sins.

They talk about the fact that his blood washes our sins away. They talk about the fact that Jesus' death on the cross rescued us from the power of Satan and everything like that. So their understanding of what Jesus did is different than, let's say, a Presbyterian's understanding or even a Lutheran's understanding or even some Pietist understanding and certainly this German Awakening thing. Now, having said that, the German Awakening did have a very strong emphasis on how one lived. Okay? And Pietism did too. Okay? Pietism did too.

But the connection between the individual and the redeemed community is not intrinsic as it was among American Mennonites in the 18th and early 19th century and, of course, early Anabaptists as it is in the German Awakening. But this German Awakening gave rise to new groups like the United Brethren, like the Evangelical Association and so on. And it's these groups that began to make an impact on Mennonite communities as they tried to woo their young people away from their communities into this new community and so on. And that's what Christian Burkholder is writing against.

So you spoke of the Pietists and the Brethren or the German Baptists who Funk and Burkholder were writing to try to protect the Mennonites against. Was the resistance successful, or did the Pietists and German Baptists, the United Brethren and others, end up affecting the Mennonite consensus on theology in the sense of, did they win Mennonites over to their perspectives in any ways? Yes, they did. I mean, the very fact that these writings exist and a response to, I mean, Burkholder would not have written it probably if all this effort on the part of the United Brethren and other German Awakening persons hadn't had any impact. They did. They were successful in wooing persons away from the Mennonite community.

And the other thing, though, with Pietism is that primarily Pietism impacted American Mennonites and also European Mennonites through its literature, through its devotional literature. And they read Johannes Arndt, True Christianity. And they also read Terstegen's letters and so on.

But primarily through the hymnody, okay, primarily through the hymnody. But my sense is that if they were singing a song, okay, they were singing a hymn, even if it's a Pietist hymn, that they put in their own kind of they contextualize it in a sense, and their theological framework in a sense imbued it with a Mennonite understanding. Okay? And so you could say these words, okay, you'd sing these words and so on. And does a Mennonite singing, let me see, what was a common hymn, "Spare your repentance not while one day leads to another," it's a very common hymn that's written, I think, by a Reformed person and so on.

What did that mean to a Mennonite? What did that mean to a Lutheran or to a Reformed or to an Evangelical Association person, United Brethren? I think what they brought to it, their own framework, their own theological understandings, imbued that hymn with a certain context and understanding. So I think that, I think that for Mennonites, particularly for Mennonites who practice believers' baptism, "Spare your repentance not while one day leads to another," is a call to, is an initial call to surrender to Christ and to repent. And of course, that ties in with the Anabaptist understanding that which you go into the world, you preach the gospel, and those who believe, who repent and believe, those are the ones you think.

A Lutheran singing that song is not going to have that context or he's not going to bring that to that song. And so the hymnody itself could, I think, be contextualized by whatever community you're coming to. It's when, as Martin Baham, a Mennonite bishop, and William Philip Otterbein, a Reformed minister, met in 1770 at Isaac Long's barn at a big meeting, and they embraced each other and they said, "We are brothers." And it was, "We are brothers based on the fact that we both have had this crisis new birth experience."

That's the foundation. And actually, the Mennonites had no problem necessarily with crisis conversion experiences. They just didn't think that they were the only way one could be converted. Okay? But when you begin saying that that particular new birth, the way in which the new birth has to happen in this particular kind of experiential way is necessary, okay, and then when you begin to make common cause with other traditions or other people who are not non-resistant, who baptize babies, who swear oaths, okay, then it becomes problematic. And that's where Martin Baham, eventually, the other Mennonite bishops had to put him out of the church because he was saying, "This is really the basis of my fellowship."

And of course, he becomes a bishop in the United, what becomes United Brethren. So I think sometimes reading literature and song can introduce us to new ideas. When we read something, what do we bring to it? Do we read it through our own framework? Do we imbue it with a meaning that maybe not the writer had originally or a context that originally the writer himself did not have? But we bring into those texts our own understandings, and they can assist our understanding. And one of the things I like to think about is that it seems to me that whenever, in a sense, new ideas come into Mennonite communities or into Amish communities and so on, they come across conceptual bridges.

Okay? There's something in the tradition that connects with something that this new other tradition is saying. And there's a similarity, and they can kind of cross over. All right. So that's what I would observe here. And older Mennonites today use the Umpar Taishiga Songbook, which was a new hymn book that Lancaster Conference put out in 1804. And most of the hymns are Pietist hymns. It has so about 80 of the Ausbund hymns. It has maybe 20 other hymns written by 18th, 19th century Mennonite authors, including Christopher Dock and so on. But most of the hymns are Pietist hymns. And they're hymns that Lutherans and Reformed and the Brethren particularly, I mean, almost all the Brethren hymnary was Pietist.

And the interesting thing is that the Umpar Taishiga also includes hymns by Brethren, okay, because there were some Brethren hymn writers in the 18th century who were writing hymns. And some of those hymns made their way into the Umpar Taishiga Songbook. And that songbook is still what is being used by the older Mennonites at Groffdale Conference today, the ones who are still using German.

So I think it's one thing to read and to use these texts as kind of inspiration and so on like that. It's another thing, though, when you say, "Okay, we are now Brethren." And that's always been a problem. And the other thing I would observe is that up until the 1860s, for the most part, okay, one could push back and say maybe the 1840s. But up until the 1860s, all these other groups who, for want of a better term, you could describe as Evangelical, though that's kind of imposing a 20th-century category on it, they're trying to win young people away and incorporate them in new churches. And the Mennonite church's stance is one of resistance, of not accepting these ideas and so on like that.

Starting particularly in the 1860s, all right, we began to see a change of accepting new methodologies, things like Sunday school and so on, and then later on, projected or revival meetings, an interest in mission work and outreach, and even some kind of reframing theological understandings. Now, some of this has to do with the fact that they are also transitioning from German to English. And so how do you translate some of these concepts that are in German into English and so on?

And a person who's a prime person involved in this whole new kind of approach is John F. Funk, who you mentioned died in 1930. He lived up until his 90s. He really had not been that active for almost 25 years before his death and so on. But he is a pivotal person in American Mennonite history.

He actually deserves a full-fledged biography, and he's never had one. But he's an interesting person because he feels as though, particularly about Sunday school, his argument is, of course, there are a lot of people resisting the idea of Sunday school because it's coming from these Protestants. It's coming from these worldly churches and so on. And of course, that's one of the things that gives rise to the old order movement and so on. But his argument is, "Yes, yes, we know these worldly churches use Sunday school, but can't we have Mennonite Sunday schools in which in our Sunday schools, they can be taught at," and he says this Mennonite doctrine, okay, Mennonite teachings, that this is just, in a sense, a different venue for teaching.

Now, the other interesting thing that happens, of course, is that it increases the role of laity in teaching, all right? Up to this particular point, it's the leadership, the appointed leadership who do the teaching, the servants of the word and so on, other than the teaching that is supposed to happen in individual households by the father and so on like that. And of course, that is the argument the old orders make.

Any teaching that happens, other than what we hear in the preaching, should be done at home by the parents and so on. So in the latter part of the 19th century, we have new ideas being introduced, new methodologies being introduced, and there is resistance. Okay? There is resistance.

And there's not one approach to how much of this to take in. Somebody like John F. Funk is actually a cautious innovator, all right? The younger generation that was sort of his protégés are less cautious, are very much become very much caught up, particularly when they're going to, they're getting education. Sometimes they're going to Evangelical churches. In the 1890s, there are some of them who actually go to Moody Bible Institute and pick up premillennial dispensationalism, which was the greatest heresy ever to hit the Mennonite church. But anyhow, well, one of them, okay, one of them. But anyhow, they pick up on this kind of stuff, all right, and become less cautious in how much to look at.

So for example, if you look at an early mission, urban mission in Chicago, the Chicago Mission, I think it's during the 1890s, it's basically using kind of the typical Protestant urban mission thing. We think of the Bowery Mission and so on. That's kind of its approach. Okay? But it gets these people, and so they send people there. They have resident missionaries, and they do the kind of things that Protestants, Evangelicals have done in urban missions and stuff like that.

But then they try to dress them up in plain clothes. And some of that is because they're not, I think it's sometimes because they think that that's what they should do. But sometimes I think it's also a means by which to deflect criticism of what they're doing, all right? Because if they can get these converts to dress plain, all right, then that will silence their critics. Now, that might be a topic for the next or another podcast. But along with this comes some newer theological understandings. Now, one of the things we do have to keep in mind is that there's still this very strong emphasis that salvation and how you live are connected.

My personal opinion is that the older way, looking at Funk and Burkholder and then Samuel Gottschal as another writer, Peter Burkholder in Virginia, who writes in his Nine Reflections, A Bishop in Virginia is published in 1837, this older way of looking at things makes a more intrinsic connection between salvation and how we live.

I would say that, and I think Funk still had that. I think he still had that intrinsic connection. And I think most Mennonites emphasize, yes, this is important. This is important. Okay? In fact, their criticism of Evangelicalism is that they're not doing that. And of course, they're still very strong about non-resistance. Funk himself wrote the first book or booklet defending non-resistance or arguing for non-resistance, written by an American Mennonite in 1864, Warfares: Its Evils Are Duties. And it's a scathing critique. It's written right in the middle of the Civil War. It's a scathing critique of Christians going off to war and how that is counter to everything Jesus had taught. All right? And then what's interesting, though, is too that this kind of new project that he's launched, in which he's, in a sense, trying to update the Mennonite church, but still keep it Mennonite, still keep some of those older understandings, importances, and so on.

I would say one of his chief, in a sense, almost mentor, but certainly compatriot, is the Ohio Bishop John M. Brennaman, a man who had great stature among the Mennonites in the middle of the 19th century, wrote for Funk's Herald of Truth. And some of his articles combined into booklets and so on.

At Funk's urging, he wrote the second Mennonite tract or booklet on non-resistance called Christianity and War. And again, a very well ably argued exposition of a Christian Mennonite understanding of war and why Christians should not participate in war and so on.

But he's a person who's very much rooted in the older understandings, but he is open to some selective innovation. All right? And he's probably in the middle of the 19th century, along with Funk. Actually, he wrote more than Funk did, theological kind of articles, most of which, of course, appear in Funk's Herald of Arheit or his Herald of Truth, both the German and the English versions. Now, if one looks at Brennaman's letters, particularly his letters written in English, the English is a little rough. Okay?

And so I suspect that Funk, who had gone to what we would refer to as kind of a high school, Pergamian Seminary in his home area in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, he had more education than most Mennonites of his day did. I have a suspicion that Funk did him a good work over, did a good editing of those, which Brennaman was fine with. He was fine with. He had no problem with that.

But Burkholder wrote on salvation. He wrote on Christianity and war. And then probably his seminal, his most important one is pride and humility. And maybe that'll be, again, a topic for another, we'll cover that otherwise.

And I would say that in Brennaman's understanding, I think he does still pretty well hold in tandem the idea of how we become Christians, how salvation happens, and how we're to live. Okay? He does a pretty good, I still think he still does a pretty good job of that. And again, his understanding of atonement really reflects that older understanding. He talks about ransom, talks about our sins being washed away. He talks about the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives and so on. So I think really, even though he's open to some innovation, it's cautious.

Okay? It's cautious. And it still is pretty well rooted in that older understanding. And Funk is still too, but he's more open to innovation, maybe some newer ideas coming in. And I would say it's the next generation that that becomes even more pronounced.

This is a very helpful survey of the ideas, the theology, the personalities, the prominent personalities influencing Mennonite theology during those two centuries. So I observe that today, many of the various Mennonite groups in North America, at least among the Swiss, originated from divisions and disunity that happened in the mid to late 20th century. And there are, of course, exceptions. You mentioned the old orders and some of the things that led to the difference of perspectives in their early days.

Is our state of being distributed across numerous affiliations, conferences, networks, and fellowships novel? How does this compare and contrast to the experience of Mennonites during the first two centuries in North America? Well, okay. So if you look at, if you look at, let's say, 18th century, okay, North America. Now, first of all, I think I should frame that by saying that 16th-century Anabaptism is not a monolithic movement. There are various kinds of Anabaptists in the 16th century. Okay? We already talked about the Swiss and the Dutch. There's also the Hutterites, but then there's some other ones. There's some graduations between those that are sort of not exactly either Swiss nor Dutch nor Hutterite and so on.

So the diverse Anabaptism from the very beginning was a somewhat diverse and one could say fragmented movement. Now, there were groupings, and the Swiss Brethren is one grouping. But of course, in 1693-94, we have a major schism among the Swiss Brethren that results in the formation of the Amish. And there the issue has to, again, issues have to do with questions about essentially church order, how to practice the ban, is avoidance to be used or not. The Swiss Brethren tradition didn't really include avoidance. But Amen, reading the Dirk Reconfession, reading Menno Simons, and so on, came to the conclusion that that should be practiced. Okay?

And so we have a division, a fairly significant division happening in 1694. So severe that when they were kicked out of Zurich in the 1670s, the Amish and the Rishon parties, which was what the other group was called, wouldn't really talk with each other, even if they were on the same boat going down the Rhine River. So the Amish come here and Mennonites come here.

And then, of course, if you want to think about the German Baptists being a new toy for a new Baptist group who have a lot of commonality with the Amish and with the Mennonites. I mean, Alexander Mack was reading Menno Simons. He knew Mennonites. And essentially, their understanding of church and of how one should live the Christian life is very, very similar to what Mennonites' understanding would be or what Amish understanding would be. Okay?