Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: The 200-year sojourn of Mennonites in Russia can serve as a paradigm for Mennonites envisioning a post-Gulag future anywhere. It contains elements of living out early Anabaptist visions, of adapting those visions to changing historical contexts, of a faith and vision tested to the breaking point and of a chastened time of recovery, indeed of resurrection. By following a red thread of faith affirmations from leaders of a variety of sub-groups between 1925 and 1990, as well as corroborating themes from female voices, one can detect a continuing loyalty to a legacy. Central to that legacy was an affirmation of justification by God's grace, expectation of suffering as the cost of serious discipleship, responding to evil with love and forgiveness, including offering the Good News to the neighbor. Further, the paradigm includes the reality of a dynamic spiritual tradition, an evolving peace theology, a persistent mission theme and a developing theology of church, state and society. AN ANABAPTIST-MENNONITE LEGACY AND THE GULAG EXPERIENCE For nearly a generation, the popular image of the Russian Mennonite story has been formed by the film And When They Shall Ask. The film introduces viewers to a people who traced their roots to the Dutch Anabaptist radical Menno Simons--a pacifist people fleeing outright persecution and systemic harassment, a pilgrim people seeking a place of religious freedom where they could live out their simple biblical faith. Was Russia that place? the movie asks. The movie's moment of high drama--the Mennonite exodus out of the Soviet Red Sea to Canada between 1924 and 1926--suggests the real answer: God traveled with the immigrants to Canada. The remaining footage about the Mennonites who remained in the Soviet Union, about those who survived the Gulag and prayed to a God who heard them, appears unconvincing. In this essay I will argue that the two-hundred-year experience of Mennonites in Russia can be seen as a major paradigm for their becoming a Mennonite church that seeks continuing resonance for the coming century. That paradigm contains elements of living out the visions of the early Anabaptist reformers and of passing on that vision as adapted to changing historical contexts. It also contains a seventy-year period when the vision was severely tested, followed by a chastened time of recovery. This latter era may well be instructive for the global Anabaptist-Mennonite churches, even though its meaning for North Americans has become alien. The period of testing and recovery marked a renewed appropriation of the faith, a time of building the Mennonite community in pilgrim contexts, a time of the destruction and death of Mennonite institutions and places, so that the recovery had to be attempted in places of exile. It should be no surprise that the call to seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile (Jer. 29:7) was cited so often, or that Russian Mennonites no longer view the Ukraine as their homeland. The Russian Mennonite legacy has directly impacted several hundred thousand Mennonites now living in Europe and both Americas. Indirectly it has affected the South German/Swiss Mennonite tradition as it joined with the immigrant stream from Russia as the major shaping traditions in North America. Further, the Russian Mennonite tradition has affected large bodies of new Mennonites through mission. One significant unresolved question is whether we have sufficiently considered whether the Russian Mennonite theological tradition could provide more help for living with the challenges of modernity in North America than has the Anabaptist Vision school nurtured in the South German-Swiss tradition. (1) Thus far, because of its more nuanced framing of theology and its more restrained emphasis on distinctives, the Russian Mennonite tradition has played a secondary role in shaping North American Mennonite identity. Two features of the Russian Mennonite story have persisted as negative stereotypes, making it serve as a negative example or undesirable paradigm. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".