Canadian Mennonite
Volume 10, No. 20
October 16, 2006
An alternative to mean-spirited Christianity
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Jacobsen, Douglas, and Rodney J. Sawatsky. Gracious Christianity: Living the Love We Profess. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006.
Gracious Christianity summarizes the entire scope of classic Christian theology from the nature of God to the end times. This book was written by two friends who became soul mates in their thinking about Christian faith and life during their 10 years as colleagues at Messiah College.
The central question which Sawatsky and Jacobsen address is how Christians can be more embracing of those who are different from them and yet remain people of strong faith and commitment. The authors suggest that the questions “stem from observing defensiveness and mean-spiritedness that pervade so many expressions of Christian faith in America and around the world…. We are convinced that the good news proclaimed by Jesus, when it is properly understood, will never foster hateful faith, but will make us gracious instead.”
The book is timely, in that it addresses the “one inch deep one mile wide” spirituality that pervades so much of today’s thought. The prevailing assumption that it matters less what you believe than how you live—that doctrine is a distraction at best—denies the significance of a particular narrative and the framework for ethics that it provides. This book reminds readers that their Christian faith and identity are rooted in a particular narrative, and that it is this very particularity that enables, and calls for, a “gracious” engagement with persons of other faiths and persuasions. With few and carefully chosen words, and with abundant graciousness, Sawatsky and Jacobsen capture what John Howard Yoder called the “moreness” of the gospel.
Drawing on such influential apologists as Augustine, Aquinas, Bonhoeffer, Brian McLaren, Henri Nouwen and Lesslie Newbigin, the authors engage doctrinal issues in ways that invite the reader in. In the chapter on heaven, hell and the judgment, the authors suggest that goofy and graphic descriptions of the final judgment “fail to recognize that our actions and attitudes in the present have long-range consequences for both ourselves and others…. Hell is the result of our unwillingness to embrace God’s love much more than it suggests the limits of God’s grace.”
The authors’ hope was that Gracious Christianity will “in some way help those of us who call ourselves Christian to be more gracious in the way we live, acknowledging our own brokenness and reaffirming our commitment to the humble, gentle and loving way of Jesus.”
Shortly after beginning the writing of this book, Sawatsky was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of brain cancer and he died as the final pages of the manuscript were being completed. He talked often and fondly in those last months about the book, his co-author, and about those he loved. What is also true, is that those who loved him most—his wife Lorna and their three daughters—modelled in those last months the fundamental graciousness of which the book spoke.
Book unlocks Siberian Mennonite history
Fresno, Calif.
A new book illuminates a little-known chapter of the Mennonite story. Ethno Confessions in a Soviet State: Mennonites in Siberia, 1920-1980, Annotated Archival Listing of Archival Documents and Materials is a joint publication of the Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies and the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The book, published in March, is the first fruit of the Siberian Mennonite Research Project, begun in 2002 by the Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies at Fresno Pacific University.
The goal of the project is to explore the history of Mennonites in Siberia. Some of these individuals and families were exiled to the region by the Soviet Union. Others migrated voluntarily in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to Paul Toews, director of the Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies.
Mennonites came to Russia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries at the request of Empress Catherine II, to farm in the area known as “South Russia,” known today as Ukraine. While some emigrated to North America beginning in the 1870s, many still lived in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. Mennonites experienced great hardship and persecution during the Soviet era, when the government, which recognized neither religious nor distinct cultural identities, treated them as though they never existed.
The project hired Andrey Savin, a historian with the Russian Academy of Sciences, to research archives in Siberia and Moscow. He collected an annotated listing of 1,000 archival files, 103 selected documents and a number of photographs and illustrations that are included in the book.
Publishing with the Russian Academy of Sciences increases the visibility of the field of Russian Mennonite studies. The book also comes at a time of renewed interest in ethno-cultural studies in Russian historiography.
Toews spent the summer in Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine, working with two translators on an English edition of the book. That publication, also in cooperation with the Russian Academy of Sciences, is scheduled for release in mid-2007. Plans are to publish two more volumes of documents.
—Fresno Pacific University release