Identification with the people in a revolutionary situation
by Gerald Schlabach
with two responses from Central America
May 1988
Preface
Twentieth Century Mennonites and Brethren in Christ are accumulating considerable experience in situations of oppression and revolution. Local congregations and international service workers alike encounter profound challenges to the quietistic nonresistance that has prevailed among Anabaptist Christians in this century. Gerald Schlabach, writing out of firsthand experience in Central America in the 1980s, addresses core questions faced by Christians seeking to live with integrity in the midst of violence.
- Does the present experience of Mennonites and Brethren in Christ in confronting oppression and violence validate the historical Anabaptist tenets of nonresistance?
- Are 20th Century Anabaptists from the North equipped to be in solidarity (take sides) with the poor, to espouse with integrity a "preferential option for the poor"?
- Wherein lies normative authority for absolute nonviolence; in the existential community of faith, in theological reflection, in Scripture, in suffering?
Schlabach's paper is a useful tool for Christians who are grappling with anguishing questions of personal commitment to action against oppression and with the choices of colleagues to resort to violence. The anguish cannot be avoided. However, it is possible to move beyond the question of whether to take sides to when and how. Furthermore, Schlabach frames the discussion in ways that bring clarity to the distinction between "understanding" revolutionary violence and "endorsement" of it.
The Executive Committee of MCC studied this paper in September 1987 and affirmed it as "a key statement in the continuing search for faithful service."
Herman Bontrager
Secretary for Overseas Peace Office
About the Author
From 1983 to 1985 Gerald Schlabach and his wife Joetta Handrich served as MCC country representatives in Nicaragua. At that time, Schlabach began developing a region-wide "MCC Peace Portfolio" for Central America, which became his full-time assignment, based in Honduras, beginning in January 1986. In August 1987 Schlabach returned to the United States, where his work as a freelance writer includes editing a new MCC Newsletter on the Americas. His paper, "Identification With the People in a Revolutionary Situation," was presented to the MCC Executive Committee at its September 1987 meeting.
When I give food to the poor,
they call me a saint.
But when I ask why the poor have no food,
they call me a communist
--Don Helder Camara
