Ted Grimsrud—May 8, 2018
I have read with great appreciation many of the books John Dominic Crossan has written over the years and have heard him speak several times. A few years ago he published a book I found pretty helpful and relevant to my interests, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation (HarperOne, 2015). I don’t know for sure whether Crossan, who is Catholic, shares my pacifist convictions, but he clearly cares deeply about peace on earth.
The right agenda
I believe that Crossan has exactly the correct agenda for this book. He argues, “escalatory violence now directly threatens the future of our species and indirectly undermines solutions to other survival problems such as global warming, overpopulation, and resource management” (p. 244). He writes this book in order to address that problem, to show how the Bible can be used in ways that contribute to violence, and to suggest ways the Bible might be read that will actually help us move toward peace.
Crossan’s book may be read alongside Greg Boyd’s The Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross (Fortress Press, 2017). Boyd and Crossan happily share deep convictions about helping Christians deal with the violence in the Bible in way that will empower Christians to be peaceable today. They approach the issues quite differently, though. The differences are significant, for sure. I would recommend reading both works as a way of getting a sense of the breadth of possibilities for Bible-centered peace theologies.
One big difference between these two thinkers is how they think of biblical inspiration. Boyd affirms what he understands to be a very high view of inspiration, and as a consequence he undertakes to construct a quite detailed and elaborate argument for how he can see the Bible as truthful throughout and yet also argue that the Bible is consistently a book of peace. I have written a lengthy critique of Boyd’s argument. I see it as way too convoluted. But I find his work enormously instructive.
Crossan, on the other hand, has no trouble with asserting that parts of the Bible simply are untrue. This makes his argument much simpler and more straightforward than Boyd’s—though not without problems of its own. I am not fully happy with Crossan’s approach, either. I think he too quickly accepts the presence of major internal contradictions within the Bible and thus misses some insights that an attempt to read the Bible’s overall message as largely coherent might provide. However, in this blog post I want to focus my criticisms of Crossan elsewhere.
Crossan’s main argument
Very briefly, I would summarize his main argument in this way: The Bible’s teaching can be understood as combining (and not harmonizing) two distinct views of justice—retributive and distributive. These two views stand in deep tension with one another. The presence of them both leads to the Bible’s internal contradictions between a violent, punitively judgmental God and a merciful, healing God. The Bible itself does not resolve this tension—in fact, the final book of the Bible (Revelation) is perhaps the most retributive book in the entire canon. However, Christians today can and must resolve the tension in their own lives. We may do so, Crossan argues, by centering our reading strategy on the life and teaching of the historical Jesus.
Jesus as he truly was gives us clarity about the way God truly is—characterized by distributive justice and ultimately a healing and not punitive God. Now, this understanding of Jesus requires some careful discernment since the gospel writers at times may smuggle in some retributive thinking into how they tell the story. But for Crossan, the historical Jesus, the Jesus that we may discern behind the gospels, rejected the retributive view of God that is present in much of the Old Testament and certainly was characteristic of many of his contemporaries.
I find this argument helpful. I certainly agree that Jesus provides us with the clarity we need for unshakeable convictions about nonviolence—and the warrant we need to reject the pro-violence materials in the Bible as in any way normative for Christian ethics. However, there are a couple of problems I have with Crossan’s approach that I’d like to reflect on.
First, I think that “restorative” works better than “distributive” as the alternative to “retributive” justice. And, second, I think it is better to read the Bible as having a more coherent, pro-peace message than Crossan does. I am bothered by his dialectal reading, especially by how this reading requires an understanding of the book of Revelation that I believe is unhelpful and inaccurate.
The alternative to “retributive” justice?
I am pretty attracted to Crossan’s analysis about the two kinds of justice, especially his characterization and critique of “retributive justice.” I would tend to read some of the texts he cites with a little more nuance, but I agree that there are two different kinds of voices in the Bible and that we must reject any tendency to let the retributive voice override the peaceable voice.
However, I am uncomfortable with his use of “distributive” as his alternative notion of justice in the Bible. I do agree that the vision for life among the Hebrew people reflected in the teaching of Torah, had at its center a commitment to the appropriate distribution of the materials necessary for a good life to all the people in the community. But underlying this vision was a notion of justice as wholeness, as healthy relationships—what I would call the grounding for “restorative” justice.
So, we do have a sense of “distributive” justice in the biblical ideal. But what about when there is injustice and oppression, when the vulnerable are exploited and left out? Or, when there are other incidents of injustice and brokenness? Crossan suggests, “retributive justice is secondary and derivative” in relation to “distributive” justice and “comes in only when that idea is violated” (pp. 17-18). However, I think what actually happens is that when there is violation, the community faces choices about how to respond—one approach is more punitive and retributive, the other is more reconciliatory and restorative.
The roots to the latter approach, though, are found in the vision for the community. The deepest sense of community is not based on equality and fairness, but on a relational ideal. God’s agenda, according to the Bible, in creating this people is wholeness in relationships between people and other people, people and the natural world, and people and God. The hope when there is brokenness is that these relationships might be restored. Punishment as an end in itself (the motivation with retributive justice) does not lead to restored relationships. Hence, as Crossan rightly states, “there are no divine punishments” (p. 244).
In recent years, “restorative” justice has emerged as a strategy for dealing with brokenness that provides an alternative to retributive dynamics. To some degree, this movement has theological roots based on a reading of the Bible that highlights the notion of justice as being concerned with setting right damaged relationships. To think of the Bible’s core notion of justice as “restorative” rather than “distributive” can help link contemporary concerns with the concerns of the people of the Bible—and ground them in a relational context (as I have written about elsewhere).
Revelation as the culmination of the Bible’s peaceable story
Crossan uses an image of two distinct trains that symbolize the Bible’s two notions of justice. This image requires a dialectal reading of the Bible, where we have these two relatively equal impulses interacting with each other throughout—and never resolved. So in the Old Testament we do have the original vision of distributive justice, but it is joined by the strong sense of punitive, retributive justice that is attributed to God in many places. And both, according to Crossan, are present in the New Testament as well—Jesus embodying one, the book of Revelation the other.
Recognizing that we need some sense of resolution of this dialectic if we are to live lives committed to breaking the spiral of violence, Crossan advocates making central a reconstruction of the actual message of the historical Jesus who guides us on how to read the Bible in a way that helps us find a clarity that will empower peaceable living.
Along with the polarity between the two kinds of justice, Crossan also suggests we recognize a polarity between two kinds of power, what he calls “nonviolent power” and “violent power.” He sees what he calls the “Normalcy of Civilization” as being present when retributive justice and violent power are combined. It’s opposite is the “Radicality of God,” where distributive justice and nonviolent power are combined.
This analysis is helpful (especially if we substitute “restorative” for “distributive” justice. However, I don’t agree with Crossan’s reading of the Bible as leaving us with an unresolved dialectic among these options. I think the Bible actually does give us a more coherent picture on the side of the “Radicality of God” if we read it as a whole. We may do this in part because the New Testament does provide a lens with which we may read the Old Testament in line with nonviolent power and restorative justice. That is, I think Crossan fundamentally misreads Revelation and hence projects his dialectic too deeply into that part of the Bible.
I have argued in my lengthy writings about Revelation that it does present us with a sense of God’s power as nonviolent power and God’s justice as restorative justice. I will sketch very briefly some of my main reasons for saying this.
Revelation begins with a statement that what follows is “the Revelation of Jesus Christ” (1:1) and makes clear that this is the gospel’s Jesus Christ when it describes him in 1:5 as the “faithful witness” (who lived a life of resistance to the Powers that be that led to his martyrdom), the “first born of the dead” (who had this life vindicated through resurrection), and “ruler of the kings of the earth” (the ultimate “conqueror” whose politics of healing will rule the world).
The key moment in the book comes in chapter 5 when we are told of a great scroll that contains the message of the victory of God. However, initially, no one can be found to open this scroll. Then the one who can open the scroll is found—the “Lion of the Tribe of Judah” who turns out to be a Lamb, slain and standing (5:6). This Lamb, the Jesus who Revelation reveals, has already won the victory and is worshiped as worthy. The only victory needed in Revelation is won not through the power of violence but through the power of persevering love, embodied in the faithful witness of Jesus.
The sufficiency of this victory is stated in 12:11 (the “comrades … have conquered [the Dragon] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony”). Then the victory is envisioned in 19:11-21, where Jesus rides forth victorious, with his rob already “dipped in blood” (the blood of his faithful witness) before his encounter with the Powers of evil, who he simply captures and throws into the lake of fire—no “Battle of Armageddon” needed. The outcome of the conquering efforts of the Lamb is the destruction of the Powers of evil and the healing of the nations and their kings who had formerly aligned themselves with the Powers. And the means of the conquering was Jesus’s self-sacrificial love joined with the self-sacrificial love of his followers.
Though Revelation is often read as portraying God as directly intervening with punitive violence toward rebellious human beings, the actual text presents God as directly active only in the witness of the Lamb and his followers. And the message of the book challenges its readers to join this witness. Jesus’s followers are to be active in the conquering work. But this call to action is not a call to be warriors doing battle in inter-human warfare where they shed the blood of their enemies. Rather, the call to action is a call to follow the Lamb wherever he goes (14:4).
Contra Crossan
This message of Revelation, a message of the transforming power of Jesus’s faithful witness to the ways of persevering love, is about the opposite of how Crossan reads Revelation. Crossan reads the violent imagery in Revelation quite literally and seems to miss entirely the way Revelation’s symbolism works. He writes: “Revelation’s promise of a bloodthirsty God and a blood-drenched Christ represents for me the creation of a second ‘coming’ to negate the first and only ‘coming’ of Christ; the fabrication of violent apocalypse to deny nonviolent incarnation; and the invention of Christ on a warhorse to erase the historical Jesus on a peace donkey. Jesus’s nonviolent resistance to evil is replaced by Christ’s violent slaughter of evildoers” (How to Read the Bible, p. 181).
Crossan needs a retributive Revelation to sustain how he imposes his unresolved dialectic on the Bible. While his method of resolving the dialectic with the scholarly recovery of the historical Jesus as our contemporary ethical norm does indeed lead him to a strong affirmation of the path of nonviolence, I think he greatly weakens the Bible’s own peaceable message.
I think the dialectic between retributive and restorative justice is resolved within the Bible itself. And the way the Bible resolves it helps us to find a powerful peace witness in the final, canonical text read as a whole—not in an extra-biblical scholarly construct. Jesus himself brings together the message of Torah, the prophetic witness to that message, and his own embodied shalom that resisted empire (and the retributive dynamics that slipped into the biblical text) and incarnated in history transformative compassion and healing. And this embodied shalom actually is what is revealed in the book of Revelation—a wonderful coda to the Bible’s coherent message about God’s healing strategy.

Syndicated from Thinking Pacifism

Ted Grimsrud—May 4, 2018
For the past several months I have been putting most of my writing energy into a study of the book of Revelation, and have not met my goals for blog posting frequency. I finally realized that I need to combine thinking so much about Revelation with writing blog posts. So I expect to share several sets of reflections that draw heavily on Revelation in the next few weeks.
Punitive judgment in Revelation
One of my ongoing interests is the issue of punitive judgment—in the Bible and in life. I feel that I have developed a pretty strong argument that shows that the book of Revelation as a whole emphasizes mercy and healing much more than punitive judgment. However, some passages in Revelation have been rather persistently interpreted in punitive terms. Perhaps the most notorious comes at the end of chapter 14. This is what is written:
“Then another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. Then another angel came out from the altar, the angel who has authority over fire, and he called with a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle. ‘Use your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth, for its grapes are ripe.’ So the angel swung his sickle over the earth and gathered the vintage of the earth, and he threw it into the great wine press of the wrath of God. And the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles.” (Revelation 14:17-20, NRSV)
After reading through several dozen commentaries and other book and articles on Revelation, I recognize that there is a pretty strong consensus that these verses are talking about God’s punitive judgment against humans who have turned against God. There is one important stream of interpretation, starting with the influential 1966 commentary by George B. Caird, that reads this paragraph in a non-punitive way. In general, though, even commentaries that read other difficult passages in non-punitive ways, tend to see John teaching violent retribution here.
Now, as I will describe at the end of this post, I do read Rev 14:17-20 in a non-punitive way (here’s a sermon I preached on this). But I thought it would be interesting as a thought experiment to take seriously the possibility that this is a punitive text and try to follow the logic of such a reading. What if Revelation 14 is about punitive judgment? What would the implications of such an interpretation be?
If Revelation 14:17-20 teaches punitive judgment….
Let me suggest several implications of affirming that Rev 14:17-20 does portray God-enforced punitive judgment—and that this picture gives a true picture of God’s character and will (I recognize that some interpreters would conclude that the passage teaches punitive judgment but still believe that such a picture of God is not true).

The moral nature of the universe is retributive. The picture in 14:17-20 comes from living in a world where there must be retaliation against all evil doing. The world is governed by the norm of reciprocity. Perhaps this view includes a sense that simply being alive makes one subject to such retaliation, since to be human is to be complicit in human sinfulness.
God is all-powerful and uses His power to kill massive numbers of people in vicious ways that leads to extraordinary amounts of blood to be shed. We are not told explicitly that God is behind this unfathomable bloodshed (“blood flowed … as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles,” 14:20) or precisely how all this blood was taken. But we should assume that it is all due to God’s direct intervention—a God who kills in massive quantities and by causing the dead to bleed profusely.
God’s practice of retributive justice is inefficient since this judgment takes place in a world where we know that many sinners get away with being sinners. If this punitive judgment is at all understood to be a historical event, we have to imagine that—like in historical incidences of large-scale human warfare—many of the actual perpetrators of the evil deeds that lead to war do not themselves suffer the violence of the conflict.
The level of collateral damage is extremely high because this violence surely is indiscriminate in its expression, reaching not only idolatrous wrongdoers but also relatively innocent bystanders, including numerous children. Again, this point reflects the terrible history of actual warfare over most of recorded human history, especially modern warfare.
The likely response to this kind of massive violent judgment from God by the people who remain surely would be mostly terror. It is difficult to imagine people responding to such extraordinary punitive judgment with love for the one who creates the slaughter.
If God brings this kind of massive violence as a response to human wrongdoing, then Jesus was wrong when he portrayed God as loving and merciful; the writer of Exodus was wrong when he wrote about God’s love lasting forever (even as God’s judgment lasts only a couple of generations—Exod 20:5-6); and Paul was wrong when he wrote that God loves God’s enemies (Romans 5).
We are left with the question of what this massive punitive and indiscriminate violence would possibly achieve. What good is accomplished by killing enough people viciously enough to create this kind of scene with blood several feet high over an area of 200 miles?

What are our interpretive options?
Probably, for most of us, thinking seriously about the ramifications of the punitive judgment reading of Revelation 14:17-20 leaves us feeling a bit uneasy. What are the possible ways we might think about this text and this approach? I assume that many people kind of pass this passage over fairly quickly, accepting the likely punitive judgment interpretation but not thinking carefully about it. So, I am suggesting here that we stop for a while and think about the ramification I listed above. When we do so, we then are faced with a few options.
First, we may decide that indeed the punitive judgment interpretation does seem the most likely. And with this, we may be committed to affirming the inspiration and authority of the Bible, the entire Bible. So then, we will need to think about how to integrate this reading of Rev 14:17-20 with our overall reading of the Bible and our beliefs about God.
How do we hold together the punitive judgment here with what the Bible teaches elsewhere about God as being loving—most notably in the message of Jesus (but also in parts of the Old Testament and in the writings of Paul—not to mention elsewhere in Revelation itself)? How do we apply this portrayal of God with the likelihood that such beliefs about God and the moral universe seem to correlate closely with human practices that are violently punitive, even in ways that turn out to be deeply unjust?
Or, second, we may agree that the violently punitive interpretation of Rev 14:17-20 is the most likely reading of the text itself but insist that such views should not be seen as normative for Christians today. This would leave us with some more challenging questions. What are the implications of separating the Bible into truthful and untruthful parts? How much responsibility do we have to seek energetically to find ways to read the Bible as presenting an essentially coherent (even if not perfectly harmonious) message about how God relates to humanity? What kind of normative ethical and theological guidance is possible if we accept the Bible as largely fragmented, incoherent, and internally contradictory?
Or, third, we may reread this text more rigorously and look for an interpretation that fits with the rest of Revelation, with the rest of the New Testament, and the rest of the Bible and that is theologically and ethically coherent and life-giving. Is such a reading possible?
I believe that it is possible to interpret Rev 14:17-20 in a peaceable way. In fact, I believe that such an interpretation is not only possible but is in fact the best reading, the one that takes fullest account of the words in these verses and the teaching in the rest of Revelation.
I will briefly sketch such a reading here.
If Revelation 14:17-20 is not about punitive judgment
Chapter 14 concludes with two harvest visions, first of grain (14:14-16) and second of grapes (14:17-20). The reaper of the grain harvest is “one like the Son of Man,” almost certainly a way of identifying the reaper with Jesus (this same phrase is used of Jesus in 1:13). The meaning is not totally clear, the reaping is simply described. But since it is Jesus, most likely the idea is to portray salvation, the “judgment” of the followers of the Lamb to be found worthy to join him in paradise.
The grape harvest is more complicated, but there are good reasons to see the grape harvest as another way that John portrays the style of conquest characteristic of Jesus and his followers. Jesus achieves victory through faithful witness and persevering love even to the point of shedding his blood and dying. Crucially, in Jesus’s picture of “conquering,” the shed blood comes from Jesus and his followers, not their human enemies (most obviously, see 12:11: “[The followers of the Lamb] have conquered [the Dragon] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death”).
The reaper in the second harvest vision is not Jesus but an angel (14:17). That the angel reaps suggests something similar to angels that participate in the plague visions described in chapters 6–10. Likely, the second harvest, like the plague visions, portrays the present time where followers of the Lamb conquer the evil Powers through their persevering love, even to the point of shedding blood. Evoking the martyrdoms of 6:9, we are told in 14:17 that the second angel “came out from the altar.”
The angel reaps the ripe grapes and throws them “into the great wine press of the wrath of God” (14:19). As we learn from the plague visions, the “wrath” may be understood as the outworking of the rebellion of humanity against God—not God’s direct intervention but an unfolding of negative consequences. We might also add, from chapter 13, the outworking of how humanity empowers the Beast to go conquering with their idolatrous trust in the Beast. These dynamics call for persevering love from the Lamb’s followers, not for retaliation (13:9-10).
We are told “the wine press was trodden outside the city” (14:19). This “outside the city” image was used in Hebrews 13:12-13 to refer to Jesus’s death. Certainly the model of Jesus’s faithful witness that lead to his blood being shed reinforces the sense that John has in mind here “blood” as a symbol for the entire process of “conquering” the Dragon “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of [the comrades’] testimony” (12:11).
The final image in the harvest scene is extraordinarily gruesome. “Blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles” (14:20). This is a picture of terrible excess. But what does it mean? It would be out of character in relation to the rest of Revelation to see this blood as the blood of God’s enemies. The other references to “blood” in the rest of the book always refer to the blood of Jesus or his followers.
So, the excess here should be seen as a powerful way of underscoring the importance and effectiveness of the way of life that Jesus embodied and called upon his followers to imitate. We could link the picture here with the vision in chapter 7. The picture there is also of excess, “a great multitude that no one could count … [that] have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (7:9, 14). It would take a lot of blood to wash that many robes!
Finally, according to Rev 17–18 the blood of Jesus and his followers in fact turns out to be the precise means that are used to bring Babylon down. Chapter 17 will picture Babylon as a Great Harlot that “was drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the witnesses to Jesus” (17:6). Then, in the next chapter we read how the nations “have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication” (18:3) after which Babylon fall when she drinks “a double draft [from] the cup she mixed” (18:6).
We must take the language in Revelation about “conquering” seriously. Jesus conquers through his faithful witness and his followers share in the conquest with their faithful witness. And this “faithful witness” is bloody—at least metaphorically in that it involves living lives of nonviolent resistance to the Empire’s hegemony. At points such resistance leads to suffering, even, perhaps, to death. The book promises from the very beginning, though, that such witness is vindicated and that Jesus indeed is “ruler of the kings of earth” (1:5)—and that the nations and their kings will find healing in the New Jerusalem (21:24; 22:2).
Revelation emphasizes strongly the link between Jesus’ self-sacrificial love and the self-sacrificial love of his followers. John’s main agenda in Revelation is to encourage his readers to follow Jesus’ path. This is the path Jesus spoke of in one of his great parables: the path of giving drink to the thirsty, food to the hungry, friendship to the lonely, care for the sick, clothing to the naked, and companionship to the imprisoned—on all occasions, since all people in need are, in a genuine sense, Jesus himself.
 

Syndicated from Thinking Pacifism

Ted Grimsrud—April 29, 2018
As I appreciatively joined in the memorial service yesterday (April 28) for my friend Norman Kraus, who died on April 6 at the age of 94, I reflected on my first encounter with his writing. Back in the Spring of 1976, if I had imagined that 42 years later I would be sitting in a Mennonite church in Virginia grieving the loss of the author of The Community of the Spirit as one who had been my good friend for over 20 years I would have been pretty shocked.
My final term attending the University of Oregon, Spring 1976, was when I decided not to pursue journalism as a career. I went ahead and graduated that term, but with no intent to stay with journalism. I had gotten intensely involved in a small evangelical congregation, gotten bitten by the theology bug, and read with great attention writings by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jacques Ellul among others.
I took to browsing the shelves at Northwest Christian College, next door to the UO, looking for books to help me deepen my theological understanding. I happened upon a small volume written by a man named C. Norman Kraus who was identified as a Mennonite professor at a college in Indiana. Not only did the name Goshen College mean nothing to me, the term Mennonite also meant nothing to me.
However, when I started looking at the book, I quickly was hooked. Kraus spoke a language I understood—”discipleship,” “community,” “the gospel of peace.” I read the book thoroughly a couple of times and began to look for other Mennonite writings. That lead to Guy Hershberger, John Howard Yoder, and Millard Lind. It also led us to going to hear Myron Augsburger when my wife Kathleen and I visited her family in Arizona. One thing led to another, we visited the Mennonite congregation in Eugene, headed for Elkhart, Indiana, to attend the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries, and by 1981 we joined the Mennonite church and embarked on a long surprisingly fraught journey.
The writings of Norman Kraus were the starting point for all this. For better or worse, he played a foundational role in my life as a Mennonite. I personally would say absolutely for the “better.” I am deeply grateful for the role Norman played in my theological development, and in more recent years in my remaining in good standing as a college professor and pastor in the Mennonite world. Some who do not appreciate his theological journey (or mine) might say for the “worse.”
A kind of prodigy
Norman grew up in the Tidewater area of Virginia, near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, in a conservative, rural Mennonite community. He couldn’t wait to get away to go to college and beyond. He attended Eastern Mennonite College and immediately moved on to Goshen Biblical Seminary, impressing leaders enough there that he was hired at the age of 27 as a Bible and church history teacher at Goshen College.
 
 [This is Kraus in 1951 standing between his new Goshen colleagues J.C. Wenger and J. Lawrence Burkholder]
He remained at Goshen for the rest of his teaching career, though he took many opportunities to relocate for short term educational and ministry experiences. He studied at Princeton Theological Seminary and wrote a Th.M. thesis that was published by John Knox Press as Dispensationalism in America: It’s Rise and Development (1958). He started the project as an effort to understand the role of dispensationalism among Mennonites, but it was broadened to be what proved to be a pathbreaking effort at examining the role of this perspective on biblical prophecy among American Christians in general. This book played a major role in the thinking of historian Ernest Sandeen in his influential study, The Roots of Fundamentalism.
After a few years back at Goshen, Norman turned to completing his Ph.D. at Duke University, focusing more on theology. He spent the 1966-7 school year in India, teaching at Serampore Theological College. His next major book was The Community of the Spirit, that was published by Eerdmans in 1974, with a revised edition being published by Herald Press in 1993 and reprinted by Wipf and Stock in 2008.

Eerdmans also published a sequel, The Authentic Witness: Credibility and Authority in 1979 (reprinted by Wipf and Stock in 2010). Both of these books articulated an Anabaptist alternative to mainstream Protestant and evangelical understandings of salvation and Christian living. Norman argued forcefully for a unity between belief and action, with a strong emphasis on the role of what he called the Messianic community in the embodiment of faithful discipleship.
A turn toward a global theology
In 1980, Norman took a leave of absence from teaching at Goshen College and moved to Japan with his wife Ruth. They spent the next seven years working with the Japanese Mennonite churches. Norman taught at Eastern Hokkaido Bible School during most of this time, though also teaching for shorter periods in India and Australia.
In response to a probing question from one of his Japanese friends about why Jesus had to be crucified, Norman immersed himself in developing a constructive christology that would attempt to answer that question in a way a non-Westerner might understand. The Krauses returned to North America in 1987 when Norman’s opus, Jesus Christ Our Lord: Christology from a Disciple’s Perspective was published by Herald Press. The book was popular enough that a revised edition came out only three years later (and it was reprinted by Wipf and Stock in 2004).
Norman followed his christology volume with a one-volume systematic theology, God Our Savior: Theology in a Christological Mode in 1991, also published by Herald Press (and reprinted by Wipf and Stock in 2006). These two books established Norman as perhaps the pre-eminent Mennonite writing doctrinal theology while teaching at a Mennonite school.
Jesus Christ Our Lord, in particular, created a sensation among North American Mennonites that is impossible to imagine in our post-theology context today. It was a serious, academic book of theology (though at the same time clearly written and accessible) that drew a wide audience. It particularly offended a conservative contingent of church leaders who were tone-deaf to Norman’s attempt to write theology that would make sense to those outside of North American evangelical Christianity. Norman’s proposals were not actually all that radical in the context of broader Christian theology—and they were certainly faithful to the Mennonite peace position, but he did not express them in traditional terms.
The hostility was intense. Norman told me many years later that he still felt hurt by the personal nature of many of the attacks and the failure of denominational leaders to offer him support. One booklet captures the spirit of the reaction—it was titled Christ or Kraus? During this time of publication and reaction, Norman retired from Goshen College and moved back to Harrisonburg, Virginia, with Ruth. He also suffered a major heart attack.
Norman regained his health and settled into an active retirement full of church involvement and continued scholarly writing. He published An Intrusive Gospel? Christian Mission in a Postmodern World (InterVarsity Press, 1998); To Continue the Dialogue: Biblical Interpretation and Homosexuality (Pandora Press, 2001) [Norman edited this book, a collection of essays taking various positions—it’s notable as the first publication that included Mennonite writers arguing for an inclusive stance]; Using Scripture in a Global Age: Framing Biblical Issues (Cascadia Publishing House, 2006); The Jesus Factor in Justice and Peacebuilding (Cascadia Publishing House, 2011); and On Being Human: Sexual Orientation and the Image of God (Cascade Books, 2011).
An important theological friend
I first met Norman in 1989. I had recently read his Jesus Christ Our Lord and reviewed it  favorably for a Mennonite periodical. A friend of mine took me along to a planning conference in Chicago of the Mennonite Central Committee Peace Section. I was a new pastor, recently minted Ph.D. in Christian ethics, and an utter stranger to all these leaders of Mennonite peace witness.
I met several heroes—longtime leaders, Robert Kreider and Winfield Fretz, who I had learned about in my dissertation research on World War II conscientious objectors, and Vietnam War-era peace warrior Earl Martin, whose book on his experience of staying in Vietnam after the war ended I had just read. And, Norman Kraus.
Norman was interested in meeting me, too. He said he had appreciated my review; it was one of the best he’d seen. And he had wondered who this Grimsrud fellow was, someone he had never heard of. I can’t remember if our paths crossed over the next seven years or not, they probably did once or twice. Then, when Kathleen and I moved to Harrisonburg in 1996, the first Sunday we attended Park View Mennonite Church, there was Norman in our Sunday School class. So we renewed our acquaintance and we met Ruth. Sadly, shortly after that she was discovered to have cancer and died a few months later.
As I mentioned (and I told Norman about this as soon as I could), his writings played a major role in my entering the Mennonite world. And, I would say, he has remained throughout these past 40+ years one of my most important influences. I think he rates alongside Gordon Kaufman and John Howard Yoder as the most important of North American theological thinkers. I studied with Yoder and became friends with Kaufman—and have written elsewhere about their importance. Though Norman did not have the wide, beyond the Mennonite world, influence of the other two, I think his self-conscious effort to write thoughtful but accessible theology made him perhaps the more authentically Anabaptist of the three.
I found it fascinating when I talked with Norman about Yoder. Norman of course knew Yoder personally quite well; they were students at Goshen Biblical Seminary together in the late 1940s and lived near each other in northern Indiana for many years. However, Norman said he didn’t know Yoder’s thought all that well, and that he hadn’t read many of Yoder’s writings. He rarely cited Yoder in his writings, and Yoder rarely cited Norman. I believe that their respective theological projects nonetheless overlap a great deal. To realize that they did not mutually influence each other indicates that each one was drawing on the same Anabaptist Mennonite tradition and applying the insights of that tradition to the contemporary world in impressively similar ways.
I used God Our Savior in my Introduction to Theology class for many years (and enjoyed having Norman regularly share with the class). The book was a bit of a stretch for most college undergrads, but I think it generally went over pretty well. Eventually, I wrote my own textbook (Theology as If Jesus Matters) that was greatly influenced by Norman’s approach, especially his profound strategy of addressing each theological theme through the lens of Jesus’s life and teaching.
I believe that Norman’s two big books (Jesus Christ Our Lord and God Our Savior) remain important resources for peace theology. I believe that Norman did not receive the respect he deserved as a major constructive theologian. He is rarely referred to by younger Mennonite scholars. I hope, though, that some day his work will receive more attention. The central challenge the Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition faces today is to make its core convictions accessible and applicable in our post-denominational and post-rural Mennonite enclave world. Norman’s work is an important resource for that challenge.

An important ecclesial friend
For the first several years that Kathleen and I lived in Harrisonburg, we were part of the same church as Norman. I well remember sitting in on a fascinating Sunday School class that Norman taught for “skeptics” in the congregation. We left Park View when Kathleen began pastoring at Shalom Mennonite Congregation, but Norman and I still saw each other regularly. Interestingly, for the past few years we became part of the same congregation again when Norman and his second wife, Rhoda, began attending Shalom.
Norman played a crucial role in helping me navigate some of my stormy Mennonite waters. I came under fire from various sources due to many of my theological convictions. When I was being considered for tenure at EMU, some rather intense lobbying occurred in opposition to my being approved.
At one point, without my knowledge, EMU’s three top administrators called a meeting with one of my harshest adversaries and invited Norman to join them as an “expert” theological resource. Two of the administrators met with me to inform of this meeting afterwards. I was concerned (and angered a bit), but when they told me Norman was part of the meeting I breathed a sigh of relief. He did indeed offer a strong defense of my work, and after that, though the rest of the process including some intense conversations with the Board of Trustees, these administrators strongly supported my candidacy—which was approved. And from then until I retired in 2016, I felt solid support from EMU’s leaders.
At the same time as the tenure process was happening, I was also under fire within Virginia Mennonite Conference. Strong forces within the conference wanted to take away my pastoral ordination. This process included several meetings where I spoke with conference leaders. I was allowed to bring a companion with me to those meetings, and Norman graciously agreed to join me. I was gratified that he spoke in support of my ministry—and that as a consequence of those meetings shared many of my frustrations with the accusers. Eventually I was “exonerated,” thanks in part to Norman.
I was helped in both of these cases by Norman’s support. He was a highly respected person in the Mennonite community. In talking with him in the years since, I have gotten the impression that part of his willingness to invest himself in these ways came from his memory of his own struggles during the early years of his teaching career at Goshen College. He was considered theologically suspect by many in the Mennonite world and could empathize with the difficulties faced by theology professors who challenge received ideas.
An important dialogue partner
Over these past two decades, Norman and I conversed many times about theological themes. I genuinely felt we were kindred spirits. He continually inspired me with his agile mind, his undiminished curiosity, his remaining deeply engaged in the issues of the day, his insights and knowledge of Christian theology, and his positive spirit.
I did get him to talk at length one time about his own teaching career and some of the hurts he experienced due to insensitive administrators and unfair theological criticisms. As we neared the end of the conversation, he expressed a bit of embarrassment at being so candid. However, it was clear that the adversity had done little to embitter him or slow him down. He was driven by a passion to understand and to communicate. I think he looked back on his life as a reasonably successful effort at being true to that passion.
One of his most remarkable legacies, I think, is the collection of four books that he wrote over the final couple of decades of his life. He remained deeply engaged with the big questions and addressed them in profound ways into his seventies, eighties, and even nineties.
He wrote on evangelism in our postmodern, pluralistic age (An Intrusive Gospel?), arguing for a clear witness to Jesus as our definitive revelation of God combined with a deep respect for other religious traditions. He wrote on interpreting the Bible as a truthful source of guidance in our environment of relativism and the questioning of authority (Using Scripture in a Global Age). He wrote on how Jesus remains directly relevant for peacemaking, even as Mennonites and other Christian pacifists learn from more secular peacebuilding approaches (The Jesus Factor in Justice and Peacebuilding). And, he wrote on human sexuality and the debate about “homosexuality” in the churches (his essays in the book he edited, To Continue the Dialogue: Biblical Interpretation and Homosexuality and the book On Being Human: Sexuality and the Image of God).
Norman apparently left detailed instructions for his memorial service. It was well-planned and executed. And it was, fittingly, a kind of farewell lecture from a great mind and spirit. We heard moving remembrances from family and friends. And we heard from Norman—honest, insightful thoughts about death, dying, and resurrection. His iconoclastic impulses were represented, but even more his deep and abiding faith in the God of love he devoted his life to.

Syndicated from Thinking Pacifism