Do you recommend any resources/websites that point to the example of the early church as a transformationist phenomenon?

If not, I would be interested in getting such resources together in one place; I know Jesus Radicals has some stuff, and Christarchy has some stuff, but I feel an aggregate of reading resources/web resources would be good if it doesn’t already exist?

Thanks for responding to this, it gives me a better sense of where you are coming from. And, of course, as someone who has spent years working for justice on behalf of the marginalized, I resonated strongly with Yoder’s arguments for peace and justice.

However, I have to soundly reject the pretense of Nathan Hobby’s argument. Saying that the Cross of Christ is not x, y, and z, I think, dangerously treads a line of elitism and tries to put a corner market on discipleship.

Of course, the Cross of Christ is not the promise of getting more stuff, the Cross of Christ is not acting in ways that are violent or hubristic. But, I think, saying that the Cross of Christ is only the result of a political clash is, ultimately, reductionist. I think you can affirm the place of the political clash, but I don’t think by refuting the place of other burdens placed upon someone so that they can work toward mercy, grace, forgiveness, and peace.

The Cross of Christ is also a debt paid for our sins. The Cross of Christ is also the initiation of a new covenant, where the curtain is torn asunder and God has come to dwell in our hearts.The Cross of Christ is not just victory over the dominion of the political powers, but victory over death and victory of the powers of Satan.

The Cross is Christus Victor, it’s Ransom, it’s Penal Substution, it’s Moral Influence. I don’t see why these views can’t be held in tension together.

Yoder, I think, even recognized that he could only affirm a reading of a political Jesus, but could not necessarily refute a non-political reading. He even outlines in the first chapter of The Politics of Jesus the common arguments against a political reading of Jesus, and says that they are not without merit.

Therefore, I think I would identify with the Transformationist stream to a degree, so long as they don’t lay their claim on the Cross to the point of exclusivity.

I reread your comment on my earlier post and I agree that your framing of the separationist stream and my framing of the transformationist stream have strong similarities. In particular I resonate with this:

Repentance, theologically speaking, is our renunciation of the powers of this world and our oath of loyalty to Christ.

I think people who focus on the domination system and the powers need to think more about repentence. I have a friend in the UK who has focused a lot on the framework of repentence for shared sin. She is the director of a Christian student campaigning network and uses the paradigm of repentence to approach issues of trade injustice. They’ve used this as a jumping off point for public actions repenting for the burden of injustice we each carry. She’s talked about writing a book on the concept and I think it has the potential to build a lot of bridges between different streams of theology on these issues.

As far as why I don’t identify with the separationist stream so much I guess it would be mainly because I grew up in Lancaster county where the descendants of the Swiss Brethren have been practicing social/cultural nonconformity for 400 years. While I value my heritage, I also see it’s limits. If we don’t recognize the political and economic aspects of the powers, we can end up wearing plain clothes, but driving black bumper SUV’s and marginalizing women. Nevertheless I recognize that the separationist culture has arguably been the most effective at preserving certain Anabaptist values over the centuries.

My reading of Sawatsky was that he was starting with observation of pluralism within contemporary Mennonites as opposed to the the claim of a singular vision of the H. S. Bender and the “Goshen school”. Then he went back to the early Anabaptist to find correlaries.