Peace, Progress and the Professor by Bush Perry;

Author:Bush, Perry; [Bush, Perry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 5652321
Publisher: Herald Press
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

Diverging Readings of Anabaptist History

Through the 1920s, as Smith kept up a frantic teaching schedule, traveled extensively, and supervised two banks, he thoroughly knit his mind once more back into the fabric of Mennonite history. Even much of his travel abroad was for research or explicitly educational purposes, and in between his trips he spent nearly every other summer either buried in various archives or intensively immersed in writing. All these efforts bore fruit. Before the end of the decade, he would write two more major books, edit a third, complete a lengthy private memoir of his growing-up years, and furnish a running commentary on his journeys to the Mennonite popular press.

The tumultuous Mennonite world of the 1920s, however, was in no mood to receive anyone’s historical narratives dispassionately. In coming to Bluffton, Smith had removed himself from the immediate authority of the bishops and other hierarchs of the Mennonite Church. The congregational polity of the General Conference church did not lend itself to the emergence of such officials, and even as he retained his membership in a Central Conference congregation, with his 1920 book Smith cemented his reputation as something like the official historian of the GC denomination. Yet Smith was fooling himself if he thought he could remain immune from the theological and ideological conflicts raging around him. He persisted in seeing himself as a historian thoroughly committed to the lofty ideal of objectivity. “I have no ax to grind, no preconceived ideas to find justification for,” he would insist in supreme exasperation to his most vigorous attacker. “I am merely an honest searcher after the truth.” The Mennonite world of the 1920s would not allow such a removed position. The theological and ecclesiastical fight between Mennonite fundamentalists and progressives was rising to a fever pitch, and it would place diverging readings of Mennonite history at the very center of the storm.1

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