How did my Goshen College experience influence my views on political issues? As a student at Goshen in the latter 1950s, I moved within in an intellectual and spiritual climate much invigorated especially by: (1) the “Anabaptist vision” emphasis of seminary dean Harold S. Bender; and (2) the social ethics of Guy F. Hershberger, which for Mennonites brought a fresh emphases on applying Biblical pacifism to a wide variety of social issues – through Christian example, through practical service, and, in careful and circumspect ways, through public witness that amounted to a kind of political engagement. Then, as a Goshen professor from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, teaching American history and American Mennonite history (with emphasis on social history), I profited much from working inside a new generation who were sometimes applying, sometimes criticizing, but always wrestling with the Bender-Hershberger legacy, especially its social and political implications.

Not least in that generation were friends such seminary professor Ted Koontz and my Goshen colleague J. Richard Burkholder, Harvard Divinity professor and then Goshen president J. Lawrence Burkholder, and the ever-provocative John Howard Yoder.

The climate and its resources for political consciousness were so rich (and sometimes conflicting) that any summary of its “influence” on me has to be a vast reduction. But the most important “political” convictions that grew in me have probably been these five:

1. For Jesus’ disciples, our first loyalty is to Jesus and to the Reign of God that Jesus proclaimed. Loyalties to nation and political systems remain secondary, although quite all right insofar as those systems contribute to God’s just and merciful purposes.
2. God’s primary agent for doing Divine work in the world, and for anticipating and building God’s Reign, is God’s church. Civic governments and nation-states can and should contribute to God’s shalom and create the climate for God’s Reign; but the church is the primary embodiment of God’s people, of Jesus’ followers and disciples, and it is the primary vehicle of their loyalty and faith.
3. By his person, teaching, and example, Jesus taught his followers to proceed with love, reconciliation, and redemption – which mean, not with sheer coercive power and certainly not with violence.
4. Therefore, in political practice, those who have committed themselves to following Jesus should proceed primarily with faithful witness (including the practical witness of service) rather than by the short cut of capturing and exercising the instruments of violence and coercive power.
5. And yes, for that witness, we do often need to engage with the political order and even speak its language. That often means that in the immediate case we call our politicians not directly to the full ethics of Jesus, which is not their political language, but rather to some frankly less-than-ideal improvements, some “middle axioms” – which very often, as John Howard Yoder pointed out, means calling upon political leaders and the whole political order to practice far more of the best democratic and humanitarian ideals that they themselves espouse.