A Pilgrimage Of Faith, J.B. Toews, 1993

Joachim of Fiore - it was not until the Reformation of the six- teenth century, with its creation of alternate expressions of the Christian faith, that another investigation of church history was launched; this time, however, not from within the church but from without. Begun by Humanists of the renaissance, who regarded "beginnings" as the purest expression of a movement, Protestants could see the "development" of the church only in terms of decline and corruption. From that point onward, church history has, as often as not, been used to justify the historian's own branch of the Christian church as to attack and seek to undermine all others. As Anabaptists/ Mennonites, the latter was our lot - with a few notable excep- tions - well into the twentieth century. Only infrequently have vi "insiders" of these churches had the courage to take a critical look at their own church history. In the German Lutheran tra- dition, Johann Amdt, in his Wabres Cbristentum, and Philip Jakob Spener, in his Pia Desideria, did so. Out of their critical reconstructions of the past grew the Pietistic revivals in the Lutheran Church that have had a profound impact in the his- tory of the Christian church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Church history is therefore a somewhat different entity than secular history and to a certain extent at least, pursues differ- ent purposes. One of these purposes is to trace the degree to which the church, in its various branches, has lived up to the ideals enunciated in the New Testament and embodied in the earliest church as portrayed in the Acts of the Apostles. This "primitivist" thrust was particularly characteristic of the An- abaptist movement. Subsequent renewal movements within the Mennonite Church have therefore struggled with the prob- lem of this dual origin: their own and that of the Apostolic Church. It is for this reason that Merino and the New Testa- ment play the role they do in the birth of the Mennonite Brethren Church in Russia. By returning - or at least attempt- ing to do so - to this dual beginning, renewal movements of necessity become critics of their contemporaries. This lies in the very nature of their enterprise. It is now one hundred and thirty three years since the birth of the Mennonite Brethren Church, and therefore time for someone in that church to take a backward glance to see how we have done. Who better to do this than J,B+ Toews whose life spans well over half of those years and who has experi- enced much of what he writes about in the following pages. He is o