Peter Mommsen at The Point:
Growing up, one of the first things I learned from the Bible was the commandment Thou shalt not kill. This makes sense considering that the religious community I belong to—the Bruderhof—is rooted in Anabaptism, a Christian tradition that, with occasional exceptions, has been pacifist since 1525. (The Anabaptist movement, which also includes the Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites, celebrates its quincentenary this year.) Over the sixteenth century, thousands of Anabaptists were executed as traitors to Christendom by Catholic and Protestant rulers. No doubt that’s why their signature virtue was Gelassenheit—“self-abandonment,” “submission,” “readiness to suffer.” It’s an ethic Nietzsche would have hated.
For a long time, I didn’t like it either, even after taking lifelong vows to become a Bruderhof member as an adult. Christian pacifism irritates because it demands what the biblical scholar Richard Hays calls “the conversion of the imagination”—the overturning of certain assumptions that modernity lives by.
more here.
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