Laura Roberts Investigates Mennonite Identity

As a doctoral student at the GTU, Laura Roberts’ grounded love for her Mennonite faith has grown to include a fresh, critical examination of the nature of tradition, in ways that introduce a new dynamism and flexibility.

The Mennonites’ origins are in the Protestant Reformation. An evangelical group descended from the 16th-century Anabaptists, early emphases were on separation of church and state, separation from the world, and on discipline for both community and individual. Most Mennonite communities today are known for their interest in social issues, their strong peace stand, and their emphasis on community, embodied in independent local churches.

Theology and Tradition
Since the 1980s, discussion among Mennonite thinkers has focused on more explicit theology and theological method. Recent historical work had shown that there was not one original Anabaptism in the 16th century, but many related movements with diverse beliefs, styles, and practices. This multiplicity of origins included numerous elements that did not fit comfortably with the existing Mennonite self-understanding. The issue then was, what did these new findings mean about the tradition and its theology?

Despite the new scholarly interest in the Mennonites’ multiple origins, Roberts heard the language around the tradition itself as “pretty static. I wanted to look at how we thought about tradition itself, in order to find a way that it could be understood as adequately dynamic.”

To this end, her dissertation explores conceptualizations of the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition since the mid-20th century. Paul Ricoeur’s focus on hermeneutics was a key inspiration, notably his insight that “Traditions live by the grace of interpretation.”

Exploring the power and aliveness of interpretation became a way to use the Mennonites’ own focus on community to open up the tradition from the inside, protecting it from a single, overly rigid, or fundamentalist definition. As Roberts said, “None of the tradition drops from heaven like a stone. It comes through lived faith in a community, and that has to be recognized. The lived component is a process of interpretation, which means arguing out competing interpretations, within community.”

At the same time, the “grace of interpretation” does not imply that “the tradition can be made to mean just anything or everything. There are multiple meanings but not an infinite number.” The theologian’s role, as Roberts came to understand it, lies in interpretations of the tradition that are both responsible and creative.

“A Broadening Experience”
Roberts found her GTU experience to be enormously broadening both personally and in her scholarship. She came to the GTU with a strong sense of her identity and its location in a minority tradition, and was struck by the level of “genuine interest” from faculty and students alike. Her best friends in the program were Catholic, Lutheran and Episcopalian, and she cherished the opportunity to “walk through core theological issues with them.”

The ecumenical and interfaith environment influenced her scholarly work as well. “The gift of the GTU has been studying with people who have been asking some of the same questions of their traditions that I have begun asking of mine, but for much longer,” Roberts said. “The challenge from my committee and colleagues was to think more broadly about how my project was dealing with problems common to other traditions, not just Mennonite—to recognize the commonalities while at the same time addressing the particular shape of these issues in the Mennonite tradition.”

A Career in Teaching
Having completed the GTU doctoral program in four years, Roberts now returns to Fresno Pacific University, a Mennonite Brethren affiliated school, where she taught for five years before coming to the GTU. With her are her husband Mark, a high school English teacher, and their new daughter Clara.

At Fresno Pacific, with its religiously diverse student body, she will remember the support for pluralism at the GTU and work to make a similar experience for her students—“encouraging them to explore their own traditions, and making sure there’s room for everybody.”

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