Farming as Religious Imperative? Quiet on the Land?

In 1847 agricultural scientist and Russia expert Baron August von Haxthausen reported that for the conservative Mennonites in Russia tilling the soil is a “religious duty from which no one is exempt except those with special need, for the Bible teaches: ‘By the sweat of your brow you will you cultivate the ground’” (note 1).

This same rationale for Mennonite farming is picked up in Friedrich Matthäi’s 1866 volume of German settlements in Russia (note 2).

The biblical reference is a composite of Genesis 3:17 and 3:23. God says to Adam: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life” (3:17); and 3:23; God “banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.”

That perspective however was rooted neither in Mennonite tradition nor theology.

In the sixteenth century Flemish Anabaptists were largely urban; ability to read scripture was an imperative—not farming. While Genesis 3:17 is quoted in the 1632 Dordrecht Confession (note 3), no connection is made to agriculture.

Nor is farming mentioned in Danzig Flemish Elder Georg Hansen’s seventeenth-century Old Flemish Confession (note 4). He was a conservative and "patron saint" of the later Kleine Gemeinde (note 4). In Hansen’s suburban congregation in 1681, there are 114 Mennonites living in the city perimeter—38% of Mennonite house heads were retailers of “spirits” (note 6). This specialty is explained in part because Danzig Mennonites were hindered by law to full participation in public life.

Tilling the soil was also not thematic in the Prussian Short and Simple Statement of Faith (note 7) nor in the eighteenth-century Elbing Catechisms (note 8). And in contrast to Haxthausen, there is no Mennonite religious imperative for working the land based on “the Fall” and original sin. If Mennonite confessions or catechisms ever erred, it was typically in the opposite direction: most have an optimistic or positive views of human possibility in light of the new life in Christ. This trumped the power and implications of the Fall.

Twentieth-century Mennonite leader Benjamin Unruh never tired of reminding readers that Mennonites referred to themselves as the peaceful “quiet in the land” in contrast to the militant revolutionaries of Münster. The “quiet in the land”—die Stillen im Lande—is a posture and identity statement for the tradition of Menno, not a location on the land. Psalm 35:20 is the reference point; it speaks of those who live quietly in the land—no agricultural reference is intended.

Danzig elder Hansen’s goal was certainly to create a more rigorously separated, transformed “community of believers,” but not removed from the city. It was a retreat from the "public square" from ostentatious, showy attire, or activities like dancing. Whether one agrees with his strategy of church or not (he had his Mennonite critics), the goal was to be “a light to the world, to shine without fault,” to proclaim “his excellencies” while holding firmly “to the Word of life” and to each other in love as members of one body “to the end of the age” (note 9). The ban achieved this “outer quietness,” as one Dutch observer of Danzig noted in the mid-1700s. The concern of Hansen, much like later Danzig Elder Peter Epp or Elder Gerhard Wiebe in Elbing, was a pure and spotless church, as witness and pointer to the kingdom of God. This larger concern was rooted in the tradition of Menno Simons and Dirk Philips.

The invitation to settle in Russia from Georg von Trappe (agent for Catherine the Great) proposed the creation of “model agricultural settlements” of “excellent German farmers” to teach, to set a good example of sound management and to stimulate competition amongst neighbouring peoples and the New Russian peasantry (note 10).

Trappe encouraged his Mennonite colonists before they immigrated “to let your light shine in Russia before the people, that they may see your good works, and glorify your heavenly Father” (note 11). Trappe declared in an open letter his own pious conviction that this Mennonite migration to Russia was a special mission, “the work of the Almighty Creator” (note 12).

This would become the self-embraced sense of mission and identity of Russian Mennonites for more than a century—as model farmers, i.e., as a vehicle for witness.

The advice of Flemish Elder Gerhard Wiebe to those who would leave for Russia in 1788 summarizes the Polish-Prussian experience:

“… persevere in patience to the blessed consummation” and “keep low and be subject to the authorities of the land, even if they are harsh toward you. Strive to overcome evil with good. Protect yourself with your hard work so that you do not offend the ruling spiritual leaders. For they can be the first to make people hate you.” (Note 13)

Such are the “quiet in the land,” and this has nothing to do with a theological up-valuation of farming.

Jewish neighbours saw farming as a “bitter lot” for fallen humanity and largely unfitting for God’s “chosen people” (note 14). But for Mennonites, farming in Russia was an imperative based at best on the call in their charter/ Privilegium to be a model community, which overlapped with their sense as a faith community, to let their light shine helpfully before others. That is the thread back to Menno, not farming per se (note 15).

How did Haxthausen and Matthäi get it so wrong? Their claims are made as the landless crisis was becoming acute and no more than half of Mennonite families owned their own farm: Other kinds of pessimistic, confrontational politics were at play that obscured the longer Mennonite connection of vocation—rural or urban—to mission, not to the Fall.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: August von Haxthausen, Studien über die innern Zustände, das Volksleben und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen Rußlands, part II (Hannover: Hahn, 1847), 175; 184, https://archive.org/details/studienberdiein03kosegoog/page/n187.

Note 2: Friedrich Matthäi, Die deutschen Ansiedlungen in Rußland. Ihre Geschichte und volkswirthschaftliche Bedeutung (Leipzig: Fries, 1866), 223, http://www.digitalis.uni-koeln.de/Matthaeif/matthaeif_index.html.

Note 3: Dordrecht Confession; cf. “Fall of Man.” https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Dordrecht_Confession_of_Faith_(Mennonite,_1632)#II._Of_the_Fall_of_Man.

Note 4: Cf. doctrine of the “Fall of Adam and Justification” in Georg Hansen, Confession oder Kurtze und einfältige Glaubens-Bekänetenüsse derer Mennonisten in Preußen, so man nennet die Clarichen (N.p. 1678), http://pbc.gda.pl/dlibra/docmetadata?from=rss&id=35959.

Note 5: Klaas Reimer, founder of the Kleine Gemeinde in Russia, was encouraged by father-in-law Danzig Flemish Elder Peter Epp’s vision for emigration. Reimer deemed the Mennonite churches in Danzig and Prussia to be the hopelessly fallen “Babylon,” and believed that they could build an earthly model of the “New Jerusalem” on the Russian steppes. If Babylon is a city, so is the New Jerusalem. The core theme is mission and light—not a religious imperative to farming.

Note 6: Edmund Kizak, “A radical attempt to resolve the Mennonite question in Danzig in the mid-eighteenth century. The decline of the relations between the city of Danzig and the Mennonites,” translated by Camilla Badstubner-Kizik and Erwin Jost, Mennonite Quarterly Review 66, no. 2 (1992), 127–154; 134.

Note 7: Confession, or Short and Simple Statement of Faith (Rudnerweide, Russia, 1853). https://anabaptistwiki.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Confession,_or_Short_and_Simple_Statement_of_Faith_(Rudnerweide,_Russia,_1853)&oldid=16196.

Note 8: Cf. “Fall of Man,” in Katechismus, oder kurze und einfältige Unterweisung aus der heiligen Schrift, in Frage und Antwort, fur die Kinder zum Gebrauch in den Schulen, including the 1837 foreword of the 8th Prussian edition (Berdjansk: Kylius, 1874), https://archive.org/details/cihm_90991/page/n5.

Note 9: Hansen, Confession oder Kurtze und einfältige Glaubens-Bekänetenüsse, 17–19, http://pbc.gda.pl/dlibra/docmetadata?from=rss&id=35959; with reference to Philippians 2:15; 1 Peter 2:9; Ephesians 4:16; Matthew 28:20. One Danzig family diary records how members of urban congregations were confronted on fashion choices that gave offence to other (rural?) congregations, including dressing gowns with otter muffs, use of wig powder, adoption of laces and ties over the usual boot buckle, canes with silver buttons, and pockets on the outside of men's coats. Excessive use of silverware and dancing at a wedding were matters for discipline, as well as drunkenness and a variety of sexual offences, but these were not limited to the city congregations. Cf. Waldemar H. Lehn, ed., “Lehn Diary,” 25; 15; 17; 19; 33; 35; 37; 41; 43; 45; 53. Transliteration from the gothic script and translation by Waldemar H. Lehn, 2010. From Mennonite Heritage Archive, Winnipeg, MB.

Note 10: Grigorii G. Pisarevskii, Izbrannye proizvedenija po istorii inostrannoj kolonizacii v Rossii [Selected works on the history of foreign colonization in Russia] (Edited by I.V. Cherkazyanova. Moscow: ICSU, 2011), 150, https://bibliothek.rusdeutsch.ru/catalog/860. [English selection: https://www.mharchives.ca/download/3422/]

Note 11: In David H. Epp, Chortitzer Mennoniten. Versuch einer Darstellung des Entwicklungsganges derselben (Odessa, 1889), 46, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/Dok/Epp.pdf. This mission is consistent with Hansen’s 1678 Mennonite Confession.

Note 12: Pisarevskii, Izbrannye proizvedenija, 180f.

Note 13: Gerhard Wiebe, “Verzeichniß der gehaltenen Predigten samt andern vorgefallenen Merkwürdigkeiten in der Gemeine Gottes in Elbing und Ellerwald von Anno 1778 d. 1. Januar.” Transcriptions from the original by Willi Risto, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/Buch/Risto1.pdf, pp. 182, 184.

Note 14: Cited in Dmytro Myeshkov, Schwarzmeerdeutschen und ihre Welten: 1781–1871 (Essen: Klartext, 2008), 343.

Note 15: On the larger theme of Mennonite farming, cf. Roydon Loewen, Mennonite Farmers: A Global History of Place and Sustainability (Baltimore: University of Johns Hopkins Press, 2021; Kindle). With reference to Genesis 1:28, Loewen helpfully notes (pp. 6f.) that "religious teaching permitted and even encouraged the cultivation of the soil ... and promised the cultivators of the soil cultural legitimacy, even spiritual meaning." Cf. also idem, “The Kleine Gemeinde as Sectarian Farmers, 1850-75,” in Delbert Plett, editor, Leaders of the Mennonite Kleine Gemeinde in Russia, 1812–1874, edited by Delbert Plett, 83-99 (Steinbach, MB: Crossway, 1993), https://www.mharchives.ca/download/1261/.

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To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “Farming as a Religious Imperative? Quiet on the land?,” History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), July 11, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/07/farming-as-religious-imperative-quiet.html.