I was out on a service call for around 6 hours today, and during part of the process we were just waiting on a program download to expand, so I asked him about 'gelassenheit'. He called in one of his employees whom he said would know. He said that he'd heard it used a lot, but didn't have a definition for me. (He was, of course, dealing with a language barrier.)Josh wrote:This is a very good question.If there is supposed to be this unbreakable tie between the individual and their congregation, then what is the "Gelassenheit-ed" Christian supposed to do when their congregation changes ("drifts") to the extent that the fellowship has become strained, to the point that the person has become a pariah, nothing but a thorn in the collective flesh of the congregation?
We talked about this for some time, and when I asked him the question above, he said that the promise is to the ordnung, and so if a congregation has drifted away from that, then a person who finds himself to be more conservative than the congregation is free to find a congregation that still follows the original ordnung. When I explained about the situation a person can end up being just a thorn in the flesh to the rest of the group, he said that if a person like that remains there, he can (even silently) be a prophetic voice calling the group back. (This is more or less my own terminology, but I think it accurately expresses his meaning.) They then talked about the time when the Dan church left the larger Amish group, that if they had stayed, the more liberal group might not have changed so much. The conservative voice would have restrained the most liberal among the entire group. There is some talk about this same thing in respect to my own background - that if the group that left the 'Big Church' (in the Molotschna colony in Russia in 1860) and became the Mennonite Brethren had remained longer, and stayed to be a force of revival of spirituality in the main church, that the revival that eventually swept through the Big Church might have come sooner, and there would still be unity.