How His Mind Was Changed
Jophn E. Zercher, Nonresistance, and the Power of Motivated Reasoning

Of all its contributions to twentieth-century theological reflection, the most important gift of The Christian Century was its recurring series “How My Mind Has Changed.” Inaugurated by editor Charles Clayton Morrison in 1939, the series offered scores of first-person accounts detailing how influential Christian theologians had changed their views, if not completely, then at least in part.¹ How did Karl Barth come to conclude that the humanistic subjectivity of theological liberalism is no match for the objective reality of the Word of God?² How did Martin Luther King Jr. make the switch from the gloomy theological realism of Reinhold Niebuhr to a more optimistic view of human potential and, in turn, embrace a theology of nonviolence?³ How, more recently, did Sallie McFague become convinced that an essential task of Christian theology is to expose the sin of ecological degradation?⁴ In the pages of the Christian Century, readers could locate the answers to these and many other questions, answers written after the fact by the very people whose minds had changed in some significant way.

How do minds change? I’ve often wondered how my father, John E. Zercher, came to conclude that his World War II military service was more a matter for repentance than a cause for celebration. Indeed, how did this willing participant in the so-called Good War become one of the Brethren in Christ Church’s most determined proponents of the denomination’s peace position? In the years leading up to World War II, the Brethren in Christ peace position was typically called nonresistance, a term derived from Jesus’s command that his followers should “not resist an evil person.”⁵ In light of that verse, and a range of other biblical passages that point to Jesus’s rejection of violence, the denomination concluded that Christians should not contribute to their nations’ war efforts as combatants, noncombatants, or defense industry workers. For my father, who came to accept that view in the years following World War II, the idea of nonresistance eventually came to include more activist components—for instance, criticizing America’s military endeavors and the nationalistic attitudes that undergirded them.

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1. The first series featured thirty-four different theologians and ran for eight months, from January 1939 through September 1939. [↩]
2. Karl Barth, “How My Mind Has Changed in This Decade,” Christian Century, September 13-20, 1939, 1097-1099, 1132-1134. Barth himself argued that this was not a change in his thinking, but was rather a view that had been more fully confirmed in his mind. [↩]
3. Martin Luther King Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” Christian Century, April 13, 1960, 439-441. [↩]
4. Sallie McFague, “An Earthly Theological Agenda,” Christian Century, January 2-9, 1991, 12-15. [↩]
5. Matthew 5:39 (KJV). [↩]