Foreword

Perhaps the most important words of Weyburn Groff’s Nonviolence: A Comparative Study of Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Mennonite Church on the Subject of Nonviolence are found in his concluding sentence: “It is the opinion of this investigator that in the development of a systematized agape-love ethic, a major consideration must be the discovery of the meaning of agape-love in responsible citizenship.” For readers familiar with ongoing peace position debates among Mennonite theologians and ethicists over the past half-century (some might prefer to call these exchanges “discernment”), the significance of this sentence may be apparent. For those less familiar, perhaps the best starting place for introducing this manuscript is a visit to the context in which it was written.

Weyburn Groff wrote this text, originally submitted in 1963 as a doctoral dissertation, out of his experience in India. He took up an approach that paralleled in some ways but also departed from that of his better-known Mennonite theologian contemporaries…