Yoder and other Anabaptist theologians argued that the early Christian Church of Jesus and his followers had been radical and pacifist but that had changed with the “Constantinian shift” in 312 A.D. That was when the Roman emperor Constantine had a vision just before the Battle of Milvian Bridge in which he saw a cross above the sun and heard the words, “by this sign you will conquer.” Although the shift from an anti-imperialist revolutionary religion of the colonized to a militarized, establishment religion of empire was gradual, with the Constantinian shift the Church had been subverted and perverted.
According to this narrative, there followed numerous attempts of believers to return to the original faith of Jesus, and these included the monastic movements, the spiritual and even the “heretical” movements of the Middle Ages. But only with the coming of the Anabaptists’ “Radical Reformation,” beginning with Peter Waldo and his followers in the late twelfth century, did a serious turn back to Christ’s teachings occur in the West. This led to a crisis of authority as Medieval Christians asked what exactly constituted “Christ’s teachings,” and who represented them, but it also represented the beginnings of a radical political tradition in the West that would grow out of its religious roots and take distinct secular forms. As Norman Cohn wrote of the Medieval millenarian and apocalyptic movements’ survival into our own day, “stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are still with us.”11 They certainly were with a few of us in the HCOB, even if the revolutionary movements of Christianity weren’t yet on my agenda, and the same spirit was alive and well in Berkeley, even if expressed in the hip argot of the 1970s.
Radical Catholics, seekers of various sorts, gnostic mystics, and old hippies cycled through the HCOB as well as the collective households, either visiting or staying on for a while. This was especially true of Dwight House, which every imaginable form of humanity passed through, some of them saints, and true prophets and people of uncommon wisdom, depth, and compassion. But there were also the others, each with his or her own unique worldview, con, or delusion, depending on the person. Both saint and sinner found some corner of the House Church to rest in, although some may have never gotten far beyond the entryway. This was, after all, Northern California, a region that has always offered the tantalizing scent of utopia.
Chief among the many reasons I liked hanging out in the Dwight House basement was because that’s where Karen Bostrom lived, a delicate woman with long, blond hair, a tough facade and a great, but wounded, heart. She would become my first wife in a relationship that, perhaps, was doomed from the start.
We married less than a year into my time in Berkeley, and I believe we were the first marriage to take place in HCOB. Within a month we’d began to encounter what I would only recognize much too late as insuperable problems. Less than a year into our marriage we went off for six months to live and work in Switzerland, passing part of the time at Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri.12 By then I had a deeper affection for the secular philosophers Schaeffer criticized and a greater respect for their ideas than I did for Schaeffer and his Evangelical Reformed theology. I found myself challenging the Schaeffer dogma at every meal, and soon Karen and I left the community. A friend in Lausanne got us in contact with a local family who needed help tending their milk cows when they went up into the high slopes for summer grazing. I applied for the job and they hired me so I went to work in the mountains as a “cowboy.”
I’d brought with me three books, and these would become my only reading for the next couple of months I worked outside of Villars in the high slopes: the Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, The Crooked Lines of God, by William Everson/Brother Antoninus, and a copy of Slavery and Freedom, by Nicolas Berdyaev. I had ample time to read and while the poetry of Everson and Eliot would become a form of devotion for me, Berdyaev would begin a new transformation in my heart and mind. His “mystical anarchism,” as it has been called, was a particular comfort to me there as I passed hours of isolation in the high slopes of Switzerland: an idyllic context for a descent into hell.
The Russian philosopher had deeply inspired Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who had “indoctrinated” Dorothy Day with Berdyaev’s “personalist socialism.”13 Berdyaev himself had referred to the personalists around the French magazine Esprit (Emmanuel Mounier, Jacques Maritain, and others) as being “the most interesting movement” in Western, Catholic Christianity, and “in Protestantism the most remarkable figure is [Christoph] Blumhardt.” Christoph Blumhardt was a founder of Christian Socialism in Germany and Switzerland, an influence on the young Herman Hesse and close to the Anabaptist Hutterian Brethren.
Toward the end of his life Berdyaev believed that “the world is entering upon a socialist and communal period,” but he continued to reject “the metaphysical untruth of collectivism, which denies personal character and the freedom of the creative act.” For Berdyaev, the creative act was the greatest human endeavor because “in creative activity there lies a mystery which cannot be rationalized nor reduced to any form of determinism, nor in fact to anything coming from outside.”14
Rejecting both communism and capitalism, Berdyaev insisted on a communitarianism based on respect for the individual’s personality and sobornost, a Russian concept meaning “spiritual community or common life.” He detested Russian communism for “leveling society” and reducing all human endeavor to the lowest-common denominator; he had an equal disgust for the selfish individualism of the United States, a country he refused to visit. Berdyaev’s socialism had a Nietzschean side to it, and so he also had great disdain for bourgeois culture.
After years in the Evangelical tradition that advocated a certain passivity before God—since humanity can do nothing to save itself but “believe in Jesus”—and a distinctly negative view of “sinful” human nature, Berdyaev’s optimism, his Nietzschean exultation in human will and his Orthodox universalism, was a great relief. It also presented itself as a path out of my emotional hell as my first marriage disintegrated.
I studied Berdyaev in the solitude of the chalet, looking out the windows occasionally to rest my eyes on, and marvel at, the enormous mountains and beautiful green valleys painted with cascades of wildflowers. I read Eliot and Everson, lingering especially over their religious works like Eliot’s “Choruses from the Rock” and his “Four Quartets,” and the marvelous devotional poems of Everson’s The Crooked Lines of God.
My wife Karen had gotten a job in a school teaching children English, and she made the trip down the valley every day to work while I stayed at the chalet tending the cows. Impossibly, we both were becoming more depressed in the wonderland of the Swiss Alps. This paradise of majestic mountains and rivers, serene forested slopes leading up to bare rocky crags and winding green valleys would have been the perfect setting for a romantic first year of marriage, except that now Karen had decided she wanted to return to California and file for divorce.
I followed her home and soon I was back in Berkeley where I picked up my old life again, now with eighty-five cents in my pocket, no work, no place to live, and even further out on the margins of the Christian community. Fortunately I ran into Marc Batko, a street theologian and translator of German theology, and he offered me the floor of his studio to sleep on until I could get on my feet.
I eventually put together enough part-time work that I was able to get a room of my own, and then I got steady work in Logos Christian Bookstore on Telegraph Avenue.
At Logos Bookstore I was introduced to a whole new world of theology. At first my job was simply to open boxes of books and stock the shelves under the management of the bookbuyer, a brilliant and likeable man a few years younger than me named John Young. He had long hair and a beard and he knew every book in the store and the whole field of theological writings. The bookstore was owned by an Evangelical couple from over the hill in the more conservative area of Walnut Creek, but John had