Anabaptism at 450: A Challenge, a Warning

Hard by Ulrich Zwingli’s Grossmünster Church, in Zurich, Switzerland, in the house of one Felix Manz, there gathered one January night in 1525 a small but determined group of defeated men. Bested by Zwingli in a disputation before the town council, Conrad Grebel and about a dozen of his radical colleagues assembled to assess their future. They could go along with the snail’s pace, as they perceived it, of Zwinglian half-hearted reform, or they could strike out on their own, against the council’s command, for a church restored to its primitive integrity. Gradual reformation or radical restitution: this was the question.

Grebel resolved the issue by baptizing, with Manz’s household water, an erstwhile Catholic priest, George Blaurock, who then baptized all the rest. This ceremony symbolized a decisive break with the gradual reformers as well as with the Catholic Church. The sign of that rupture was chosen: adult baptism, which in the view of others was rebaptism, since they had been baptized as infants. Hence they were branded Anabaptists, from the Greek ana-, again, and baptizein.

The Grebel-Blaurock group formed what came to be called the Swiss Brethren. Other groupings also arose under the sign of rebaptism. Among those still flourishing today are the Hutterites, the Mennonites, and a major subdivision of the latter, the Amish. Whether any contemporary Baptist communion can trace its origins to the house of Felix Manz is a matter of scholarly dispute. Also in question is how far the event occurring in the shadow of Grossmiinster that January night simply echoed the “enthusiasm,” as Ronald Knox calls it in a book by that name, characteristic of Montanism, Donatism, and other early heresies.

A Challenge …

Commemorating historical events is more than reminiscence. It is also a recognition of the current significance of things past. One asks, then: What might our world owe to Anabaptism that those both inside and outside its tradition should commemorate?

Anabaptism poses both a challenge and a warning. History is open to varying interpretations, and not all observers perceive in it the same values—or even the same events. Celebration, then, of this Anabaptist anniversary may well fasten upon a number of themes. At least two are likely to be prominent among them, however. They clearly emerge from George Williams’s already classic study, The Radical Reformation. Etched in the early history of Anabaptism are (1) consequence and (2) courage.

For the Anabaptist, the Christian faith has practical consequences. Faith without temporal and practical implications is not true faith. Faith, for the Anabaptist, is a state of being and of behavior. It requires a life built up out of acts implicit in that faith, as made explicit in the Word and by the Holy Spirit. Whether or not each person’s confession was continually supported by his life became the concern of the brotherhood; the “ban” was mandatory for those whose good confession was not persistently validated in good works.

Hear Peter Ridemann as he draws together the strands of a Confession of Faith, produced in prison in 1540, first published in 1545, and still an accurate statement of what Anabaptists believe:

We teach further, that Christ came into the world to make sinners blessed … and that man through faith might be planted and grafted in Christ. This, however, taketh place as follows: as soon as the man heareth the gospel of Christ and believeth the same from his heart, he is sealed with the Holy Spirit.… This Spirit of Christ which is promised and given to all believers maketh them free from the law or power of sin, and planteth them into Christ, maketh them of his mind, yea, of his character and nature, so that they become one plant and one organism together with him: he the root or stem, we the branches.…

Now, because Christ is the root and the vine and we are grafted into him through faith, even as the sap riseth from the root and maketh the branches fruitful, even so the Spirit of Christ riseth from the root, Christ, into the branches or twigs to make them all fruitful. Hence the twigs are of the same character as the root, and bear corresponding fruit.… Now since Christ is a good tree and vine, naught but what is good can or may grow, flourish and be fruitful in him.

Thus doth man become one with God, and God with him, even as a father with his son, and is gathered and brought into the Church and community of Christ, that he with her might serve and cleave to God in one Spirit, and be the child of the covenant of grace, which is confirmed by Christ [Confession of Faith, Plough, 1970],

Ridemann’s Confession, which occupies some one hundred thirty printed pages in the edition from which I quoted, is, according to Mennonite historian Robert Friedmann, “characteristic not only of the Hutterite type of Anabaptism but of the movement as a whole.” And Ridemann’s drift is clear: rebirth through the Spirit is into a new manhood characterized by good works, done to and for the brethren in the community established by the Lord as his Church—a community in turn fully responsible for the behavior of all its members.

Anabaptism’s anniversary is an ever timely reminder that faith either has practical consequences or is dead.

A consequential faith presumes, as it inspires, courage. For it invites reaction. So it was with Anabaptism, and sixteenth-century reaction was bloody and to the death. Seizing upon the means common to the times, magistrates both Catholic and Reformed pounced upon Anabaptism like beasts of prey. And fully reminiscent of the primitive church restored was the heroism with which Anabaptist men, women, and children stood their ground, bowed their heads, suffered, and died for what they believed.

No need, really, to recount the tortures, expulsions, imprisonments, beheadings, burnings inflicted upon the rebaptized and rebaptizers. Their page flames out as a glorious one in the annals of courage.

Professor Williams summarizes in these words his eight hundred pages of Anabaptist early history:

The great majority of the mighty host of men and women whose lives we have sketched communicate an overwhelming sense of their earnestness, their lonely courage, and their conviction. They were aware of a providential purpose that informed their deeds. The bleakness, squalor, brutality, and frenzy of the vast scene in which they played their parts was relieved for them—as for us, the spectators—by the intense assurance which these people had that within the shadow of their crosses God stood keeping watch above his own. The cumulative effect of their testimony is that Christianity is not child’s play, that to be a Christian is to be commissioned [The Radical Reformation, Westminster, 1962].

In this commemorative year, what can be said about all this? What might an age in full flight to escape even minor discomfort do with the Anabaptist witness of consequence and courage?

Is not “belief” now commended as one key to the penthouse of success? Is not “faith” promoted in lieu of psychiatry, or through it, as the way to a carefree existence? Does not the Christ figure at least on the fringes of positive and possibility thinking—routes to achievement and status? Do not “evangelists” impart freely what has cost them nothing to attain, hawking a “savior” (in Bonhoeffer’s words) like a cheapjack’s wares on street corners?

Voices from out of prisons, heard above the crackle of devouring flames, muffled by lacerated tongues, drowned by weighted sacks in rolling rivers—can such voices be heard, this day, above the commercial din, through the sleek propaganda?

… And A Warning

Persecution has, or finds, occasion. Why were peaceful and peace-loving communal groups sought out for destruction? Was any legitimacy cloaked beneath the unspeakable brutalities that Anabaptists suffered?

Imperial Rome found primitive Christianity inimical to the state. The Sanhedrin found it a threat to true religion. These were the charges once again put forth against the radical restitutionists of the Reformation. Was it once again new wine threatening old wineskins, the spirit shrugging off the strictures of the letter?

In the sixteenth century, men killed and died for doctrinal convictions with an enthusiasm largely confined in our times to Marxists. But is there in the Anabaptist story an issue other than doctrine that might still admonish our more tolerant, and more timid, era?

William Estep denies that the Anabaptists were guilty of heresy: “They accepted,” he says, “the teaching of the Apostles’ Creed, the trinitarian concept of God, the incarnation, the atoning work of Christ, and the authority of Scripture.” Such formal acquiescence in doctrines largely common to new Protestant and old Catholic alike is subject to some qualification. But the issue was not perceived in purely theological terms.

Anabaptism was perceived as a threat to two institutions deemed indispensable to civilization itself: church and state, separately or together. Those who marshalled the forces unleashed against the radicals clearly understood what the Western world has since partially ignored or forgotten. It is fitting that this anniversary year recall for us, too, that lacking even the secular state, human society cannot endure; and that lacking the church, society will not continue to be humane. The best state is that in which Christians are active to provide the Church all the freedom its people can employ.

The Anabaptist threat to the state was doublepronged: (1) forbidding participation by believers in the political process, and (2) ruling out the use of force, even in suppression of violence.

On the first, Ridemann says bluntly in his Confession: “Thus, a ruler can be no Christian, or no Christian can be a ruler.” Politics is off-limits to the faithful: it is left in the hands of the demonic and ungodly. Granting that political power can be “a servant of God for the punishment of evildoers,” the Anabaptist paid his levies—except those for military use. But participate in office, or appear at the polling booth, or take the oath, he would not.

In striking contrast, Calvin’s appreciation of civil government is salutary still: “Its function among men is no less than that of bread, water, sun, and air; indeed, its place of honor is far more excellent.” As to Christian participation in politics, Calvin urges: “Accordingly, no one ought to doubt that civil authority is a calling, not only holy and lawful before God, but also the most sacred and by far the most honorable of all callings in the whole life of mortal men.”

The issue is evident. And, as Solzhenitsyn is reminding the world, it is urgent. Politics is survival.

As to the second prong of the Anabaptist threat to the state, its consistent pacifism: surely all can now see that rejection of the awful use of force by the political power simply exposes a people to that illegitimate exercise of power called violence. It is a practical lesson that the Anabaptist himself experienced almost in vain.

It is imperative for the modern world to perceive that the alternative to violence is not pacifism but the legitimate exercise of force. Until, for example, terrorism becomes a capital offense, terrorists will force the release of captured comrades by the threat of new violence—with social order the ultimate victim.

We can revere the awesome heroism of the Anabaptists without beclouding the distressing reality it reflects: that he who refuses to support and participate in the lawful exercise of force becomes complicit in the violence thus liberated. And if he then becomes the victim of such violence, his complicity extends to a double violation of divine law: homicide done by the violent, and suicide willed upon himself. The lawful use of force, in war, as well as in other ways, is the only alternative a society has to submersion in violence. That this is not always the fate of the pacifist, and that pacifist communities survive to this day, is but testimony to the value of the legitimate exercise of force by the state.

The Anabaptists were apprehended as seditious. At issue then, and now, is always the continuation of that order essential to social survival. To this, as I say, Solzhenitsyn bears compelling witness.

For the Anabaptists the issue in regard to the Church was its inviolable dependence upon the integrity of the Scriptures. Protestantism was engaged in replacing the objective authority of an infallible church with the objective authority of an infallible Bible. Anabaptism was perceived to be hindering this process: it substituted the subjective authority of the Spirit-illumined interpreter for the objective authority of an infallible Word.

Calvin delineated the tension as early as his exchange with Cardinal Sadoleto in 1539:

We are assailed by two sects, which seem to differ most widely from each other. For what similitude is there in appearance between the Pope and the Anabaptists? And yet, that you may see that Satan never transforms himself so cunningly as not in some measure to betray himself, the principal weapon with which they both assail us is the same. For when they boast extravagantly of the Spirit, the tendency certainly is to sink and bury the Word of God, that they make room for their own falsehoods.

Ridemann identifies, as we have heard, the believer with Christ through the agency of the Spirit. It is but a step from this identification—a step that the Anabaptist was prone to take—to the claim that Christ’s or the Spirit’s knowledge and discernment are at the believer’s beck and call.

“We believe and consider ourselves under the authority of the Law,” said the Anabaptist disputants at Bern in 1538, “in so far as it does not contradict the new law, which is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We believe and consider ourselves under the authority of the prophets in so far as they proclaim Christ.” The Law and the prophets (in short, the Old Testament) were authoritative “in so far as” they fit into the subjective grid of the interpreter. The New Testament, in practice, suffered similar control or emendation.

Assuming that he possessed the mind of Christ or was guided by the immediate illumination of the Spirit, the Anabaptist threw all things (Calvin believed) into “confusion.” He sought to live, and to judge, from the vantage point of heaven, from the perspective of the Last Day—what may now be called living “eschatologically.” From this privileged observatory, the Anabaptist claimed to discriminate unerringly the sheep from the goats. His civil posture was irenic, but his language was martial, his attitude authoritarian, and his assurance of nearomniscience immutable. He was, moreover, often millenarian—as much perhaps in anticipation of seeing his judgments vindicated upon the disbelieving as in entering, himself, the airy realm of the blessed.

Calvin’s corrective is as pertinent today as it was over four centuries ago: “It is no less unreasonable to boast of the Spirit without the Word than it would be absurd to bring forward the Word itself without the Spirit.” Not only the survival but also the social impact of the Church—as Calvinism has abundantly shown through the centuries—resides in the preservation of the integrity and authority of the Scriptures over all subjective illumination.

Ronald Knox is no doubt correct in concluding that the chief historical importance of Anabaptism lies “in the recoil of official Protestantism from the very notion of enthusiasm. The idea of a prophetic ministry, native to the Protestant genius, disappears everywhere, and ordained ministries spring up to replace it, no less institutional in character than is the Catholic priesthood” (Enthusiasm, Clarendon, 1950).

Unlike the Catholics, however, the Reformed identified the Church, not with its ministry but with the Bible soundly exposited and applied to believer and world alike. If the four-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Anabaptism causes renewed reflection upon this conception of the Church, we can all enthusiastically celebrate it together.

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