The Reformation Radicals Ride Again

After 400 years of misrepresentation, Anabaptist thought is not only getting a new hearing but also winning converts.

In the following two articles we explore the increasing influence of Anabaptist theology on current Christian thought. Below Charles Scriven describes this influence by focusing on three figures: John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, and James William McClendon, Jr. Next we provide a sample of this neo-Anabaptist thinking in “Peculiar People,” an excerpt from Resident Aliens, a new book by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon.

The Anabaptists are back. Though maligned and dismissed for centuries, these Reformation radicals are today winning the admiration of many theologians.

When Ulrich Zwingli, under pressure from the Zurich city council, compromised his beliefs about the conduct of the Lord’s Supper, his youthful disciples thought he had “cast down” the Word of God and “brought it into captivity.” Soon they were meeting for home Bible study, which the law forbade. Though baptized as infants, they began to baptize one another again. They put forth a radical vision of full solidarity with Christ. They considered their religious loyalty to outweigh any loyalty to the practices and institutions dominant in their society.

These dissidents—called Anabaptists, or rebaptizers—suffered persecution from the start. Taking the resurrection to certify compassion and nonviolence, and considering their life together to be the contemporary tangible presence of Christ, they broke with surrounding society and thereby offended it. Anabaptists who arose later in southern Germany and the Netherlands bore a similar witness with similar effect. Almost to the present day the Anabaptist vision has been written off as irrational or irrelevant or both.

A New Context

But that is changing.

In the past, historians gave distorted accounts of the dissenting movement, feeding conventional hostilities. But truer accounts, written both by the Mennonite heirs of the first dissenters and by such non-Mennonite historians as Roland Bainton and George Hunston Williams, have in this century clarified Anabaptist belief, reclaiming the movement from caricature. At the same time, Mennonite theologians have been interpreting their heritage as a radical form of social responsibility, which is a keen topic to today’s Christian thinkers.

Other factors also account for rising Anabaptist influence. The horror of nuclear war has heightened people’s sense of moral urgency and has focused attention on peacemaking and nonviolence—two central Anabaptist themes.

The dechristianization of modern society is another factor in that it provides a more hospitable context for believers whose thought is characterized by dissent. Anabaptists rose up in defiance of a church that to them seemed soft. Although the Reformation had begun, Protestants as well as Catholics were still embracing the medieval vision of Christendom, where everyone was Christian by birth, and where church and state were integrally linked.

Now we are moving, as theologian George Lindbeck writes, “into a culturally (even if not statistically) post-Christian period.” Whereas once the church could see itself as the guardian of the prevailing social order, that seems less natural today. To some degree, the entire community of believers has begun to feel itself a minority—or at least a cultural minority. Anabaptists have had this experience from the start. In the new context it is likelier than before that they should be taken seriously.

Another reason for rising Anabaptist influence is the emergence of scholars who are challenging the foundational tenets of modernity. Modern thought had taken reliance on authority to be immature, even unnecessary. A “postmodernist” perspective argues that this is naïve and so focuses on such questions as how language works, how knowledge is acquired, and how individuals are related to their communities.

Postmodernist arguments by no means assure the recovery of Christian influence, but they undermine cavalier dismissal of viewpoints rooted in communal history and authoritative documents. The dissenters who founded the movement were radical partisans of the Bible story; a world not wholly disrespectful of authority can listen better to their witness.

These are plausible reasons for the resurgence of the Anabaptist vision. But we also need to explore the shape that vision is taking today. Three writers may be considered representative. One is John Howard Yoder of the University of Notre Dame; as a Mennonite, he is a direct spiritual descendant of the sixteenth-century dissidents who broke with their tamer Reformation counterparts. The second, a writer whose thought joins Catholic, Methodist, and Anabaptist threads, is Stanley Hauerwas, himself a Methodist and a professor at the Duke Divinity School. The third is James William McClendon, Jr., a Southern Baptist who teaches at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union and whose passion is to reclaim Anabaptist insight for the forgetful churches whose roots touch or lie close to it.

John Howard Yoder

The best known of Yoder’s several books is The Politics of Jesus (1972); another important volume is The Priestly Kingdom (1984), a collection of major essays. Yoder’s basic claim is that Jesus of Nazareth, in his actions and teachings and cross and resurrection, provides the normative pattern for Christian existence, a pattern socially and politically relevant today. In other words, Jesus’ life and teachings are our criteria for social and political responsibility.

This is striking, first, because it challenges the conventional view that Jesus’ mission was “spiritual,” focused on inner, religious transformation, and not political. In The Politics of Jesus, Yoder shows how in Luke’s gospel Jesus comes across as “an agent of radical social change.” Jesus portrays his ministry in expressly social terms. He expects society’s leaders to oppose and finally kill him. He warns his followers to anticipate hostility from the authorities. Though he resists the temptation of messianic violence, the point is not disinterest in social transformation but the integrity of his own nonviolent intent. Jesus intimidated the Jewish and Roman authorities to the point of assuring his own execution.

The New Testament calls us, Yoder argues, to live as Jesus did. The point is not imitation in general, as though we were called to celibacy or rural life, but imitation “at the point of the concrete social meaning of the cross in its relation to enmity and power.” What may seem at first to be weakness will, like the Cross itself, turn out to be world-changing power.

Such is Yoder’s faith. The church must keep the memory of Jesus alive, embracing the full gospel story, including the ethos of nonviolence. In this way Christ’s followers, instead of blessing the present order, will pioneer a new order. By such pioneering witness they will alter human consciousness and so transform the world. Even if their faithfulness is not effective in the short run, it will be effective in the long run; that is what it means to affirm the victory of the Lamb.

Stanley Hauerwas

The distinctive emphasis of Stanley Hauerwas’s writings is sanctification, what one might expect of a Methodist. But this theme is Anabaptist, too, and in elaborating on it Hauerwas has clearly made a case for the Anabaptist point of view.

Hauerwas’s books include A Community of Character (1981) and The Peaceable Kingdom (1983), a “primer” that summarizes his overall moral vision. In these and other works he argues that character development is a fundamental Christian task. Since the Enlightenment, popular Christian ethics has focused on resolving moral quandaries such as whether capital punishment, or abortion, or lying, are ever justifiable. But he points out that it is persons, persons with certain character traits, who decide about such matters. That is why the being of the moral self is prior to the doing. And that is why, without denying that the quandaries must be attended to, we should consider the development of character to be basic.

Character development happens, according to Hauerwas, under the impact of the narratives with which human beings identify. Modern thinking has urged emancipation from authority outside ourselves, but this is pretentious and self-deluding. All of us, including secularized scientists and philosophers, bear the marks of history, the marks of stories we deem important.

This complicates our efforts to communicate across cultural divides, but it is a fact we cannot undo. Communication across such divides is, in its way, possible, Hauerwas would argue, but it is difficult. Instead of trying (futilely) to erase the difficulty by diminishing our uniqueness, we should be as faithful as we can to the narratives we consider most important.

For Christians this means unembarrassed identification with the Jesus story. In the development of personal character, and of the church’s character as a whole, the story told in Scripture and culminating in the gospel must be our guide. Upon this, authentic Christian identity depends.

Through worship and shared life, the community of Christ embraces the ethic, the “social ethic,” of the Cross. As Jesus appeared powerless, accepted suffering, and refused violence, so must the church. Without rejecting or withdrawing from society, it must be faithful to its Lord.

Such faithfulness has political significance. In being truly itself, truly what the Jesus story suggests, the church provides the wider world with a “contrast model” of social life, an “alternative policy” that challenges worldly assumptions. Thereby the church, trusting the divine promise that its life “will not be without effect,” changes the surrounding society. In developing distinctively Christian character, both in its individual members and in the life these members share, the church bears a transforming witness in a hostile, divided world.

With its claim that loyalty to Christ outweighs loyalty to other causes, practices, and institutions, Hauerwas’s vision is distinctly Anabaptist, reflecting his conviction that Anabaptists, or Mennonites, exemplify “the most nearly faithful form of Christian witness.”

James William Mcclendon, Jr.

McClendon begins his 1986 volume Ethics, part one of a projected three-volume systematic theology, in a similarly Anabaptist way. “Theology,” he writes, “means struggle,” and the struggle “begins with the humble fact that the church is not the world.” It is always a temptation to offer a “theology that will seem true to the world on the world’s own present terms.” Thereby we may “in the short run” entice nonbelievers to take us seriously, but only at the cost of “betraying the church.”

This is a classic Anabaptist emphasis. McClendon prefers to speak of his views, however, as “baptist” (with a small b). The term baptist was the preferred self-designation of Anabaptism’s pioneers. When uncapitalized, the term invites attention not just from Baptists proper but also from Christians whose origins reveal a connection or a strong similarity to Anabaptism, such as Mennonites, Plymouth Brethren, Adventists, and others.

McClendon was a pioneer in attending to the relations of narrative, character, and community in Christian life. His Biography as Theology (1974) argues that the character of Christ, what is central in Christian life, must find embodiment in contemporary saints or become “mere antiquarian lore.” McClendon thus supports his theological analysis (both here and in his Ethics) with chapter-long illustrative stories, stories of such figures as Martin Luther King, Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Dorothy Day.

The stories typically tell of courageous faithfulness and show the connections between the courage involved and the subject’s participation in Christian community. All this reflects the Anabaptist heritage that the author understands himself to be interpreting.

The key Anabaptist idea, McClendon suggests, is that the Christian community today is the apostolic community and is the eschatological community. The present church bears the same identity, in other words, as the past and future church. The same Lord, with the same ideals and the same liberating power, governs its life. That is why Scripture must be central. Here the story of the church’s Lord is told; here, though without “naïve biblicism,” the church must find its guidance for today.

For all three of these thinkers, Christ is the last word. And the suggestion is that recognizing this means defying much of conventional Christian wisdom, including the commonplace dismissal of New Testament nonviolence. Here the Anabaptist heritage, interpreted for today, invites solidarity with Christ even to the point of breaking, and breaking radically, with the dominant ethos of surrounding culture. This solidarity, far from being irrelevant, is how the church builds peace in the world.

In The Priestly Kingdom, Yoder declares the Anabaptist model “a paradigm of value for all ages and communions.” Whether that is so will probably occupy us more and more. The three theologians we have considered are among several who are gaining a stronger and stronger hearing today. Through such contemporary voices, Reformation Anabaptists are establishing a presence—and making a challenge—that seems unlikely to go away.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.