Deeper Waters: The Anabaptist Tradition
What a Pietist admires about Protestantism's peacemakers
Whatever you think of her “post-evangelical” move, I’d like to think that all but the most sectarian Christians can join Katelyn Beaty in affirming that their particular church, denomination, and religious tradition is but “one of countless tributaries that all pool water from this great, rushing river we call Christianity…. If you think the trickle is the whole river, then you might leave not realizing there are waters that are deep and mysterious and sustain life — indeed, with the living presence of the Source.”
In that spirit, I thought I’d spent two or three Tuesdays sharing my own experience of “swimming to deeper waters,” of learning — through historical study, devotional reading, or personal experience and relationships — from Christian traditions different from my own. We’ll start with one that I started to study around the same time that I began to dig deeper into Pietism.
This past Sunday, I taught the first hour in a two-part Reformation history class at a local church. While the congregation is Lutheran, they asked me to go beyond Luther and share the stories of other Protestant traditions. First, and most important to them, the Anabaptists.
I’ve often told people that I initially didn’t understand why Bethel’s one-semester sprint through Western civ and church history, Christianity and Western Culture, devoted a whole lecture to the Anabaptists. It’s not because it’s a way of telling Bethel’s own story — while some of our historians have tried to connect us to the first credobaptistic Protestants, Bethel’s background is Pietist and Baptist, not Anabaptist.
No, over time I’ve realized that teaching our students that story because the Anabaptist tradition has significance far beyond its relatively modest numbers, challenging other Christians to take seriously Jesus’ call to discipleship and to accept persecution for the blessing Jesus declares it to be.
Anabaptist Origins
On January 21, 1525, Conrad Grebel baptized George Blaurock, who then baptized the other men gathered at Felix Manz’s home in Zurich. For breaking with the city’s leading reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, over the question of baptism, these “Swiss Brethren” soon came in for severe persecution. Grebel was arrested, escaped from prison, and died in exile (perhaps from the plague) in 1526. Manz became the first of many Anabaptists (“rebaptizers” — since virtually all had been baptized as infants) executed in Zurich itself, when he was drowned in January 1527. Blaurock was burned at the stake in northern Italy two years later.
Not long after Manz’s death, a former monk named Michael Sattler helped the Swiss Brethren write The Schleitheim Confession, which declared infant baptism to be “the highest and chief abomination of the pope.” Sattler was then arrested in what’s now southern Germany and executed with his wife Margarethe in May 1527.
The largest Anabaptist group descends from Dutch pastor Menno Simons, who renounced his vows as a Catholic priest in 1536, reiterated the Anabaptist commitment to peace and holiness after the collapse of the millenarian Münster rebellion, and died in peace in 1561. In 1693 Jakob Ammann led a group of Swiss and Alsatian Mennonites into a new Anabaptist movement, the Amish, seeking a more rigorous separation from the world. Other contemporary Anabaptist groups include the Brethren, Mennonite Brethren, and Brethren in Christ, all of which were influenced by Pietism’s emphasis on “heart religion,” plus Hutterite colonies that practice communal ownership of property.
Anabaptist Distinctives
Like any Christian tradition, there’s significant diversity in belief and practice among Anabaptists. But while his ideas have been much debated by Anabaptist-Mennonite scholars, I still find Harold Bender a helpful starting point for understanding how Anabaptists in America have retrieved a distinctive tradition from the past.
A professor at Goshen College who founded the Mennonite Historical Library and Mennonite Quarterly Review, Bender dedicated his 1943 presidential address to the American Society of Church Historians to articulating “The Anabaptist Vision.” He defined it in terms of “three major points of emphasis.”
1. “A new conception of the essence of Christianity as discipleship.”
While many of our Bethel students resonate with the Anabaptist rejection of infant baptism, Bender doesn’t quite describe that practice in the way you encounter it in Baptist settings. “The greatest of Christian symbols,” baptism for Bender is “the pledge of a complete commitment to obey Christ.” That is, it’s a pledge of discipleship, not a profession of belief. For while “the Anabaptists had faith… they used it to produce a life. Theology was for them a means, not an end.”
What’s the difference? “The Anabaptists,” Bender explains, “could not understand a Christianity which made regeneration, holiness and love primarily a matter of intellect, of doctrinal belief, or of subjective ‘experience,’ rather than one of the transformation of life.”
2. “A new conception of the church as a brotherhood.”
As a Pietist, I can resonate strongly with the first two items on his list — Christianity is a religion of the intellect and doctrinal belief, but it’s far more than that. Where we part company is the third (“subjective ‘experience’”), since Bender goes on to criticize my tradition for sharing Luther’s emphasis on “inward experience of the grace of God” and then reducing the church to “a resource group for individual piety.”
By contrast, Bender says that Anabaptist ecclesiology views the church in collective terms, as a purely “voluntary” community whose members have not only experienced “true conversion” but commit together “to holy living and discipleship.” It’s his way of rejecting Christendom: the “idea of a mass church with membership of the entire population” backed by legal or social force, which he attributed to both medieval Catholicism and the magisterial reformers (Luther, Calvin, Church of England).
Indeed, both the commitment to whole-life discipleship and the church as voluntary community necessarily implies for Bender a related principle: “the separation of the church from the world, that is nonconformity of the Christian to the worldly way of life.” In article four of The Schleitheim Confession, this separation demands non-participation in “all popish and antipopish works and church services, meetings and church attendance” — that is, both Catholic and Protestant Christianity — but also abstention from “civic affairs” — political (holding public office), legal and economic (swearing the oaths that made both contracts and trials possible in a semi-literate society), and military. Which leads to what’s arguably the most distinctive attribute of Anabaptist Christianity.
3. “A new ethic of love and nonresistance.”
Since “the world would not tolerate the practice of true Christian principles in society, and the church could not tolerate the practice of worldly ways among its membership,” Bender assumed that the Anabaptist church was bound to be a “suffering church.” Having “refused to accept what they considered the sub Christian way of life practiced in European Christendom,” the Anabaptists also refused to resist persecution and insisted on loving their enemies.
Michael Sattler may have said “that if warring were right, I would rather take the field against the so-called Christians, who persecute, apprehend and kill pious Christians, than against the Turks,” but his point was that warring was never right — that the only resistance that he would offer the Muslim armies invading central Europe in the 1527 was “earnest prayer.” Bender quoted Conrad Grebel: “The Gospel and those who accept it are not to be protected with the sword, neither should they thus protect themselves.”
Even as Bender addressed a conference that he had nearly missed because of wartime railroad delays, thousands of Mennonites and Brethren were working for the Civilian Public Service, conscientious objectors to what most American Christians still see as the epitome of a just war. Six years earlier, their churches had made clear their position against war and military service:
Peace within the heart as well as toward others is a fruit of the Gospel. Therefore he who professes peace must at all times and in all relations with his fellowman live a life that is in harmony with the Gospel.
We believe that war is altogether contrary to the teaching and spirit of Christ and the Gospel, that therefore war is sin, as is all manner of carnal strife; that it is wrong in spirit and method as well as in purpose, and destructive in its results. Therefore, if we profess the principles of peace and nevertheless engage in warfare and strife we as Christians become guilty of sin and fall under the condemnation of Christ, the righteous judge.
I’ve never quite been convinced by such arguments. I reluctantly believe that war is sometimes a necessary evil for Christian pilgrims sojourning in this violent world. I’m certain that subjective religious experience is as essential to Christianity as belief and practice. I dislike the sectarian impulse within the Anabaptist tradition almost as much as the Christendom (and Christian nationalism) it renounces.1
But teaching Anabaptist history, reading writers like Bender, and getting to know individual Anabaptists and their churches continually prompts this pietistic, pedobaptistic advocate of the just war tradition to ask just how committed a disciple of Jesus I actually am, and to question the biblical basis for my beliefs.2
To close my adult class on Sunday, I quoted from a 2010 service of repentance and reconciliation between Lutherans and Mennonites. Lutheran World Federation president Mark Hanson apologized for the way that “some of our most honored Reformation leaders” defended the persecution of Anabaptists, and Anglican primate Rowan Williams argued that Anabaptist nonresistance brought into relief “centuries of Christian collusion of with violence.” Meanwhile, Mennonite World Conference general secretary Larry Miller confessed that Anabaptists have sometimes “claimed the martyr tradition as a badge of Christian superiority. We sometimes nurtured an identity rooted in victimization that could foster a sense of self-righteousness and arrogance, blinding us to the frailties and failures that are also deeply woven into our tradition.”
“[I]f ye have not heard or read the Word of God,” Michael Sattler told his judges just before they sentenced him to a brutal death, “send for the most learned, and for the sacred books of the Bible, of whatsoever language they may be, and let them confer with us in the Word of God; and if they prove to us with the Holy Scriptures, that we err and are in the wrong, we will gladly desist and recant and also willingly suffer the sentence and punishment for that of which we have been accused, but if no error is proven to us, I hope to God, that you will be converted, and receive instruction.”
I have been so drawn to facets of Anababaptism and have wondered if there are modern expressions that have softened some their sectarianism?