The Anabaptists
2
THE ANABAPTISTS
D. P. Kingdon
This paper falls into four parts. In the first I shall attempt to set the Anabaptists in their historical context; in the second I shall examine the origins and, to a small extent, the history of Anabaptism. Third, I shall endeavor to expound the Anabaptist doctrine of the reformation of the Church. Last, I shall attempt to draw out some conclusions which seem to me to be very relevant to the present day.
The Radical Reformation
The Anabaptists were part of a movement which has been variously described by recent historians as “the Left Wing of the Reformation” (J. T. McNeill and R. H. Bainton), or “the Radical Reformation” (G. H. Williams). The Radical Reformation, as I prefer to call it, was a complex movement, composed of heterogeneous elements. It included not only Anabaptists of various types, but also groups which exalted alleged revelations of the Spirit above the written word of Scripture, spiritualizers of varying tendencies, and what G. H. Williams calls Evangelical Rationalists. Grouped under the Radical Reformation one may find both political revolutionaries like Thomas Muntzer and pacifistic communitarians like Jacob Hutter. One may discover rigoristic legalists and antinomians, wild fanatics, and sober pietists. The Radical Reformation was, to employ the vivid image of Rufus Jones, a veritable banyan tree.
Diverse though the elements were which constituted the Radical Reformation they were united by two basic convictions. The first was that the Protestant Reformation in Germany and Switzerland, its two chief centers, had not been nearly radical enough. In both countries, which were a patchwork of separate jurisdictions, the reformation of the Church had been largely carried out by the government of the day. Both Lutheranism and Calvinism had this in common, that they made an appeal to the “Christian magistrate” or the governing power as an instrument for the reformation of the Church.
G. H. Williams has designated the Lutheran and Calvinist sections of the Reformation movement “the Magisterial Reformation.” He calls it such because its principle is reformation through the state. Basic to the Magisterial Reformation is the ideal of a Christian magistrate, the reform of the Church by means of the power of the state, an ideal which continued to be upheld even when it represented a small minority in a predominantly Catholic country. Intimately related to this ideal is a territorial conception of the Church. As the opposition of the Magisterial Reformers such as Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin to the principles of the Anabaptists increased, it was to become quite evident that their view of reformation depended upon their concept of a territorial Church which embraced all the citizens of an area or country in virtue of their baptism. When in 1531 Melanchthon drew up a memorandum on Anabaptism in which the death penalty was prescribed for recalcitrant Anabaptists, it is this territorial conception of the Church which is in the foreground. “What would happen,” he asks, “if children were not baptized, if not that our whole society would become openly heathen? . . . it is a serious matter to cast children out of Christendom and to have two sets of people, the one baptized and the other unbaptized. . . .”1
The second basic conviction which united the Radical Reformation in opposition to the Magisterial Reformers went far deeper than mere dissatisfaction with the pace and extent of reform. The Radical Reformers rejected root and branch the territorial conception of the Church. To their mind the Church is a covenanted community of converted men and women who are pledged and active disciples of Christ. What they desired to see was the restoration of the Apostolic Church as it existed in the days of the martyrs. The Radical Reformers did not agree with Luther that the Church, which he held to have fallen into a state of corruption in the later Middle Ages, could now be rescued and reformed. They held that when the Church received the support of Constantine, or even before this, it fell so as to be lost. What was required, therefore, was less the reformation of the existing Church than the restitution of the true Church.
The Radical Reformation held that the restitution of the Church could not be brought about by the magistrate precisely because the alliance of the Church and state from the time of Constantine onwards had resulted in the fall of the Church. The only way in which the effects of this terrible fall could be undone is by the preaching of the Gospel, and the gathering of a Church which would be a fellowship of regenerated persons. Since faith cannot be compelled, all forms of coercion are wrong. The Church must be formed on the principle of voluntary association by those who have first given themselves to Christ, and then to one another, to walk in His commandments.
Other common convictions were shared by the Radical Reformation. Apart from a few exceptions, such as the Munster revolutionaries (who have attracted a disproportionate amount of attention), the great majority of its adherents refused to bear arms. They held that our Lord, both by example and precept, had forbidden believers to engage in war. The only form of coercion they permitted themselves was excommunication. They also gave to the Great Commission (Matt. 28:19–20) an emphasis which it did not receive in either Lutheranism or Calvinism.
The exponents of the Radical Reformation differed from the Magisterial Reformers over a number of points of doctrine. For the most part they rejected the doctrine of absolute predestination. They did not agree with the idea of the invisible church as it was set forth, for example, by Calvin in the Prefatory Address of the Institutes: “as God alone knows who are His, so He may sometimes withdraw the external manifestation of His Church from the view of men.” The Radical Reformers rejected Calvin’s view because they believed that true saints may be visibly known and gathered into Church fellowship. For the most part the followers of the Radical Reformation were psychopannychists; that is they believed in the death or sleep of the soul, pending the day of resurrection. Some were anti-Trinitarian, others were docetic in their Christology. Many, however, were both orthodox in their doctrine of the Trinity and of the Person of Christ.
Emergence of the Anabaptists
It may be well, at the outset, to indicate that the study of Anabaptist history is beset with problems. The first problem is that of the relation of the Anabaptists to the pre-Reformation sects. Do the Anabaptists go back beyond the Reformation to the Middle Ages? Recent scholarship inclines to the view that they do not, but the question has not yet received a definitive answer. The second problem is that of the relation of the Anabaptists to the seventeenth century Baptist founding fathers, Smyth and Helwys. Were these two men induced to forsake independency because of the influence of Anabaptist ideas? On this question there is considerable controversy among Baptist historians.
A further problem is the diversity of the Anabaptists. Some groups, such as the Mennonites, rigorously repudiated any suggestion that they were linked with the revolutionaries of Munster. Many Anabaptists espoused the peculiar Christology of Melchior Hoffmann who taught that Christ did not receive His humanity from Mary, but “passed through her as water through a pipe.” Others held to the orthodox view of both the Person of Christ and the Trinity.
Three types of Anabaptist are discernible, although it must be emphasized that these classifications must not be too rigidly applied, because there are some individuals who could be placed in more than one group.
The evangelical Anabaptists were biblicists. For them the New Testament only was normative for doctrine, ethics, and policy. The Old Testament, on the other hand, received an allegorical interpretation. Thus the ban (excommunication) was held to have replaced the sword used by the Israelites.
The evangelical Anabaptists sought to cleave to the historic Christ. For them His instructions, His life, and His crucifixion were normative. The imitation of Christ was, for them, the normal expression of the Christian life: “from hazardous rebaptism at some Germanic Jordan to a martyr’s pyre, represented the fulness of the Christian way”2 (G.H. Williams). When they were baptized many evangelical Anabaptists felt that, like their Lord, they should itinerate, preaching the gospel of repentance. Some groups revived the voluntary Christian communism of the Church at Jerusalem (Acts 2). The Hutterites especially made it a way of life which still continues to this day in certain parts of the United States of America.
Unlike the evangelical Anabaptists, the revolutionary Anabaptists regarded the Old Testament as normative for theology, and especially for the constitution of the Church. When they came to set up their commonwealth in Munster (1533–1536) they drew more and more upon the Old Testament. Eventually it came to be interpreted out of any relation whatsoever with the New Testament. Not surprisingly certain features of the old dispensation, such as polygamy, began to reappear. Munster became, during the years of Anabaptist rule, a strictly organized theocracy on the Old Testament model. Sins punishable by death included blasphemy, seditious language, scolding one’s parents, backbiting, spreading scandal, and complaining.
The contemplative Anabaptists are the furthest removed from the revolutionary Anabaptists. In some respects they are akin to the later Quakers. A representative figure is John Denck. While he accepted baptism as an adult, and administered the rite to new converts, he placed most importance on the following of the inner Christ, whom he identified with the inner Word which he held was common to all mankind wherever it bursts into the flame of conscience.
Contemplative Anabaptists are less easy to define as a group than the other two groups of Anabaptists. They probably had contacts with all of the trends represented in the Radical Reformation.
It has been necessary to survey the various groups of Anabaptists because from the time of Luther and Calvin onwards they have frequently been classed together as all alike anti-social and indeed as violent revolutionaries. The terrible episode of Munster served to brand all Anabaptists, in the eyes of their opponents, as fanatical revolutionaries and terrible profligates. Yet both before and after Munster many Anabaptist conventicles went out of their way to rebut the charge that they were anti-social and immoral.
It is important to realize that among Anabaptists there existed a great diversity of opinion as to how the restoration of the primitive Church was to be brought about. The Anabaptists of Munster believed that the Kingdom of God could be brought in by force. The Anabaptists of Zurich and elsewhere believed, on the other hand, that the attacks of the world were to be expected and accepted as part of the lot of a Christian. As R. H. Bainton has written, “Anabaptism was inchoate and could include the Schwertler, who would use the sword, and the Stäbler, who would carry only the staff.”3
Most modern scholars locate the emergence of the Anabaptist movement at Zurich during the years 1524–1525, although a few still adhere to Karl Holl’s view that the movement had its origin in the prophetic movement at Zwickau in the winter of 1521–1522.
The leaders of the Anabaptist movement in Zurich were former supporters of the Zurich reformer, Ulrich Zwingli. Among the group around Zwingli were Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz. However, in course of time two divisive issues served to separate them from Zwingli. The Zurich reformer was prepared to leave the matter of the program of reform in the hands of the city council, whereas Grebel and others wanted reform to be carried out immediately. However, the division went deeper than disagreement over the strategy of reform. By 1524, while the Zwinglian party was seeking a gradual reformation of the whole of the Swiss cantons, the radical party was calling for the immediate restoration of the righteous remnant. The Anabaptists, as they were to become known, wanted a fellowship of churches assembling in Zurich and its village dependencies. After much disputation with Zwingli, they came to the point where they rejected outright their birthright in the established or civic Church. They rejected the baptism of infants, holding that it was incongruous to regard the passivity of eight-day-old infants and the joyous experience of old men who, awakened to their sinfulness, now rejoiced in sins forgiven, as underlying the same baptismal action.
The decisive break came when the city council decreed in January 1525 that all who failed to have their infants baptized within eight days would be exiled. On January 21, 1525, three days after the issuing of the decree, four leaders of the Brethren, as they called themselves, were expelled from Zurich, and Grebel and Manz were forbidden to hold any more “schools” for agitation. That same day, in the evening, Grebel baptized George Blaurock, a former priest, by affusion, on profession of his faith. Blaurock then baptized his companions. That evening was the birthday of evangelical Anabaptism. The account of this historic meeting in the “Hutterite Chronicle” says, very movingly, “Thus they together gave themselves the name of the Lord in the high fear of God. Each confirmed the other in the service of the Gospel and began to teach and keep the faith. Therewith began the separation from the world and its evil works.”4
In the week January 22–29 an Anabaptist church was formed in the village of Zollikon, about five miles from Zurich. Here baptism by affusion on profession of faith and the partaking of the Lord’s Supper in primitive, apostolic fashion according to the New Testament accounts of institution, were solemnly observed.
Within the decade 1525 to 1535 Anabaptism spread throughout Switzerland, Germany, and Bohemia. Its martyrs must be numbered not in hundreds, but in thousands upon thousands. The bitter persecution to which they were subjected undoubtedly helped to create the fanaticism which characterized the Munster commonwealth, for it unhinged excitable minds, and removed sane and wise leaders who would probably have held fanaticism in check.
The Anabaptist Doctrine of the Church
The Anabaptists exposed a fundamental ambivalence in the thought of Martin Luther. On one hand Luther maintained that faith is wrought in the heart by the Spirit working with the Word. It cannot, therefore, be compelled by man. As Luther wrote in 1523, “Faith is a free work to which no one can be forced. It is a divine work in the Spirit, let alone then that outward force should compel it or create it.”5 As a corollary to this view of faith Luther argued, in his earlier period, that “heresy is a spiritual thing which cannot be cut with steel nor burned with fire nor drowned with water.”6 Luther’s view of faith ought logically to lead to the dissociation of church membership from citizenship, for since faith is the inward work of the Spirit it is impossible to connect citizenship in a state with membership of the Church of the redeemed. Luther seems, at first, to have been aware of this. In 1520 he defined the Church as “an assembly of believers including all who have truth, faith, hope and love.”7 In 1522 he made an effort to form a nucleus of heart-felt believers, who partook of communion in both kinds apart from the rest of the professed members of the Church. In 1526 he recommended that earnest Christians should meet alone in a house for prayer, reading, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. “Non-Christians,” he said, “should be excluded with the ban.”8 While what Luther envisaged is not precisely an Anabaptist separatist congregation, because he viewed the nucleus of believers as existing within the territorial church as leaven—ecclesiola in ecclesia—it is easy to see that Luther can be regarded as, in some sense, the source of Anabaptist ideas.
However, alongside the tendency in Luther’s thought toward an explicit doctrine of the gathered church, there exists another element with which it is in tension. Faith is outward as well as inward. It may be given creedal formulation. The Church is a visible society holding to this faith. As a visible society the Church exists in correlation with the state, the school, and all other agencies of the “corpus Christianorum.” After his experience with the Zwickau prophets this view of the Church came to triumph. The liturgy of 1526 marked the complete abandonment of any tendency toward a gathered church of believers. It was not, said Luther, intended for Christians, but for non-Christians. Inconsistently, he maintained that all baptized in infancy should be accounted Christian. By March 1530 Luther was ready to give his consent to the death penalty for Anabaptists.
The ambivalence in Luther’s thought is such that he can be regarded in some sense as the father alike of Anabaptism and Lutheranism. His concept of a society of believers, if pressed, leads to the Anabaptist conventicle. His view of the Church as a visible society in correlation with the state leads to the state church of later German Lutheranism.
The Anabaptists decisively rejected Luther’s view of the Church as including all baptized in infancy. They emphatically repudiated the identification of Christian and citizen, nowhere more pointedly made than in the preface to Zwingli’s commentary on Jeremiah: “The Christian is none other than the good and faithful citizen, and the Christian city none other than a Christian Church.”9
The Anabaptist concept of the fall of the Church is fundamental for an understanding of their view of the reformation of the Church. The Anabaptists believed that there was a “golden age of the faith.” In the time of the Apostolic Church Christians held goods in common, refused to bear arms, and practiced a rigorous simplicity. They were in all things separated from the world unto God. But when the Church received the support of Constantine, an illicit union of Church and state came about. The means whereby this union was perpetuated was the rite of infant baptism. By including children en masse in the Church at baptism, the Church became flooded with hosts of nominal Christians.
The Anabaptists had no sense of the historical continuity of the Church as Luther and Calvin had. The Church was not merely hidden beneath the accretions of medieval corruption. It was lost, for it had been destroyed. As Obbe Philips put it, “We must with all understanding concede and confess that the first Church of Christ and the apostles was destroyed and ruined in early times by Anti-Christ.”10
It is worth pointing out that the idea of a fall of the Church is a recurring feature in Church history. One meets it in Marcionism, Donatism, St. Francis of Assisi, J. N. Darby, and Mormonism! The question of great practical importance is how far one takes the idea of the fall of the Church. Has the fall destroyed the Church or only disfigured it? Has it led to the Church being overlaid with rubbish or has it led to its total disappearance? According to one’s view of the fall will be one’s view of the remedy. Broadly speaking the Reformers were persuaded that the remedy lay in reformation, the Anabaptists that it lay in the restitution of the Church. While the Reformers sought to reform the territorial Church with a rediscovered gospel, the Anabaptists desired to restore a long-lost apostolic Church pattern with the gospel. Philip Schaff has aptly commented on the difference between the Reformers and the Anabaptists. “The Reformers,” he writes, “aimed to reform the old Church by the Bible; the radicals attempted to build a new Church from the Bible.”11
The Church must be restored by the putting away of all that led to her fall, and by the creation of a spiritually pure Christian fellowship. The first necessity in the work of restitution was the sundering of the union between Church and State. Separation from the world unto God, in order to be free to follow His will, was the first note sounded by the Anabaptist call for restitution. Significantly the Hutterite Chronicle’s account of the first baptisms at Zurich ends, “Therewith began the separation from the world and its evil works.”
The Anabaptists were not separatist individualists. Their aim was the restoration of apostolic Church life. They therefore sought to found churches of regenerate believers, who gave themselves to God and to each other, to walk together in covenanted fellowship. The initiatory rite in this fellowship was baptism, which was administered only to those who could testify to the work of conversion in their hearts and who were prepared to give themselves up to Christ in serious and devoted discipleship. For the Anabaptists the restitution of the Church resulted in the recovery of true baptism. They were not concerned with a mere outward ordinance, for they held that the outward rite of baptism sets forth an inner baptism unto a life of stern ethical endeavor and, most probably, of suffering and martyrdom. The Christ unto whom they were baptized was not, in Muntzer’s words, a “sweet Christ” who allowed men to profess the faith while remaining careless about sin. He was the “bitter Christ” who offered his disciples the way of the cross—suffering, rejection, and death. Undoubtedly the Anabaptist stress on the ethical import of baptism stemmed from a sense of deep disappointment that the Reformation had not resulted in an adequate transformation of daily life. Constant emphasis is laid by Anabaptist writers on the necessity of crucifying the flesh, that the life also of Christ might be manifested in the believer. Where this crucifixion “does not take place,” says Dietrich Philips, “and cannot be seen, there is neither God, nor Christ, nor Holy Spirit, nor Gospel, nor faith, nor true baptism, nor the Lord’s Supper. In short, there is no congregation of God.”12
Related to the Anabaptist concept of inner baptism is the necessity of enforcing strict standards of entry into the Church, and vigorous discipline within it. Discipline was particularly important, for the Anabaptists were striving for a pure Church. “A Church without the practice of a genuine apostolic excommunication,” wrote Menno Simons, “would be like a town without ramparts or barriers, a field without enclosure, a house without doors or walls.”13
A further mark of the restored Church was evangelistic witness. While some of the Reformers were not persuaded that the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19–20 continued in force beyond the apostolic age, the Anabaptists viewed it as applying particularly to themselves. Because they recovered the baptism of believers they recovered also the impulse to evangelize the world. The phenomenal spread of Anabaptism was undoubtedly due to the recapturing of the binding authority of the Great Commission. K. S. Latourette rightly sees the Anabaptists as the forerunners of the modern missionary movement.
The final mark of the restored Church was the abolition of hierarchical distinctions between believers. Although the Anabaptist movement contained many ex-priests, it was essentially a lay movement. Questions of ministerial order were considered unimportant in the light of the fact that each believer was called to minister to the fellowship with the gifts that he had. The restored Church was a people, not a people plus a priest. A layman, if invited by the Church, could preach the Word, baptize, and administer the Lord’s Supper.
Evangelicals and the Church Today
I wish to conclude this paper by making a series of observations which seem to me to arise from the consideration of the Anabaptist concept of the Church.
First, it is possible within evangelicalism, historic and contemporary, to find those who lean to the side of the reformation, and those who lean to the side of the restitution of the Church. The former emphasize the continuity of the Church. They argue that reformation will strip away the unbiblical accretions of generations. For them the Church is not lost, but hidden. Evangelicals of this type are, therefore, reluctant to separate from the ecclesiastical communion to which they belong because they believe that the situation is never so hopeless that, by reformation according to the Word of God, it cannot be changed for the better. Howell Harris gave classic expression to this kind of outlook when, with reference to the ecclesiastical situation in the Wales of his day, he wrote that he had been set free from scruples about remaining in the Established Church “by having a deep Spirit of mourning and wrestling poured upon me for this dark benighted Church, and further to believe that He would not yet utterly forsake us, but would rebuild this ruined part of His Church.”14
The other type of evangelical, on the other hand, is prepared to contemplate separation because he believes that it is possible to begin again, and form a Church which is both doctrinally and spiritually pure. He tends to regard the Church as having ceased to exist when doctrinal error and spiritual declension come to dominate the life of an ecclesiastical communion. His type of outlook is exemplified in Philpot’s The Seceders.15 Of course sometimes, as in the United States particularly, separation can become for some evangelicals a sort of new gospel which they must forever be preaching.
Yet it must be recognized that by no means all restitutionist evangelicals (to coin a phrase) are separatist in spirit. But many, while reluctant to attempt to form a new evangelical Church, are persuaded that the point may be reached when a Church ceases to be a Church any longer, and that therefore the only course open to any evangelical within such a body is to separate and to attempt the restitution of the Church. The practical question is, “When does a Church cease to be a Church?”
Much of the present confusion among evangelicals in the face of the contemporary ecclesiastical situation stems from the fact that some are basically reformers and others are basically restitutionists. As a consequence it is impossible to get agreement as to what ought to be done now.
Second, the divergence among evangelicals as to whether or not to participate in the Ecumenical Movement seems also to have a very real connection with our subject. In a recently published symposium entitled “Evangelicals and Unity,” the editor, J. D. Douglas, points out that none of the contributors is drawn from a communion which subscribes to the principle of the gathered church.l6 I find such an admission interesting because it seems to me to provide an explanation as to why certain prominent evangelicals feel able to participate in the World Council of Churches. If they do not subscribe to the principle of the gathered church then an amalgam of territorial churches does not present nearly the same difficulty, in principle, as it does for the evangelical who believes in the doctrine of the gathered church. For the latter it is at least a theoretical possibility that a united Church in England would not be a Church at all, that is a Church of visible saints.
Third, my subject seems particularly relevant to the present situation as many evangelicals see it. A growing number of evangelicals want to set about forming a new, united evangelical Church. In other words, they want to go the way of restitution. Before they do so they need to ask themselves some searching questions. Does the concept of the fall and restitution of the Church rest upon biblical foundations? Is the restitution of the Church a practical possibility, or are hopes being built upon an unbiblical perfectionism?
Other evangelicals, like the Magisterial Reformers, urge caution. They are against a root and branch attack upon contemporary ecclesiastical problems. Some have a marked enthusiasm for the established Church, because they feel that there is biblical warrant for a recognition by the state of the Kingship of Christ. Such naturally are not enamored of life in a separatist Church.
What is God’s will in this hour, which is in so many ways similar to that which saw the birth of Anabaptism? It should surely pain us that evangelicals who believe the same gospel and preach the same inspired Word seem to be teaching paths which lead, I fear, not toward but away from each other. May God give us wisdom to know and grace to do His will in these perplexing days.