Church History Since the Reformation CH507 ormation ef e ...The Anabaptist Story, published by...

Church History Since the Reformation

Transcript - CH507 Church History Since the Reformation © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 04 of 24CH507

The Anabaptist Tradition

Church History Since the Reformation

This lecture 4—The Anabaptist Tradition. Greetings once again in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and let me invite you to join me in prayer as we begin. Let us pray. Almighty God, we ask that you would open us up to that which you have to teach us today through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Over the past few lectures, we have been exploring some of the major branches of Protestantism, those broad traditions which emerged during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. So far we’ve had opportunity to examine the Lutheran tradition and the Reformed tradition. These together form what historians have come to call the Magisterial Reformers. Tied together by their commitment to basic theological affirmations, such as justification by grace, the authority of the Scriptures, and the priesthood of all believers, these folk are also tied together by their adherence to a church-state cooperation, a pattern of state support, and interaction of state and church together. They’re also tied together by a commitment to a parish structure of church life, the practice of infant baptism, the principle of mixed membership with wheat and tares together, and the like.

Emerging alongside of these magisterial bodies, however, and with a strikingly different understanding of church practice, was the great Anabaptist tradition, what I like to call the Free Church tradition. Very often this has been labeled the Radical Reformed tradition or the left wing of the Reformation. These folk are also committed to those three great affirmations of theology which emerged out of the sixteenth century. They were just as committed as the Magisterial Reformers to justification by grace through faith, the authority of the Bible, and the priesthood of all believers.

In distinction from the Magisterial Reformers, however, they wanted to see church and state separated from one another. They stressed believer’s baptism. They rejected infant baptism.

Garth M. Rosell, PhD Experience: Professor of Church History

and Director Emeritus, Ockenga Institute at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary



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They emphasized voluntary church membership and support by people who were in the congregation rather than the state. Their emphasis was on religious freedom, what some of them came to call “soul liberty.” And they emphasized the nature of the pure church, that is, wheat and tares are to be separate from one another and that the church is to be made up of wheat alone; that is, redeemed Christians only.

Our story of this particular wing of the Reformation begins in Zurich, again under the ministry of Huldrych Zwingli, and we want to turn to that story in a moment, but first let me just suggest to you if you’d like to read further in this interesting area that I have a few suggestions that might be helpful. Two books that I found particularly useful are Donald F. Durnbaugh’s The Believer’s Church: The History and Character of Radical Protestantism, published by Macmillan Press in 1968. Along with the Durnbaugh volume, let me suggest primary attention to William R. Estep’s The Anabaptist Story, published by Eerdmans in 1975. These two are wonderful places to begin your survey of the Anabaptist character of the church’s life. Let me suggest a few more that may be helpful as well. George H. Williams’s The Radical Reformation, Westminster Press, 1962, or John H. Yoder’s The Legacy of Michael Sattler, about whom we’ll speak in a few moments, published by Herald Press in 1973. Or John C. Winger’s The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, The Mennonite Publishing House, 1956, or Franklin H. Littell’s The Anabaptist View of the Church, Star King Press, 1958, or Harold Bender’s Conrad Grebel, the Mennonite Historical Society, 1950. Or Gunner Westin’s The Free Church Through the Ages, Broadman, 1958. There are other very helpful articles in The Mennonite Quarterly Review, in The Journal of Church History, and in The Mennonite Encyclopedia.

You must understand that much activity and research in the radical Reformation has taken place over the past two or three decades and much of that is not in book form yet but is available to you in article form, so if you’re not familiar with The Mennonite Quarterly Review, you may want to make acquaintance of that interesting periodical. And you’ll find numerous articles, scores of articles there, that will be of interest relating to the subject that we are looking at in this lecture.

Let’s then turn our attention to the birth of the Anabaptist movement. The Reformation in Zurich developed rapidly under Zwingli’s guidance. Around him began to gather a number of gifted young scholars, humanists by their own definition, who



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were interested in the study of the Scriptures. Some of these had been excited by the work of people like Erasmus. Among them in 1521 was a bright, young scholar named Conrad Grebel. He had been involved in studies at the University of Paris. His father, as a matter of fact, was a member of the Zurich City Council. Grebel, along with his other young colleagues, began to study together with Zwingli, and they soon became themselves zealous for reform. This was particularly true of Conrad Grebel, who became consumed with his interest in the reform of the church. Within a few years, as a matter of fact, some of these, including Grebel, were ready to go far beyond what Zwingli was teaching, and, in fact, this led eventually to a formal break between Zwingli and his more radical followers, including Grebel.

And we begin to see that emerging in this fateful disputation in January 1525. The practice of that day was when an issue was to come before the church, it would be argued, it would be disputed publicly in the presence of the Council of Zurich; that was the leading political body of the town. When the council had heard all of the arguments, they would decide who was the victor and what ought to be done as a result of this in terms of town law. As a result of this particular disputation, Zwingli came out the victor and these young colleagues of his were denounced as radicals. The city council further indicated to this group that they could either conform to the findings of the council, they could leave Zurich, or they could face imprisonment. Many of them, as we’ll see, chose the last option.

A few days later, January 21, 1525, a dozen or so of these folk met the home of Felix Manz. He had his house near the Grossmunster; that was the big church where Zwingli was the pastor. The events of that night are recorded for us in an eyewitness account, probably written by George Blaurock, entitled The Large Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren. You can actually get hold of this if you would like in a variety of different forms in the library, but let me read to you from that account a few of the paragraphs that appear about this very formative early development of Anabaptist life.

“And it came to pass,” we read, “that they were together until anxiety came upon them. Yes, they were so pressed within their hearts. Thereupon they began to bow their knees to the most high God in heaven, and called upon Him as the informer of hearts, and they prayed that He would give to them His divine will and that He would show mercy unto them, for flesh and blood and human forwardness did not drive them, since they well knew what they



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would have to suffer on account of it. After the prayer, George of the House of Jacob stood up and besought Conrad Grebel for God’s sake to baptize him with the true Christian baptism upon faith and knowledge. When he knelt down with such a request and desire, Conrad baptized him, since at that time there was no ordained minister to perform such work.”

This interesting and straightforward account of that fascinating meeting forms the beginnings of early Anabaptist life and thought. This was not an impetuous move. It had grown out of months of careful Bible study by people who were growing increasingly dissatisfied with the course and progress and speed of the Reformation in their city of Zurich.

After his baptism by Grebel, George Blaurock proceed to baptize everyone else present, and they together pledged to live as true disciples of Christ, to live lives separated from the world, to teach the gospel, and to hold the faith. Those were the basic elements in this pledge. Anabaptism was born in that little house that day, and these folk came to be called the Swiss Brethren. Clearly they had broken with Rome, they had broken with their Reformed colleagues in Zurich, and they reflected the first radical effort in the Reformation to form a church simply on New Testament patterns. The stress was upon the absolute necessity of personal commitment to Christ as essential, as formative for salvation, and as a prerequisite for baptism.

Why were these people dissatisfied with Zwingli? The dissatisfaction, I think, can be traced back to the late period of the year 1523 when Grebel himself speaks of the disintegrating relationship which he had with his mentor, Huldrych Zwingli. Grebel, you see, had written on December 18 a letter to his brother-in-law and former teacher, Vadian, who was pastor of a Reformed church at St. Gall, and in his letter he implied that he had lost confidence in Zwingli and, in fact, was deeply dissatisfied with the progress of the Zurich Reformation. Grebel and some of his colleagues, most notably Simon Stumpf, had opposed Zwingli at an October 1523 disputation, one that focused on the Mass and the use of images. All of them agreed; that is, Zwingli, Grebel, Stumpf, and the others that the use of images and the use of the Mass in worship should be denounced on the basis of the teachings of Scripture, but Zwingli wanted to appeal to the Zurich council to make the decision on when and how that finding would be enforced. Grebel and Stumpf wanted to appeal the matter only to Scripture and once Scripture spoke to move quickly to abandon



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such practices. Zwingli here divided the territory between truth on the one hand, which was determined by the Scriptures, and on the second, implementation of the truth, which was the task of the political leaders in the town’s council. He was, as you see, a part of the Magisterial Reformation, and we talked about that, in fact, we called him the father of that movement.

The Magisterial Reformers were committed to the integration of church and state, and part of that integration was the shared responsibilities and authorities in the two provinces, and here Zwingli was clearly dividing the task of determining the truth, which was the church’s task on the basis of the teachings of Scripture, and the implementation of truth, which was the task of the political leaders. The result was that the Mass was not abolished, as in fact Zwingli had indicated he would do on Christmas Day 1523, and the reason it wasn’t abolished is that the town council refused to give final okay to abolishing it at that time. Grebel and his colleagues, in fact, look back to this event as the historic divide between themselves and the Reformed wing of the church. And the issue was precisely that issue of church-state relations and the ongoing linkage between the two.

The problem for them was a slowness which Zwingli seemed to have in his reform there in Zurich. Feeling that Zwingli was willing to sacrifice the Word of God, as they would have put it, on the altar of human authority, Grebel emerged from this disputation as the leader, as the spokesperson of this embryonic Anabaptist movement. There were seven of these young scholars who were part of that early group—Manz, Stumpf, Grebel, Blaurock, Brötli, Hottenger, and Reublin. They started meeting in private homes during the year 1524, often they met in the home of Felix Manz, a convenient location on Neustadt Street. They corresponded with Martin Luther, with Karlstadt, and some of the other Reformers, and they began to seriously study the Scriptures, questioning the practice of such things as infant baptism. Within the year, in fact, three parents at Zollikon, a small village near Zurich, withheld their children from baptism. This is the beginning of the actual practice of believer’s baptism, the refusal to have infant baptism practiced. Wilhelm Reublin, pastor at Wytikon, a village near Zurich, was the first that we know of to have preached publicly against infant baptism. He was, in fact, imprisoned in August and then forced to leave Zurich. This led to a disputation in January 1525 and the town council decided in favor of infant baptism, and this added further fuel to the flames of conflict between the Reformed wing and the Anabaptist wing now beginning to



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emerge.

It’s perhaps important to distinguish at this point between different groups of Anabaptists or of Radical Reformers. The Radical Reformation included at least three major groupings. One of them, of course, the Anabaptist group about which we are primarily talking today, but in addition to that group, we find also the Inspirationalists and the Rationalists. All three of these groups were dead set eventually against infant baptism, but that’s where the similarities end on many levels.

Take, for example, the issue of authority for Christian life. The Anabaptists placed authority in the Scriptures. They were the only final court of appeal for matters of faith and life. The Inspirationists placed their authority in the Spirit, the immediate illumination which the Spirit brings in the life of the believer. Included in this group are the Zwickau prophets, for example, Nicholas Storch and Thomas Muntzer. They all claimed special revelation. They were guided by the Spirit, often through Scriptures, but sometimes moving beyond Scriptures into private new revelations. Clearly different from the Anabaptist commitment.

The Rationalists, on the other hand, found their authority base in reason. Many of these tended to be anti-Trinitarian. They included folk like Michael Servetus, Juan Valdez, Sebastian Castillo, . . . and Fausto Socinus. If you fail to distinguish between the wings of the Radical Reformation, your thought can come to very unfortunate ends, because these folk markedly differ from one another on major theological issues, and it’s important for us not only to recognize that breadth but also to point out that what we are focusing on in this lecture is primarily that major Anabaptist wing of Radical Reformation thought, the one which has had the most power in terms of numbers and spread throughout church history since the time of the Reformation.

The mainstream radical Reformers were the Anabaptists, a very remarkable and impressive group of people. The roots of Anabaptism, just to say a word about that, reached well back into the Middle Ages and into the early church, and you’ll remember some of our discussions earlier on of that linkage with evangelical humanists and with medieval mystics, and with groups like the Waldensians and the Albigensians, and perhaps you can recall some of your readings in those areas.



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The Anabaptist thought to reclaim the New Testament pattern of church life. They received from Roman Catholic and Protestant alike the same response, the very response, in fact, that many of the early Christians had been afforded by their surrounding culture when the church was founded in the first century; namely, persecution. Many of them were imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Church and state were considered indivisible by Protestant and Catholic alike. This was part of the old Constantinian legacy from the fourth century. Church and state were to be linked together, and from that time right down to the Protestant Reformation only a few voices had spoken out against this kind of division. In fact, it came to be considered something of a crime, perhaps something like treason, to divide church and state. Drowning, death by sword, and death by stake were most often employed in this task of persecution.

The very first Anabaptist martyr we know about is Eberli Bolt. He was a preacher burned at the stake in Switzerland by Roman Catholic authorities on May 29, 1525. In an interesting Cornell Press study by Klausen in 1972, there’s the estimate that some 84 percent of the deaths of Anabaptists came at the hands of Roman Catholics and some 16 at the hands of Protestants. However that division is actually determined, it’s clear that Anabaptists received persecution from both sides, and in fact beyond. It led, in fact, to three centuries of intense persecution.

Conrad Grebel’s ministry lasted, in fact, only one year and eight months. Grebel’s an interesting person. One of two sons from a family of six children. Born into a wealthy Swiss home. His father was a member of the council of Zurich, as I mentioned a moment ago. He went to the University of Basel in 1514, then transferred the following year to the University of Vienna, where he spent three more years. He studied there under the great humanist, Vadian, and we have fifty-seven of the letters between those two longstanding friends. He never actually received a degree. The University of Vienna at that time was a raucous place. It had about five thousand very rowdy students. Sexual promiscuity was rampant. Drunkenness was common, and Grebel himself joined in with relish, especially in the brawls that took place in town. In fact, he suffered all his life from some form of venereal disease which was a result of his promiscuity while he was at the University of Vienna.

He then went to the University of Paris to study for a time. He spent twenty-two months there. Got into further brawls; one of



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them involved the death of two Frenchmen and raised a lot of serious questions and, in fact, eventually led to his return home. Sometime in July 1520, this prodigal returned home, frustrated, ill, largely empty-handed, with no degree, and it was in Zurich that he came in contact with the great Huldrych Zwingli and became increasingly fascinated by the study of the New Testament. He joined a little study group there. These were essentially high-level Bible studies. He married a young lady in February 1522, and finally the talented but rather unfocused Conrad Grebel was converted to the Christian faith. This happened in the spring of 1522, and he felt as a result of this called into the ministry. His devotion to the Word had come to mean more to him, however, than his devotion to his teacher, Huldrych Zwingli, and it was this central commitment to the Scriptures that brought them into conflict in 1523.

The turnaround was phenomenal. His brief ministry went from house to house, witnessing, baptizing, conducting the Lord’s Supper. He began a whole writing campaign following his conversion on behalf of the Swiss Brethren. He had poor health. He suffered from poverty, continuing illness, and yet he was undaunted in his vigorous pursuit of ministry. Finally he was arrested. November 18, 1525. He was tried, found guilty, and imprisoned. Many others were in prison with him. Through the help of friends, he escaped the prison, but he soon died himself of the plague in the summer of 1526.

Along with Conrad Grebel, other colleagues greatly aided in this early spread of Anabaptist beliefs—Felix Manz, George Blaurock, and Michael Sattler are among those who promoted the faith most vigorously in these early decades. Felix Manz, born in Zurich in 1498, the illegitimate son of a Roman Catholic priest, which was true in many instances. This was the case with Erasmus, . . . with Heinrich Bullinger, and others.

After Grebel’s death, it was Manz who became the leader of the Swiss Brethren in Zurich. The government mandated the death penalty for rebaptizing. Many of these folk, however, went forward with their task of what they believed to be the true teaching of Scripture; namely, that one baptized only believers. This brought them into direct conflict with the law. Manz himself is arrested for that reason and brought to trial as a kind of test case. Eventually convicted and drowned in the Lammat River, January 5, 1527. The drowning of Anabaptists was a kind of symbolic act. Since they were baptizing others by immersion, they were often put to death



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as a result of drowning.

George Blaurock took over for Grebel and Manz after they were put to death, and the extent and effectiveness of his ministry is little short of phenomenal. He was severely beaten with rods on the very day Manz was put to death, but he continued to preach for two and a half years more before they finally burned him at the stake at the Tyrol. He was educated at the University of Leipzig, became a Roman Catholic priest before his conversion. He was described as a tall, powerful figure with fiery eyes and black hair. Perhaps not as bright as his colleagues, but with maybe even more zeal.

One of the most intriguing of these early leaders is Michael Sattler, and his was the most heroic martyrdom perhaps of all of those early Anabaptist leaders. In May 1527, Sattler was sentenced to death, and the sentence read as follows: “Michael Sattler shall be committed to the executioner, the latter shall take him to the square, and there first cut out his tongue, and then forge him fast to a wagon and there with glowing iron tongs, twice tear pieces from his body. And then on the way to the site of the execution, five more times as above, and then burn his body to powder as an arch heretic.” That was the reading of the sentence.

Sattler himself had been born near Stauffen, 1490. He had entered a Benedictine monastery there and began to study the Pauline letters in the New Testament. He actually became a prior. Disenchanted, he left the monastery troubled by the laxity that he found there and the immorality among the other monks. He embraced Lutheran doctrines. He got married. He fled to Zurich, where he joined the Anabaptist cause and began his ministry near Rottenburg.

He was preaching at a conference of Anabaptists assembled at Schleitheim on February 24, 1527, when he comes to prominence within the movement. The conference approved the Schleitheim Confession as it’s come down to us, which was penned by Michael Sattler. This confession is perhaps the best known of all the early Anabaptist confessions, and I’d like to read just a portion of it, because it reflects not only the thinking of the Anabaptists but also the immense insights of Michael Sattler, one of their early leaders. It’s not so much a confession or a full-blown theological doctrine. It’s more like the old Didache in the late first, early second century. It’s a kind of church manual, a how-to guide for setting up the church’s life. I’ll read a section of that and it will



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give you some of the flavor perhaps.

“The articles which are to be discussed are these: baptism, the ban [that is, excommunication], breaking of bread, separation from the abomination, pastors in the church, the sword, and the oath.” Let me go through a few of these. First, concerning baptism. “Baptism shall be given to all those who have learned repentance and amendment of life” (believer’s baptism only, you see.). “Those who believe truly that their sins are taken away by Christ and to all those who walk in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and wish to be buried with him death, so that they may be resurrected with Him, and to all those who with this significance request baptism of us and demand it of themselves. This excludes all infant baptism, the highest and chief abominations of the pope.” And then on the ban. “The ban shall be employed with all those who have given themselves to the Lord to walk in His commandments and with all those who are baptized into the one body of Christ and who are called brothers and sisters and yet who slip sometimes and fall into error and sin, being inadvertently overtaken. The same shall be admonished twice in secret and the third time openly disciplined or banned according to the command of Christ (Matthew 18), but this shall be done according to the regulation of the Spirit (Matthew 5), before the breaking of the bread, so that we may break and eat one bread with one mind and with one love and my drink one cup.”

Then it talks more about the breaking of the bread and then separation, and, of course, the Anabaptists emphasized separation from the world. “A separation must be made from the evil and from the wickedness which the devil planted in the world. In this manner simply, we will not have fellowship with them; that is, the wicked, and not run with them in the multitude of their abominations. This is the way it is, since all who do not walk in obedience of faith and have not united themselves with God so that they wish to do His will are a great abomination before God. It is not possible for anything to grow or issue from them except abominable things, for truly all creatures are of but two classes—good and bad, believing and unbelieving, darkness and light, the world and those who have come out of the world, God’s temple and idols, Christ and Belial, and none can have part with the other.” Pretty clear division.

“Flee from them then and flee from all popish and all anti-popish works in church services, meetings, and church attendance, drinking houses, civic affairs, commitments made in unbelief,



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all of those things which are highly regarded by the world and yet are carried on in flat contradiction to the command of God. This means also the elimination of all devilish weapons of force.” And remember the Anabaptists are a part of that nonviolent or pacifist wing of the church, and the statement by Sattler goes on to spell that out in great detail in terms of the implications that Christians are not to take up the sword, Christians are not to serve as magistrates in the government, Christians, in fact, are to have nothing to do with those secular organs. Their task is to serve the gospel, and that means separation from those political bodies. It means separation from any taking of an oath, of any swearing in courts, and the like.

This may give you a little idea of some of the emphases that were emerging among these early Anabaptists, these early Swiss Brethren, and it is a good indication also of the power with which a person like Michael Sattler could speak and write.

On May 20, 1527, Sattler himself was executed, and the account of that is a very moving account, and I would like to read that for you, and this is found in William Estep’s little booklet, The Anabaptist Story. It’s found on page 47. Let me just read two brief paragraphs. “The torture, a prelude to the execution began at the marketplace where a piece was cut from Sattler’s tongue. Pieces of flesh were torn from his body twice with red hot tongs. He was then forced into a cart, and on the way to the scene of the execution, the tongs were applied five times again. In the marketplace and at the site of the execution, still able to speak, the unshakable Sattler prayed for his persecutors. After being bound to a ladder with ropes and pushed into the fire, he admonished the people, the judges, and the mayor to repent and be converted, and then he prayed ‘Almighty Eternal God, thou art the way and the truth. Because I have not been shown to be in error, I will with thy help to this day testify to the truth and seal it with my blood.’

“As soon as the ropes on his wrists were burned, Sattler raised the two forefingers of his hand, giving the promise signal to the brethren that a martyr’s death was bearable. Then the assembled crowd heard coming from his seared lips, ‘Father, I commend my spirit into thy hands.’”

It’s a pretty moving account that fits into that long and distinguished history of martyrs in the church, and certainly among that group, Anabaptists were well-represented. Sattler’s own wife was drowned eight days later. The example of Sattler



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and his wife had perhaps more impact than any other martyrdom on the Anabaptist movement. It was circulated widely and moved people deeply, even those who were outside of the Anabaptist fold. These accounts are found in the Martyr’s Mirror, a kind of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs for this particular era. Thousands of Anabaptists, many of them unknown to us, faced the martyr’s death, but as the Count of Altzey commented after the mass executions that failed to halt their spread, “What shall I do?” he lamented. “The more I execute, the more they increase.” One’s reminded of Tertullian’s famous phrase, “The blood of martyrs shall be the seed of the church.”

After the death of Grebel, Manz, and Blaurock, the center of Swiss Anabaptist activity moved from Zurich up to Bern. Here Anabaptist thought took deep root and produced a very sturdy plant. Many under persecutions in Zurich fled to other places—to Moravia, to Poland, to the Netherlands. Their behavior commended itself. As one Roman Catholic theologian of that time reported, “As concerns their outward life, they are irreproachable—no lying, deception, swearing, strife, harsh language, no intemperate eating and drinking, no outward personal display. None of these are found among them, but humility, patience, uprightness, neatness, honesty, temperance, straightforwardness. In such measure that one would suppose that they had the Holy Spirit of God.” Remarkable.

Consequently, as Sebastian Frank commented, “The Anabaptists soon gained a large following, for they taught nothing to be love, faith, and a cross. Hans Denck helped carry the message to Southern Germany. Pilgrim Marpeck worked in Augsburg. Balthasar Hubmaier focused attention on Moravia. Jacob Hutter launched the Hutterites. These and others are fascinating stories and can be readily found in libraries that carry materials relating to the church, and I would encourage you to read further on Anabaptist history. It will inspire you and encourage you in your faith.

Special mention should also be made of a couple of additional figures. Menno Simons is one of those who is perhaps the most important of all of the Dutch Anabaptist leaders. Menno Simons was trained as a parish priest, and after pursuing this ministry for five years, he renounced the Catholic Church and joined the Anabaptist cause. In fact, he abandoned his very comfortable life, respect in the community, and secure income to become what was in effect a hunted heretic. And, in fact, he did this at the very



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time when the air was still heavy with the odor of death from the famous and tragic Munster affair. Some of you will remember that under the leading of people like Melchior Hofmann, a strong apocalyptic element came into certain wings of Anabaptism. A group of Anabaptist refuges in 1533–1535 actually attempted to set up a kingdom of the saints and this was led by Jan Matthys and Jan Bockelson. This was located in Munster, a fortified city in Westphalia. They felt this would be the site of the new Jerusalem and there in a reign of care with great fanaticism, the practice of polygamy and all kinds of other irregularities, an ugly incident which discredited Anabaptists across Europe was both charted and fulfilled. And despite that aberration with in the Anabaptist cause, Menno Simons left his very secure position, convinced of the faith, and became himself one of the great leaders and spokespersons for Anabaptist thought, particularly strong in the Low Countries.

Menno Simons himself for twenty-five years shepherded and reorganized the stricken companies of Anabaptists in Holland and in neighboring communities. His views were very similar to the Swiss Brethren, the kinds of things that we read in the Schleitheim Confession—stress upon believer’s baptism, emphasis on the responsibilities and rights of local congregations, rejection of Christian participation in government, the principle of nonresistance or pacifism.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Mennonites became a numerous and influential community in Holland. The number of Mennonites today is said to be over half a million, some 70,000 in Holland, nearly 13,000 in Germany, 50,000 or so in Canada, and some 250,000 in the United States. These are divided into a variety of different groups—the Old Mennonite Church, the General Conference Mennonites, the Mennonite Brethren, the Old Order Amish, and the like.

In addition to the Mennonites, we ought to say just a word about the Hutterites. These are the Hutterian Brethren, descendants of the Anabaptists from Switzerland. They differed from the Swiss Brethren in one primary way. The Hutterites adopted a kind of Christian communalism. They held property as generous stewards and in common with one another. The movement was organized in Moravia in 1528. The amazing fact is that this communal body structured on common ownership of property has continued now for over four centuries. Many folk have argued that those who build communities on sharing a property can’t last long, and, in fact,


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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they point to many illustrations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of exactly this kind of experiment that finally fell by the wayside. The Hutterites, however, should remind us that it’s quite possible and indeed can be successfully achieved that one can both hold the faith and do so in a communal atmosphere.

It’s fascinating to read about these Hutterites with their arrangements of buildings, with their economic structure, with all of the emphasis on missions and concern for one another in the outreach of the gospel. And I would encourage those of you who have opportunity to read about the Hutterites because you have here another fascinating example of left-wing Reformed thought.

We’ve been examining, then, in the brief time we’ve had together in this lecture one of the great traditions of the Protestant Reformation, one that until recent times has been very much neglected, but which in our day is coming increasingly to center stage and attention. The great Anabaptist tradition teaches us many things, and in fact, laid the foundation for much of church life in our communities today.

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