HELPING THE CHURCH FIND PEACE: John Howard Yoder’s Renewed Anabaptist Vision as a Call for the Church to be a Faithful Witness for Christ in Society

“The church can be a foretaste of the peace for which the world was made… Nonconformity is the warrant for the promise of another world. Although immersed in this world, the church by her way of being represents the promise of another world, which is not somewhere else but which is to come here. That promissory quality of the church’s present distinctiveness is the making of peace, as the refusal to make war is her indispensable negative transcendence.”

– John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 94.

Raised as a Mennonite , taught at a Catholic university for two decades, and worked closely with

the World Council of Churches, John Howard Yoder’s theology grew from the soil of the

Anabaptist movement that was a vibrant, if controversial, part of the Reformation. The

controversial part led to about 5000 Anabaptists being martyred by both Catholic and Protestant

overlords; the vibrant part made the highly decentralized Anabaptists the fastest-spreading and

most mission-minded Reformation movement. Luther famously denounced them as “enthusiasts”

and their born-again impulse to baptize adults quickly became a death penalty crime.  Adult

baptism was seen as a treasonous threat to medieval Christendom’s unity of church and

state.  The refusal of many Anabaptists to take oaths of allegiance to the state or kill at the

command of their rulers at a time when Muslim Turks where knocking on the doors of Vienna

also did not endear them to the authorities.  The reason they refused oaths and warfare was

simple enough: they took seriously Jesus’ example and commands not to do these things but

instead practice the nonviolent politics of the church. They were willing to follow Jesus as Lord

even if some European Caesar killed them for it.   

This Anabaptist angle on theology has been called peace church (as versus just war), free church

(as versus state church), believers, or adult baptizing, church (as versus infant baptizing), or

Radical Reformation (as distinct from the mainline Reformation of Luther, Zwingli, and

Calvin).  It has even been called a “third way,” neither Catholic nor Protestant, though I think it

is better understood as both/and, rather than neither/nor.  While Yoder and my Mennonite

denomination is rooted in the Radical Reformation, it also self-consciously imitates the

nonviolent praxis of the messianic Jews who wrote the New Testament and the first two to three

centuries of Church Fathers.  From Polycarp, Justin Martyr, and Ireneus in the 2nd century, to

Tertullian, Cyprian, and Origen in the third, no early church fathers offered a justification for

Christian participation in the wars of the empire.  Nor did they support revolutions against it, like

the Jewish Revolt of 66 AD that resulted in Rome destroying Jerusalem and its Temple, just as

Jesus had predicted would happen a generation before it did.  The Roman Empire periodically

persecuted the church during this formative period, as seen by the fact that many of the church

fathers I just mentioned were executed for treason against the state.  In this they followed in the

New Testament footsteps of John the Baptist, Jesus, Stephen, Paul, Peter, and James, all of

whom received the death penalty from either Herod (in the case of John the Baptist), the

Jerusalem Temple-state run by the Sanhedrin and high priests (in the case of Stephen, James and,

indirectly, Jesus,), or the Roman superpower itself (in the case of Jesus, Peter, and Paul.) 

What came to be called the Just War tradition emerged only in the fourth century after Christ,

first with Ambrose but especially with Augustine, in the new context of an officially

Christianized Roman empire, emperor, and army.  This Constantinian shift of the church actually

developed gradually over the century following Constantine himself, rather than in one fell

swoop.  During this momentous change in its worldly fortunes, Christianity went from being an

illegal cult potentially punishable by death, to a tolerated mystery religions among many other

Near Eastern cults, to the one-and-only-allowed religion of the empire (that is, a state-church)! In

developing a Xian justification for war, Ambrose and Augustine drew heavily on the natural law

tradition of Greco-Roman thought (such as the Roman philosopher Cicero), as it is very difficult

to justify Christian participation in war directly from the New Testament, and if one wanted to

develop the church’s ethic of war and peace directly from the Old Testament, you would

necessarily end up with something much more like “holy war” than just war. 

So, although this peace church perspective has certainly been a minority position since

Constantine, it represents the oldest Christian thought and practice about violence and the

state.  You might call it the “classic” position.  It has been witnessed to by an unbroken

succession of Christian groups through the millennia.  Sometimes this pacifistic stream flowed

through monastic sub-movements within the official church like St. Benedict or St. Francis of

Assisi.  Other times it bubbled up from lay renewal movements that ended up outside the official

church, like the medieval Waldensians, Cathars, or Czech Brethren, or the Anabaptists of the

16th century (all of whom were persecuted as “heretics”).  The Quaker renewal that emerged

from the 17th century Puritan Revolution in England, and the Church of the Brethren—an

18th century hybrid of German Pietism and Anabaptism—are also considered historic peace

churches. Like Mennonites, the Amish and Hutterites trace their roots directly back to the

original Anabaptists.  The very first Baptists picked up the practice of adult baptism from Dutch

Mennonites in the early 1600s, after being exiled from England by the King James of Bible

fame.  They did not carry forward the peace teaching of Jesus as strongly.  However, the most

famous peace church advocate of the 20th century, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was a Baptist

preacher if ever there was one!

Many other individuals and traditions have come to similarly nonviolent conclusions about Jesus

and the New Testament in the modern era, including the unorthodox Russian Orthodox Tolstoy,

the American Transcendentalist Thoreau, the 19th century Stone-Campbellite revivals that birthed

both the Churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ, the first generation of Asuza Street

Pentecostals, a Hindu who cherished the Sermon on the Mount named Gandhi, the Lutheran

Dietrich Bonheoffer (despite his self-conscious choice to break faith with this way at the very

end of his life), the French Reformed pastor Andre Trocme whose tiny village of Le Chambon

saved 5000 Jews from Hitler without firing a shot, activist Catholics like Dorothy Day and

contemplative ones like Thomas Merton, white Baptists like Walter Rauschenbusch, Clarence

Jordan, Will Campbell, and Glen Stassen, and black ones like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks,

and Vincent Harding, Episcopalians like William Stringfellow, Anglicans like Desmond Tutu,

Methodists like Stanley Hauerwas and Walter Wink, and current historical Jesus and New

Testament scholars like N.T. Wright and Richard Hays.  Both American Jewish rabbis like

Abraham Heschel and Michael Lerner, and much less known but amazingly courageous

Palestinian priests like Elias Chacour and Naim Ateek have embodied this peacemaking way. 

Chacour, who I met in 2003 in Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth, is author of “Blood Brothers” and

“We Belong to the Land,” which describes the Palestinian Christian experience with the state of

Israel.  Naim Ateek—whose son and daughter-in-law Sari and Tanory are recent Fuller graduates

and friends—has led me, and many other American Christians, on solidarity tours among

Palestinian Christians and Muslims suffering under 40-years of occupation in the West Bank and

Gaza Strip.

My two-part presentation tonight therefore represents an attempt to offer to you a (hopefully)

compelling and coherent reading of how the New Testament and early church—reading the

Hebrew Bible in light of Jesus Messiah—ended up taking a nonviolence-advocating stance.  In

other words, as John Howard Yoder often insisted, a peace church praxis is not a peripheral or

optional Christian teaching for especially holy saints or extremist cults, but emerges from the

heart of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection as testified to by the Gospels.  It can and should

unapologetically call itself “catholic-with-a-small-c” theology, that is, a witness and a gift to all

Christians everywhere and in all times.  I hope my own limitations will not cause this profound

wisdom of the cross to appear to you as folly or become to you a stumbling block.  Hopefully by

the end of the evening, even if you strongly disagree, you will have gained a better informed

respect for this foundational part of our shared faith in Christ, the Suffering Servant Messiah of

Israel.    

Before highlighting Yoder’s thought, I will give a brief “bio” of the man himself, in keeping with

the “narrative” approach to ethics this course has taken.  As Yoder once said, if your “talking the

talk but not walking the walk” when you go to speak to the government, you’re only

“lobbying.” When you do both, you’re witnessing to the state.  James McClendon—who used to

teach theological ethics at Fuller—liked to talk about doing “biography as theology.”  What are

the Gospels if not that, after all?!  Both the now deceased McClendon and his still-very-much-

alive widow, Nancey Murphy, have also made peace church commitments to Christ as members

of the Church of the Brethren.

A. Personal Background and Circumstances

Yoder was raised a Mennonite in Smithville, Ohio, the son of Howard C. and Ethel Yoder, who

operated a chain of greenhouses. Both his parents were deeply immersed in the Mennonite brand

of Anabaptist Church tradition. Consequently, his father spent two terms of service with the

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in Russia and Europe. From early childhood to his

teenaged years, John attended a local Mennonite Church in Smithville, where four generations of

his forebears had been members. It was also in this faith community where he was first nurtured

in the rich Anabaptist heritage.1

B. Early Influences

As a young and promising intellectual, Yoder was influenced at Goshen College by Harold

Bender, the first Mennonite to be elected president of the American Society of Church History.

Bender successfully sought to renew North American Mennonite life through both ecumenical

contact and renewed attention to the 16th century. “Anabaptist Vision.”2 Largely due to Bender’s

influence, Mennonite scholarship in church history became well-known before contributions in

other fields. >> ADD MORE INFO ON THIS

After completing college in only two years, he encouraged in the late 1949 by the dean of his

school to volunteer in missions, doing relief and refugee work in the devastated landscape of

post-WW II France. His fluency in several European languages (including German, Spanish, and

French) helped him a lot in his work. For five years Yoder administered an orphan’s home for

boys, where he met and married Anne (Annie) Marie Guth, a French Mennonite relief worker, on

the 12th of July, 1952. 

1 Joon-Sik Park. "Yoder, John Howard"; http://www.anb.org/articles/08/08-02372.html; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. accessed March 4, 2012

2 Harold S. Bender, The Anabaptist Vision (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1944).

Upon finishing his initial stint in Europe, he then began doctoral studies in German at

the University of Basel, studied under no less a theological giant than Karl Barth. Also included

in this roster of highly-acclaimed mentors were; the eminent New Testament scholar Oscar

Cullmann, the Biblical theologian Walter Eichrodt, and the Existential philosopher Karl Jaspers.

He finished his doctoral degree from the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1962, where he wrote his Th.D. dissertation entitled, (as translated from the original German) “Conversations

between Anabaptists and Reformers 1523-1538

Seeking to demonstrate the Anabaptists' original commitment to dialogue, he argued that

contrary to the common view that the Anabaptists took the initiative in breaking off from other

churches, they had refused to break before being driven to establish a separate church. It was in

fact the Anabaptists who went to great lengths in seeking to overcome division, as shown in the

debates held, almost always at their instigation, in some parts of Switzerland from 1525 to 1538

In the 1950s Yoder also helped pioneer the first ecumenical dialogues between the free and state

churches of Protestantism since the Reformation.  Given the very fresh memory of the German

church’s tragic capitulation to the demonic forces of Nazism, it is not surprising that the first

topic on the table was church and state and war and peace.

 http://levellers.wordpress.com/2006/08/12/mentors-1-john-howard-yoder/

Yoder returned stateside in the 1960s and served the Mennonite church through its mission board

and seminary.  Yoder’s most influential work, “The Politics of Jesus,” was published in 1971,

causing a stir in the academic world.  It is widely considered one of the theological watersheds of

the 20th century, putting him on a short list with the likes of his mentor, Karl Barth.  Shortly after

the Politics of Jesus made its splash, Yoder was invited to teach ethics at the prestigious Catholic

university of Notre Dame, a highly unusual opportunity at the time for an unsystematic, low-

church scholar.  At Notre Dame he made a big impact on one of the other Protestants on the

faculty, Stanley Hauerwas.  Hauerwas, a disillusioned liberal mainliner and contrarian rabble-

rouser, has done much to spread Yoder’s influence beyond the historic peace churches.  The

differences between the two can be seen in the fact that Yoder self-consciously titled his last

collection of essays “For the Nations” to counter Hauerwas’ earlier book “Against the

Nations.”  Yoder always insisted that Jesus’ nonviolent Way was God’s gift of grace to, and for,

nation-states, not just the church. 

Like one of his favorite Reformed dialogue partners, Richard Mouw, Yoder believed in the

Lordship of Christ over all of life.  Mouw and Yoder engaged in several friendly exchanges

through the years, for example, their co-written article “Evangelical Ethics and the Anabaptist-

Reformed Dialogue,” which can be found in the Fall 1989 edition of the Journal of Religious

Ethics.  You also might check out Mouw’s “When War is Unjust: Being Honest about Just War

Thinking” in the Fall 1985 edition of the Mennonite Quarterly Review.  Yoder himself taught

Just War theory to ROTC students at Notre Dame for decades.  He believed those who claimed

the just war tradition ought to take it very seriously, and few knew it better than this pacifist.  In

advocating Just War criteria to other Christians, Yoder perhaps realized that, in practice if not

principle, the devastating “shock and awe” power of modern weaponry has made 20th and

21st century warfare very nearly unjustifiable, as civilian casualties now make up more than half

the wreckage of war.  Despite much hype about “precision-guided” missiles, the percentage of

civilian casualties in war continues to increase, as the current conflicts in Lebanon, Israel,

Palestine, and

Iraq graphically display.  The “civilian immunity” clause of classic Just War theory has been

shredded by modern weapons, most especially the widespread acceptance of the once-shocking

practice of dropping bombs on cities from airplanes.  This tactic was pioneered by the Nazis but

taken to unprecedented levels by British and American bombers by the end of World War 2. 1.5

million German and Japanese civilians lost their lives in the firebombing of dozens of cities,

including hundreds of thousands of women and children. 

Yoder’s fluency in both his mother-tongue of New Testament pacifism and Just War theory

demonstrated his belief that Christians need to know several languages to carry out the mission

of the church.  He learned at least five or six languages in order to teach around the world and

translate the work of non-English scholars.  He translated the Dutch Reformed scholar Hendrikus

Berkhof’s “The Powers” into English, which helped set off the torrent of theological reflection

on the contemporary meaning of this Pauline Powers language that has reached a highpoint in

Walter Wink’s work.  Yoder died at age 70 in 1997, sitting in the chair of his Notre Dame

office.  A true scholar’s death! 

Enough of Yoder’s life.  Also by way of biography as theology, I will just briefly note my own

family’s engagement in issues of church and state, war and peace.  My parents were part of a

Mennonite mission team of about five or six families and several single men and women who

planted a Vietnamese church in

Saigon, Vietnam in the midst of the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 70s. (My parents and older

sisters have some great stories about living through the Tet Offensive of 1968, when the war

came right into their city neighborhood!  I was born two year later, so I missed out on the

excitement.)  My dad’s ten-year “tour of duty” in mission and service work in Vietnam more

than met the alternative service requirements placed on him by the American state as a

conscientious objector to war.  After the tragic end of that disastrous war, my dad used his

fluency in Vietnamese to help resettle thousands of SE Asian refugees in the US and Canada,

where many have become highly productive citizens.  My Mom taught English as a Second

Language to immigrants for many years in the public schools system.  In his retirement, my dad

volunteers with a local Victim-Offender Reconciliation Program, or VORP, a restorative justice

approach to crime and punishment that Mennonites began experimenting with in the early 1970s

and which is now an alternative track option in some North American court systems.  My dad

just recently traveled back to Vietnam to help strengthen the Vietnamese Mennonite church in

face of discrimination by their communist government, who last year had six of the church’s

leaders thrown into prison.  All have since been released after pressure was applied by

Mennonites all over the world, other evangelicals, and groups like Amnesty International, though

not without some beatings and much hardship along the way.  Thus these contemporary

Christians are re-living the struggle for religious freedom that characterized the Anabaptist

movement of the Radical Reformation.  Which brings us back to where we started, with the

Anabaptists!

The Gospel Realism of Jesus:  Reinhold Niebuhr was the most influential American Christian

ethicist of the 20th century.  He became famous for his brand of Christian realism. Niebuhr was

admirably honest about writing off Jesus as an “impossible ideal.” He presumed he had a more

penetrating analysis of power and politics than Jesus did.  If we look closely at some provocative

Gospel sayings of Jesus, however, we may find grounds to challenge Niebuhr’s assumption of

superior insight.  Yoder makes one such Gospel saying of Jesus the centerpiece of his essay “A

Christian Case for Democracy” (found in his A Priestly Kingdom: the Gospel as Social

Ethics).  Remember, the cornerstone of Anabaptist ethics is always starting with Jesus and taking

pretty seriously what he said and did!  Then we can test whether what Augustine or Calvin or

Niebuhr or Menno Simons or President Bush says lines up with Jesus.) 

Luke 22:24-28 is part of Jesus’ Last Supper instructions to his disciples before his Passion on a

cross, that cruel and unusual torture reserved by Rome for political rebels and slaves.  In

characteristically pithy style, Jesus declares “the rulers of the nations (or Gentiles) lord it over

them, and those who exercise authority let themselves be called benefactors.  But it shall not be

so among you; the greatest shall be like the youngest and the leader as one who serves.  Who is

greater, the one at the table or one who serves?  Is not the one at the table?  But I am among you

as one who serves.”  (To show how politically loaded Jesus’ teaching appears once we remove

our modernist evangelical blinders, Jesus in the very next verse explicitly promises to confer a

kingdom on his disciples.  He says they will sit on the thrones of the 12 tribes of

Israel, doing justice for, or judging, the people.)

Yoder’s essay divides this Jesus saying into three.  First, Yoder notes how Jesus

straightforwardly acknowledges the reality of pagan domination in his society, without any

special fanfare.  He simply states, “your rulers lord it over you.”  He neither justifies existing

state power as directly ordained by God, nor does he seek to deny or overthrow it.  He simply

says, “the state is…It exists and we Yahweh-believers must deal with it.”  The Bible, Yoder

claims, has no comprehensive theory of the state.  (Don’t worry I’ll get to Romans 13—and

Revelation 13—before all is said and done this evening!)

So, first Jesus says, “the state is.” In part two of his teaching he goes on in almost cynical fashion

to notice “and these rulers allow themselves to be called your benefactors.”  In other words, all

governments—from monarchies to democracies—attempt to justify themselves by claiming they

do good things for the people under their rule.  Jesus here seems to have a strong dose of

Niebuhr-style realism about power!  Maybe Jesus wasn’t so naïve about politics after all,

Reinhold; maybe he wasn’t quite the otherworldly dreamer you thought he was.  

Remember, this is the same Jesus who called his own local ruler, Herod Antipas “a fox” and sent

him a message on no uncertain terms that he was not afraid of Herod’s power, nor would he be

intimidated by him into changing his ministry plans.  In Luke 13, verses 31-35, Jesus is warned

by some friendly Pharisees that he better skedaddle, because Herod is looking to kill him.  Jesus

replies, “Tell that fox, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow and on

the third day I finish my work.  Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my Way

because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the

city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.  I wanted to gather your children

like a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were not willing.  See, your house is

abandoned.”  Notice the power-packed meaning for Gospel readers of Jesus “finishing his work

on the third day” (resurrection day is the third day, remember) or Jesus being “on his Way.” (The

Way was the first name by which Christians identified themselves.)  Or, how Jesus directly

challenges his own capital city, where sat the glorious seat of King David and King Solomon’s

great “house” the Temple.  He says, this Temple-state kills the prophets and rebels against

God.  He indicates that Yahweh has abandoned this Temple-system, just like Jeremiah declared

six centuries earlier, and that God’s children are still living in exile and under oppression.  Sadly,

it is just as true today as it was the first century that Jerusalem “does not know the things that

make for peace,” a fact that Jesus’ later laments in Luke 19.

In thinking about Jesus’ own relationship to the state, it is absolutely crucial to recognize that the

Jerusalem Temple was much more than a religious institution: it was a full-fledged client-state of

Rome.  As the center of economic and political power in 1st century Judah, it possessed the legal

powers to tax the people via multiple tithes. Alongside the tribute demanded by Rome and

Herod, the Temple tithes represented a triple-tax on the peasants, which was pushing them to the

brink of survival.  This reality is represented in the Gospels by the poor and destitute folk who so

often populated Jesus’ parables and encounters.  The Temple also had its own judges and court

system, even its own death squads.  Remember the thugs with clubs sent by the high priest to

drag Jesus from the Garden of Gethesmane?

Unlike modern Western attempts to somehow separate the spiritual from the secular, religious,

economic, and political institutions were fully enmeshed in the ancient world.  To imagine that

someone could be religious but not political would have made no sense in the time of Jesus,

whose career was politically charged from its very beginnings.  Just think of the plot elements in

the birth narratives about Jesus: imperial taxation; forced displacement of Joseph and a pregnant

Mary from their homes in Nazareth to go to Bethlehem; no housing for the poor when they got

there; foreign kings visiting secretly from afar; local kings and their terrorizing death squads;

escaping as refugees into Egypt; political praises to a Lord and Savior other than Caesar being

sung to the lowest of the low, the shepherds.  Well, you get the idea.   

This same Jesus of Nazareth also once said “have no fear of those who can kill the body” (like

Herod Antipas, whose father Herod the Great attempted to murder Jesus as a wee baby) “but fear

only that which can kill the spirit,” that is, Satan.  And remember, the Gospels present Satan as

being in charge of the kingdoms of the world in Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness.  Wow, this

is getting pretty realistic, Jesus!

Cynical as Jesus’ attitude about the state might seem, the self-justifying government language of

benefaction—call it rhetoric or propaganda if you like—can be quite useful for kingdom-comers

seeking first the salvation and shalom of their neighbors.  It opens the door wide for subjects and

citizens of whatever state—whether oil monarchy, socialist, neo-liberal, Zionist, Islamic, or

fascist—to hold their government accountable to its own best principles and claims for

itself.  Martin Luther King Jr. was a master at this.  I believe he was the greatest patriot America

has ever seen, even though the state threw him in jail dozens of times, J. Edgar Hoover and the

FBI wire-tapped and harassed him for years, and his own countrymen killed him in the

end.  Rev. King was no Communist.  He was a black Baptist peace church preacher who said

“Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence two hundred years ago and declared ‘all men

are created equal’ (sorry women); Lincoln proclaimed the Emancipation Proclamation one

hundred years ago, setting us free from slavery.  So how come my people are still in bondage to

the segregation and terrorism of the Jim Crow South and the vicious racism of Chicago or

Philadelphia or LA?”  King used the benefaction language of the greatest heroes of the American

republic to challenge democracy to live up to its own best principles and potential. 

As Christians we know that the “will of the people” does not carry the same authority as the

voice of God speaking through Torah, the prophets, and Jesus Messiah.  We know that the

majority is not often moral.  And being “wise as serpents” we also recognize that even

democracies—at least those on a large national scale—are always managed by a ruling elite, who

make most of the decisions without consulting us ordinary folk.  (How many of you were

consulted about the free trade agreement between Mexico, the US, and Canada called

NAFTA?  I know they never gave me a call!) Yet while we remain realistic about the limits of

large-scale democracy, we are eager to use the tools of citizenship, consent theory, democratic

representation, rights to assembly, free speech, petition, and nonviolent protest to battle the

inevitable injustices that arise from inherent concentrations of wealth and power (a central

insight of Reinhold Niebuhr’s, by the way.)  Our freedom in Christ allows us to use any

democratic tools that come to hand on behalf of the peace and prosperity of our neighbors and

even our enemies.

“Seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into Exile” God commanded Jeremiah in

Babylon, and this word from Yahweh is at the heart of Yoder’s political ethic for Christians

through all time and in all nations, Lebanon as well as Israel, Iraq as well as the good ol’

USA. Democracy is to be affirmed, Yoder says, because it offers so many more ways to hold the

rich and powerful accountable to the most marginal and weak in our society.  Treatment of the

“least of these” is the litmus test that separates the sheep from the goats, and democracy can help

us advocate for those lost sheep.  Yet Yoder also warns about the dangerous and self-righteous

arrogance of military crusades that would impose democracy by force on others.  This Yoder

essay, written in 1984, somehow rings a bell for me today.     

Most of the time, Yoder says, when we try to hold the state accountable to the poor, the widow,

the orphan, the illegal alien—or for that matter, hold to account corporations or the media or

public schools or hospitals or whatever societal institution you choose—we will do so in a

second or secular language, different from our mother tongue of worship.  We will sometimes

speak in terms of equality or rights, for example.  Yoder calls these translated, second language

terms “middle axioms” in Christian Witness to the State. However, there is no reason we cannot

also speak publicly in our mother tongue of biblical faith, as Martin Luther King also did so

vividly, like when he quoted the prophet Amos: “let justice roll down like a river, and

righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”  After all, the Bible speaks of public justice in over

1000 passages, more than any other theme.  We bible-believers don’t need Enlightenment

liberalism to talk about justice; we have plenty of our own material! 

But there is a third and climactic conclusion to Jesus’ triadic teaching: “The rulers lord it over

you; they say they are your benefactors, but, third, it shall not be so among you, for you are

servants because I am a servant.”  In the church we do servant leadership and reject worldly

hierarchies of domination like patriarchy and militarism.  Yoder says “we play a different ethical

game” than our pagan rulers.  In this Christian game we fight evil like Jesus did: through

nonviolent healings and exorcisms, subversive stories that turn the world upside-down,

preaching unto repentance, feeding the hungry, offering hospitality to the outcast, befriending

women and children, engaging in contemplative and intercessory prayer, afflicting the

comfortable and comforting the afflicted, partying with sinners, and loving enemies. Or as the

Apostle Paul says in Ephesians 6, we fight only with the weapons of the Holy Spirit, never the

carnal weapons of the world. Yet, as John of Patmos repeatedly promises us in his Revelation,

the Way of the Lamb is more than enough to conquer to the world and its Roman beast.  We go

the extra mile and turn the other cheek, taking the transforming and reconciling initiatives of the

kingdom and pouring hot coals on the heads of bullies and oppressors so that they might be

shamed into repentance, like King and the black church did to Jim Crow racists like Bull Conner,

or Gandhi did to the British Empire, or Palestinians did to the Israeli occupiers of their traditional

lands in the first and nonviolent intifada of the 1980s. 

Yoder calls this engaging in “holy experiments” and encourages the church to constantly,

creatively, and concretely to be about this work of innovating new social forms of compassion

and service.  Yoder takes the term “holy experiment” from William Penn’s Quaker colony of

Pennsylvania, which operated a state for some 80 years on pacifist principles.  This New World

experiment set many important precedents of governance later enshrined in the US

Constitution.  Once the calls of the non-pacifist majority of

Pennsylvania’s citizens to kill the Indians on the frontier became vociferous enough, the Quakers

resigned their seats in the state legislature, not wanting to impose their peace ethic on others. My

Mennonite ancestors bought land from the sons of William Penn in the 1720s and farmed that

land in

Lancaster County for 6 generations, and I am proud to lay claim to this peace church stake in

America’s origins.  When it comes to discussing with my neighbors how to respond to

September 11, for example, I believe my peace church perspective has earned a place at the

table.   

 Yoder’s (vastly simplified) Critique of 6 Historical Models of Church and State: 

Let’s look at Yoder’s rather goofy-looking, old-fashioned graphics of 6 different historical

Christian approaches to the state found in Christian Witness to the State, to close out the first part

of my presentation. 1)Roman Catholic clergy/lay dualism: “counsels of perfection” for the holy

orders/ordained priests, and a lower standard for the rest, including the emperor and the vast

majority of Christians; 2) Lutheran ethical dualism between inner/outer, public/private, and face-

to-face relations vs. “stations”/vocations/occupations (like being a hangman for the state!);

3)Reformed/Calvinist theocracy: Renewed monotheistic affirmation of one standard of God’s

will for all, but the public responsibility of Christian magistrate to whole of society means it can

sometimes actually be immoral to act with Christian love rather than secular justice.  Introduces

right of “just revolution”—like the Puritan Revolt and execution of the English king in the 1640s

— alongside “just war” (the roots of modern liberation theology).  A state can be both too good

(acting too much like Jesus and putting citizens at risk) and too bad (straying so far from its

ordained Rom. 13 calling to the Rev. 13 “beast” that Christians must rebel against it); 4)liberal

Christian pacifism: The standard of Christ’s love can be applied to society and state—a “social

gospel”—but the criteria is fuzzy/uncertain; its contradictions collapsed in face of World War 1,

with Barth and Niebuhr revising their original liberal pacifistic stance towards “neo-orthodoxy”;

5)Niebuhrian realism: Combines a) Catholic affirmation of Greco-Roman “natural law”

principles of justice as a necessary supplement to Christian love in statecraft; b) accepts the role-

specific ethics of Luther (private vs. public ethics); c) agrees with the Reformed that there is only

one standard of love, but the heavy weight of sin greatly limits the possibility of a straight-

forward application of it to mass society; and d) agrees with the liberal pacifism Niebuhr first

espoused that Christ-love is a theoretically applicable standard, but defines “agape” as

(essentially) complete self-abnegation and renunciation (quite differently than the Bible, which

says love your neighbor as you love yourself; love God and love enemies, because God loves

God’s enemies, including you/a sinner far from grace). Niebuhr’s historical-realist analysis

means, unlike all the previous models, there is no attempt to identify a fixed point or universal

norm; we rather must be attuned to the interplay of forces in whatever context we are in and seek

the best love/justice compromise available (the flexibility and freedom of this non-

foundationalist approach is actually quite similar to Yoder’s radical reformation/“always

reforming” ethos); 6) sectarian: For the first time a clear testimony to the difference that faith

makes for the possibilities of one’s political ethic.  Yoder compares and contrasts a spectrum of

sectarian praxis, from a) traditional Amish-Mennonite way, that says the government is ordained

to use the sword but it is “outside the way of Christ”—a kind of “two kingdoms”/Schleitheim

Confession of 1527 dualism—and yet still holds the state accountable on some matters of justice,

like religious persecution/ freedom.  They also allow for their being other kinds of Christians

than their own group; and b) Jehovah’s Witnesses, who say all government is evil/of the devil,

and the church is a strictly/exactly defined remnant of 144, 000).   

Yoder’s Model: Jesus’ Body Politics: In his 75-page mini-classic Body Politics: Five Church

Practices before a Watching World Yoder takes five central sacraments of the church—baptism,

Lord’s Supper, binding and loosing, the many gifts of the Spirit, and the open meeting of

discernment—and shows how they are not only fully “political” actions—in the sense of having

to do with power-distribution among people—in their own right within the church, but could also

be translated more broadly into redemptive practices serving the wider society and state.  These

focal practices include: 1) the Lord’s Supper: breaking-bread in the communion of the body, the

“love-feast”/shared meals of Acts 2 and 4, and Jesus’ open table fellowship with sinners and

outcasts translates into the practice of everyone having an economic right to food, security, and a

sustainable livelihood; 2) Baptism: breaks down the divisions between Greek and Jew, slave and

free, man and woman—Galatians 3:28—just like Christ “came preaching peace” and “breaking

down the dividing wall of hostility,” as Paul proclaims in Ephesians 2.  This translates into a

practice of giving civil rights to all kinds and classes of people and God’s creatures; 3) binding

and loosing (or what Anabaptists called the “rule of Christ,” found most explicitly outlined in

Matt. 18).  This describes an orderly, nonviolent, social process—moving personal to communal

levels, as needed—for resolving conflicts and doing reconciliation, restitution, reparation,

restoration, “tough love/“care-fronting,” and forgiveness between victims and offenders (or

simply disputants) within a community;  Glen Stassen and company’s “just peacemaking

practices” take this to a global/political science level of application; 4) the many-gifts of the

Spirit: the practice and principle of valuing and facilitating the participation and skills of every

member of a society, no matter how weak, despised, or seemingly “disabled”; and 5) the “open

meeting”   (or what Yoder calls the “rule of Paul”); the principle/practice that every voice must be

listened to in a consensus-building process of discernment and decision-making about matters

that affect the whole body. 

These five practices are not exhaustive, simply representative, and Yoder calls each of them

“sacraments,” defined as social processes where human and divine action come together.  Duane

Friesen in his Citizens, Artists, and Philosophers: An Anabaptist Theology of Culture outlines a

dozen or so such practices, including the ones Yoder cites, and divides them into a) ritual

practices of moral formation; b) process practices; c) pastoral care practices; and d) community

service practices.    

http://mennomight.wordpress.com/2006/08/24/john-howard-yoders-anabaptist-reading-of-church-and-state-every-church-a-peace-church/

Outline: Start with an outline of the paper following the format below. Even a rough map of where you are going is better than none at all.

Example:

I. Introduction: 5-7 sentences. Be sure to state your topic with specificity…be exact, clear, and methodical.

A. What is your thesis topic? (e.g., Is God knowable?)B. What is your goal? (e.g., prove that God is knowable).C. How will you proceed to meet your goal (e.g., prove that God is knowable by examining proofs from both natural theology and special revelation

II. Body Paragraphs:

A. The Knowability of God: Explanation. Answer what the topic is about and why the importance to prove the knowability of God.

B. Natural theological “proofs” for the knowability of God.

C. Special Revelation “proofs” for the knowability of God.

D. Counter-Arguments for the knowability of God.

E. You can have more than four paragraphs; the above are just examples.

III. Conclusion (restatement of introduction). 5-7 sentences.

IV. Bibliography (follow Turabian format for bibliography): YOU MUST CITE AT LEAST 10 FOOTNOTE SOURCES IN YOUR PAPER AND THEN INCLUDE THEM AND ANY OTHER BOOK THAT CONTRIBUTED TO YOUR THINKING ON THIS SUBJECT IN YOUR BIBLIOGRAPHY.

THESIS TOPIC :>>> Raised in the radical wing of the Reformation, John Howard Yoder’s writings stirred his own people, the Anabaptists and the Church at large not only in preserving but in seeking to find ways to faithfully embody what he saw as the uncompromising message of Jesus; the gospel of God’s peace and reconciliation.

I would like to propose that by studying the life and writings of this eminent Mennonite-Anabaptist theologian the church will find a … re-discover its original calling and message of peace/nonviolence and learn ways of living out the powerfully transforming gospel of reconciliation…

(HOW) In order to accomplish this task, he

A. Personal Background

John Howard Yoder was born in Smithville, Ohio, the son of Ethel and Howard C. Yoder, who operated a chain of greenhouses. His parents were steeped in the Mennonite Church tradition, with his father having served two terms with the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in Russia and Europe. During his childhood and youth, John attended the Oak Grove Mennonite Church in Smithville, where four generations of Yoders had been members and where he first came to be aware of his rich Mennonite heritage. After graduating from Wooster High School in Wooster, Ohio, in 1945, he attended Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana, and completed a four-year B.A. in Bible and religion in two years, graduating in 1947. He then completed a master of theology degree in the following year. During this time he was profoundly influenced by the eminent Mennonite theologians Harold S. Bender and Guy Hershberger, who kindled his interest in Anabaptist studies and helped him deepen his commitment to peacemaking.

Joon-Sik Park. "Yoder, John Howard"; http://www.anb.org/articles/08/08-02372.html; American National Biography Online March 4, 2012

B. Early Influences

Yoder was influenced at Goshen College by Harold Bender, the first Mennonite to be elected president of the American Society of Church History.

Bender successfully sought to renew North American Mennonite life through both ecumenical contact and renewed attention to the 16th C. “Anabaptist Vision.” Largely due to Bender’s influence, Mennonite scholarship in church history became well-known before contributions in other fields.

First and fundamental in the Anabaptist vision was the conception of the essence of Christianity as discipleship

The break of the radical reformers with the establishment in positing the corpus Christi against the corpus Christianum knows many parallels with our current situation. The problem with the Constantinian vision of the church as the empire at prayer has been that coterminous membership in church and state can only be maintained by the use of the sword. The early free church leaders were considered seditious in their practice of believers' baptism, which implied voluntary membership, religious freedom, and separation of church and state. The dream which had regarded Constantine's conversion as the beginning of the Christianization of the world was replaced by the suspicion that the fall of the church occurred with its alignment with the interests of the empire.

The Constitution of United States provided religious freedom, and we have not experienced the most blatant fruits of state church mentality. Nevertheless, the equation of Christianity with American society has been pervasive enough to describe current disaffections with the myth of a "Christian" America as post-Constantinian. In an attempt to oppose the tendency to wrap both the big gun and the Bible in the Stars and Stripes and unfurl all before the world, the founders of Sojourners community first presented their message under the rubric, Post American. Such prophetic witness against the degenerations and extremities of American civil religion finds rootage in the left-wing tradition. Though Anabaptists have often been accused of anti-state bias, their theology has neither articulated anarchism or hatred of the state. Rather, the call to love all people, even one's enemies, and to place faithfulness to the way of Christ above all other allegiances so challenge jingoistic attitudes that it evokes the wrath of those with narrow nationalistic identities. One becomes countercultural not primarily out of a desire to be different, but as a result of affirming love for other cultures. This often leads to feelings of alienation from our highly self-centered culture.

Though this accent of Anabaptist witness will not readily gain popular acceptance, it continues to be needed in a culture which displays too few signs of repentance from greedy consumerism or idolatrous devotion to making weapons of death. We also live in a time of a growing challenge to the notion of the Christian west and its mission to the atheistic east and the pagan south. Colonialism, the great missionary advance, and the subsequent economic imperialism of giant corporations need to be supplanted by mutual partnership in mission to paganism found in every nation, the necessity to make major readjustments in the grossly unequal control of the world's resources, and the psychological conversion necessary to take our place modestly as one nation in a family of nations. In this we can continue to be informed by the radical commitment which gives priority to the vision of the kingdom over national and tribal loyalties.

The painful revelation that America has often meant bad news for many has been accompanied by growing numbers who seek basic identity in something other than the "melting pot." This interest in roots, the new pride of the "unmeltable ethnics," has spawned fresh affirmations of pluralism. Though Anabaptist ecclesiology has stressed the necessity of working to a consensus and seeking to maintain the unity of the Spirit within the body, the opposition to coercing such unity through legal, state, or other hierarchical structures offers a theology for our present pluralistic situation. Our quest for one baptism and one faith should be in the context of persuasion, understanding, and love. Anabaptist theology, at its best, offers an ecumenical style which opposes on the one hand any easy amalgamation and acculturation of traditions lest we lose distinctive gifts, while on the other hand the centrality of the great commission calls us from isolationism to dialogue and witness. There is probably no historic position which affirms as strongly the possibilities of the presence of the Spirit in the struggles and sufferings of minorities. The interest in roots of oppressed peoples extends to the Bible itself. Radical rootedness in the Bible combines with a radical challenge to the status quo to provide an attractive option for those who wish to transcend the present rerun of the fundamentalist-liberal debates of the twenties. Anabaptists have never felt entirely comfortable with either the individualism of American conservativism or the maneuvers for power of many liberals.

The hunger for rootedness in a messed-up world is intimately related to the current search for models of community. Our era may be the first in human history lacking the benefits of extended families. We may discern vestiges from earlier decades when most people on our planet were a part of a tribal entity, a farm community, an ethnic neighborhood, a family church, or a clan of kinfolk. With the scattering of the extended family due to the subservience of our destinies to the technological society, the nuclear family has inherited the obligation to meet practically all of our existential and emotional needs. Previously, parental deficiencies were buttressed by grandparents, aunts, and kissing cousins to provide supplementary resources for identity. Caught in the network of giant institutions, there is a new hunger for warm, intimate relationships. Because the nuclear family cannot bear all of the needs carried by the extended family of the past, there exists the contemporary yearning for community. Much of the popular experimentation with group living in the sixties failed due to the dearth of moral and spiritual underpinnings. For this reason many have turned to the rich experience and wealth of resources available in free church communal ecclesiology.

As a second major element in the Anabaptist vision, the church was created by the central principle of newness of life and applied Christianity

Because they insisted on a visible concretion of the body, evangelical Anabaptists, unlike other sixteenth century radicals, were not spiritualist in their understanding of the church. Nevertheless, they did focus on "peoplehood" more than any concept of institution. The church is a fellowship of persons participating in the fellowship of the Spirit, the resurrected body of Christ. Though the people do not understand themselves as an institution, the people have institutions. People do not go to church as much as people are the church. The church is not the building; rather, the church gathers in a meeting house to point to the presence of God in the sanctuary of life. One submits to discipline not because one is joining together in any illusion of perfection, but because sinners acknowledge that God's help is mediated through a sister or brother. One participates in being a disciple for others because one cares deeply and such caring should extend to all of life including material possessions. The work of the Holy Spirit, symbolized by the laying on of hands, means that we do not come to God apart from a brother or a sister. Baptism involves a response to the mediation of God's message and grace through the community. The death of the old and birth of the new means making a covenant with God and the body for ministry and mission. Instead of choosing sides in the traditional debate concerning the presence of Christ in the bread, the Anabaptist focus has been on the real presence of Christ found in his visible body, the people, as they break bread together. For Anabaptists the correct translation is in fact: "You are my body (Matt. 26:26)."

The third great element in the Anabaptist vision was the ethic of love and nonresistance as applied to all human relationships

 The Brethren understood this to mean complete abandonment of all warfare, strife, and violence, and of the taking of human life.54 

(54. Not all the Anabaptists were completely nonresistant: Balthasar Hubmaier for instance for a brief period (1526-28) led a group of Anabaptists at Nikolsburg in Moravia who agreed to carry the sword against the Turk and pay special war taxes for this purpose. This group, which became extinct in a short time, was known as the "Schwertler" in distinction from other Moravian Anabaptists called the "St&aumlbler," who later became the Hutterites and have continued to the present. It is obvious that Hubmaier and the "Schwertler" represent a transient aberration from original and authentic Anabaptism. Bullinger (Von dem unverschampten fr&aumlfel[1531] fol. 139v. ) testifies that the Swiss Brethren considered war to be "das ergist uebel das man erdencken mag," and (Der Widert&aumlufferen Ursprung [1561] fol. 16 r.) says "they do not defend themselves, therefore they do not go to war and are not obedient to the government on this point." See also, extensive compilation of evidence by John Horsch in his booklet, The Principle of Nonresistance as Held by the Mennonite Church, A Historical Survey (Scottdale, Pa., 1927), 60 pages.)

Conrad Grebel, the Swiss. said in 1524:

True Christians use neither worldly sword nor engage in war, since among them taking human life has ceased entirely, for we are no longer under the Old Covenant.... The Gospel and those who accept it are not to be protected with the sword, neither should they thus protect themselves.55

Pilgram Marpeck, the South German leader, in 1544, speaking of Matthew 5, said:

All bodily, worldly, carnal, earthly fightings, conflicts, and wars are annulled and abolished among them through such law... which law of love Christ... Himself observed and thereby gave His followers a pattern to follow after.56

Peter Riedemann, the Hutterian leader, wrote in 1545:

Christ, the Prince of Peace, has established His Kingdom, that is, His Church, and has purchased it by His blood. In this kingdom all worldly warfare has ended. Therefore a Christian has no part in war nor does he wield the sword to execute vengeance. 57

Menno Simons, of Holland, wrote in 1550:

[The regenerated do not go to war, nor engage in strife.]... They are the children of peace who have beaten their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and know of no war.... Spears and swords of iron we leave to those who, alas, consider human blood and swine's blood of well-nigh equal value.58

In this principle of nonresistance, or biblical pacifism, which was thoroughly believed and resolutely practiced by all the original Anabaptist Brethren and their descendants throughout Europe from the beginning until the last century,59 the Anabaptists were again creative leaders, far ahead of their times, in this antedating the Quakers by over a century and a quarter. It should also be remembered that they held this principle in a day when both Catholic and Protestant churches not only endorsed war as an instrument

of state policy, but employed it in religious conflicts. It is true, of course, that occasional earlier prophets, like Peter Chelcicky, had advocated similar views, but they left no continuing practice of the principle behind them.

________________

1. Reprinted from The Mennonite Quarterly Review 18 (April 1944) Xlll, 67-88, with slight revisions.  That version had in turn been reprinted (with slight revisions) from Church History (March 1944), 3-24.  The essay is available in booklet form from Herald Press, 616 Walnut Ave., Scottsdale, Pa. 15683-1999

2. Rufus M. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion (London, 1909) 369.

Professor Walter K&oumlhler of Heidelberg has recently expressed a similar evaluation, asserting that the historical significance of the Anabaptists "ersch&oumlpft sich nicht in dem Duldermut, der Arbeitstreue, dem kulturellen Fleiss.... Nein, die Mennoniten d&uumlfen ohne Uberhebung einen Platz in der Weltgeschichte beanspruchen als Bahnbrecher der modernen Weltanschauung mit ihrer Glaubens--und Gewissensfreiheit."

3. The results of this research are best found in: Mennonitisches Lexikon, edited by Christian Hege and Christian Neff (Frankfurt a. M. and Weierhof [Pfalz], Germany 1913 ff.), now at the letter "N"; Ernst Correll, Das Schweizerishe T&aumlufermennonttentum: Ein Soziologischer Bericht (Tubingen, 1925); Mennonite Quarterly Review (published at Goshen, Indiana, since 1927); Mennonitische Geschichtsbl&aumltter (published at Weierhof [Palatinate] since 1936); R. J. Smithson, The Anabaptists, Their Contribution to Our Protestant Heritage (London, 1935); John Horsch, Mennonites in Europe (Scottdale, Pa., 1942); C. Henry Smith,The Story of the Mennonites (Berne, Indiana, 1941); L. von Muralt, Glaube und Lehre der Schweizerschen Wiedert&aumlufer in der Reformationszeit (Zurich, 1938). Cf. also: Wilhelm Pauck "The Historiography of the German Reformation During the Past Twenty Years; IV. Research in the History of the Anabaptists," Church History (December 1940) IX, 335-364; Harold S. Bender, "Recent Progress in Research in Anabaptist History," Mennonite Quarterly Review (January 1934) VIII, 3-17. Only three volumes of the great source publication, Quellen zur Geschichte der Wiedert&aumlufer (Leipzig, 1930 ff. ), published by the Vermin fur Reformationsgeschichte, have yet appeared.

4. Quoted in translation by John Horsch, Mennonites in Europe, 325, from Bullinger's Der Wiedert&aumlufferen Ursprung, etc., Zurich, 1560.

5. Horsch, 293, from Sebastian Frank's Chronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtbibel (Strassburg, 1531 ).

6. Heinrich Bullinger, Von dem unverschampten fr&aumlfel . . . der selvsgesandten Widertouffern (Zurich, 1531), folio2v.

7. F. Roth, Augsburgs Reformationsgeschichte (Munich, 1901), I, 230.

8. Letter of Zwingli to Vadian, May 28, 1525, Huldreich Zwinglis S&aumlmtliche Werke ed. Egli, Finsler, Kohler, et al. (Leipzig, 1914) VII, 332.

9. The full official text of the decree may be found in Aller des Heiligen Roemischen Reichs gehaltene Reichstage, Abschiede und Satzungen (Mainz, 1666), 210, 211. It is also edited by Ludwig Keller in Monatshefte der Comenius Gesellschaft (Berlin, 1900), IX, 55-57, and by Bossert in "Die Reichsgesetze &uumlber die Wiedert&aumlufer" in Quellen zur Geschichte der Wiedert&aumlufer, 1. Band Herzogtum W&uumlrttemberg (Leipzig, 1930), 1º-10º. See the excellent discussion of Anabaptist persecution by John Horsch in "The Persecution of the Evangelical Anabaptists," Mennonite Quarterly Review (January 1938), XII, 3-26.

10. Geschicht-Buch der Hutterischen Br&uumlder, edited by Rudolf Wolkan (Macleod [Alberta] and Vienna, 1923), 142,181.

11. Ibid., 182-187. The following quotation is composed of extracts selected from this account without regard to the original order, chiefly from 186, 187.

12. Gottfried Keller's Werke, ed. by Max Nussberger (Leipzig, n. d.) VI, 309. See Elizabeth Horsch Bender, "The Portrayal of the Swiss Anabaptists in Gottfried Keller's Ursula," Mennonite Quarterly Review[July, 1943] XVII, 136-150.

13. In Switzerland, this group was called "Swiss Brethren," in Austria "Hutterites," in Holland and North Germany, "Menists." All these groups seriously objected to the name " Anabaptists" which was a term used to designate a punishable heresy and which after the tragic M&uumlnster episode (1534-35) was a name of odious opprobrium. I use the term here only for custom's sake. The term "Mennonite" came into wider use in the seventeenth century and was ultimately applied to all the groups except the Hutterites.

14. Ernst H. Correll, Das Schweizerische T&aumlufermennonitentum (T&uumlbingen, 1925), "Allgemeine historisch-soziologische Kennzeichnung," 3-10, gives an excellent concise survey. See particularly 6, footnote 1. See also Karl Kautsky, Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation (1897). Troeltsch rejected the theory of the socioeconomic origin of the Anabaptists.

15. Albrecht Ritschl, Geshichte des Pietismus (Bonn, 1880). Cf. R. Friedmann, "Conception of the Anabaptist," Church History (December 1940) IX, 351.

16. Ludwig Keller, Die Reformation und die &aumllteren Reformparteien (Leipzig, 1885). Cf. also Friedmann, op. cit., 352.

17. Max G&oumlbel, Geschichte des Christlichen Lebens, etc. (Coblentz, 1848), 1, 134. Ritschl, op. cit., 22, characterizes Gobel's views as follows "Die Wiedert&aumlufereI also soll nach G&oumlbel die gr&uumlndlichere, entschiedenere, vollstandigere Reformation sein, welche als 'Kind der Reformation' Luthers und Zwinglis zu erkennen aber von Luther seit 1522, von Zwingli seit 1524 aufgegeben worden w&aumlre." Ritschl (op. cit., 7) himself states the Anabaptist position as follows: "Nicht minder haben die Wiedert&aumlufer sich dafur angesehen, dass sie das von Luther und Zwingli begonnene Werk der Wiederherstellung der Kirche zu seinem rechten Ziel f&uumlhrten."

18. Horsch, op. cit., 289.

19. Letter of Conrad Grebel to Thomas M&uumlntzer, Sept. 5, 1524, Thomas M&uumlntzers Briefwechsel, ed. H. Bohmer, and P. Kirn (Leipzig, 1931), 92; English translation, Walter Rauschenbusch, "The Zurich Anabaptists and Thomas M&uumlnzer." American Journal of Theology (January 1905) IX, 92.

20. Taken from an unpublished manuscript in the Staatsarchiv des Kantons Bern, (Unn&uumltze Papiere, Bd. 80), entitled Acta des Gespr&aumlchs zw&umlschenn predicannten und Touffbr&uumlderenn (1538), Copy in the Goshen College Library.

21. Karl Holl, Gesammelte Aufs&aumltzezur Kirchengeschichte (2nd and 3rd ed. ) (T&uumlbingen, 1923), 359.

22. Corpus Schwenckfeldianorum (Leipzig, 1911), II, 280 f. See also K. Ecke, Schwenckfeld, Luther und der Gedanke einer apostolischen Reformation (Berlin, 1911), 101 f. See also the discussion on this topic in J. Horsch, "The Rise of State Church Protestantism," Mennonite Quarterly Review (July 1932), VI, 189-191.

22a. See Luther's Deutsche Messe, translated in Works of Martin Luther (ed. C. M. Jacobs et a1.) VoI VI (Philadelphia, 1932), 172, 173.

23. " Drei Zeugenaussagen Zwinglis im T&aumluferprozess" in Huldreich Zwinglis S&aumlmtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1927), IV, 169.

24. Against this interpretation of Luther (and Zwingli) it may be argued that Luther never completely and consistently adopted the concept of a church of "earnest Christians only" which is here attributed to him, but that along with it he also retained the contradictory concept of the church functioning as a " corpus regens," that is, as an institution of social control. It may be agreed that Luther held the two concepts for a time and that he finally abandoned the former in favor of the latter, but the fact nevertheless remains that the former was for a time dominant, and that it is the implicit meaning of his whole basic theological position. The retention and eventual dominance of the second concept is an evidence of the carry-over of medievalism in Luther's thought. In regard to Zwingli, Wilhelm Hadorn says: "It must be admitted that not only Zwingli but also other Swiss and South German Reformers, e.g., Oecolampad and Capito, originally held views similar to the Anabaptists" (Die Reformation in der Deutschen Schweiz. [Leipzig, 1928]. 104). Walter K&oumlhler, the best living authority on Zwingli, says; "Es ist, wie bei Luther auch, die Kapitulation der autonomen kirchgemeinschaft vor der Obrigkeit eingetreten." (Zwinglis Werke [Leipzig, 1927], IV, 29).

25. Karl M&uumlller, Kirchengeschichte, II, I, 476, M&uumlller describes the essential goal of the Anabaptists as follows: "Es bedeutete inmitten der Aufl&oumlsung aller Verh&aumlltnisse genug, dass hier eine Gemeinschaft stand, die die Heiligung des Lehens allem anderen voranstellte und zugleich in dem unteren Volksschichten wirklich Fuss gefasst, sie mit selbstandiger Religi&oumlst&aumlt gef&uumlllt hat." (Kirchengeschichte. II, 1, 330. )

26. Johannes Kuhn, Toleranz und Offenbarung (Leipzig. 1923), 224 says: "With the Anabaptists everything was based on a central idea. This central idea was concretely religious. It was Jesus' command to follow Him in a holy life of fellowship." Professor Alfred Hegler of T&uumlbingen describes the Anabaptist ideal as "liberty of conscience, rejection of all state-made Christianity, the demand for personal holiness, and a vital personal acceptance of Christian truth." Professor Paul Wernle says, "Their vital characteristic was the earnestness with which they undertook the practical fulfillment of New Testament requirements both for the individual and for the church." These and other similar quotations are to be found in Horsch. "The Character of the Evangelical Anabaptists as Reported by Contemporary Reformation Writers." Mennonite Quarterly Review (July 1934). VIII, 135.

27. Pilgram Marpeck, the outstanding writer of the Swiss and South German Brethren, is an example. See J. C. Wenger, "The Theology of Pilgram Marpeck." Mennonite Quarterly Review (October 1938), XII, 247.

28. The German (Luther) translation of I Peter 3:21 calls baptism " Der Bund eines guten Gewissens mit Gott."

29. Bullinger, Von dem unverschampten fra&aumlfel (1531), fol. 75 r.

30. S. M. Jackson, Selected Works of Huldreich Zwingli (Philadelphia, 1901), 127.

31. Bullinger, Der Widert&aumlufferen Ursprung, fol. 15 v.

32. Joachim von Watt, Deutsche Historische Schriften, ed. Ernst G&oumltzinger (St. Gall, 1879), II, 408.

33. C. A. Cornelius, Geschichte des M&uumlnsterschen Aufruhrs (Leipzig, 1860), II, 52.

34. W. J. McGlothlin, Die Berner T&aumlufer bis 1532 (Berlin, 1902), 36.

35. J. J. Simler, Sammlung alter und neuer Urkunden (Zurich, 1757), I, 824.

36. Karl Rembert, Die Wiedert&aumlufer im Herzogtum J&uumllich (Berlin, 1899), 564.

37. Ernst Muller, Geschichte der Bernischen Ta&uumlfer (Frauenfeld, 1895), 88. M&uumlller speaks (p. 89) of the mandate of 1585 as conceiving of "das T&uumluferwesen" as a just judgment of God on the church and the people of Berne.

38. Sebastian Franck, Chronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtbibel (Strassburg, 1531), folio 444v.

39. Schwenckfeld's Epistolar (1564), 1, 203.

40. Bullinger, Der Widert&uumlufferen Ursprung (1561), fol. 170r.

41. Quellen zur Geschichte der Wiedert&uumlufer, 1. Band Herzogtum W&uumlrttemberg, ed. Gustav Bossert (Leipzig, 1930), 216 f.

42. Ibid., 259 ff.

43. Complete Works of Menno Simons (Elkhart, Indiana, 1871), II, 37b.

44. Handlung oder Acta der Disputation gehalten zu Zofingen (Zurich, 1532).

45. Bohmer-Kirn, op. cit., 97.

46. Horsch, op cit., 386.

47. P. Tschackert, Die Entstehung der Lutherischen und reformierten Kirchenlehre (G&oumlttingen, 1910), 133, says of the Anabaptists that they were "a voluntary Christian fellowship, striving to conform to the Christian spirit for the practice of brotherly love.

48. Johannes K&uumlhn, op. cit., 231. fol. 22v.

49. Ernst M&uumlller, op. cit., 44. See Ernst Correll, op. cit., 15 f. on the attitude of the various Anabaptist groups on community of goods.

50. Horsch, op. cit., 317.

51. A. Hulshof Geschiedenis van de Doopsgezinden te Straatsburg van 1525 tot 1557 (Amsterdam, 1905), 216.

52. Bullinger, Der Widert&uumlufferen Ursprung, fol. 129v.

53. John Horsch, The Hutterian Brethren 1528-1931 (Goshen, Indiana, 1931), gives the only adequate account in English of the Hutterian Brethren. It is of interest to note that Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Zwingli condemned private ownership of property as a sin. See Paul Wernle, Renaissance und Reformation (T&uumlbingen, 1912), 54, 55, for the citations of Erasmus and Melanchthon, and Horsch, Hutterian Brethren, 132, footnote 126, for the citation of Zwingli. Wilhelm Pauck says that Bucer's ideal state was that of Christian communism, "Martin Bucer's Conception of a Christian State," in Princeton Theological Review (January 1928), XXVI, 88.

54. Not all the Anabaptists were completely nonresistant: Balthasar Hubmaier for instance for a brief period (1526-28) led a group of Anabaptists at Nikolsburg in Moravia who agreed to carry the sword against the Turk and pay special war taxes for this purpose. This group, which became extinct in a short time, was known as the "Schwertler" in distinction from other Moravian Anabaptists called the "St&aumlbler," who later

became the Hutterites and have continued to the present. It is obvious that Hubmaier and the "Schwertler" represent a transient aberration from original and authentic Anabaptism. Bullinger (Von dem unverschampten fr&aumlfel[1531] fol. 139v. ) testifies that the Swiss Brethren considered war to be "das ergist uebel das man erdencken mag," and (Der Widert&aumlufferen Ursprung [1561] fol. 16 r.) says "they do not defend themselves, therefore they do not go to war and are not obedient to the government on this point." See also, extensive compilation of evidence by John Horsch in his booklet, The Principle of Nonresistance as Held by the Mennonite Church, A Historical Survey (Scottdale, Pa., 1927), 60 pages.

55. Letter of Grebel to M&uumlntzer, B&oumlhmer-Kirn, op. cit., 97.

56. (Pilgrim Marpeck), Testamenterle&uumltterung (n.d., n.p., ca. 154-1), fol. 313r.

57. (Peter Riedemann), Rechenschaft unserer Religion, Lehre und Glaubens, von den Bruedern die Man die Hutterischen nennt (Berne, Indiana, 1902), 105.

58. The Complete Works of Menno Simons (Elkhart, Indiana, 1871), 1, 170b and 81b. The quotations were revised by comparison with the Dutch editions of 1646 and 1681.

59. Mennonites of Holland, Germany, France, and Switzerland gradually abandoned nonresistance in the course of the nineteenth century. The emigrant Mennonites in Russia and North America have maintained it. The Mennonites of the United States furnish 40 percent of all conscientious objectors in Civilian Public Service in the present war, and the Mennonites of Canada a still higher percent of the conscientious objectors in that country.