Download File 50. >> I am so surprised by your answer. When I hear of

File 50.
>> I am so surprised by your answer. When I hear of
Anabaptists, I don't think of revolutionaries. It's not
surprising that Anabaptists like these were feared by the
authorities. Were they all like that? Am I simply wrong in
my impression?
>> No. You're actually quite correct in your impression.
The vast majority of Anabaptists were not apocalyptic
revolutionaries. Many of them were opposed to religious
violence. Nonetheless, in kind of the -- because of the
revolutionaries, the Anabaptist movement as a whole got tarred
with that brush. But a lot of them weren't like that at all.
Among those who were not like that, I want to single out one
in particular, and this is Menno Simons. He's a reformer
actually from the Netherlands who, when he embraced
Protestantism, ended up embracing the Anabaptist form of
Protestantism, rather than one of the magisterial forms,
Lutheranism or reformed Protestantism.
Simons had been a Roman Catholic priest. He was, as I said,
from the Netherlands, and during the reformation period he was
led to reexamine Christian truth on the basis of the scriptures.
Ultimately, he rejected Catholicism and embraced the Anabaptist
position, the Anabaptist position regarding baptism, but also
a number of other issues he took a different position from that
of the more mainstream reformers.
For a long time after he had come to this new position, he
hesitated to break with the Catholic church, but one of the
things that actually moved him to make the break was the
persecution that other Anabaptists were experiencing. Menno
Simons felt a great deal of kind of conscience qualms about the
fact that others were being persecuted, even dying for their
faith, and that he was remaining more or less comfortable within
the establishment.
So at length, he, too, broke with the Catholic church and
joined the Anabaptist movement. But Menno Simons didn't want
to have anything to do with revolutionary violence. His own
brother was a revolutionary Anabaptist who had lost his life
in an attempt to fight against the establishment, so Menno
Simons didn't want to have anything to do with that.
And so what he did was to articulate another kind of
Anabaptist practice, and this was one that was committed to a
peaceful, even passivist, kind of a Christian life and
existence.
So let me tell you a little bit about Menno's theology. Well,
as you might expect, he's an Anabaptist. That means he
rejects -- rejects infant baptism. Part of the reason why he
could reject infant baptism was on account of his belief that
our Lord's death had cancelled out the guilt of original sin
for all people, and that meant even for children.
Now, he hadn't cancelled out the corruption of original sin,
so that people still became sinners, but he thought that nobody
would be condemned for simply that corruption, and that it
wasn't until a child reached what he called the age of shame
that he could be held personally accountable for sins, and
accordingly, be -- be damned or else be saved.
So it was only after you became an adult that you were really
a fit subject for hearing about the Christian religion, becoming
converted, and, once converted, then you should be baptized as
kind of the sign and the seal of your conversion.
So in common with all the Anabaptists, Menno Simons believed
in kind of the gathered church, of which baptism was a sign.
Rather than a means of grace for creating faith, it was a sign
of faith that was already present.
Beyond his views on baptism, Menno Simons also had a strong
commitment to Christian community. In part, this may have been
on account of the fact that his movement was persecuted. If
they were going to have a Christian community at all, it needed
to be close-knit, it needed to be tightly bound. Members had
to have a kind of strong level of commitment. But this was
Menno's belief anyway, that Christians were meant to be in
close-knit communities. This meant that they would encourage
and exhort one another to faithfulness during tough times, but
it also meant discipline. If individuals fell or they slid back
into their old ways and customs, then they had to be disciplined.
And Menno and his movement became rather famous for their
readiness to impose what they called "the ban" upon back-sliding
members. And "the ban" included not only exclusion from
communion and from church services, but if you were under "the
ban," no Mennonite, no follower of Menno Simons, was supposed
to have anything to do with you. Any kind of social relations
or business relations were terminated, if you were under "the
ban." So they -- as I say, they become well-known for their
emphasis upon discipleship and Christian discipline.
It's also the case that in their Christian practice, Menno
was pretty strong on their staying away from violence; that they
were really to follow the Sermon On The Mount in its particulars,
and Menno's reading of the Sermon On The Mount meant that you
weren't supposed to engage in any kind of violence, so you
weren't supposed to be a soldier or any kind of officer of the
law. You weren't supposed to take oaths. It was okay to obey
the authorities, but only in so far as the authorities did not
trespass the word of God, and from the standpoint of Menno and
his followers, most authorities were always trespassing the
word of God, particularly in their attitudes toward the
Anabaptists.
So Menno's group had to kind of function as an underground
church, an underground movement, and Menno himself was often
hunted as a heretic.
One other aspect I think I should mention regarding Menno's
theology is his doctrine of Christ. Menno and others of this
radical reformation often departed from classical Christianity
in their understanding of the person of Christ. It's hard to
figure out the origins of this, but it does seem that there was
a strong strain of what we might call a spiritualism, even a
Platonism at work in the radical reformation, people who tended
to identify material things with evil and spiritual things with
good.
At any rate, what Menno and others taught about the person
of Christ was that our Lord brought with him his human nature
into the womb of the Virgin Mary, so that although they would
affirm that he was a true human being, nonetheless, he did not
derive his human nature, his human flesh, from the Virgin Mary
or from ordinary -- ordinary human being. And so there is
really kind of a question as to what Menno and these others
really thought about the human nature of Jesus. Was he really
a human being like all other human beings, or did he have some
kind of special or supernatural body and flesh?
Now, there are some historians who think that Menno received
his Christology from Melchior Hoffman and that Melchior Hoffman
may have received it from yet another radical reformer, a man
by the name of Casper Schwenkfeld. I don't think we need to
talk a whole lot about Schwenkfeld. He is mentioned in the
Lutheran confessions.
His theology of Christ, which was similar to that of Menno's,
is condemned by the Lutheran confessions. He actually had, at
one point, been a follower of Luther, but had broken with Luther
over Christology and then also over the doctrine of the
Eucharist. Like so many others at this time, Casper
Schwenkfeld denied the real presence of our Lord's body and
blood in the sacrament. He liked to talk about spiritual
eating, which he separated from the physical eating and the
sacraments. So Casper Schwenkfeld is yet another member of
this rather large group, this complicated group, this group in
which there are some tendencies but not a lot of central
organization, and certainly no confessions and creeds, this
group that we're calling here the radical reformation.