The Anabaptist Witness

Today's Scripture

Matthew 26:52 — "Then Jesus said to him, 'Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.'"

John 18:36 — "Jesus answered, 'My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.'"

Matthew 5:9 — "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."

The Big Idea

For five hundred years, the Anabaptists — the spiritual ancestors of today's Mennonites, Amish, and Brethren — have held that a follower of Jesus may never take up the sword, because the cross is not only how Jesus saved us but the pattern for how his people live. You do not have to agree with them to need them. Their witness keeps a question alive that the rest of the church is always tempted to bury.

Reflection

Born under the sword

In January 1525, in Zurich, a handful of Christians did something illegal: they baptized one another as adults, on confession of faith. Their enemies mocked them as Anabaptists — "re-baptizers." The city's response escalated fast. Within two years, Zurich was executing them by drowning — a cruel joke about their baptisms. The movement learned immediately what its convictions would cost.

What is remarkable is what they did with that knowledge. In 1527, a former monk named Michael Sattler led a small gathering that produced the Schleitheim Confession, the movement's first common statement. Its sixth article faced the question of violence head-on:

"The sword is ordained of God outside the perfection of Christ. It punishes and puts to death the wicked, and guards and protects the good." — Michael Sattler, Schleitheim Confession

Read that carefully, because it is more interesting than a simple "violence is bad." Sattler agrees with Romans 13 — the sword is ordained of God for restraining evil in a fallen world. But it operates, he says, "outside the perfection of Christ" — outside the community of those who follow Jesus. The state may wield it. The disciple may not. Within months of writing those words, Sattler was tortured and burned at the stake. His judges cut out his tongue first. The records say he prayed for them while he could still speak.

Their anchor text was the scene in Gethsemane. Armed men come for Jesus; Peter draws and strikes; and Jesus — at the moment when self-defense had its strongest case in history — says: "Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52). He adds that he could appeal to his Father and receive "more than twelve legions of angels" (Matthew 26:53). The Anabaptist reading is simple: if ever a sword was justified, it was that one, and Jesus refused it. The disciple does not get a better excuse than the Master turned down.

A kingdom that does not fight

A few hours later, Jesus stood before Pilate and explained why: "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting... But my kingdom is not from the world" (John 18:36). Notice the proof Jesus offers that his kingdom is different: his servants do not fight. Not "my kingdom is invisible" or "my kingdom is only spiritual" — his kingdom is real and it is arriving, but you can recognize it by what its citizens refuse to do.

After the disaster of Münster in the 1530s — when a fringe group claiming the Anabaptist name tried to set up God's kingdom by force and was slaughtered — a Dutch ex-priest named Menno Simons spent his life gathering the shattered, peaceable majority. (His followers are why we say "Mennonite.") He stated their conviction without a millimeter of wiggle room:

"The regenerated do not go to war, nor engage in strife. They are children of peace who have beaten their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and know of no war." — Menno Simons, Reply to False Accusations

Regenerated is an old word for born again. Menno is claiming that Isaiah's swords-to-plowshares prophecy is not just a someday-promise; it has already begun in the church, or the church is not being the church. Paul talks the same way about the church's arsenal: "though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds" (2 Corinthians 10:3-4). The church does fight, the Anabaptists insist — against sin, lies, and the devil — but its weapons are truth, prayer, suffering love, and the gospel. And over it all stands the beatitude: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God" (Matthew 5:9). Sons resemble their Father. The family trade is making peace.

Importantly, this was never passivity. Menno's communities were famous for feeding enemies and sheltering strangers:

"True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant; it clothes the naked, it feeds the hungry, it comforts the sorrowful, it shelters the destitute, it serves those that harm it, it binds up that which is wounded." — Menno Simons, Why I Do Not Cease Teaching and Writing

"It serves those that harm it." There is the Sermon on the Mount, alive and walking around in seventeenth-century Holland. One famous Anabaptist, Dirk Willems, escaped prison across a frozen pond; his pursuer fell through the ice; Willems turned back and pulled him out — and was recaptured and burned. The peace churches do not just refuse to kill their enemies. They keep rescuing them.

What the peace churches give the rest of us

Maybe you are already composing objections. Good — hold them for a moment, and listen to two voices from outside the Anabaptist house who refused to dismiss it. Charles Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher of Victorian London, was no Mennonite, yet he thundered:

"Long have I held that war is an enormous crime; long have I regarded all battles as but murder on a large scale." — Charles Spurgeon, sermon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle

And in our own era, Stanley Hauerwas has argued that the church's deepest political contribution is not advising the government but simply being a community that lives Jesus's way in public:

"The church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic." — Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom

A congregation where former enemies share one table, where no one returns evil for evil — that community is an argument, before it says a word. The Mennonite scholar John Howard Yoder pressed the point that this way of life will cost what it cost Jesus:

"The believer's cross must be, like his Lord's, the price of his social nonconformity." — John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus

(Honesty requires a footnote: Yoder was later credibly shown to have abused many women, a grief his own Mennonite community has publicly reckoned with. His argument must be weighed on its merits; his life is a warning that no theology exempts its holder from repentance.)

Now the strongest objection, stated fairly: isn't this freeloading? The pacifist farmer sleeps safely because police and soldiers — other people's sons and daughters — carry the sword he refuses. If everyone followed his example, wouldn't the wolves eat the world? It is a serious critique, and Day 4's tradition stands behind it.

The Anabaptist answer is not a debating trick; it is a life. First: we never asked for protection on those terms, and when persecution came, we did not resist it — check the record of our martyrs. Second: the church's job was never to run the world's security; it is to show the world what the coming kingdom looks like, the way Stephen did when he died praying, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them" (Acts 7:60) — and his killers' coats were guarded that day by a young man named Saul, who never escaped the memory. Third, and deepest: Christians believe victory has already been redefined. "And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death" (Revelation 12:11). Conquered — by dying. That is either nonsense or the actual mechanics of how God wins.

Winning by dying

Which brings us to the gospel itself, because the Anabaptist case finally rests not on a verse about swords but on the shape of salvation.

"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus," Paul writes, and then traces the arc: he "emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant... he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him" (Philippians 2:5-9). Down, down, down — then up. The cross was not an unfortunate detour on the way to Jesus's victory. It was the victory. "We preach Christ crucified," Paul says, "a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles... For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men" (1 Corinthians 1:23-25).

N.T. Wright — who is not an Anabaptist — describes how this changes the way God's kingdom advances:

"The method of the kingdom will match the message of the kingdom. The kingdom will come as the church, energized by the Spirit, goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating." — N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus

A kingdom whose message is a crucified Lord cannot spread by crucifying people. Whatever you conclude about soldiers and police and the hard cases — and this plan is not finished arguing — that much is settled at Calvary. God's deepest answer to his enemies was not to destroy them but to die for them, and the empty tomb is his announcement that the method worked.

So receive the Anabaptist witness, at minimum, as a gift you must not lose. They are the church's memory that we worship a Lamb. They make it impossible to baptize every war our nations want blessed. And they ask each of us the question under all the other questions: do you actually believe the cross was a victory — or just a sad thing that happened before the real power showed up? Tomorrow, in Bonhoeffer, we meet a man who believed it with his whole heart and still chose to join a conspiracy against Hitler. The argument is about to get harder.

Going Deeper

Read Matthew 26:51-54, then Philippians 2:5-11, slowly. Then try a small Anabaptist practice today: identify one conflict in your life — a group chat, a rivalry, a simmering grudge — and deliberately refuse your usual weapon in it. No comeback, no cold shoulder, no recruiting allies. Instead, do one concrete act of service or one honest prayer for the person on the other side. You are not solving the war question today. You are testing, in miniature, whether the way of the Lamb has power.