The Anabaptist Witness

Today's Reading

Read Matthew 5:38-48 once more — the text the Anabaptist tradition will not let the rest of the church forget.

Read John 18:33-38, where Jesus tells Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting." A kingdom whose servants do not fight is a strange kind of kingdom, and the Anabaptists have insisted on its strangeness.

Read Matthew 26:51-54, where one of Jesus's disciples draws a sword to defend him in Gethsemane and Jesus stops him: "Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword."

Read Philippians 2:5-11 — the early Christian hymn of the descent and exaltation of Christ. The way up is the way down. The throne is reached by the cross.

Reflection

In the spring of 1525, a small group of Christians in Zurich did something the medieval church had not seen in over a millennium. They baptized one another as adults, on the basis of confessed faith, against the explicit law of the city. The act was illegal, dangerous, and carried out with full knowledge that the magistrates could and would respond with force. Within months, several of the leaders had been arrested. Within a few years, many had been killed — some drowned by reformers who concluded that those who insisted on adult baptism deserved a third "baptism" by execution.

The Anabaptist movement (the name means "rebaptizers") was born under the sword and refused to take it up. By 1527, a small synod near the Swiss village of Schleitheim, under the leadership of Michael Sattler — a former Benedictine prior who would soon be tortured to death — produced the Schleitheim Confession, the first systematic Anabaptist statement of faith. Its sixth article articulated what would become the defining Anabaptist conviction on violence.

The sword, Sattler wrote, "is ordained of God outside the perfection of Christ" — meaning, the magistrate's sword exists in a fallen world among people who do not yet know Christ, and serves a real purpose there. But "within the perfection of Christ" — meaning, within the church, the community of those who have confessed Jesus as Lord — the sword has no place. The disciple's only weapon against the sinning brother is the ban (excommunication, the call to repentance). The disciple does not kill, and does not become a magistrate, because the calling of Christ is incompatible with the calling of the sword.

This was a radical position in the sixteenth century, and it remained radical for the next five centuries. While the magisterial reformers — Luther, Zwingli, Calvin — argued among themselves about how the church should relate to civil power, the Anabaptists argued that the church's calling was different in kind from the state's. They were persecuted, often viciously, by Catholics and Protestants alike. The story of the Anabaptist communities of the Netherlands, Switzerland, and southern Germany over the next century is in many places a martyrology. The Martyrs Mirror, compiled by Thieleman van Braght in 1660, runs to over a thousand pages — most of them from the Reformation century.

Menno Simons, the Dutch Catholic priest who became, after Sattler, the most important early Anabaptist theologian, gave the movement its later name. His pastoral leadership held the surviving communities together after the disastrous Münster rebellion of 1534-35 — a uprising in which a group calling themselves Anabaptists tried to establish a violent millennial kingdom by force. Menno repudiated Münster and held to a strict reading of the Sermon on the Mount. "The regenerated," he wrote in 1552, "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." His followers — Mennonites — became, with the Amish (who emerged from a Mennonite split in the 1690s), the Brethren, and later the Quakers, the historic peace churches of Western Christianity.

The argument the Anabaptist tradition has made for five centuries is not strategic. It is not that nonviolence works better than violence, or that pacifism is a clever path to peace. The argument is christological. Jesus, the Lord of the church, refused the sword. He told Peter to put his weapon away. He went to the cross without violence and called his disciples to take up the same cross. The cross is not just the means of atonement but the pattern of the disciple's life. To take up the sword is to step out of the way of the Master.

This is why the Anabaptist tradition has resisted being domesticated as just another political stance. It is not the policy preference of liberal Christians who happen to dislike war. It is a confession that the kingdom Jesus inaugurated is not advanced by the kingdoms' weapons. The cross has already won. The disciple's job is to bear witness.

The most influential modern Anabaptist theological voice was John Howard Yoder, whose 1972 book The Politics of Jesus argued that the New Testament's portrait of Jesus is irreducibly political — that Jesus's renunciation of the sword is not a private spiritual posture but a public political stance with implications for every disciple. The book reshaped Christian ethics across denominational lines; figures from Stanley Hauerwas (a Methodist) to many Catholic theologians cited it as decisive. The book is also, more than thirty years on, complicated by the fact that Yoder was credibly accused over decades of sexual abuse of women, a pattern that his denomination eventually acknowledged and that has changed how we read him. The argument of The Politics of Jesus is not refuted by the sins of its author — many great theologians have left wreckage behind them — but it is also not enhanced by them, and it would be wrong to commend Yoder personally without that knowledge.

Stanley Hauerwas, building on Yoder and on Karl Barth, has argued for half a century that the church's primary political task is not to make the world more just but to be the kind of community whose existence is unintelligible if Jesus is not Lord. A church that fights its nation's wars, baptizes its nation's flag, and absorbs its nation's enmities is a church that has forgotten this. A church that refuses to kill, that gathers across the lines of warring nations, that prays for its nation's enemies, is a church that names — by its life — the gospel it preaches.

The strongest critique of the Anabaptist position is the one Bonhoeffer made before he made his other choice. The pacifist church, Bonhoeffer argued, lives in a world protected by the very magistrate's sword it refuses to take up. The Mennonite farmer in Pennsylvania who pays no military tax still lives in a country defended by a navy. The Quaker who refuses the draft still benefits from the police force that protects his family. Pacifism, on this critique, is parasitic on the violence it denounces — a beautiful witness made possible by people whose hands are dirtier.

The Anabaptist answer is patient. The church is not the state. The church's job is not to be a superior civil order but a different one. The witness of the disciple who refuses the sword is not a strategy for running a nation; it is a sign of a kingdom that does not run on the nations' fuel. When the persecution comes, as it has come for five hundred years, the Anabaptist does not pick up the sword to defend himself. He bears the cross. The witness is in the bearing.

You do not have to be persuaded by the Anabaptists to be changed by them. To listen to them is to be reminded that the early church, for three centuries, also refused the sword. To listen to them is to feel the weight of the cross on the church's politics. To listen to them is to be unable to baptize, without examination, every war your nation has fought.

The just-war tradition we listened to yesterday and the Anabaptist tradition we listen to today have argued with each other for five centuries. They have also, sometimes, learned from each other. A serious just-war Christian should be more demanding of any actual war than the average citizen — because the criteria are real. A serious Anabaptist Christian should be unable to dismiss the cry of the innocent who are killed when the church refuses to act. The two traditions, taken seriously, both refuse the easy peace of "my country, right or wrong" and the cheaper peace of "not my problem."

Tomorrow we look at the man whose life refused both traditions — and who has been claimed, badly, by both.

Going Deeper

Read Matthew 26:51-54 (the sword in Gethsemane) and John 18:33-38 (Jesus before Pilate). Then read Philippians 2:5-11. Ask: if Jesus's path was the cross, and the disciple is called to "have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus" — what does that mean for how the disciple holds the sword? The Anabaptist answer is one. The just-war answer is another. Sit honestly with how each tradition reads these passages.