Many polemical issues are deserving of research. For example, rather than only giving a description of the Anabaptist views of baptism, it would be a worthy area of research to specifically outline Anabaptist critiques of the pedobaptist position. Other areas might include arguments against the state-church model and differing hermeneutics between Protestants and Anabaptists. The area of research that will be begun in this work will be the Anabaptist critique of the Protestants insofar as the Protestant reforms largely did not yield the fruit of the new life.
Discipleship and regenerate living has long been considered at or at least near the center of Anabaptist identity. Bender, in his perennially reproduced statement of the Anabaptist vision listed discipleship, ecclesiology and the love ethic, specifically in regard to non-resistance, as three key identifying factors of Anabaptism.[1] What often goes unrecognized is that Bender later refined his view to say that the love ethic was not unique to Anabaptism, although the non-resistance attribute was foreign to other appropriations of the love ethic, and that Anabaptist ecclesiology was actually a derivative concept from the Anabaptist position on discipleship.[2] This placed discipleship as the “most characteristic, most central, most essential and regulative concept in Anabaptist thought, which largely determines all else.”[3]
Though such a reduction of discipleship as the sine qua non of Anabaptist identity has not gone fully unchallenged,[4] the continued popularity of Bender’s model evinces that discipleship and the call for a regenerate lifestyle are at least near the center of prominence in Anabaptist identity. For this reason, the current research will look into several expressions among Anabaptist authors in their polemics against the Protestants on the issue of discipleship. The obverse of such a theology of discipleship and moral reform as an important mark of early Anabaptist identity would be the critique of those that did not show such moral reform or a discipleship ethic in their theology. Following is a look into polemics of Balthasar Hübmaier, Hans Denck and Menno Simons against the Protestants and the lack of moral reform that those Anabaptists saw among the state-church reformers.
Balthasar Hübmaier
The earlier writings of Hübmaier generally dealt with the issue of baptism, but as he gained slightly more freedom in his later years in Nikolsburg he was able to broaden the scope of his critique of the Protestants to include the issue of moral reform. The general tenor of Hübmaier’s complaint was that the Protestants may have taken a few good steps in recovering the gospel, they did not complete them with good works. Regardless of what one may have proclaimed, Hübmaier did not give much heed to that proclamation without the evidence of works.
Hübmaier called the Christians who would not amend their doctrine with the new life, “Mouth-Christians,” who gladly boast of Christ’s work on the cross.[5] He earlier said that things would not go well in the church “Even if we should all shout, write, and hear the gospel until we are hoarse and tired.”[6] He further goes on to say that the result of such thinking is that “We[7] still claim to be Christians, truly evangelical, and boast of our great faith, and have never touched the works of the gospel and of faith with our little finger.[8] Further, he wrote, “Whoever lets his faith stand naked and does not clothe it in good works adulterates Christian liberty into carnal license.”[9] The force of Hübmaier’s words is clear, that to take the Protestant doctrine of sola fide, which Hübmaier would call “mere faith,”[10] without the amendment of life would be an empty gospel and was apparently in Hübmaier’s mind the cause of great sin in his world.
Hübmaier drew that point clearly in On Fraternal Admonition. He wrote, “We all want to be Christians and good Protestants by taking wives and eating meat, no longer sacrificing, no more fasting, no more praying, yet apart from this one sees nothing but tippling, gluttony, blasphemy, usury, lying, deceit, etc...”[11] The Protestants, according to Hübmaier’s critique, did not seem to differentiate the commands coming from Rome insofar as some were extra-biblical additions and others were biblical moral commands. In throwing out the errata of the church in its rites and rituals, the Protestants apparently also tended to throw out the Christian lifestyle for it was only viewed as yet another work added onto faith by the Roman church in order to merit salvation.[12]
Summarily, Hübmaier had made the criticism of the lack of a reformed life among the Protestants as set against their doctrine. He wrote:
"People had learned no more than two points, without any amelioration of life. The one point, that they could say: “We believe. Faith saves us.” Second: “We can do nothing good of ourselves.” Now both of these are true. But under the mantle of these half truths all kinds of iniquity, unfaithfulness, and injustice have completely taken over."[13]
Hübmaier was undoubtedly approving of those Protestant doctrines–sola fide and total depravity[14]–but they were not a complete picture of the Christian life. Only by a reformed life would on truly learn the gospel.
Hübmaier’s broader polemic on free will also included elements critical of Protestant morality. He wrote that the strong predestination doctrines of the Protestants led toward apathy of lifestyle and that any moral failings would be attributed as inevitable, for they were putatively the work of God. He wrote that such a doctrine was to “blame him [God] for unrighteousness.”[15] He further goes on to say that to continue is sin so that God’s providence of salvation, as opposed to man providing for his own salvation by works, is a blasphemy, and that to say God wills sin either does not know God or does not know sin.[16]
[*]op. cit. MQR 45, no. 4 (Oct. 1971): 291-311. Some of the material from that article is also covered in Klaassen's Anabaptism: Neither Catholic nor Protestant (Waterloo, Ontario: Conrad, 1973). My reading of that work partially, although not entirely, inspired my search into this topic.
[1]“The Anabaptist Vision,” MQR 18, no. 2 (Apr. 1944): 67-88., which is itself is a reprint of a printing of a lecture and has since been reproduced in other literature including a standalone binding from Herald Press.
[2]“The Anabaptist Theology of Discipleship,” MQR 24, no. 1 (Jan. 1950): 26-27.
[3]Ibid., 27.
[4]Leonard Gross, “Recasting the Anabaptist Vision: The Longer View,” MQR 60, no. 3 (Jul. 1986): 352-363.; Werner O. Packull, “Some Reflections on the State of Anabaptist History: The Demise of a Normative Vision,” Studies in Religion 8 (1979): 313-323.
[5]Apologia, in Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism [BH], ed. and trans. Wayne H. Pipkin and John Howard Yoder, Classics of the Radical Reformation, no. 5 (Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald, 1989), 526.
[6]On Fraternal Admonition, BH, 375. This context is specifically in regards to the vanity of such boasting of the gospel without the use of fraternal admonition and the ban, the means of discipline and thus moral reform in the church.
[7]“We” mostly likely refers to Hübmaier’s own Germanic peoples, the group seemingly at the forefront of his social conscious as evidenced by the introduction to his A Christian Catechism, BH, 343-344.
[8]Apologia, BH, 527.
[9] Ibid., 528.
[10]Ibid., 527.
[11]BH, 375-376.
[12]Walter Klaassen echoed this critique while commenting on a slightly broader representation of Anabaptist writers, saying “But many were not so subtle; they assumed from Luther’s words that works also included moral behaviour.” Anabaptism: Neither Catholic nor Protestant, 31.
[13]On Fraternal Admonition, BH, 375. cf. Free Will I, BH, 447-448.
[14]That Hübmaier would agree with total depravity, see Free Will I, BH, 438.
[15]Apologia, BH, 534.
[16]Free Will II, BH, 468, 469.
