I ran across an interesting quote while reading Robert Friedmann’s Theology of Anabaptism: An Interpretation.[1] It reads: “Wo keine Gemeinschaft ist... da ist auch keine rechte Liebe.”[2] Friedmann provides a translation: “Where there is no community, there is also no genuine love.” In this context, “community (Gemeinschaft)” specifically refers to the faith community.
The sentiment represented in the tract, which comes much later than the earliest period of Anabaptism, is found elsewhere in Anabaptist thought. Andreas Carlstadt, for instance, wrote, “Beggars are a sure indicator that there are no Christians, or else very few dispirited ones, in any town in which beggars are seen.”[3] What is fascinating about this concept, perhaps more strongly in Carlstadt than the quote given by Friedmann, is that for there to be no poor among Christians does not simply mean that there are to be no poor members of any particular Gemeinschaft as would be the case for a Hutterite Bruderhof. There were to have been no poor among the entire community in which a group of true Christians, as a sacred community within the secular community, dwelt.
What caught my attention of the first quote, however, was its particular wording. It is reminiscent of the Latin liturgical phrase, “Ubi caritas est vera, dues ibi est.”[4] Two differences are prominent. First, whereas the Latin speaks in the positive (the presence of true love indicates the presence of God), the German speaks in the negative (the absence of true love indicates the absence of the church). Second, and more importantly, the presence of God is substituted with the presence of the church. This is wholly conceivable in view of the consideration that Anabaptist saw themselves as the body of Christ, being God, on earth. If indeed the author of the 1560 epistle was purposefully alluding to the liturgy, then this would shed light on the Anabaptist view of their role as God’s representatives as described in 1 Corinthians 5:20-21.
As it goes for now, this is just raising a question that prods me to find a copy of the original article to see if there is any other play on liturgical themes.
[1]Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History, No. 15 (Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald, 1973).
[2]Robert Friedmann, “An Epistle Concerning Communal Life: A Hutterite Manifesto of 1650,” MQR 34 (1960): 252, quoted in Friedmann, Theology of Anabaptism, 124.
[3]Andreas Bodenstein von Carlstadt, On the Removal of Images and That there Should Be No Beggars Among Christians, in The Essential Carlstadt: Fifteen Tracts by Andreas Bodenstein (Carlstadt), from Karlstadt, trans. and ed. E. J. Furcha (Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald, 1995), 120.
[4]“Where love is true (or "Where there is true love"), there God is.”
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