As reviewed previously, Alvin J.
Beachy argued that the reformers and the radical held two opposing view of
grace in the matter of justification.[1]
The Lutheran line held to forensic justification, in which the sinner simul
iustus et peccator (at the same time just and sinful) by having the
righteousness accounted on the sinner’s behalf with no change in actual
rghteousness. The radicals, represented by Hans Denck, Melchior Hoffman,
Balthasar Hübmaier, Pilgram Marpeck, Dirk Phillips, Caspar Schwenkfeld and
Menno Simons, did not accept such an imputed righteousness but rather affirmed
an imparted righteousness involving an ontological, not merely positional,
change of the sinner to righteousness. In this way, the Anabaptists maintained
a more Augustinian notion of justification.[2]
In On the Mystery of Baptism, Hans Hut demonstrated further complexity
of theologization within the Anabaptist movement by offering a middle way
between the two opposing views on the nature of righteousness in justification.[3]
Hut’s conception of righteousness
in justification was this: the justified sinner is initially imputed
righteousness in a forensic sense. He wrote, “The faith which one receives from
hearing the gospel will be imputed for righteousness, until a person is
justified and purified under the cross. . . . [T]he faith which one has
initially must be sharply distinguished [from tested faith].”[4]
So, while the initial faith of the believer imputes righteousness in lieu of
actual righteousness, Hut’s words point toward a second step.
The first step being imputed
righteousness, the second step is a growing actual righteousness. It was this
type of righteousness of which the Anabaptists wrote while it was the
righteousness of the first step of which Martin Luther had written. Hut
described the growing actual righteousness of the second step in this way: “So
God exercises his justice on us through the suffering of the holy cross, which
he lays on each one. . . . “Here all lust to which we have been accustomed in
this creaturely life will be rooted out and broken. Thus the world’s yoke of
total sin will be thrown off.”[5]
The image Hut had used was that of
silver trapped in ore, which until it is drawn out of its impurities is
nonetheless “held to be good.”[6]
The period of testing is the baptism on which Hut’s writing centers, thus
explaining why the matter of justification is included in a baptismal treatise.
The work does not focus on water baptism as the sign that had been debated in
Zurich. His focus was more on the baptism to which the sign pointed, writing,
“[T]he symbol and the essence must be sharply distinguished.”[7]
This “essential” baptism, of which
water was a sign, was the testing by which one would be “justified and purified
under the cross.” Hut wrote, “Christ speaks of real baptism as the water of all
grief, through which the lord purifies, ashes and justifies all carnal lusts,
sins, and impure actions (Matthew 20).”[8]
This is in line with difference between the “sweet” Christ of Luther and the
“bitter” Christ of Thomas Müntzer, with whom Hut was associated. Hut repeated
Müntzer’s Christology, “[N]o one can attain the sweet son of God unless he has
previously tasted the bitter Christ in justification.”[9]
Baptism, the subject of this treatise, is then at its heart the trials and
testing that reveals the bitterness of Christ experienced in participation in
and imitation of Christ’s suffering, “For no one may attain the truth unless he
follows in the footsteps of Christ and his elect in the school of every grief,
or at least has consented partly to this [referring, presumably, to the first
step], according to the will of God and in the justification of the cross of
Christ.”[10]
Further, “[H]e [the believer] must put the cross on his neck, as did Christ,
and thus fulfill the will of God the father through suffering . . .. Christ the
crucified has man members in this body and still is no member. Nevertheless
every member bears the work or suffers, or consents to suffer, according to the
model of the head [Christ]. Without this remedy no one knows Christ . . ..”
Hut further reflects the Anabaptist
polemic against the reformers that has been investigated here previously.[11]
Hut could not accept forensic justification alone, writing, “[T]heir teaching,
as anyone may hear, is nothing but ‘believe!’ and it goes no further.”[12]
He later wrote, “[I]t is a very bad gospel which the world and learned
preachers down to our age are involved with, and which does not improve people
but only aggravates them. . . . The whole world now talks about freedom, and
yet always remains in carnal servitude.”[13]
After the first step of imputed
righteous from which the follower begins along the second step of growing in
purity through the testing of the baptism of all grief, there is possibly a
third step. At this step, one arrives at a fully purified state, the process of
purification by testing having been completed. Expanding on an earlier quote,
Hut wrote, “The faith which one receives from hearing the gospel will be
imputed for righteousness, until a person is justified and purified under the
cross. For then such a faith is conformed to the faith of God and is one
with Christ. The just person then lives from such a faith.”[14]
If Hut is indeed teaching
perfectionism here, then what is being described is that the second step of
testing eventually leads to a point at which all sin is cleansed from the
follower and the follower lives in a third stage out of the perfection of an
ontologically changed righteousness internal to the believer. The training
wheels of the first step are then unnecessary since followers are no longer
justified by Christ’s righteousness but rather by their own, which has forged
in the fires of suffering. For this reason Hut could write, “This justification
is valid before God, and it does not come from an untested faith.”[15]
Returning to the metaphor of silver ore, Hut wrote that there is a point at
which “[A]ll the impurities are separated from it.”[16]
Further, “[T]he person will be so
full of joy that he will forget all worldly lusts, pleasures and honors, and
will regard everything as dross.”[17]
It is unclear whether Hut’s
language indicates the perfectionist teaching of which Anabaptists had often
been accused or if he is using hyperbolic language to indicate a state at which
the follower’s faith has been sufficiently tested and purified in order to be
counted righteous on its own merit rather than on the merit of Christ as in the
first step. Hut was not entirely expansive on this point since his point was to
elaborate on the baptism of every grief associated with the second state.
Regardless of whether Hut taught perfectionism, it still remains that there is
a third step in Hut’s soteriology during which the follower’s faith, either
completed or continuing in its growth, sufficiently merits righteousness in the
eyes of God.
This is not to be confused with
Pelagianism, for that later internal righteousness has its origin in the
external righteousness of Christ. According to Hut, in the second step, “[T]his
justification must occur only through the action of God in the baptism of every
grief shown to and exercised upon man by God, to whom alone man is subordinate
for justification. Therefore, if a person is to be justified by God, the person
must always allow God, as his lord, to perform his work in him.”[18]
Hut would not let anyone take credit for his or her own righteousness but
rather insisted that the real righteousness internal to the believer had been
wrought by God.
In this way Hut maintained the
Anabaptist soteriology of accepting an internal, imparted righteousness on
account of which the believer was justified before God. For Hut, n contrast to
the rest of the Anabaptists, the inception of justification was not based on
this righteousness. Only the fulfillment of justification was based on this
righteousness. At the same time Hut retained Luther’s forensic model, but only
accepting the external righteousness of Christ imputed to the believer as the
grounds for justification as only an initial step in the salvific process. Hut
thus retained elements of the competing soteriologies while at the same time uniquely
synthesizing them in accordance with Müntzer’s doctrine of the bitter Christ.
The doctrinal development of the Anabaptists, especially among lay leaders like
Hut who did not have any formal theological training, is shown to be heterogeneous
and full of individual creativity that far surpassed the simplistic,
unsophisticated biblical literalism of which they had been charged.
[1]Alvin J.
Beachy, The Concept of Grace in the
Radical Reformation, Bibliotheca Humanistica & Reformatorica vol. 17
(Nieuw-koop: B. de Graaf, 1976). See review posted 1 May 2011.
[2]Although he
does not look at the concept of grace in detail, James William McClendon, Jr.
“Balthasar Hubmaier: Catholic Anabaptist,” MQR
65, no. 1 (Jan. 1991): 32, listed the doctrine as a point of continuity between
Hübmaier and Catholic theology.
[3]“On the
Mystery of Baptism,” in The Radical
Reformation, edited by Michael G. Baylor, Cambridge Texts in the History of
Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 152-171. Hut
does not appear to have been self-consciously presenting a mediating position
in the same way that Bucer would purposefully attempt a mediating position
between the Lutheran and Zwinglian camps on the Lord’s Supper. Nevertheless,
Hut’s position implemented aspects of both views in a creative manner that did
not completely deny either.
[4]Ibid., 165.
[5]Ibid., 166.
[6]Ibid., 165.
[7]Ibid., 163.
This “essential” baptism is roughly analogous to what Hübmaier had called
spirit baptism and fire baptism, although Hut’s “essential” baptism
intermingles the two as spiritual life aided by the fires of trial.
[8]Ibid., 162.
[9]Ibid., 169.
[10]Ibid., 154.
[11]The three
part series, “Anabaptist Polemics against the Lack of Protestant Moral Reform,”
posted 28, April 2011 and 17 May 2011.
[12]“On the
Mystery of Baptism,” 153.
[13]Ibid., 164.
[14]Ibid., 165.
emphasis mine.
[15]Ibid.
[16]Ibid.
[17]Ibid.
[18] Ibid., 162.
Notably, if the follower is to “always” be in this process, it seems unlikely
that Hut was advocating a completely sinless life.
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