One of my
current reads is Werner Packull’s Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian
Experiments during the Reformation.[1]
I had read the publication of his dissertation, Mysticism and the Early
South German-Austrian Anabaptist Movement, 1525-1531[2]
and I am refreshed to once again read his writing, which to me is solid history
that is very readable–a narrative that is fastened to historical details and is
sympathetic from an outside perspective without feeling the need to be
apologetic in Anabaptism’s defense. In a section titled, “The Forgotten Factor:
The Availability of the Vernacular Scriptures,”[3]
Packull composed a mini
essay on the historical circumstances that contributed to the New Testament
orientation of Swiss Anabaptist Biblicism.
In that section Packull reviewed the dates of printings of the
Scriptures in the vernacular that would have been available to the book
distributor Andreas Castelberger and the network of friends involved in the
Bible study from which Anabaptism would spring. Luther’s New Testament was
completed in 1522 and was widely available. Versions tailored to the Swiss
dialects became available in the following years. The Old Testament began to be
available in the vernacular shortly thereafter, with a first installment coming
out of Basel at the end of 1523. While the Old Testament existed in the
vernacular, it was several years before it was completely translated and the
translations that were available were not as widely available.
In light of the certain New Testament preference of the New
Testament over the Old,[4]
Packull concluded that it was possible “that the New Testament orientation of
Early Swiss Anabaptism was influenced by particular historical circumstances
that included the limited availability of the vernacular Scriptures.”[5]
Since the Anabaptists could be loosely characterized as a bottom-up hermeneutic
community reflecting the practical concerns of the congregation rather than a
top-down hermeneutic authority structure under the leadership of the learned
for whom the availability of the vernacular Scriptures would have less
consequence, despite that there were several learned leaders among the first
Anabaptists, “Swiss Anabaptist vernacular biblicism, it can be argued [as
Packull had just done], took shape before a wholistic reading of both
testaments was an option for a hermeneutic community that had rejected the
tutelage of the learned.”[6]
The Anabaptists had a different reform polity in mind than
Zwingli and the incipient cause of limited availability of vernacular Scriptures
lent the Anabaptists to appeal primarily to the New Testament. This
dialogically led to further differences of reform polity as the paradigm of New
Testament oriented Biblicism hardened in continued Anabaptist polemics. The
turning point was the issue of baptism, which reflected both the difference
over reform polity and hermeneutics. The Anabaptists appealed to the New
Testament on the issue while Zwingli read the Old Testament rite of
circumcision at an equal level with the New Testament, justifying this move by
claiming that the New Testament church instituted baptism before writing the
books and letters collected in the New Testament. Packull recognized that it
was not insignificant that the correlation of the breaking point of baptism and
Zwingli beginning to preach the Old Testament in the Münster.[7]
Packull’s awareness of the influence of this factor on the
hermeneutics of the Anabaptists prevents interpreting their New Testament
orientation as a “deliberately held principled position”[8]
developed in the crucible of insular theological reflection. There is one
further question that comes to my mind from Packull’s research. Is the New
Testament orientation of the Anabaptists in accordance to the above-mentioned
factors developed in distinction to an inherent Reformation hermeneutic that
held both Testaments as equal or was that orientation developed as the logical
conclusion of an early Reformation preference for the New Testament that set
about those factors?
It was no accident that the New Testament was the first to be
translated and printed. Luther’s translation was an effort to proliferate the
gospel that Luther had grounded in the New Testament, especially in passages
like Mark 1:15 and explicated in his lectures on Romans. Zwingli’s demonstrated
the same preference for the New Testament by preaching from the New Testament
long before systematically approaching the Old. Packull contended that
Zwingli’s regard for the Old Testament was always present but was obscured by
the New Testaments bases for his preaching. Packull wrote, “Zwingli’s own
initial preoccupation masked potential differences.”[9]
The exact status of the importance of the Old Testament in Zwingli’s
hermeneutics has not been given (to my knowledge) treatment but would be a
worthwhile avenue of future research. However, if his change from his initial
doubts of infant baptism is any indication,[10]
then it seems that Zwingli possibly held to a Anabaptistic New Testament
orientation and only later did he elevate the Old Testament for the purposes of
combating the Anabaptists.
If a preference for the New Testament was the initial Reformation
standard, then it would not be the case that the availability of the vernacular
Scriptures caused Anabaptists to prefer the New Testament, although the
strength of Packull’s research would confirm that that factor certainly
reinforced the preference. It would then have been Zwingli, needing a polemical
advantage, who turned to the Old Testament, which would have been available to
him without translation. What then may be the case, as is fitting with my
broader interpretation of the Reformation, is that it was not the Anabaptists
radicalized their Biblicism beyond that of the reformers but rather that the
reformers moderated on their previous positions, on which the Anabaptists
remained consistent. Though a complete paradigm shift from the
reformers/radical reformers paradigm to one of reformers
(Anabaptists)/moderating reformers (Luther, Zwingli, et al.) may be more
seismic than warranted, a push in that direction will move interpreters of the
Reformation away from the default assumption that differences between the two
parties were always a result of radicalization.
A more complex dynamic is at play. At times the radicals indeed
took the reforms of the moderates beyond the positions the moderates
consistently maintained. At other times the radicals were the ones who
consistently maintained the initial positions on reform on which the moderates
had drawn back. The continuity of ideas did not necessarily rest on the continuity
of persons. What may more often be revealed to be the case was that the later
split came on issues on which there was no firm position. For example, neither
party retained Zwingli’s initial hesitance on infant baptism. The radicals went
beyond it by practicing believer’s baptism while the reformers withdrew.
Luther’s early consideration of an ecclesiola
was radicalized into the separated church of Anabaptism while Luther set the
idea aside for later institution (which never occurred). Historians of the
Radical Reformation should be served well in gaining a new interpretive tool by
being free of assuming all differences between the two camps resulted from the
radicals going beyond positions that the moderates consistently maintained.
The same operating principle may be at play in the topic at
hand, namely that the differing hermeneutics after the split over baptism were
not necessarily indicative of one side standing firm and the other either
radicalizing or moderating. The New Testament preference was observed by all
but as the debates over reforms continued, Zwingli and his learned coterie
lessened the distinction between the Testaments by elevating the Old to support
their moderate reforms while the Anabaptists expanded on that preference almost
to the exclusion of the Old Testament since they did not have it readily
available to them. Their preference of the New Testament was so great that they
were subject to the taunts of the moderates, who charged that they were
reviving the error of Marcion.[11]
[1](Baltimore,
Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
[2](Scottdale,
Pennsylvania: Herald, 1977).
[3]Hutterite Beginnings, 27-29.
[4]In an
endnote, Packull quoted John Howard Yoder’s claim that the preeminence of the
New Testament among the Anabaptists is so certain that it is taken for granted.
Packull called this an understatement (Packull, Hutterite Beginnings, 329). Importantly, Jonathan R. Seilig
concluded that the Anabaptists treated the Apocrypha as equal to the rest of
the canon (“Solae [Quae?] Scripturae: Anabaptists and the Apocrypha,” MQR
80, no. 1 [Jan. 2006]: 5-34). While these claims are not cotenable, Packull is
only speaking of the emerging movement of the mid- to late 1520s while Seilig
wrote of Anabaptism up until the mid-1600s. Before the first century of
Anabaptism was completed the historical circumstance of extremely limited
availability of the vernacular Old Testament had passed.
[5]Packull, Hutterite Beginnings, 28.
[6]Ibid., 32.
[7]Soon after
arriving in Zürich in 1519, Zwingli had begun preaching from the Gospel of
Matthew with the mandate to preach the complete text, genealogies and all—a
project that would consume the first half of the 1520s (Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation (New York:
Manchester University Press, 2002), 51).
[8]Packull, Hutterite Beginnings, 28.
[9]Ibid., 29.
[10]Many sources
attest to this change, but the most in depth that I have come across is that of
Brian Brewer, “Zwingli’s Early Anabaptist Convictions: History or Mythology?”
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Studies
Conference, Ft. Worth, Texas, October 2011.
[11]Packull, Hutterite Beginnings, 28.
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