Friesen, Abraham. Reformers, Radicals, Revolutionaries: Anabaptism in the Context of the
Reformation Conflict. Elkhart, Indiana: Institute of Mennonite Studies,
2012.
It has
been quite some time since my last post, mainly because I have been focusing on
a project that I can hopefully announce soon. A side effect of working on that
project is that it has cut down on the time I have had for reading. So, I’ve
been trying to work some reading in lately. This is my latest read in addition
to finally going back to finishing Furcha’s translations of some Karlstadt
pamphlets.
Friesen’s
offering here stems from a series of lectures given at Southwestern Baptist
Theological Seminary in early 2009. It is through those lectures that I first
encountered the content of the book, which contains additional material. I had
gained a lot of direction from those lectures early in my studies on
Anabaptism. Most importantly among those lectures’ influence was the concern
for the parable of the wheat and the tares of Matthew 13, the Augustinian
interpretation of which Friesen refers to as a “common theme” to the book (2).
My interest in the parable culminated in investigating not only the
reinterpretation of the field as the church, which Christ had instead
interpreted as the world, but also in looking for a textual justification for
Augustine having applied the same verb, exradico,
to both the wheat and the tares. That debate aside, through Friesen’s influence
on this matter, I became keenly aware that, in the same way that historical
theology is a prior act to developing systematic theologies, the history of
biblical interpretation should serve as a prior act to historical theology. So,
just as historical theology and the development of doctrine are relatively new
fields of study within Christian history, only over the last 150 years or so, I
see the history of biblical interpretation as a necessary discipline.
One other
area of influence that colored my early studies on Anabaptism was Friesen’s
occasional turn to continuing the Reformation conflict into today. Friesen’s
Mennonite parity is clear as he from time to time inserts himself into the
Reformation conflict as though he were a contemporary opponent to the
sixteenth-century Reformers. I can’t even say yet that I have completely shaken
the tendency engage the study as though the centuries old debates were raging
anew.
Friesen
brings into the work his decades of research with his central contention of the
Erasmian influence being determinative for the formation of Anabaptism being a
rope woven throughout. The first chapter, the lengthiest, narrates Luther’s
early affinity for and later disavowal of Erasmus on account of the latter’s neglect
of using the Augustinian law/gospel dichotomy in interpreting Romans (38).
Since Erasmus did not publish on the Matthean account of the Great Commission
and the apostolic practice of baptism as recorded in Acts until after this
split, Luther ignored the humanists teachings on the matter. In Friesen’s
judgment, the Anabaptists were the ones who picked up faithfully on Erasmus
baptismal studies where Luther had left off.
This
continuity between the earliest leanings of the reformers and the program of
the Anabaptists comes back in Friesen’s third chapter regarding the relation
between the early writings of the Reformers and the origins of Anabaptism.
Friesen begins that section by noting the Simple Confession of 1585, in
which the author asserts that they would happily abide by the teachings of the
state-sponsored reformers if only by those reformer’s earliest writings (115).
If the reformers had moderated themselves on the issues that the Anabaptists
saw as central to a thorough reformation, the question must be asked of what
sparked the moderating efforts of the reformers.
The answer
to that question forms the bulk of the other parts of the books. The second
chapter deals with the tension between the universality and the purity of the
church. The Anabaptists wanted to continue the effort to purify the church,
which would mean excluding the unregenerate members of society from Christian
fellowship. The reformers on the other hand had chosen universality in
accordance to Augustine’s interpretation of the parable of the wheat and the
tares, which Augustine took to mean that the unregenerate should be tolerated
within the church until the last times.
At
those last time was to be a separation, but how that was to come about was
questioned in the sixteenth century. Whereas many scholars viewed some of the
revolutionary excesses of many Radicals such as Thomas Müntzer and the
Anabaptists at Münster as the natural byproduct of apocalypticism that viewed
itself as living at the end of days, Friesen argued that apocalypticism was
shared not only by the revolutionaries and the pacifist Anabaptists (whom other
have argued would have taken the revolutionary course if given the opportunity)
but also by Luther himself (187). While Luther and Müntzer agreed on the
Augustinian interpretation of the parable and that the end of days was at hand,
the difference was that Luther interpreted the reaping of the tares as
occurring without human hands. The Anabaptists, however, rejected the
interpretation that tares are to be tolerated within the church (188). Rather,
they were to be tolerated in the world, thus abnegating temporal revolution.
Friesen
also overviews his future work as another reason for the moderation of the
reformers. The Nuremberg edict of 1523 set as imperial law Prince Frederick’s
policy of reform that paced Luther’s and other Wittenberg faculty’s innovations
(139ff.). True doctrine could be preached but any actual alterations to
ecclesial structure and ordinance would have to wait until a general council of
the church would decide the matter. The Anabaptists, then, were in Friesen’s
contention not content to wait for the true gospel to be manifested in the
church order but rather insisted that changes be made immediately. I look
forward to the publication of this research in its entirety.
This
leads to Friesen’s final topic, Mennonite distinctives, which Friesen accepts
as an “unhappy choice” of terminology (196) since it extracts those
distinctives from the core of the Anabaptist understanding of the faith and
sets them at the periphery. Friesen ubiquitously agrees that the Anabaptists
were consistent with the reformers on the major points of doctrine, as
evidenced by Schleitheim not forwarding them as points of contention
(208). Nevertheless, those articles did not merely outline preferences of adiaphora
but rather pronounced the very nature of the true, pure church.
Friesen’s
scholarship, typified here, is characteristically independent. He is firmly
sourced in the primary literature and often gives the impression of not being
too concerned with what else is going on in Anabaptist research. This is not to
say that he is unaware of or unconcerned with it but that the various streams
of Anabaptist research do not direct his research. He is asking different
questions. He has his own interpretive paradigm, central to which is the
Erasmian influence. He takes his own approach to the primary sources that feels
no need to encamp itself with any of the established interpretive schema. While
everyone else has been doing great spade work in the valley, Friesen has been
building his own mountain. They may not be on that mountain but they will
certainly fall under its shadow.
