On Snyder and Sattler, Again.

When reviewing C. Arnold Snyder’s biography of Michael Sattler,[1] I wrote, “It [Snyder’s argument to setup the relationship of Sattler’s Benedictine past to is later Anabaptism] is like a three-legged stool in that taking out one leg will tip over the stool but it is also unlike a three-legged stool in that there are far more than three legs.”[2] In that review I also summarized the subsequent debate with Heinhold Fast regarding baptism. Now I wish to similarly summarize, although more briefly, the debate with Dennis D. Martin, whose objections were much broader.

Martin’s article, “Monks, Mendicants and Anabaptists,”[3] in general agrees with my assessment given above, comes from Martin’s background of scholarship in Medieval Monasticism. Looking at the categories of sola scriptura, “Practical Christocentrism” (i.e. discipleship), soteriology, and sectarianism, Martin repeatedly gives the cases that although Sattler could have gotten some of those ideas from the sources to which Snyder ascribed in his reconstruction of the evidential silence, those themes had other possible origins of influence on Sattler. For instance, Sattler’s biblicism need not have been learned in the Scriptorium of St. Peter’s in the Black Forest since it could have also been picked up from the Protestants. Martin then concludes to say that Snyder’s arguments are streams of plausibilities that added together have the statistical effect of being implausible.[4] At best, if Snyder did not successfully demonstrate the direct influence of Sattler’s monasticism on his Anabaptism, then, Martin concluded, the best Snyder could show is the parallels between the two theologies, which would be a parallel that had already been accepted as a foregone conclusion.[5]

The real issue seems to me to be about methodology. Martin lamented, “[T]he North American thesis format emphasizes interpretation at the expense of diligent archival work.”[6] While Snyder’s biography attempted to reconstruct the silence of the evidence, Martin seems to have preferred not to conjecture too far into that silence. Snyder was himself aware of the difference of methodology, saying, “[N]o historian of the sixteenth century can avoid working with less than coercive evidence.”[7] Snyder is certainly correct to say this since even when evidence is available, the accuracy of that evidence is often in question, especially considering that much evidence from the period is stained with the polemical dyes of the debates in which they were composed. The matter then does not appear to be of whether it is appropriate to use non-coercive evidence but rather of how non-coercive may evidence be as a basis for interpretation.

Snyder did not help himself in his case by saying that he had a “strong suspicion” for one fact and a “lurking (and probably unprovable) suspicion of another.[8] He at the same point conceded the incompleteness of his archival searches but stated that further enquiry at a time of “requisite leisure and access” might provide valuable insight.[9] This is precisely the sort of methodology to which Martin objected at the outset. It is one thing to offer possible explanations for gaps in the evidence but it is quite another to build an entire framework of biographical interpretation on the assumption that one or the other of those explanations is true.

Snyder did tackle the objection that other sources may have influenced Sattler besides Benedictine monasticism. While he admits the possibility of other sources, he complained that Martin himself offered no constructive counter-thesis. Most tellingly, Snyder wrote, “[T]he burden of proof is on Martin to present either the historical or literary evidence leading to his counter hypothesis in the Sattler case.”[10] Again, the difference in methodology determines the way that each scholar is judging the others’ arguments. Snyder accused Martin of not offering a better counter thesis while Martin had no intention of offering such but only to show that Snyder’s interpretation was not necessarily warranted. Martin seems to have been happy with merely bringing archival sources to light and stating little more than the evidence suggested while Snyder insisted that an interpretation must be set forth; and if not then his must be accepted until a better interpretation is found.

Snyder’s interpretive framework does remain as the most viable working hypothesis on the source of those aspects of Sattler’s thinking, but Martin has shown that there is a great possibility for that working hypothesis to be undone. Snyder’s paradigm has extensive explanatory power if not concrete historical evidence. It could one day be substantiated beyond the circumstantial if new evidence arose but it remains equally susceptible to having the legs kicked out from under it by those same evidences that as of yet sit in historical silence.

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[1]The Life and Thought of Michael Sattler, Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History, no. 27 (Scottsdale, Pennsylvania: Herald, 1984).

[2]http://wederdooper.blogspot.com/b/post-preview?token=AqezSjkBAAA.RXB9G-cXkE62_pe8CtiJNA.gR_Vazl021bEAfaWQiy0NA&postId=7745240353806073617&type=POST. According to the Google stat tracker, only six of my dear readers have read this. Go read it. Now. You’re not actually down here in the footnotes, are you?

[3]“Monks, Mendicants and Anabaptists: Michael Sattler and the Benedictines Reconsidered,” MQR 60, no. 2 (Apr. 1986): 139-164.

[4]Ibid., 162.

[5]Ibid.

[6]Ibid., 140n. It is worth noting that Martin’s dissertation was completed at a North American university, the University of Waterloo.

[7]“Michael Sattler, Benedictine: Dennis Martin's Objections Reconsidered,” MQR 61, no. 3 (July 1987): 263.

[8]Ibid., 269.

[9]Ibid.

[10]Ibid., 276.

Life Spans of Anabaptists baptized between 1525-1530: A Generous Approach

I had a free afternoon and thought I would conduct a rather unscientific collection of data to hopefully begin to answer this question asked in an earlier post. Was the average lifespan of an Anabaptist after baptism really eighteen months? As I wondered then, the fact never seems to have a solid citation. It only floats around as an anecdote assumed true, from what I have thus seen. So, I decided on a method to begin to assess the plausibility of the claim in order to judge whether it would be worth the while to investigate the question further.

My method was this: I went onto the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online,[1] and searched the names of a variety of Anabaptists who were baptized between the years 1525-1530. Since we are looking for an average in months, I did not consider the actual day of baptism or death but on the month. I compiled two lists: one where GAMEO had the month information available and another for those Anabaptists for whom GAMEO had only had a year or other less precise date. When it came to rounding, I tended toward rounding in advantage of a shorter lifespan. This is bad math, yes, but I am not trying to find the actual figure. I am only trying to assess the plausibility of the given figure. So, if I can skew the results toward that figure and still cannot support it, then my purpose has been served even though I had biased the test against myself.

Here are the life spans of those whom I looked up for whom the months of baptism and death were available (sorry that I don't have my columns in nice clean lines).

                                    Baptism                  Death                     Months as Anabaptist

George Blaurock                     1/25                        9/29                        56

Conrad Grebel                         1/25                        7/26                       18

Balthasar Hubmaier                 4/25                        3/28                        35

Hans Hut                                 5/26                        12/27                      19

Michael Kürschner                   6/28                        6/29                        24

Felix Manz                               1/25                        1/27                        24

Michael Sattler                         1/25                        5/27                        16

Leonhard Schiemer                  4/27                        1/28                         9

Ambrosius Spittlemayr             7/27                        2/28                         7

             The average among these guys is 23 months, five months more than the anecdotal life span. This at first gives some plausibility to the 18 month reference and from such a small sample size (9), I don’t have enough information to say this with great certainty, even if the result is 28% greater than the 18 month claim. So, I came up with another list with those whose months aren’t listed. These are the numbers I had to skew against me and they may help us if the results turn the average significantly one way or the other.

Hans Amon                               before 29            42                     156

Gabriel Ascherham                    before 28            45                     204

Wolfgang Branhuber                  before 27            29                     24

Johannes Brötli                         1/25                    28                     36

Johannes Bünderlin                   26                       after 32             72

Andreas Castelberger                1/25                    after 3/28           36

Hans Denck                               before 6/25        11/27                 30

Andreas Fischer                         28                      40                     144

Oswald Glait                              before 3/26        10/46                  247

Jakob Hutter                              29                       2/36                  63

Jakob Kautz                               26                      32                     72

Hans Nadler                               27                      after 2/29           24

Philip Plener                               early 27              after 35              96

Wilhelm Reublin                         1/25                    after 59              408

Peter Riedemann                        before 29            12/56                 324

Hans Schlaffer                           26                        2/28                  18

Wolfgang Uliman                        4/25                     28                     36

Jacob Wiedemann                     27                        35 or 36             96

George Zaunrig                          before 28              31 or 38            36

The average I got for these guys is roughly 111 months, which is more than nine years. Combined with the first list, that average comes down to about seven years. The result of this is to say that for those very first Anabaptist, baptized within the first five years of the movement’s inception, the average lifespan was nowhere near the purported eighteen months unless I happened across a whole lot of outliers or there is a big group that got chopped down very shortly after their baptism. It may have been that the eighteen months was originally a limited figure, perhaps only describing Dutch Anabaptists in the 1530s, for example, and then later erroneously applied to all Anabaptists.

This in no way is meant to minimize the persecution that the Anabaptists faced. It was very real. Even if they were not killed in so short amount of time, the exiles, being taken away from the families and homelands they loved, their status as social outcasts and lives of instability and uncertainty were true persecutions. I plan on giving a short notice on the opposite effects that this persecution had on the movement’s vigor in a future post called “Seed and Sickle.” Though I do not mean to downplay the severity of the Anabaptist plight, I do nonetheless hope to prevent it from being mythologized.

And for those who might denounce my unscientific method here, I plead that this rough work is sufficient for testing the plausibility of the questioned claimed. Should this method have produced a result under three years, then further, more precise, study would be warranted. Besides, if I were writing for a seminar or journal, I would hold up the higher standard from the outset of this little study. Luckily, as a blog, I don’t have to always restrict myself to that standard, although I usually do.

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[1]http://www.gameo.org.

What was going on down in Nicolsburg?

As a beginning student of Anabaptism (an maybe I still really am and don’t realize how far I’ve yet to go) I always got confused over one of many things. What was going on down in Nicolsburg? As a student at a Baptist institution I was of course exposed to Balthasar Hübmaier with abnormal weight. What I remember thinking then of that important time in Hübmaier’s career was that he went down there, there was a controversy, Hübmaier is martyred, something else happened, add salt, shake well and out popped Hutterites. I knew it started with Hübmaier and ended with Hutterites but the road between the two was unclear. Something drastic must have happened in the innards of the Moravian mechanism that took a magisterial, sword-bearing input yet produced a separatist, pacifist, communitarian output.

So, with bravado unbecoming of my inexperience, I have decided to make a chart illustrating the path from Nicolsburg to Jacob Hutter. At about Hutter’s arrival, things get fissiparous and the Austerlitz group is splintered, with one group following Hutter and adopting his name as their own. Your screen, dear reader, is probably not big enough to contain such a chart; so, I will take you up to the arrival of Hutter and at least one piece of the puzzle should be clearer (or so I hope).

Here’s a narrative to accompany the chart. After Hübmaier’s recantation in Zürich, he left for Moravia via Augsburg, arriving in Nicolsburg in July 1526. Hübmaier began a magisterial Anabaptist reformation along the lines of that of Waldshut, befriending the local lords, the Liechtensteins. He had great success, performing a great number of baptisms subject to possible exaggeration. The advancement of his reformation among the indigenous population was augmented by the arrival of refugees.

There were tension between the locals and the refugees. The refugees, led by Jacob Wiedemann, were not supported by a magisterial reformation and preferred to exist as a separatist congregation. Accordingly, they began to hold their own meetings and as a matter of survival began to advocate mutual aid. This mutual aid was not yet developed into the more communalistic communitarianism for which the later Hutterites would be known.

Hübmaier was reforming a city. Wiedemann was with the refugees dissenting. And then there’s Hut. What had been an internal difference erupted into tract warfare. Hans Hut sided with Wiedemann and the refugees and began a campaign against Hübmaier. Hübmaier matched volleys by his writings against Hut. What began as a debate over separatism and the corollary of participation in the magistracy was turned to the issue of pacifism.[1] Although Hut left town for Vienna in June 1527 and soon thereafter martyred and in July Hübmaier was given up to the Hapsburg authorities, in whose hands he was martyred, the two parties were now irreconcilable. The positions they held on the question of pacifism became their identifying mark; Hübmaier’s congregation became known as the Schwertler (sword-bearers) and the dissenting group that remained under Wiedemann’s leadership became known as the Stäblers (staff-bearers).

The Schwertler were dissipated by persecutions in 1535 and have not been of much interest to scholars. The Stäbler were forced from Nicolsburg during the Spring of 1528 by the Lords who favored the magisterial reformation that had been Hübmaier’s legacy. They ended up in Austerlitz where their practice of mutual aid was radicalized into communalism. This group was enlarged by even more refugees, among whom differences of ideas were imported—differences that would lead to later fractionalization. One of the immigrants was Hutter, who would go on to lead one of these groups that would become known as the Hutterites.

If four paragraphs isn’t concise enough a narrative, let me try again. Hübmaier founded an Anabaptist church in Nicolsburg. Some of the church members wanted to be pacifists. The pacifists were kicked out of town and went to Austerlitz and formed a communitarian church. Many groups came out of that group, including the Hutterites.

So, I hope that clears up some of that little knot in Anabaptist history. I hope that it helps at least one person understand more clearly what was going on down there in Nicolsburg. At least the way my mind works, having things in chart format helps me understand it.

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[1]Hut was known for his apocalypticism, which was ardent enough to earn him the rebuke of Denck at the Martyrs’ synod of August 1527. Hut there agreed to place his apocalypticism at the periphery of his preaching. Such apocalypticism is often associated among the radicals with violence, for it was taught by some that the end of days was to be accompanied by the wrathful execution of God’s judgment of the unbelievers by the faithful church of God.  On the contrary, Hut’s end times fervency was pacifistic. He predicted that that judgment would come at the hands of the godless Turks on behalf of the faithful remnant.

Anabaptist New Testament Biblicism and the Shift of Expectations toward Radicalization

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]

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[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.

Review of "A Response to Grace: The Sacramental Theology of Balthasar Hubmaier," by Brian Brewer

Brewer, Brian Christian. “A Response to Grace: The Sacramental Theology of Balthasar Hubmaier.” Ph.D., diss., Madison, New Jersey, Drew University, 2003.

Brian Brewer, now Assistant Professor of Christian Theology at Truett Theological Seminary, will soon have published A Pledge of Love: Balthasar Hubmaier and Anabaptist Sacramentalism, which if not a direct publication of his doctoral dissertation seems to at least work on the same subject. Since that publication has been delayed, I have chosen to read the dissertation instead.[1] The central investigation is into Hübmaier’s sacramental thought as revealed through the two ordinances, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and in other ecclesiological practices. One of the primary ideas is that Hübmaier retained much of the sacramental thinking of his Catholic background in his understanding of church practices.

Beginning with the perfunctory biographical section, Brewer focused the narrative on Hübmaier’s sacramental practice throughout his various places of ministry. The bulk of the work is on the Lord’s Supper and baptism–two subjects that have already been given much attention in Anabaptist scholarship. Particular attention was paid to the influences of Hübmaier from Luther, Zwingli and humanism.

Perhaps the most important contention in the dissertation is that of the fifth chapter. Brewer saw Sacramentalism as a guiding force in many other aspects of his ecclesiology, namely penance, the ban and preaching. These areas were not as thoroughly developed as the ordinances since Hübmaier’s writings were compelled to give the weight of his writing to the controversies of his day. As an Anabaptist he was necessarily embroiled in baptismal debate with Zwingli, and as a reformer he was not unaware of the prominent debate on the Supper. Brewer viewed Hübmaier as tending to import sacramental importance onto other activities in the church. Had Hübmaier been given the freedom to develop his thinking in these areas, he may have developed them in a sacramental direction. However, Brewer recognized that speculation into the trajectory of Hübmaier’s thought is not entirely productive and that the sacramentology associated with those other church practices stem largely from the unity of those practices with the sacramental ordinances.

Brewer continued by discussing Hübmaier’s influence on later traditions. The main line of influence that Brewer identified was on the Hutterians, whose beginnings in Moravia absorbed some of Hübmaier’s thinking that had remained a part of the Moravian Anabaptist consciousness after his Nikolsburg ministry. That influence may have spread further into Schleitheim Anabaptist thinking as transmitted through Peter Riedemann.[2] Brewer downplayed what influence Hübmaier would have had in early Baptists but recognized that Baptists could legitimately adopt Hübmaier as a like-minded prototype of Baptistic belief. Interestingly, Brewer turned to Karl Barth, whose thinking, though not dependent on Hübmaier, paralleled the reformer in his uneasiness with infant baptism. Barth did not replace the practice with believer’s baptism but nonetheless observed that it distorted the practice as instituted in Scripture.

That turn to Barth was demonstrative of Brewer’s final conclusion that Hübmaier’s theology provides a starting point for ecumenical discussion. Hübmaier’s relationship to the early Anabaptists, kinship to later Baptists, magisterial type of reformation alongside mainstream reformers and retention of important Catholic modes of thought place him in position to recognize how bridges can be built among those various groups in contemporary church life.

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[1]Dr. Brewer told me that the publisher has had to take extra time with some new printing equipment. The original release date was to have been in February.

[2]Brewer cited Heimann, Franz. “The Hutterite Doctrines of Church and Common Life: A Study of Peter Riedemann’s Confession of Faith of 1540.” MQR 26, No. 1 (Jan. 1952): 22-47; 26, no. 2 (Apr. 1952): 142-144. Having not yet read this article, the line of influence seems thin but still merits consideration. This could be an important avenue of future research.

Hübmaier and Article VII of the Baptist Faith and Message

            I arrived late to a Baptist research symposium to hear the Q&A following a student’s paper presentation. I don’t know what the paper was on except that had to do with Balthasar Hübmaier. The last question the faculty panel asked of the student was if Hübmaier would affirm the Baptist Faith and Message in regards to the Lord’s Supper. The student first responded by saying that Hübmaier would prefer relying on Scripture rather than on creeds or confessions. It was a bit of a pat answer but it was essentially correct. After thinking out loud for a few seconds, the student admitted that Hübmaier likely would agree to the substance of the BFM. Unfortunately that question had been the last and my immediately upshot hand was ignored. So, let’s reevaluate the question: would Hübmaier affirm the BFM’s teaching on the Lord’s Supper?

            Article VII of the BFM reads, “The Lord’s Supper is a symbolic act of obedience whereby members of the church, through partaking of the bread and the fruit of the vine, memorialize the death of the Redeemer and anticipate His second coming.”[1] Two aspects of this are important for our enquiry: the memorial aspect indicated by the words “symbolic” and “memorialize” and also the reference to the events of the crucifixion and the parousia. By referencing the event of the crucifixion the BFM bypasses the question of real presence that was at the fore of Reformation debates on the Supper. This is confirmed by Leon McBeth’s summary of historical Baptist understanding of the Lord’s Supper as “recall[ing] and reflect[ing] upon the death of Christ.”[2] McBeth further concluded that the central concern among Baptists regarding the Supper was real presence but rather the matter of who would be allowed to participate in the ordinance.

            Huldrych Zwingli’s memorial view was that the words of institution were metaphorical, with est of hoc est corpus meum taking the meaning of significant. The emphasis for Zwingli’s memorial view was the memorialized body, which was broken. For Baptist, as the BFM indicates, the emphasis is on the crucifixion event, during which that body was broken. The difference is of emphasis rather than substance on this point. While Baptists were engaged in a different debate on the Lord’s Supper, they retained an essentially Zwinglian answer to the debate from Hübmaier’s day. The first direction to take in answering the central question is to ask if Hübmaier would agree with the BFM’s understanding of real presence.

            Hübmaier’s teaching on the subject has been summarized often enough not to demand extensive treatment here.[3] John Rempel’s work, which has gained great currency in Anabaptist studies since its publication, summarizes Hübmaier’s opinion on real presence: "An ontological shift followed in which the visible church became the res referred to by the signum. That is to say, for Hubmaier the breaking of bread became preeminently a sign of the church and its covenant of obedience."[4] Further, "The Lord's Supper is [for Hübmaier] the sign that the incarnation is being carried on in the church."[5] If the Body of Christ memorialized in the Supper was for Hübmaier the church rather than the physical body as taught by Zwingli and evidently agreed to by Baptists, then Hübmaier would thus be at odds with the BFM.

            Reading Hübmaier’s writings might cause confusion if the chronological development of his controversy with his erstwhile co-reformer, Zwingli, is not taken into account. While that controversy centered on baptism, baptism was to the extent of that controversy’s reach. For instance, Hübmaier initially agreed with Zwingli, writing in one of his earliest works, Eighteen Theses Concerning the Christian Life of 1524, “The mass is not a sacrifice, but a memorial of the death of Christ.”[6] The editors of Hübmaier’s works commented on the similarity to one of Zwingli’s 67 Theses. Interestingly, both Zwingli and Hübmaier at this stage viewed the Supper as memorializing Christ’s death, thus further demonstrating the interchangeability of the body of Christ and the event during which that body was broken.

Directions toward including the church as the body of Christ alongside the physical body (in memory) of Christ are evident as Hübmaier’s thought developed. He wrote that believers partaking in the Supper are “willing to let [their] flesh and blood be broken and sacrificed, which [they have] now become one bread and one drink.”[7] While Hübmaier’s positioning of the church as the body of Christ represented in the Supper was a development of his thought beyond Zwinglian memorialism, perhaps even to the point of assuming greater prominence over the physical body of Christ, it is not as clear that the Zwinglian starting point had been set aside.[8] In Brewer’s estimation, Hübmaier’s “Eucharistic conclusion is the same as Zwingli’s, differing only in their hermeneutical routes.[9]

If Hübmaier intended to include the church as the res to the Supper’s signum to the exclusion of the physical body, then the BFM’s reference to the memorial of Christ’s death would not be in agreement with Hübmaier’s mature theology. If Hübmaier only intended to add a second meaning to the sign, then the BFM would be within Hübmaier’s teaching, although not fully encompassing the development of the additional meaning. While this may appear to allow Hübmaier the speculative affirmation of the BFM’s declaration on the real presence debate, given that the respective doctrinal statements were forged over the fires of different controversies. To make a judgment on this is admittedly speculative (a danger that will be addressed below), but it is evidence enough that Zwingli’s position was essentially no different than that of Baptists in general and that Hübmaier came to view Zwingli as an opponent on the issue.[10] This says little about other areas of possible disagreement between Hübmaier and the BFM’s teaching on the Supper such as the BFM’s eschatological outlook[11] or the BFM’s lack of entanglement of the Supper along with baptism into Hübmaier’s disciplinary ecclesiological superstructure.[12] If Hübmaier were to affirm the BFM, it would likely be with qualification at the least.

Why then indulge in such speculation? There is a danger in speculation to the point of losing focus on what was actually said, even if there were tendencies evident in the life of a theologian whose untimely death aborted a full fruition of his thought. Also, and more urgently, there is the possibility of idealizing a theologian of near kinship that can anachronistically project onto a historical figure the image of the one speculating. I suspect that this is what happened in our case here–the student may have saw great similarity on clearer areas and made a premature judgment on a grey area. A beach ball and a bowling ball cast remarkably similar shadows but seeing only the shadow would be a poor guide to deciding whether the ball is safe to punt. To be fair to the student, he was forced to speculate because that was the question that was asked. It might not have been a fair question to ask in the first place (unless the paper was titled, “Hübmaier and the BFM: A Comparison of Free Church Perspectives on Real Presence in the Supper”). Sometimes questions must be answered simply because they are asked.

While it would be convenient to find a historical teacher quite similar to ourselves and thus validate our own position on the authority of heroes, we must remember the true value of historical theology. No theologian of the past is an authority for us beyond except where they agree with Scripture. However, when we find one who has a very similar starting point, that theologian can become an effective foil toward our own theological development. In the case of Hübmaier and the Baptists, the shared starting points include recognition of the authority of Scripture, and a free church composed of believers. Both Hübmaier and the Anabaptists should be understood for who they really were and then, listening to their voices, they can challenge our theology and thus lead us to growth. Perhaps that may only mean that we are confirmed in our positions, but the differences can force us to strengthen our arguments or alternately rebuke us in our error.

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[1]http://www.sbc.net/bfm/bfm2000.asp. This is the latest edition of the BFM from 2000. The wording is retained from the 1963 BFM while the 1925 BFM, reading that the Lord’s Supper “commemorate[s] the dying love of Christ.” The emphasis in the supper as memorializing Christ’s death is similar.

[2]H. Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness (Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman, 1987), 81.

[3]One of the more recent of which is Brian Brewer, “A Response to Grace: The Sacramental Theology of Balthasar Hubmaier,” Ph.D. diss., Madison, New Jersey, Drew University, 2003, ch. 3.

[4]John Rempel, The Lord’s Supper in Anabaptism: A Study in the Christology of Balthasar Hubmaier, Pilgram Marpeck and Dirk Phillips, Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History, no. 33 (Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald, 1993), 53

[5] Ibid., 80.

[6]In H. Wayne Pipken and John Howard Yoder, eds., Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian, Classics of the Radical Reformation Vol. 5 (Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald, 1989), 32. cf. Summa of the Entire Christian Life, in Balthasar Hubmaier, 87-88.

[7]A Simple Instruction, in Balthasar Hubmaier, 334. Rempel saw notes of that direction even earlier in Hübmaier’s writings, Lord’s Supper in Anabaptism, 55-56.

[8]Rempel’s contention that Hübmaier used of the purposefully ambiguous phrase “the body of Christ in remembrance” in order to bridge from the physical body to the church (Lord’s Supper in Anabaptism, 63) might be an overstatement. Rempel may have been reading back onto Hübmaier’s use of that phrase Hübmaier’s later development, effectively suggesting that what Hübmaier intended as an addition was really a replacement.

[9]Brewer, “Response to Grace,” 98.

[10]Allowing that Hübmaier’s opposition was not against Zwingli’s position per se but rather the arguments by which Zwingli arrived at that position, it is significant that Baptist seem to also follow Zwingli’s argumentation. Millard J. Erikson, for example, significantly used “signifies” to interpret “is” in the institutional words. Christian Theology, 2^nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 1129-1131.

[11]Hübmaier commented on this but this was not sufficiently developed to readily facilitate comparison.

[12]Simon Victor Goncharenko placed discipline in too important a role in Hübmaier’s theology by labeling it the “central” point (“The Importance of Church Discipline within Balthasar Hubmaier’s Theology.” Ph.D. diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011, vi. See the earlier review on this site), but such overreaching would hardly be possible if discipline were not of great, if not central, importance. Brewer listed discipline among those ecclesiological activities he called “quasi-sacramental”, thus recognizing discipline’s importance near to the level of baptism and the Supper.