Review of The German Reformation and the Peasants' War: A Brief History with Documents, by Michael G. Baylor

Baylor, Michael G. The German Reformation and the Peasants’ War: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2012.

For students of the Radical Reformation, the Peasants’ War is a movement in the background that is not entirely understood, especially as it related to those involved with the rebellion who would later join the ranks of the Anabaptists. Dr. Baylor’s latest publication, intended for high school curricula but also appropriate as an introduction at the collegiate level before continuing on to broader treatments. The advantage of Baylor’s work is that the larger themes explaining the movement are not lost in detailed historical narrative. This is helpful for students whose focus is elsewhere but need a basic understanding of the war, which is often referenced but not fully explained in Radical Reformation scholarship.

Several significant themes come to the fore. The sense of dissatisfaction among the peasants arose from changing population dynamics. In the late medieval period populations declined, resulting in feudal lords offering better working conditions in order to attract from among a smaller pool of labor. In the latter half of the fifteenth century, populations rebounded from earlier losses such that lords returned to many of the practices that had formerly worked to the peasants’ disadvantage (3ff). It was this loss of some of the privileges temporarily enjoyed that led to the discontent that fulminated in the mid-1520s.

Baylor’s focus was on the peasants’ revolt’s relationship to the Lutheran Reformation. He recounted the polemic of the Catholics, who had blamed Luther’s teachings with fomenting social unrest yielding rebellion. Luther countered by insisting that he had consistently warned against violent action taken established governments (3).[1] Also, the peasants sometimes saw themselves as a social movement but at other times saw themselves as enacting the teachings of the Reformation in their calls for social reform (15,21). The relationship with the Anabaptists was not described except to point forward toward the future involvement that many of the peasants would have in the then nascent Anabaptist movement (30). The discontent that was felt toward the Established churches that supported the princes was continued in the Anabaptist protest against those same Established churches.

The bulk of the book consists of primary source documents, mostly abridged. They are divided into sections representing documents from before Luther’s Reformation, those representing the views of the Catholics and Protestants, those written by peasants and their supporters, and lastly those on the debate between the relationship between the German Reformation and the Peasants’ War. The documents contain a nice mix of texts and pictures. The abridgement does cause a problem in one place, though. The abridgement of Exsurge Domini skips between the third and eighteenth error listed in the bull without correcting for the change of anathematizing what is denied to what is affirmed (48). So, for the student not sufficiently acquainted with the differences between Catholic and Protestant doctrine might be confused as to whether the doctrines from eighteen on are approved of or condemned by the bull.

---

[1]The Catholics apparently ignored that the social unrest had beginnings well before Luther’s time. The oldest document recorded in this book includes an initiation right into the organization of the peasants. That rite involve saying 5 five paternosters and a Hail Mary–clearly understanding itself in terms of Catholic ritual (36).

The Short Lifespan of Anabaptists: Myth?

One fact(?) mentioned in Goncharenko's dissertation was that Anabaptists had an average lifespan of eighteen months after baptism, i.e. after a year and a half after accepting believer's baptism in the Anabaptist community the baptizand would be martyred.[1] He gave no reference, which is no surprise since I have heard this "fact" cited occasionally but never with any reference. In a wikiality world, I suspect I could impart truth to it by citing Goncharenko in Wikipedia.

This is one of those anecdotes that is shared to highlight the Anabaptists as being the persecuted church. It is supposed to be so hard to believe because we don't realize the extent of the persecutions. Maybe I am overly critical but the uncited Anabaptist lifespan may actually be too hard to believe.

I have my doubts for three reasons. The first is that I've yet to find a credible source for this fact. The search for this fact is obscured since mentions of it don’t point back to any reference. This should raise questions in the historian’s mind because it is no unique incident for “facts” to work their way into the body of knowledge on a subject.

One instance of this is the immersion baptism of Menno Simons. For many years it had been believed that Menno practiced baptism by immersion. John Horsch traced references to this “fact” back to one translation of a key text written by Menno but found that the translation suggesting Menno baptized by immersion was spurious and artificially inserted into the text.[2] Unfortunately, I cannot yet begin such a search since I cannot find any references to trace. I ask my readers’ assistance if you come across any citations. It may be that, if given a starting point, I can trace this back to a credible, verifiable source. It is also possible that I may find this to be a spurious insertion into our “knowledge” of the first generation of the Anabaptists.

The second reason is that it is no secret that this “fact” serves a polemical purpose of validating the Anabaptists as the persecuted church. Given Christ’s warning that the church would suffer for his name sake, acknowledging the persecution of the Anabaptists serves to validate them as the true church of Christ. Any hyperbole on this point would of course heighten the Anabaptist role as the church persecuted. To say that baptism was a veritable death sentence in the sixteenth century is too convenient an aid to Anabaptist polemics to not warrant a staid measure of scrutiny.

The third reason regards the manner by which we would come upon information about the post-baptismal lifespans of Anabaptists. While the first two reasons cannot prove against the “fact” but only prove it unwarranted, this third reason provides an explanation as to how such an error could be developed. The knowledge that we would be able to gather on the deaths of Anabaptists favors overrepresentation of those with shorter lifespans after baptism.

This overrepresentation arises in two ways, both based in the accessibility of records concerning Anabaptist martyrdom. The major figures with whom we are familiar today, primarily writing teachers in the church but also prominent leaders with no written legacy, were those who were prominent in their day also. Because of that prominence the biographical details including the accounts of their martyrdom are well known. It is that same prominence that would have made them higher priority targets for persecutors. So, the same prominence that resulted in these leaders’ higher rate of persecution also resulted in a higher availability off accounts of their martyrdom, which is to say that the Anabaptists who faced more acute persecution were those of whom we have more records. So, the records would be skewed toward a nonrepresentative sampling of baptized believers. The Anabaptists who were less prominent were under the radar (insert appropriate 16^th-century metaphor here–“beyond the nostrils of the hounds”?) of the authorities, thus living longer and consequently leaving less records of their longer post-baptismal lifespans.

The second way is similar but not in regards to prominence. Many of the records we have of individual Anabaptists comes from trial records. These trials were often seeking execution. So, those Anabaptists whose lives were cut short by persecution made it into the records while those who died of natural causes would have been far more likely to not have made it into the record as being Anabaptists. The Nicodemism under which some Anabaptists lived, particularly among the followers of David Joris, compounded this problem.[3] So again, it is the Anabaptists who were martyred who are overrepresented while those whose longer lives would extend the eighteen month average lifespan are those who would be underrepresented in calculating that number.

If we were to find a credible source for this eighteen month lifespan, the most it could say is that it was among those of whom we have record that the average post-baptismal lifespan was eighteen months while recognizing that this cannot take into account those of whom we have no record, whose lives were likely considerably longer and would thus redefine the statistic.

Two final notes: I don’t mean to pick on Goncharenko, especially since I was less than generous in my previous review. He only cites this fact that seems to circulate without proper credibility. For the sake of clearing his name as a sole transgressor, here is another example of someone mentioning the fact without citation:

http://lakeswampbaptist.com/templates/System/details.asp?id=31214&PG=xCast&LID=4014&CID=20828

Also, I may update this post sometime in the future. Someone might find a citation I can follow that opens the path to begin following this line of investigation. I might find it myself. I might also take some time to crunch some numbers out of the Martyr’s Mirror and various biographies I have laying around. Perhaps this calculation will confirm the number. Today, however, I only wish to raise the warning against accepting “common knowledge” to readily. I’m more interested in what really happened in the Radical Reformation than in polemical expediency.

---

[1]149n in the dissertation, but I don't know where it is in the book. Perhaps the fourteenth footnote in the last chapter like it is in the dissertation.

[2]John Horsch, “Did Menno Simons Practice Baptism by Immersion?” Mennonite Quarterly Review 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1927): 54-56.

[3]J. Denny Weaver, Becoming Anabaptist: The Origin and Significance of Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism, 2^nd ed. (Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald, 2005), 138.

Review of The Importance of Church Discipline within Balthasar Hubmaier’s Theology, and of Wounds that Heal: The Importance of Church Discipline within Balthasar Hubmaier’s Theology, by Simon Victor Goncharenko

Goncharenko, Simon Victor. “The Importance of Church Discipline within Balthasar Hubmaier’s Theology.” Ph.D. diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011.

_________. Wounds that Heal: The Importance of Church Discipline within Balthasar Hubmaier’s Theology. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick, 2012.

This review comes from my reading of Goncharenko’s dissertation, which has recently been published as a monograph. The assumption that I will be making throughout this review is that the latter closely follows the former at least close enough that this review would be helpful for those reading the book also.

Goncharenko’s dissertation on the importance of the doctrine of church discipline within the framework of Hübmaier’s theology seeks to fill a gap in Hübmaier studies. Other works have looked at Hübmaier’s doctrine of church discipline alone, but none yet has sought to investigate the doctrine’s impact on other facets of Hübmaier’s theology (6). Gonharenko sought to fill this gap by arguing that church discipline played a major role in the development of the rest of Hübmaier’s theology, especially his anthropology, soteriology and, of course, his ecclesiology (v). After providing an introductory chapter, perfunctorily summarizing Hübmaier’s biography, Goncharenko spent a chapter each on these three theological categories in Hübmaier’s thought.

That first chapter begins unfortunately with little value to the dissertation. It gives a biography that is frightfully without citation and a listing of influences on Hübmaier. That listing does not provide any content to what those influences were beyond names except in the cases of Luther, Erasmus and Zwingli on the matter of baptism. The content of the influences on more relevant matters comes in later chapters. While Goncharenko is correct that the context must be understood since theology is not developed in a “vacuum” (v), it is not certain how an overview of Hübmaier’s general biography clears up his understanding of church discipline.

There is also some other troubling material at the outset. Goncharenko provided the categories of 1) Anabaptists, baptizers who denied Sacramentalism, 2) Radical, baptizers more badly, and 3) Magisterial reformers, those of the state church imposing reformation from the “top-down” (8). These categories are at best confused. The difference between “Anabaptist” and “Radical” only seems to be at the point of denying Sacramentalism, at which point one must ask if there were any baptizers that did not deny Sacramentalism. Goncharenko seem to have misunderstood George Huntston Williams’ categorization, which used the term “Radical” much more broadly to include Anabaptists (which fits the category of the same name that Goncharenko had borrowed from Kirk Robert MacGregor), Spiritualists and Evangelical Rationalists. It is not clear what Goncharenko had in mind since he did not cite his sources. Also the use of “Magisterial” could be problematic in the case of Hübmaier, who has been described as a “magisterial Anabaptist.”[1]

Also, in a footnote summarizing the debate on monogenesis versus polygenesis, another discussion with which the reader should already be familiar, Goncharenko demonstrated a poor understanding of the particulars of the debate. He attributed the introduction of monogenesis to Harold Stauffer Bender without awareness that monogenesis was the assumption before Bender’s work.[2] Curiously, he also did not recognize the work that created the debate.[3] All of this raises serious doubts about Goncharenko’s grounding in Radical Reformation scholarship.

An especially helpful summary of Hübmaier’s church discipline closed out the introduction. Goncharenko gave four purposes for Hübmaier’s doctrine: Church discipline was to 1) keep the church pure in the eyes of the world, 2) prevent believes from falling into sin, 3) provoke offenders to repentance and 4) provide a “unifying factor” for his theology that would ground his theology into practice (29). It is this fourth purpose that Goncharenko has set out to demonstrate in accordance with his thesis that church discipline was important to Hübmaier’s theology and linked that theology with practice (v).

In the chapter on anthropology, Goncharenko spent the bulk of space reviewing the nature of Hübmaier’s anthropology. Church discipline occupied two-and-a-half pages at the end of the chapter. Goncharenko’s anthropological review gave content to the listed influences from the previous chapter, affirming the findings of previous scholars that Hübmaier reflected the nominalism of medieval thought. That background served Hübmaier’s biblical interpretation as opposed to the more Augustinian background that served the Reformers (47). Goncharenko held an uneasy tension between attributing to Hübmaier a biblicism that “ . . . did not blindly embrace . . .” the medieval background (46) while at the same describing Hübmaier as having “. . .reache[d] back to a number of late medieval scholastic concepts with which to support his doctrine of man . . .” (48) and having had a “. . . reliance on certain medieval concepts for his anthropology” (51).

The short section on church discipline is somewhat at odds with the thesis, which was to show that church discipline was important to the rest of Hübmaier’s theology. Goncharenko effectively said that it was rather that it was Hübmaier’s theology that was important Hübmaier’s doctrine of church discipline, writing, “. . . [T]he trichotomous division of the nature of man is what propels Hubmaier to esteem the doctrine of church discipline so highly” (64). This happens by Hübmaier’s ascription to free will determining his understanding of the voluntary nature of the church, by church discipline answer the problem of how man can overcome sin, and by Hübmaier’s trichotomy allows a balance between the handing over of the flesh to Satan as a result of disciplinary action and the preservation of the spirit against destruction (64-66).[4] It remains unclear whether Goncharenko was attempting to show discipline’s importance to the rest of Hübmaier’s theology or if he only wanted to show how discipline fit in as an outworking of Hübmaier’s theology.

The next chapter, on soteriology, adheres more closely to the thesis, claiming “[C]hurch discipline will emerge as an essential part of Hubmaier’s Soteriology” (77). This was demonstrated by showing that church discipline guarded against charges of perfectionism by it inherent admission of faults within believers needing discipline (75), the maintenance of faith through continued brotherly love as aided by church discipline (80), and the placement of baptism outside of salvific operation but rather as an initial step submitting the baptizand under the disciplining authority of the church (94). Hübmaier’s recognition that salvific faith was not the confession of doctrine but more so the faith made evident by a disciplined life, thus manifesting one’s adherence to true doctrine (98).[5]

The last theological category with which Goncharenko dealt was ecclesiology. He gave a competent overview of church discipline in its relationship to Hübmaier’s ecclesiology, especially in its relationship to the ordinances. This connection was made through Hübmaier’s understanding of the keys, which were given to the church and moderated by discipline and the ordinances (108-109). Baptism, as a submission to the disciplining authority of the church (125), acted as a key letting believers into the church. The Lord’s Supper, as that from which those disciplined are kept out, then would act as a key keeping the unrepentant out of the church (113).

Though this dissertation began weakly, the last two chapters on soteriology and ecclesiology are solid explanations of Hübmaier’s though in these areas.  The main thesis that church discipline is important to Hübmaier’s theology is here only halfheartedly accepted. Goncharenko’s estimation that the doctrine was important needs no contesting, even to the point of demonstrating that discipline is an integral component of Hübmaier’s ecclesiology. The extension of this importance to say that discipline made Hübmaier’s soteriology “come together” (77) or that it was the “central” doctrine among the whole of Hübmaier’s theology (vi) is a contention that not convincingly argued.

It may seem that I’ve been a bit harsh on the product of Southwestern Seminary, and I admit I keep a keen eye on the work coming out of there. Since it is my alma mater, which hopes to become a center of free church studies beginning in the sixteenth-century Anabaptist movement, I want to see a standard of excellence among the scholarship that comes from there. What I don’t want to see is anything less than excellence pass by and thus remove the solid foundation of scholarship that will be needed if we truly want the movement inform our own tradition rather than impose our own thinking back onto history.

---

[1]Hans-Jürgen Görtz, The Anabaptists (London: Routledge, 1996), 100, among others.

[2]Goncharenko placed the origin of the monogenesis theory at “The Anabaptist Vision,” MQR 18, no. 2 (Apr. 1944): 67-88. The later debate against monogenesis was actually centered on two competing visions of monogenesis typified by Ernst Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1912), and Karl Holl “Luther und die Schwärmer,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte I: Luther (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1932), 420-467.

[3]James Mentzer Stayer, Werner O. Packull and Klaus Deppermann. “From Monogenesis to Polygenesis: The Historical Discussion of Anabaptist Origins,” MQR 49, no. 2 (Apr. 1975): 83-121.

[4]Oddly, Goncharenko’s description of how this occurs involves only the flesh and the spirit. No account of the soul’s involvement in this process is given. This process is thus described as being facilitated by a dichotomy; so, it is not explained why Hübmaier’s trichotomy aids the tension between preservation and destruction of the offender.

[5]There is one fault in this chapter in that it uses Calvin as representative of the Swiss protestant faith rather than Zwingli since Calvin has a wide accessibility. At this level of work, one should be expected to provide the necessary background, regardless of accessibility, especially in this case where anachronism is a danger.

Hut's Middle Way of Righteousness in Justification

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.

Global Social Justice, Anabaptists and the Peasants’ War, Hermeneutics, and the Sovereignty of God in History

The rise of concern for global social justice is an undeniable trend within Evangelicalism, the prominence of which needs not be detailed here. Along with this new emphasis comes the usual fear of a revival of a social gospel a la Rauschenbusch, in which sanctification is replaced by mere social activism. At the same time, the movement is celebrated for reclaiming a proper understanding of social concern for the poor that had been lost by a greed-motivated western society. Though both motivations are likely in play in this new emphasis, it is most important to view the role of the awareness of global poverty that has had on Christian interpretation (or rather application) of Scripture on relevant passages and the relationship that this seems to have with radical movements in the Reformation era.

Anabaptists had an association with the Peasants’ War, an association of which the nature has long been in dispute. The Peasants’ War was an uprising late in the first decade of the Reformation that sought to overturn the existing structures of Central European economic life in favor of a more equal society. I may be painting with broad strokes in saying this, but the general sentiment toward the Radical Reformation taken by secular scholars has been that the socio-economic concerns of the peasants were the engine of the development of communitarian readings of Scripture.[1] Meanwhile, historical theologians would deny that Anabaptist social concern was merely a carryover from the Peasants’ War but were instead a fresh interpretation of Scripture.

Although these poles may be an overgeneralization, I ask the question, could it be that, rather than the politics of the peasants determining Anabaptist scriptural interpretation or rather than Anabaptist interpretation outside of any socio-economic influence, the God, being sovereign over history, used the social concerns of the peasants to direct the Anabaptists toward an interpretation of Scripture that recaptured the social impact of nachfolge life, i.e. could it be that the Peasants’ War removed the veil from the eyes of mainstream interpretation that had ignored the social impact of the gospel in favor of retaining the status quo of the feudal system?

If the study of the Anabaptists is to inform our approach to contemporary issues in the church (which is the overarching assumption of my interest, if not of all of church history), then it might be worth asking that same question of contemporary emphases on the social impact of following Christ. Could it be that this emphasis is not the result of progressivism overriding Christian hermeneutics but rather the social situation drawing our attention to what Scripture has been trying to tell us all along. Awareness of famine, poverty and warfare can no longer be considered “wholly other,” but in our age of communication the distress of the world is set before our eyes. The call of secular ethicists, starting from different assumptions, seem to have challenged some false assumptions through which the church has long interpreted Scripture.

For instance, Peter Singer wrote on global justice to say that globalization prohibits unconcern our distant neighbor in need. He wrote, “The fact that a person is physically near to us, so that we have personal contact with him, may make it more likely that we shall assist him, but this does not show that me ought to help him rather than another who happens to be further [sic] away.”[2] If it is possible for God to use a pagan King like Nebuchadnezzar to chastise his people, Israel, then it would not seem beyond God’s ways to use a secular ethicist to convict the church that it has been shallow in its interpretation of Scripture concerning global social justice. My conclusion is that God’s sovereignty over history is displayed in the influence of socio-economic and political concerns toward correcting Christian interpretations of Scripture. These concerns may be precisely what God uses to jar us out of our holding pattern hermeneutic that subjects the Bible to the maintenance of current social structures.

How did this look in the Radical Reformation? In some cases the economic dissenters were social reformers with religious overtones but in other cases they were part of a religious reform that had social implications. An example of the first might be Hans Hergot, who in On the New Transformation of the Christian Life outlined a new societal structure that was to encompass all of Europe.[3] Although this manifesto is lightly peppered with scriptural citations, it is apparent that his rigid, bottom-up hierarchical structure of a worldwide commonwealth is not an attempt to follow any scriptural formula but rather a pragmatic construction to facilitate a populist-empowered government. Even by Hergot’s own admission, the development of this reform program arose from his own personal realizations sparked by the imagery of John 10.[4]

References to Scripture often give the appearance of appeal to common religious awareness rather than exegetical conviction. This must be understood in the context of a society that was far more ensconced in Scripture than that of the present day. Scriptural allusions held far greater currency.[5] Nonetheless, Hergot did not make the claim that his system was founded on Scripture but was “that which the holy spirit shows me.”[6]

When he complained of the mainstream interpretation of Scripture, which maintained the old order against which the peasants struggled, he decried, “They always interpret Scripture and twist it to produce quarrelling and litigation.”[7] His complaint does not appear to be that they were misinterpreting Scripture but rather that they were doing any interpretation of Scripture in the first place. For Hergot, Scripture in the end provided an unreliable guide because it was a futile attempt to discover the true interpretation. This is why he followed that complain by writing, “But [you should] trust completely in God,”[8] thus echoing Thomas Müntzer’s complaint against the same protestant interpretations of the Bible. Müntze had condemned them for relying on “The mere words of Scripture,”[9] “The dead words of Scripture,”[10] and “The inexperienced papal text of the Bible.”[11] Müntzer preferred to “not pray to a dumb God [i.e. one speaking only through Scripture] but rather to one who speaks [in direct revelation],”[12] for “all true parsons must have revelations.”[13] So, although Hergot utilized Scriptural language, this was only in accordance to the speech patterns of his day and his brand of revolution bears more the mark of a social rather than exegetical genesis.

This origin of peasant protest, however, was not necessarily characteristic of the entire movement. The Eleven Mühlhausen Articles include scriptural citations in a manner reminiscent of confessional statements.[14] The phrases, “As it is written,” and, “According to the word of God,” are used in the articles, describing the approach that is taken in developing their content. The peasants at other times showed a reliance on Scripture, saying, “. . .[T]he basis of all peasants’ articles (as will be clearly seen) is directed toward hearing the gospel and living according to it . . ..”[15] They also declared an intention to submit to Scripture, saying, “. . . [Y]ou will also gladly release us from serfdom or show us from the gospel that we should be serfs.”[16]

This is not to naïvely assume that the hermeneutics of the peasants was exactly as they had claimed, but it does show that they were attempting to mold their program after the pattern of Scripture. Whether this attempt was successful at correctly interpreting the relevant scriptural texts is a valid question, but regardless of success or failure the attempt itself is sufficient to reframe our approach to Reformation hermeneutics in regard to social justice. The debate was not between the scriptural position and the socio-economic position, in which each party can be cast in either role. The debate was rather between competing interpretations of Scripture, each of which necessarily impacted the social order of the day either toward retention or revolution.

Nor should one simplistically assume that the radicals of the Reformation, peasants and Anabaptists alike, were all of one mind on how Scripture was to be interpreted. Conrad Grebel expressed his discontent with Müntzer for setting up tablets, presumably a copy of the ten commandments.[17] Andreas Karlstadt, representing Orlamünde, wrote that that community could not covenant with Allstedt because the former denied the appropriateness of armed resistance advocated by the latter.[18]

Though debate existed within the movement, many of the general tenets of the radicals have since found greater favor within Christianity in our day. Few contemporary Christians would challenge what had been contented during the Reformation. Peasant and Anabaptist demands such as, “Those who are in need should be looked after,”[19] or, “Should this pastor be in need, he should be provided for by the community that chose him,”[20] or that families should not have to pay their lords for the death of their relatives as payment for the loss of property,[21] a practice known as heriot. If Roland H. Bainton is correct, then religious liberty, a matter broadly accepted by evangelicals, owes its genesis to the Anabaptists.[22]

If it was the social situation that pointed the radicals toward interpretations of Scripture that were controversial in their time but have largely since become assumed exegetical conclusions, then the validity of socio-economic and political stimuli in the process of doctrinal development need not be so quickly disparaged. Perhaps it is that God, who is sovereign in history, could use historical events to shake Christian interpretations of Scripture loose of maintenance of standing social structures.

So, to those who might view the contemporary rise in concern for global social justice as having been prompted by extra-biblical stimuli as described above, one must be careful to be sure that interpretations favoring established social orders likewise are not bending hermeneutics to socio-economic pressures. The sword has two edges. This is the value of historical theology as this forum seeks to apply it–to see beyond our own situation by looking through the lens of doctrinal development from those of situations outside of our own. It may just be that God is once again proving his sovereignty over history by using the ethical concern generated by secular sources to prod the church toward a corrected reading of Scripture on matters of social justice.

For now, I only present an initial point of discussion. Much research still needs to be done on both the historical and contemporary issues, but I would hope that the ideas presented here might stimulate further consideration of the appropriation of the Radical Reformation heritage on this matter. I especially note that some might take issue with presenting the peasant rebels alongside more mainstream Anabaptists.

---

[1]A caricature view would be Friedrich Engels, Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg, Moscow, 1956.; but modern, more tempered views can be found in Claus-Peter Clasen, Anabaptism: A Social History: Switzerland, Austria, Moravia, and South and Central Germany (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1972).; and James Mentzer Stayer, The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods, McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion, no. 6 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). An excellent summary of the latter can be found in A. James Reimer, “From Denominational Apologetics to Social History and Systematic Theology: Recent Developments in Early Anabaptist Studies,” Religious Studies Review 29, no. 3 (Jul. 2003): 237. Stayer concluded that communitarianism was not a fringe view within Anabaptism but rather normative in compliance to the community of goods portrayed in Acts.

[2]“Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (1973), reprinted in Ethical Theory: Classical and Contemporary Readings, 5^th ed., ed. by Louis P. Pojman (Belmont, California: Thomson Wadsworth, 2007), 244. Emphasis in original. Let it be noted that this is one of the few points with which I would ever agree with Singer.

[3]In The Radical Reformation, ed. Michael G. Baylor, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 210-225. It has been my reading of this source book that has been the springboard of my thought in this area.

[4]Ibid., 211.

[5]In our day, a phrase like “wiser than Solomon” may draw more than a few blank stares and references to going the “extra mile” are usually made in ignorance of Matthew 5:41.

[6]On the New Transformation, 219.

[7] Ibid., 224. The quintessential example of a Protestant interpretation in defense against the peasants is Martin Luther’s 1524 “Letter to the Princes of Saxony Concerning the Rebellious Spirit,” Weimar Ausgabe XV [The critical edition of Luther’s complete works in their original languages], 210-221. Hergot’s manifesto is from 1527.

[8]On the New Transformation, 224. The bracketed material is of Baylor.

[9]The Prague Protest, in The Radical Reformation, 8.

[10]Ibid., 6.

[11]Ibid.

[12]Ibid., 10. Bracketed material mine.

[13]Ibid., 4.

[14]In The Radical Reformation, 227-230. Müntzer, although just show to have not taken an entirely benevolent stance on the text of Scripture, did have a hand in drafting these articles, but Baylor pointed out that others such as Heinrich Pfeffer were also instrumental in the articles’ composition, which reflected local concerns that predated Müntzer’s arrival in Mühlhausen.

[15]The Twelve Articles of the Upper Swabian Peasants, in The Radical Reformation, 232.

[16]Ibid., 234.

[17]Letter to Thomas Müntzer, in The Radical Reformation, 39.

[18]Letter from the Community of Orlamünde to the People of Allstedt, in The Radical Reformation, 33-35.

[19]The Mühlhausen Articles, 228.

[20]Michael Sattler, The Schleitheim Articles, in The Radical Reformation, 176.

[21]The Twelve Articles, 237.

[22]“The Parable of the Tares as the Proof Text for Religious Liberty to the End of the Sixteenth Century,” Church History 1, no. 2 (1932): 67.; A key text would Balthasar Hübmaier, On Heretics and Those who Burn Them, in Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism, edited by H. Wayne Pipkin  and John Howard Yoder, Classics of the Radical Reformation, no. 5. (Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald, 1989), 58-66. However, there are those who would attribute religious liberty to the Reformed tradition, such as Jon Witte, Jr., “Law, Authority, and Liberty in Early Calvinism,” in Calvin and Culture: Exploring a Worldview, edited by David W. Hall and Marvin Padgett, Calvin 500 Series (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: P & R, 2010), 17-39.

Anabaptist and Contemporary Baptists Conference Audio

So, Southwestern has done us all a favor and posted the conference audio, which can be found here:
SWBTS Anabaptist Conference Audio
So, with this up, I won't need to provide any more summaries like the one I posted on Italian Anabaptism. However, I may in the next few days post some interactions with a few sessions more along the lines of the "Saving Denck" post.

Two notes:
Some of the speakers are given the title "Dr." on that link, although a few of the speakers are presently finishing up their dissertations. This might be an insignificant misnomer since they will presumably finish and Dr. Misseau had already earned a doctorate in another field.
Normally, I wouldn't care enough to note something like that except that it points toward what I hope does not become a weakness as this conference becomes, as planned, an annual event. Several of the speakers presented either their recent or upcoming dissertations (in the cases of McDill and Woodbridge, I had their dissertations open on my laptop and watched them trace through a summary of that material). This in no way detracts from the value of their work but does give rise to a concern that if the conference has in this first year nearly exhausted recent and current doctoral students' work within Baptist circles, then this does not bode well for a sustainability for an annual conference. SWBTS will have to rely on more than summaries if they hope to sustain the conference unless a large wave of Anabaptist scholars come through Baptist Academia in the coming years. This would actually be quite desirable. On the other hand, since this summary material is now largely covered, this would open the door to presentations of fresh material to be presented, especially as the conference (hopefully) gains traction. SWBTS being my alma mater, I would like to see this succeed, but at the same time I recognize that not every year can be approached in the same manner.