The Anabaptist Story

An Introduction to Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism

William R. Estep

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9781467420907
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Four hundred seventy years ago the Anabaptist movement was launched with the inauguration of believer's baptism and the formation of the first congregation of the Swiss Brethren in Zurich, Switzerland. This standard introduction to the history of Anabaptism by noted church historian William R. Estep offers a vivid chronicle of the rise and spread of teachings and heritage of this important stream in Christianity.This third edition of The Anabaptist Story has been substantially revised and enlarged to take into account the numerous Anabaptist sources that have come to light in the last half-century as well as the significant number of monographs and other scholarly works on Anabaptist themes that have recently appeared. Estep challenges a number of assumptions held by contemporary historians and offers fresh insights into the Anabaptist movement.

XI

Across the Seas and through the Years

ANABAPTIST ANCESTRY HAS BEEN CLAIMED FROM TIME TO TIME for such widely divergent groups as Unitarians, Baptists, Quakers, and Communists. Obviously, identification of the Anabaptists with either the Unitarians or the Communists involves the loosest possible use of the term “Anabaptist.” Antitrinitarian or Unitarian concepts never became characteristic of any major expression of sixteenth-century Anabaptism, with the possible exception of the Polish Brethren (Socinians). Virtually the same situation existed in regard to communism. Communal life has been practiced from 1528 to the present only by the Hutterites. Other attempts by the Philippites, Gabrielites, or the more deviate Münsterites began and ended within a few years. Of course none could be equated with contemporary communism of Marxist inspiration.

To claim that Baptists and Quakers are direct descendants of the Anabaptists is to assume that similarity of belief proves causal connections. Such relationship is assumed from something other than historical evidence. However, this is not to deny the pervasive influence of sixteenth-century Anabaptism upon succeeding generations but to point up the task of the historian. Therefore, this chapter has a dual purpose. It attempts to examine the relationship of continental Anabaptism to contemporary religious groups with which it is most closely associated, directly or indirectly; and it seeks to evaluate the impact through these groups of Anabaptist concepts on the modern world.

Lineal Descendants

Dutch Mennonites were reported to have been residents of New Amsterdam as early as 1643. A French Jesuit priest named Jogues, in listing the varieties of religious life in the colony, mentioned the “Anabaptists here called Menists.”¹ Although shortly afterward other Mennonites ventured to the New World, the first permanent settlement was not founded until 1683 in Germantown, Pennsylvania.

The Mennonites were few in number and without the services of a regularly ordained minister. They worshiped until 1690 or 1698 with some former German Mennonites who had joined the Quakers.² From this Mennonite-Quaker conventicle came the first public protest in the American colonies against slavery. The protest in 1688 was addressed to a meeting of the largest religious group in Pennsylvania, the Quaker Monthly Meeting. Among other things it declared: “Those who hold slaves are no better than Turks.”

The petition then proceeded to emphasize the damage which the practice of slavery was likely to do to further immigration. “For this makes an ill report in all those countries of Europe where they hear off, that ye Quackers do here handel men, like they handel there ye cattle and for that reason have no mind or inclination to come hither.”³ Apparently the protest had no immediate effect. Subsequently the Quakers were numbered among the most ardent champions of the antislavery movement.

The first trickle of Mennonite immigrants in the mid-seventeenth century swelled into thousands across three centuries. Today Mennonite colonies may be found from Canada to Paraguay. There are large settlements in north-central Mexico and the midwestern states of the United States. The Mennonites have distinguished themselves in North and South America as excellent farmers. Often exclusive and withdrawn, until the present century their influence on the non-Mennonite world has been meager. Their usual choice of farming as a vocation and their exclusiveness have both militated against an effective evangelistic witness.

In spite of these characteristics, however, Mennonites have been the consistent advocates of some basic sixteenth-century Anabaptist principles. Their stand against war is a case in point. The Mennonites’ position in this respect was largely negative from the time of the Revolutionary War through World War I. As a result, they have suffered much for their historic nonresistant witness. Usually misunderstood by patriotic neighbors, their motivations have been openly questioned. Frequently they have also been accused of sympathizing with the national enemies—the British during the Revolutionary War and the Germans during World War I.

World War II ushered in a new era in Mennonite church-state relations. While maintaining their nonresistant witness, the Mennonites addressed themselves to the problems presented by the demands and ravages of war. Through the Mennonite Central Committee, they looked for ways to make a positive Christian witness that did not violate their long-standing convictions. The results have been impressive. They have made solid contributions to technological advance in carrying out experiments in many fields at the risk of life. The most gratification came to them in serving in mental hospitals. “As the war progressed,” writes C. Henry Smith, “more and more of the units were assigned to mental hospitals. Of the fifty-one such units, the Mennonites administered twenty-five.”⁴

One result of service in mental rehabilitation by Mennonites and other conscientious objectors was establishment of the National Mental Health Foundation. The Mennonites have also become interested in establishing mental hospitals as a Christian expression of concern for modern civilization’s casualties. However, not all Mennonite young men chose to follow the route of conscientious objector. About half of them chose either regular service or noncombatant military service.

What has been said about the Mennonite tendency toward an exclusive, withdrawn, ghetto-like existence is even more true of the Amish and Hutterites. Under the leadership of Jacob Ammann the Amish schism developed in Switzerland during the latter part of the seventeenth century. It represents various degrees of cultural isolation. Few outsiders have sought to understand the deeper principles underlying the old-world folkways of the black-garbed Amish and his sensitive conscience. His fastidious concern with buggies, hooks and eyes, beards, and bonnets has alternately provoked exasperation and mirth in his non-Amish neighbor.

The Amishman is almost always a farmer, and a consistently good one at that. Perhaps his economic success, coupled with his aversion to government regulations, makes him an enjoyable target for tired comics. At any rate, his influence on human existence swirling around him—whether in Pennsylvania, Iowa, or the states in-between—has been slight.

The Hutterites, also lineal descendants of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, join the Amish in the backwater of what is generally considered cultural progress. Centuries of persecution have forced them more and more into a monastery-like existence. Within Hutterite colonies located in Canada, the Dakotas, and Paraguay, apparently life goes on much as it did four centuries ago. The continued use of German, which was retained during sojourns in Hungary, Transylvania, and Russia, increases isolation from the modern world. This cultural insulation protects the Hutterites from outside influences, but it also prohibits any effective interchange of ideas. Thus, evangelism and appreciable influence on the outside world are also lacking in the Hutterite expression of Anabaptism.

Is, then, the modern world indebted to the Anabaptists to any considerable degree? Have its concepts of freedom, separation of church and state, democracy, and the regenerate church come from this source? If so, the channels of this influence, for the most part, must lie outside those of the lineal descendants. Attention must now be turned to the groups whose ideas bear a striking similarity to the basic insights of sixteenth-century Anabaptism. The first of these is the Baptists.

Baptists and Anabaptists

The relationship of continental Anabaptism to early English Baptists has long been subject to debate. There was a time when many Baptists desired to establish a visible succession back to the apostolic age. Any theory which traced Baptists through Anabaptists found acceptance. However, in recent years it seems to be the vogue to discredit any viewpoint that posits an Anabaptist-Baptist historical relation. The most vocal advocate of this position is Winthrop S. Hudson, formerly professor of church history at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. Writing for the Baptist Quarterly, Hudson said: “It was not until the twentieth century that Baptist historians began to point out … that the evidence that the Baptists are not to be confused or identified with the Anabaptists is quite overwhelming.”⁵

Hudson not only distinguished English Baptists from the Anabaptists but implied that all Anabaptist influence was repudiated by Helwys. He dismissed as insignificant the contact of early English Baptists with Dutch Anabaptists.

The insistence upon Believer’s Baptism was a logical corollary drawn from the Reformation emphasis upon the necessity for an explicit faith and from the Congregational concept of a gathered church, as well as from the common storehouse of Biblical precept and example, rather than being the result of any supposed Anabaptist influence.⁶

Hudson’s position seems to have been taken out of consideration for something other than historical evidence. He admitted this fact in an earlier article:

By obscuring the theological considerations … which determined the attitude of Baptists on political and social issues, the task of dealing … with the new problems which have emerged has been made exceedingly difficult. This is true in terms of questions of polity, of providing structural support for a democratic society, of coming to terms with the major issues of economic life, and it is especially true if unnecessary obstacles are not to be placed in the way of ecumenical discussions.⁷

Does not this admission on Hudson’s part seriously jeopardize his position? As St. Amant has insisted, the historian can never allow the message of history to create historical facts. Nor can he ignore or distort those facts in the interest of his own bias.⁸ Neither ecumenical interests nor theories of Baptist succession should be allowed to alter the historical record in the least.

Ernest A. Payne, one of England’s most prominent twentieth-century Baptist leaders and an able church historian, takes issue with Hudson when he writes:

No responsible historian “confuses” or “identifies” the seventeenth-century Baptists with the continental Anabaptists of the sixteenth century. By implication Dr. Hudson appears to be denying all similarity or connection. This is, I am convinced, a misreading of history and would deprive the Baptists of one of the main clues to an understanding of their origin and development.

After listing Hudson’s four basic propositions, and before proceeding to refute them, Payne offers the following succinct summary of Hudson’s position.

He describes the former [Anabaptists] as stemming from “a few university trained humanists” of an Erasmian type, and the latter [English Baptists] as an offshoot of English Calvinistic Puritanism in its Congregational form. Only by a very selective process, so I believe, can these positions be maintained.⁹

With such prominent Baptist historians in obvious disagreement, others must be exceedingly cautious in seeking a historically valid solution to the problem. In unraveling the mystery of Dutch and English Anabaptist life and any possible influence on the English Reformation, several questions must be considered. What was the relation of sixteenth-century Anabaptism, first, to the rise of English Separatism; second, to the General Baptists; third, to the Particular Baptists; and fourth, to American Baptists?

Anabaptism and English Separatism

To understand English church life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is necessary to distinguish between Puritans and Separatists. The former were devoted to the established Church of England but desired to reform it in the direction of Calvinism. The Separatists, however, regarded the Church of England as apostate. They believed that the only Christian reaction to it was complete withdrawal.

Opinions vary on the extent of influence which the Anabaptists exerted on the rise of English Separatism. It is Latourette’s opinion that an Anabaptist contribution to English Separatist movements is undeniable.¹⁰ Scheffer, an erudite Mennonite historian of another generation, was convinced of the indebtedness of English Separatism to Anaba...