Transforming Faith Communities

A Comparative Study of Radical Christianity in Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism and Late Twentieth-Century Latin America

Michael I. Bochenski

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781610978118
  9781498262286
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621895978
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Transforming Faith Communities argues for a model of being church that combines congregationalism with a constructive approach to church-state relationships. Congregationalism within a vision for a renewed Christendom is commended here as a viable option for Christian mission in the twenty-first-century world. In making this case, two movements are explored--those inspired by sixteenth-century Anabaptism and late twentieth-century Latin American liberation theology. Each movement is held up as a mirror to the other. A continuing vision for the transformation of church and society emerges from this book as a number of contemporary resonances begin to sound. These include an outline of some likely common features in the development of radical religious communities, an examination of some of the factors that create world-affirming Christian faith communities, and many examples of effective and constructive engagement with church and society across the centuries.

1

Introduction

Several parallels between the radical Christian movements inspired by Latin American liberation theology and sixteenth-century Anabaptism can quickly be discerned. Both movements exploded into life inspired by a powerful new idea. For the sixteenth-century Anabaptists this was that New Testament baptism is only for those who already have a personal faith in Christ—believers’ baptism. For the twentieth-century Latin American liberation theologians, the crucial new realization was that God’s concern about poverty is an all-embracing biblical priority—the preferential option for the poor. Both movements built upon a newfound, or re-appropriated, concept and then applied its insights to contemporary religious and secular life. Both movements emerged in continents that were deeply Catholic in religious affiliation and can, in some ways, be viewed as renewal movements emanating from within that Church. In both movements there were concerns to reshape Church and Society in general in the light of their discoveries, accompanied by attempts to create local congregations as authentic Christian communities. Both movements asked radical questions about the political and religious status quo and made moving appeals for liberty, and for freedom of conscience. Examples of enormous courage—shown in the face of persecution, harassment and often death—abound in each context. Both movements engendered very high levels of mistrust, indeed paranoia, among the secular and religious authorities of their day. Both also encouraged lay leaders who played key roles, and both also allowed women to exercise some leadership roles. In both of these movements, too, there was a deep commitment to evangelization, in its many expressions, which resulted in their expansion, especially among communities of the poor.

But there was also a key difference. Those committed to liberation theology hardly ever questioned the presuppositions of a Church-State ecclesiology, for all of their dissatisfaction with them. Many Anabaptists, in contrast, abandoned the Christendom ecclesial model within a few decades. Some reasons for this significant point of discontinuity will emerge over the course of this book. It will, however, also become clear that separatism was not an inevitable or consistent theological conclusion for Anabaptism, especially when Central European examples of the movement’s development are brought into the equation. One significant and relatively new aspect of contemporary Anabaptist research is the rediscovery that the movement was not simply confined to Western Europe. The melting of “The Iron Curtain” has helped to open up a large new field of Anabaptist studies as, among others, Karin Maag has indicated: “It is a curious fact that one can read most general histories of the Reformation without being strongly aware that there was a Reformation in Eastern Europe . . . The almost total exclusion of lands such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia (as it then was) and Poland from free cultural and political interchange with neighboring lands to the west for 45 years from 1945 had a hugely distorting effect.”1 This book draws on Anabaptist materials from Central and Eastern Europe—in the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Czech lands including Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and Transylvania especially. This book is, then, one which seeks to bring creatively together two areas of theological research—Anabaptist studies and liberation theology.

The methodology adopted in this comparative process—one of holding up mirrors from one movement to the other—will, it is hoped, be vindicated by the ecclesiological insights that result. The scale of this book is, however, an ambitious one involving two major religious movements, each capable of generating many doctoral theses in and of themselves. The options for chapter themes and examples are accordingly manifold. No claim is made then that the six themes chosen for this book—origins, contextual responses, opposition, faith-community building, use of Scripture and evangelistic practice—are comprehensive ones. The cornucopia of examples chosen, nonetheless, demonstrate the fruitfulness of a comparative approach. Taken together, they help to open up the heart of radical Christianity. It should also be noted here that a predictable chronological framework for each chapter has been deliberately avoided. The chapters do not necessarily start with an Anabaptist point of reference and then move on to a similar Latin American one. Instead, related examples are interwoven—having first been drawn from the lives and literature of participants in both movements.

Contemporary Anabaptist studies still largely operate within a framework established by a small number of scholars. Harold S. Bender argued in 1944 that Anabaptism was the fulfillment of the Reformation, truer to the original vision of Luther and Zwingli than they were themselves.2 At its heart, he argued, it was an attempt at restitutio—the recreation of the original New Testament church, envisaged by Christ and the apostles. Discipleship, for him, was the essence of Anabaptist Christianity, coupled to its discovery of a new congregational ecclesiology. It was also, as Bender affirmed with some pride, the first religious movement in history to advocate religious tolerance based on freedom of conscience. Evangelical Anabaptism, he argued, was the pioneer movement which gave rise to many of the core convictions of contemporary Protestantism, thus playing a key and formative role in the development of World Christianity. George Huntston Williams’ monumental 1962 work The Radical Reformation, with its subsequent revised and expanded editions, made a more substantial case for this re-instatement. Indeed Williams introduced so much new material that, over 40 years later, his work remains indispensable to researchers of what has been called “the left wing of the Reformation.”3 He drew out the many nuances of Anabaptism so convincingly, and in such detail, that almost all attempts to claim that it was a uniform movement, sharing agreed core convictions from the very beginning, are doomed to failure. His contention that, for example, there were other types of Anabaptist radicals than Evangelicals—for example the Spiritualizers and (his own ancestors in the faith) the rationalist Unitarians—is incontrovertible. James Stayer’s works on the sword and on community of goods within the Anabaptist movements built on Williams’ methodology. Stayer also emphasized the considerable diversity within these radical movements during the first three decades or so of their existence.4

C. Arnold Snyder’s review of the various Anabaptist movements, published some 30 years after Williams, synthesizes the approaches of Bender, Williams and Stayer.5 His research contains many examples of diversity and nuancing but, nonetheless, argues that there were core convictions during Anabaptism’s early decades: “In spite of the fact of multiple origins and a variety of ideological influences, there was nevertheless a coherent core of belief and practice that was common to all sixteenth-century baptizers.”6 This core included the Apostles’ Creed, anti-sacramentalism, anticlericalism, belief in the authority of Scripture, salvation by grace through faith, and these convictions—the presence of the Holy Spirit as the community gathers, the importance of both Word and Spirit in discipleship, the need for both faith and works, and an eschatology characterized by the conviction that they were all living in the last days.7 Snyder also suggested that there was a common Anabaptist ecclesiology that included five core ingredients. Baptism is for adults and only after prior teaching and faith. The ban—the Anabaptist practice of excluding those deemed to have sinned from membership of their communities for a period—is the preferred biblical method for admonition and discipline. The Lord’s Supper is a service of remembrance that must be closed to the non-baptized. Mutual charitable support is necessary because none can lay claim to earthly goods, and belonging to a faith community means being willing to suffer and persevere to the end.8

A lengthy challenge by Snyder to the views of a German advocate of early Anabaptist uniformity—Andrea Strubind—in the pages of The Mennonite Quarterly Review in 2006 replayed, in many ways, the differences between Bender’s approach and those of Williams and Stayer. Here, once again, detailed arguments for and against the diversity within Anabaptism of the early Swiss radical Reformers were rehearsed.9 Strubind’s argument was that there were direct links between the ecclesiology of the proto-Anabaptists in 1523–25 and the separatist theology that emerged during a formative Anabaptist Assembly at Schlei...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: New Beginnings
• Chapter 3: Responding to Revolution
• Chapter 4: Persecution and Propaganda
• Chapter 5: Building Communities
• Chapter 6: Word and World
• Chapter 7: Evangelism and Evangelists
• Chapter 8: Transforming Faith Communities
• Appendix to Chapter 6: Word and World
• Bibliography