Anabaptist Studies

This article examines the utopian vision present in the eponymous work by Thomas More and in the early Anabaptists. In the light of the discussion on the power and dangers of utopian thinking in liberation theology it seeks to show how More struggled with the tension between the positive possibilities of a different world and the destructive criticism of the present reality. A similar tension is found in early Anabaptist practices, especially in terms of their relationship to the state and their practice of commonality of goods. The article shows that all attempts to reduce visions of a better world to a particular setting end up as ideological.

The Christian anarchist tradition and the work of Giorgio Agamben both fit within a subversive trajectory of political theology that critiques the state paradigm, while also operating at a distance from the state in their creation of a newly imagined political community. This research asks what it could look like to conceive of a political community beyond the state, imagined from the subject position of the marginalized. It also seeks a mutually-informed path towards the practical formation of such communities, as elaborated through a case study of the Anabaptist tradition. Agamben's concepts provide a renovation of the political themes of Christian anarchism. Examining the works of Agamben in conversation with Christian anarchism reveals the common themes of moving beyond revolution, voluntary exile through the abdication of rights, and messianic vocation. As the space for political praxis within Agamben's work continues to evolve, the Anabaptist tradition provides helpful practices to imagine a withdrawal from the governmental machine as a community of voluntary exiles.

In Dietrich Bonhoeffer's writings, Martin Luther is ubiquitous. Too often, however, Bonhoeffer's Lutheranism has been set aside with much less argumentative work than is appropriate in light of his sustained engagement with Luther. As a result, Luther remains a largely untouched hermeneutic key in Bonhoeffer interpretation. In Bonhoeffer's Reception of Luther, Michael P. DeJonge presents Bonhoeffer's Lutheran theology of justification focused on the interpersonal presence of Christ in word, sacrament, and church. The bridge between this theology and Bonhoeffer's ethical-political reflections is his two-kingdoms thinking. Arguing that the widespread failure to connect Bonhoeffer with the Lutheran two-kingdoms tradition has presented a serious obstacle in interpretation, DeJonge shows how this tradition informs Bonhoeffer's reflections on war and peace, as well as his understanding of resistance to political authority. In all of this, DeJonge argues that an appreciation of Luther's ubiquity in Bonhoeffer's corpus sheds light on his thinking, lends it coherence, and makes sense of otherwise difficult interpretive problems. What might otherwise appear as disparate, even contradictory moments or themes in Bonhoeffer's theology can often be read in terms of a consistent commitment to a basic Lutheran theological framework deployed according to dramatically changing circumstances.

Table of Contents
0. Introduction: An Argument for Bonhoeffer Interpretation
-Taking Luther’s Ubiquity Seriously
-What is ‘Lutheran’? Issues of Definition and Method
-Arguing for the Lutheran Character of Bonhoeffer’s Thinking

1. On the Way toward Christocentrism
--Karl Holl: Luther’s Religion of Conscience
--Christ or the Conscience?
--Conscience against Conscience
--Meager Christology
--Justification as the Unconditional, Effective Word of Christ’s Personal Presence as the Church

2. Christology in Conversation with Barth and the Lutheran Tradition
-Once more, Barth and Bonhoeffer on whether the Finite is Capable of the Infinite
-The History and Pre-History of the (in)capax Phrases
---This Man Is God
---This Is My Body
---The Finite is Capable of the Infinite
-Barth’s Rejection of the capax and the Majestic Genus
---The Finite is Not Capable of the Infinite
---The Common Actualization of Divine and Human Essences in Christ
-“The is may not be interpreted any further”: Bonhoeffer’s Christology

3. Caricatures of the Two Kingdoms
-Denials of Bonhoeffer’s Two-Kingdoms Thinking
-From Luther’s Two Kingdoms to the Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms
---The Two Kingdoms in Luther’s Theology
---Church and State from a Lutheran Confessional Perspective
---Church and State in Confessional Comparison
---The Twentieth-Century Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms
---Troeltsch and the Niebuhrs

4. The Twofold Form of Christ: Bonhoeffer’s Two-Kingdoms Thinking
-Early Two-Kingdoms Thinking
---“The Nature of the Church”
---“Lectures on Christology”
---“Thy Kingdom Come!”
---“The Church and the Jewish Question”
-The Two Kingdoms in Discipleship
-Late Two-Kingdoms Thinking
---“Protestantism without Reformation”
---“Heritage and Decay”
---Green, Rasmussen, Hauerwas
---“Ultimate and Penultimate Things”

5. Anabaptists and Peace
-Bonhoeffer’s Non-Commitment to Nonviolence
-The Doubly Curious Association of Bonhoeffer with Anabaptism through Yoder
---Yoder on Bonhoeffer
---Bonhoeffer on Anabaptists
-Bonhoeffer on Peace
--Peace and Preservation
--Orders of Preservation
--The Sermon on the Mount as Concrete Commandment
-Peace in Bonhoeffer and Anabaptists
-Interpreting Bonhoeffer on Peace
-Ecumenical Lutheranism and Lutheran Ecumenism

6. Lutheran Resistance Resources
-Luther to Hitler
-Lutheran Subservience and Bonhoeffer’s Resistance
-Luther on Resistance to Authority
-The Interims, Flacius, and the Magdeburg Confession
-Formula of Concord X
-Bonhoeffer and Lutheran Resistance Resources

7. Struggle and Resistance
-Resistance through the Confession of the Ecumenical Church
---Status confessionis
---Threats to the Gospel from outside: The State that Disregards its Mandate
---Threats to the Gospel from Inside: Heretical Legalism
---Confession, ‘the Jews,’ and Race
-Resistance through the Suffering Obedience of the Discipleship Community
---The Second Battle of the Church Struggle
---Cheap and Costly Grace
---Justification
-Resistance through the Responsible Action of the Individual
---Between Compromise and Radicalism
---Active Resistance
-Conclusion: A Lutheran Theology in Accord with Reality

*** In 2023 I have updated the entry to include a pre-publication version of my essay. ***  For a further sample from the text, including an excerpt by Hartmut Lehmann, see the attached link or go to the publisher's website (look for the "Leseprobe" tab on the Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht website). The papers in the volume are from a conference held in Sept. 2016 at the German Historical Institute in London.

ABSTRACT: This essay uses the method of historiographical criticism to reexamine the frameworks used to research the relationship between apocalypse and violence. Its focus is the presentation of Anabaptist rule at Münster in the mid-1530s. New religions scholars and historians alike often cite this case as evidence of how millenarian prophecy can lead believers to violent actions. The essay demonstrates that this view is based largely on anti-Anabaptist and anti-sectarian propaganda that has its origins in the medieval and early modern eras. Partly because of the popularity of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), which translated older polemical interpretations of religious outsiders into a modern scholarly form, hostile assumptions about Anabaptist violence have found their way into academic debates today. The essay shows that the distorting effects of these kinds of assumptions are not limited at all to the case of Anabaptist Münster, but in fact shape unhelpfully the way scholars conceptualize more generally the relationship between dissenting "sects" and established "churches." "Thinking outside the cages" of polemically derived conceptualizations can form the basis for cross-disciplinary research on believers under siege.

The Nazarenes were founded by a former Reformed minister Samuel Fröhlich about 1830 in Switzerland, but they soon expanded to Central and Eastern Europe. Because of their pacifist beliefs and refusal to swear and to take an oath a large number of the Nazarenes were condemned to severe prison sentences. This religious community was persecuted primarily during the communist era in Southeastern European countries (Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia) since they were considered disloyal citizens and a threat to the government. From 1945 until 1960 the Nazarene illegal border crossing from Yugoslavia to Italy or Austria was highly present. Rejecting one of the essential components of Yugoslav communism, so-called " nationwide defence and social self-protection " , the Nazarenes were perceived as anti-communists and their existence was seen as illegitimate. The repression of this religious minority in communist Yugoslavia is the subject of this paper. The material collected for the purposes of this paper came to be the result of empirical research, conducted in Serbia (2009–2013) and the United States (2015), on the Nazarene community and their emigration to North America. Based on qualitative interviews and archival research, this paper aims to analyse community members' narratives of their lives during communism and emigration of this religious minority across the Atlantic.

While the Anabaptist movement was still fl uid in the early 1520s, it soon crystallized into factions with sharp differences. Although the Moravian Anabaptists never succeeded in creating common doctrines and practices, the Central and East European experience was not merely a marginal part of the great Anabaptist story. Out of these divergent tendencies grew a strong sect that survived exile through a radical social experiment. Hutterite colonies, settled in a hostile environment, fl ourished for a long period while other sects disappeared within a few years. The factors that determined the advance and survival of the Hutterites point beyond religious motives. This social experiment was dependent on the integrated social structure enabling them to cope with an aggressive environment without assimilating. Various epochs of the Hutterite history show that communal life was never a uniform and perfect experience, but variants of the structure persisted in the colonies as they evolved in their local circumstances.

This essay discusses three recent collections of essays on the work of John Howard Yoder in order to answer inductively what it might mean to faithfully inherit the theological legacy Yoder left. First, I survey various readings of Yoder offered within these three volumes as well as the general approach of each volume. Following Chris Huebner’s lead, I argue that faithfully inheriting Yoder includes careful attention not only to Yoder’s content but also to his style. I then apply these criteria to representative essays from these volumes to assess how faithfully they receive Yoder’s work for their own.

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This essay examines how early Anabaptists used patristic literature and creeds to defend their practices of baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and community of goods, as well as their doctrinal stances on Christology and the Trinity. They used patristic literature to claim that they stood in a stream of faithfulness that reformers and Catholics had largely abandoned. They appealed to many different patristic authors and obscure canons of councils, sometimes reading primary sources. Yet they did not separate their ethics and theology by developing a separate history of nonviolence. Instead they embedded their views on violence and nonviolence within their apologetic stances on worship and doctrine. Theology and ethics were inseparable for the Anabaptists.

The novelist Ingrid Rimland became a prominent Holocaust denier in North America during the 1990s. Before embracing neo-Nazism, Rimland won acclaim within the Mennonite church-the Christian denomination in which she was raised-for her writings about women's hardships in the Soviet Union. Her debut novel, The Wanderers: The Saga of Three Women Who Survived (1977), reflected widespread efforts to position feminized Mennonite suffering as comparable to Jewish persecution under Nazism, coupled with silence about the role individual Mennonites played in the Holocaust. The church's male-dominated elite offered Rimland limited structural support as a female writer, however, and she struggled to sustain her literary career while raising a son with disabilities. Patriarchal constraints alongside Mennonite leaders' failure to address historic antisemitism helped allow her drift into white supremacy.

Neo-Anabaptist and other similar churches that advocate pacifism and social justice often struggle with traditional portrayals of the atonement. Views that portray the need for violence to bring about the salvation of the world are understandably troublesome to Anabaptist sympathies. In particular, the traditional portrayal of penal substitutionary atonement (PSA), where Jesus is described as receiving the punishment of God intended for sinners, is repugnant to most modern writers of Neo-Anabaptist thought. In developing a robust soteriology that reflects the nonviolent convictions so central to the Anabaptist hermeneutic, Neo-Anabaptists have embraced what has been called a "nonviolent atonement. 1 " Considering the Anabaptist commitment to nonresistance and social justice, this attraction is understandable. Tethered to this nonviolent hermeneutic, however, is an identification with the primitive church. Close to heart of Anabaptist thought is a perceived identity to the persecuted church that lived before the Constantinian synthesis of the fourth century. Since the birth of the movement in the 16 th century, down to the blogs and conference halls of the iconoclasts and radicals of today, patristic historiography has played an epistemological significance in the development of the Anabaptist hermeneutic. 2 Attempts to connect this patristic identity with Anabaptist soteriology have often generated faith expressions that fall outside of the norm. Debate over patristic atonement theory is nothing new. At least since the Middle Ages, gifted writers such as Peter Abelard have reframed and scrutinized the patristic accounts of the atonement. In the twentieth century, a significant challenge to patristic atonement theory occurred in response to the book Christus Victor, written by Gustaf Aulén. In his book, Aulén presents a cleverly written revisionist history of atonement theory. Aulén's thesis repudiates the idea that penal substitutionary atonement played any significant part of the patristic thought or literature of the early church, especially among the Greek fathers. Significant to this study, Aulén presented a historiography of patristic atonement theory that he described as nonviolent or "benevolent." 3 Aulén presented this patristic historiography in sharp contrast to what he saw as the violent metaphors found in later theories of the middle ages, created by men such as Anselm of Canterbury. Stemming from an intuition to root their epistemology in a nonviolent patristic historiography, Anabaptist writers followed the lead of Gustaf Aulén with tenacity. Progressing through the twentieth century, Neo-Anabaptists worked out their soteriology incorporating "nonviolent" atonement models with a historiography identical or at least very similar to that of Aulén. The vocabulary surrounding the rejection of PSA grew over the 20 th century, starting from suspicion in the 1950s, and growing to include labels such as "divine child abuse 4 " by the end of the century. Significant to this study, every major work done in defense of a "nonviolent" atonement theory did so by incorporating an epistemology that leaned heavily on a patristic historiography similar to that presented by Gustaf Aulén.

The juxtaposition of two sixteenth-century religious groupings, one in Western Europe, the European Anabaptists, and one in Japan, Jōdo Shinshū (then called the Ikkōshū), allows to make sense of the seeming contradictions present in the history of the latter, a commingling of violence and its refusal. The two traditions were both beholden to a binary that contrasted the outside world (including secular law and its claims) to the sect itself. This engendered two apparently contradictory reactions: the dismissing of the world while not confronting it and its claims or vigorously fighting with arms the world. For Anabaptism, what long prevented one to apprehend this logic was Anabaptist confessional historiography, which ended up rejecting armed violence and turned pacifist, and Anabaptist fragmentation. In the Japanese case, it has been the canonization of Rennyo’s teachings. His pastoral letters ultimately called for respect for authorities and forbade armed rebellion. This voice has been taken as the sole authentic representative of the tradition out of which he came, whereas there must have existed varied understandings stemming from the opposition buppō-ōbō (Buddhist Teachings and Teachings of the Realm), including some that logically led to defend the sect with arms. The complexity of earliest Anabaptism, in particular in relation to secular authorities and warfare, thus helps to make sense of Jōdo Shinshū’s seeming confused and inconsistent late medieval history–the coexistence of, on the one hand, armed leagues of devotees and, on the other hand, calls to respect authorities and the claim to be peaceful.

This article investigates a megachurch's ritual internally referred to (with ironic tones) as “Purge Sunday” in order to show how evangelicals in Canada navigate their "spoiled identity" (Goffman). This occasional Sunday ritual, a sort of “anxious bench” counter-performance or reverse altar call at The Meeting House (Toronto), demonstrates clearly the ambivalence of the church toward consumer culture and megachurch growth pressures while at the same time reinforcing aspects of it. It is a signal to their audience that communicates the congregation’s distance from high-pressure evangelical churches and so-called “cults.” This particular ritual celebrates one of the paradoxical dimensions of their identity—that they are “evangelicals for people not into evangelicalism”--an attempt to find a more culturally legitimate Canadian identity.

At least 135 Colonial American music manuscripts from Pennsylvania are located in libraries throughout the United States and beyond. They are affiliated with the Ephrata Cloister, founded in 1732 by Conrad Beissel. Ephrata, and its nineteenth-century affiliated community Snow Hill, were celibate, ascetic, German-speaking, Sabbatarian communes in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. Their residents created a large corpus of hymns and motets in a scriptorium. Because Ephrata and Snow Hill produced no heirs, their documents were scattered and their traditions were mostly forgotten. Although significant strides have been made in recent years to understand Ephrata’s theology, substantial lacunae remain in the study of its music.

This article outlines the methodology that the author developed as part of a dissertation in order to capture, organize, understand, and synthesize data of Ephrata and Snow Hill music manuscripts. It discusses the creation of a descriptive catalog of all extant available music manuscripts. This catalog is the first of its kind: it organizes music manuscripts according to their content and proposes a chronology for them. The article also discusses inferences and hypotheses relating to the music manuscripts and their creation. Of particular note is the research-based discovery that the music manuscripts provide tangible evidence of the first possible female composers in America. Finally, the article outlines potential avenues of research in future Ephrata music studies.

In 1646 seven London churches 'commonly (though falsely) called Anabaptist' issued a revised confession with one innovation: to permit a Christian to be a 'magistrate or civil officer'. Scholars align these churches, the foundation of the English Particular Baptists, with the Separatist-Congregationalist movement from which they sprang. Such analysis neglects their radical political thinking-like earlier Anabaptists, but unlike the Congregationalists, they denied that the state should endorse or enforce true religion. The conditions of 1646 made it possible to realise the Anabaptist vision for the 'institutional separation of church and state'.

Update 2023: The pdf with this entry is a pre-publication version of the essay. Other contributors to the collection are Mirjam de Baar, Martina Bick, Marian Blok, Nicole Grochowina, Linda A. Huebert Hecht, Mark Jantzen, Marcel Kremer, Marion Kobelt-Groch, Lucinda Martin, Mary S. Sprunger, John Staples, Mirjam van Veen, Piet Visser, Anna Voolstra, and Gary K. Waite.

The collection arose out of a conference in 2007 in Amsterdam.

This was a an effort to group the writings of the Anabaptist and Spiritualist David Joris into the three major periods of his career: 1. his early works while a hunted Anabaptist leader in the Netherlands, 1535-1539; 2. his transitional, early spiritualistic works from his time in Antwerp, 1539-1544; and his full-blown spiritualistic writings from his exile in Basel, 1544-56. Includes a decoded list of all of the recipients of his letters included in the unpublished Hydeckel (in the Jorislade Collection of the University Library of Basel), dated between 1537 and 1543.  There are now several works since discovered to be by Joris that are not included in this article; a new bibliography is needed.

This essay examines Nancey Murphy’s postmodern holism in light of certain frequently waged criticisms of this approach, which tend to gather around a shared concern that Murphy may accidentally foster a kind of epistemological insularity. While this criticism turns out to be a nonstarter, I end by arguing that Murphy ought to pay heed to concerns about the possibility of communities not listening well to voices from outside of one’s own tradition—concerns Murphy can address with these same philosophical resources, and the resources available to her from her own Anabaptist tradition. (Excerpt used with Permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers).

The Swiss Anabaptists of the sixteenth century played a pivotal role in the Radical Reformation and the beginning of the Anabaptist movement as a whole. Though his career as an Anabaptist was abruptly cut short, Michael Sattler was one of the most memorable and influential Anabaptist of the Swiss Brethren.  The testimony of his life and death proved instrumental in holding together the diverse Anabaptist movement at a critical time. He served as a “bridge” between the precarious beginnings of the movement and its structured consolidation years later. 

In studying Sattler, it is difficult to escape the interplay between his theological underpinnings and his dramatic life and death. Exploring this intimate link provides a window into this turbulent historical period and also into the theological pulse of a particularly significant group of Anabaptists.  Though Sattler was not the only Anabaptist to be cruelly put to death, his execution was certainly the most memorable, as the words he wrote and the martyrdom he endured have strengthened and edified many since his time.  The purpose of this study is to explore the nature of Sattler’s legacy and to explain why his life and letters in particular gained the significance they did in the years after his death. If Sattler was a “bridge,” what did this structure look like and how was it able to withstand the turbulent floodwaters of the post-Reformation era?

Reformation era martyrdoms in Zürich marked the beginning of the Anabaptist movement (Amish, Hutterites, and Mennonites).  From around the globe, members of these groups travel to Switzerland in search of a better understanding of their history, theology and family origins.  In 2004, reconciliation events took place wherein the Zurich city council and the Reform Church in Switzerland formally requested forgiveness, which was given, of a group of Anabaptist church leaders. Then in 2007, the Swiss government tourism authority in Emmental organized a year-long series of reconciliation events. This paper will examine the impact of the events in 2004 and 2007 on inter-group relations in the light of some relevant aspects of conflict resolution theory.  An interface with tourism and pilgrimage research is suggested through the concept of reconciliation tourism.

Majolica workshops in Faenza produced the fi rst bianchi wares in 1540 using a delicate recipe that represented a technical breakthrough in stabilizing white enamel. The celebrated bianchi di Faenza quickly came to symbolize a superior quality so that the neologism faience became the most used synonym for majolica throughout Europe. The appearance of the new technology coincided with a period of intense and extreme heretical activity in Faenza, which culminated in 1567–69 and resulted in the inquisition and expulsion of ca. 200 persons, among them many potters. Some 600 miles to the northeast, in Moravia, about 18,000 Anabaptists (mostly from Germany, Switzerland and the Tyrol) found refuge, and started producing bianchi wares that were highly esteemed by the local nobility. The fi rst surviving pieces from 1593 feature infl uences of both German and Italian majolica, thus the question remains: what was the mechanism of the diffusion from Italy to Moravia? My chapter will illustrate several theories formulated mainly by art historians, and supported by archival materials, will argue for an indirect link between Italy and Moravia.

Warum ging Barbara Halt, Bäuerin und sechsfache Mutter aus dem Dorf Urbach, nicht in die Kirche? War sie eine gefährliche Täuferin, die als Ketzerin zu verfolgen war, oder nur ein eigensinniges Weib, dem die Predigten des örtlichen Pfarrers nicht zusagten?

Am Beispiel des Herzogtums Württemberg im 16. und frühen 17. Jahrhundert geht die Studie den Täuferbildern, der obrigkeitlichen Täuferpolitik sowie den lokalen Formen des Umgangs mit Täufern nach und analysiert die Handlungs- und Legitimationsmuster der als Täufer verdächtigten. Im Fokus steht das Verfahren der Kirchenvisitation, welches Möglichkeiten zu vielfältigen Verhandlungen über die Grenzen des religiös und sozial Erlaubten eröffnete.

In this thesis, I examine both how theology is conceptualized and how it is embodied in performance. Focusing on the Hutterites, an Old Order Christian communal group, I explore the interplay between history and tradition on the one hand and cultural adaptation and dynamic change on the other. Although Hutterites are often stereotyped as aloof sectarians who want nothing to do with secular society, I explore the rich and multifaceted world of Hutterite musical production, showing that the boundaries between sacred and secular are much more porous and variable than often admitted.

Through an in-depth examination of Hutterite choral singing in Manitoba, I show how individual Hutterites express their agency, engaging with past doctrine and their current cultural surroundings to fashion a performative life that makes sense out of both--what I call "performing salvation."