Part of my salary is an allotment for books and periodicals that I’m supposed to use for education and personal enrichment. This past year, I’ve been receiving “The Mennonite”, which is a semi-monthly periodical printed by Mennonite Church USA. While the articles are well written and the content is well-organized, I never really felt all that engaged by it. My last issue came this past week, and I knew just by looking at it that I would read the whole thing cover-to-cover. Most of the issue focused on how Reformation era Anabaptist theology applies to contemporary church practice and thought. On top of that, the articles were accompanied by all sorts of “Martyr’s Mirror” woodcuts and writings from various historical figures.
The first article was entitled “Anabaptists & Mennonites” and written by Walter Klaassen who also wrote Anabaptist: Neither Catholic nor Protestant. I loved that book and I’ve loved his work on Pilgram Marpeck, another under-recognized Reformation era Anabaptist scholar. I have a lot of respect for his work and have been fortunate enough to learn, not from him but from students and proteges of his. I was expecting to be enriched by this article, but I constantly found myself disagreeing with him. He makes a few valid points and others that I didn’t agree with, for historical and for semantic reasons. Of course my level of study and accreditation falls far short of his, but these are my responses.
But I have grown increasingly uneasy, even disturbed, by the now common designation of Mennonites as Anabaptists. We seem to think that in spite of our often uncritical cultural accommodation we can somehow preen ourselves with the bright feathers of a heroic tradition.
This is essentially the basis of his article. For a number of reasons, he is not comfortable with contemporary Mennonites calling themselves by the name of their spiritual (and often geneological) ancestors. The first reason is that the majority of Mennonites now are not re-baptized, and since the prefix `ana’ comes from the Latin meaning “again”, that disqualifies them from using the title.
But names rarely imply their literal meaning, especially in the passing of time. Are Catholics universal as the original definition of that term implies? Do Protestants still protest? In general or especially against the Catholics? Are the Brethren all male relatives of each other? Is the United Church really all that united? Are the Brethren all male siblings of each other?
He goes on to list a number of things which the early Anabaptists were and that we (contemporary Mennonites) are not. They challenged everything in their culture. They separated church and state. They rejected capitalism. They couldn’t justify any killing. They lived as outlaws because of their beliefs. In my studies I have not found that these statements are either universally true about the early Anabaptists, or that they are universally false about contemporary Mennonites.
He accuses us of holding up our own religious group too high, but not holding up the early Anabaptists high enough. It seems to me that he is holding them up a little too high. The early Anabaptists certainly did new and different things despite the dangers that came along with it, but there are still a number of non-heroic things about them. Often, civil unrest caused as much of the religious conversion as any spiritual conviction or revelation. The Anabaptist word was spread with fire and brimstone style end times preaching, which I doubt Klaassen would consider heroic in this day. Soon after the small Anabaptist communities developed, they often fell prey to petty sectarian infighting and leadership turmoil.
Klaassen does list two groups of Mennonites that can legitimately call themselves Anabaptists, those who have actually been rebaptized and those living in countries with repressive governments (ie. Vietnam, Colombia, Ethiopia, etc.). As much as I respect both of those groups, this would have been an absurd notion to the early Anabaptists. The very reason they hated being called Anabaptists was partly because it was used derisively but mostly because it legitimized their first infant baptism, which they couldn’t do, and they certainly wouldn’t expect us to do it either in a contemporary setting. Also, they wouldn’t have expected us to be poor or persecuted, just that we help those who we know are poor and persecuted in our world.
Those of us who have studied and written about 16th-century Anabaptism have not emphasized sufficiently that our 16th-century forebears were not out to separate from the Catholic church of their day … they were out to reform the one church, not to create another.
I agree that the Anabaptists were not setting out to establish an Anabaptist church would could co-exist peacefully with other mainline churches. I think they would be surprised, if not offended, that we study them as much as we do, and that we even name our schools after them. What they wanted, was not to reform the church but to purify it. In purifying the church, all of the unholy aspects of it need to be removed. They didn’t see themselves starting a new church, but rather they saw themselves as leaving a group of people following an earthly, man-made religion and joining the one true church. In other words, the one true pure church already existed, the problem was that no Catholics or Protestants belonged to it.
I still have a lot of respect for Walter Klaassen and I agree with a lot of the points he made. I agree that we often comfort ourselves too much in our ethnic pride. I agree that many of us are too comfortable with our adaptation within larger society. I agree that we need to continue to work in ecumenical circles, strengthening the one body of Christ. Also I still love the early Anabaptists and will continue to study them. I have no problem admitting that I fall short of their legacy, as have my both my geneological and institutional ancestors, but that, it seems to me, is also part of the Anabaptist legacy.