9 January 2007

It’s a mistake to identify the Anabaptists as most fundamentally anti-institutional, since the first step of the early Anabaptists was almost never a break. Balthasar Hubmaier set up a territorial believers’ church at Waldshut, where Anabaptism was the official religion of the city for a time. The Grebel circle didn’t break with Zwingli and the Zurich council until the unbearable slowness of reform drove them to articulate the church’s active independence from other worldly powers. Menno, with certain strict criteria, thought a Christian magistrate a possibility. Rather, as C. Arnold Snyder says, “the strong ‘separation from the world’ ethic that pervaded later Anabaptism was not a necessary original component of Believers’ Church ecclesiology, but was a further theological interpretation that was encouraged, in part, by the encounter with a decidedly hostile world.” And even the imperative of separation developed primarily as a moral rather than an institutional conviction.

That’s not to deny, of course, that the Anabaptists resonated deeply with St Paul’s pronouncement, “We must obey God rather than any human authority.” But this resonance stemmed from a deep biblicism and evangelical spirit, not from any fundamental antagonism to institutions as such. Anabaptist anti-clericalism, historically rooted in a lay antipathy towards a socially and economically privileged class of clergy, found its main expression as a critique (itself medievally rooted) of the clergy’s unscrupulous example—not a critique of the need for shepherds, or institutional structure, or anything of that kind. Anabaptist political critique, as I’ve said, was not originally so drastic as complete disavowal, but rather grew more severe only in correlation with territorial banishment and violent persecution.

Personally, I’m quite theologically sympathetic with a deep-seated ‘separation unto God.’ But construing the movement as one most basically of ‘separation,’ or even most basically of dissent, misrepresents the evangelical aims of the early Anabaptists and casts a pall of decay over the whole Anabaptist tradition. The gradual development of institutions is not itself inimical to the early Anabaptist witness, whatever negative consequences we might see in it. Separation from the world always meant separation unto Christ, with all the political and economic and structural imperatives that came along with it. If systems have been left behind, it is in favor of a body.

(I know I’m ignoring the spiritualists.)

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Tags: Anabaptist,Political Theology