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MEDIEVAL-RELIGION  April 2004

MEDIEVAL-RELIGION April 2004

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Subject:

Re: Anabaptists and rebaptism

From:

Dennis Martin <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 16:47:01 -0500

Content-Type:

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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

The term Anabaptist refers primarily to 16thc radical reformers
beginning in Switzerland and spreading throughout the Alpine
German-speaking areas as well as into middle Germany (some indigenous
roots in middle Germany stem from the charismatic and apocalyptic
iconoclasts of the early 1520s and the great Peasant's War of 1525
(Thomas Muentzer).  A distinct and slightly later second center arose in
in the Netherlands and Low-German speaking areas of modern Germany--the
revolutionaries of Muenster and their pacifist precipate stemming from
Menno Simonszoon and others.  They were sometimes called Catabaptists
and were associated by their opponents, beginning with Zwingli, with the
Donatist heresy.  Thus the proper explanation for Anabaptist is
"rebaptism," not "no baptism."

The movement rejected the label because the were indeed, as Edwin notes,
non-sacramental and iconoclastic, refusing to recognize infant baptism
as efficacious, so in their view they only baptized once.  Their direct
descendents today are the Mennonites and Amish and Hutterites.

Whether the earliest Baptists, who stemmed from England, were influenced
by continental Anabaptists remains a hotly disputed question.  The
continental Anabaptists were not predestinarian or Calvinists.  THey
valued baptism highly and believed in the freedom of the human will
(again, with one or two exceptions among their leaders)  Many, but not
all were pacifists.  The English Baptists began from a Calvinist
context, with an otherwise similar radical critique of sacrament and
liturgy and hierarchy in the Church of England, also with apocalyptic
overtones, and they later split into Calvinist and free-will variants.
So they parallel the continental ancestors of the Mennonites but whether
any genetic influence took place, has been argued both ways.

In my view the fundamental issues for the Anabaptists were
ecclesiological (hence the rough parallel to the Donatists in insisting
on a pure, small, remnant church, separated from the evil and doomed
world), but one could argue that their ecclesiology arises from a more
fundamental radicality, iconoclasm, rejection of institution and
tradition which erupted at various points among the "mainstream"
Reformers but was suppressed as threatening the social order by the
mainstream Protestant leaders.  The Anabaptist movement at its fringes
was anti-trinitarian in Hungary and Poland, though the second-generation
Dutch Anabaptists also settled into a comfortable, rationalistic
unitarianism to a large degree, after about 45 years of active
persecution (ending by the 1580s or so).  In Switzerland imprisonment,
selling into galley slavery, occasionaly capital punishment continued
into the early 1700s, so the Swiss Brethren continued to hemhorrage
refuges down the Rhine into Alsace and Baden and eventually to the New
World.  The Amish schism took place in the 1690s among these Anabaptist
refugees in Alsace.  From the beginning they spread across the Alps
(upper Rhine to Grisons) into South TIrol (also indigenous origins there
growing out of the peasant's revolt there); heavy persecution in Tirol
sent them down the Inn River to the Danube and to toleration by princes
in Moravia: their leader was Jakob Hutter, hence the Hutterites.  Forced
out of Moravia by recatholicization in the 17thc, they ended up in
Transylvania and the Ukraine and thence to western US and Canada in the
late 19thc.  The Dutch Anabaptists spread along the North Sea and Baltic
coasts where their skills in draining wetlands and bringing them under
cultivation were sought after; when Prussia militarized in the late
18thc, they moved to the Ukraine under a Privilegium from Catherine the
Great; militarization in Russia in the late 19thc sent some of them also
to Canada and the US.  These are the Mennonites.  The Swiss refugees who
went down the Rhine to Rotterdam and to Pennsylvania in the early and
mid-1700s (both Amish and non-Amish Swiss Anabaptists) eventually became
known also as Mennonites, though genetically they did not arise from
Menno Simonszoon's teaching.

Much cross-fertilization took place between these continental
Anabaptists and the state church Pietists of the 17th and 18thc,
producing a pacifist group that fled to Pennsylvania, the Church of the
Brethren (German Baptist Brethren).  Most Pietists remained in the state
church and baptized infants, but the rejection of infant baptism by the
German Baptist Brethren grew out of and tied them to the Mennonites.

Similarly, the many continental Baptist or Free Church groups in Europe
today arise not from the 16thc Anabaptists but from the 19thc revival
movement which had both state church and anti-state church (Free Church)
wings as well as from missionary work carried out by English and
American Baptists.

What the Baptists and Anabaptists and other Free Church groups have in
common is a rejection of infant baptism, with all its consequences for
the idea of being born into and growing up in a Christendom-Christian
society situation.  Apart from that, they differ widely.  Of course, in
the United States with no state churches after the 1820s, the object
against which their protest had originated did not exist, but the
mainline denominations brought a lot of Christendom assumptions with
them, creating something of a parallel.  With the dechristianization and
(looming) disestablishment of state churches de jure or de facto in
England, Scandinavia and the Continent, the whole mix becomes much more
complicated.

What does this have to do with medieval religion?  The Waldenses (and
sometimes the Albigenses) were claimed by some Anabaptists as their
forebears: The True Remnant throughout the Dark Ages of popery and
magical-superstitious idolatry that ruined the Church from the time of
Constantine or even from the first century while the apostles still
lived (Menno knew enough history to know that infant baptism is taken
for granted as long-standing practice by 3rd-centuiry Fathers, so he
assumed the fatal fall into idolatry began while the Apostles still
lived).  The Anabaptists did not have a very good understanding of the
Waldenses (we still don't, in many ways) and no evidence of genetic
connection between the surviving Waldenses and the emerging Anabaptists
in the 16thc has ever been persuasively presented, but there are in fact
some striking theological, sacramental, ecclesiological parallels
between the Waldenses' and Anabaptists' theology.  One thing they have
in common is a radical belief in a dramatic Fall of the Church into sin
and apostasy, apart from the True Remnant.  This is fundamentally an
ecclesiological matter--a loss of faith in the indefectibility of the
historic, visible Church.  But to some degree that rejection of
indefectibility was shared by the mainline Protestant Reformers.  So
even here the distinct thing about the Anabaptists is the radicality of
their position--they extend the apostasy not merely to the
papal/episcopal church (Luther, Calvin, Presbyterians etc.) but even to
the Reformed but infant-baptizing Protestants who have substituted a
papcy/episcopacy of learned university professors for the Catholic
papacy and bishops.

The problem of the second generation: what to do with children born to
believing parents to ensure that they do not adhere to the faith merely
nominally, merely as a cultural acquiescence, has been with Christians
from the early centuries onward, though, of course, exactly where the
"first" and "second" generation situation obtained varied as
Christianity moved northward and westward and eastward from the 5th-12th
(14th, if you include LIthuania) centuries.  That dynamic was present in
the medieval Church as well: preachers and teachers, monastic leaders
etc. all sought to bring home to infant-baptized children of Christians
the need to make the faith their own, to convert, to live holy lives, to
imitate the saints.  That not everyone heeded their calls for conversio
was obvious to all observers; the Anabaptists were those who said,
enough already, of this nonsense: the source, the root of the problem is
the silly notion that one can make an infant into a Christian by a
sacrament.  Their concern over the large numbers of nominal (and
scandalously living) unconverted supposed Christians led them to reject
sacramental infant baptism and in turn led them to question the very
idea of objectively efficacious sacraments (something some of the
mainline Reformers also did, but not as radically).

Dennis Martin


>>> [log in to unmask] 04/29/04 12:18 PM >>>
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and
culture

> From: Robert Kraft <[log in to unmask]>
> If classmembers have had some Protestant history exposure, they may
have heard about "rebaptism" in connection with the Anabaptist movement,
the very name of which means "rebaptism"! To oversimplify things, the
idea was that the only valid baptism was of persons who understood what
was going on (not infants), thus the need for a new ("adult") baptism of
persons associated with the movement.

Edwin replies:
Just a subtle ammendment:  Anabaptists believe(d) that physical baptism
is not necessary for salvation, nor is it sacramental (Anabaptist = no
or without baptism).  Inner change (sola fide) is considered
regenerative, but physical baptism is merely an outward sign of
obedience and repentance (thus adults only).  This view is still held by
many modern Baptists.  Rebaptism, in the Anabaptist system, is simply a
reaffirmation of faith.  This claim is based on direct biblical
interpretation which rejects historical traditional interpretation.

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