I do not think Servetus should be classified as an Anabaptist without
considerable qualification. He denied the deity of Christ and hence
the Trinity. A relatively small segment of the Anabaptist movement,
especially in what is now Poland, was anti-trinitarian.
Of course, what constitutes common characteristics of Anabaptists has
been fervently debated. I won't go into the debate here. The main
effort at classification was by George H. Williams in the early 1960s,
in a book titled _The Radical Reformation_; he includes the followers
of Socinius in Poland but at the edges of the movement and, of course,
his decision to use "Radical Reformation" as his overall rubric
expands the topic beyond "Anabaptism." Roland Bainton's preferred
term was "Left Wing of the Reformation." The problem is that it is
hard to see what the wide variety of groups placed under these labels
by Bainton and Williams have in common, except some vague sense that
they were more "radical" than Luther and Calvin. The problem is that
in some ways, later scholars realized, some of them were more
"conservative" than Luther and Calvin--e.g., in issues of church
discipline--which was the major dispute the Swiss Anabaptists and the
Dutch Mennonites had with the major reformers, but not the major
issue, say, for the Franconian "Anabaptists" like Hans Denck.
James Stayer and Werner Packull and others have revisited this
question since then. Stayer basically abandoned any effort to find a
common doctrinal ground, since some Anabaptists were pacifists and
some were revolutionaries, some had no use for any symbiosis of
temporal and spiritual government and others tried to establish a
Christian commonwealth uniting civic and religious government.
So Stayer concluded that the only common marker that makes any sense
is restricting baptism to adults, which, of course, is where the name
came from. By this criterion I don't believe Servetus would be
considered an Anabaptist, but I don't know for sure what his position
was on baptism. He certainly did not belong to an organized group and
had no direct contact with the other Anabaptist groups in Switzerland,
largely in German-speaking Switzerland. Calvin's contact with
Anabaptists came largely in Strasbourg, when he was in exile from
Geneva.
Finally, someone asked why the Anabaptists were persecuted by both
Protestants and Catholics. Primarily, one can say, because their
rejection of infant baptism severed a link between society and the
church, making adherence to the church a matter of adult decision
rather than being imbibed with mother's milk. This was quite
threatening to those who believed it important that Christian faith be
integrated with society's patterns of behavior and customs. This is
often decried as the baleful result of Constantine's conversion (of
course, if one is to point fingers, Theodosius might be a better
target) but is more helpfully understood as something to be expected
in a religious faith based on creation and incarnation: if God made
people to reproduce by bringing helpless babies into the world, then
the process of education and nurture of children in the faith of their
parents would not be a declension from a pristine norm of adult
conversions but a perfectly appropriate, God-intended, way of coming
to faith. If God became incarnate to redeem those he created, then
all human activity, including childrearing and nurturing, both
physically and religiously, would also come under that redemption.
Calvin and Luther still assumed this and made various arguments for
the legitimacy of baptizing infants--e.g., Calvin's understanding of a
covenantal society into which all are baptized in an analogy to
circumcision, even if not all of those baptized are necessarily among
the elect.
Of course, the Anabaptist groups that survived more than one
generation, primarily the Mennonites in the Low Countries (who spread
to West and East Prussia and came into contact with the Socinians
later) and the Swiss Brethren in southern Germany and Switzerland and
the Hutterian Brethren (originally from South Tirol but resident in
Moravia and later in Hungary and Russia) reestablished the mother's
milk process for integrating offsrping into their sect, even though
they never adopted infant baptism. Since they all rejected the idea
of objective sacramental efficacy, baptism was not the channel, but
being born into a Swiss Brethren or Mennonite or Hutterite family did
expose one to Anabaptist nurture and education, greasing the skids
toward an eventual adult baptism. The age of baptism gradually crept
downward into early adolescence or even into late childhood in some
Mennonite groups. From time to time they would realize that they had
fallen back into much of what they had originally rejected and a
revivalist movement would emerge. The Amish (an splinter group from
the Swiss Brethren in the late 1600s over the question of strict
church discipline) and some of the Mennonites have de facto encourage
teenagers to become at least a bit "wild" so that their eventual
conversion and baptism as young adults would be more clear-cut and
create a better basis for adherence to the group.
This is more than anyone probably wanted to know about Anabaptism,
but it just grew like Topsy. In a former life I was associate editor
of the Mennonite Encyclopedia. One may profitably turn to its pages,
including its 1990 fifth volume, for more details.
Dennis Martin
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