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Anabaptism Turns 500

Anabaptism Turns 500

Last updated on: September 18, 2024 at 12:01 am by David Swartz

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Anabaptism Turns 500 2024-09-17T14:56:39-04:00 David Swartz

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On January 21, 1525, Conrad Grebel (re)baptized George Blaurock in Zürich, Switzerland. Most Anabaptists—and some scholars—mark this date as the birth of Anabaptism. So in just a couple of months, that radical reforming religious movement celebrates its 500th birthday.

That Anabaptism could turn half a millennium old would have shocked early Anabaptists, many of whom thought that the end of time was imminent. That so many early Anabaptists were apocalyptic might shock many contemporary Anabaptists.

This historical blind spot, among others, stems from a narrative inherited from mid-twentieth American Mennonitism. In “The Anabaptist Vision” (1944) Harold S. Bender emphasized freedom of conscience, the church as a voluntary brotherhood of believers, and an ethic of love and nonresistance as key markers of identity. As a rejoinder to hostile Reformation-era accounts that depicted Anabaptists as heretics and fanatics, this made for a deeply satisfying usable memory. William Estep’s The Anabaptist Story (1963) echoed Bender’s normative account. He envisioned the Anabaptist attempt to restore the church to what it was before Emperor Constantine as a bright meteor bursting through a dark, sinister Catholic sky.

But every generation rewrites history. In the 1970s a new set of scholars, diving deep into the archives to look at both leaders and ordinary Anabaptists, began to deconstruct this idealized golden age. James Stayer, for example, questioned whether Zürich was the only point of origin. Claus-Peter Clasen applied a new social lens of analysis. Werner Packull recovered the mystical and apocalyptic dimensions of early Anabaptism. Collectively, they sought to capture the premodern weirdness of a movement with no single authority and no single theology.

An even younger set of scholars has emerged in a new multicultural moment. Anicka Fast, Felipe Hinojosa, Jaime Prieto, John Roth, Masakazu Yamada, and many others have begun narrating the diffusion of an incredibly diverse movement after the sixteenth century. About two-thirds of the over two million baptized believers in 86 countries now live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The most typical Anabaptist is now an Ethiopian woman, not a man with a bowl cut in Holmes County, Ohio.

A new book captures these important trajectories. Troy Osborne’s Radicals & Reformers: A Survey of Global Anabaptist History is an absorbing synthesis of scholarship on 500 years of Anabaptist history over five continents. We’re introduced to a stunningly diverse cast of characters. In addition to the usual suspects, we meet Anna Baerg, Edna Ruth Miller Byler, Helena von Freyburg, Daniel Kitamba, Julia Yellow Horse Shoulderblade, Tee Siem Tat, Adolphine Tshiama, and Ibrahim Tunggul Wulung. Yes, Amish cabinetmakers appear in this great crowd of witnesses. But so do Indian matchmakers, a naked man parading through Amsterdam, evangelical church planters in Indonesia, and a zealous baker from Haarlem who believed he was the true Enoch. Menno Simons doesn’t appear until page 71 and then mostly disappears after page 93. This is an Anabaptist history for a new globalized, multicultural era.

Osborne recognizes that there is no such thing as a “naked Anabaptist.” We are not disembodied theologies. We are not pure representations of the pure gospel. Faith is always lived out in the clothing of ethnicity, gender, diet, technology, and worship styles. Sometimes that clothing takes the pleasing shape of mutual aid, costly discipleship, mission, spiritual renewal, and cultural discernment. But it also takes the troubling shapes of violence, inequality, patriarchy, and colonialism.

This critical lens comes with a cost. Bender’s Anabaptism offered a center and more coherence. But there are gains too. Osborne’s Anabaptism offers more usable pasts for a diverse constituency. As the movement has come full circle in the last century’s global swell, it is difficult not to notice, for example, resemblances between the enchanted landscapes of Africa and Latin America and the supernatural terrains of sixteenth-century farmers and fisherfolk in Europe.

Even more importantly, it feels more real and faithful to the complexities of lived experience. What civil rights activist James Baldwin said about America is also true about Anabaptist history: that wherever and whenever humans do life—and seek transcendence—together, it is both terrible and beautiful.

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