Modem Theology 13:2 April 1997
ISSN 0266-7177
THEOLOGICAL AND SECULAR
ΜΕΤΑ-NARRATIVES OF POLITICS:
ANABAPTIST ORIGINS
REVISITED (AGAIN)
1
THOMAS HEILKE
Once upon a time, the story of Anabaptism was a simple tale. Anabaptism
began in the southern German-speaking areas of Europe, sometime early in
the third decade of the sixteenth century. It could be identified by a
relatively coherent, stable, and recognizable set of doctrines or behaviours,
the most important of which included a personal and communal discipline,
a rejection of state-sponsored religion, and one or another form of pacifism.
Even the devil in the details of this story was a minor-league player. Scholars
might dispute the precise origins of Anabaptism, but few seriously questioned
that were was such an origin and that Anabaptism was an easily
identifiable movement.
2
Similarly, even though scholars had produced
numerous biographies of early Anabaptist leaders, the differences between
these leaders—with perhaps the exception of Thomas Müntzer and his
immediate followers—could be treated as either largely incidental or as
temporary pot-holes on the road to unity. It was relatively easy to discern
who was or was not a "true" Anabaptist. It was possible, then, to trace a
continuous, determinative path from the earliest Anabaptist stirrings in the
1520's to the present day. Serious disruption in this narrative could be
attributed mainly to external forces (persecution, political expulsion, wartime
disorder, etc.). Internal disputes and splits among various Anabaptist
groups could be treated as rifts in a main line that continued in unbroken
succession to the contemporary inheritors of the Anabaptist tradition.3
No more. The scholarly work of the past thirty years or so has produced
results that remind one of Nietzsche's ironic (if erroneous) comment on the
Dr Thomas Heilke
Department of Political Science, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Maiden, MA 02148, USA.
228 Thomas Heilke
origin of nihilism: "Christianity breaks up because of the necessary character
of its morality.—Science has awakened doubt in the truthfulness of the
Christian God: and by this doubt, Christianity dies (Pascal's deus absconditus).*
The apparent unity in the origins of Anabaptism has been shattered not so
much by openly hostile doubters, but by the truthful scholarship of contemporary
Anabaptists themselves, or at least by camp followers. Their
work has fragmented the seeming unity of original Anabaptism along
several lines. The result threatens to be an anabaptisma abscondita. One can no
longer tell "The Anabaptist Story/'5
With this background in mind, the present essay has four aims. First, it
examines the purpose and results of some recent work that has either
questioned, rejected, or reformulated the possibility of envisioning an original
Anabaptist unity. Second, it considers the motivations for fashioning
such a contestable unity in the first place. Third, it considers the place of
unitary motivations and their critiques in contemporary studies of Anabaptism.
Fourth, it seeks briefly to draw implications for ecclesial historiography
in general. A reconsideration of the debate concerning Anabaptist
origins can be directed toward a larger register to provide for an instantiation
(as well as a critique) of what John Milbank has called "a 'countermodern'
articulation of a specifically Christian onto-logic."6
1 want to suggest,
then, that recent reappraisals of Anabaptist origins are best understood
as attempts at "getting the story straight" that have their own story to tell.
This new story—told in a social science mode—introduces a different metanarrative
that in turn raises a number of interpretive issues for telling, retelling,
appropriating, and evaluating the "original," believers' Anabaptist
story. (Ironically enough, the original story was also accepted by certain
scholars hostile to the Anabaptists.) These issues have remained somewhat
elusive in the literature surrounding this debate, and the present essay aims
to scrutinize more carefully the most important of them. Accordingly, the
essay first reviews the transition from a unitary Anabaptist history to a more
fragmented one. It then examines the character of this new, semi-fragmented
account. Finally, it considers the conditions and premises for a new account
of Anabaptist origins from a believer's perspective. Although these interpretive
issues are raised here within the scope of Anabaptist history and its
current status, the essay has wider implications concerning the problem of
practical faithfulness and telling "true" stories. This problem is not confined
to the intentions of "believers" alone, since the metanarrative of our truthfulness
occurs as a subtext for every story.7
From Monogenesis to Polygenesis
In a summary essay published in 1975 on the occasion of the "450th
anniversary of the emergence of Anabaptism in Zürich,"8
James Stayer,
Werner Packull, and Klaus Deppermann suggested that the premises of
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Anabaptist Origins Revisited 229
a unitary origin (monogenesis) of Anabaptism was an unsupported and
unsupportable assumption of the pioneering work on the Reformation
conducted by Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Holl, and other scholars hostile or indifferent
to the religious claims of the Anabaptists, as well as by Anabaptist
believers and scholars themselves. "The history of Anabaptist origins," they
argued, "can no longer be preoccupied with the essentially sterile question
of where Anabaptism began, but must devote itself to studying the plural
origins of Anabaptism and their significance for the plural character of the
movement." They noted that the assumption of Anabaptist monogenesis as
opposed to polygenesis had never been established, but merely implied in
the debate between Troeltsch and Holl, and otherwise generally assumed
among contemporary Anabaptists and non-Anabaptist scholars alike. Empirical
studies showed that it was "an unexamined assumption which simply
does not bear rigorous examination."9
Stayer, et al. did not indicate, however,
the direction such studies might take, nor what results one might
expect, nor what the normative consequences of polygenesis might be for
those who looked to the Anabaptists as their spiritual ancestors.10
For scholars like Troeltsch and Holl, a unitary story with specific origins
firmly (and unproblematically) "locates" Anabaptists in a sociological, cultural,
or historical setting, making them readily identifiable and easy to
characterize. In this paper, however, I focus on the motives of the so-called
"evangelical Anabaptists" or "believers" and their "polygenetic" counterparts.
For believers, past attempts at telling an Anabaptist story, with a
determinative beginning, a coherent middle, and a tentative ending that
terminates in one's own present (and therefore holds out the promise of a
new beginning, or at least a continuation of the middle) had a justifiable and
discernible impetus. It was in part an effort to trace a spiritual ancestry that
would give practical moral identity to a contemporary community that saw
itself as descended from the original Anabaptists. Such an intention elicits
the following question: are the monogenetic stories of Mennonite scholars—
"evangelical Anabaptists"—and other believers not simply historical selfauthentications,
self-serving attempts at establishing an historically located
legitimacy, subtle expressions, as it were, of a will-to-power? Eric Voegelin's
discovery of what he called historiogenesis as an activity of historical
construction has (as we shall later see) its own problems, but is a helpful
attempt to capture this motive.
According to Voegelin, "historiogenesis is a mytho-speculative extrapolation
of pragmatic history toward its cosmic-divine point of origin" that
"proves to be a symbolic form of extraordinary pertinacity, elasticity, and
variability."11
It is a construction of political history in which the author
demonstrates a continuous line of politico-theological meaning from a
divine origin to his own present. Voegelin found the phenomenon to be
pervasive from as far into antiquity as written records exist up to the present
day. In every case, the known pragmatic events of an author's past could
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230 Thomas Heiïke
be strung along a line of meaning that demonstrated the continuous and
continued divine sanction of the political and social order in which the
author finds himself. Historiogenesis is, in this sense, "a speculation on the
origin and cause of social order," but it is also the literary legitimation of a
particular order. It emerges "from the cooperation of pragmatic historiography
with mythopoesis and noetic speculation."12
The telling distinction
between "pragmatic history" on the one hand and historiogenesis on the
other is that the single thread of meaning required by the latter frequently
requires its authors to disregard and inventively re-interpret data uncovered
by the former. For example,
The Sumerian Empire was a manifold of city-states under local dynasties,
with an imperial organization superimposed, whenever one of
the cities, not always the same, gained ascendancy over the others
through conquering expansion. Whereas a critical historian would have
to relate the parallel histories of the cities, as well as the changes of
ascendancy, the authors of the King List constructed a unilinear history
of Sumer by placing the parallel city-dynasties in succession on a single
temporal line of rulers, issuing into the restored empire of their own
time. The parallel histories of the cities were abolished, but nevertheless
absorbed into an imaginary, unilinear history of empire. One cosmos, it
appears, can only have one imperial order, and the sin of coexistence
must be atoned by posthumous integration into the one history whose
goal has been demonstrated through the success of the conqueror. If it,
then, be remembered that the imaginary line of kings is extrapolated
to its absolute point of origin in divine-cosmic events, so that nothing
extraneous to it has a chance of disturbing the one and only course
admissible, the construction appears as an act of violence committed
against historical reality. The relevant course of events descends ineluctably
from the cosmic origin down to the present of the authors
whose society is the only one that matters.13
The two apparent motives for such constructions both originate in the
pragmatic, concrete experiences of a society. In the first place, the continued
historical existence of society makes one wonder what constitutes this existence
and what kind of meaning it might have. A society must have existed
long enough for such a "retrospective extrapolation of events of an absolute
starting point [to be] intelligible,"14
but this social stability cannot be taken
for granted. Threats to the stability or even the very existence of a society
make its members anxious, and this anxiety becomes the second motive
for historiogenetic constructions. Temporal and temporary stability, always
threatened by historical impermanence, includes an "imaginative construction"
that converts "temporal gain into a possession forever."15
The rationale for introducing this concept into the discussion of Anabaptist
historiography is three-fold. First, it seems to me that a critique of
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Anabaptist Origins Revisited 231
such historiography as a kind of historiogenetic construction is what the
new historians of Anabaptist heterogenesis that I will review are moving
toward in their critique of the evangelical, unitary thesis. Second, if this
critique has merit, then their historiogenetic critique is a powerful objection
to evangelical ways of writing Anabaptist history. Third, then, we may ask:
if we substituted into Voegelin's account of the Sumerian King List "church"
for kingdom and city-state and imperial order, "theologian" or "Anabaptist
leader" for ruler, and "kingdom of God" for cosmos, would we not have a
crude summary of evangelical Anabaptist historiography? It seems on its
face, at least, that insofar as twentieth-century Mennonites claim theological
(often conjoined with direct biological) descent from the sixteenth-century
Anabaptists, their historiography has clear historiogenetic characteristics in
at least five ways.
First, most Anabaptists had and many Mennonites have a strong "kingdom
theology". In the manner of Augustine, they see the church as one kind
of kingdom in conflict with the political rulers and authorities, as well as the
sociological trends of the "secular" world.16
The desire to render the continuities
of Anabaptist ways of being church intelligible and useful may
usher in a kind of historiogenetic construction that displays the continuity
of the alternate "kingdom" (in the manner of Augustine) of the Anabaptists
as a meaningful unity in both pragmatic or secular and theological history.
Both anxiety, induced by the seeming fragility of this kingdom of faith, and
the observation of seeming continuity despite four hundred years of episodic,
sometimes intense persecution and oppression, are plausible motives
for such constructions of meaning.
Second, Anabaptist historiography of any kind must deal with origins,
which is perhaps its most contentious problem. The evangelical historians
look to certain key events as the locus of Anabaptist origins. Cast under
categories of "rebirth" or "restitution", they look to these originating events
as recapturing an even more distant origin, the Christian church of the first
century. Third, this question is then linked with the phenomenon of continuity,
both of Anabaptism over the last four hundred years, and the
Christian "free church" tradition over the last two thousand. Fourth, there
exists a firm claim of divine sanction or divine blessing in the Anabaptist
story. The Anabaptist and their modern heirs are, after all, attempting to live
faithfully to a calling or standard for which they claim divine approbation
if not command. Finally, the writing of Anabaptist history along these lines
of meaning seems to demand a "selective" use of sources and a definitional
imposition (what is "normative Anabaptism"?). In short, there exists a clear
case for claiming that evangelical histories of Anabaptism are historiogenetic
treatments of the historical data.
Even in the face of such historiogenetic motives among the monogenetic
story-tellers, however, the (re-)discovery of Anabaptist polygenesis does
not put to an end any attempt to tell a coherent story; it merely poses
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232 Thomas Heilke
the necessity of telling the story differently. That this is possible is not
self-evident, yet not unlikely; but I anticipate.
Let us begin by considering specifically the most noted of the writings
from the scholarship that attempts to define a new Anabaptist identity amidst
the fragmented origins. These would include the work of C.P. Ciasen, James
M. Stayer, and Hans-Jürgen Goertz.17
The primary motivation for their work
seems to be two-fold. First, there is a "philological" intent. All three scholars
are trying to get the story straight. All three consciously oppose the story
they read out of the Anabaptist texts and other sources to the unitary
account that evangelical Anabaptists and others have traditionally offered.
Stayer's book, for example, is an examination of the development and
heterogeneity of Anabaptist thinking regarding "the relation of force and
ethical values." This relation, in Stayer's view, is a specifically political
problem, captured by the Anabaptists under the rubric "the doctrine of the
Sword." This doctrine does not indicate an immediate concern with "revolution
and pacifism" as central theoretical issues; rather, according to Stayer,
Anabaptists "were wrestling ... with the ethics of coercion," which they
referred to as the teaching on the sword.18
Stayer develops a typology of
positions on this question, and he discovers that the Anabaptists can be
found on nearly every point of its topography.19
In Stayer's finding, there is
no unified Anabaptist opinion on this question of political coercion, which,
according to their evangelical interpreters, most distinguishes Anabaptists
from any other Christian tradition. With this result in mind, Stayer intends
to deliver a "study of the historical development of a body of thought, not
the systematic exposition of a static theory." He proposes not to "single out"
a definitive Anabaptist doctrine, but to demonstrate "a diversity of Anabaptist
doctrines of the Sword roughly paralleling that which was present
in the first years of the Reformation movement before there were clearly
identifiable Anabaptist sects." This diversity eventually coalesced among
the several Anabaptist groups into a similar radical apoliticism, but only
over a period of time. Stayer concludes that the Anabaptist distinctiveness
on the question of coercion was not based on an initial unity, but on the fact
that "the religious character of the several sects pointed them to a different
ultimate resolution of the issues about the Christian and the Sword from the
ones that won out in the various branches of official Protestantism."20
Initially, then, the "family resemblance"—to use Wittgenstein's term—of
Anabaptists is narrowly circumscribed, nearly formal: "The Anabaptists I
have investigated are necessarily united only by the outer sign that gave
them their label: they are members of sects practicing baptism of believers
and forming religious groups on that basis. Any other general qualities of
Anabaptism will have to be assigned on an a posteriori rather than a priori,
basis."21
There appears, therefore, to be only a formal Anabaptist identity,
but no universal or unitary Anabaptist qualities, and no clearly determinative
Anabaptist origins or Anabaptist visions of the good life.
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Anabaptist Origins Revisited 233
Clasen's book was published in the same year as Stayer's. Ciasen wants to
examine "the structure and nature of the Anabaptist movement itself." This
seems a quixotic effort in our post-Kantian context. What, after all, is a
"movement itself"? According to Ciasen, it is discovered by approaching
"the Anabaptist movement from the point of view of social history", which
is an attempt "to understand Anabaptism in the context of the sixteenth century
German society, not to formulate a sociological model." Thus, Ciasen
seeks to present a study "based strictly on fact."22
His approach is avowedly
"quantitative": how many Anabaptists lived in what towns? How many
converts to Anabaptism were there in any given year? What occupations did
Anabaptists have? How did Anabaptists organize themselves, economically
and ecclesiologically? What did they do, empirically speaking? What was
done to them?
Ciasen writes in that era when there was considerable optimism among
social scientists regarding the intrinsic intelligibility and power of empirical
studies, and it would hardly be to the point to rehearse yet again the decisive
objections to many of the claims of such endeavors. That facts only appear
as facts within a contextual matrix is no longer news. Suffice it to say that
we know there are no "facts" apart from interpretive structures that give
them their "place" in a coherent whole.23
But this well-sung refrain has implications
for Clasen's study that should not be shrugged aside and that
I will examine presently. For the moment, let us note that Clasen's study
also opens a space for questioning monogenesis. Questioning this premise is
not an initial motivation of his work, but observations of doctrines and
behaviors lead him to the conclusion that Anabaptism was, in its doctrines,
practices, and adherents, pluralistic, if not polygenetic.
Goertz's work takes up where Stayer's leaves off, with a nod to Clasen's
efforts. Unlike Stayer, Goertz seeks a common motivation among Anabaptists
that would give their "family resemblance" more depth. This would
give us a better conceptual grip on what Anabaptists were about than the
formal, descriptive appellation with which Stayer begins and seemingly
ends. Like Stayer and Ciasen, Goertz begins with the premise that the
Anabaptists must be understood in the context of the social and ecclesiastical
politics of their time. Their unique but disparate doctrines and practices are,
consequently, the direct product of an engagement with their political
environment.24
According to Goertz, the various features of the heterogeneous
Anabaptist groups of the sixteenth century have in common an
"anticlerical impulse" that can be traced through every ecclesiological,
social, and political practice unique to them.25
Anabaptism in all its manifestations
is defined by anticlericalism, which is the source of any "family
resemblance" among them. Although this looks like a new monogenesis
at the motivational level, Goertz suggests its normative implications are
heterogeneous or polymorphic, and therefore indeterminate.
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234 Thomas Heilke
From Polygenesis to a New Story
I have suggested that the first motivation of the work of Stayer, Ciasen, and
Goertz rests in an effort to get the story straight. But this effectively opens up
a second motivation in the midst of the first: each wants to tell a story of his
own. For the "evangelical Mennonites", the history of early Anabaptism is
ultimately a story of God's activity in history, with which later Anabaptists
can identify and in which they can discover moral and ethical resources for
living their own story by continuing in what has gone before.26
A socialscientific
approach to Anabaptist origins and history results not only in a
disruption of this evangelical story, but in its replacement.
Being a principled scholar, Stayer clarifies his historiography with two
remarks that help us to understand what he is doing. First, he calls himself
a "profane historian with a liberal perspective." We are led to believe that
this characterizes the history he writes as "profane history", which is contrasted
in particular with the history that "Anabaptist evangelicalism" tells.
The problem with the latter, in Stayer's view, is that it "imposes on the disparate
Anabaptist sects a consistency and a system which do not correspond
to sixteenth-century realities."27
His profane perspective is intended to
provide a critical distance from such religiously or politically motivated
interpretations. Evangelical Anabaptism is "an abstraction of limited utility,"
containing "within it phenomena which [are] stubbornly different
from one another." These phenomena would "have to be understood in
an historical context even if in a differently constructed one from Holl's
Schwärmertum."28
Accordingly, whereas the evangelical Anabaptist historians
seek an identity, a single thread of continuous meaning in the story of the
Anabaptists, Stayer is uninterested in or dubious about such a "confessional"
enterprise. Instead, the meaning of the story resides for him in the
gradual resolution of conflicting dogmas and mediating political experiences.
His hope is for a continuing "rationality and progress of knowledge,"
which begins with a focus on "interacting groups and sects, rather than [the]
unified movement" depicted in Evangelical historiography.29
But what does this mean? When he is confronted with the sixteenthcentury
Anabaptists' political doctrines, Stayer acknowledges in a second
remark a realpolitical liberalism that regards the Anabaptist doctrine of
nonresistance (which finally won the day as the movement coalesced) as
quixotic and unpersuasive, but as perhaps the most relevant "to the historical
situation of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists."30
Even though an
"absolute rejection of the pragmatic, and of social responsibility ... is built
into the ethics of non-resistance," the Anabaptist response is an expedient
response to their sociopolitical situation. Its political effectiveness and its
meaning beyond a pragmatism that insures survival appear to be nil.31
In a helpful review of Stayer's argument, John H. Yoder takes up this
evaluation and shows that "prior theological and world view commitments"
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Anabaptist Origins Revisited 235
will affect the "meaningful unity" Stayer constructs from the data he
examines. Yoder does not directly contest Stayer's critique of the evangelical
Anabaptist historiography, but he does contend that Stayer's prior commitments
lead him to misunderstand some of the variation in Anabaptist
criticisms of the political authorities of their time. Stayer's realpolitical
commitments force the need for an ideological consistency on Anabaptist
positions that excludes, ex hypothesi, a number of possibilities for dialogue
that Anabaptists wanted to entertain. Thus, Anabaptism may be polygenetic,
and it may vary across its responses to varied political situations,
but this pluralism is a principled pluralism that finds its identity in an
underlying unity of hope and purpose concerning the political realm.32
If
a realpolitical liberalism obscures the principled yet pliable stance of the
Anabaptists, then they cannot be partners in discussion, but only contestants
in conflict.
It would appear, then, that Stayer's real-historical perspective measures
success by survival, not by a faithfulness to a story that must take some
account of the situation. His position does not thereby contest the Anabaptist
perspective, but undermines or subverts it, because he relocates the
meaning of the Anabaptist story. For Stayer, principled pacifism and nonresistance
(whose manifestations may vary with the political situation) are
rooted not in an effort at obedience to a story as it is delivered in an
authoritative text, but in an Anabaptist political illegitimacy that makes such
pacifism expedient.33
Stayer's "profane" history is a history written from the
perspective of the Realpolitiker, in which pacifism and non-resistance are
neither "true", nor faithful, but expedient. Anabaptism's plural origins and
its hesitant, historically mediated progress toward unity are, for Stayer (and
Goertz), evidence of this assertion. For the evangelical interpreter, however,
the same data are evidence of readiness to rational discussion, willingness
for negotiation and careful assessment of the situation, but without sacrifice
of core principles. Thus, Stayer's finding of Anabaptist pluralism on certain
central doctrines leads him, out of his interpretive commitment to Realpolitik,
to dismiss Anabaptists as partners in discussion on grounds of both incoherence
and opportunism.
Stayer's claim of pluralist development are a critique not only of contemporary
evangelical Mennonite claims of continuity, but, more importantly,
of their own (and, most likely, earlier Anabaptists') self-understanding. It
seems to imply that peaceableness is a product of expediency, not a recovery
of an original, biblical vision. (We will see that Goertz's and Clasen's work
produce similar results). Yet Stayer's findings of doctrinal fragmentation do
not proceed to a typologically necessary conclusion. First, we may learn
lessons and clarify our principles in light of practical experience, but that
does not vitiate their moral insight, nor make them merely exercises in
expedience. Second, peaceableness is neither a necessary nor historically
frequent response to persecution or political oppression. Violent resistance
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236 Thomas Heilke
and an ongoing quest for revenge are more likely. Indeed, as Yoder points
out, there is no evidence that any of the doctrinal or practical outcomes in the
Radical Reformation are predetermined. Sociological explanations that exclude
not merely "religious impulses", but faithfulness to a vision or the
possibility of an historically circumscribed theophany are not only theoretically
overdetermined, they are only partially supported by the evidence.34
Stayer's perspective allows him to dismiss the possibility that peaceableness
is not merely a politically expedient stance, but a stance based on a wider
"kingdom theology" that has both deeper sources and broader implications
than one's immediate relations to the ruling authorities, and that strictly
limits the role of expedience as a political directive for survival.
We see similar outcomes in Goertz's attempt to relocate the Anabaptist
"family resemblance" in an "anticlericalism". In Goertz's view, a variety of
Anabaptist activities and doctrines, including their use of biblical writings,
their practice of sanctified living, their pacifism, their demand for a
believer's church independent of the ruling political authorities, and their
interpretation of standard Christian doctrines (Lord's Supper, Eucharist,
etc.) reduces to one or another form of anticlericalism. Like Stayer's interpretation,
however, this conceptualization is effectively an attempt to retell
the Anabaptist story. Thus, we may call Dirk Willems' famous rescue of
his pursuer (who then had him arrested and ultimately executed) from the
frozen river into which he had fallen an act of anticlericalism insofar as it
displays a degree of faithfulness to an ethic of agape or love for the enemy
that few "clerics" of the Magisterial churches either preached or demon-
strated.35
But such self-sacrifice seems to stretch the definitional function of
the category beyond what is useful or credible. Certainly, the violence of the
Batenburgers, a sect immediately descended from the Münster Anabaptists
and with whom Willems or his peaceable companions had to contend, is also
"anti-clerical", but to much different effect. Thus, the term itself does not
provide us with the resources to make sufficient ethical distinctions within
stories or between them. Adding such resources—if we procure them from
a story of faithfulness rather than from a real-historical story—is already to
retell the story in such a way that its meaning moves beyond Goertz's
anticlerical appellation.
To put it another way, anticlericalism is an epiphenomenon of Anabaptism,
an accidental quality attendant to Anabaptist activity that does not
capture what Anabaptists seem to have thought they were doing.36
Thus, the
doctrines and activities of anticlericalism (biblicism, separatist ecclesiology,
adult immersion, moral discipline, and so on) are "anti-clerical", because
they are the activities of the citizens of one kingdom in contrast to the
activities of the citizens of another kingdom, whose most powerful and
articulate representatives happen to be in significant part the clergy of the
Magisterial churches. Anticlericalism is the surface of the story, not its
depth. Goertz reads a surface phenomenon, an accident that seems to be
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Anabaptist Origins Revisited 237
universally present among the Anabaptists, for the essential "family resemblance".
To exchange one for the other is to tell a different story, not necessarily
to render a better "explanation". It is the different story Goertz tells
that makes this move in nomenclature intelligible. In the story he replaces,
the practice of a sanctified life, not anticlericalism per se, may lead to a
diatribe against the "shepherds", whose assigned (but neglected) task it
seems originally to have been to assure the conditions for such a life. The
practices of the Anabaptists lead to an implicit or even explicit critique of
those who do not live up to their self-assigned claims in the way the
Anabaptists attempt to do, but Anabaptist practice itself is not the critique of
the clergy per se, and it precedes this latter activity.37
In the new story, which
Ciasen articulates more sharply in this register than Goertz, anticlericalism
is an immediate expression of resentment, embitterment, and populist
distrust of education. Ciasen rightly points out the execrable excesses of the
Anabaptists in their criticisms of the clergy, but these misdeeds do not
remove the possibility of loftier motives—among at least some or even many
of the Anabaptists—as the initiating impulse for such critique.38
Goertz's and Clasen's recasting of the story raises anew the questions that
Stayer's retelling invokes. What will be the "narrative base" from which we
tell the story?39
Will it be a narrative of essential conflict and violence, or of
prophetic faithfulness and hope? Stayer himself seems ultimately to want to
avoid disrupting the Evangelical Anabaptist tradition, preferring perhaps to
attenuate its basis:
The revolutionary (and in many areas mystical-spiritualist) beginnings
of sixteenth-century Anabaptism must not be allowed to obscure the
peaceful, biblicist, sectarian and separatist character of the mature
movement. It is the need to revise and enlarge, without destroying, the
vision of Anabaptism of the earlier generation of commitedly proAnabaptist
historians that makes polemic so inappropriate at this
juncture.40
But what does this mean? Along with Ciasen, Stayer explicitly states that the
evangelical perspective is—methodologically, at least—uninteresting, and
Goertz suggests the same.41
Instead, they ask us to assume the perspective of
the real-historian. To do so, however, implies that we historicize and then
relativize the tradition that Stayer does not intend to disable. In his words,
"A major thesis of the book was that separatist non-resistance alone survived
the sixteenth century because it was the most realistic of the competing
Anabaptist teachings on the Sword."42
To repeat, the question here is
expedience and survivability, not faithfulness, vision, or hope. For Goertz, it
is enough to conclude that the plurality itself of Anabaptists in the sixteenth
century brings their significance for a modern normative theological determination
into doubt.43
The intensely contextual nature of their anticlericalism,
moreover, makes their particular theological insights, derived from a
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238 Thomas Heilke
particular historical context, of little value for contemporary problems.
Accordingly, the normative demand of theology or ecclesiastical historiography
cannot be founded "scientifically", which is to say, in a social or
doctrinal history.44
Such a history discovers conflict, but without a determinative
normative vision.
The conclusions of Stayer and Goertz, then, do not merely add new data
to the debate, but rather, they deny an alternative core of Anabaptist selfunderstanding,
which subsists in what one might call a "prophetic vision".
A return to the prophetic [an understanding found mainly in the great
prophets of the Old Testament and in Jesus] understanding of the
sacred— this is the heart of the radical religion of Anabaptism. It would
be incorrect to say that no others in their time had grasped this
understanding of things. A measure of it existed in Protestantism as well
as in Roman Christianity. But the Anabaptists were practically the only
ones who sought to find and express God's will in radically personal
and communal terms.45
In such a reading, the activity of God in history is paramount for every
leader in the early Anabaptist movements. As part of this divine activity,
Jesus of Nazareth is the founder of a new kingdom. The significance of this
claim for Christian ethics—i.e., how to live up to the appellation, "Christian"—is
multifold, but two strands stand out in the context of our
discussion.
First, the ethical perspective and principles of behaviour of this new
kingdom stand in marked contrast to the ethical perspectives and principles
of conduct in the earthly kingdoms of the larger world, where the citizens
of the new kingdom are still physically located as resident aliens. In the
Anabaptist view of the church, citizens of Jesus' kingdom have, by joining
that kingdom, made a conscious choice to live in a new way with new
norms. For example, they will love their enemies, they will renounce selfishness
and violence, and they will submit themselves to disciplined communities
of faith. The sociopolitical implications of such a stance include a
skepticism regarding the claims of the state or the political authorities over
the lives of its/their citizens or subjects, most particularly in cases when
the ruling political authorities pretend to godly sanction. Anabaptists are
enabled to live up to the demands of their new citizenship by reason of
the second strand of God's activity; the new kingdom is God's ongoing work
in the world, and Anabaptists have become a part of it. The current work of
the kingdom of God belongs to its members in partnership with God.46
Thus,
a description of the new kingdom and of its members' participation in it
must take the form of a story. The kingdom has a past, a present, and a
future. Its members enter that narrative (for the Anabaptists, in faith through
baptism) and continue to work out the narrative into which they are
adopted.47
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Anabaptist Origins Revisited 239
The analyses of Ciasen, Stayer, and Goertz all lead to a retelling of this
story, which implies a denial of Anabaptist claims at several levels. The core
of their claims, I think, has been recast in John Milbank's account of social
and political theory in the West since Machiavelli. According to Milbank,
Western social and political theory, regardless of school, thinker, or national
origin, has been subtended by a theological meta-narrative deliberately set
off in contrast to the traditional narrative of Christianity. This meta-narrative
has been consistently underwritten by an ontology of violence that none of
its indigenous critics have overcome, despite consistent attempts to supersede
it. The metanarrative that Milbank traces takes for granted essential
ontological premises regarding the necessary role of force and violence in
human affairs. His ultimate intent is to discover an alternative narrative
that denies the necessity of violence. He looks to one strand in the Christian
tradition, displayed in constructs like Augustine's theology of the two
cities, to do so. This tradition rejects violence as the regulating principle of
either human or divine acts, and it proposes to replace it with an ontology
of peaceableness. My suggestion is that this is what those Anabaptists
who took up non-resistance as a personal and communal ethic were also
trying to do. Goertz's "anticlericalism", Stayer's "expedience", and Clasen's
"social history", however, all extend a metanarrative of violence into a selfinterpretation
of peaceableness and the belief that such peaceableness is a
real possibility.
This move, moreover, is easy enough to understand. After all, an ethic of
peaceableness is fragile—in connection with the Anabaptists, the personal
eruptions of Thomas Müntzer48
, the political eruption at Münster, and the
subsequent marauding of the Batenburgers, for example, are evidence that
peaceableness is indeed a delicate plant. As Milbank has it, such evidence
can only be overcome with a counter-story of God's peaceable and loving
relationship with human beings. Its fundamental characteristics from both
the divine and human sides are ultimately displayed in the life of Jesus, but
also in the lives of martyrs like Willems.49
It is the display of this life that
Anabaptists—at least as an evangelical interpreter reads the [same] evidence—seemed
to want to emulate.
The real-historical or social-historical analysis of Anabaptism, then, is a
denial of peaceableness as an ethical possibility. This denial displays itself
in curious, seemingly picayune details in the new stories Stayer, Goertz,
and especially Ciasen tell. As an example, let us note the difficulty Ciasen
experiences in his brief discussion of the Anabaptist martyrs. Death, that
stark limit and deep chasm before which we each must stand, forces upon
us the question of the meaning of the thin thread we call our life. The Anabaptists
responded with a story of the kingdom of which they saw themselves
a part. Faithfulness and hopeful obedience to its dictates and a
willingness to die in that obedience were, therefore, the substance of
their lives' meaning and the basis of their courage. Ciasen disregards this
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240 Thomas Heilke
self-interpretation, and the result includes strikingly banal observations
regarding, for example, the executions of Anabaptists. He notes that "Erhard
reports that on their way to the gallows some Anabaptists were fearful, if not
terrified, and depressed." "Under immense nervous strain," he continues,
"some of the Anabaptists doomed to die behaved in a most unusual way.
One brother who lost his shoes in the mud along the road did not even look
back and went right on singing."50
This curiously detailed and descriptive
account that is somehow trite and without any concern for the meaning of the
Anabaptists' death is not a trivial difficulty: Clasen's methods cause him to
miss the possibility that martyrdom is a form of political witness within a
coherent ethic, as Stanley Hauerwas has argued in another context:
For it was through martyrdom that the church triumphed over Rome.
Rome could kill Christians but they [sic] could not victimize them. The
martyrs could go to their death confident that the story to which their
killers were trying to subject them—that is the story of victimization—
was not the true story of their death. To Rome Christians dying for their
faith was an irrational act. For the martyrs their dying was part of a story
that Rome could not acknowledge and remain in power as Rome.
Thus, the most determinative political witness the church had against
Rome was martyrdom. By remembering the martyrs, the church in effect
said, "You may kill us, but you cannot determine the meaning of our
deaths." Rome does not get to tell the story of our lives, but rather the
church claims to be the triumphant political community that knows the
truth of our existence better than Rome. The church—exactly because it
does not seek to rule through violence, though it necessarily manifests
God's rule—triumphs by remembering the victory of the Lamb through
the witness of the martyrs.51
On this account, Clasen's social history turns the story of Anabaptist
martyrdom into a story of victimhood. Like Stayer, he renders their story(s)
essentially meaningless.52
This meaninglessness of the Anabaptist story is
highlighted for Ciasen by the historical ineffectiveness of this "minor
episode in the history of sixteenth-century German society."53
In Clasen's
curious reading of Anabaptist doctrine, "it was a fantasy to hope that love
could take the place of law and government."54
Accordingly, Ciasen denies
the Anabaptist witness; although he sympathetically suggest that "if we do
not recognize the spiritual force of Anabaptism, we fail to understand the
movement altogether," his own implicit "methodological atheism" prevents
him from doing so in a way that makes sense of this aspect of the story.55
One
wonders what, precisely, a "religious impulse" or a "spiritual force" is.56
Ciasen recognizes and pointedly argues that Anabaptism must be reckoned
as a social phenomenon, because "Anabaptism was not just a set of doctrines
and practices to be followed; it deeply changed the life of the believer,"
which had strong implications for how the believer conducted himself or
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Anabaptist Origins Revisited 241
herself in the world.57
In his estimation, however, "The Anabaptists had'no
discernible impact on the political, economic, or social institutions of their
age," nor did they have much "if any, influence on sixteenth-century
culture." He finds it unlikely that the later notion of the separation of church
and state was in any way derived form earlier Anabaptist formulations.58
Anabaptist Historiogenesis?
It is no accident, I think, that neither Stayer, Ciasen, nor Goertz are ultimately
able to move from scholarly curiosity to finding much of use in
the Anabaptist story. Their narrative base denies them this possibility. The
Anabaptist story loses its ethical significance, precisely because a "realpolitical"
stance or "methodological atheism" excludes it. But this outcome
does not make their story untrue, so we must ask: what of the contrasting
story of Anabaptist unity that evangelical Mennonites once told? What is the
purpose and use of that story? Can it be sustained in the face of the empirical
research Goertz, Ciasen, and Stayer provide? Are much of their data concerning
pluralism simply ignored, as Stayer asserts,59
or are these data themselves
not in question here, but only the story the authors make of them?
Can other interpretations of Anabaptist history find rich resources in these
works, and can these resources serve as important controls on any subsequent
interpretation of Anabaptism? Are not the metanarratives and
presumptive motives of these stories likewise eligible for scrutiny?
Let us consider briefly three such narratives. Harold Bender's well-known
article, "The Anabaptist Vision," is more an analysis or even synthesis of
events than a story as such, but his treatment of Anabaptism subsumes a
clear narrative. There is, in Bender's reading, an "Anabaptist spirit" or "Anabaptist
vision" that makes the emergence of Anabaptism as a discernible
movement the "culmination of the Reformation, the fulfillment of the original
vision of Luther and Zwingli." This vision was lost by these two
reformers in the ongoing events and decisions of the early Reformation, but
it was retained by the Anabaptists, who broke with the predominant
Reformation trend. Who is and who is not to be counted among this latter
group is clear.60
The story moves down to the present day in a well-defined
way. The "heterogeneity" of non-Lutheran or non-Zwinglian Christian
groups, moreover, is neither denied nor overlooked; its constituents are
simply differently characterized: "There is no longer any excuse for permitting
our understanding of the distinct character of this genuine Anabaptism
to be obscured by Thomas Müntzer and the Peasants War, the
Münsterites, or any other aberration of Protestantism in the sixteenth cen-
tury."61
There is, as Stayer complains, a "normative Anabaptism" and all
the rest.
Walter Klaassen's account, which appeared a year before Stayer's analysis,
is a more extended formulation of Bender's brief articulation of the
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242 Thomas Heilke
Anabaptist vision. Where Bender focussed on a new conceptualization of
Christianity as discipleship, church as brotherhood, and love and nonresistance
as the proper Christian activity as the major constituents of the
Anabaptist vision, Klaassen widens this vision to consider more of the
practical problems such a vision encounters and the sorts of political, social,
ecclesiological and ethical solutions it proffers. Klaassen is particularly
interested, as I have already noted, in stressing the "prophetic" character of
this vision.62
Perhaps because his treatment is more extended, Klaassen
acknowledges more readily than Bender that at least some of the Anabaptist
"aberrations" must, in fact, be recognized as part of the story of Anabaptism
itself, not as entirely extrinsic phenomena. Like Bender, however, Klaassen
sees in Anabaptism a spiritually motivated unity of purpose, motivation,
and vision that the real-historians replace or deny.
Klaassen extends the Anabaptist story into the present by suggesting that
many of the problems in established Christianity to which Anabaptists
responded are the problems of established Christianity today. Indeed, he
sees Anabaptism ecclesiologically and sociologically reborn in contemporary
debates. Contra the real-historians, the Anabaptist story has, in this sense
at least, historical continuity.
More explicitly than either Klaassen or Bender, J. Denny Weaver acknowledges
"the different origins and the diverse histories of the several early
Anabaptist movements."63
Despite this polygenetic heterogeneity, however,
Weaver insists on a "shared outlook" that consists in a set of "common
beliefs and practices" that "did develop—if something short of a homogenous
theology—at least enough in common that one can follow its legacy
through clearly identifiable streams into the last quarter of the twentieth
century."64
Moreover, this common stream is part of an even wider current
of movements, which, if "not causally related, ... all reflect a way of being
the church identifiable throughout Christian history." This stance allows
Weaver the title of his final chapter, "The Meaning of Anabaptism," in a way
that the approaches of Stayer, et al. would not. Weaver demonstrates that the
heterogeneity and polygenesis of Anabaptism can be subsumed under the
broad intention of living faithfully to a vision and understanding of Christian
practice without denying the real cleavages that this heterogeneity
produces or the historically delimited context in which the practical working
out of such a vision must take place. Thus, trading back real-political
motivations for "religious" ones re-establishes the possibility of a unitary
meaning in Anabaptism without ignoring the historical data more recent,
less "religiously" motivated studies have brought to light. Perhaps most
important for any evangelical interpretation of the story, by reasserting the
priority of a historical vision that affirms the regulative moral authority of a
tradition of faith handed down through several millennia, it denies without
historical falsification Goertz's conclusion that sixteenth-century Anabaptism
speaks in no meaningful way to its modern students. In the end, perhaps
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Anabaptist Origins Revisited 243
Weaver, Klaassen, and Bender see a historical continuity in the problems
Anabaptism addresses that Goertz, Ciasen, and Stayer do not. That a realpolitical
stance—which assumes a structural continuity in human affairs
through time—should produce this historicist result is one of its prevailing
ironies.65
In the accounts of Weaver, Klaassen, and Bender, Anabaptism cannot be
reduced to expressions of resentment, powerlessness, or illegitimacy. Anabaptists
themselves, these authors suggest, had something else in mind, a
more positive agenda by which they identified themselves. It might be
described as "recovery" or "restoration".66
What they sought to "recover" or
"restore" was the manifestation in practice of an image of the good life, or,
to speak with Paul and James rather than Plato, the just life, or, to use an
Anabaptist term, the "God-pleasing" life.67
The image was rendered for the
Anabaptists in the stories of the Old and New Testaments, both in the form
of specific commands, but more generally in the form of narratives that
illustrated how to live out such commands or what a life that embodied such
commands might look like. In contrast to the real-historians, the evangelical
interpreters insist on the essential pertinence of this vision for contemporary
concerns and practices. Its content includes what I have noted in passing:
non-resistance pacifism; a new conception of church as brotherhood and
separated from political power; the practice of peace and agape as central to
Christian ethics; a prophetic stance toward the powers that be.
The real-historians and the evangelical historians are not so radically
separated in their enquiry, however, that we cannot contrast them along a
common line. All want to tell a story, a unifying tale with an underlying
"lesson." For the former group, the lesson is realhistorical—the modern
relevance of the Anabaptist story is nil, itself an affirmation of realpolitical
principles concerning the historical relativity of moral questions. For the
latter group, the moral continuities provide resources for present practices.
Thus, we return to the question of historiogenesis.
Although the stories of the real-historians may themselves be a part of a
competing historiogenesis (a credible possibility I leave aside here68
), they
clearly have the function of disrupting the unitary evangelical alternative
with their "pragmatic historical" claims. We must ask, then, whether any
attempt to make an Anabaptist vision pertinent for present concerns requires
the kind of historiogenetic construction we surveyed earlier. The
question is pertinent in a consideration of real-historical evaluations of
Anabaptism, because such evaluations tend in the direction of this assertion.
Not to raise the issue is to beg nearly every question real-historians direct at
evangelical interpretations. The answer falls into two parts.
First, Voegelin's use of historiogenesis, which he regards in the same class
of literary constructions as theogony, anthropogony, and cosmogony, tends
to reduce all stories to a kind of mythopoetic "speculation", thereby
subordinating them, in his analysis, to philosophy. This, too, is a tendency of
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244 Thomas Heilke
realpolitical or real-historical studies. But an analysis of narrative theology
suggests that the category of historiogenesis (or other concepts in its class)
cannot itself be the last word for Voegelin's philosophy of history. Put
briefly, I have suggested throughout this essay that the evangelicals and
real-historians are offering two alternate narrative contexts within which to
understand moral reflection (scholars or "unbelievers" who offer a hostile
monogenetic account have yet another). The real-historical account insists
that power and interest defined in terms of power—which is to say, violence
and the necessity of violence for establishing political stability and legitimacy—is
the proper context for comprehending the meaning of any story,
including the Anabaptist one. Powerlessness and secular political illegitimacy
breed their own theologies and ethics, but over the long-term, these
are of little interest and even less importance. The Anabaptist view of the
world, is, therefore, a product of the resentments, power struggles, and
political illegitimacies of a particular time and place. It may be of interest to
the antiquarian, but it is of no use for understanding the contemporary
situation, which continues to reflect the truth of realism and the moral
relativism/situationalism that attends it.
The evangelical interpretation, on the other hand, takes for granted a
narrative context for understanding ethics—past and present—and God's
activity in the world.69
Moreover, it rejects the real-historical premise concerning
the necessary ubiquity of power as the defining element of every
human relation. And finally, it suggest that there is no ultimate meaning
"behind" the story of Anabaptism it tells. It is the story itself that is a
manifestation of the new kingdom of which the evangelical narrator wants
to be a part.70
In response to a charge of historiogenesis, the evangelical historian
suggests that the Anabaptist story, as told from an evangelical perspective,
can be historiogenetic, but it need not be. It does take account of a kind of
continuous kingdom, but this continuity may not be materially and
politically manifested, which is not the case in imperial historiogenesis. It
does take origins into account as well, but unlike most foundation myths,
the founding of this kingdom tells of the death of the founder, and the
subsequent martyrdom of its citizens and refounders, including the Ana-
baptists.71
It thereby indicates a rejection of the violence that characterizes the
narrative base of all other historiogeneses. Third, then, the continuity of this
kingdom is based not on human will, force, and violence, but on God's
grace. It is, therefore, "not of this world," which is to say, its divine sanction
is not a justification for violence, but a protest against it. Finally, the problem
of "definition" is not unique to Anabaptist historiography, but attends all
historical accounts, accordingly, criticizing a move toward definition is
question-begging. We may avoid "the creation of idealized and systematic
pictures of all the Reformation groups" in an "exploitation of history for
purposes of theological apologetics,"72
but that does not obviate the need for
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Anabaptist Origins Revisited 245
an interpretive framework, regardless of our historiographie intent. On a
wider register, then, the problems of Anabaptist historiography are similar
for any group of believers who seek to give intelligibility and meaning to
their tradition of practices. In each case, the identification of a "narrative
base" in Newbigin's terminology or a "metanarrative" in Milbank's is the
primary step towards identifying both the integrity and the God-conforming
truthfulness of our story over against any number of attempts to retell it.73
The necessary and sufficient condition for historiogenesis is, on this
account, the exclusionary, triumphalist element that lies at the heart of the
constructions Voegelin examined, and that asserts itself as a justification for
violence in human affairs and as an "explanation" for the divinely sanctioned
success of that violence. Although every community "has externality
as one of its important components," Voegelin suggested it "is as a whole a
little world, a cosmion, illuminated with meaning from within by the human
beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of
their self-realization." The meaning of such a "little world" is "illuminated
through an elaborate symbolism," of which historiogenesis is one conduit.74
If we drop the triumphalist pretense and its subtext of violence, however,
the apparent Anabaptist "historiogenesis" of its "community of faith" takes
on a radically different meaning for this "little world" than the historiogenetic
construction of the other "little worlds" that inhabit the story of
humankind up to the present. Faithfulness, martyrdom, and vision give
continuity in this story, not divine sanction manifested in violence and
political power. The evangelical tale is, therefore, quasi-Augustinian. (It is
not precisely Augustinian, because it denies the use of force to either
establish or maintain the kingdom of God, whereas Augustine eventually
accepted such practice). It is the tale of a different kingdom, whose divine
sanction is manifested not in political power, but in the ability to remain
faithful. This also means that its continuation does not depend on the use of
violence, which historiogenetic myths serve to justify. Moreover, it means
that the continuation of the kingdom is not only a divine act, but a divine
challenge. The construction of the story is not meant only to illustrate
historical continuity, but prophetically to inspire it. This inspiration becomes
a corner-stone of "the mode and condition" of "self-realization" for those
who "create and bear" the kingdom story.
The perspective I have drawn here actually permits a new kind of
historical freedom. The stories of Anabaptists need not be inserted willynilly
along a single line of meaning, forcing the "facts" that real-historical
studies uncover into predetermined results in order to make them meaningful
along predetermined lines. In this case, there need not be an anxiety that
may result either in despair or triumphalism and that betrays the "emotional
confusion" that ushers in mythopoetry.75
Instead, there is a story that expresses
a clear vision embodied in the story itself. The scope of the vision
permits critique, course correction, and new creative modes for its realization
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246 Thomas Heilke
in time. It is not bound by the necessities of realism, and it does not strictly
belong to the historiogenetic type.
The Anabaptist (Augustinian) Counter-Narrative
Historiogenetic constructs are one way to symbolize the historical continuity
of a perceived political/cultural unity. They are not merely a "pretext" for
violence, nor merely a self-serving justification for it, although they do
perform these functions. They are also accounts of the historical continuity
of a specific community, thereby rendering that continuity and the peace
of the community's citizens in it meaningful. They help to make sacrifice
(including a willingness to kill or die) for the sake of a community both
possible and intelligible. An evangelical Anabaptist history of God's kingdom
(I have used Jesus' overt political term intentionally) serves similar
functions. And as the wider discussion of Newbigin and Milbank, for
example, show, similar histories serve these functions in other Christian
narratives. But historiogenetic constructions must be understood not only
in terms of their form, but their intent. Whereas the intent of political
historiogenesis is both to justify violence and render it intelligible, the
evangelical intent is to extract an intelligible line of meaning from what is
admittedly a set of heterogeneous and heterogenetic events, but to do so
in a way that displays the possibility of peaceableness and faithfulness,
not violence. It does so to fulfill a need, being a narrative that attributes
meaning. Joyce Clemmer Munro has well described the need for such
narrative—hinted at, but not fully articulated in Weaver, Bender's or
Klaassen's work:
I am not a trained historian, but I am an American Mennonite hunting
for workable fragments from our experience, partly because the rest
of the world—before it considers me anything (female, Christian, Mennonite,
mother, student of literature, writer)—considers me an American.
So I must examine my Mennonite roots in the context of the American
soil in which they have taken nourishment these past three hundred
years. As a person particularly interested in storytelling and the force of
storytelling among my people, I want a history that will 'see life steadily
and see it whole,' a view of our past from which good fiction, good
philosophy, good theology, good poetry, good art and good deeds can
grow.76
I would suggest, then, that interpreters in the school of Goertz, Ciasen, and
Stayer cannot (as Stayer himself seems cheerfully to admit) have the last
word. As long as the Mennonite descendants of Anabaptism remain a recognizable
group with a past, a present, and the hope of a future, its members
will continue to explore the basis for the "family resemblance" that allows
them to "see life steadily and see it whole" so that they may have the
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Anabaptist Origins Revisited 247
resources to live the life their family resemblance demands. Real-historical
works deliver a plenitude of "facts", incidents, or findings that may attenuate
unifying claims that can themselves ail-too easily become exclusivist,
insular, and even triumphalist—a long stride toward historiogenesis. Insofar
as these works purport to tell a story of their own, however, they cannot
be a final word in the matter, nor, perhaps, even a particularly encouraging
word—they merely open a new realm of contestation. Thus, being a
"believer" produces a no more recognizably fideist stance than any other
perspective. It simply produces (or demands) a different story. And this
story is no more closed to scrutiny in its defence of its "truth" than any other.
Indeed, an openness to peaceable discussion may make it less so.
This openness poses a challenge from Anabaptists to their Christian confreres
in other traditions. Milbank, whose critique of social-scientific readings
closely informs the present account, offers a pertinent example of how
this challenge operates. Having developed a Christian counter-narrative of
peace over against the ontological violence inherent in every form of modern
social-scientific reasoning, he moves to an Augustinian justification for the
(albeit tragic) Christian use of violence.77
On an Anabaptist reading, this
move seems to be an act of faithlessness again the story God reveals in the
life of Jesus.78
A perceived appeal to steer historical events for the sake of
the neighbor's well-being, thereby taking up against the violence one has
refused an identical counter-violence (even if for noble ends), is an insufficient
imperative in the Anabaptist view. Faithfulness, rather, consists of
letting God take responsibility for history, which is to say, the members of
His kingdom do not forsake peaceableness, regardless of the ends or consequences.
As Guy Hershberger has suggested, moreover, Augustinian
moves of this kind may too readily discount the creative measures peaceableness
can take against the world's violence that so quickly justifies
seemingly noble-minded counter-violence.79
Thus, it is certainly the case
that the problems of Anabaptist historiography I have recounted here could
be used as a practical example of how to read a believer's story both as
narrative and "counter-narrative" over against a host of hostile contenders
(as Milbank has so ably done). Important as this lesson might be, however,
it would miss the deeper point of the Anabaptist story, which is to present
a narrative of the kingdom not as method (as either a "Machiavellian" or
genealogical or real-historical reading of this story might suggest), but as
substance, that substance being the peaceableness of God.
To argue that meaning is self-assigned would, in a Christian context, be
idolatrous. To suggest, however, that Christians explore their stories to find
there the resources for living well or living faithfully is only to enjoin them
to engage in a kind of political theory in one context and theology in another.
Literature does so without being asked. Perhaps, then, "peoplehood", "faithfulness",
"restitution", or "people of God",80
to name only four, are, in fact,
useful and not self-authenticating categories for exploring new ways of
Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997.
248 Thomas Heilke
delivering the elusive family resemblance that constitutes Anabaptism, and
for considering the ongoing Anabaptist challenge to hear anew God's story
as told in the Anabaptist instantiation of His kingdom.
NOTES
I My thanks to Ryan Beasley, Raymond Christensen, Ken Collier, Paul D'Anieri, Stanley
Hauerwas, Tara Heilke, Kurt Thurmaier, and the editors of this journal for their helpful
comments on earlier drafts. The research and writing of this paper were supported by
a Fellowship from the Evangelical Scholars Program of the Pew Charitable Trusts. My
sincere thanks to the directors and referees of the program.
2 James M. Stayer, Werner O. Packull, and Klaus Deppermann, "From Monogenesis to
Polygenesis: The Historical Discussion of Anabaptist Origins/' The Mennonite Quarterly
Review LIX (1975), pp. 83-122, here p. 83.
3 My picture of simplicity is deliberately overdrawn. For a strong suggestion that the story
of the Anabaptists has rarely, if ever, been seen this uni-dimensionally, see Werner Packull,
"A Response to History and Theology: A Major Problem of Anabaptist Research Today,"
The Mennonite Quarterly Review III (1979) 3 pp. 108-211, here p. 210. It is clear, too, from
Bender's summary article, that unitary Anabaptism was something to be established, not
assumed (Harold S. Bender, "The Anabaptist Vision," Church History ΧΠΙ [1944] 1, p. 7.) For
a brief inventory of some pertinent issues on both sides, see James M. Stayer "Was Dr.
Kuehler's Conception of Early Dutch Anabaptism Historically Sound? The Historical
Discussion of Anabaptist Munster 450 Years Later," Mennonite Quarterly Review LX (1986)3,
pp. 261-2.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, Giorgio Colli
and Mazzino Montinari, eds., vol 12, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1885-1887 (Berlin: Deutscher
Taschenbuch Verlag de Gruyter, 1980), pp. 122-3; (2[123]).
5 This is the title of William R. Estep's work (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1963), which is
a good exemplar of the "unitary" interpretation of Anabaptist history. For a review of
the fragmentation, see especially James Stayer, "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom and Let
a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend," The Mennonite Quarterly Review LIII (1979)3,
pp. 211-218.
6 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford and Cambridge,
Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), p. 296.
7 Milbank, Theology, p. 23.
8 Editor's comments, The Mennonite Quarterly Review, LIX (1975)2, p. 82.
9 Stayer, et al., "From Monogenesis to Polygenesis," p. 85.
10 Although one might expect a clearer notion in Stayer's "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom," he
remains elusive, celebrating diversity seemingly for its own sake.
II Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, vol IV of Order and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1974), p. 101.
12 Voegelin, Ecumenic Age, pp. 60, 62.
13 Voegelin, Ecumenic Age, p. 65.
14 Barry Cooper, "Voegelin's Concept of Historiogenesis: An Introduction," Historical
Reflections/Reflexions historiques IV(1975), p. 237.
15 Voegelin, Ecumenic Age, p. 66; cf. pp. 68-73.
16 Cf. Robert Friedmann, The Theology ofAnabaptism (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1973), pp. 36-48;
James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Systematic Theology: Ethics (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986),
pp. 160-62,173-7.
17 C.P. Ciasen, Anabaptism: A Social History, 1525-1618. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 1972); James M. Stayer, Anabaptists and the Sword, 2nd ed. (Lawrence: Coronado
Press, 1976); Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Die Täufer: Geschichte und Deutung (München: Verlag
C.H. Beck, 1980).
18 Stayer, Anabaptists, pp. 2,4,5,1.
19 See Stayer's map, Anabaptists, xviii, and his verbal elaboration at pp. 2-3.
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Anabaptist Origins Revisited 249
20 Stayer, Anabaptists, p. 4.
21 Stayer, Anabaptists, p. 4.
22 Ciasen, Anabaptists, pp. xi, xvi.
23 Cf. Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual
Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958); Thomas Kuhn,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), esp.
pp. 43ff. "But facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a 17th-century invention.
In the 16th century and earlier 'fact' in English was usually a rendering of the Latin
'factum/ a deed, an action, and sometimes in Scholastic Latin an event on occasion. It was
only in the 17th-century that 'fact' was first used in a way in which later philosophers such
as Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey were to use it. It is of course and always was
harmless, philosophically and otherwise, to use the word 'fact' of what a judgment states.
What is and was not harmless, but highly misleading, was to conceive of a realm of facts
independent of judgment or any other form of linguistic expression, so that judgments or
statements or sentences could be paired off with facts, truth or falsity being the alleged
relationship between such paired items." (Alasdair Maclntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
[Notre Dame: Univesity of Notre Dame Press, 1988], pp. 357-8.
24 Goertz, Die Täufer, pp. 8,10,36,40.
25 Goertz, Die Täufer, p. 66.
26 This seems to be the thrust of Davis's defense of Harold Bender's "religious sensitivity" or
"religious presuppositions." (Kenneth R. Davis, "Vision and Revision in Anabaptist
Historiography: Perceptional Tensions in a Broadening Synthesis or Aleien Idealization?"
The Mennonite Quarterly Review Lffl (1979)3, pp. 203,204). Davis's defense of Bender and his
concomitant criticisms of Goertz and Stayer are on target, but his use of "religious" is
underspecified: the term carries unfortunate implications that make it too amenable to
the story Goertz and Stayer are trying to tell. It remains part of a liberal Enlightenment
discourse that subsumes Christianity into a category that is essentially alien to the Anabaptist
version of Christianity and that sympathizers of the Anabaptist project may deny
in toto. (Cf. Milbank, Theology, pp. 101-143; and Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks:
The Gospel and Western Culture [Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
1986], pp. 10-20).
27 Stayer, Anabaptists, p. 13.
28 Stayer, Anabaptists, p. 17; cf. pp. 334, 335.
29 Stayer, Anabaptists, p. 20.
30 Stayer, Anabaptists, p. 22; cf. pp. xv, 335, 337.
31 Stayer, Anabaptists, p. 22.
32 John H. Yoder, "'Anabaptists and the Sword' Revisited: Systematic Historiography and
Undogmatic Nonresistants," Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte LXXXV (1974)2, pp. 127-139.
Goertz seems to think that Yoder's rejoinder misses the main thrust of Stayer's analysis:
"Yoder concentrated on Stayer's typology, failing to see that it had been subordinated to a
careful search for historical factors of the beginning and development of Anabaptist ideas.
This 'empirical' concern stands in the forefront against a systematized theological history
which tends to abstract historical reality." (Hans-Jürgen Goertz, "History and Theology: A
Major Problem of Anabaptist Research Today," The Mennonite Quarterly Review LIII [1979]3,
p. 183). It seems to me, however, that Yoder's claim is precisely that Stayer has done
something similar to what Goertz accuses Yoder of doing. In Yoder's reading, Stayer's
empirical concers are, in fact, subordinated to the interpretive grid he brings to his "search
for historical factors," which prevents him from reading the story in any but one way.
Yoder is concerned not with Stayer's typology, but with the "priority" of a "consistent
logic" in his "definitional dualism" that allows only one, rather unnuanced reading of the
Anabaptist story (p. 130). The typology follows from this reading, as Goertz is right to point
out, but the reading is itself largely pre-determined, not confessionally, but definitionally:
"Why should it be assumed, after all, that the only respectable answer to an ethical
question, especially one so complex as 'Should the Christian be a ruler?' must be an unqualified
'yes' or an unqualified 'no', so that intermediate views are less worthy of recognition?"
(p. 128; cf. pp. 129-30).
33 Stayer, Anabaptists, pp. xxii, xv. It might be worth pointing out that "legitimacy" is itself a
perspectival political criterion. The Anabaptists laid charges of illegitimacy on biblical
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250 Thomas Heilke
grounds against the prevailing ecclesiastical authorities, but these charges could be ignored
on the basis of who held political power, not moral suasion.
34 Cf. Eric Voegelin, "Immortality: Experience and Symbol," in Ellis Sandoz (ed.), The
Collected Works ofErie Voegelin: Published Essays, 1966-1985, vol. 12 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1990), p. 65.
35 For a recounting of this story, see Thieleman J. van Braght, The Bloody Theater on Martyrs
Mirror of the Defenseless Christians, Joseph F. Sohm, trans. (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1938),
pp. 741-2.
36 Goertz's reply to this objection is worth nothing: "Die Historie versucht, die Intention aus
einem überintentionalen historischen Geflecht zu erarbeiten, denn vieles, was den
Menschen bewegt und zu zielgerichtetem Handeln treibt, geschiet hinter seinem Rücken.
Historische Forschung kann die Intention also nicht für sich nehmen, sie muß zugleich ihre
historischen Bedingungen einerseits und ihre gesellschaftlichen Implikationen andererseits
in Rechnung stellen. Nicht was die Täufer wollten, macht ihr Wesen als historische
Erscheinung aus, sondern was sie waren" (Täufer, p. 156). Although one can hardly deny
the contextual character of human action, Goertz's stance, which harkens to the French
positivists of the nineteenth century, seems to me to permit us to challenge any selfinterpretation
as essentially misled, if not self-serving. This is an exercise in the expurgation
of "false consciousness" fraught with difficulties, not the least of which is moral selfauthentication
for the expurgator. Its implicit search for "invisible hands" in history
(which, curiously enough, take over the narrative role of the Holy Spirit in Christian discourse)
raises problems we cannot address here.
37 The judgments and exhortations of the thirty-fourth chapter of the biblical book of Ezekiel
may be instructive here.
38 Ciasen, Anabaptism, pp. 75-77, 82-3.
39 The term is from McClendon, Ethics, p. 154.
40 Stayer, Anabaptists, p. xiii. "James Stayer has demonstrated that the unity of Bender's
Anabaptism was somewhat overdrawn, but the fundamentals of Bender's thesis still hold
if one grants the validity of religious presuppositions. The degree of unity manifest by
the Schleitheim Articles (1527) indicates that in only two years, a remarkable degree of
consensus and cohesion had already emerged." (Davis, "Vision and Revision," p. 204.)
41 Stayer, Anabaptists, p. 6; Goertz, Täufer, pp. 161-4.
42 Stayer, Anabaptists, p. xv; cf. p. 335.
43 Goertz, Täufer, p. 161.
44 Goertz, Täufer, p. 164.
45 Walter Klaassen, Anabaptism: Neither Catholic nor Protestant (Waterloo, Ontario: Conrad
Press, 1973), p. 18. For an elaboration of the sociopolitical dimensions of this vision, see
John H. Yoder, "The Prophetic Dissent of the Anabaptists," in Guy F. Hershberger (ed.)
The Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1957), pp. 93-104.
46 Friedmann, Theology ofAnabaptism, pp. 36-46.
47 McClendon, Ethics, pp. 27-35,56-67,328-356.
48 I cannot help but note the extraordinary and personalized violence of Müntzer's language,
even taking account of the polemical context and disregarding ultimate "intentions" (See,
for example, his sermon and two tracts ["The Prague Protest," "Sermon to the Princes," and
"A Highly Provoked Defense"] in Michael G. Baylor, edited and translator, The Radical
Reformation [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], pp. 1-32, 74-94).
49 Cf. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, esp. pp. 380ff.
50 Ciasen, Anabaptism, pp. 403-406.
51 Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? How the Church is to Behave if Freedom, Justice, and a
Christian Nation are Bad Ideas (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), p. 38.
52 Not surprisingly, the Stayer-Goertz-Clasen accounts underwrite a Nietzschean genealogy:
powerlessness breeds resentment. Resentment creates theodicies and theologies that
explain powerlessness as a kind of moral power. (Cf., Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of
Morals, Walter Kaufmann, trans. [New York: Random House, Inc., 1967], esp. First Essay
[pp. 24-56].) Accordingly, pacifism is a moralistic expression of the small-minded resentment
of "slaves"-the powerless. For a real-historian this is the only possible reading of the
foolishness that is pacifism. For the Christian non-resistant, in turn, it is an egregious
misreading of God's power.
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Anabaptist Origins Revisited 251
53 Ciasen, Anabaptism: A Social History, p. 428.
54 Ciasen, Anabaptism: A Social History, p. 428.
55 The term is from Goertz, "History and Theology," p. 186. (The entire essay, translated into
English by Werner O. Packull and James M. Stayer, forms a portion of the final chapter of
Goertz's book, Die Täufer, where the term also appears). Clasen's implicit "methodological
atheism" appears in the penultimate paragraph of his introduction: "Mennonite historians
and other church historians in this country regard the Anabaptists with much warmth and
sympathy. I have the impression that their sympathy is often based on religious convictions
and moral sentiments. As a social historian primarily interested in sixteenthcentury
German society, I prefer to approach the Anabaptists from a different angle. I
confess that ideologies, whether Christian or Marxist, do not interest me very much. I am
not particularly concerned with the rediscovery of Christian truths of the establishment of
God's kingdom. I am, however, greatly interested in the question whether during the
sixteenth century, or even today, the political doctrines of the Anabaptists could be
considered a workable basis for the functioning of society. Once this question has been
asked, Anabaptism appears in a new light." (Anabaptism, p. xviii). To my knowledge, no
Anabaptist ever claimed that his or her "political doctrines" "could be considered a workable
basis for the functioning of society," if the ultimate aim of that society was not the
selfless worship of God. One should note, moreover, that "workable" is a spurious criterion
until given concrete form. And at that point, the Anabaptist critique begins.
56 Ciasen, Anabaptism, p. 425.
57 Ciasen, Anabaptism, p. 140.
58 Ciasen, Anabaptism, p. 428. This conclusion is clearly a direct refutation of Bender's claim
that "There can be no question but that the great principles of freedom of conscience,
separation of the church and state, and voluntarism in religion, so basic in American
Protestantism, and so essential to democracy, ultimately are derived from the Anabaptists
of the Reformation period, who for the first time clearly enunciated them, and challenged
the Christian world to follow them in practice. The line of descent through the centuries
since that time may not always be clear, and may have passed through other intermediate
movements and groups, but the debt to original Anabaptism is unquestioned." Harold S.
Bender, "The Anabaptist Vision," Church History ΧΙΠ (1944), pp. 3-4. Clasen's conclusion is
somewhat self-contradictory, in that, while he denies a discernible Anabaptist impact, he
suggests at the same time that "ironically, these meek people, who endeavour in the name
of Christ to establish the kingdom of love, in reality seemed to be bent on destroying
civilization." (Ciasen, Anabaptism, p. 425). It is worth recalling in this context William
Klaassen's reply to Ciasen, that survival of either civilization or of the seemingly historically
unimportant group we are examining may not be the most important question for
us to ask. (See William Klaassen, "History and Theology: Some Reflections on the Present
Status of Anabaptist Studies," The Mennonite Quarterly Review LIII (1979)3, p. 199.)
59 James Stayer, "Die Anfänge des schweizerischen Täufertums im reformierten Kongregationalismus,"
in Hans-Jürgen Goertz, ed., Umstrittenes Täufertum, 1525-1975: Neue Forschungen,
2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1977), p. 49n96: "Hier haben
wir die beharrliche Weiterführung einer Tendenz in der Täufer-Historiographie, die ihr
vorgefaßtes Bild vom Täufertum dadurch bestätigt, daß sie alles, was nicht dazu passen
will, schlicht als "nicht-täuferisch" bezeichnet."
60 "Although the definitive history of Anabaptism has not yet been written, we know enough
today to draw a clear line of demarcation between original evangelical and constructive
Anabaptism on the one hand, which was born in the bosom of Zwinglianism in Zurich,
Switzerland, in 1525, and established in the Low Countries in 1533, and the various
mystical, spiritualistic, revolutionary, or even antinomian related and unrelated groups
on the other hand, which came and went like the flowers of the field in those days of the
great renovation. The former, Anabaptism proper, maintained an unbroken course in
Switzerland, South Germany, Austria, and Holland throughout the sixteenth century, and
has continued until the present day in the Mennonite movement, now almost 500,000 baptized
members strong in Europe and America." Harold Bender, "The Anabaptist Vision,"
Church History (1944) XIII, p. 8.
61 Bender, "Vision," p. 8.
62 See, for example, Neither Catholic nor Protestant, pp. 18, 62-3.
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252 Thomas Heilke
63 J. Denny Weaver, Becoming Anabaptist: The Origin and Significance of Sixteenth-Century
Anabaptism (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1987), p. 111. (Weaver's bibliography includes the
works of Goertz, Stayer, and Ciasen).
64 Weaver, Becoming Anabaptist, p. 112.
65 Cf. Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Strugglefor Power and Peace, 5th ed. (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), pp. 1-11.
66 Walter Klaassen, "The Nature of the Anabaptist Protest," The Mennonite Quarterly Review
XLV(1971)4, pp. 298-300. Cf. H.W. Meiheuizen, "The Concept of Restitution in the Anabaptism
of Northwestern Europe," William Keeney, trans. The Mennonite Quarterly Review
XLIV(1970)2, pp. 141-158; Frank J. Wray, "The Anabaptist Doctrine of the Restitution of the
Church," The Mennonite Quarterly Review XXVIII (1954)3, pp. 186-196.
67 Klaassen, Neither Protestant nor Catholic, p. 20.
68 The immediate analysis itself seems to usher in monogenetic conclusions: "It appears that
the newer theory of polygenesis is but a form of monogenesis one step removed. That is,
Anabaptism is again seen as primarily originating from a common movement of social
tension with its attendant expressions of anticlericalism." Davis, "Vision and Revision,"
p. 206.
69 Cf. McClendon, Ethics, pp. 59-62.
70 Cf. David Burrell and Stanley Hauerwas, "From System to Story: An Alternative Pattern
for Rationality in Ethics," in Stanley Hauerwas, Truthfulness and Tragedy: Further Investigations
into Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: Univesity of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 20.
71 On the role of fratricide in foundation myths and its meaning, see Hannah Arendt, On
Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 18-20.
72 Stayer, et al., "Monogenesis to Polygenesis," p. 87.
73 Milbank's discussion of ontological violence in post-modernity and of the retelling of the
Christian story demonstrated in the post-modern genealogical method is a wider example
of this same problem (Milbank, Theology, pp. 278ff).
74 Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952),
p. 27.
75 Voegelin, Ecumenical Age, p. 110.
76 Joyce Clemmer Munro, "Passing on the Torch," The Mennonite Quarterly Review, LX (1986)1,
p. 10.
77 Milbank, Theology, pp. 417-422.
78 I have detailed this argument elsewhere. See my, "On Being Ethical Without Moral Sadism:
Two Readings ofAugustine and the Beginnings of the Anabaptist Revolution," Political
Theory 23 (1996), pp. 493-517.
79 Guy F. Hershberger, War, Peace, and Nonresistance (Scottdale: The Herald Press, 1946),
pp. 360-61.
80 See Calvin Redekop, "Anabaptism and the Ethnic Ghost," The Mennonite Quarterly Review,
LVIII (1984)2, pp. 133-146, for a critical account of the constitutive possibilities this term
offers. John Howard Yoder in "The Hermeneuticals of Peoplehood," in The Priestly Kingdom
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), pp. 15-45 examines the practical
hermeneutics the concept may deliver.
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997.
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