Should we call ourselves Anabaptist?

Over the course of my life I have done my bit in lectures and books to make 16th century Anabaptism visible to people in our time. I have been and remain an advocate for the Anabaptist form of Christian faith as put forward by, for example, Pilgram Marpeck. The fact that my wife Ruth and I now worship and work in the Anglican church has done nothing to change that.

But I have grown increasingly uneasy, indeed disturbed, by the now common designation of Mennonites as Anabaptists. We seem to think that in spite of our often uncritical cultural accommodation we can preen ourselves with the bright feathers of a heroic tradition. Then we go on to imagine that we can be like those who were part of that tradition centuries ago by adopting the nickname their enemies gave them.

I suspect that all this is part of what we call multiculturalism. We celebrate our distinctiveness from others in the church and world. It looks suspiciously like another brand of sectarianism.

Those of us who have studied and written about 16th century Anabaptism have not emphasized sufficiently that our 16th century forebears were not out to separate from the old catholic church of their day. Like the reformers Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli and Thomas Cranmer, they were out to reform the one church and not to create another. It was the lamentable consequence of an intolerant century that their efforts were rejected and came to nothing because Anabaptists refused to embrace the coercive methods of the other reformers. Their vision to contribute to the reform of the one church failed, as did that of the other reformers. Perhaps we can identify the Mennonite tradition as a long-term holding action in order that the original vision not be lost.

Consciously against

What especially characterized 16th century Anabaptists was that they stood consciously against and challenged virtually everything their Christian culture took for granted. They rejected all religious coercion and insisted that governments had no role in the internal life of the church. They rejected the emerging capitalist economic system of the time primarily because it discriminated against the poor and defenceless. They refused to accept any justification for the use of force and killing in the defence of the gospel. They paid an extremely high price for accepting the baptism of believing adults as a sign of commitment to follow Christ because it was against the law and often carried the death penalty.

The Anabaptists of the 16th century are our spiritual ancestors and we rightly celebrate their life, witness and martyrdom by rehearsing their story. But that does not make us Anabaptists.

With very few exceptions, we are not rebaptized, for that is what the name means. We are not persecuted and hounded into prison and death for our faith. We are affluent and conformed to this world in our enthusiastic embrace of consumerism and don’t have the singleness of heart that was required of them for living faithfully in the face of imprisonment, torture, exile and death. Without doubt, we too are trying to live faithfully in our time and place, but it’s hard because it costs us virtually nothing to be baptized; baptism has no life and death outcome for us.

Further, we are no longer sure about our faith; its basis keeps shifting uncertainly for us as for other Christians. Applauding the siren voices of people like John Spong and Tom Harpur, for example, as some Mennonites do, is a sign that we are confused about what the truth is. Anabaptists were human and did not always get things right, but without exception they knew their faith basis was that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, had come into the world to save sinners, that in His death they had forgiveness of sins, and that in His resurrection they had the light and power to live the Christian life. They had confidence and trust in God’s love and judgment that would see them through the darkness of their time to the light of His eternal kingdom.

The kingdom is a gift

It is a betrayal of Anabaptism to reduce Christian faith to social activism as we are inclined to do. We are not called to change the world by our own efforts. We do not build God’s kingdom; it is a gift God gives us when we have faith in Christ and which we may, by God’s grace, receive.

There are, however, some Mennonites who may justifiably use the name Anabaptist. They live in Vietnam, Colombia, Ethiopia and in other places in the world where they were and are being persecuted for their faith by repressive governments and therefore know what it was like to be Anabaptists back then. And there are also those who have come into the Mennonite churches from churches that still baptize infants, who have been rebaptized. Perhaps we could dignify all of these as modern Anabaptists, and the rest of us could be content with being called Mennonites, our old nickname.

If we are going to be faithful to the Anabaptist vision, we will renounce all separatism and ethnic pride, and participate in the incomplete, ongoing reform of the whole church to the glory of God and His Son Jesus who prayed that we all might be one.

Walter Klaassen is author of several books on Anabaptist themes, including Anabaptism: Neither Catholic nor Protestant. He lives in Saskatoon. This article first appeared in The Messenger, September 21, 2005.