Academics in the Early Anabaptist Movement — Finny Kuruvilla — Anabaptist Perspectives Ep. 081

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with Finney Caravella. We're in Boston, Massachusetts, at Sattler College, which you helped start. And something, obviously it's called Sattler College, so you're inspired by Michael Sattler, apparently a fair amount. And there's something there that I think some of our audience might not know, but he was pretty well known academically. He had done a lot of higher education, things like that. We don't know a lot about his life. Unfortunately, I wish we had a lot more information about him. But what we do know is the Huttarite Chronicles records that he was fluent in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Wow. And we do know, we actually have four accounts of his trial.

So of course he was famously put on trial before he was executed. When he was on trial, and the accounts agree on this, he gave his defense in Latin. And so that is, I think, a pretty amazing feat. So picture that, you're on trial, possible consequence of being killed. And here you're having to do your entire discourse in Latin. He was no doubt a learned man. And what we do have of his writings, Schleitham Confession, things like that, document and prove that he indeed was a capable writer there. We have less information, like I said, biographically about him compared to people like, say, Grebel or Menno Simons, others. But what we do have is very impressive.

And what I like about him is that he's an example of a person who brings together excellence in his academic and educational pursuits. But obviously he's now wedded that to service for the Lord and service for the kingdom. And so that's really the ideal. And what so often happens is people lose sight of how those can actually help each other. And they're not, they shouldn't be at least competitive. They shouldn't be things that we view as opponents, but as synergistic. Was he unusual? Like, was he unique in the radical Reformation? Or were many of the others? Many of the others were actually very highly educated as well. So Conrad Grebel, who was the leader of particularly the Swiss Brethren, the Swiss Anabaptists, and most would say he was the most important of the leaders.

It is widely regarded, Harold S. Bender is a person who would agree with this assessment, that his Greek, for example, he was regarded as one of the best Greek scholars alive. So Erasmus was, most people would say it was the best Greek scholar of that day. And most people would put Grebel in the company of those people right at Erasmus's heels. And so Grebel had made his splash, so to speak, and how he even got associated with Zwingli and all that was through his academic pursuits. And really the Anabaptist movement began out of the university academic environment, as did the Protestant Reformation, with people who were diligently applying themselves with study of the original languages to the Bible.

So a bit of a what if here, and you already kind of touched on this, but how would the Reformation look different if they hadn't put so much importance on the academic side? The Anabaptists, I don't believe in, we can obviously speculate here, but I don't think the Anabaptist movement would have ever begun. Because so much of it, just so if we go back and look at Zwingli and what happened there, there was a lot of intense study that was occurring that was this amazing cauldron that these ideas were being born out of, right? And so had it not been for that environment of diligent application of scholarship and study of the original languages towards the text, how would these ideas have come about?

And in particular, some of the ideas about infant baptism, about non-resistance, separation from the world. I mean, those had to be established using deep, deep ideas. Hubmeyer would be another person who was also very educated. These were very much ideas that came out of very intense exegesis of the scriptures. And so I think it would be very unlikely to imagine the Anabaptist movement beginning without the leadership of these men. So we're looking at the past and the effect that it had, and you're saying it had a huge effect. So now how for us today, looking back on that, what can we learn from those forefathers? First, we have to be careful to avoid either ditch, right?

So the one ditch that we have to be very careful about is that education has the answers. And that if we're all highly educated, that fixes our problems and somehow. Which, to be honest, like you are highly educated, correct? I am. I have two doctorates and I've spent a lot of time in school. So obviously you value this highly for yourself. I do. Now I was raised in a home and in an environment where education is highly valued. So the Indian community, my parents generally put a high premium on education. And so I'm sure that some of that came from them. Although I would say I just love learning, which is the bigger factor. There is certainly a ditch out there which lifts up education as having the answers and says that if we just have enough knowledge, if we just have enough information, then that is going to save us, right?

But in a sense, that's the era of Gnosticism, right? Gnosticism is salvation by knowledge. And we have to be very careful to avoid that. Instead, we should view education as a tool to serve the kingdom of God. The other ditch is to discard that entirely and to say education has limited value or it's maybe something suspicious that we need to be very guarded about and almost look down on people who want to study and pursue. I've been in several churches over the years where if you want to, say, learn Hebrew and Greek or go deep there, they'll say, you know, what's wrong with you? What's wrong with the King James? You know, why can't you just be content with that?

There's a lot of places that forbid people going to college and that say if you go to higher education, you can't be part of our communities. That error is also pernicious. The problem with that side of things is that when you do that, education is going to come in somehow. So what's going to happen is that the people in those settings who are hungry to fill themselves with solid preaching and good reading, well, guess where they're going to turn? They're going to turn towards Protestant evangelicals or lots of preachers that are out on YouTube and places like that. They're going to be beginning their education through that. And it's amazing to me, I like looking at people's bookcases where you walk in and say they're a very committed Anabaptist.

And how many of their books on their bookcases are written by Protestant evangelicals, right? It's a huge percentage. How many people are reading the John Pipers of the world and people like that, right? A lot of them are. And although they may personally not pursue education, they're getting the education of, say, John Piper or Tim Keller or people like that coming in. And you better believe that's coming into their preaching. So what happens is when we minimize that, we end up creating a vacuum where people who want to be diligent students of the word end up turning to other channels.

And then that vacuum gets filled by the books and tapes and YouTube videos and things like that of people coming in. And so it's going to bleed through. Education is too powerful of a tool for us to simply minimize and try to push off to the corner as being something that puffs up. You know, a lot of people say, oh, First Corinthians says knowledge puffs up. And it certainly can when it's done badly and when it's not put in the service of the church, when it's not put in the service of Jesus. However, when it's used rightly, as I think the early Anabaptists did an amazing job at that, it has this incredible power to fuel us, to motivate us, to give us a rich supply of ideas to engage with the outside world.

And to, I mean, how many of us haven't enjoyed good books over the years? I mean, there's something about just the power of ideas that is stimulating and engaging and really exciting. And so yeah, we have to be very careful to avoid either of those. There's a very interesting speech that was given by someone named Charles Malik many years ago. The speech is called The Two Tasks. And he said the two tasks were saving the soul and saving the mind. And his thesis was that the church had to embrace both vocations, saving the soul and saving the mind. And to the extent that it focused on one rather than the other, it would lose both.

This enterprise of saving the soul, saving the mind, I mean, it's embedded in Jesus's commands about loving the Lord our God with our heart, soul, mind, strength. I see education generally as something that is an incredibly, incredibly powerful tool that's been so abused on all sides. And as so often is the case, when people see abuse, they want to turn away. But an argument against abuse is not an argument against use. If we were to be consistent in applying that, well, hey, people abuse marriage, so let's not get married. You know, people abuse the church, so let's abandon the church, right? I mean, it's a silly train, but so often what we do is we see the abuse and we overreact on the other side and unfortunately throw out a lot of the benefits that could come from an education in the service of King Jesus.

Okay, so you have the two ditches of education. You're saying this does have value and you're going to get an education from somewhere. From somewhere, right. Make sure it's coming from the right place. Exactly. Which is what you all are trying to do here at Sattler. Correct. Basically bring it back to Jesus. Exactly. Is there anything else you would like to add? Because I think this is a pretty big issue. It's a huge issue. Honestly, us Anabaptists don't view this properly.

And that's, yeah, it's probably more out of ignorance than anything, honestly. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's slowly starting to change too, which I think is encouraging. Another piece I would add about education is that there's a growing interest that many people have, which is, I think it's really good to go to new countries, to go to cities and to evangelize there. Well, it is so effective. It is so powerful to use education as a tool to get into cities, colleges, and other areas. So I'll give you a couple of examples. There's two basic segments of the population in America that are open to the gospel. And very consistently in pretty much all 50 states, you're going to find this to be the case.

The two most open groups are students, college students, and international communities. So the Joe average person who is maybe suburban or rural, they're just not that interested. They've got their comfortable American life, their fence, their garage, all that. They do the same routine again and again, right? So that type of person, not totally closed, not impossible, but generally speaking, that's not where God is moving today. God is moving in those two populations. Now, what a lot of people tell me is they say, I feel way too intimidated to go and do evangelism on a college campus. And the reason they feel intimidated is that they were never there, right? It's because they have that fear factor of the unknown.

Well, guess what? If you've been to college, if you've graduated, one, you find out it's not as intimidating as you might seem. People are just regular people, just at different stages of life with different experiences. And so I would encourage people to think about something like, and it doesn't have to be college per se, but using education as a tool to get into some of these places. I'll give you another example. So if you want to go internationally and say, get a visa in a different location, well, the ability to go in as, say, a healthcare professional, as opposed to coming in and saying, I'm a pastor or I'm going to be a missionary or something like that.

I mean, it's very difficult to get into those places. If you come in with real skills that are credentialed, that someone can look at and say, hey, you're going to actually bring value to my country, to our situation. It's a powerful door opener, right? And so why not also look at education again as a tool for ministry? You know, obviously there's this self-development idea and just being a person who is capable to be that approved workman who's not ashamed, right? But as I said, it's a platform to get in. One other thing too that I'll say on the side of education is that I think people in general don't realize that there's this general phenomenon that if you are properly educated, it gives you humility and you realize how much you don't know.

If you are content and complacent, it's often, and I don't mean this at all in a negative way, it's often a sign that your lack of education has maybe not opened you up to the vistas and horizons that are out there, right? And there's a complacency that can happen there. I mean, I feel like, I mean, I've been in school for a lot of years, I read a lot, and here I am in my mid-40s and I feel like I'm just getting started with my learning. And I feel like I have so much to learn. And so I think, again, good education is something that is paradoxically should be generating humility in you, right? And now it's poor education or lack of education that makes you complacent and can put you out.

Now, again, that can go badly, obviously, and people can be educated for the wrong reasons and it can engender pride. But I think the right type of education is something that should produce a godly humility. There's a formal hypothesis that has been proposed and I think very well validated where the less you know about a field, the more confident you are about it. The more you know about a field, the less confident you are about it. It's really interesting. There's a famous case of this particular social scientist where he studied a robber who robbed a bank and he covered his face in lemon juice thinking that that would make him invisible to the cameras.

And this, obviously, it's completely ridiculous, but he was so ignorant that, you know, that's how you do invisible ink if you know how to take lemon juice and do all that, right? Oh my goodness. And this particular hypothesis that he came up with said that, well, hey, the more ignorant you are about something, maybe the more confident you are about it. And lo and behold, that's been true time and time and time again in a variety of studies where if you know very little about something, I see this happen all the time. I'm a physician and it's amazing how often people come to me. They couldn't tell you the first thing about the difference between the Golgi apparatus and the mitochondria, but they will tell you for absolute certainty that this particular herb that their grandmother gave them is going to cure them of this disease.

And I've seen a lot of people make very poor health choices rooted totally in ignorance. I mean, they just have absolutely no idea there. But they're probably as sure as anybody. But they're absolutely sure as can be. And some sad cases that I've dealt with in the last few years of people who have had cancer and not gone down routes that were very well validated with good evidence because, again, they were just convinced there. And so again, I think we have to be very careful about that, that we're not unaware of this paradox there that, again, the right education can actually bring humility and lack of education can sometimes breed confidence. That is so interesting because I've been trying to figure out that mindset because I've met a lot of people who are, say, fairly ignorant about a topic, but they will be sure that they're right.

And I'm just like, I don't understand this. But what you're saying, more knowledge can actually help you be even more humble in a way if it's done right. Absolutely. And I mean, frankly, study of the Bible is a good example of that. Where often people who know very little are very, very confident about this, right? Yeah. I mean, even let's pick on, say, somebody outside the church. I remember someone coming in to, he was a physician into the office area where I was when I was a resident, not too far from here. And he came in and he was just blustering about how messed up Christianity was and how the Bible was just full of all these contradictions and all that.

And my answer was, so tell me one of these contradictions. He didn't have one. He didn't know the Bible at all. But it's just this idea that gets repeated, right? Where, oh yeah, religion is just this. And we see this happen all the time where people on the streets who don't know the first thing about Christianity, they think they know everything about the religion that there is, right? In reality, they're very, very, very ignorant. And so that phenomenon happens in study of the word of God as well, where people who have really applied themselves very little have a false confidence in all that. Yeah, I've just, I've never thought about it quite that way before.

The name is the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis or the Dunning-Kruger philosophy. Or actually, it's really more of a proposition that's been fairly well validated that there's an inverse relationship between knowledge and confidence. That is really, really interesting. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak. You're very welcome, Regan. It's been great to be with you.