Christendom and the Anabaptist Genius — Stephen Russell — Ep. 124

Welcome to Anabaptist Perspectives. Steve Russell and I are together here at Faith Builders, and today we're going to be talking about some of the Anabaptist contribution to these large conversations about Christendom, the social church, and where our culture is kind of heading today. But we'll start off with your more general interest here in world religions.

I know you've been interested in how Christianity compares and contrasts to other or to world religions, right? So maybe you could just begin here by introducing us to some of the aspects of world religions that you're interested in. Okay. Well, of all things, this comes partly through reading Chesterton, who would have been both a member of the Church of England for a while and then eventually Catholic, both of which are part of Christendom.

But anyway, one of the things Chesterton makes clear as he is trying to help people see the reality of Jesus is that Christianity is not a world religion. And he does that by showing the connection between all of the world religions. And there are connections such as all of them make the essential method of becoming whatever they are, the natural birth. You are born into this community, and that's what makes you what you are. Some of them are so rigid on this, the Zoroastrians, or they're sometimes called Parsis, won't even let someone outside of their circle join. So you get that on the one extreme. On the other extreme, you have the Muslims who say everyone is born a Muslim, and then your family and your local culture corrupt you into becoming a Jew or a Christian or something else.

And then you have to revert. You do not convert. You revert to the original. So that is really one of the key things about religion as the world sees it, and that is that you are born into it with, you know, some of them do have the possibility of making a change, but even when you do, often it's seen as not a conversion but a reversion. And then all of them also care about the government and the religion working hand in hand so that what you have, whether you're in a Hindu country like India or a Muslim country like Turkey or a Buddhist country like Thailand, in each of them, the government has some kind of connection with the religion, and they work hand in hand.

The religion undergirds the state, and the state supports the religion and even enforces it sometimes. Now that's, so that is typically on whatever scale you're thinking about, even if it's maybe a tribal religion, they still work that way. You're born into it, and it works with whatever the leadership is in that setting.

This is kind of startling. What you're describing here is the way many world religions operate, especially cooperatively with the state. I think to many of our viewers here, that's how Christianity operates as well. So what kind of distinction are you making here between Christianity, Christendom, and religion? Well, this is where I feel that Anabaptism has a powerful word to speak to other believers, other Christian believers.

Christendom would be what happened after Christianity started to do the very things that the world religions were doing, that you were more born into it than chose it. That was a change that took several hundred years to go from a faith that you chose to follow or a person you chose to follow to where everyone who was born in a Christian family was baptized.

I've read somewhere that someone did some research, and the last time he could find a record of someone being born into a Christian home in Europe, so this would be in the Middle Ages, and yet not baptized as a child, doing that later is in the 1100s, early, I think it was early 1100s. So from sometime in the hundreds to 1100, the Christian church made a shift from choosing to become baptized, choosing to follow Jesus to that's done for you as a child.

And also during that same time period, there was a gradual turning away from the early Christian recognition that we don't pick up the sword and we don't rule over other people to a position where we have to, this happened under the Roman emperors, we have to, the Roman state maintains peace, and we need to support that at least initially. And so there's actually in the years something like 300 to 600, there are a lot of Christians who people who really did believe in Christ, I'm convinced of this, but who also thought before they got baptized, they should either serve the government or be in the military. And then they would withdraw, and then they would be baptized, and then they would not participate again in government or in the military.

That kind of compromise can't last, and it eventually disappeared. And so you had a movement from making a compromise to basically church and state working hand in hand. You had a slow change from wanting your children to choose to follow Jesus to making that choice for them. And this is where we get Christendom.

It's still a lot of true teaching and still a lot of real believers, but a lot of people too who are baptized pagans. And so you have this very mixed situation in Christendom, and you actually have a situation where the church has to impose itself with force.

Now it doesn't necessarily do that itself, but it gets the state to do that. But that's not what the church is, that's not what the church should be about. So Christianity as the original believers, the apostles practiced it, was a call to follow Christ and to form a community, to form a new community. And that community would be one that sought the good of themselves, of course, and the good of others.

So Christendom is the way you're describing this kind of alliance between state and church, which inevitably seems to become somehow coerced, even though you can make some fine distinctions there. Inevitably. And that becomes something of the problem. I think John Howard Yoder, he coins the term Constantinianism, and he always says it with something of a sneer.

It's that merger, the overlay of these two powers. And in his mind, there should be something totally different that's carried forward a lot these days.

Could I say one before you had, are you going to have one more? Yeah, go ahead. One thing that you made me think about there, I think we need to recognize that this shift, this compromise, if you would have been in it, it would have made a lot of sense. And what I would ask you to do is read the last chapter of Eusebius's History of the Church, or sometimes it's called Ecclesiastical History.

And in that, he talks about how the world was prepared for the coming of Christ, how Christ came, how the apostles preached the gospel throughout the world. And right up to his time, where Constantine took over the Roman Empire, this champion of God. And just before he took it over, in the eastern part of the empire, there was a strict, a very severe persecution of Christians.

And so the ending of this book is so fantastic. Constantine defeats his brother-in-law, who is the persecuting emperor. And Eusebius says, whereas the, something like this, this is a paraphrase, whereas the day before, people walked around with their heads down and were nervous, would somebody ask me, am I Christian?

Now that Licinius, the pagan emperor, has been defeated, now the Christians are walking around with their heads up, and they're celebrating, and they're all so happy. God has conquered the evil emperor with the good emperor. And so I think we need to try to understand where these people were and why it's so seductive, this shift. And it's even seductive to why not, I'm a Christian, my spouse is a Christian, why not baptize our child? You know, the move is seductive. Now we are a couple, we're many hundreds of years later, and we can look back and see the results, and they couldn't back then. So that's something I really, sometimes, well, this sneering is what bothers me.

I think we should recognize that we're also liable to slip into something that looks good, but the end result is not going to be good. And earlier I talked about my political involvement. I just, that felt good. It looked good. And I think it was destructive. What the early church, the direction the early church moved looked good at the time, but it was destructive. The formation of Christendom was destructive. I don't think it meant those people weren't Christians anymore.

There were Christians and there were pagans in the church. But there needs to be a, well, I think this is where we come in, Anabaptists, we need to be bold and talk about these two things that shifted and how the church should move back to what it means to be a church and what it means to relate to the wider culture. Yeah. Well, I'm going to use Kreider's book here, The Patient Firming of the Early Church. That's a good book.

Something of a bridge. Yeah. What Kreider identifies as being one of the really significant virtues of the early church was its patient kind of attentiveness, its embeddedness in its own community as kind of an alternative to the pagan system and at least pre-Constantinian. And that's what actually drove forward the church and its growth at that time. I mean, he's also suggesting, you know, sometimes you get the picture of the early church, it's growing explosively, just like always like acts. And there are periods of that, but many times it was actually, it wasn't quite so fast and patience was actually very significant. But what begins to happen with Constantine is something of a departure from that patience to something that's much less patient.

Absolutely. I think the chapter is just the impatience of Constantine. So let's get this done. Let's get things moving. And it becomes bureaucratic and in some ways effective, but that cardinal virtue of patience is left behind. Yes.

Let's just use that as a jumping off and talk about the Anabaptists and we're leaving some wide gaps here, but the Anabaptists have had political views, okay? You could maybe locate this in the times of the Reformation. There's the early church and they're seeing themselves as their own body politic within the larger culture. There's something of the Constantinian synthesis or merger happening there. Jump forward now, go to the 1500s, talk about some of the political views of the Anabaptists.

Okay. Well, I often myself avoid the term political for the church. Pretty loaded. Yeah. And the way our culture uses it does mean the American culture, which is a democracy and so on. Oh, that's so unfortunate. But that's how it's used.

But the early, the Anabaptists, one of the key things they saw was that we are part of this bigger political unit, the state. They recognize that. Sure. And they very clearly stated that it's from God, but that it's meant to be ruled and directed by those that haven't surrendered to Jesus and who can use coercion legitimately. Now I don't exactly, that's another question how to talk about that and how to think about what God has done in establishing the government, but they recognize that. But they also recognized, and that is something you're born into. I'm born into the city of Zurich. I have no choice. So I'm going to be a citizen of Zurich. Okay.

I'm going to be a citizen of that political unit. However, they also saw that the church was something else. And I think we can say that they recognized clearly that it was yet another kingdom and that it functioned very differently. And this is where the world religion thing comes in. You choose to become part of this community that is following Jesus.

It's not inevitable. It is your choice. Okay. And the neat thing about that is it doesn't remove community. You have a responsibility, a very important responsibility, and someone else has responsibility to you. It's that community of believers that are following Jesus. Now I'm not saying the other, the political community doesn't have any call on our lives. They do. And we're to respect our leaders and pay taxes and obey the laws.

But in my way of thinking about this, that is a dead community. I think that's Adam, the body of Adam, a dead community. We have joined the living body of Christ. And that, so we choose that one by one, and yet we're planted into this community and we have responsibilities to the community. The community has responsibilities to us. It's a living thing, whereas the state is a necessary thing, but not a thing full of life.

So on the one hand, we have to, we choose it. We're not born into it. And on the other, this dead community, this dead body, it has to enforce its will by coercion at certain points. That should not be what the state what the church is about. We should be, and that's one reason we don't participate in the and what the state does.

We should be calling people to choose individually to also join this community that is following Christ and to let that transform us, change us, make us different. The state never changes anybody. It does make us do things differently than maybe we want to, but there's no real transformation there. And so just going back to this book, what Kreider has to say is the early Christians recognize this. I think the things we see in the New Testament are mostly the reaction of either Jews or converts from paganism or pagans who have become God fearers, all of whom have heard about Yahweh and they have submitted themselves to him to varying degrees. And when they heard the gospel, they were ready.

It's the church later, it's later the church has to decide to bring people in a patient way. You know, so there are fewer of those Jews coming in. There are fewer proselytes and God fearers. And so most of the people that are coming in a little bit later are right out of paganism and they need a lot of, they need someone to walk with them to make sure they really understand and are moving really towards Jesus. And that's the beauty of what the church, the early church did as it lost a pool of potential converts who were already aware of the Old Testament. It shifted and it made, it worked. It worked with people where they were to bring them fruitfully into the church.

Some of this is implied, I think, in what you're saying, but I'm wondering where, and this is moving toward the Reformation again, where the center of gravity, you could say, of the sense of obligation actually fell. And I think you've said as much, if there's a living body and if there's a dead body, I'm probably going to spend most of my time with a living body. It could almost sound like just dual citizenship here.

Well, you know, Paul had dual citizenship. That's right. I think if you, we won't have time to get into this, but if you look at the times he used his citizenship in the book of Acts, I think every time was to advance the kingdom of God.

And I could get into that, but I don't think we will right now. Yes, the early Anabaptists, they had a sense of dual citizenship. They were quite willing to obey the government where they could. And, but their primary citizenship was in heaven, to use one of Paul's phrases. And this wasn't just a, I'm connected to Jesus thing. This was, I'm part of this community that's connected to Jesus. And so if you want to use the word political, well, there is a real politic there that's going on, you know, and that was what was important to them. Yeah.

I don't think that they scorned the government. I think they recognized the need for the government. They would scold the government, at least during the times they were persecuted. I mean, somebody who was ready to be beheaded or burned at the stake would sometimes say, this is wrong and this will redound on your head. They were willing to say that.

But they always were willing to obey the government where it was legitimately calling for them to do certain things. There's a recognition of some of the authority that's given to a government. You could even say that God ordained authority, but there is a really significant allegiance to that community that are actually functionally a part of. And that's probably where a lot of their time and their energy is actually going. Absolutely. And it fits with this beautiful phrase that probably Michael Sattler wrote in the Schleithaim Confession. They're in a community that's walking according to the resurrection. Wow. Walking in the resurrection. They're alive. Which is a political statement. It is. Yes, it is. It is.

They don't call the other community dead. Yeah. But I'm thinking about Paul where he talks about, we were in Adam, we're now in Christ. We were in that dead body of Adam and that's where this government is. We are now in this living, we're walking in the resurrection. And just to be clear what I'm saying, political, there exists this term, and this is why I have regret about it. It's been hijacked in a lot of ways. And when you say that to be walking in the new Adam, that's the organizing principle of what makes that community function.

And because that's how we relate to each other, that's how we generate our rules, that's what organizes our heroes and who we actually esteem in that community, it becomes political. But we've tended to reserve that term for certain democratic functions, which is, I think, hugely unfortunate. But it's also the way it's understood in our culture, which is one reason I avoid it. I understand. Yeah. But you know, you used the word, we come up with rules. And so what I'm talking about is something we enter into freely, but it is a community. And it will have, it will have a history and it will have a tradition and it will have rules. And that is not the sword.

It's not the same thing. We come together, we recognize that we need to have something directing us as a community. And different Christian communities may have slight variations. That is not a problem. But sometimes I say this because you use the word our rules. And in the contemporary church, there are many who reject any kind of responsibility or recognition that somebody else might have a say in my life in the Christian community. And that is something the early Anabaptists and the early church both recognized. Yeah. Which really undercuts your ability. If you don't, if you have no means of discipline within the community, it's very difficult for you actually to really accomplish the sort of Christ-following goals that you're after.

Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, all of the early Anabaptist confessions or statements of faith, they always, I think they always included excommunication. And Schleithaim says, makes it really clear, this is different than, we don't kill people, but we try to wake them up when they have slipped away from Christ, when they are going away from, when they're leaving the community, we try to wake them up. This is what you're doing. And so we excommunicate the Catholics and the Protestants back in the Reformation would execute people. And they make a very clear, you know, there is a need for discipline in our living community, but it's meant to bring you back to life. And Menno himself talks about this.

He says, you should be so careful. You should take years sometimes to make sure that the person hears what you're saying and makes, really does say, no, I'm going this way. And he also says, it should hurt you more than it hurts him. It should hurt the church more than it hurts the person that you finally expel. But it's all for his good and it's for his hopefully bringing him back.

This is all interesting and we keep on going here, I think, but I think we should jump ahead. We've talked early church, we've talked Reformation, and now let's talk about the times that we're actually in right now that you and I are participating in.

People say, and I think it's becoming more apparent that we're living in a post-Christian culture. And in this post-Christian culture, it's, I think, becoming also clear that we have in these days some things in common with the early church and the first number of centuries of their time. There's more things in common with them now than we have for thousands of years, right? Yes. Because of the culture around us. That's right. Yeah. The situation of the church has some things in common with the situation that they face. So supposing that somebody today, a Christian today, wanted to participate in that tradition established by the early church, what beliefs, what practices would you recommend to them today?

Well, I would, one thing, going back to world religions, if that person had been baptized as a child, I think that person, I would talk to him or her about this is really what it means to start to follow Christ, to actually be embedded in a community. And this happens at least in a large part through the baptism.

So I would, we should be unashamed about that. This is the reality that the early church saw and the Anabaptists saw. And we have to be gentle. You know, you said we're more like, the setting we're in is more like the early church in the pagan Roman Empire that was an adversary. Well, up until recently, there was a very strong Christendom kind of setting. And so we have to recognize that for some of those people, they still look to that and yearn for it. Well, I think we need to be bold enough to say there needs to be a break.

And so I'm not even questioning if he's a Christian or not. Sure. You know, but this is the way it was meant to be. This is a place where Christendom absorbed a part of world religions. And I think it's good to make that step.

So that would be one thing. And you need to do it in a community. So I made the switch from Catholic to Anabaptist. It's not that we're perfect. We've got lots of problems. But I would invite that person to go on this journey with me in an Anabaptist setting.

And, but I also would want to say that I would invite him to recognize that we need help too, to see where we have perhaps made a compromise or are too comfortable in an un-Christian way. And so I would want to invite that person to come and go with me, but, and us, but feel free to talk about what you see that needs to be changed. So as far as practices, I would really say that if he hasn't been baptized, that is really key. And I would try to help him see this doesn't just mean that I baptize him and that's it. That or that somebody baptizes him. But rather that he's baptized into a living community that he's going to participate with and that is going to have a real say in his life and he's going to have a say on our lives.

And that's why I would say to him, recognize we may be making some mistakes and feel free to talk about it and we'll try to hear. You know, which is, this is what the church ought to be. Well, I would say this. One of the things that really surprised me, even when I was Catholic, but not yet an Anabaptist, was the priesthood of believers. I mentioned in another talk that when I converted, I wanted to serve the Lord and I was Catholic. And so at first I moved towards becoming a priest.

That didn't work out for many reasons. It was very discouraging. And then later I found out I'm already a priest, which was really very encouraging. So I would say that another thing I'd want a person to understand who is coming this, who is seeing the problems in Christendom is to recognize that often there, even in churches that talk about the priesthood of believers, there's often a kind of hierarchy that I think is, I think there's a hierarchy in creation. That's what I think. But I think there can be a hierarchy in the church that is actually, that's disruptive and doesn't take, doesn't take consideration of the gifts that we have been given and that we could use in the church.

Understanding the priesthood of the believers and actually practicing it really opens that up. We want whatever God's given you to be exercised in the church. That's what we should do. And so I would want him to understand that, that he's got giftings that come from God, natural ones and gifts of the Spirit. Well, let's use those in the community. So baptism as a means of entering into this living body of Christ. And then the gifts and the capacities of this person being encouraged and realized through the priesthood of believers is something what I'm hearing you say. But this actually has a real form to it. It's got its own consistency, its own integrity. And that's something different than just like spilling ourselves into the state and trying to go ahead and encourage that to do kind of our work for us.

Yes. Yes. Very, yeah, definitely. And having said that, you know, let's say this person had been politically involved. Sure. I would also try to help him see that it's as we help others come this way, start to follow Christ in a real community, that we're going to really make an impact in the world.

We're told in the Gospels to be salt and light, not to be the sword, not to be the king. And it's that salt and light. You know, you were saying, let's think about the contemporary world. Well, in our world, we don't even know what it means to be human anymore. And one of the big ways that comes out is this confusion about sexuality.

I think that what the church is called to right now is to think clearly about what it means to be a human being. I used to say human sexuality, and I realized later, no, that's only a part of it.

But what I wanted to say is if we're right, what people are doing as they believe there's no shape to being human and no shape to human sexuality, what they're doing is hurting themselves massively. Yeah. And so if he's been involved in politics, the thing that we need to do as a church is to be salt and light and to talk to people about the direction they're going, which is destructive. And then to also be willing to help people in very messy situations who have been destroying their lives.

That's really where the, instead of putting energy into politics, that's where we need to put our energy is into helping people recognize the destructiveness of the path they're on. I think this is valid, by the way, to call people to follow Christ because you actually, he actually wants to make us more human.

And the path you're on is a destructive one. And so, you know, somebody might say, well, this is so self-centered. In a sense, it is, but I think this is what God wants is to develop us, you know? And so I would say that in our contemporary world, we need to recognize how destructive the culture has become. And being a small community that's trying to follow Jesus is actually going to be a light. And it's going to draw people. And it's going to be hard for them to, some of them are so far away that it's going to be a long, we need that patience again. It's going to be a long haul as they start to move in the right direction.

This is interesting. I mean, it explains to me, I think it helps me to understand some of the interest, which is very significant in the early church right now in Christian studies. And it's part of that, again, it's that situation where we find ourselves in, which it's like, well, the church actually has her own claims about what it means to be a human being in the world. And there's a lot of interest in trying to unpack and excavate what that could actually be like, which I think betrays there could have been some, a little bit of an overstep into this Constantinian world, you'd say, right? And now there's a recovery of saying, wait, wait, wait, we don't just say everything that everybody else is.

We actually have our own views as Christians about what it means to be a human being, what it means to live in community with each other. And Christ is at the center of that. When the church goes into union with the state, when that Constantinian thing happens, I think then we get this big emphasis on, okay, now I'm saved, you know? And then you just march ahead with the church and the state working together and doing whatever the state says. Whereas, and so the reality of what does it mean to be a human isn't big there. Yeah. But it really was in the early church. It really is for the early Anabaptists. It should be for us.

It is for the world right now. What does it mean? And so I would invite you, you wrote about Irenaeus, and this is a big thing for him about what it means to be human. And so I would invite them to ask you some questions about that. That sounds like a lot of fun. You can feel some Aristotle coming through on Irenaeus. We're not human yet. We're potentially human, but Christ is the human, and we should be on our way to him to become actually human.

Yeah. I think the early church got that. They weren't so much philosophers that they could say it really well, but that's what they were doing. Well, I think Irenaeus says it awfully well. Yeah. And this is what motivates me so powerfully is I want to be, you know, we all say we want to be like Christ. Yeah. I mean, I want to be a human being. That's right. And he's the human being. There could be nothing more natural. No. Yes.

It's so wonderful. And that, yeah, that's being a Christian and becoming what it means to be a human. I love that. It's natural. It's what we're actually moving away from this corrupted thing. It takes time, but we're moving away from that to bit by bit becoming what we were meant to be. Yeah.

And just to circle this up and close this then, when we become our truest nature, which is in the true Adam, that's Jesus, and our communities are moving us in that direction as well, we actually just have the true form of human community. There's nothing more natural, nothing more compelling about that.

So thanks for the invitation. Do you have something more? I just, one more thing since you said what you just did, and then you can close. But I do want to emphasize this isn't just me becoming more of a human. It has to happen in a community.

And I think this because Paul says we're in Adam. So I think that the original formation of humanity by God in Adam and Eve was meant to be community. In fact, the whole story about Adam being alone, you need community, okay? So this has to happen in community. It isn't just Jesus and me. It's in community. And so the dead community doesn't work, but now we're in the living community of Christ.

This is something that the Anabaptists and the early church understood, and we need to get a hold of it in this modern autonomous age. We have to get a hold of, no, we're really meant to be connected. So I just wanted to throw that into it. Yeah. And to be even in, say, in the image of God isn't something we get to do as individuals. It may be something that we do collectively, at least as male and female, but maybe even broader than that. Even broader. You see, I think you reflect things to me about Jesus that I can't see, and I hope I do the same thing. So that's why we need to be in a body.

I can't reflect fully what the full humanity of Christ is, but I can reflect parts of it. You don't, and vice versa. And it just brings joy into life that, you know, I can learn from you and maybe even become more that part of me that's not there, you know, but that's real humanity. Maybe I can develop that too. But yeah, we need each other to see what that is, what it is to be human. So that's all I have. Well, thanks for talking to us today.