Conrad Grebel: Partier & Rising Star to Hunted Radical - John Ruth

Had that break not happened, there would not have been Swiss Anabaptists, nor their descendants in Switzerland or Pennsylvania, or I would not have existed. So that was my pilgrimage, and I can't say that I expect everybody to groove on it, but I sure do.

John Ruth has spent decades reading and researching, writing books about the history of the Anabaptist movement and the Mennonites, including this book on Conrad Grebel called Son of Zurich, which is still in print. It was published almost exactly 50 years ago. So John, it is an honor to have you on the podcast.

Again, you spent a lot of time reading into this or researching these things and trying to pass that story on to the next generation. And you have a lot of different books, but today I'd like to focus specifically on Conrad Grebel and how studying into his life has affected you and what lessons that might have for us today. So wherever you want to take the conversation, it is an honor to have you here, and I'm looking forward to learning more about Conrad Grebel tonight.

Well, when I was a young minister, 21 years old, I got a job in a bookstore in Southerton, Pennsylvania. I had been ordained a year before at the age of 20, not expecting it. Quit college because now I was a minister. I didn't need any more credentials.

And in the bookstore that I worked at was a new book by a scholar named Harold Stauffer Bender out of Goshen, Indiana, in which he depicted the life of Conrad Grebel. I later talked to a protégé of Harold Bender named John C. Wenger.

And John C. Wenger told me that he was on hand when Harold Bender wrote that book back in about 1950 or so. He said he had 18 chairs in a room with open documents on each chair, and he walked around the room writing this book. Oh, wow. Well, I read this biography of Conrad Grebel, this brand new book. Frankly, it was way over my head, and it wasn't terribly exciting, but that was my introduction.

Then let me see, in 19—that was 20 years later. Here I came from graduate studies in English literature, and I was a new professor of English at Eastern University where I had gone. And I got an invitation from a man named Winfield Fretz, who was the principal of Conrad Grebel College. And he said they wanted a biography of the man for whom their college was named.

He had been born in my home community too. And he picked me up because I was young and literary, and he knew about me. So I went and wrote a book about Conrad Grebel. And I had no training in history, so I just told it as a story as I could. And that's where that book came from. Then now that I'm almost 95, in the past couple of years, the memory of Conrad Grebel and the role he played was such a narrative in my head that I returned to it. And then I had the chance to go to Croatia for a wedding in 2022. And I said, "I'll go if you will also allow me to stop off in Zurich on the way home."

Well, in 30 minutes, they had that arranged. That allowed me to go to Zurich, the canton of Zurich, to the town maybe 30 miles away named St. Gallen, where Conrad Grebel's brother-in-law had been mayor. And the archive has Conrad Grebel's correspondence.

And in there was a letter which he wrote in September 5, 1524, that I wanted to put my hand on because in it, Conrad talked about what it was to follow the Word to form a Church of Christ. And that was where the church in which that formed the group of people that I am was born at that moment in history and on those subjects. And I want to make a pilgrimage all the way home. Now, maybe that's just plain sentimentality. It's up to the audience to think what they want to about it. But for me, it was existential. I went home and I looked at that letter. And I looked at, by the way, I looked at that letter over the years because John Christian Wenger, who was the protégé of Harold Bender, had published that letter.

Oh. He published it in a paperback, and you could see both the original, the calligraphy in German, and the English translation. And I lived with that from time to time over the years. I think that professional scholars would say I overemphasize it, but that's where I find a break in history that I can refer to and imagine myself. Had that break not happened, there would not have been Swiss Anabaptists, nor their descendants in Switzerland or Pennsylvania, or I would not have existed.

So that's what that was my pilgrimage. And I can't say that I expect everybody to groove on it, but I sure do. And I think it's an important piece to note. We're filming this in September 2024, so exactly almost to the day, 500 years from when Conrad Grebel wrote that letter. And there's also another piece, significant piece. I think he told me this over the phone, but when he wrote that, he hadn't been rebaptized yet, and the Anabaptist movement in Switzerland had not started yet. Do you want to talk about that? Give us maybe a little more context for this.

Well, first, you're right. It was four months before the first baptism even. Wow. So at this point, the whole one of the big pieces for the Anabaptists was this concept of believers' baptism, right? And you're saying this is before that even happened. They haven't made that move yet.

Four months later, that Georg Blauroch, a slightly older person who was a Catholic priest, implored Conrad, "For God's sake, give me true Christian baptism." That was in January. But this letter was written in September. And I think it would be most interesting to just consider a couple of facts about Conrad Grebel.

He grew up in a noble family. You were given real estate by the emperor if you had ancestors who were in the Crusades. Wait, really? So the Crusades would have been hundreds of years before. That's right. But that's when the nobility was given real estate, and Conrad grew up in one of those noble families. He is von Grebel.

See, not just Grebel. Von Grebel means from that family. So he was from the top of the social status in Zurich. His father was the head of one of the guilds and a member of the inner council, not just the 200 that ran Zurich.

As the Catholic control was fading, literally, Zurich was technically under the control of a Catholic nun of an abbess in one of the churches, the Frauenkirche, the Our Lady's Church along the Limmat in. Well, anyway. Okay. First off, Conrad Grebel is from a noble family. He lived in a tower house. He was sent to the University of Vienna.

And the man that monitored him there became his brother-in-law.

His name was Adrian von Watt from St. Gallen, and he was given the Renaissance name of Vadian. See, Switzerland was envying at that moment the beginnings of the Renaissance in Italy, in Milan. And Vadian, the professor of young Conrad Grebel, who came to the university there, was so bright that his professor said, "You are going to be the top person when the Swiss get their Renaissance." He said this about Conrad Grebel, you're saying? Yes, he did. Young Conrad. So he was very smart. Yeah. He was smart, and he was not together. He was a young scapegoat.

And in my book, I tell the narrative sequence in which eventually, believe it or not, when the plague hit and almost killed Ulrich Zwingli, who was at that time stirring Zurich to reform, that broke up Conrad's studies at Vienna. And his professor of Vadian, they both came home back to Switzerland. And through that connection, Vadian got to know Conrad's sister and married her, Martha. Okay. It's quite a fascinating story. And then Conrad doesn't go back to school. And finally, he goes back, and he wants to go to Milan. He wants to be with the growing edge of the Renaissance, where they're studying the classics. Because that was kind of the cutting edge at the time, or like?

It was new. It was when you get your great painters and your great scholars out of Milan, but that hadn't hit Switzerland or France yet. And so Conrad wanted to go to Milan, but instead wound up at the University of Paris.

Why? Well, because the King of France gave scholarships to Swiss. Why? Because the King of France wanted the Swiss soldiers in his 100-man bodyguard because the Swiss soldiers were known as the best. Oh. So it was all politics, basically. It was a political move. Everything was all politics.

Yes. Economy is always operating. Politics is always operating. But Conrad didn't think this way. He wanted to know these Latin and these Greek classics. But instead, he wound up at the University of Paris. And they had not yet been affected by the Renaissance.

And by the way, King Francis was finally captured in some war, not until the last of his 100 Swiss guard was killed. That's how tough the Swiss soldiers were. Well, Conrad is studying at the—he's not studying. He's just goofing off at the University of Paris. He's bored stiff. Oh, oh my. He's kicked out by his tutor, and he's a skirt chaser. He gets venereal disease. He's just goofing off. And then he hears that back in his hometown of Zurich, where his family is a real player, there's a reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, and he gets excited.

Then he starts thinking.

At that moment, we're talking 1524, '25. At that moment, the peasants, the farmers, the Bauern, the Bauern of Europe are rising up with their pikes and their forks and whatever they had. They had no guns or swords like the professional soldiers had. And they are defying the order. They're defying the kings, the Bauernaufruhr.

And Martin Luther said, "Chase them down. They're bad news," even though he had already seen through the shallowness of the macro culture, people coming up from Rome trying to raise money by selling indulgences so they can finish building St. Peter's. And Luther, in 1519, posts his theses on the wall and says, "God help me, Connegtanders, I can't do any other." And he puts his '95 theses on. Okay, that's not what stirred Conrad up. He heard that the reform was hitting Zwingli. And Zwingli came to his conclusion after he had been a chaplain at a battle at Mariano in which Italians and Swiss fought. And a lot of them were killed. And Zwingli says to himself, "This isn't making sense.

We're two Christians." And at that time, the reform is starting to seep into Zurich. And they hear about this professional, this brilliant young preacher at Zwingli, who's at a monastery in Einsiedeln, and they invite him up there. And when Conrad, goofing off in Paris, hears that his home church has this exciting new preacher, this turns him on. At the same time, a very interesting thing happens.

In one of his letters home to his brothers-in-law, he expresses the realization that he is basically living on the scholarship that King Francis gave to Zurichians. And where did King Francis get his money? From taxation. And who paid taxes? The peasants. And what did they do? Gave half of their produce to the king. Oh, half. And hardly enough for them to eat, to exist. And they were in trouble.

And the Catholics and Luther both said, "Put him down." And Conrad has this—he has this streak in himself. He said, "Now, wait a minute. That hits his conscience. This doesn't add up." And he goes home, and his parents are disgusted with him. And he shacks up with a barber, his girlfriend, and doesn't tell his parents.

But then he gets involved with Ulrich Zwingli, and Ulrich Zwingli is impressed with him. And his buddy, Felix Muntz. Felix Muntz is a Hebrew scholar. Conrad Grebel knows he's Greek. And Zwingli says, "You know what? I'm going to put a Bible college here in the Grossmünster, in the big church. We're going to start over again. Conrad, you're going to be the Greek professor, and Felix, you're going to be the Hebrew."

So everything's going fine. And Zwingli does what Luther did. Luther had posted his '95 theses on the door at Wittenberg. This is what I believe, and this is what ought to be done. That was Germany, right? That was in Germany, near Worms. Okay. So Zwingli puts out a book, not of '95, but '56 theses.

And he asks Conrad Grebel, this young fellow, to write a stylish Latin poem at the end of his book. Wow. And that appears there. And Conrad wrote it and stuck a Greek phrase in there he loved. And he wrote all these letters home to his now brother-in-law in Latin.

The letter that I'm talking about was the first letter he wrote in German. Now we're going to get serious. We're going to get back to who we are, not who we aspire to be in terms of the macro culture, because something is happening in our hearts. We are reading—20 of us, or less than 20, are reading the scriptures, and it's making a difference in our life.

And then he hears about the peasants' revolt. And he hears that the leader of the peasants' revolt from Alstatt in Bavaria, he's taking a tough stand. He's not doing like Zwingli, who says, "We'll move as fast as the town council can let us go." And that really shakes Conrad, because he's been reading the scriptures straight back into Matthew and Mark and Luke. And he's developing that logic in his own mentality. And then he hears this other—what he considers to be a political solution. And he admires somebody who takes a tough stand, which is Thomas Müntzer. Now, Thomas Müntzer goes down in history as a heretic and a troublemaker and a rabble-rouser and a communist and everything else.

Yeah. And Conrad writes a fan letter to Thomas Müntzer. This is the letter I'm talking to you about, in which he says, "Don't be surprised, brother Thomas, that we call you brother, because you are different. You are not into this spurious compromising. You go right to the root of things." See, Grebel was already thinking about what's fair, what's right, and going straight to the Hebrew and Greek New Testament and just plain living with it and discussing it around in the circle and being drawn into its logic and feeling that even the reform that Zwingli is bringing in the Catholic Church, which is huge, Zwingli will still kill.

You have to be realistic. As Martin Luther said the same thing. By the way, Conrad had already written a letter to Martin Luther, which he never answered, although he acknowledged he got it. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Okay. And he said, "Yeah, if you want to—fellas want to have your small group like that, you go ahead. But don't expect that the rest of the Christendom will follow you. Be realistic."

Well, then the Anabaptists would have said, "Well, what's it for then?" Aha, Luther said, "That's why we need grace. We're all sinners. I'm sure we won't be right." But that was his solution, grace. Conrad's solution was, "Let's do it.

Let's read the Sermon on the Mount." When Ulrich Zwingli first turned toward the congregation in the great church, the Grossmünster of Zurich, and laid open the New Testament in Greek, in Greek, instead of turning back toward the cross, toward the crucifix, and saying, "Well, hocus—I won't come to me now. I'm almost 95. Hocus corpus meum." He turned around and said, "I'm going to talk to you in German, not in Latin. And I'm going to have the New Testament open here.

And I'm going to start at the beginning of Matthew 1, and I'm going to go wherever it takes us." So that was just unheard of at the time. That's right. Yeah. In fact, I like the quote of an old man. The church was packed.

They all stood. There was no—you didn't sit. And one old man said, "When I heard that, him preach like that in my language, in my Muttersprache, in my German, in my local idiom," he said, "the hair stood up in the back of my neck."

Well, it did on the back of Conrad Grebel's neck, too. And he got visceral. He said, "I'm swollen." He quoted the book of Job. He said, "I almost am going to burst." He wrote to his brother-in-law. And his brother-in-law said, "Oh, cool. Come on now." But Conrad was a hothead.

We began with radical, not compromising approach to the scriptures. Well, what Conrad found in the scriptures was so interesting, which it's why I live even. It's why a group of people were formed that took his point of view.

By the way, I don't praise Conrad. He was not mature in everything. Sounds like he's on quite the journey through this time, right? Like he's making mistakes. He's kind of a partier, all this stuff. But then there's also elements that you're saying where, "Wait a second. Oh, he's searching. Oh, what about this?" And he's learning and developing. Is that so? Well, the way he would put it was this: "When we took up the scriptures."

That's a powerful line. Yeah. When we did that, we were going—before that, we were going along with whatever worked. But when we took up the scriptures, then he said—and by the way, in that letter, which I looked at many times again, he says, "When you have the rights for them," it was the Mass, or we would say communion, "it must not be done without Matthew 18 and love."

Now, that first intrigued me. What's he talking about? He said that it is the supper of unity, the communion supper. It is not

some kind of mysterious—it's the body of Christ, but it's a supper of unity, which he gives us in his body. And you do not take that unless you are in unity. And you discern whether you are in unity, and then you eat and pray. And that's Matthew 18. But there's more in Matthew 18.

And there's something revolutionary in Matthew 18. By the way, he also says to Thomas Müntzer, by the way, who never got the letter. He was killed before he got the letter. I don't know how it got back to Conrad's brother-in-law, and thank God it did. So we can read it today. It's in the archives there in the town of St. Gallen. But he said, "When we took up this word, take Matthew 18 and the binding and loosing of it."

Here's how it works. So I went back and looked at Matthew 18 later. And Jesus was there describing how you deal with relationship. And by the way, for Conrad, it was not about doctrine. It was not about politics. It was about relationship.

And that's what the gospel is. It is reconciliation. And if you don't have that, no matter how right you are about any doctrine, so what? That didn't create the Anabaptist Church. Relationship did. It's more so he uses the word brother over and over. And he says, "Don't be surprised that we call you brother. But we call you brother on the basis of your sticking to the scriptures." Now, he said at one point, "I hope you're not—I hope it isn't true what they say that you are using the sword, because Christians don't use the sword."

And that was 10 years before Menno Simon set it up in Friesland, in Halle, in the Netherlands. Conrad says that first. Well, Thomas Müntzer was a fighter. He died under the sword. He's celebrated by communists with a great big cyclorama. Really? Yeah. Okay. And he's considered as a violent overthrower of false power. But Conrad is radical both ways. He says, "Follow the scriptures wherever they take you, but don't take the sword, because true believing Christians do not use worldly sword or the war, because with them killing ist gar abgetan."

It's totally put away. Now, that is a line in history. Luther didn't cross it. Zwingli didn't cross it. Presbyterians didn't cross it. That's what made us a minority. Otherwise, we'd have been part of Zwingli's reform, Lutherans and Reformed Church. That's why we were a group that became an ethnic group that gave up everything and gave up their lives.

Conrad Grebel is—like you're saying there was a line there, right? That the other reformers had come up to you, and Conrad Grebel said, "We're crossing over to that." That is right. And that created this moment right here where we're talking. It would not have happened. That's incredible to think about. Like now, some of these ideas, it's like, "Okay, we're 500 years in. We just kind of take them for granted, I suppose." But someone had to be the first person to say, "This is where we're going to be," right?

That's a profound thought. Why don't we think our way back to that moment? Yeah. And then, you know, if they could have caught Conrad after he baptized, he'd have been—well, they caught his buddy, Felix Müntzer, and drowned him. They would have killed Conrad Grebel. Would not have ended well. Yeah. But he managed to escape a number of times, including out of a dungeon.

Oh, really? Just a few. How? Like, as in he had been caught and wasn't in the dungeon, and he was out. He was caught and put in this dungeon on the wall of Zurich, only about 1,000 feet from the home he had grown up in. Oh, really? Wow. But somebody left a door open, and they all got out, and Conrad got away. Wow. And he went over to his sister, to another sister, and died in the plague as a young man. I don't think he was even 30 yet.

But we have more to say about him. But here's the thing. Conrad Grebel said, "I counted the times he used the word love, and that counted the times he used the word word, the word." And he says, "Zeug mit das Wort."

That is, move with or use. I asked a Swiss scholar what that meant. And he said, "Use the word." American translators say, "March forward with the word," and stuff like that. But the Swiss scholar told me, the University of Zurich, "Use the word to form a church of Christ, to form a church of Christ." Now, you had the church, and then you had the Reformed Church. But Conrad still wants to form a church. That's us.

That's drawing a line starting from there. And he mentions Matthew 18. Now, let's think about Matthew 18. Jesus said this. It's about relationship. He said, "You know, the righteous people said to Jesus, 'You fellowship with sinners.'" That's the way we do today. When something comes up, first we say, "What about sin?" Jesus didn't start there. He started with the relationship. He says, "Go talk to the guy. Maybe he won't listen. Or take somebody else. It could be just you."

When you find he won't listen, tell it to the church. Now, what does that mean? Go and stand in front of a church with a building with a steeple on it and talk to it? There was no church.

Ecclésia. Share it. And then make a call. You bind or you loose.

And heaven will back you in that function. Not ask, "Heaven, what's the rule here?" and we'll apply it. No. Use your brain that was given by God. That's radical. We wouldn't have been born if they hadn't seen that point then. Go by Matthew 18. Now, Jesus didn't say, "You will always get it right."

He didn't say that. He said, "Bind or loose." I grew up in a culture that did nothing but bind. Now I'm living in one that does nothing but loose. I want to live in a fellowship that when it comes to the Lord's table, declares that it is at peace. It's not just between me and Jesus.

That is the original concept, the supper of unity, Conrad Grebel said. Now, use the analogy of a baseball game. Supposing you're one of these modern Christians who said, "I got to go by my feelings." Supposing you had three strikes and you say, "I'm sorry. I need four or five strikes. Thank you."

It wouldn't be baseball. It'd be batty up or just playing ball, fooling around. Well, Trump got that call wrong. Well, maybe he did. But without the ump, you don't have baseball. And without binding and loosing, you don't have Jesus' plan.

And that's about relationship. He's not lecturing them on his genealogy back to David or whether Mary, his mother, was a virgin, which is I don't deny, by the way. But that isn't the point. Use the word to form a fellowship in which you are responsible and which you take the responsibility of binding and loosing and asking God for help. And God will help you. But there's no promise you will always get it right, because Conrad himself didn't get some things right.

But without the ump, you don't have baseball. All I'm saying is that the more I thought about Conrad Grebel's letter, this logic got a hold of me. This is incredible. So, okay, so when I was reading your book, there's a part at the front that I'd unlined, and maybe you could respond to this, but this kind of stuck out to me. "Names are less important than influences. And the remarkable fact in regard to Conrad Grebel is that most of his ideas, which seemed so radical in the 1520s, appear to be passed into the living tradition of many Mennonite communities in America, though with a distinctly quietist coloration." Yeah.

Again, I don't understand all the historical context, right? So I'm still learning a lot of this. But you're tracing such a direct parallel along the lines from what he did. And even some of the stuff you're saying where he was going to the word, using the word, and out of that were forming the church.

These were really radical ideas at the time. I don't know. Do you want to respond to that? Do you want to add more about how the ideas that Conrad Grebel starts with and how that chain progresses on down to us today?

Those ideas have formed a fellowship in which those who remain responsible stay with it. Some of the radicalism, but they're quietists, and they pull out of the world around them. And I'm not saying that's bad, but I'm saying that they have some radical ideas at the core, even though they're quiet. The Amish do. But yes, and I think that's a piece that's easy to forget is how radical all this started. Like you keep mentioning like they tried to, they killed some of these people. They put Conrad Grebel in a dungeon. Like this apparently was really upsetting to society, right? Oh, terribly. Yeah. To Ulrich Zwingli's. In fact, Ulrich Zwingli pulled strings to get Conrad Grebel's father beheaded.

This great reformer. And Ulrich Zwingli fought the Catholics and said, "We must fight the Catholics." And led two times the Protestant forces of Zwingli of Zurich against the Catholics of Zug, just to the south. And the second time in the battle, the Catholics caught Zwingli and cut him in four pieces.

So this is his heresy. Wow, that story ends not well. No, not. And when you go to Zurich near the Grossmünster, you see the statue of Zwingli holding a Bible and a sword. I was going to say, that's in the book, I think, isn't it? Yeah. That's how you—every tourist that goes to Zurich sees that. But you end, and again, I have to be honest, I haven't read every word, right? Because this just came from Amazon right before this interview, right? But you end your book with the picture of Zwingli there, with the word, like the Bible and a sword. But then you make a point that there's no statue of Conrad Grebel. And the contrast between those two.

Do you want to speak into that? Maybe explain a bit more of what you're referring to there. Well, there's an imprint in my heart, and there is a peoplehood that flowed forth from that historic crossing of a line.

Had they not been, they were willing to pay taxes, but not fight, because with killing ist gar abgetan. No killing. And he says that in passing. He doesn't even have to argue for it. He says, "By the way, Thomas, you know I hope you're not using a sword because that doesn't work."

But Zwingli didn't see that. This greater leader, these great Calvin didn't see it. Luther didn't see it. See, but we are a minority. And by the way, many people don't realize. And I say this not so much as a historian, as an amateur who looks at certain factors and thinks about them.

There was a bigger group of Anabaptists who would fight. They were called Schwätzler, that is, would carry the sword. Only the minority group, minority group were the stabler, who would only carry a staff. You could keep an animal away, you know, like that, but not kill. With a sword, you could kill.

The Schwätzler were thousands more than the stabler. But the Schwätzler died out quick. The stabler included people of the branch of the Hutterites, who were also totally pacifists. And at the point that you give up, see, people think there's the phenomenon in the 19th, 20th, and 21st century, people who leave the Mennonites because they want to be more evangelical. And then they get fuzzy on this other, which was the thing that birthed us to start with. They want to get fuzzy on that. And ambivalent.

Well, when you get ambivalent on that, then you're no longer rooted in this historical moment and movement. There's no statue for Conrad Grebel. Right. So what? Conrad Grebel never wrote a book. He had the ability to write. He never wrote a book, but he had a list of scriptures that he thought people should read.

And he never published it, but somebody got a hold of it and got it printed, just the list. And for getting that list printed, the Catholics burnt this man to death that did that. That was not the Protestants of Zurich, but the Catholics of Zurich. Whoa. Why? Because he put out that list of scriptures recommended by Conrad Grebel. And it was just a list. And I guess that was just so controversial that that's right.

See, we're here in the 21st century, right? It's just hard to get our heads around. That's right. Like how, like now we're like, what's the big deal? But back then, I guess that was just so radical. Well, you're giving a common person the right to read the scripture. They're not prepared to read it. Don't let them read it. We'll explain from the pulpit. This is true. See. Now, but here's the important point.

On that list, that's all we have from him. And these many letters to his brother-in-law. Guess what the first verse that he recommended, the first passage that he asked you to read? I mean, I would have no idea.

John 3:16. Really? That's something. Wow. God is love.

Conrad Grebel said, "Where's the love?" What is it that makes us brothers and sisters? What is the good news but reconciliation?

It's not a total explanation of all the conundrums in the Old Testament. Sure, use the Old Testament like Jesus did. Look what he pulled out. Did he pull out of it the sword? He said, "They that take the sword shall perish with the sword." He said, "Peter," he said, "You have heard, sure you've heard it said, an eye for an eye." And that was an improvement for then.

But I say unto you, love your enemy. Do good to them that hate you and will despitefully use you. That is revolutionary. And the Anabaptist, Conrad Grebel's wing of the Anabaptists took it. That I live because the people was formed out of that.

When I track the stream of my life back to that marker in history, I find myself in that. And that's so easy to forget. I heard someone say, "I wish I could remember where I read this," but history is like the prologue, you know? Like if you don't understand where we got, like where it came from, how are you going to understand the rest of the book, right? It's like the prologue to a book.

And it seems like our people, the Anabaptist people today, don't really understand our story very well. Or at least that's maybe that's just my own experience. But there's a lot that I don't understand. Like even a lot of what you're telling me is like, "Well, I haven't heard this before. You know, I don't know this story." Well, it was just the response to the curiosity of why. How did this start? Or what did it mean? And then I found it was relevant for the 21st century. Because now we have chaos again.

And we have to bind and loose, and how? And the church tends to split over it. And the church doesn't get everything right. But Jesus didn't say that it would. But he said you should do that function. And I live in a state of the Mennonite church where it's just in free fall. Everybody does what's right in their own eyes. They go to communion because they have communion oftener than other, and they don't have council meeting anymore. In 1843, a Lancaster Mennonite bishop said, "You never have communion without the preparatory service." And that's what I believe in my heart. But our church doesn't practice it. But I'm not going to walk away from our church.

I'm going to be there and help. I'm not going to form one more Mennonite split group, Amish group. There's dozens already. As though Jesus said, "By this shall all men know that you are my disciples if you split faithfully when you come to a new issue." So we've had Chester Weaver on this podcast. Do you know Chester? Yeah.

So I messaged him and said, "Hey, we're going to be talking to John Ruth. And is there anything specific you'd like me to ask you?" And he sent me a question. "How can we stimulate more interest in Anabaptist history among our people?" He wanted me to ask you that. And I agree. I have the same question. Because, again, speaking from my own experience, because I don't know what everybody else experiences, I feel incredibly ignorant of our story.

And I'm starting to realize that I have lost a significant piece. So how can we generate more interest in our story among our people? Okay, hold that question a moment when I make a comment. Yeah. Scholars have not forgotten.

They are. But scholars are more intrigued with the paradoxes and the failure to live up to what the Anabaptists said than they are in the kind of message I just told you that inspires me. And they're right. They give us true accounts.

See, even Menno 10 years later up in the Netherlands, he said much the same as Conrad, "True Christians don't go to war," and all that kind of thing. But they had many splits there among the Anabaptists of Holland.

And Menno said one time, he's quoted saying, "He was a cripple." He said, "I would jump with joy on my crutch if our people would not split." Really? I didn't know he said that. Yeah. Okay. If they can only get along together. And that's one of the things that I don't have solved.

The very thing that so enthusiasms me historically produced split after split after split after split.

And you don't have, in Lancaster County itself, you can have 15, 18 varieties. And then along come the charismatics, and then they have their split. And the split and split. And so one of the interesting things that I have to live with and can't solve is, why am I so taken with Conrad's vision when in actuality the group that I covenant with can't stay together?

And what does the world have to think of a group that can't stay together? That shows, can't we learn to get along? Now, I admire the Amish. I have sole fellowship with the old order Amish. I need, because where I come from, everybody does what's right in their own eyes. And they don't want to hear anything about discipline. They won't let you finish your sentence if you start talking about it. They get offended. And bless their hearts, I love them. And they're my people. But it's not where my soul is.

Now, back to your question, how can we get people interested, more interested? One answer would be, I think what you're doing in this, what do you call it? Podcast. Yeah, podcast. It's an effort. Just like the Anabaptists got together and talked back then. It's an effort in the technological terms of our moment.

So I commend you for that. And remember, Jesus said that the way of the kingdom is not going to be a popularly endorsed message. This is true. And that's tough to live with, but it's the truth. You sow the seed, and a lot of it falls, doesn't even germinate.

Some germinates and flares out. Some the birds pick away. Some is misinterpreted. But he said, "Where it lands and takes root, it springs up." And I see in my congregation, in my community, I see people attracted to what I know is at the heart of our Anabaptist seriousness. Even when they see it only as a remnant in a middle-class comfort, personal salvation-oriented fellowship, the way it acts.

They sense like the bee that gets a pheromone into the blossom and gets the nectar. They sense it with something. There's a frequency there. Something hums inside you when it hears that. And there is something like that in the Anabaptist story, in the Anabaptist vision.

And it'll be popular, and it'll flare up with certain people who will get it all excited about it and last at least five years in it. And then they'll go back and be conventional again. So, man, this has been incredible.

I feel like I've learned a lot about particularly the story of Conrad Grebel, but also just in general, like where our people have come from, the roots, I guess you could say, of the Anabaptists. As we kind of tie the ribbons on this package, you know, it's what you've been presenting, is there anything in particular you'd like to leave our audience?

Well, if your audience can go on YouTube, see if you can find the funeral sermon for Harley Widler of Partridge, Kansas. A bachelor who taught himself Russian literature and was teaching Pushkin under Putin and was shocked by Putin, but they loved him over in Novgorod, I think it is.

He went to the University of Pennsylvania, humble Amish.

When his parents went beachy and drove off in the car, they saw him going off to the old order Amish church yet on their horse and buggy. But then he became beachy too then. But listen to the tenor of that sermon.

I don't have the data right in front of me now, but I felt listening to the right thing there. And that was, I would have never heard that without modern media, without the internet. And new things will happen as information flows in different patterns now. New things will happen. That's my hope. And in the meantime, I'm prepared for any kind of disappointment.

Wow. Mr. Ruth, thank you so much for sharing what you've learned with us. You bring a lot of decades of experience to the table, and it has been a true honor to do this interview with you. I would suppose one piece to leave with people is your book, even though it was 50 years ago, it's still in print. You can go on Amazon right now and buy it. And I'd recommend people do that. I found it fascinating. Actually, like you'd said, this is the original first edition, which is quite interesting to see. And learn the, it feels like the real piece here is learn the story of where this came from. And I feel like there's a lot that I have to learn.

And you've helped me with that this evening. And I appreciate that. You know, one little comment. It was a historical accident that when they wanted to get pictures of Mons Blarock or imaginative pictures, somehow I got swept into posing for them. And this is me, actually. No, really? Yeah.

You're on the cover of the newspaper. Maybe that's all it amounts to. Wow. Well, thank you so much for sharing this evening. I really appreciate this. Thanks for listening to this episode with John Ruth. If you found this interesting, you might want to watch this episode we did with John Roth, who explains some of the beginnings of early Anabaptism. And you can find that link down in the description below. All our content is over on our website at anabaptistperspectives.org. And you can also sign up to our monthly email newsletter there as well. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.