Money in the Early Anabaptist Movement — Stephen Russell — Ep. 149

This is Anabaptist Perspectives. Money matters, and almost everybody, whether Christian or not, agrees with that, I believe, which is why we are doing a series about economics.

For this episode in the series about economics, Steve Russell is with us again, and we are going to talk about economics and Anabaptist, what the early Anabaptists had to say about money. Steve Russell isn't a stranger to Anabaptist perspectives. You've been with us for numerous episodes, this season and also previous ones. Steve has devoted many years of his life to studying history. He studied European studies at George Mason University in the late '80s and earned his Master of Arts in Church History and Theology at Wheaton Graduate School, a long time before I was born.

So we're going to start with a quote from Peter Riedemann. Riedemann wrote this in 1540 or 1542, from the five articles of faith, which explained what he called the great controversy between us and the world. And in the third article, called True Surrender and Christian Community of Goods, Riedemann wrote this: "When God the Lord had led the children of Israel out of Egypt and they were in the wilderness of sin, he gave them bread from heaven, manna, which they gathered, some more and others less. When they measured it with an omer, those who had gathered much had nothing over, and those who had gathered little had no lack. But when some kept part of it for the next day, it bred worms and stank."

This is an example for us. Now that God has brought the Christian church out of the Egypt of the present time, the church in the wilderness of this world should be like the Israelites. The rich should have no more than the poor and the poor no more than the rich, but everything should be given up for common and equal use. So Riedemann clearly saw economic implications in the gospel and economic implications for Glossenheit. But talk about how Riedemann's view compared to the other Anabaptists. In the context of the Anabaptist movement, was his position unique? Well, one thing that I would like to say, perhaps just to get started before I deal with that, he mentions that these are about the controversy between us and the world.

One of the key things for the Anabaptists was that faith has to be something in the heart, not just a historical faith. Everybody in Europe believed in the historical faith. Everybody believed in Jesus. Everybody believed he was God and man. But how many of them had actually made it a heart thing? That was one of the key things where they had a controversy with the world, or in other words, the Catholics and the Protestants. And I say that because this particular issue is only part of that. What should happen when you really give your life to Jesus, when he actually is born in you, in your heart, and he starts to affect your life? One thing that I would say is the Anabaptists had pretty much a typical medieval Catholic view about money as far as lending it out, and that really we shouldn't do that out of interest.

But they also took very, very seriously the call that the early church would have had that you should help your brother who's in financial need. And that would be one of the things that the Anabaptists would have said, that you need to care for your brother, and it doesn't matter if you are going to lose money or not, you need to help him out. And I just want to give two examples of that. We have an example of an Anabaptist meeting done secretly at night in a forest.

I can't remember the exact year, but it's in the middle 1500s. An evangelist was coming through, and so they knew who they were. They knew who the Anabaptists were. They told them, "Let's meet at such and such a place, at such and such a time." And they also would bring in those local people that weren't Anabaptists yet, but that they felt they could trust. Anyway, we have a record of one of these meetings where, after the gospel is explained, they're asked, "Does anybody want to give his life to the Lord?"

Or at least that's how we would say it, I suppose. And then the next thing they do is ask, "Are there any needs? Does somebody need seed or tools to start their garden so that they can feed themselves, or at least partially feed themselves?" And so, you know, who has extra seeds and who has tools? This was actually part of the worship service, the need to help each other out. So that's one picture. Another picture is this happened in the 1600s. And by that point, the Swiss government wasn't executing church leaders anymore, but they would expel them. And there is a particular church leader whose farm was seized, and he was expelled and told not to come back.

Well, he did come back. These were his people. This was his congregation. And the farm had been taken and sold. So when he came back, his people helped him get started again. This happened twice, that he was expelled and came back. Both times, his people helped him get started. And finally, his farm was far enough up the valley that the government sort of let him alone. But my point would be that these people saw it as their responsibility to help him get started again. And it had to pinch them at least a little bit. That was a thing they recognized, that I think you could say it this way: God's given us the earth and the fullness of the earth, and we're supposed to use it and possess it, but with open hands.

Well, at least the Swiss brethren would have said it's okay to own things, but we hold those things with open hands. Now, there was a difference. You read Peter Riedemann. He was a Hutterite. And the Hutterites believed that also we have to share everything. And that was actually very clear in the reading that you read. There should not be any rich, and there should not be any poor. But they believed that you shouldn't own anything. The commune owned everything together, and no one owned anything in particular, I guess, except for your clothes.

And that caused friction between the Swiss brethren and the Hutterites. They both believed in what I would call brotherly sharing. But the Hutterites said that any private ownership is a sign of greed. And the Swiss Anabaptists said, "No, we can own things, and we can use our skills and develop our farms." And so one is maybe going to have a little bit better farm than the other, but we help each other out as there's need. And so this became a point of conflict. The Hutterites were extremely mission-minded, but one of their mission fields was the Swiss brethren. They often sent their people to the Swiss brethren, who already believed everything else they did, except for the fact that they owned private property.

And that, for the Hutterites, was a sign that you're probably not totally yielded to Christ. You have to give up everything. In one sense, they were very similar to the people around them. Interest isn't a good thing. They took much more seriously what all Christians would have taught, that we should help each other, but they took it seriously. And then there's the conflict, though, between the Hutterites and the Swiss brethren on this really basically just one point: Can you own things with open hands or not? And the Hutterites said you can't. The Swiss brethren said you can. So there was a distinction between the Hutterites and the Swiss brethren on how they thought about money.

But I'm curious for both of these groups who did very clearly see economic implications of the gospel and the way they lived out their faith, what resources did they use to come to the conclusions that they did? I'm particularly interested in the way they talked about the Bible when they would make their case for their economic positions. That is what they would have said they were using. And they were. However, you can't get around the fact that they also lived in an environment that influenced them. And so they were very much influenced by medieval Catholicism, which had big questions about usury or interest. To point out or illustrate or defend their position, they would go to the Bible.

Both would go to the Bible. They both recognized that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. That was probably the second or third most popular quote for the Anabaptists. But these two groups did that stewardship differently. And here's where the conflict came in how they looked at the scriptures.

The Hutterites would say, "Look at the church in Jerusalem. That's the model for us," where they held everything in common. It's not exactly what they did because somebody like Barnabas had estates, and he sold those when he wanted to and then put the money in the general fund for the Jerusalem church. But generally speaking, they pooled their funds and shared them. And the Hutterites said, "That's our example." The Swiss said, "But we don't see that anywhere else. We don't see that pattern anywhere else." And as I remember it, the Hutterites said, "Well, that's the original, and that's what was meant to be, even if it wasn't." I guess it's a matter of interpretation. And the Hutterites felt that what was done at Jerusalem, the first church, is the pattern for all the churches.

All the Anabaptists would have agreed with the traditional Catholic position that work is good. And this is one of the things that the Anabaptists were known for. They were gradually driven out of Switzerland, and they went to southern Germany, which had suffered a really horrendous war, the Thirty Years' War. And so many areas were just devastated, and the population had been decimated. Practically, sometimes more than half the people either fled or died during the war. And so in the southern part of Germany, along the Rhine River, the rulers there held their nose and invited Anabaptists in. They didn't like Anabaptists. The rulers might be Protestant or they might be Catholic. And they didn't want Anabaptists necessarily, but they also needed people to farm the land.

And so Anabaptists settled there. And it's from there that they usually came to the New World, came to Pennsylvania. But one of the things that's fascinating is they worked really hard, and they typically took farms that might be very run down because of their hard work and also because of thinking about how to do things. They improved the land. So they did a good job of rotating crops. One of my students wrote a paper about this. So I'm going from his paper. One of the things that they developed was raising livestock and putting the manure on the land to enrich the land. Part of southern Germany ends up becoming part of France. And the French king liked what they were doing and told his Catholic subjects, "Look at these guys and do what they're doing."

But so I just want to say that as far as economics, one of the things that the Anabaptists recognized, and I think in a good way, was that work is good and that they developed what was in them and became good farmers and good whatever they were because they weren't just farmers. They were millers and they were blacksmiths and other things. But they seemed to recognize the goodness of work. So talk a bit about the landscape today. How do present-day Anabaptists live out either coherence or divergences from what you're describing being the case in regard to money in the early part of the movement? In one of the other episodes, we talked a little bit about how the Catholics and the Protestants came to see that perhaps interest on money lent out isn't always wrong because it can help build up a company or a private company or it can help a person get a farm.

We live in a setting where we have to figure out how some of these essential ideas can work. So I have huge questions about the way our Western economic system is based on borrowing and interest and all that, or even the stock market. But somehow we have to make we have to function in that setting. And that may mean doing things like borrowing. But I think we have to try to recognize what the key things are about the past, how we looked at things in the past. And so a recognition of the goodness of the world. God has created the world. It's good. And the gifts that he's given us and that should be developed, God wants us to develop those gifts.

If we keep those things in mind, I think that's going to lead to a good approach to work, whatever we're doing. We have to figure out in this system that's perhaps not so good, how do we do those good things as well as we can and avoid as much as possible the things that are counterproductive to the goods that God wants us to develop in our lives. Well, that is wise. And thank you for sharing that.

I think we're coming to the end of the episode, but is there anything else that you would like to add before we stop? I would just want to encourage people to take to heart what God says about he's given each one of us a certain number of talents or gifts. There's real flourishing when, because we're connected to Jesus, we actually develop those giftings he's given us. And I think that the focus there is what we need rather than a focus on making a lot of money or something like that. Well, thank you. And thank you so much for joining us on this episode and the other ones that we have recorded about money. I think this is offering some helpful ways to think about how to live faithfully with the resources that God has given to us.

So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us for this episode. And thanks to our donors and partners for making this possible. For more episodes, please subscribe or visit our website at anabaptistperspectives.org. You can also leave a comment or review to help more people find our content.