Nonresistance in Historical Anabaptism — Stephen Russell — Anabaptist Perspectives Ep. 064

Well, hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with Stephen Russell. We're at Faith Builders up in Guys Mills, Pennsylvania. You've written a book on non-resistance. You've been a teacher here for quite some time. You have a degree in church history. And there's a doctrine of the Anabaptists that's probably one of the more famous ones, and it's non-resistance. Can you just, first of all, describe what do the Anabaptists mean when we use that term? And just go into a little bit of that. So do you mean the early Anabaptists in the Reformation days? Yes. Okay. The word they actually used was, "We are defenseless Christians." And for them, the reason for using that particular word was all the other Christians were connected to the state.

And so if they found somebody who was heretical, they would judge them, and then they'd hand them over to the state, and the state would usually execute them. Wow. All right. So the Anabaptists made it very clear, "We believe in discipleship, but we do not use the arm of the state. We don't use the sword. So we're defenseless Christians. We don't defend ourselves." And if somebody happens to have the wrong doctrinal view, they work with him. And if he doesn't change, they may excommunicate him, but they will not use the sword. They are defenseless Christians. And they even tied together the concept of excommunication, and they compared that with, "Yes, sometimes somebody needs to be disciplined because of his doctrine, but you don't kill them."

So that was the key thing. Because in Reformation days, most people weren't drawn into the military. You came in on your own. So that wasn't as big a question then. It was more, "Do we use the state to discipline in the church?" And no, we don't do that. And the whole reason was because of love. We love our enemies.

Even if it's a person in the church who falls away doctrinally and is potentially corrupting the church, they would say, "We may have to expel him, but we expel him and we try to treat him in a way that he may come back. We want him to come back." Interesting. Okay. It's basically taking it would be their interpretation of Jesus' teaching of love your enemies. Yes. Yeah. So my question is, where did this teaching come about? How did this happen? And specifically, where geographically did it originate? For the Anabaptists. For the Anabaptists. Okay. Well, the early church was non-resistant, and it lost it. And so what you have is the medieval church just before the Reformation.

Everyone believed in the just war theory that you may have to defend yourself. And then a man named Erasmus printed, published the Greek New Testament. And so everybody could look at the original source and see what Jesus said, what the apostles said. And they saw in here that we were called to do something beyond what we were allowed to do in the Old Testament. We were actually supposed to lay our lives down, and we were supposed to love our enemies that way. And so one of the sources is Erasmus, the fact that he published the Greek New Testament, and then they saw in the original source what Jesus called us to and what the apostles called us to.

And the first time that we actually hear them putting this into practice, there's two important times. One is Conrad Grebel is moving towards adult baptism. And he's writing to some other reformers, and he makes it clear that we are to lay down the sword. The sword doesn't belong to the Christian. The next place it comes out clearly, so that would be about 1524. 1527, the Anabaptists write the first confession of faith that they have. It's called Schleidheim. And there they make it very clear.

The Christian is to walk in the life of the resurrection, and he is to live in the perfection of Christ, and the sword is not part of the perfection of Christ. God has established the government to take care of those who are not walking in the perfection of Christ, and they have the sword.

Yeah. And you mentioned this at the beginning, but you're saying the early church did have the non-resistant teachings. They lost that. And then around the time of the Reformation, you see this revival coming back. Because they're looking back at the original documents. They're looking at the New Testament, and they're looking at it in Greek. And there were at least some places in the Vulgate, which is the Latin Bible they were using before that, there were some places there that were mistranslated. So I don't know that there were any about the non-resistance. But for instance, when he started his ministry, he said, well, in the Greek it says, "Repent and be baptized." And in the Vulgate it says, "Do penance."

And that's. Interesting. Okay. So it had a little bit of a flavor to it. Yeah. It had a little flavor that was definitely very Catholic. And that was one of those things that startled people as they started reading the Greek New Testament. And I think it made them more pay attention. So what are we being called to? Yeah. But coming back to God's word, what does it actually say? I don't know that the Vulgate had any mistranslations on the issue of non-resistance, but the whole thing was people realized that the church had slipped away from what was the original call in the New Testament. And so they went back eagerly looking at what should we do?

How should we live? So the question is then, what other perspectives did the church have on violence, on war? And you've already kind of touched on that, but where did those things come from? Yeah. Well, the early Christians were both non-resistant, and they also were not willing to participate in government. And I could go into this really extensively, but I don't think we would have enough time. And as the first emperor came along who called himself a Christian, Constantine, started a gradual moving together of church and state. And probably the most important person for shifting the church away from non-resistance and non-participation in the state is St. Augustine.

Which is on your board right here. I had a class on him. Just teaching a class on that. Late 300s, early 400s. And he is the person who takes a pagan writing. The pagans knew that war is not good. Interesting. Okay. But they had to do it. So Cicero, a pagan around 50 BC, wrote a theory of just war. And it had lots and lots of restraints. Augustine takes that. And these restraints are, if you're going to have a war, they're good.

For instance, "Don't harm non-combatants." And so you go after the other soldiers, but don't harm old men, women, children, and don't destroy livelihoods, don't destroy farms, etc. These are the kinds of things it said. And Augustine added to it ideas to make it Christian. So if we have to fight, we have to do it in love. Continuing on with that, so around the 400s, you have these ideas developing. Where does it go from there? Two things happen there. Augustine says that we have to defend the order, the social order. So at least sometimes we have to defend. It's meant to be defensive. It's meant to be defensive. It doesn't work out that way, but that's what it's meant to be.

And also, because of his change, it starts to make it look better if we actually are Christian and participate in the government. Now, let me tell you what they used to do. Right up to Augustine's time, as more and more people became Christian, some of them, especially in the upper class, started to think the Roman Empire keeps chaos at bay.

So before I get baptized, I will serve the government, either in the military or in the government itself. And then maybe when I'm 30 or 40, I will withdraw and get baptized.

Okay. But the original pattern was not participating in the military or the government. But this is a big step in compromise. And then that doesn't last long. Sometime soon after Augustine's time, it becomes acceptable to be in the military and to be in the government. In fact, while the emperors were still pagan, there were some Christians in the army because sometimes some soldiers would hear the gospel and want to be baptized, and they couldn't leave the army. And the church worked with them and said, "If you promise not to kill, we will baptize you." But now if their commander said, "There's a battle and you have to go," and you refuse, you would be executed.

So this is a promise that you're—and it's a promise that puts your life in the balance. The church did that because this was a pastoral need. There were some soldiers who were turning to the Lord and couldn't get out of the military. But at the same time, when the church did that, they also made it clear—this would be in the early 200s—they also made it clear if you are in the government and you have the potential of judging a case that could be a capital case, you had to withdraw, at least for that. But those people could leave. They could leave government. So essentially, the church was saying, "We don't want you in the government or in the military."

Augustine is saying, "Well, but we have to, to keep things functioning well, to keep the world functioning well." And then eventually, it becomes just the norm. However, during the whole of the Middle Ages, Christians still knew—and I'm just using that word as people in the church—they still knew that this wasn't really what God wanted. And so during the Middle Ages, the church developed books that told priests how to deal with people that came to them in confession about, "I was in the military." And so it was accepted, but they still knew it's not quite right. And so there were rules. Did the man know that he had stabbed someone, let's say? Did he know if he had died?

And if he was an archer, then he didn't know if he hit anyone. And so there were a whole different set of rules depending on how well you were aware of if you had actually killed someone or not. But they recognized there was something in them that said that they heard the gospels, and they knew this isn't really the best. So even though the church was allowing it and accepting the just war, people were still not at ease. But there was one more development. As Christianity and Islam came into contact with each other, Islam affected Christianity. And Islam, with its jihad and its holy war, it affected the Christians. And it's about 100 years after Islam comes on the scene that we have the first crusade.

It wasn't called a crusade. That's years later. But we have the first time that the church tried to force people to become Christians militarily. Then a few hundred years later, we have the first actual crusade to go conquer the land where Jesus lived, where the Muslims had taken over. So now you get grace if you go and fight for God. That's the crusade. That's a totally different tone going on there. Totally. And it comes from Islam. Yeah. It comes from Islam. It's like it's very reactionary to something. Yes. So this goes on. So you're saying these teachings started coming around the 400s. This goes on for quite some time until around the Reformation time, I guess.

Yes. And well, the crusades are a little bit before the Reformation. And then in the Reformation, as people are looking at the scriptures and asking themselves, "Where has the church made a mistake?" People recognize that there are things that aren't quite what they should be. They started seeing things like, from our perspective, and I think from the biblical perspective, people are called to follow Jesus, and then they ask to be baptized. Not you baptize them as children. That was a big thing. But then they also noticed other things like, "Should we be involved with the sword, whether it's the state or whether it's the military?" And so that is rediscovered in the Reformation. So considering the many different views at the time, especially the strong connection that the church was having with the state.

In the Reformation days. Yeah. In the Reformation days, why do you think the Anabaptists took such a strong stance on that? And how did that go for them, basically? Well, they felt that so much had been added, and that's the problem in the church. And they wanted to get back to the original. They wanted to be more biblical.

And so that's what motivated them. I think there was another thing, and that was they were motivated to preach the gospel in a way that nobody else was because everybody was baptized as a child. So all you need is to educate them.

You don't have to call them to faith. The Lutherans baptized children, the Anglicans baptized children, the Reformed or the Calvinists baptized children, so did the Catholics. The Anabaptists said, "No. Each one has to make his decision." And so what they were calling you to is a vision that God has, that we all have a need, and we all have to—that's answered in Jesus. But this actually changes you, and it makes you a person who's about love, just like God's about love. So it was an attempt to be biblical, and it was an attempt to preach the gospel. And as you preach the gospel, you start to realize this is about loving your enemy more than loving yourself.

So I think it was both the recognition of God as love and the recognition that the scriptures themselves make this clear. You heard that you should love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say unto you. So they would read these things, and they wanted to be as biblical as possible. But then they also saw their call to evangelize. It meant they ought to be lovers rather than people that defended themselves or hated others.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And they were very willing to say, "This is important enough. We're going to really take a stand here." Yeah. I like that. Now we're shifting a little more to current day, but I guess you can answer this from the Reformation perspective as well. But are the Anabaptists unique in their commitment to peace and non-violence? And then how does their approach differ from other denominations? I guess I'm thinking of you have Bonhoeffer, Quakers, different people who had peaceful—yeah. Just answer some of that.

What are the differences there? The Anabaptists were the main group in the Reformation that saw the need to be defenseless. That's the word they used. Okay. Okay. And then there may have been a few others, but they're the key. Now, there was a group among the Anabaptists who picked up the sword, the Munsterites. They felt that the time had come to stop being slaughtered like sheep. And so they picked the sword up. It was a very sad event. And it was only a small group of Anabaptists, but most of them were non-resistant then.

There have been other Christians throughout history who have been non-resistant. Ever since the Reformation, many Christians look to the scriptures and try to shape their lives according to that. In the United States, there were the Restorationist Christians and the Pentecostal Christians, both of whom looked at the scriptures and at the beginning tended to be non-resistant.

But it wasn't a—I would say it wasn't well thought out. I think the Anabaptists did a better job of thinking about it and how it's really a core aspect of being a Christian. And so they saw it there, but they have lost it.

Also, there are many Christians who would call themselves pacifists. And I would make a difference between a pacifist and a non-resistant Christian. Now, somebody might call himself a pacifist and actually mean somebody who will lay his life down rather than defend himself. But often, there have been Christians who see that war is not good, and they prefer to try to avoid it. And so they often start pacifistic organizations. But historically, when this happened before the Civil War, there were a lot of pacifist organizations, but the Civil War was for a good reason. So you have Quakers going into the military to free the slaves. World War I—the same thing. There were a lot of pacifistic organizations.

And just before the war, they were trying to get together and call for peace. But once the war started, many of those people said, "This is a war, and justice is on our side, and so we should fight it." So the people that I'm thinking of as pacifists, yes, they see the evil of war, but they can at times be drawn into war. The non-resistant person is one who will not even defend himself.

He sees the image of God in the other person, and rather than destroy that or damage it, he will let that person—if he wants to be my enemy, he will let that person kill him. But he won't. And pacifists often will not go down that path. They wouldn't be quite that extreme or extreme or. Yeah. They wouldn't be that thorough. Yeah. Thorough is a much better word. Yeah. And then there's this other thing that's happening today.

A lot of just war theory people are recognizing that with the kinds of weapons we have—nuclear weapons and things—and biological and chemical weapons—that war may hurt a lot more people than it used to. And so there are people who still believe in the just war theory but are becoming very reticent about war. Really, we can hardly go to war. Now, that's not non-resistance. But I'm just saying that people that have a Christian outlook tend to resist going to war. Many times they do, but often feel like they have to. Right now, a lot of people are seeing this is really something we should avoid. And I think we Anabaptists have a moment where we can be talking to our friends and helping them see the biblical, the godly approach.

They're starting to question, "Can we really have a just war?" And so I think we need to understand our own position and start helping our friends, whether they're Baptists or whatever they are, to see that this is really very scriptural and it's what God wants from us.

Very good. All right. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us for this episode, and especially for the time you've put in to study this out and to teach this to others. I think that's really powerful. And we need more of that. So I appreciate that. Thank you. Yes. Thank you.