The Essence of Anabaptism — Dean Taylor — Ep. 001

Well, hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with Dean Taylor, and the last time we did a video project was about two years ago, actually. We're going to have to make sure and tell everybody where to find those. One thing that I noticed about some of your teaching that kind of sparked my interest was you talk a lot about the essence of Anabaptism and what it is that we stand for. Just can you just give us a brief description of what you mean by that term? What is the essence of Anabaptism? Okay. It's a great question. And one thing I wanted to say right from the beginning, when we talk about Anabaptism, it's not a denomination.

I mean, in other words, there's not like a church or a denomination called Anabaptists. It's not like the United Methodists or the Mormons or something like that. Anabaptism is a worldview. It's a biblical worldview or a hermeneutic. It's not a denomination. So it's not like we're pushing one particular denomination. We're talking about an entire way to interpret the Scriptures. So I basically see in general, there's an evangelical worldview, a Catholic worldview, and an Anabaptist worldview. Okay. Okay. So the essence of what I think is particular about the Anabaptist worldview is a focus on Jesus Christ, on his teachings, his dreams for humanity, his teachings to us, and putting those teachings into practice in our lifetime.

There was an interesting letter written by Conrad Grebel, who was one of the earliest Anabaptists before 1525. He wrote a letter to Vadian, his friend. And in that letter, Vadian begins to be pulling away from the radicals that were studying with Zwingli and Zurich. And in that letter, Conrad Grebel hits on two things in that letter that really struck me. And I see these two things as the essence of Anabaptism spoken from the very beginning from one of its founders.

And these two things are this. The one thing he said, "I believe the word of God without a complicated interpretation. And out of this I speak." So that is so simple, but so profound. But so the way I read that is, you know, he's saying that when they look into the Scriptures and the Bible says something, they just take it at face value. And actually, if you look at the different groups of radical movements throughout the time, since the times of the apostles, it seems like you get a bunch of people who get the word of God, open it up, and just say, "Let's do it." So the way I see in Conrad Grebel's interpretation there is, you know, let's say if we had an Anabaptist study Bible, we would have, if it says, "Love your enemies," it'd have a line down here, and then it would say, "What this really means is love your enemies."

So things like this. I believe the word of God without a complicated interpretation, and out of this I speak. The second thing he said in that letter was, "The words of the Lord were meant to be put into practice."

Now, everybody kind of says that in some degree, but not really. The difference with the Anabaptists from the very beginning, when they began to watch the new upcoming Protestant Reformation, they were following the evangelicals, studying with Zwingli and Zurich. They mentioned that these things about the grace of God and about the holiness of God and these things they were loving, they were loving every bit of that. But what they saw was that there was no putting into practice the actual teachings of Jesus. So instead of seeing, like saying, the teachings of Jesus as some sort of meditation or some sort of thing to be put into some different millennial or when you're in heaven or something, they saw these as the dreams of Jesus Christ, the teachings of Jesus Christ for humanity today.

They are the cure for humanity. So then there was this active working out of putting the teachings of Jesus into practice. And so I guess those are the things that I see as the essence of early Anabaptism. In the midst of that, I want to say one quick thing also is the concept of the church. In the early Protestant Reformation, it was still state church almost up to World War I, this concept of the state and the church together. And from the very beginning, the early Anabaptists broke with the evangelicals in the sense that the church is to be made up of people called and born again of Christ and coming together to live out the teachings of Jesus Christ.

In other words, they saw themselves as like a little embassy of the kingdom of heaven. And they are ambassadors living in the embassy of the kingdom of heaven, showing to the world what it would look like if we would follow the teachings of Jesus. Okay. And so going back to that letter from Conrad Grebel, when was that written? What year? It was when he was studying, I don't know the exact year, must have been somewhere around 1523, 1524. So we're talking about something that's like 500 years old. Yeah. Yeah. And this is definitely, this is not a new thing. It's not a new way of thinking. Yeah. And I like how you describe it more as a worldview, a way that we view the world and act on that instead of it being a denomination.

I think that's a really, yeah, that's important to say. Yeah. Because, you know, the Scriptures give us, you know, cautions about being factious and that type of a thing. And I think that's important. So I'm going to go back to something else you had said earlier is if there was an Anabaptist study Bible, it would be extremely simple. There really wouldn't be anything to the notes because it's just, it is what it says.

And I've heard you say before that really the teachings of Scripture are very simple. Like we overcomplicate things. And now that does seem pretty true, like pretty straightforward with some of the teachings of Jesus. But is Scripture really simple? Can you elaborate on that, especially with some of the things we see in the Old Testament? So that's a great question. So the thing that I look at with the Scriptures is you're right, it's very simple. And that's not necessarily easy, but it's very simple.

And that because Jesus, you know, gave us the idea that we should come to him as a child and in the simplicity. And as I found that many of these basic teachings of Jesus Christ, basic teachings of the Bible, and if you look at the first 300 years of the church, they just took it very simply. So, but the Old Testament, the Old Testament is something that gets brought up and particularly when it has to do with warfare. And people will say, okay, well, that's not very simple when we're talking about, when we're talking about the war and you're saying it's not very easy to understand. So the thing that I had to find out when I was going through the Scriptures is, is first of all, you know, when I started to study and I started to look at the teachings of Jesus and take them literally, it changed my life.

When I began to say, wow, so what if Jesus really meant every word he said? It changed completely. And as I began to look at these things, it was one night in bed and I was reading to my wife and I said, okay, honey, I'm going to read to you from this Scripture. And I was reading to her from the Sermon on the Mount and I started to read to her about Jesus' teachings and going through all that. And I started, you know, if we were to go through the Sermon on the Mount and look at all these teachings, I mean, he has strong teachings on the permanence of marriage, on lawsuits, on our economics, on warfare.

And as you look at all these things on swearing of oaths, and I started to say, you know, if we were to go out of our way to create a church that everything Jesus commanded us to do, we did exactly the opposite, we would kind of come up with the modern American church. And that really bothered me. And I said, you know, what if Jesus really meant these things to be worked out into practice? So I took it and I wanted to walk faithfully with Christ in that way. So I began to say, okay, so what do you do with all the Old Testament Scriptures? And particularly the issue that was coming to my mind in particular was warfare and that type of a thing.

And so as I looked through this, I realized there's one thing that you have to understand and I think you have to embrace to be a true biblical Christian, and that is God cannot change. He cannot change. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. James says in him there is no chance of changing, no shadow of turning in him. So we cannot in our mind allow the slightest bit of concept that the God of the Old Testament is a God is different than the God of the New Testament. God cannot change. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

But there's a problem with this when we're looking at and we're trying to balance out Jesus' teachings. So as I began to study these things and started thinking about, you know, it's very clear these teachings and not only the teachings of Jesus, but the lifestyle of Jesus and look at the way the first, the early church did these things.

But what do you do with these things? And as I started to read sort of, I don't know, sort of liberal or pacifist sort of writings, they discredited the Old Testament and kind of gave a sense that, oh, the Old Testament, you know, was written by men and they kind of got to it or it just seems like it just sort of discredits the whole Old Testament. And I just couldn't do that. But then I realized I had to come to the terms that God says, he says, Jehovah is a warrior, a warrior.

And as I read through those Old Testament wars, I read through the concept of Jehovah is a warrior. I read that he said that our God is a jealous God. I realized I have to embrace this. God cannot change. If God is a warrior in the Old Testament, then God is a warrior in the New Testament. And so then as I studied that, the thing that came to me as I pondered this, particularly in a military setting that I was in, is that God is just as jealous and just as zealous to spread his kingdom and to propagate his righteousness as he was in the Old Testament, but he's given us a different way to fight.

So when Jesus came, when Jesus came in the Sermon on the Mount, he did not discredit those things, but he said, and he said, I know that it has been said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I know that it has been said this way. He's not denying it, but now I say, love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. And so as I embrace this concept of the Old Testament, it is not God that changed, but his types of his weapons have changed. You know, the Ephesians passage says, we wrestle not with flesh and blood. It doesn't stop there. It says, we wrestle not with flesh and blood, but we do wrestle against principalities, against powers, against rulers of darkness in high places.

But there's also something else that needs to be looked at. If I can take for a moment and explain the way we look at the Old Testament from my background. And it's kind of like that story of the emperor has no clothes. Oh yeah, yeah. And if there's a bluff that's being said about the Old Testament, that when you start looking at it in detail, it's really not so.

So on one hand, Jesus' teachings very clearly indicate that we have a different way of fighting. The Paul backs it up in his writings. The early church backed that up as well. But there's something even deeper, and you have to pay close attention to this.

What's being said by evangelicals and Catholics today when dealing with just war ideas is that there's this implied concept that the Old Testament has these teachings on just war that somehow would guide us today if we decide whether we want to go to war with Iraq or something or North Korea. And so they're said this, well, how can you ignore the Old Testament teachings that have all this warfare in there? And they begin, then they go on to their explanation of the just war teaching. The problem is this does not exist in the word of God anywhere. Anywhere. There is no just war teaching in the Old Testament. The closest thing we have is in Deuteronomy chapter 20, where he gives some guidelines on wars.

And if you read through the entire chapter, you would never embarrassingly try to bring this up as a just war teaching. It's very, it's very powerful. There's no just war teaching in the Old Testament, period. There's the judgment of God being brought down upon a certain group of people or by his judgment. And that does teach us something about the character of God and about judgment. But there is no just war teaching. There is no just war teaching in the New Testament. There is no just war teaching in the first 300 years of the church until we get up to Augustine and some of those writers during that time period. What we have in the Old Testament is a clear indication of God's judgment being meted out.

That is correct. We have the importance on people obeying God's word. You remember Saul when he was commanded to go to war, the king Saul, and he was supposed to do this. And he was one of the first things he got in trouble for is he did not execute everyone that he was supposed to in that. So the importance of this is listening to the voice of God exactly how he's told us to do this.

God has spoken and he has told us to love our enemies. And that is what we have when it comes to warfare in the Scriptures. So let me repeat. There is no just war teachings in the Old Testament. None. There is a judgment of God being brought out on people, but there are no teachings of just war. There is no just war teachings in the New Testament, certainly. And there's no just war teachings for 300 years of the church. And so my take on it is that the only way to be consistent with the Old Testament is the emphasis on hearing what God has said. I remember a commercial back when I was in the army.

And there's these two soldiers, a sergeant and a private out painting this barn or warehouse or whatever. And one of the privates says to the sergeant, why are we out here painting this warehouse when I heard they're going to deploy the troops? I mean, we're all going to go back to America. We're not going to be here anymore anyway. I don't see why we're painting something that we're going to no longer be a part of. And the sergeant nicely said, private, continue the mission until the mission changes.

But the emphasis on obedience as a soldier was still essential. And this is what I see in the entirety of the word of God. The Old Testament zeal of God is still there. His passion for mankind, his desire to spread his kingdom, and his justice and his righteousness and even his judgment is revealed to us in the Old Testament. But we do not have a just war teaching. When it comes to even how the one thing that we do have is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. And it is that very thing that Jesus said, I know it has been said, but now I say, love your enemies. And gives us a totally different way to view even this Old Testament law that was given to us.

So I say that the emphasis, the only way to obey the word of God in the Old Testament and the New Testament is to hear the word of God and to follow what our commander has told us to do.

That's interesting though, because it's almost like we've muddled things or made it more complicated than it actually is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So what you're describing here is obviously a very radical, but yet simple approach to this is what the Bible says. This is what Jesus teaches. This is what we're going to do. Now, there's a lot of other groups out there who say the same thing, that they also hold very strongly to what Jesus teaches. So how is the Anabaptist approach to these teachings different than, say, an evangelical or a Catholic who would also claim that they have a strong allegiance to those teachings? It's a great question. And I want to repeat the idea again.

We're not talking about a denomination. We're talking about a worldview. I would consider myself, you know, I read many evangelical writers and I read some Catholic writers also. I'm blessed by the lives of both of them. But I'm as much not an evangelical as I am not a Catholic. The Anabaptist worldview is an emphasis that I think is extremely important. And it has to do with focusing on the teachings of Jesus. Now, I believe that all of them, the Catholics even, the evangelicals, all agree that the word of God is completely true.

It's the emphasis. And the way I've kind of given an example once, you know, you take a pair of binoculars and you turn them up backwards and you look through them backwards and you know, it's real small instead of real big. And I believe this is the way I kind of look at the concept of a hermeneutic, a biblical principle that focuses on Jesus in a real way.

And so as I started to ponder this difference, just like you're saying, and try not to be judgmental on anyone else, but I began to ask the question like this. Can a person be a follower of Christ without following Christ?

Okay. Yeah. So basically at the end of the day, in my background that I grew up with, the answer was, well, yeah. I mean, you got saved. That makes you a follower of Christ. So now you're a follower of Christ, but you don't really have to follow Christ to be a follower of Christ as long as you're saved. It wasn't put in the shoe leather. It wasn't put in the shoe leather. And it's the other thing that, you know, really hit me was the idea of just taking Jesus' teachings, you know, literally. I remember one time when I was getting out of the army, I was an armorer. The guys that take care of machine guns and, you know, to make sure they're clean or whatever.

And my job during this time was, it was getting close to the Persian Gulf War, was to install these grenade launchers on the M203 grenade launchers on an M16. And I was just starting to read the word of God and to study, you know, these types of things. And I remember holding it and literally saying, what would Jesus do? I was reading a book at the time that was asking that question. What would Jesus do? And I remember saying, oh, it's so complicated.

And I finished the job, I'm sad to say. So now it's somewhere out there. Maybe it's retired by now as an M203 on an M16. But the idea that we do this concept of, you know, saying it's complicated kind of shields us from taking the truth of it very seriously. It's almost like something to keep us from even thinking about it. We're just like, oh, it's too complicated. We'll not worry about it. Yeah. And here's the difference. Again, this focus on Christ. Our salvation is a person. It's Jesus. Our salvation is not a creed. Our salvation is not a doctrine or a recognition in our mind. Our salvation is the very person of Jesus Christ.

Christ within us is salvation. Not a mental ascent to his death, not a mental ascent to certain creeds, but Christ within us, us being dead and born again into Christ. You know, the most, you know, probably quoted passage in the Bible, John 3:16, you know, as we look at this, we know the story, Zacchaeus is coming to Jesus and he's asking, you know, these questions about how can a person, you know, do the miracles like you?

We know you must be of God. And then he says these things, and sometimes we've ignored what he's actually saying here. Jesus answered, excuse me, John chapter 3, verse 3. Jesus answered and said, "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."

Now notice the emphasis is on the kingdom of God and what God was doing on this earth. And you must be born again to understand that, to see that. But the emphasis isn't just to be born again and to stop there. So if our emphasis is on Paul and we turn the binocular and we turn it around, now every word of Paul has to be understood as absolutely true. It's the word of God. But it's the emphasis on Christ. If the emphasis is we're born again, we're saved, everything else is kind of extra, then we've lost it. If the emphasis is on the very person of Jesus Christ, his salvation, his grace, his teachings, his life, his example become what exactly we want to mold ourselves by.

And you know, one of the things that I think mark a difference, and you're talking about just the difference of evangelicals and this Anabaptist view comes to in Luther's famous letter that he wrote called Sin Boldly. Now, yeah. Now, so here he says in this letter to he wrote to a friend, Martin Luther, who was a star of the Protestant Reformation, he says, "No sin can separate us from him.

Even if we were to kill or to commit adultery thousands of times each day, do you think such an exalted lamb paid merely a small price with a meager sacrifice for our sins? Pray hard for you are quite a sinner." Now, I will take it that Martin Luther tended to exaggerate. He was writing to a friend. Let's cut him some slack and maybe he was using hyperbole. But the sentence that comes before this, I think really explains the difference. He says, "It suffices that through God's glory we have recognized the lamb who takes away the sins of the world."

So in other words, a mental recognition, a mental ascent to who Jesus is and his facts of his atonement, he says, "It suffices that we recognize the lamb." I say no. I think the scriptures say no. It suffices when the lamb of God is inside of us and we are born again. And if this is true, it is a reality. Then all those passages where Jesus is talking about judgment day and he's talking about those who obey me make perfect sense. It's still not us by our own strength. It's Christ within us. There's another quote that I find interesting. So the early church believed this way. When you read through the New Testament, you read to the early Christians, they believed that Jesus was the center of their faith.

His teachings were for humanity. This is the answer. When we get into Constantine in 325, there was this different shift to saying the proper creed meant you were a Christian. Yeah. Yeah. So if you said this creed, the Nicene Creed, I don't have a problem with the Nicene Creed, but if you said the Nicene Creed, you then would be a Christian.

Now the problem was, not the problem with the words of the Nicene Creed, the problem was the shift. Instead of being Christ within us, that our salvation is Jesus, the emphasis began to be put on a proper understanding of this Christology that they were propagating. This idea is why I say that it's a difference of truly focusing on the very person of Jesus Christ. He has given us his plan for humanity. He has given us salvation and the Holy Spirit to live it out. And he wants to live this in us. But his teachings, his teachings are for us and they're for today and they're beautiful and they'll change the world.

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense because you're pulling the focus not just back to, you know, some verses here, some verses there, whatever. You're pulling it back to the very core, which is Jesus. And I think that's something, especially in our own circles, I think we forget that often. We really do. Yeah. I think this is one episode that I think is really important that we really, really start sharing what it is that we mean by Anabaptist, you know, by these things that we value.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I've heard somebody once say that some people say from my background, the teachings of Jesus are for a new millennial or for heaven or something. I heard somebody once say, how hard is it to love your enemies in heaven?

These teachings are for today. They're the cure for humanity. We need a biblical hermeneutic that focuses on the teachings of Jesus Christ, believing the word of God and allowing his plan for humanity to be lived out in this world. Yeah. Yeah. Amen.

Okay. Well, let's just go do it. Thank you so much, Dean, for sharing. And thank you all for watching. If you have questions about something he shared, make sure and email us or put a comment down there and we'll make sure and try to respond to that. If you have ideas for other episodes you'd like to see us do, let us know. We'll try to make it happen. And we'll see you guys in the next video.