Zwingli Didn’t Put the Sword Away, Grebel Did - John Ruth

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. I didn't—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, say, you know, 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 quietist, 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 quietist. 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.

Oh. 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 heritage. 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. Well, every tourist that goes to Zurich sees that. But you end—and again, I haven't—I have to be honest, I haven't read every word, right? Because this just came from Amazon right before this interview, right? So, but you end your book with the picture of Zwingli there, with the word, like the Bible and a sword. Yes. But then you make a point that, you know, there's no statue of Conrad Grebel.

No. 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 is gar optan, 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 the 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 Schradler, that is, would carry the sword. Only the minority group, minority group were the Schtabler, 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 Schradler were thousands more than the Schtabler, but the Schradler died out quick. The Schtabler included people of the branch of the Hutterites, who were also totally pacifists. And at the point that you give up, see, people think they tend—there's the phenomenon in the 20th, 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.