by Peter T. Chattaway
March 15, 1994
Introduction
I. Origins
II. Menno Simons
III. War Taxes and Substitutes
IV. The Fate of Nonresistance
Conclusion
Bibliography
Contrary to popular opinion, the Reformation was not a simple matter of Catholics versus Protestants, the Pope versus Martin Luther. While Martin Luther certainly played a central role in breaking up the hegemony of the Roman Catholic church, his was not the only voice of dissent. Other Reformers came to the fore in the years immediately following the posting of Luther's famous 95 Theses in 1517, but these Reformers could not always agree on what form the new church -- and therefore society itself -- should take. The Catholic church, meanwhile, sought help in trying to stamp out these heresies, as it had done before. In all of this, both Catholic bishops and Reformers found themselves siding with secular princes and, ultimately, working with them to ensure a more localized version of the hegemony that once included all of Europe.
Out of this milieu arose the Anabaptists, a loose assortment of Reformers who believed that the very partnership of church and state was, itself, at the heart of the problems that the Reformation had sought to correct. From its earliest days, pacifism and nonresistance formed a central tenet in the theology of the Anabaptist movement, qualities that were impossible in societies headed by kings who kept standing armies, and who thus needed to be ready to kill. The Anabaptists thus became known as Radical Reformers for seeking to distance themselves from the society at large, and society's warmaking elements in particular.
While Luther was making waves in Germany, a German-speaking priest named Ulrich Zwingli rose to the leadership of the Reformation in Switzerland. Just as Luther was eventually helped by certain German princes, Zwingli gained legal support for his reforms from the city council of Zurich. His was not a completely religious Reform; Zwingli was an admirer of the humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus and a "thorough-going humanist" himself (Estep, p. 9). Zwingli also attracted a number of students who were eager to study the New Testament in its original Greek.
Eventually, these students became convinced that the Reformation had not yet been taken to its proper conclusion; to them, Luther and others had so far produced only a "halfway Reformation" (Dyck, p. 24). A number of students, led by Conrad Grebel, came to the conclusion that baptism should only be performed on adults who believed the Christian gospel; this was the most radical break from Rome yet, since Luther and Zwingli still practiced infant baptism and other sacraments. Zwingli broke from his more radical students, and in January 1525 the Zurich city council came down in Zwingli's favour, telling the radicals that they could "conform, leave Zurich, or face imprisonment" (Estep, p. 10).
A few days later, on January 21, a small gathering of these radicals met at the home of one Felix Manz to discuss what their next move ought to be. By the end of the meeting, Grebel had baptized one George Blaurock, who then baptized the rest. These first Anabaptists -- that is, people who had been "baptized again" -- made their decision in the knowledge that they would be harassed by the state and the church, even by other Reformers. Indeed, their first martyr, Eberli Bolt, was executed just a little more than four months later, on May 29 (ibid., p. 22).
Grebel himself was arrested shortly afterwards, and he died in prison of the plague in 1526 (Goertz, p. 128). Before his death, however, he and a number of other Radical Reformers were able to formulate some of the basic concepts of Anabaptism, including the belief in pacifism and nonresistance. For Grebel, Christ was the captain of "the true milites Christi", and not any temporal authority; similarly, the individuals who constituted the church were called not to conquer but to suffer in Christ's name (Williams, pp. 191-192). In an effort to dissuade Thomas Muntzer from what became known as the Peasants' War of 1525, Grebel wrote to him:
True believing Christians ... must be baptized in anguish and tribulation, persecution, suffering, and death, tried in fire, and must reach the fatherland of eternal rest not by slaying the physical but the spiritual. The use neither worldly sword nor war since killing has ceased with them entirely ... (Grebel, quoted in Brock, 1991a, pp. 33-34)
By the autumn of 1525, it was reported in Zurich that the Radical Reformers also believed that state officials could not really be considered Christians, since the state, of necessity, had to wield a sword to preserve social order (ibid., p. 35). In fact, the Anabaptist approach to the state was not quite so uniform, and it became even less so in later years. But their refusal to take up arms in support of the state was perceived as a sort of threat by both Catholic and Protestant magistrates, as it was "subversive of good order" (ibid., p. 38; cf. Dyck, p. 82).
On February 24 1527, the Swiss Brethren, as these first Anabaptists came to be known, met in Schleitheim to endorse a written statement by Michael Sattler, a former Benedictine monk who was later burned at the stake on May 21 of that same year (Williams, p. 295). Among his "Seven Articles" of confession (Brock, 1991a, p. 36), Sattler condemned the use of force:
Therefore there will also unquestionably fall from us the unchristian, devilish weapons of force -- such as sword, armor, and the like, and all their use for friends or against one's enemies -- by virtue of the word of Christ: Resist not evil. (Sattler, quoted in Williams, pp. 292-293)
Whether the religious persecution was the cause or possibly the result of this next belief, many Anabaptists came to expect that the Day of Judgment was close at hand. For Sattler and others, it was not enough to exercise the negative side of love by not resisting evil; Anabaptists also sought to exercise the positive side of love by spreading their interpretation of the gospel through their missionary activity (Goertz, p. 142). The movement spread to Germany very quickly, since German was the language of the Swiss Brethren (Brock, 1991a, p. 40), as well as the Netherlands; as early as 1535, twenty-five Dutch Anabaptists were arrested and brought before the courts as far afield as England (Dyck, p. 91).
Certain Anabaptist sects had a different view of this "apocalyptic fervor" (Williams, p. 173). Sensing that the Day of Judgment was at hand, Melchior Hoffman believed that Christ would return to his New Jerusalem -- which happened to be located in Strassburg, where rebaptism was punishable by death -- in 1533 to cleanse the world of the "bloodsucking anti-Christian Lutherans and Zwinglian preachers"; his own followers believed him to be the second Elijah (Goertz, pp. 186-187). Hoffman did not practice violence himself; he preferred to wait for the Second Coming first. Instead, Hoffman was arrested in 1533 and spent ten years in prison before dying there.
More tragically, a disciple of Hoffman's named Jan Matthijs moved to Munster in 1534 and declared that Munster, not Strassburg, was to be the New Jerusalem. Rebaptism was forced on the citizens, and the Bishop of Munster raised an army to reclaim the city. Matthijs was killed in an early skirmish, and his successor, Jan van Leiden, proclaimed himself the new King David and introduced polygamy and other practices before the city fell to the Bishop on June 24, 1535 (Dyck, p. 78). Needless to say, this incident did not reflect well on the other Anabaptists, who sincerely believed in pacifism but continued to be perceived by the political authorities as dangerous, potential troublemakers.
The events at Munster, as well as a related incident at a monastery near Witmarsum in the Netherlands, prompted a Catholic priest named Menno Simons to examine his own role in the church. On January 30, 1536, Menno publicly declared his new allegiance to the Anabaptist cause and went into hiding (ibid., p. 81). Menno, of course, went on to become one of the most influential Anabaptist thinkers and writers, and eventually the Mennonites named after him became virtually synonymous with Anabaptists themselves.
On the separation of church and state, Menno followed the principle taught by St. Paul in Romans 13, that secular authority existed at the will of God and ought therefore to be followed so long as that authority was not "contrary to the Word of God" (Brock, 1991a, p. 98). Menno's early writings had an almost Lutheran approach to civil authority, in that he allowed for use of "the ordinary sword of the magistrate when it must be used" (ibid., p. 99) and in 1540 he even exhorted the state to "punish the wicked and rightly wield the sword that God has given you" (Williams, p. 736). However, whereas Luther believed a Christian could wield the sword in a "public capacity" and remain peaceful in one's "private capacity" (ibid., p. 346), Menno emphasized that Christians had no business with physical violence and ought to put all their energies into spiritual battle:
Our weapons ... are weapons with which the spiritual kingdom of the devil is destroyed and the wicked principle in man's soul is broken down ... We have and know no other weapons besides this ... And iron and metal spears and swords we leave to those who, alas, regard human blood and swine's blood alike. (Menno Simons, quoted in Brock, 1991a, p. 98)
Menno held to this fundamental division between the Christian community and secular authority, and in later years he became less inclined to permit the state a violent role. In 1558, he advised magistrates not to "wield the sword that God has given you", as he had in 1540, but to "punish the wicked in a Christian manner and rightly serve in the offices that God has given you" (Williams, p. 736).
III. War Taxes and Substitutes
While they objected to use of the sword, some Anabaptists were not opposed to, say, guard duty with an ax, provided that they were not required to kill anyone (Brock, 1991a, p. 44). A thornier issue was that of the war tax. Following Christ's command to "pay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar" (Matthew 22:21), most Anabaptists believed that the war tax ought to be paid without protest, though the Hutterites of Moravia proved a noteworthy exception (Brock, 1991a, p. 46).
The Hutterites were an Anabaptist movement that followed the teachings of Jacob Hutter, who had been executed in 1536. For them, pacifism meant total communalism, since they believed that the existence of private property was at the root of all strife (ibid., p. 50). To them, the war tax was Blutgeld, i.e., "blood money". According to one anonymous Hutterite:
There is little or no difference between slaying with our own hands and strengthening and directing someone else when we give him our money [to slay] in our stead. (quoted in Brock, 1991a, p. 54)
When they refused to pay the tax, the government seized their property anyway. And, in good nonresistant fashion, the Hutterites let their property go to the state in this way without any overt protest; it was one of the milder forms of persecution that they endured. This policy continued until the Hutterites were finally expelled from Moravia in 1622 (ibid., pp. 56-57).
Other Anabaptists, however, not only paid their war taxes, but at a 1568 conference in Strassburg, they approved the practice of purchasing a substitute who might perform an individual's military duty on behalf of the conscripted Anabaptist (ibid., p. 45). In an even more interesting scenario, the Dutch Mennonites made a donation to Prince William of Orange during his fight for independence from Spain in 1572, and said that the use of the money was completely up to him; they did ask, however, for Prince William's friendship "if God would confer upon him the government of Netherlands." In 1575, William obliged, exempting the Mennonites from military service and giving them the opportunity to dig ditches and perform other civic duties instead. "This constitutes the first piece of legislation allowing conscientious objection to military service." (ibid., pp. 101-102) By this time, an estimated 1500 to 2500 Anabaptists had been martyred in Belgium and the Netherlands alone (Dyck, p. 86). However, many Duth patriots thought their Prince had gone too far and that the Mennonites had, in effect, bribed their way out of military service; Reformed ministers were known to harass Anabaptists by interrupting their services and otherwise ridiculing them (ibid., p. 100). However, the exemption from military service remained in place until it was revoked in 1799; it then became compulsory again to serve in the military or, instead, purchase a substitute (Brock, 1991a, p. 109).
Pacifism and nonresistance appear to have survived best with those Anabaptists and Mennonites who left the homelands of the founding Mennonites and moved to countries such as Russia and America. As early as November 1644, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed an act against immigrant "Anabaptists ... [who] denied the ordinance of magistracy, and the lawfulness of making war" (Brock, 1991b, p. 13). The Mennonites did not establish a permanent settlement in North America until the founding of Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1683; within five years they had joined the local Quakers in protesting American slavery, declaring that "those who hold slaves are no better than Turks" (Estep, pp. 203-204). During the French and Indian War of the 1750s, the Mennonites asked the state for protection but, for the most part, refused to take part in the actual fighting; protection was a service that they expected as part of "Caesar's duty" to them (Brock, 1991a, p. 195). During the American Revolution (1775-1783), the Mennonite church in North America threatened to split over the issue of whether or not to pay the war tax; those who did not pay had their goods confiscated anyway (Dyck, p. 295). During the American Civil War (1861-1865), Mennonites and others were drafted into the armies of both sides, though they found ways to cling to their pacifism. Confederate General T. F. "Stonewall" Jackson remarked:
There lives a people in the Valley of Virginia, that are not hard to bring to the army. While there they are obedient to their officers. Nor is it difficult to have them take aim, but it is impossible to get them to take correct aim. I, therefore, think it better to leave them at their homes that they may produce supplies for the army. (quoted in Dyck, p. 296)
Churches were painted yellow and some Mennonites were even tarred and feathered for their refusal to fight during World War I (1914-1918); when World War II (1939-1945) approached, the Mennonites and other peace churches asked the U.S. government for provisions for conscientious objectors. Thus was formed the Civilian Public Service, whereby conscientious objectors were permitted to build dams and work on other projects (ibid., pp. 296-297.)
Catherine II opened the doors to Russia for the Anabaptists in 1770, but she did not impose a war tax on them until 1787 (Brock, 1991a, p. 60). The Mennonites were promised exemption from the military "for ever" in 1800, but the government of 1870 thought differently and sought to introduce universal military service as part of its efforts to modernize its armed forces (ibid., p. 156). The Mennonites protested, many of them preparing to leave the country for the United States or for Canada, where an 1849 statute had eliminated even the fine for military exemption (ibid., p. 229). The Russian government dealt with this mass exodus by creating a Forestry Service that all conscientious objectors could work for instead of serving in the army (ibid., p. 160). The Mennonite interpretation of Jesus' teachings also had an effect on Leo Tolstoy's pacifist ideology, though he went further than the Mennonites in rejecting not only violence, but the legitimacy of the state itself (Brock, 1991b, pp. 190, 193).
In Europe, the belief in nonresistance did not last so long. After years of persecutions, including imprisonment on galley slaves and the branding of their foreheads, the Bern Mennonites of Switzerland gradually let go of their nonresistance platform, while keeping to the other articles of faith (Dyck, pp. 113, 285). By the eighteenth century, Dutch Mennonite nonresistance had been watered down, if not abandoned, to such a degree that Francois Adriaen van der Kemp, the minister at Leiden in 1780s, would exchange his clerical garb for his captain's uniform and proceed to the drill field every Sunday (Brock, 1991a, p. 108). In the nineteenth century, the Mennonites of France were denied special exemption on the basis that the law ought to be the same for all; by 1850, young Mennonites were performing military duties no differently from other French men (ibid., pp. 151-152).
It was not until the years following World War I that the European Mennonites began to reclaim their heritage as pacifists. Members of the European churches visited a Quaker centre in England during the war, and returned to the Netherlands hoping to restore the old convictions to the faith. Thus, shortly after the war, the Dutch Mennonite church sponsored, among other projects, a Work Group of Mennonites Against Military Service in 1922 (Dyck, pp. 296-297).
The Anabaptist movment arose out of a desire for love, brotherhood, and religious purity. In the views of the Anabaptist leaders, none of these objectives were compatible with the waging of war, and Anabaptists were ready to die rather than give up their stance for peace. However, like the earlier versions of Christianity that they stood against, at least nominally, differences in interpretation and practice divided the church, while friendlier associations with the state weakened the church's resolve to stand for peace. In recent years, largely as a result of the World Wars that ravaged Europe, there has been a renewed interest in peace on the part of the European Mennonites, an interest that those in other parts of the world have not been so quick to abandon. Time will tell how large a role the Mennonites may play in the increasing global push towards world peace, a goal that remains as elusive as ever.
Brock, Peter. Freedom from Violence: Sectarian Nonresistance from the Middle Ages to the Great War. Toronto: Univeristy of Toronto Press, 1991.
_____________. Freedom from War: Nonsectarian Pacifism 1814-1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Dyck, Cornelius J., ed. An Introduction to Mennonite History. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1967.
Estep, William R. The Anabaptist Story (rev.). Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1975.
Goertz, Hans-Jurgen (trans. Walter Klaassen). Profiles of Radical Reformers. Kitchener, ON: Herald Press, 1982.
Suggs, M. Jack, etc., ed. The Oxford Study Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Williams, George Huntston. The Radical Reformation (3rd ed.). Kirksville, Missouri: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Inc., 1992.
© 1994-2003 Peter T. Chattaway
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