This article was originally published in the Fall 2024 issue of MennoMedia’s Leader Magazine. Illustration of George Blaurock generated using DALL-E by Tim Nafziger, August 26, 2024
As Mennonites and other Anabaptists prepare to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Anabaptism, we are marking the anniversary of January 21, 1525, when George Blaurock and Conrad Grebel gathered with others for a secret meeting in the house of Felix Manz in Zurich, Switzerland.
Earlier that day these reformers had lost a contentious theological debate in the city. Zurich city council had declared their meetings illegal and ordered them to baptize all their unbaptized children. Yet those gathered felt the bible was leading them differently: baptism should be an adult decision upon confession of faith. Blaurock turned to Grebel and asked him to baptize him. As the story goes, Grebel obliged and Blaurock became the first Anabaptist: twice baptized.
But this story is only one part of the Anabaptist origins. It is a story that has been told to intentionally minimize the stories of other radical reformers.
Mennonite Action and Vincent Harding
Before we tell the full origin story, let’s go 499 years forward to another January morning, this one in 2024. It’s January 16 and over a hundred Mennonites are walking through the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. This is part of the Capitol complex: “temple of our Democracy” according to house speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Those gathered are part of a group called Mennonite Action calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. On a pre-arranged signal, they all sit down. It is a creative disruption, like Jesus’ nonviolent direct action in the temple in Mark 11:11-19. Rather than pulling out a whip, the Anabaptists sit down and began singing hymns until they are arrested by Capitol police.
Mennonite Action is building on the work of groups like Pink Menno, Community Peacemaker Teams and On Earth Peace. These are Anabaptist-rooted groups who have gone beyond conscientious objection to actively working for justice and peace. They have often faced pushback from Mennonites who are more focused on personal holiness and traditional ideas of nonresistance.
Mennonite leader Vincent Harding was a key prophetic voice in challenging Mennonites to join the wider movement for peace and justice. In the early 1960’s he wrote: "We need somehow to move away from the passivity suggested by our dependence on the phrase ‘nonresistance,’ to a new sense of involvement and participation implied in the term ‘peacemakers.’" (Kerhrberg, Sarah, From Fort Peachtree to Atlanta: The Mennonite Story, Mennonite Historical Committee. For references see Mennonite Historical Bulletin, Volume 64, July 2003 on page 3)
Mennonite voluntary service director Edgar Stoesz embodied the Mennonite establishment position when he rejected Harding’s invitation to work for racial justice. "As we refrained from participating in its annihilation, but helped later to reconstruct Germany, so we decline to participate in the interracial conflict but seek rather to bring reconciliation and goodwill,” Stoesz said. (Kerhrberg)
Harold S. Bender and Passing as Proper & Protestant
This brings us back to the furtive Anabaptists gathered in secret on January 21, 1525. When US historian and scholar Harold S. Bender chose to focus on their story, his goals were similar to Stoesz. Bender and Stoesz were invested in an Anabaptist vision that didn’t rock the boat, but dutifully cleaned up in the wake of disasters, both natural and imperial. In his 1942 Anabaptist Vision, Bender emphasized the values of “freedom of conscience, separation of church and state, and voluntarism in religion.” (Bender, Harold S, The Anabaptist Vision, American Society of Church History, 1943) These were all quite compatible with mainstream liberal Protestantism of his era.
When Bender wrote about the origins of Anabaptism, he chose to focus on Blaurock, Grebel and Manz in January 1525, while ignoring what was happening up the road in southwest Germany at the same time. At the time of the first rebaptisms, radical reformer Thomas Müntzer was traveling through southwest Germany rallying a movement of peasants to call for justice and liberation. The biblically based Twelve Articles they wrote were a seminal human rights document whose impact continues with us to today. Scholar Rodney Sawatsky calls these and other “apocalyptic” Anabaptists the “Transformationist” stream of Anabaptism (Sawatsky, Rodney, “The One and the Many: The Recovery of Mennonite Pluralism” published in Anabaptism Revisited; Essays on Anabaptist/Mennonite Studies in Honor of C. J. Dyck, Herald Press, 1992). But the transformationist Anabaptists were effectively suppressed and slaughtered in 1525 (and again in Münster in 1535) so that only the strictly pacifist streams of our tradition survived.
The radical reformation was a period of whirlwind and foment across the region. Most modern historians agree that a more accurate story of Anabaptist origins has many sources. It’s called polygenesis. It’s understandable that Bender would want to focus on the Swiss Brethren and ignore the other, more rowdy origin stories that make up the early Anabaptist tapestry. The embarrassing revolutionary cousins actively resisted the political and religious authorities and were killed. In 1943, Bender was trying to shepherd Mennonites in the midst of World War II when the largely German community (who refused to join the army) was viewed with deep suspicion by their neighbors. Respectability was a key part of survival.
Menno Simons and Survival
Menno Simons had similar survival goals in his church planting and support work with the early Mennonite church. He was distinguished among early Anabaptist leaders in a large part by his survival. His decades of writing and preaching and itinerancy were in the wake of the transformationist Anabaptist take over of the city of Muenster in 1534 and 1535. There were Anabaptist revolutionaries still living in the hills (the Batenburgers) who famously swooped down to slaughter 125 cows owned by a monastery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batenburgers). Simons understood that peace was not just good theology, it was also a practical path out of near extinction for the Anabaptist movement.
This is the history behind Edgar Stoesz’s resistance to Vincent Harding’s call for Mennonites to join the civil rights movement in working for racial justice. Harding and those of us in the modern transformationist Anabaptist stream were not and are not advocating the absurd cow killing violence of the Batenburgers. The murderous excesses of those early transformationist Anabaptist movements are clearly wrong. What we are embracing is their commitment to disrupting the power structures in the way that Jesus did.
In his address to Mennonite World Conference in July of 1967, Harding suggested Mennonites were “huddled behind the barricades of the status quo, praying the storm will soon be over so that life can continue undisturbed.” Harding challenged Mennonites for jumping too quickly to focus on the violence of the Black Panthers or other revolutionary movements without first understanding the massive systemic oppression that they faced. (Source: https://anabaptistworld.org/beggars-saints/ )
Revitalizing the Transformationist Stream of Anabaptism
We can bring the same curiosity to the story of the transformationist Anabaptists of the 1520’s and 1530’s. Let’s grapple with the messiness of our origin story rather than denying it as Bender did.
Sadly, Harding moved away from the Mennonite Church in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Yet the transformationist stream grew. It brought together a commitment to nonviolent direct action with resistance to the triple evils of militarism, racism and poverty. These were so named by Dr. Martin Luther King in in his April 4, 1967 sermon in which he came out against the Vietnam war exactly one year before he was assassinated (Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence, Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967). That speech was written by Harding (Berger, Rose Marie, https://sojo.net/magazine/april-2007/interview-man-who-wrote-kings-most-dangerous-speech 2007). Once again in the 1960’s, prophetic religious leaders were killed for speaking against the political authorities.
As the transformationist stream gathered steam in the 80’s it drew on the work of William Stringfellow and Walter Wink who understood the Apostle Paul to be using the language of “powers and principalities” to describe the spiritual, economic and political forces of domination in our world.
Organizers like Canadian Mennonite Hedy Sawadsky understood their faith as calling them to oppose nuclear weapons as part of a wider movement to abolish nuclear weapons. She moved to Texas to track the White train which quietly shipped nuclear weapons on train tracks across the country. Sawadsky herself was deeply influenced by years working in Palestinian Refugee camps with Mennonite Central Committee.
Sawadsky joined Gene Stoltzfus in founding Christian Peacemaker Teams in 1986 (Duane Ruth-Heffelbower, The Anabaptists Are Back: Making Peace in a Dangerous World, Herald Press, 1991). As we watch new movements like Mennonite Action and the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery rising up today, we would do well to remember that the transformationist Anabaptist stream has been with us from the beginning.