Читать книгу Reformation Thought - Alister E. McGrath - Страница 15

Every intellectual movement has its conservatives and radicals. The New Testament’s demand to “test everything” and “hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21) points to a critical process of sifting and refining, aimed at capturing and then preserving what was “good” about European Christianity and church life at this time. The British philosopher Roger Scruton puts his finger on two themes that lie at the heart of a conservative way of thinking: “the conviction that good things are more easily destroyed than created,” and a “determination to hold on to those good things” in the face of social and cultural change.² While Luther was clear that there were major issues with the church’s teaching on grace, he comes across as an essentially conservative thinker, determined to retain as much as he could of legitimate traditional Christian belief and practice.

Others, however, were more radical, holding that it was necessary to start all over again, setting to one side what had been inherited from the past and reconstructing Christianity in a manner that liberated it from past cultural and political captivities. The movement that is now generally known as “the radical Reformation” was actually quite diverse, reflecting a series of theological, cultural, and political agendas. Some, such as the Socinians and other anti-Trinitarians and rationalists, believed that Christianity had become trapped in a series of irrational beliefs, such as the doctrine of the Trinity; it was time to extricate Christianity from such false turns. Others, such as Caspar von Schwenckfeld, pointed to the need for spiritualizing key Christian ideas. Given the diversity of this movement, it is difficult to survey it properly and fully. For our purposes, we shall focus on the section of the movement that is generally known as “Anabaptism.” Not all radicals were Anabaptists in either the strict or broad sense of the term; nevertheless, this section of the radical Reformation perhaps had the greatest impact on the Reformation as a whole, and thus deserves special attention.

So what was “Anabaptism”? The term “Anabaptist” was invented by Zwingli (the word literally means “re-baptizers”) following the rise of the movement in Zurich, and refers to what was perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Anabaptist practice – the insistence that only those who had made a personal public profession of faith should be baptized. Anabaptism seems to have first arisen around Zurich, in the aftermath of Zwingli’s reforms within the city in the early 1520s. It centred on a group of individuals (notably Conrad Grebel, c.1498–1526) who argued that Zwingli was not being faithful to his own reforming principles. He preached one thing, and practiced another.

Although Zwingli had made faithfulness to the sola scriptura (a Latin slogan meaning “by Scripture alone”: see pp. 126–8) principle a cornerstone of his ministry, Grebel argued that Zwingli was inconsistent in its application. Grebel criticized Zwingli for retaining a number of practices – including infant baptism, recognizing a close link between the church and the magistracy, and permitting Christians to engage in warfare – which were not sanctioned or ordained by Scripture. For Grebel and other radical thinkers, thinking and living sola scriptura demanded that reformed Christians should believe and practice only what was explicitly taught in Scripture. Zwingli was alarmed by this, seeing it as a destabilizing development which threatened to cut the Reformed church at Zurich off from its historical roots and its continuity with the Christian tradition of the past.

The Anabaptists had good reason to accuse Zwingli of compromise. In 1522, Zwingli wrote a work known as Apologeticus Archeteles, in which he recognized the idea of a “community of goods” as an authentic Christian ideal. “No-one calls any possessions his own,” he wrote; “all things are held in common.” On this point, Zwingli and the Anabaptists seemed to be in fundamental agreement. But by 1525, Zwingli had changed his mind, and come round to the idea that private property was not such a bad thing after all.

Although Anabaptism arose in Germany and Switzerland, it subsequently became influential in other regions, such as the Lowlands. The movement produced relatively few theologians (the three most significant are generally agreed to be Balthasar Hubmaier (c.1480–1528), Pilgram Marbeck (c.1495–1556), and Menno Simons (1496–1561)). This failure partly reflects the forcible suppression of Anabaptism by the secular authorities, following the Anabaptist takeover of the city of Münster in 1534, which was widely seen as a threat to law and order throughout western Europe. Yet Anabaptism’s failure in this respect may also reflect the fact that the movement did not have any substantial shared theological basis.

A number of common elements can be discerned within the various strands of the movement: a general distrust of external authority; the rejection of infant baptism in favour of the baptism of adult believers; the common ownership of property; and an emphasis upon pacifism and non-resistance. To take up one of these points: in 1527, the governments of the cities of Zurich, Berne, and St. Gallen accused the Anabaptists of believing “that no true Christian can either give or receive interest or income on a sum of capital; that all temporal goods are free and common, and that all can have full property rights to them.”

It is for this reason that “Anabaptism” is often referred to as the “left wing of the Reformation” (Roland H. Bainton) or the “radical Reformation” (George Hunston Williams). For Williams, the “radical Reformation” was to be contrasted with the “magisterial Reformation,” which he broadly identified with the Lutheran and Reformed movements. These terms have gained wide acceptance within Reformation scholarship.

Probably the most significant document to emerge from the Anabaptist movement is the Schleitheim Confession, drawn up by Michael Sattler (1490–1527) on February 24, 1527. The Confession takes its name from the small town of that name in the canton of Schaffhausen. Its function was to distinguish Anabaptists from those around them – supremely from what the document refers to as “papists and antipapists” (that is, unreformed Catholics and magisterial evangelicals). In effect, the Schleitheim Confession amounts to “articles of separation” – that is to say, a set of beliefs and attitudes which distinguish Anabaptists from their opponents inside and outside the Reformation, and function as a core of unity, whatever their other differences might be.