May 22, 2025 • 43 mins
Do the debates about Christianity that stirred so much violence in the 1500’s still matter? Stephen Russell and Dean Taylor emphasize the importance of a believer’s church and the church refusing to adopt governmental power. “The same theology in similar circumstances will likely produce similar results”
Stephen Russell talks about Erasmus’s influence and legacy:
Dean Taylor mention’s Chesterton’s story from Orthodoxy about an Englishman discovering England:
This is the 268th episode of Anabaptist Perspectives, a podcast, blog, and YouTube channel that examines various aspects of conservative Anabaptist life and thought.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(01:00:00):
Well, we have to look at our
foundational document, our constitution, the Bible.
And it makes it so clear that
these two things are two kingdoms.
They don't mix and the end of what
They don't mix and the end of what
Constantine started in the 1500s wasn't great.
It ain't going to be good if we do it now.
And I think we're actually experiencing something right now
(01:00:23):
where Christians are trying to make
that happen and it's going to be a disaster.
All right, well, it's an honor to do this.
I don't think I've ever interviewed both
you, Dean Taylor, and you, Stephen Russell, at
the same time in more of a roundtable discussion.
(01:00:46):
But this is really exciting.
Just for some reference, we're doing
another project here at Anabaptist Perspectives,
a documentary series on the origins of
the Anabaptism and all of that, which we'll
have linked and so forth.
We wanted to have a conversation about things relating to
that and the issues that were
involved with the beginnings of the Anabaptist movement.
(01:01:08):
And we're recording this in 2025.
So we're right at the 500th year
since the Anabaptism started, in 1525.
So the big question I have for both of you is, do the
debates that were happening around
the Reformation time and that the Anabaptists were
changing their views on and writing
(01:01:29):
all this stuff and so forth, do
those debates still matter today?
And if so, how does it relate to our churches today?
Basically, why should we care about
the disagreements they had way back when?
So Mr. Russell.
You want to start us off.
Well, one of the things that's important to me is I think
(01:01:49):
that after the Reformation—there
are two things that have really shaped the
modern world and there are other things, but
the Reformation itself set the Western world in a certain
direction and so did the Enlightenment.
And I think both of those things have pushed us more
(01:02:10):
towards becoming hyper-individualistic.
And so I think that one of the things that
I really hope I can encourage people to do
is to recognize how the modern and
postmodern world and way of thinking has shaped us.
And we need to go back where we were still thinking in a
(01:02:35):
way that was more aware of there's
something transcendental.
But our world has—the Western world has
become, if not intellectually recognizing
it, it's become materialistic.
It's lost the transcendental.
And so we can go back to a time, the Reformation, when they
(01:02:55):
actually believed there's really
a God and this really matters.
And unfortunately, they killed each other because of that.
That's a bad thing.
But they actually believe this.
And I think a lot of us modern
Christians, we talk about God.
But I don't know if we aren't acting more out of a
non-transcendental kind of mindset,
(01:03:18):
kind of a materialistic mindset.
And we've got to do this.
So I think going back to the Reformation and what the
Church did before that can be very
helpful because I think we've bought into something even
without—always without recognizing
it.
So that's where history comes in.
(01:03:39):
We bought into an approach to life that
doesn't call for a real awareness of God.
So I think that is one reason to go
back while they still did believe that.
Now, part of the place that we're at now
came out of all of the disruption and all
of the fighting and killing
(01:03:59):
that happened in the Reformation.
So there's some actual blame on the Reformation for us
becoming individualistic and pulling
back from the transcendental.
But it's there that they still believe that.
Everyone basically believe that very deeply.
And so I think that can be helpful for
(01:04:19):
us evaluating where we're at right now.
Are we more like the non-believer in a way we think?
Or is there a way to move away from that?
And I think learning some of this stuff can help us there.
What would you like to add?
I remember when I was getting ready to do a class with
(01:04:40):
ancient history and I was doing
Greek and taking students to Athens and reading through
Herodotus and some of these, Thucydides
and that.
And I remember I was really in the
middle of them, reading that and everything.
And at the same time, right around that
time period, I went to the Sugar Creek Fair.
I remember.
(01:05:00):
So I'm reading the Thucydides and Herodotus
and I'm showing up to Sugar Creek, Ohio in
a little city fair.
And as I'm there, I couldn't help but ponder all these
sacrifices and assemblies that the
ancient Greeks had.
And then comparing it to I'm here at this Sugar Creek Fair.
But if there was one thing I thought that would be
(01:05:21):
categorically different is how secular
we are.
That in every culture up into the day, this is going to
what you said, what you made me
think of this, is that there would have
been this sacrifice to this and that, God, that
and this guy would have been doing something weird, but
he'd been doing it in the sense
of to Zeus or whatever.
But now we are just remarkably secular and we almost have
(01:05:45):
to put in our mind what you're
saying there.
And I think that's profound what you said there.
It's that putting yourself in the
ancient mind is that, is the recognition.
And so when they talk about it and they meant this stuff.
I remember when I went years ago to on a tour like similar
(01:06:06):
to this in Amsterdam and we were
with an archivist.
This is way back in 2010 or so.
And the guy was running it was an atheist.
You know, I remember he was telling us all
this stuff about the Mennonites and all this
thing and ... was there, you
know, and he's getting all upset.
You know, he's like so at first he said, well, you all
(01:06:27):
this, you know, all this if you must
be a Mennonite.
I'm not a Mennonite.
He said, well, I mean, you must be a Christian.
I'm not a Christian.
He said, you're an atheist.
And it was like you could tell ... in his innocence and
everything was like, whoa, how
can that even be?
And he said, well, we believe these things and amen we do.
And so it's not just empty history.
(01:06:48):
It's not just things left, you know, that tapping in.
That was good, Stephen.
I think tapping into that is profound.
And the reality of that and
that we do believe Christ has come.
We do believe he's given us the word of God.
We do believe that he wants his
kingdom to be established on this earth.
And yeah, let's drink those waters where they're there.
(01:07:09):
Yeah.
And I would like to give a little advertisement for two
authors that could be helpful in this.
One of them is C.S. Lewis.
And if you read his autobiography, he says very clearly, I
started as a complete atheist.
He moved towards belief in something transcendental.
(01:07:30):
And then he says the spirit dragged him kicking and
screaming into the, he didn't want to
convert.
But, and so he went from being what I
would call a modern man, a modern thinker to he
said of himself, I'm, I'm pre-modern in how I think.
And I think that he could give us
some help in that as well as G.K.
Chesterton, who also was, he believed in what God was doing.
(01:07:56):
And he, he, he foresaw so much of
where the Western world was going.
Hadn't gotten there yet in the early 1900s, but he saw
where it was going and gave us
a big warning.
And sometimes when I read him, I
feel like this man was a prophet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And think of what we're doing that he said, you know, the
whole orthodoxy work, it were
(01:08:19):
getting in a boat and we're discovering England and
thinking that we're creating our, and
we're discovering it's already there.
And it's kind of like our path into Europe here is that
digging into the ancient, the
unchangeable, the faith that was there
kind of goes with his whole concept too.
Yeah.
That's, that's amazing.
Yeah.
So, so to drill into it a bit more, the one we're talking
(01:08:40):
about these debates that were
happening in the reformation, and you start
reading about these things, it gets pretty
wild.
Because people, like you were saying, they
took this stuff really seriously and you get
the sense that they felt the supernatur, the layer between
the material, what you see world
and the supernatural was hardly even there.
Like it was just like the supernatural
was just ready to break in at any moment.
(01:09:01):
Yeah.
Right.
And so it really is a big deal to them.
Tell me about some of the debates that were happening here.
And I'm thinking specifically around the Anabaptists, like
why you obviously have the Protestant
Reformation is happening and Luther and all of these things,
but the Anabaptists are doing
something different here.
What were the things that they were pointing at as like,
that's not, that needs to change.
(01:09:22):
It's not right.
What specifically, what are
the debates we're talking about?
Well first I'd want to say they
didn't disagree with everyone completely.
I think so.
There's Trinitarian, the Orthodox Anabaptists or the
evangelical Anabaptists are as Orthodox
about the Trinity as a Catholic or a Protestant.
So there were a lot of things where they agreed.
(01:09:43):
I think it's important to recognize that.
But then what I, part of the reason I am where I am is they
recognize that the church had
lost its concept of how to form the church.
You form it by preaching the gospel to people who can
understand, helping them see their
own need and then calling them
(01:10:05):
to repentance and conversion.
And then you, that forms a special, and then through
baptism, you form a special community
that recognizes there's a lifestyle that goes with this.
And both of those things clash with both
the Catholics and the Protestants because they
had brought together the secular, the social, the
(01:10:27):
governmental I should say, and the religious.
And the Anabaptists said that
doesn't, most of them said it doesn't work.
In fact, it's our problem right now.
Now, just wrote, and the reason it's the
problem is because they stopped forming the
church the right way.
Are you really a Christian?
And in the Schleitheim Confession of Faith, Sattler points
(01:10:52):
out in the first article that
the chief abomination of the Pope was infant baptism.
That's the root of the problem and
the Protestants didn't change it.
So I think they saw clearly what the problem was.
That didn't mean that everything else was wrong.
Yeah.
So infant baptism is a specific tangible one you could,
like that was a huge division point.
(01:11:14):
And the other thing that
everybody was, so that always came up.
And the other thing that always came up was the Lord's
Supper and the Anabaptists, I would
say, recognize that we have to
recognize the body of Christ.
It even says that in 1 Corinthians 11, and
they recognized it as the people that were
gathered to partake.
(01:11:35):
And so there's something, it's not just symbolic, we are
actually the physical body of Christ
here.
And so we're recognizing that the source of grace is from
God, but it comes to me through
my brothers and sisters.
And so they also had a lot of conflicts with that.
Wasn't that one of the big issues
(01:11:56):
specifically for Menno Simons as a Catholic priest?
Oh yeah.
The transubstantiation issue of the Catholic Church that,
well, first off, describe a little
bit of transubstantiation just define that and then like
some of his pick with that specific
issue there.
Well, very early on, I think within the first year of his
being ordained a priest, he wondered
(01:12:17):
as he was, the main job of a priest, the main way to bring
grace to his people and to give
them the opportunity to receive Jesus is communion.
And he began to wonder, is this bread and wine really
becoming the body and blood of
Christ?
That's the transubstantiation that the Catholics believe
(01:12:38):
and the Orthodox believe that the
bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ.
The Lutherans believe that the real body
of Christ comes into the bread and wine.
The bread and wine is still there.
Calvin believed that spiritually you receive Christ and
Zwingli said it's just a symbol.
So those were the categories that were out there.
(01:13:01):
And I'm going to say there were like
oceans of ink probably spilled on this, right?
More than anything.
And blood too, right?
This was a huge deal.
There's so much writing from all
of these different parties involved.
And then of course, Menno Simons wrote
about this a lot and he goes through this whole
process of, is this real?
This transubstantiation thing.
(01:13:21):
Anyway, continue on with that then
because that was a main point for him initially.
Yes.
But then the second crisis of faith is he
hears about a man in his area being executed
because of a second baptism.
He said, I didn't know of a second baptism.
So he looks at the scripture and he becomes convinced of
(01:13:44):
what is the most important point,
how you form a church.
You don't form it by infant baptism.
You form it by getting people who actually
understand who they are and then see from
the scriptures, the preaching of God's word, what they are
in God's eyes and then how God
has provided a rescue from that.
(01:14:08):
And then you form a church by these people coming together.
So that's the first thing, although it's the second thing
that he stumbled on, that Menno
stumbled on.
Yeah.
Anything you'd like to add on this?
Yes, good.
You're asking the question, do these debates still matter?
And I agree with Stephen that fortunately most of the
(01:14:28):
things we agreed with and like, for
instance, describing themselves
within the apostles creed was common.
Oh, absolutely.
The Hutterites did this with Peter Riedemann's work
explicitly going through the apostles
creed and many of the different
confessions were worked in that way.
So that's good.
And I'm really thankful for that to be part
(01:14:49):
of that ancient tradition in the catholicism
with a small C of being that they didn't strip that off.
On the other hand, what they did do in that the idea of
faith and the idea of following
Jesus, I do think is very important and pertinent today.
(01:15:10):
In the sacramental concept, yeah, one of the things that
they were common to fight against
was what the Catholics and even some of the reformers would
have taught, but the reformers
did go against this concept.
It was ex opera operato, which means
by the work, the thing is happening.
So in other words, you could have a priest without faith
(01:15:34):
technically go through the motions
because he's properly ordained through apostolic succession
and this church performing something
that would give grace and would give it to someone apart
from faith in both the priest
or the believer.
Oh, wow.
It's happening.
It's ex opera operato.
By the work, it's happening.
They pushed hard against this.
(01:15:54):
So the idea of faith and everything was so
important that the sacraments need faith.
So like for instance, you have Pilgram Marpeck arguing
against, he said, provide all the semantics
on all these different levels of different
trans-substantiation, con-substantiation, and
all this type of thing.
(01:16:15):
In 1 Corinthians, it says that what you're
doing when you come together, it's not the
Lord's Supper.
And so your life, your community, you're not getting the
grace ex opera, you're not getting
it automatically.
And that's the scripture you're ignoring.
And that's a part of the conversation that
on sacramental theology today that I think
the Anabaptists have something very profound to say.
(01:16:36):
And this idea of it being more than just
the real presence in the bread in the gathered
real presence in a theosis kind of way amongst the gathered
community, it's powerful stuff.
And that was brought up.
And I think that's also
something that needs to be said today.
But with the Jesus following things, I'm so glad that
(01:16:57):
people aren't killing each other
for the most part these days.
Yeah, because that happened a lot.
It happened a lot.
I mean, and C.S. Lewis talked about that.
If you think someone's a witch, you've burned them.
C.S. Lewis makes the point.
Yeah, it's kind of what you do.
But here's the thing.
Some churches have formally repented of
Some churches have formally repented of
(01:17:17):
some of that theology that was backed it.
I think Rome has to some degree, apologize.
The Swiss Reformed have done that.
I mean, explicitly, there's a plaque there.
They talk about it when you're there in Zurich.
But not everyone.
And I would say that here's my worry.
The same theology, given the same situation, will very
(01:17:39):
likely create the same result.
We have different situations now.
We have different environment.
We have a very tolerant.
But notice how quickly things go crazy.
I mean, remember, World War II was just not in my own
father and grandfather's lifetime.
Or at least my father-in-law, at least.
(01:18:01):
Yeah, my father's too.
So in that only lifetime, you had passionate,
Bible-believing Christians supporting Hitler,
supporting Nazism.
There was something wrong in
the theology that did not change.
The circumstances change, and the result repeated.
So my point is that when we come to face the teachings of
(01:18:23):
Jesus, and I mean this charitably
as possible, and I mean this also to me, can a person be a
follower of Christ without following
Christ?
I don't know.
It should be something that we go down to the core again.
Let's start with Jesus.
Let's put his plan for humanity
back into action, and let's do it.
(01:18:45):
And these doctrines do matter.
And when you start to look at some of the
statements and stuff, and you start to see
wars bubble up in our own generations in our own life,
you're like, the reason you're acting
that way is because you don't get that basic point.
And then I get very sad when I see even Anabaptists who
(01:19:06):
don't understand the fundamentals, and
they're so washed in just American pop evangelicalism that
they don't even know these core basics
of Jesus following teaching.
And certainly they sound like 1942
Mennonites in Germany, and that's a shame.
So that's why I think this matters.
(01:19:27):
I think that the arguments still matter,
and we still need to say, okay, I'm glad.
Some churches have publicly repented of this.
Amen.
Keep it up.
Keep going.
And there are many things we have publicly
repented of, or maybe even more public, but
nevertheless, I think the arguments still matter.
We still need Jesus's cure for humanity be placed.
And just tacked on in an esoteric, speculative theology
(01:19:50):
kind of way is not what Jesus, I think,
want.
So the challenge that the Anabaptists had,
let's put this stuff to practice, I think,
needs to be said again.
Okay, so I have to ask them what
sparked the changes, like 500 years ago?
So what were the things, these were pretty
clearly radical changes, and it was a big
(01:20:13):
deal, and you're describing all these different debates
that were happening around transubstantiation,
say or this or that, or infant baptism.
What was the initial piece that got this started?
Why did those early Anabaptists take that
initial step back and say, "Wait, something's
got to change here?"
And that's a huge question.
Because of our grandfather Erasmus.
(01:20:36):
You might want to call Grebel our father, but Erasmus is
the man who put together the first
published Greek New Testament, and people
started reading and seeing what the original
said, and it sparked a lot of discussion.
Whether it's Luther or
Zwingli, we know they all got what...
(01:21:00):
See, Erasmus didn't just publish the Greek New Testament.
He also put out some things that said, "Obviously, the
early church followed the Great Commission
to form the church."
And then he looks at the book of
Acts and shows how that happened.
And we've kind of dropped that.
We've lost that.
And Luther discussed it, thought about it.
(01:21:23):
So did Zwingli.
They even talked about maybe starting a little church,
specifically Luther, a little church
in the big church of those people
that really have committed to Christ.
And so I would just say, if you want to...
Well, the Catholics said about Erasmus,
that you laid the egg that Luther hatched.
(01:21:45):
So I think if you want to just make it simple, Erasmus.
And that came from the text and
the Bible coming out in the Greek.
Wait, there's a Greek text to the Scriptures.
I thought it was just the Vulgate.
How dare you even look at what the Greeks said.
And also the world's going crazy
for Europe, for Western Europe.
I mean, it was bad enough to have the plagues.
(01:22:07):
Now you've got Constantinople falling in 1453.
You've got Jihad coming against
Europe taking different places.
You've got now...
And because of that, the kings that could
have just dealt with Protestantism now had
to fight two battles.
Charles V had to fight both the Protestants rising up and
(01:22:29):
the Jihad coming against them.
And then now the Anabaptists are in there.
It's a perfect storm.
And a lot of things was happening
and people were asking questions.
And when you have these plagues, we
saw a little bit of this in the COVID.
People start to get introspective when all
you got family members dying and all that.
And that was just...
I mean, I saw...
Have you ever seen that chart that shows the comparison of
(01:22:51):
the people that died in COVID
versus the Black Death or the crazy differences?
Yeah, it's not even close.
Yeah.
And so when you're seeing people that are
already like you started off with saying that
we're spiritual and we believe God is behind all these
things, we're asking questions.
What's wrong?
And so there was a lot of things that
(01:23:12):
looked like the end of the world was happening.
And yeah, it tipped it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We used to...
A couple of us have used the word radical.
And often in modern world, that
means just overthrow everything.
And these people were radical.
The word itself means go to the root.
And I think we should...
(01:23:32):
Christians should be radical in that sense.
Not as in radical burn it all down.
Not as burn it all down because as I've already said, the
Catholic influence is very clear
both in Protestantism and in the Anabaptists.
There was good there.
And they didn't burn it all down.
You mentioned the Creed, the Apostles Creed.
Meno, in his writings, very specifically says, "I believe
(01:23:55):
the 12 articles and I believe
the 18 articles."
And what he means there is the
Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed.
Yeah.
He quotes from them.
Yes.
So it's not like I'm dumping the whole
faith, but you guys aren't committed.
You're not living it.
And that's what you were saying.
That's where the real issue came in.
Are you willing to commit as an adult and live it out?
(01:24:19):
And then that's also why the ban became important.
The Protestants and Catholics killed us
if we wouldn't commit to their approach.
And the Anabaptists said there does need to be some sense
of discipling or I mean, disciplining.
And so they said, "That's the ban.
We always want a person to be able to come
back if we tell him he has strayed away."
Amen.
(01:24:39):
Now, that's an interesting philosophical difference.
We want the person to be able to come back if he's strayed
away, whereas the other groups
are like, "We will execute you."
Yeah.
And that's what you brought up in
Schleitheim that our limit is the ban.
Yeah.
Where you guys have execution.
We don't go any further than that.
It's interesting.
It's kind of sad.
Talk about the time.
Wow.
That Schleitheim Confession, the discussions in Strasbourg
(01:25:02):
from Michael Sattler, early Dutch
Confessions had articles on not killing heretics.
Man, that's...
I mean, it's amazing that
that's a part of the conversation.
What a bizarre world.
It's almost like culture shock.
But they did believe.
They believed.
That's part of it.
You know, if I'm a Catholic, if I'm the bishop, and you're
(01:25:22):
spouting, whether it's Protestantism
or Anabaptism, and he's listening, I'm worried you're not
just the only one going to hell.
You're trying to drag him to hell with you.
Yeah, yeah.
You have to root evil out.
Yeah, you have to root...
They're wrong.
They're taking the wrong...
Once again, it's that church and state getting intertwined
with each other that makes the
(01:25:43):
church go the direction it does.
You know, and you brought up a couple
times already this concept of the community.
You got to understand how radically different that is.
They thought as a state.
You were baptized as a baby into the state.
The state and the church were together,
and that's been like that for a long time.
I might be having this wrong, but if I remember reading
(01:26:04):
this correctly, you baptized the infant,
and now, oh, now they're in the record of this...
Now you're liable for tax and tithes and all this stuff.
Everything's in there.
You're a citizen.
Yeah, it was almost like you're a citizen, pay for your...
Yeah, okay.
So now if someone was like...
So now you have a church that's gathered as a local
community in faith, that is radically
(01:26:27):
different.
And they saw this as truly...
So when you're saying, "My brother, my
sister," it meant something to them in a way.
And you were talking about what got me thinking about that
is when you see them talk about
the Apostles' Creed and the passage where
it says, "And we believe in the communion
of the saints," several of them use that word communion in
the Latin and the German sounds
(01:26:47):
like in the community of saints.
Peter Riedemann specifically says, when he's arguing to
Philip of Hesse and such, he says,
this is the gathering of the
people of God, the communion of saints.
He sees it more physically, more actual in
this world and not being wrapped up in just
to the state or washed into just the state.
(01:27:08):
It's the gathering of the people of God into a community.
And I think, again, this is something that
Anabaptists are threatened to lose when you
just kind of get your mind so washed
up and it's just about this, the other.
That gathering of the community is an essential tenet.
It's hard to kind of articulate
doctrinally sometime, but it's there.
(01:27:31):
It's very much there and it's a big difference than the
magisterial and the Catholic Reformation.
And Witten also the enemy love and not fighting back, that
would have been a huge piece that
comes in here as well, right?
Absolutely.
And it's not just enemy love and not fighting back.
(01:27:52):
The essence of non-resistance is love for everyone.
And I would argue that that is the
motive force behind the Anabaptist evangelism.
You love your neighbor, you love your enemy.
Well, what does that mean?
You tell them about the cure for their problem.
And really, the Catholics were sending out missionaries,
(01:28:16):
especially after the discovery
of the new world, all over the world.
Even the Calvinists did some, but I think that the fact
that it was in the state church
kind of framework made it something very different.
The Anabaptists were calling people to a relationship to
(01:28:36):
God that forms this new community.
This is powerful.
I remember one of my favorite quotes by Peter Riedemann, who
at the time they were the Marine
Corps of the Anabaptists in this mission thing you're
talking about and the idea of love being
there.
He has this beautiful quote
where he says, "Love is like fire."
He gives us an analogy.
He says, "Anybody who makes a fire knows that at the very
(01:28:57):
beginning of the fire, if you
put a big stick on it, it's going to snub it out.
But if you let that fire get really big, you could throw a
whole lot of houses, whatever
you want on there, and it'll just keep burning.
So it is with love.
That if our love is small, small little things make us
offended, and we will argue with each
(01:29:17):
other or whatever, and it'll snub out the love.
But if we let our love burn, then
we can handle any of these things.
I love the idea of bringing that God's
love and yeah, that's a powerful thought.
The Bruderhof used to publish that.
I don't know if you still do.
Love Is Like a Fire if you want to read that.
It's excellent.
(01:29:39):
So here we are 500 years later.
What ways, practically speaking, do these conversations,
debates, differences from back
then affect us right now in daily life?
People coming away from the side.
We've already hit some, but
let's try to get real practical here.
(01:29:59):
What does this look like now?
Because it's not like we're
being threatened with execution.
It's just a totally different
environment that we're in right now.
I'll say this and I hope this doesn't hurt your thing.
For 30 years or 25 years at least, I and
other people, and you Stephen too, have been
preaching things on non-resistance and
(01:30:20):
such like that and talking about these things.
When I see evangelicals, conservative evangelicals, or I
even see even worse so, Amish, conservative
Anabaptists getting wrapped up in the nationalism and the
patriotism that I see, I'm just broken
(01:30:41):
hearted.
I think somehow you don't get
the very origin of who you are.
Somehow the Jesus following kingdom building that somehow
we have traded now what we think
we had the answers that we were in Jesus Christ, now do we
really think the state and politics
is going to somehow...
No.
(01:31:02):
No.
And so yes, it matters.
And let's be reminded that we have a blueprint and it's
easy and the world is not going to
come up with it.
It's not going to be any
different now than it was in any time era.
So yeah.
Well, strangely enough, well, we look at where the
(01:31:22):
Christian church was in 1500 and with
its entanglement with the
state and we see how bad that was.
The Protestant church didn't do a whole lot better, but
then here in the states, first
the British colonies and then the
states, we didn't have that entanglement.
The last state church was in
Massachusetts and it was disbanded in 1833.
(01:31:45):
So after that we have no state church, but we still have
this kind of Protestant civil
religion sort of a thing.
And I just can't understand why these people don't see that
in the early church we didn't
have this.
And then from Constantine on, it starts getting more and
more entangled and it didn't go good
(01:32:07):
places.
Why do we think we're going to do any better?
But we also need to look at...
Now this is something not...
Well, we have to look at our
foundational document, our constitution, the Bible.
And it makes it so clear that
these two things are two kingdoms.
They don't mix and the end of what
(01:32:28):
Constantine started in the 1500s wasn't great.
It ain't going to be good if we do it now.
And I think we're actually experiencing something right now
where Christians are trying to make
that happen and it's going to be a disaster.
It already is.
Because one of the core issues in 1525 and on when the
(01:32:52):
early Anabaptist movement is getting
its feet on it, so to speak.
Yeah, you read this stuff and it's just constantly like,
"No, we're trying to pull it away."
Like you're saying that the community of believers versus
the state and how those were inseparable.
They were so to the point where if you're
not part of the way the church is run here,
(01:33:12):
you don't even fit into society in
any way because this is just how it is.
And yeah, I think you're onto something there.
It does feel like there is a movement or doesn't feel there
is a real movement to try to...
And we say this, that's Americans at least, we can't say
globally, I guess, but trying
to push those back together.
And it's like, you know what?
(01:33:33):
How this thing started actually does really speak to that.
It's very specifically to that exact issue.
This is not a new one at all.
Same theology given similar circumstances
will very likely create the same results.
Something that I think is more likely to happen than a
resurgence of state church connection
(01:33:54):
in the states.
I mean, right now, it almost looks like it could happen.
But I think that because of our modernistic and
post-modernistic way of thinking, our
materialistic way of thinking in the West, I think that
what's going to happen is, despite
what's happening presently in the United States with the
(01:34:15):
political world, I think what's going
to happen is it's already starting to happen.
I can't remember the author, but there's an
author who said we used to have a positive
attitude towards Christianity.
Then for maybe 20 years, like the
1990s, for early 2000s, it was neutral.
(01:34:36):
And then from 2010 on, there's a growing
negativity towards Christianity in the Western
world and both in Europe and the United States.
I think that's where we're
actually going to have the conflict.
It's going to swing that way.
And I think there are going to be Christians who I already
know there are Christians outside
my tradition who are becoming more and
(01:34:59):
more open to what the Anabaptist position said
about love of neighbor and things like that.
And now the people who are presently trying to work with
the government, take it over, they may
have a problem there.
They may want to fight against
it, literally fight against it.
(01:35:20):
Right.
But that's where our challenge is for us is to help
Christians see that's not what we
are called to.
And people can hear that.
I think you're right on it.
When I was first converting in the army and I visited my
first Mennonite, one of my first
Mennonite Churches I ever visited,
And I was there and we were singing and presenting things.
I looked and suddenly I saw on the wall there were these
(01:35:43):
over in Europe, you know how they have
plaques of all the people that
served during the different wars.
Oh, yeah.
And so I was like, after I went back, here I'm becoming a
conscious objector and going to this
Mennonite church in Germany.
I'm like, so I was talking to this old guy
who was like 70 years old here in 1990, 89.
And I said, so I'm just curious.
I thought you were a non-resistant.
(01:36:03):
This whole reason I'm even, you know, and he just looked at
me and said, oh, yeah, World War II.
I was a little boy.
He said, I could take you to my
house and I have a barn there.
And my dad, we were raised Quakers,
but then we came into the Mennonites,
He said, but I've left this there, that there was a
painting on our barn that was a symbol to vote for
(01:36:26):
Nazis.
And he said, I've left it there as a
memory, you know, to remember these things.
And I said, well, how did, you know, we
said, Dean it, it came on us like a revival.
It came on us like, I never forget those words.
It came on us like a revival.
We were just swept into it.
And, but what happened was after that,
(01:36:47):
people like, so this is Christianity.
I mean, now, you know, the popular
people, it was the conservative Christians.
It was not just the Mennonites, it
was all the conservative evangelical.
The more Bible believing you were, the
more likely you were to go into that.
I mean, you can go to the Berlin church and the reformed
church in Berlin, you've got literally on
the pulpit an etching of Hitler, you know, you've got him
(01:37:09):
there in the, you know, and so the people
were like, well, what is this?
You know, what is this?
So the reaction then, ever since
then, you've had kind of an agnostic.
I'm worried that what's happening right
now, you could end up with an agnostic.
America, even another level, like what's Christianity?
A bunch of weird, you know, things like that.
(01:37:32):
Well, this, this is where I think
the Anabaptist understanding of the two
kingdoms is essential and we need to
try to help other Christians see this.
In Hitler's time, you know, Hitler was
saying we have been mistreated and I think the
German nation was after World War I.
I really was.
Yeah, me too.
He, so he had a kind of an argument that
(01:37:52):
spoke to the heart and, you know, he didn't
start killing people at the beginning.
I think we're in danger of the same thing right here.
There are reasonable issues that are
problematic and we can get sucked in to,
that's what happened there.
I talked to both, not Quaker, but
(01:38:14):
conservative people who were young,
conservative Anabaptists in Southern
Germany and a real believer up in Northern
Germany, who at the time was a
Lutheran minister when I was talking to him.
He was a young man and he was drafted into Hitler's army.
And these people, all of them told me we
were not treated well and he sounded like
(01:38:37):
he's bringing us release, a relief maybe is a better word.
And it's only after he got basically
all the power in his hands that he started
doing the really, really bad things.
And people were either cowed or didn't
know it or, well actually some of my German
friends said, we didn't want to know it.
(01:39:00):
There you go.
There you go.
They said we could have known
it, but we didn't want to know it.
And that's what strikes me as like the
Anabaptists, you know, saying this is not
okay, like pointing out things that like,
we may not want to know that, but it's not
okay.
That's not right.
Yeah.
You know, that's not right.
Wow.
Well, y'all definitely brought it to the
current reality, you know, that we're in.
(01:39:21):
But no, these are important conversations to have.
And I guess as far as where to leave it here with the
audience is I would encourage
people listening to go back and read some
of this stuff from the early Anabaptists,
like the things they were wrestling
with and the decisions they were making,
especially that extracting the church away
from the state was a real thorny one, you
(01:39:43):
know, and what they had to go
through and had to suffer for that.
That's significant.
That's significant.
So any closing comments from
either of you as we as we wrap this up?
The simplicity of Christ, you know, again, I go back to
Grebel's point, I believe the
word of God without complicated interpretation.
And out of that, I speak, let's be a people of the Bible
(01:40:03):
and let's put it into practical
application as a blueprint for humanity
and that the words of Jesus were meant to be
put into practice.
If we can meet there at Jesus in a
practical way, not just a theological way, but a
practical real way of meeting Jesus and
bringing his cure to humanity, I think we'll
see a better world.
(01:40:23):
I really do.
And I can get behind that message.
I get excited about that message and I pray
for it over all of us and my generations, my
children, my grandchildren, I want them to have that.
I'm not disagreeing with him at all.
He's exactly right.
But then I'm going to point out the
other side, which is these guys didn't burn
everything down.
And we have a tradition that goes all the way to the time
(01:40:47):
of the resurrection of Jesus and
the ascension and then the
Pentecost when the church started.
And there are good lessons that they wrestled with issues
and we don't have to reinvent
the wheel.
So yes, the commitment idea to Jesus is absolutely premier.
(01:41:11):
But there were people 2000, 15000. I'm sorry, 2000, 1500
a thousand years ago, 500 years
ago, who were equally committed and they wrestled with
issues that have shaped the church.
And so I'm also going to say, let's recognize the heritage
(01:41:33):
we've been given and we've got
to evaluate it.
Looking at the history of the Reformation can help us with
that, but let's not just chuck
it.
Totally agree.
Amen.
Yeah.
Wow.
Well, I think that you gave us some things to think about.
I'm pretty sure.
I'll be curious what the comments are on this one.
(01:41:54):
This is really good.
This is really important things to wrestle with.
And I just say that to people listening.
Like we love to hear from our listeners,
like what are they thinking and processing and
wrestling with.
We want to hear that.
So put it in the comments or send us an email.
But yeah, thank you both for sharing today.
I really appreciate you taking the time.
You're welcome.
Thanks for listening to this discussion
(01:42:15):
with Dean Taylor and Stephen Russell about
Reformation debates and the
origins of the Anabaptist movement.
As we mentioned briefly in this episode,
we're doing a documentary series on the
origins of the Anabaptist movement and
that's its own YouTube channel and its own
website.
You can find all of that links
down below in the description.
You can also go to that website at AnabaptistOrigins.org.
(01:42:38):
We'll be filming that in June of 2025 that
we don't have a final release date set yet
for the entire documentary series.
So make sure you're subscribed to
follow along for updates on that project.
Thanks again for listening and
we'll catch you in the next episode.
Well, we have to look at our
foundational document, our constitution, the Bible.
And it makes it so clear that
these two things are two kingdoms.
They don't mix and the end of what
They don't mix and the end of what
Constantine started in the 1500s wasn't great.
It ain't going to be good if we do it now.
And I think we're actually experiencing something right now
(01:00:23):
where Christians are trying to make
that happen and it's going to be a disaster.
All right, well, it's an honor to do this.
I don't think I've ever interviewed both
you, Dean Taylor, and you, Stephen Russell, at
the same time in more of a roundtable discussion.
(01:00:46):
But this is really exciting.
Just for some reference, we're doing
another project here at Anabaptist Perspectives,
a documentary series on the origins of
the Anabaptism and all of that, which we'll
have linked and so forth.
We wanted to have a conversation about things relating to
that and the issues that were
involved with the beginnings of the Anabaptist movement.
(01:01:08):
And we're recording this in 2025.
So we're right at the 500th year
since the Anabaptism started, in 1525.
So the big question I have for both of you is, do the
debates that were happening around
the Reformation time and that the Anabaptists were
changing their views on and writing
(01:01:29):
all this stuff and so forth, do
those debates still matter today?
And if so, how does it relate to our churches today?
Basically, why should we care about
the disagreements they had way back when?
So Mr. Russell.
You want to start us off.
Well, one of the things that's important to me is I think
(01:01:49):
that after the Reformation—there
are two things that have really shaped the
modern world and there are other things, but
the Reformation itself set the Western world in a certain
direction and so did the Enlightenment.
And I think both of those things have pushed us more
(01:02:10):
towards becoming hyper-individualistic.
And so I think that one of the things that
I really hope I can encourage people to do
is to recognize how the modern and
postmodern world and way of thinking has shaped us.
And we need to go back where we were still thinking in a
(01:02:35):
way that was more aware of there's
something transcendental.
But our world has—the Western world has
become, if not intellectually recognizing
it, it's become materialistic.
It's lost the transcendental.
And so we can go back to a time, the Reformation, when they
(01:02:55):
actually believed there's really
a God and this really matters.
And unfortunately, they killed each other because of that.
That's a bad thing.
But they actually believe this.
And I think a lot of us modern
Christians, we talk about God.
But I don't know if we aren't acting more out of a
non-transcendental kind of mindset,
(01:03:18):
kind of a materialistic mindset.
And we've got to do this.
So I think going back to the Reformation and what the
Church did before that can be very
helpful because I think we've bought into something even
without—always without recognizing
it.
So that's where history comes in.
(01:03:39):
We bought into an approach to life that
doesn't call for a real awareness of God.
So I think that is one reason to go
back while they still did believe that.
Now, part of the place that we're at now
came out of all of the disruption and all
of the fighting and killing
(01:03:59):
that happened in the Reformation.
So there's some actual blame on the Reformation for us
becoming individualistic and pulling
back from the transcendental.
But it's there that they still believe that.
Everyone basically believe that very deeply.
And so I think that can be helpful for
(01:04:19):
us evaluating where we're at right now.
Are we more like the non-believer in a way we think?
Or is there a way to move away from that?
And I think learning some of this stuff can help us there.
What would you like to add?
I remember when I was getting ready to do a class with
(01:04:40):
ancient history and I was doing
Greek and taking students to Athens and reading through
Herodotus and some of these, Thucydides
and that.
And I remember I was really in the
middle of them, reading that and everything.
And at the same time, right around that
time period, I went to the Sugar Creek Fair.
I remember.
(01:05:00):
So I'm reading the Thucydides and Herodotus
and I'm showing up to Sugar Creek, Ohio in
a little city fair.
And as I'm there, I couldn't help but ponder all these
sacrifices and assemblies that the
ancient Greeks had.
And then comparing it to I'm here at this Sugar Creek Fair.
But if there was one thing I thought that would be
(01:05:21):
categorically different is how secular
we are.
That in every culture up into the day, this is going to
what you said, what you made me
think of this, is that there would have
been this sacrifice to this and that, God, that
and this guy would have been doing something weird, but
he'd been doing it in the sense
of to Zeus or whatever.
But now we are just remarkably secular and we almost have
(01:05:45):
to put in our mind what you're
saying there.
And I think that's profound what you said there.
It's that putting yourself in the
ancient mind is that, is the recognition.
And so when they talk about it and they meant this stuff.
I remember when I went years ago to on a tour like similar
(01:06:06):
to this in Amsterdam and we were
with an archivist.
This is way back in 2010 or so.
And the guy was running it was an atheist.
You know, I remember he was telling us all
this stuff about the Mennonites and all this
thing and ... was there, you
know, and he's getting all upset.
You know, he's like so at first he said, well, you all
(01:06:27):
this, you know, all this if you must
be a Mennonite.
I'm not a Mennonite.
He said, well, I mean, you must be a Christian.
I'm not a Christian.
He said, you're an atheist.
And it was like you could tell ... in his innocence and
everything was like, whoa, how
can that even be?
And he said, well, we believe these things and amen we do.
And so it's not just empty history.
(01:06:48):
It's not just things left, you know, that tapping in.
That was good, Stephen.
I think tapping into that is profound.
And the reality of that and
that we do believe Christ has come.
We do believe he's given us the word of God.
We do believe that he wants his
kingdom to be established on this earth.
And yeah, let's drink those waters where they're there.
(01:07:09):
Yeah.
And I would like to give a little advertisement for two
authors that could be helpful in this.
One of them is C.S. Lewis.
And if you read his autobiography, he says very clearly, I
started as a complete atheist.
He moved towards belief in something transcendental.
(01:07:30):
And then he says the spirit dragged him kicking and
screaming into the, he didn't want to
convert.
But, and so he went from being what I
would call a modern man, a modern thinker to he
said of himself, I'm, I'm pre-modern in how I think.
And I think that he could give us
some help in that as well as G.K.
Chesterton, who also was, he believed in what God was doing.
(01:07:56):
And he, he, he foresaw so much of
where the Western world was going.
Hadn't gotten there yet in the early 1900s, but he saw
where it was going and gave us
a big warning.
And sometimes when I read him, I
feel like this man was a prophet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And think of what we're doing that he said, you know, the
whole orthodoxy work, it were
(01:08:19):
getting in a boat and we're discovering England and
thinking that we're creating our, and
we're discovering it's already there.
And it's kind of like our path into Europe here is that
digging into the ancient, the
unchangeable, the faith that was there
kind of goes with his whole concept too.
Yeah.
That's, that's amazing.
Yeah.
So, so to drill into it a bit more, the one we're talking
(01:08:40):
about these debates that were
happening in the reformation, and you start
reading about these things, it gets pretty
wild.
Because people, like you were saying, they
took this stuff really seriously and you get
the sense that they felt the supernatur, the layer between
the material, what you see world
and the supernatural was hardly even there.
Like it was just like the supernatural
was just ready to break in at any moment.
(01:09:01):
Yeah.
Right.
And so it really is a big deal to them.
Tell me about some of the debates that were happening here.
And I'm thinking specifically around the Anabaptists, like
why you obviously have the Protestant
Reformation is happening and Luther and all of these things,
but the Anabaptists are doing
something different here.
What were the things that they were pointing at as like,
that's not, that needs to change.
(01:09:22):
It's not right.
What specifically, what are
the debates we're talking about?
Well first I'd want to say they
didn't disagree with everyone completely.
I think so.
There's Trinitarian, the Orthodox Anabaptists or the
evangelical Anabaptists are as Orthodox
about the Trinity as a Catholic or a Protestant.
So there were a lot of things where they agreed.
(01:09:43):
I think it's important to recognize that.
But then what I, part of the reason I am where I am is they
recognize that the church had
lost its concept of how to form the church.
You form it by preaching the gospel to people who can
understand, helping them see their
own need and then calling them
(01:10:05):
to repentance and conversion.
And then you, that forms a special, and then through
baptism, you form a special community
that recognizes there's a lifestyle that goes with this.
And both of those things clash with both
the Catholics and the Protestants because they
had brought together the secular, the social, the
(01:10:27):
governmental I should say, and the religious.
And the Anabaptists said that
doesn't, most of them said it doesn't work.
In fact, it's our problem right now.
Now, just wrote, and the reason it's the
problem is because they stopped forming the
church the right way.
Are you really a Christian?
And in the Schleitheim Confession of Faith, Sattler points
(01:10:52):
out in the first article that
the chief abomination of the Pope was infant baptism.
That's the root of the problem and
the Protestants didn't change it.
So I think they saw clearly what the problem was.
That didn't mean that everything else was wrong.
Yeah.
So infant baptism is a specific tangible one you could,
like that was a huge division point.
(01:11:14):
And the other thing that
everybody was, so that always came up.
And the other thing that always came up was the Lord's
Supper and the Anabaptists, I would
say, recognize that we have to
recognize the body of Christ.
It even says that in 1 Corinthians 11, and
they recognized it as the people that were
gathered to partake.
(01:11:35):
And so there's something, it's not just symbolic, we are
actually the physical body of Christ
here.
And so we're recognizing that the source of grace is from
God, but it comes to me through
my brothers and sisters.
And so they also had a lot of conflicts with that.
Wasn't that one of the big issues
(01:11:56):
specifically for Menno Simons as a Catholic priest?
Oh yeah.
The transubstantiation issue of the Catholic Church that,
well, first off, describe a little
bit of transubstantiation just define that and then like
some of his pick with that specific
issue there.
Well, very early on, I think within the first year of his
being ordained a priest, he wondered
(01:12:17):
as he was, the main job of a priest, the main way to bring
grace to his people and to give
them the opportunity to receive Jesus is communion.
And he began to wonder, is this bread and wine really
becoming the body and blood of
Christ?
That's the transubstantiation that the Catholics believe
(01:12:38):
and the Orthodox believe that the
bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ.
The Lutherans believe that the real body
of Christ comes into the bread and wine.
The bread and wine is still there.
Calvin believed that spiritually you receive Christ and
Zwingli said it's just a symbol.
So those were the categories that were out there.
(01:13:01):
And I'm going to say there were like
oceans of ink probably spilled on this, right?
More than anything.
And blood too, right?
This was a huge deal.
There's so much writing from all
of these different parties involved.
And then of course, Menno Simons wrote
about this a lot and he goes through this whole
process of, is this real?
This transubstantiation thing.
(01:13:21):
Anyway, continue on with that then
because that was a main point for him initially.
Yes.
But then the second crisis of faith is he
hears about a man in his area being executed
because of a second baptism.
He said, I didn't know of a second baptism.
So he looks at the scripture and he becomes convinced of
(01:13:44):
what is the most important point,
how you form a church.
You don't form it by infant baptism.
You form it by getting people who actually
understand who they are and then see from
the scriptures, the preaching of God's word, what they are
in God's eyes and then how God
has provided a rescue from that.
(01:14:08):
And then you form a church by these people coming together.
So that's the first thing, although it's the second thing
that he stumbled on, that Menno
stumbled on.
Yeah.
Anything you'd like to add on this?
Yes, good.
You're asking the question, do these debates still matter?
And I agree with Stephen that fortunately most of the
(01:14:28):
things we agreed with and like, for
instance, describing themselves
within the apostles creed was common.
Oh, absolutely.
The Hutterites did this with Peter Riedemann's work
explicitly going through the apostles
creed and many of the different
confessions were worked in that way.
So that's good.
And I'm really thankful for that to be part
(01:14:49):
of that ancient tradition in the catholicism
with a small C of being that they didn't strip that off.
On the other hand, what they did do in that the idea of
faith and the idea of following
Jesus, I do think is very important and pertinent today.
(01:15:10):
In the sacramental concept, yeah, one of the things that
they were common to fight against
was what the Catholics and even some of the reformers would
have taught, but the reformers
did go against this concept.
It was ex opera operato, which means
by the work, the thing is happening.
So in other words, you could have a priest without faith
(01:15:34):
technically go through the motions
because he's properly ordained through apostolic succession
and this church performing something
that would give grace and would give it to someone apart
from faith in both the priest
or the believer.
Oh, wow.
It's happening.
It's ex opera operato.
By the work, it's happening.
They pushed hard against this.
(01:15:54):
So the idea of faith and everything was so
important that the sacraments need faith.
So like for instance, you have Pilgram Marpeck arguing
against, he said, provide all the semantics
on all these different levels of different
trans-substantiation, con-substantiation, and
all this type of thing.
(01:16:15):
In 1 Corinthians, it says that what you're
doing when you come together, it's not the
Lord's Supper.
And so your life, your community, you're not getting the
grace ex opera, you're not getting
it automatically.
And that's the scripture you're ignoring.
And that's a part of the conversation that
on sacramental theology today that I think
the Anabaptists have something very profound to say.
(01:16:36):
And this idea of it being more than just
the real presence in the bread in the gathered
real presence in a theosis kind of way amongst the gathered
community, it's powerful stuff.
And that was brought up.
And I think that's also
something that needs to be said today.
But with the Jesus following things, I'm so glad that
(01:16:57):
people aren't killing each other
for the most part these days.
Yeah, because that happened a lot.
It happened a lot.
I mean, and C.S. Lewis talked about that.
If you think someone's a witch, you've burned them.
C.S. Lewis makes the point.
Yeah, it's kind of what you do.
But here's the thing.
Some churches have formally repented of
Some churches have formally repented of
(01:17:17):
some of that theology that was backed it.
I think Rome has to some degree, apologize.
The Swiss Reformed have done that.
I mean, explicitly, there's a plaque there.
They talk about it when you're there in Zurich.
But not everyone.
And I would say that here's my worry.
The same theology, given the same situation, will very
(01:17:39):
likely create the same result.
We have different situations now.
We have different environment.
We have a very tolerant.
But notice how quickly things go crazy.
I mean, remember, World War II was just not in my own
father and grandfather's lifetime.
Or at least my father-in-law, at least.
(01:18:01):
Yeah, my father's too.
So in that only lifetime, you had passionate,
Bible-believing Christians supporting Hitler,
supporting Nazism.
There was something wrong in
the theology that did not change.
The circumstances change, and the result repeated.
So my point is that when we come to face the teachings of
(01:18:23):
Jesus, and I mean this charitably
as possible, and I mean this also to me, can a person be a
follower of Christ without following
Christ?
I don't know.
It should be something that we go down to the core again.
Let's start with Jesus.
Let's put his plan for humanity
back into action, and let's do it.
(01:18:45):
And these doctrines do matter.
And when you start to look at some of the
statements and stuff, and you start to see
wars bubble up in our own generations in our own life,
you're like, the reason you're acting
that way is because you don't get that basic point.
And then I get very sad when I see even Anabaptists who
(01:19:06):
don't understand the fundamentals, and
they're so washed in just American pop evangelicalism that
they don't even know these core basics
of Jesus following teaching.
And certainly they sound like 1942
Mennonites in Germany, and that's a shame.
So that's why I think this matters.
(01:19:27):
I think that the arguments still matter,
and we still need to say, okay, I'm glad.
Some churches have publicly repented of this.
Amen.
Keep it up.
Keep going.
And there are many things we have publicly
repented of, or maybe even more public, but
nevertheless, I think the arguments still matter.
We still need Jesus's cure for humanity be placed.
And just tacked on in an esoteric, speculative theology
(01:19:50):
kind of way is not what Jesus, I think,
want.
So the challenge that the Anabaptists had,
let's put this stuff to practice, I think,
needs to be said again.
Okay, so I have to ask them what
sparked the changes, like 500 years ago?
So what were the things, these were pretty
clearly radical changes, and it was a big
(01:20:13):
deal, and you're describing all these different debates
that were happening around transubstantiation,
say or this or that, or infant baptism.
What was the initial piece that got this started?
Why did those early Anabaptists take that
initial step back and say, "Wait, something's
got to change here?"
And that's a huge question.
Because of our grandfather Erasmus.
(01:20:36):
You might want to call Grebel our father, but Erasmus is
the man who put together the first
published Greek New Testament, and people
started reading and seeing what the original
said, and it sparked a lot of discussion.
Whether it's Luther or
Zwingli, we know they all got what...
(01:21:00):
See, Erasmus didn't just publish the Greek New Testament.
He also put out some things that said, "Obviously, the
early church followed the Great Commission
to form the church."
And then he looks at the book of
Acts and shows how that happened.
And we've kind of dropped that.
We've lost that.
And Luther discussed it, thought about it.
(01:21:23):
So did Zwingli.
They even talked about maybe starting a little church,
specifically Luther, a little church
in the big church of those people
that really have committed to Christ.
And so I would just say, if you want to...
Well, the Catholics said about Erasmus,
that you laid the egg that Luther hatched.
(01:21:45):
So I think if you want to just make it simple, Erasmus.
And that came from the text and
the Bible coming out in the Greek.
Wait, there's a Greek text to the Scriptures.
I thought it was just the Vulgate.
How dare you even look at what the Greeks said.
And also the world's going crazy
for Europe, for Western Europe.
I mean, it was bad enough to have the plagues.
(01:22:07):
Now you've got Constantinople falling in 1453.
You've got Jihad coming against
Europe taking different places.
You've got now...
And because of that, the kings that could
have just dealt with Protestantism now had
to fight two battles.
Charles V had to fight both the Protestants rising up and
(01:22:29):
the Jihad coming against them.
And then now the Anabaptists are in there.
It's a perfect storm.
And a lot of things was happening
and people were asking questions.
And when you have these plagues, we
saw a little bit of this in the COVID.
People start to get introspective when all
you got family members dying and all that.
And that was just...
I mean, I saw...
Have you ever seen that chart that shows the comparison of
(01:22:51):
the people that died in COVID
versus the Black Death or the crazy differences?
Yeah, it's not even close.
Yeah.
And so when you're seeing people that are
already like you started off with saying that
we're spiritual and we believe God is behind all these
things, we're asking questions.
What's wrong?
And so there was a lot of things that
(01:23:12):
looked like the end of the world was happening.
And yeah, it tipped it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We used to...
A couple of us have used the word radical.
And often in modern world, that
means just overthrow everything.
And these people were radical.
The word itself means go to the root.
And I think we should...
(01:23:32):
Christians should be radical in that sense.
Not as in radical burn it all down.
Not as burn it all down because as I've already said, the
Catholic influence is very clear
both in Protestantism and in the Anabaptists.
There was good there.
And they didn't burn it all down.
You mentioned the Creed, the Apostles Creed.
Meno, in his writings, very specifically says, "I believe
(01:23:55):
the 12 articles and I believe
the 18 articles."
And what he means there is the
Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed.
Yeah.
He quotes from them.
Yes.
So it's not like I'm dumping the whole
faith, but you guys aren't committed.
You're not living it.
And that's what you were saying.
That's where the real issue came in.
Are you willing to commit as an adult and live it out?
(01:24:19):
And then that's also why the ban became important.
The Protestants and Catholics killed us
if we wouldn't commit to their approach.
And the Anabaptists said there does need to be some sense
of discipling or I mean, disciplining.
And so they said, "That's the ban.
We always want a person to be able to come
back if we tell him he has strayed away."
Amen.
(01:24:39):
Now, that's an interesting philosophical difference.
We want the person to be able to come back if he's strayed
away, whereas the other groups
are like, "We will execute you."
Yeah.
And that's what you brought up in
Schleitheim that our limit is the ban.
Yeah.
Where you guys have execution.
We don't go any further than that.
It's interesting.
It's kind of sad.
Talk about the time.
Wow.
That Schleitheim Confession, the discussions in Strasbourg
(01:25:02):
from Michael Sattler, early Dutch
Confessions had articles on not killing heretics.
Man, that's...
I mean, it's amazing that
that's a part of the conversation.
What a bizarre world.
It's almost like culture shock.
But they did believe.
They believed.
That's part of it.
You know, if I'm a Catholic, if I'm the bishop, and you're
(01:25:22):
spouting, whether it's Protestantism
or Anabaptism, and he's listening, I'm worried you're not
just the only one going to hell.
You're trying to drag him to hell with you.
Yeah, yeah.
You have to root evil out.
Yeah, you have to root...
They're wrong.
They're taking the wrong...
Once again, it's that church and state getting intertwined
with each other that makes the
(01:25:43):
church go the direction it does.
You know, and you brought up a couple
times already this concept of the community.
You got to understand how radically different that is.
They thought as a state.
You were baptized as a baby into the state.
The state and the church were together,
and that's been like that for a long time.
I might be having this wrong, but if I remember reading
(01:26:04):
this correctly, you baptized the infant,
and now, oh, now they're in the record of this...
Now you're liable for tax and tithes and all this stuff.
Everything's in there.
You're a citizen.
Yeah, it was almost like you're a citizen, pay for your...
Yeah, okay.
So now if someone was like...
So now you have a church that's gathered as a local
community in faith, that is radically
(01:26:27):
different.
And they saw this as truly...
So when you're saying, "My brother, my
sister," it meant something to them in a way.
And you were talking about what got me thinking about that
is when you see them talk about
the Apostles' Creed and the passage where
it says, "And we believe in the communion
of the saints," several of them use that word communion in
the Latin and the German sounds
(01:26:47):
like in the community of saints.
Peter Riedemann specifically says, when he's arguing to
Philip of Hesse and such, he says,
this is the gathering of the
people of God, the communion of saints.
He sees it more physically, more actual in
this world and not being wrapped up in just
to the state or washed into just the state.
(01:27:08):
It's the gathering of the people of God into a community.
And I think, again, this is something that
Anabaptists are threatened to lose when you
just kind of get your mind so washed
up and it's just about this, the other.
That gathering of the community is an essential tenet.
It's hard to kind of articulate
doctrinally sometime, but it's there.
(01:27:31):
It's very much there and it's a big difference than the
magisterial and the Catholic Reformation.
And Witten also the enemy love and not fighting back, that
would have been a huge piece that
comes in here as well, right?
Absolutely.
And it's not just enemy love and not fighting back.
(01:27:52):
The essence of non-resistance is love for everyone.
And I would argue that that is the
motive force behind the Anabaptist evangelism.
You love your neighbor, you love your enemy.
Well, what does that mean?
You tell them about the cure for their problem.
And really, the Catholics were sending out missionaries,
(01:28:16):
especially after the discovery
of the new world, all over the world.
Even the Calvinists did some, but I think that the fact
that it was in the state church
kind of framework made it something very different.
The Anabaptists were calling people to a relationship to
(01:28:36):
God that forms this new community.
This is powerful.
I remember one of my favorite quotes by Peter Riedemann, who
at the time they were the Marine
Corps of the Anabaptists in this mission thing you're
talking about and the idea of love being
there.
He has this beautiful quote
where he says, "Love is like fire."
He gives us an analogy.
He says, "Anybody who makes a fire knows that at the very
(01:28:57):
beginning of the fire, if you
put a big stick on it, it's going to snub it out.
But if you let that fire get really big, you could throw a
whole lot of houses, whatever
you want on there, and it'll just keep burning.
So it is with love.
That if our love is small, small little things make us
offended, and we will argue with each
(01:29:17):
other or whatever, and it'll snub out the love.
But if we let our love burn, then
we can handle any of these things.
I love the idea of bringing that God's
love and yeah, that's a powerful thought.
The Bruderhof used to publish that.
I don't know if you still do.
Love Is Like a Fire if you want to read that.
It's excellent.
(01:29:39):
So here we are 500 years later.
What ways, practically speaking, do these conversations,
debates, differences from back
then affect us right now in daily life?
People coming away from the side.
We've already hit some, but
let's try to get real practical here.
(01:29:59):
What does this look like now?
Because it's not like we're
being threatened with execution.
It's just a totally different
environment that we're in right now.
I'll say this and I hope this doesn't hurt your thing.
For 30 years or 25 years at least, I and
other people, and you Stephen too, have been
preaching things on non-resistance and
(01:30:20):
such like that and talking about these things.
When I see evangelicals, conservative evangelicals, or I
even see even worse so, Amish, conservative
Anabaptists getting wrapped up in the nationalism and the
patriotism that I see, I'm just broken
(01:30:41):
hearted.
I think somehow you don't get
the very origin of who you are.
Somehow the Jesus following kingdom building that somehow
we have traded now what we think
we had the answers that we were in Jesus Christ, now do we
really think the state and politics
is going to somehow...
No.
(01:31:02):
No.
And so yes, it matters.
And let's be reminded that we have a blueprint and it's
easy and the world is not going to
come up with it.
It's not going to be any
different now than it was in any time era.
So yeah.
Well, strangely enough, well, we look at where the
(01:31:22):
Christian church was in 1500 and with
its entanglement with the
state and we see how bad that was.
The Protestant church didn't do a whole lot better, but
then here in the states, first
the British colonies and then the
states, we didn't have that entanglement.
The last state church was in
Massachusetts and it was disbanded in 1833.
(01:31:45):
So after that we have no state church, but we still have
this kind of Protestant civil
religion sort of a thing.
And I just can't understand why these people don't see that
in the early church we didn't
have this.
And then from Constantine on, it starts getting more and
more entangled and it didn't go good
(01:32:07):
places.
Why do we think we're going to do any better?
But we also need to look at...
Now this is something not...
Well, we have to look at our
foundational document, our constitution, the Bible.
And it makes it so clear that
these two things are two kingdoms.
They don't mix and the end of what
(01:32:28):
Constantine started in the 1500s wasn't great.
It ain't going to be good if we do it now.
And I think we're actually experiencing something right now
where Christians are trying to make
that happen and it's going to be a disaster.
It already is.
Because one of the core issues in 1525 and on when the
(01:32:52):
early Anabaptist movement is getting
its feet on it, so to speak.
Yeah, you read this stuff and it's just constantly like,
"No, we're trying to pull it away."
Like you're saying that the community of believers versus
the state and how those were inseparable.
They were so to the point where if you're
not part of the way the church is run here,
(01:33:12):
you don't even fit into society in
any way because this is just how it is.
And yeah, I think you're onto something there.
It does feel like there is a movement or doesn't feel there
is a real movement to try to...
And we say this, that's Americans at least, we can't say
globally, I guess, but trying
to push those back together.
And it's like, you know what?
(01:33:33):
How this thing started actually does really speak to that.
It's very specifically to that exact issue.
This is not a new one at all.
Same theology given similar circumstances
will very likely create the same results.
Something that I think is more likely to happen than a
resurgence of state church connection
(01:33:54):
in the states.
I mean, right now, it almost looks like it could happen.
But I think that because of our modernistic and
post-modernistic way of thinking, our
materialistic way of thinking in the West, I think that
what's going to happen is, despite
what's happening presently in the United States with the
(01:34:15):
political world, I think what's going
to happen is it's already starting to happen.
I can't remember the author, but there's an
author who said we used to have a positive
attitude towards Christianity.
Then for maybe 20 years, like the
1990s, for early 2000s, it was neutral.
(01:34:36):
And then from 2010 on, there's a growing
negativity towards Christianity in the Western
world and both in Europe and the United States.
I think that's where we're
actually going to have the conflict.
It's going to swing that way.
And I think there are going to be Christians who I already
know there are Christians outside
my tradition who are becoming more and
(01:34:59):
more open to what the Anabaptist position said
about love of neighbor and things like that.
And now the people who are presently trying to work with
the government, take it over, they may
have a problem there.
They may want to fight against
it, literally fight against it.
(01:35:20):
Right.
But that's where our challenge is for us is to help
Christians see that's not what we
are called to.
And people can hear that.
I think you're right on it.
When I was first converting in the army and I visited my
first Mennonite, one of my first
Mennonite Churches I ever visited,
And I was there and we were singing and presenting things.
I looked and suddenly I saw on the wall there were these
(01:35:43):
over in Europe, you know how they have
plaques of all the people that
served during the different wars.
Oh, yeah.
And so I was like, after I went back, here I'm becoming a
conscious objector and going to this
Mennonite church in Germany.
I'm like, so I was talking to this old guy
who was like 70 years old here in 1990, 89.
And I said, so I'm just curious.
I thought you were a non-resistant.
(01:36:03):
This whole reason I'm even, you know, and he just looked at
me and said, oh, yeah, World War II.
I was a little boy.
He said, I could take you to my
house and I have a barn there.
And my dad, we were raised Quakers,
but then we came into the Mennonites,
He said, but I've left this there, that there was a
painting on our barn that was a symbol to vote for
(01:36:26):
Nazis.
And he said, I've left it there as a
memory, you know, to remember these things.
And I said, well, how did, you know, we
said, Dean it, it came on us like a revival.
It came on us like, I never forget those words.
It came on us like a revival.
We were just swept into it.
And, but what happened was after that,
(01:36:47):
people like, so this is Christianity.
I mean, now, you know, the popular
people, it was the conservative Christians.
It was not just the Mennonites, it
was all the conservative evangelical.
The more Bible believing you were, the
more likely you were to go into that.
I mean, you can go to the Berlin church and the reformed
church in Berlin, you've got literally on
the pulpit an etching of Hitler, you know, you've got him
(01:37:09):
there in the, you know, and so the people
were like, well, what is this?
You know, what is this?
So the reaction then, ever since
then, you've had kind of an agnostic.
I'm worried that what's happening right
now, you could end up with an agnostic.
America, even another level, like what's Christianity?
A bunch of weird, you know, things like that.
(01:37:32):
Well, this, this is where I think
the Anabaptist understanding of the two
kingdoms is essential and we need to
try to help other Christians see this.
In Hitler's time, you know, Hitler was
saying we have been mistreated and I think the
German nation was after World War I.
I really was.
Yeah, me too.
He, so he had a kind of an argument that
(01:37:52):
spoke to the heart and, you know, he didn't
start killing people at the beginning.
I think we're in danger of the same thing right here.
There are reasonable issues that are
problematic and we can get sucked in to,
that's what happened there.
I talked to both, not Quaker, but
(01:38:14):
conservative people who were young,
conservative Anabaptists in Southern
Germany and a real believer up in Northern
Germany, who at the time was a
Lutheran minister when I was talking to him.
He was a young man and he was drafted into Hitler's army.
And these people, all of them told me we
were not treated well and he sounded like
(01:38:37):
he's bringing us release, a relief maybe is a better word.
And it's only after he got basically
all the power in his hands that he started
doing the really, really bad things.
And people were either cowed or didn't
know it or, well actually some of my German
friends said, we didn't want to know it.
(01:39:00):
There you go.
There you go.
They said we could have known
it, but we didn't want to know it.
And that's what strikes me as like the
Anabaptists, you know, saying this is not
okay, like pointing out things that like,
we may not want to know that, but it's not
okay.
That's not right.
Yeah.
You know, that's not right.
Wow.
Well, y'all definitely brought it to the
current reality, you know, that we're in.
(01:39:21):
But no, these are important conversations to have.
And I guess as far as where to leave it here with the
audience is I would encourage
people listening to go back and read some
of this stuff from the early Anabaptists,
like the things they were wrestling
with and the decisions they were making,
especially that extracting the church away
from the state was a real thorny one, you
(01:39:43):
know, and what they had to go
through and had to suffer for that.
That's significant.
That's significant.
So any closing comments from
either of you as we as we wrap this up?
The simplicity of Christ, you know, again, I go back to
Grebel's point, I believe the
word of God without complicated interpretation.
And out of that, I speak, let's be a people of the Bible
(01:40:03):
and let's put it into practical
application as a blueprint for humanity
and that the words of Jesus were meant to be
put into practice.
If we can meet there at Jesus in a
practical way, not just a theological way, but a
practical real way of meeting Jesus and
bringing his cure to humanity, I think we'll
see a better world.
(01:40:23):
I really do.
And I can get behind that message.
I get excited about that message and I pray
for it over all of us and my generations, my
children, my grandchildren, I want them to have that.
I'm not disagreeing with him at all.
He's exactly right.
But then I'm going to point out the
other side, which is these guys didn't burn
everything down.
And we have a tradition that goes all the way to the time
(01:40:47):
of the resurrection of Jesus and
the ascension and then the
Pentecost when the church started.
And there are good lessons that they wrestled with issues
and we don't have to reinvent
the wheel.
So yes, the commitment idea to Jesus is absolutely premier.
(01:41:11):
But there were people 2000, 15000. I'm sorry, 2000, 1500
a thousand years ago, 500 years
ago, who were equally committed and they wrestled with
issues that have shaped the church.
And so I'm also going to say, let's recognize the heritage
(01:41:33):
we've been given and we've got
to evaluate it.
Looking at the history of the Reformation can help us with
that, but let's not just chuck
it.
Totally agree.
Amen.
Yeah.
Wow.
Well, I think that you gave us some things to think about.
I'm pretty sure.
I'll be curious what the comments are on this one.
(01:41:54):
This is really good.
This is really important things to wrestle with.
And I just say that to people listening.
Like we love to hear from our listeners,
like what are they thinking and processing and
wrestling with.
We want to hear that.
So put it in the comments or send us an email.
But yeah, thank you both for sharing today.
I really appreciate you taking the time.
You're welcome.
Thanks for listening to this discussion
(01:42:15):
with Dean Taylor and Stephen Russell about
Reformation debates and the
origins of the Anabaptist movement.
As we mentioned briefly in this episode,
we're doing a documentary series on the
origins of the Anabaptist movement and
that's its own YouTube channel and its own
website.
You can find all of that links
down below in the description.
You can also go to that website at AnabaptistOrigins.org.
(01:42:38):
We'll be filming that in June of 2025 that
we don't have a final release date set yet
for the entire documentary series.
So make sure you're subscribed to
follow along for updates on that project.
Thanks again for listening and
we'll catch you in the next episode.
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