An Anabaptist Theology 2

Anabaptism sought to find a way outside Catholicism and yet not the same as the major Protestant groups, the Lutherans and the Reformed. Anabaptism, then, can be seen as a third way. Thomas Finger, in his big book A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology: Biblical, Historical, Constructive, seeks to show how anabaptism can be of help to theological discussions today.

People have approached both Anabaptism’s history and theology from a variety of angles. What the sketch of Finger shows is that theology is always contextually-shaped: there is no such thing as context-less theology. Even the Bible’s own statements are context-shaped theology.

One of the most notable — and influential — approaches to Anabaptism is through Harold Bender’s famous “Anabaptist Vision,” which finds three major themes: Discipleship, the church as voluntary brotherhood (fellowship), and the ethic of love and nonresistance. For many today, this is what Anabaptism is. This means Bender found the normative form of Anabaptism was the Swiss (seeing both the South-German/Austrian and Dutch groups as secondary). Robert Friedmann distinguished Pietism (inner experience) from Anabaptism (fellowship, suffering, mission).

George Williams, however, offered what has become perhaps the more scholarly approach to Anabaptism by dividing it into three groups: Evangelical Anabaptists (Swiss), Spiritualist Anabaptists (Spirit over letter; South-German/Austrian), and Revolutionary Anabaptists (Thomas Müntzer, Münsterites, Dutch, etc).

Scholarship at this point can get arcane, especially if we are more concerned with Finger’s own proposals than all the vagaries of Anabaptism’s history, but some focus on the medieval origins of Anabaptism, some on Erasmus, some on ascetic traditions, others on spiritual mystical traditions, others on some almost Eastern Orthodox connections (Alvin Beachy emphasized “divinization”), while yet others want to affirm polygenesis — that is, diversity (C. Arnold Snyder).

The theology of Anabaptism has an evangelical orthodoxy dimension (JC Wenger, R. Sider) and a biblical narrative approach (John Howard Yoder, J. Denny Weaver, C. Norman Kraus, James McClendon), and Finger then probes into broader contexts — like A. James Reimer’s focus on historic Christian orthodoxy. Others are mentioned, including Nancey Murphy at Fuller and Duane K. Friesen. He also sketches contributions at a more micro-levels.