Yesterday I posted some quotes from Hughes Oliphant Old’s book, The Shaping of the Reformed Baptismal Rite in the Sixteenth Century. Old’s book is one of the best I have read on the history of baptism during the sixteenth century among Reformed churches. One of the great feats of the book is to show how the Anabaptist threat shaped the way the Reformers thought about baptism. Old shows how initially there were certain ideas among the Reformers that were wrong. However, they did not realize their errors until they ran into the Anabaptists. Being confronted by the encrusted rituals of Rome on one side and the flaming revolution of Anabaptism on the other side forced the Reformers to dig deeper into the Scriptures. Old’s chapter on Anabaptism is an excellent resource. He explains the differences among the Anabaptists themselves and then draws some basic conclusions about their theology. What I think is most important is that Old shows how Anabaptism was not one limb on the Reformation tree, but was a different tree altogether. And while I know you cannot draw a straight line from Anabaptists to modern-day Baptistic thinking there are enough similarities that should give Baptists, compromised Presbyterians, and general evangelicals pause before they claim reformed soteriology, but reject reformed sacramentology.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from Old on the Anabaptists.
“At issue in this question of believers’ baptism was an attempt to found a new church for the spiritually elite.”
“What happened in the social revolution was for Muntzer an exact parallel to the crisis of the conversion experience. It is the same dramatic reversal whether on the objective plane of history or in the subjective experience of the soul. Premillenarianism [as understood by Muntzer] and Anabaptism are logical twins.”
Proto-Anabaptists in Zurich “wanted to move out and form a new church made up of those who were fully committed Christians.”
“One notices that it [baptism] is not a sign of what God will do in the life of the baptized, as Zwingli had understood it, but rather it is a sign of what the baptized has done already and will do in the future. It would appear that for Grebel baptism is not so much an act of God as an act of the one baptized.”
“For the circle of Conrad Grebel, as for Muntzer, believer’s baptism was the one key to the reform of the Church. If only those who gave evidence of a firm and mature faith were baptized, then the church would be free from impurities. Believer’s baptism would be the effective sword used to separate the true Christian from Christendom”
“The Anabaptists found it difficult to believe that Christendom was really Christian. As the Anabaptists saw it, there was only a very small number of real Christians in the world.”
For the Anabaptist, “the first responsibility of truly apostolic preaching was to bring people into the crisis experience.”
“For the Anabaptist, salvation was gained neither by the medieval sacramental system nor by faith, but rather by the conversion experience…baptism of children before they had this crisis experience would tend to prevent the development of the crisis experience.”
“The Anabaptists were, to be sure, not so much rationalists as they were voluntarists.”
The study of Hubmaier’s On the Christian Baptism of Believers “shows most clearly that the opposition to infant baptism arose primarily from an understanding of salvation radically different from that of classical Protestantism.”
“Several things should be apparent from even this brief study of these Anabaptist leaders. Anabaptism was not simply the ‘The Radical Reformation.’ Certainly it was not a radical reformation in the sense that it took the principles of the Protestant Reformation to their logical conclusions. It is far more a reaction against the Protestant Reformation. It is a very different approach to reformation than anything the classical Protestant Reformers had in mind. It was a taking of a different road than the Reformers, not simply going further along the same road.”
As I read Old’s account of Anabaptism one thought kept creeping into my mind: We are all Anabaptists. Even in Presbyterian circles, the themes of crisis conversion experiences for all including children, wanting a pure church full of pure Christians, rejection of anything like Christendom, and a voluntary approach to the Christian faith are dominant. The question Old’s book forces us to ask is “How Reformed are we really?” The answer would probably come as a surprise to a lot of us who believe that we walk in the footsteps of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and Knox.<>
