For violence towards others, it’s rather interesting that Anabaptists were the most violent.
It’s not particularly interesting, and I’m not really sure that it’s true, unless you think that violence against an establishment is more violent than violence in support of an establishment.
You wouldn’t know it today, the peaceful Anabaptists were generally the ones that survived because Europe basically united to wipe out the violent ones.
Terms seem to hide the fact of the Anabaptist violence.
Well, the problem is that there was never a unified movement called “Anabaptists.” Scholars speak of the “Radical Reformation,” which was a very diverse set of movements.
It is certainly true that Mennonites have had a tendency to tell the story as if those Anabaptists who believed and acted like them were the “real” Anabaptists, and that this doesn’t reflect the way things looked in the early 16th century.
An excellent book on the Anabaptists and violence is James Stayer’s *Anabaptists and the Sword, *published in 1972.
For instance in Germany we speak of the Peasant’s Revolt and Luther is often criticised for his harsh words against them. Well, it was an Anabaptist revolt.
That’s not really an accurate description. As far as I’m aware few if any of the revolutionary groups practiced rebaptism, though some of them did reject infant baptism. Thomas Muntzer, the most important theologian (at the time) associated with the revolt, was not an Anabaptist by most definitions, though he did have a lot of common ground with them. It’s true that Balthasar Hubmaier, who did rebaptize, was also involved with the revolt early in his career (and it came back to burn him–literally–later!).
They threw out the government and installed themselves as the voice of God. Some really strange things resulted. For instance if you were a merchant they would simply take from you without compensation what they wanted. If you disagreed, they killed you.
This is a huge generalization–the revolutionary texts I’ve seen actually seem to have a very strong commitment to law and order, just law and order of a kind stemming from an egalitarian “godly law” rather than from the power of the landowning elite.
Don’t believe propaganda–even propaganda that is nearly 500 years old!
The most famous because it held out for so long was the city of Meunster, Germany.
You are confused. The Anabaptist takeover of Munster (yes, these guys really did rebaptize and clearly were Anabaptists by contemporary definitions) happened about ten years after the revolt of 1525, and was not directly connected with it.
You see Anabaptist today basically make the case that they were right and as proof point to their persecution.
It’s certainly true that Mennonites have whitewashed early Anabaptist history to some extent. Stayer’s book has largely corrected this within scholarly discussion of the period, but it unfortunately takes decades for ideas to filter down. However, the fact is that the Mennonites as an organized movement take their rise precisely from the
rejection of violent methods, and the South German groups with which they affiliated were also those which rejected the use of the sword. The Schleitheim Confession of 1527 is very clear on the subject. So there always was a clearly nonviolent stream of the Anabaptist movement, and modern Anabaptists are within their rights to claim this stream as their source and disown the violent groups–which as you note did not survive anyway, for obvious reasons. The only place where this becomes a problem is when they speak as if this is what “Anabaptist” meant to most people in the early 16th century–it wasn’t. And as you note, it was easy for governments to treat all rebaptizers as potential revolutionaries, especially after Munster.
There was of course violence by other groups as well. Anyone who tries to pretend there was only violence by one group is at best ignorant.
Nonetheless, the Schleitheim confession existed and there were always (from 1527 on, obviously) people who subscribed to it. So it’s not true that no one in the 16th century renounced violence entirely. It’s just true that not everyone considered “Anabaptist” at the time fell into that nonviolent category.
Edwin
