Münster: It's relationship to Anabaptism.

[Ernie]

Yes. In some cases I believe that God judges people based on what they could have known, but were not true seekers or refused to learn what could have been helpful for them.
(I don't know enough about the rank-and-file Munsterites to know whether this applies to them.)

[Josh]

It is a principle found in natural law and is indeed universal to all human societies that it is wrong to steal another man's wife (especially for someone who already has a wife or wives, as the case may be), particularly it is wrong to kill a man and then take his wife. That was one of the most egregious sins in Münster.

The Bible says that false teachers will be revealed because of their blatant immorality. Of course, many people in Münster rejected the leadership when they began to engage in gross immorality - but they found themselves condemned or killed for opposing the leadership.

[Ken]

Anyone could waltz into a nearby church and read the copy of the Bible that was there. If they were illiterate or had trouble reading it, they could ask a friar or a priest or a number of other types of people to help them read it and understand it.

Maybe you could, if you were one of the less than 1% of ordinary German-speaking folks with the ability to read this. And you had the time to sit down for hours and hours and study it. As for asking priests to interpret the Bible for you. Do you think the average priest in a village church in 1520 would give a curious person a Biblically-accurate answer about a topic like Baptism?

[Josh]

Anyone could waltz into a nearby church and read the copy of the Bible that was there. If they were illiterate or had trouble reading it, they could ask a friar or a priest or a number of other types of people to help them read it and understand it.

Maybe you could, if you were one of the less than 1% of ordinary German-speaking folks with the ability to read this. And you had the time to sit down for hours and hours and study it. As for asking priests to interpret the Bible for you. Do you think the average priest in a village church in 1520 would give a curious person a Biblically-accurate answer about a topic like Baptism?

Catholics to this day will give you what they feel is a biblically accurate answer on a topic like that. Generally speaking, the priest was the most educated one in a small village and would be relied upon to help with intellectual types of matters, but was not the only person who would be literate.

Given the lack of literacy I see today (Detroit is under half literate, for example), I think the mediaeval era gets criticised a tad too much and there is a concordant lack of self-introspection about how little literacy, critical thought, and Bible knowledge there is amongst us in the present day.

[Ken]

Anyone could waltz into a nearby church and read the copy of the Bible that was there. If they were illiterate or had trouble reading it, they could ask a friar or a priest or a number of other types of people to help them read it and understand it.

Maybe you could, if you were one of the less than 1% of ordinary German-speaking folks with the ability to read this. And you had the time to sit down for hours and hours and study it. As for asking priests to interpret the Bible for you. Do you think the average priest in a village church in 1520 would give a curious person a Biblically-accurate answer about a topic like Baptism?

Catholics to this day will give you what they feel is a biblically accurate answer on a topic like that. Generally speaking, the priest was the most educated one in a small village and would be relied upon to help with intellectual types of matters, but was not the only person who would be literate.

Given the lack of literacy I see today (Detroit is under half literate, for example), I think the mediaeval era gets criticised a tad too much and there is a concordant lack of self-introspection about how little literacy, critical thought, and Bible knowledge there is amongst us in the present day.

I'm not criticizing the Medieval era. I'm simply pointing out that it is not so simple to simply say that the average person should simply study the Bible to discover God's intent on any given subject. It is really not that simple. And most people in both Medieval times and today do not absorb their religious teachings and religious beliefs that way. They defer to those in authority. And if they do reach their own opinions through studying scripture, those opinions are often vigorously squelched if they conflict with the teachings of whatever church they happen to be in. Which is often the church that they were born into.

[Pelerin]

I did some poking around on literacy. A lot of the available information covers the Dutch Republic, which began fifty years after the Anabaptists spread there and after Münster, but clearly the foundations would have been in place by that time and the general observations would be generally applicable.

The Dutch were noted to be especially literate. This paper notes that male Dutch literacy at the end on the sixteenth century was twice that of Germany—65.5% (Section 3). (Aside: this would put German literacy around 35%. Assume it was probably lower 75 years earlier, but that’s still a lot more than 1%.)

The paper’s thesis is that Dutch literacy and prosperity can be traced to a late 14th century group called the Brethren of the Common Life. I’m going to go afield a bit here because I had never heard of the Brethren of the Common Life before and I found them very fascinating. They were a pre-Reformation religious order founded about 150 years before Anabaptism. The following quote illustrates the Dutch environment of they created and might explain why Anabaptism found fertile ground in the Netherlands:

The establishment of the [Brethren of the Common Life] in Dutch cities promoted literacy among citizens by institutionalizing the educational system, by promoting an intense personal relationship with God through reading the Bible and other religious texts in vernacular …

The paper also notes in passing that “the reform that the BCL pursued was to return to the customs among the early Christians.” Very interesting.

Back to literacy: this article is about newspaper reading in the Dutch Republic. The specifics here aren’t as important, but it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that newspapers would be roughly analogous to religious pamphlets a hundred years earlier in the way they were read and discussed. I’m mainly interested in the illustrations in the article. Note that in the illustrations reading is a social event one man reads to another and they discuss it. Meanwhile in the background or off to the side women listen in as well while going about household chores. This illustrates how someone who was not personally literate might still be “well read” and have most of the benefits of literacy and be able to form independent thoughts and ideas about written works.

[Josh]

Very interesting. What particular part of the Netherlands were the bcl from (Flemish, Frisian, Dutch, Luxemburgish, etc.)?

[ohio jones]

Deventer and Zwolle were apparently the original locations, but the BCL movement spread widely beyond that throughout the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.

Also during the late 15th century, the Unitas Fratrum played a similar role (though outside Catholicism) in the Czech region with the establishment of schools in every town.

[Ken]

I did some poking around on literacy. A lot of the available information covers the Dutch Republic, which began fifty years after the Anabaptists spread there and after Münster, but clearly the foundations would have been in place by that time and the general observations would be generally applicable.

The Dutch were noted to be especially literate. This paper notes that male Dutch literacy at the end on the sixteenth century was twice that of Germany—65.5% (Section 3). (Aside: this would put German literacy around 35%. Assume it was probably lower 75 years earlier, but that’s still a lot more than 1%.)

The paper’s thesis is that Dutch literacy and prosperity can be traced to a late 14th century group called the Brethren of the Common Life. I’m going to go afield a bit here because I had never heard of the Brethren of the Common Life before and I found them very fascinating. They were a pre-Reformation religious order founded about 150 years before Anabaptism. The following quote illustrates the Dutch environment of they created and might explain why Anabaptism found fertile ground in the Netherlands:

The establishment of the [Brethren of the Common Life] in Dutch cities promoted literacy among citizens by institutionalizing the educational system, by promoting an intense personal relationship with God through reading the Bible and other religious texts in vernacular …

The paper also notes in passing that “the reform that the BCL pursued was to return to the customs among the early Christians.” Very interesting.

Back to literacy: this article is about newspaper reading in the Dutch Republic. The specifics here aren’t as important, but it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that newspapers would be roughly analogous to religious pamphlets a hundred years earlier in the way they were read and discussed. I’m mainly interested in the illustrations in the article. Note that in the illustrations reading is a social event one man reads to another and they discuss it. Meanwhile in the background or off to the side women listen in as well while going about household chores. This illustrates how someone who was not personally literate might still be “well read” and have most of the benefits of literacy and be able to form independent thoughts and ideas about written works.

The number I found for the early 1500s was 10% literacy not 1%.

I threw the 1% number out there as a random guess as to how many ordinary Germans in the 1530s would have been literate enough in Latin to be able to walk into a Medieval church and read the Bible, which would have been written in Latin. And then to be proficient enough in Latin to be able to understand the nuances of Biblical teachings.

[Josh]

In the early 1500s, anyone German who bothered to learn to read would have learned Latin or maybe Dutch since German didn’t even have a standard form let alone widespread use as a written language. There was no standard German language nor a standard written form until Luther decided to publish his translation.