The Didache: Your Thoughts

[Valerie]

Reading the early church texts is starting to get a bad reputation in Anabaptist circles. It certainly has soured in my own denomination. The influence of early churchism seems to often be followed by immersionism, sacramentalism, “real presence” / transsubstantiation, and apostolic successionism.

Is that because they come to realize those things really are more in accordance with early church beliefs and practices?

All of these are in conflict with Anabaptism (with an exception carved out for German Baptist sacramental immersionism).

Yeah, so?

It seems to me that Anabaptists would fear possibly being wrong on some of their issues they had with the Church so that if they consider to be early Church writers and teachings to be grounded, it could completely shake up the whole Anabaptist religion. Safer to to then avoid it then study it lest we have to consider we may have erred here and there in our assumptions.

[temporal1]

A general forum search for “Didache” reflects mention on 6 pages (before this topic).
search.php?keywords=Didache&sid=922355c ... ab77aed0a7

[Soloist]

Ultimately, it is my contention that if you accept the parasitic writers as of equal authority to the Bible, you will wind up orthodox, but you may disagree.

I agree. They were men who were not writing inspired work. I consider them commentaries, perhaps better then modern man but commentaries.

It seems to me that Anabaptists would fear possibly being wrong on some of their issues they had with the Church so that if they consider to be early Church writers and teachings to be grounded, it could completely shake up the whole Anabaptist religion. Safer to to then avoid it then study it lest we have to consider we may have erred here and there in our assumptions.

Sometimes there is great wisdom in not reading things. It doesn’t do well to immerse yourself in heresy from any source. Besides, both the Catholics and the Orthodox disagree on the teachings and come to very different results.

s that because they come to realize those things really are more in accordance with early church beliefs and practices?

They certainly were taught. That doesn’t make it right though.
Ultimately though, what do you really expect us to believe? The heresy we broke away from? Or what we believe the Bible teaches?

[Josh]

Reading the early church texts is starting to get a bad reputation in Anabaptist circles. It certainly has soured in my own denomination. The influence of early churchism seems to often be followed by immersionism, sacramentalism, “real presence” / transsubstantiation, and apostolic successionism.

Is that because they come to realize those things really are more in accordance with early church beliefs and practices?

Well, I place a great deal of import on early church writers and fathers.

They told us the only reliable guide is the New Testament (which they canonised). Many early church practices didn’t make it into the NT, and they could have.

The fact is, a lot of early church practice wasn’t particularly great, and where did it lead? To Augustine (especially in the West). The early church was marred with horrible divisions that led to actual wars. Much of the East, particularly the Syriac, fell into so much heresy to at they eventually transformed into Islam.

[MaxPC]

parasitic writers

Those who write polemics against the Eucharist, attacking the Host?

I think auto spell has a demon again. I believe JM meant Patristic.

[MaxPC]

Sattler might have, doubtful many of the others. Menno was, by his own confession, a very poorly educated priest. Manz and Grebel were not clerics, and, in Manses case, likely more of a language scholar. Hubmaier WAS well educated in classics, which almost certainly would have included the Didache, but a firmer opponent of infant baptism could not be found:

“With that it is not written explicitly, do not baptize them, to this I answer, can I also baptize my dog and my donkey … take infants to the Lord’s supper … sell the mass as a sacrifice, for [the Bible] does not prohibit anywhere with explicit words that we do these things?”

It is my understanding that Balthasar Hubmaier and Zwingli were at odds over the issue of baptism. The Hutterites follow the Schleitham Confession, yes?

Hubmaier Broke with Zwingli on that issue in particular. Hubmaier Was once a Catholic priest. The Catholics caught him in Nicholsberg, in the present day Czech Republic now called Mikulov. Was in 1526, he was taken to Vienna and burned in the square in front of the cathedral. His motto was “Truth is Unkillable.”

Zwingli was the driving force behind the Swiss Reformed Church, that continues tha practice of infant baptism to this day.

In general, Hutterites follow the principles of Schlictheim, although they have their own, written by Peter Riderman. I have it somewhere on my shelf.

I would be interested in reading the Peter Riderman confession. Is there an online download for that?

It seems the auto speller does not like “Schleitheim”.

[Sudsy]

Since fasting was brought up, I wonder what the variations are represented here regarding this topic. The Didache certainly teaches that fasting was a common practise amongst early believers and Jesus said 'when you fast', not 'if you fast'. It also seems to me fasting in the NT was about going without food. I have heard it referred to all kinds of things that we can go without during a time of praying over issues. Some use the 1 Cor 7:1-5 text to support this idea.

And some today are so afraid of health issues they don't go without food. But actually, there have been very positive health results from fasting. To me, it boils down to if one's health can be adversely affected then go without something else you do daily - i.e. the Internet and use this time for prayer. Otherwise, if we are NT practise followers of Jesus we should be fasting from food - right ?

https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Fasting
It begins -

Did the Mennonites ever have the practice of fasting, as for example the Roman Catholics? It is not very probable that they did; nothing is found about fasting in the writings of their leaders such as Menno Simons and Dirk Philips, though they occasionally insisted on sober eating and drinking, as did also Galenus Abrahamsz, the well-known preacher of Amsterdam, at the close of the 17th century.

So, does your church preach fasting and if so, is it up to the individual Christian to fast as they sense Spirit leading and/or is it a common practise on certain days of the year that everyone in the church is to fast ? When I was a youth in Pentecostalism, fasting was encouraged both in private and practised by the congregation regarding certain prayer issues. It was believed fasting gave 'more weight' to prayers. If it was not a corporate fast but rather an individual fast it was important that no one knew about it.

I found this very worth studying - https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resour ... tian-life/

Whoops, I see this thread has already begun, my bad. Old age, I guess. Sorry MaxPC.
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=6308&p=214408&hilit=fasting#p214408

[Judas Maccabeus]

parasitic writers

Those who write polemics against the Eucharist, attacking the Host?

I think auto spell has a demon again. I believe JM meant Patristic.

IYes, it is possessed, and writing this on an I-Pad does not help.

Also, I cannot spell.....almost at all. Grad school would have been impossible without spell check, which was just coming on line.

[Bootstrap]

The big deal in the early 16th century was ad fontes, a return to the earliest available sources. This started with the Renaissance humanists and spread to people like Erasmus, who used the oldest texts he could get his hands on as the basis for his Greek New Testament. Then reformers like Luther and Zwingli used Erasmus' work for their own teaching and translation. The Anabaptists were starved for the Scriptures and had little interest in anything more recent until they had devoured them.

And now, some people in the Anabaptist tradition seem to be giving great weight to the writings of the early church. Hopefully not at the expense of Biblical studies, but I wonder sometimes.

Menno Simons is emphatic about this. We need to look to Scripture, and not found our teaching on the fathers:

http://www.mennosimons.net/ft009-baptism.html

In the last place, they appeal to Origen and Augustine, and say that these assert, that they have received infant baptism from the apostles.

To this we answer and inquire, Can Origen and Augustine prove this by the Scriptures? Have they done so? We desire to know; if not, then must we hear and believe Christ and his apostles, and not Augustine and Origen.

But Menno Simons does read the fathers to give light to the historical record, he just doesn't see them as authoritative:

That this is not the case may readily be seen from Cyprian, because he neither enjoined nor condemned infant baptism, if those who for many years past have been preachers at Norlingen, have rightly informed me in their church records, and not deceived me in the meaning of the word Liberum.

If infant baptism is apostolic, why does Tertullian write and say, "They who are to be baptized, confess for a considerable time in the church, before the bishop, that they renounce the devil, his pomp and angels. After that they are," &c.

This is how I see it too - the early fathers, especially the Apostolic Fathers, are useful for tracking the history of some views. To do that well, I think it's really helpful to use books like Quantz's Patrology, which has extensive indexes and summaries to help track thought across different times and different geographic regions and cultures. And that takes a lot of time.

There's a lot of variety and disagreement among the Fathers. I think it's helpful to focus on the Apostolic Fathers, and see just how much variety there was. By the time of Constantine, the church has essentially become the thing that Anabaptists rejected.

[Judas Maccabeus]

It is my understanding that Balthasar Hubmaier and Zwingli were at odds over the issue of baptism. The Hutterites follow the Schleitham Confession, yes?

Hubmaier Broke with Zwingli on that issue in particular. Hubmaier Was once a Catholic priest. The Catholics caught him in Nicholsberg, in the present day Czech Republic now called Mikulov. Was in 1526, he was taken to Vienna and burned in the square in front of the cathedral. His motto was “Truth is Unkillable.”

Zwingli was the driving force behind the Swiss Reformed Church, that continues tha practice of infant baptism to this day.

In general, Hutterites follow the principles of Schlictheim, although they have their own, written by Peter Riderman. I have it somewhere on my shelf.

I would be interested in reading the Peter Riderman confession. Is there an online download for that?

It seems the auto speller does not like “Schleitheim”.

Not available online. Too long.

One source is a book from the Classics of the Radical Reformation, volume 9. Originally published by Herald press, than by Panorama , it is now published by Plough. It is in print.

Another source is "The Chronicles of the Hutterian Brethren , it is two volumes. You can get volume from Masthoff Press, but they do not have Volume 2. I called up Altona Colony in my effort to find it, they gave me the number of a colony in Manitoba, The confession is in Volume 1.

I think you will find their view of Baptism much the same as my own, maybe more so. At least one colony was "converted" at the point of a sword, Velke Levare was its name. Some resisted unto death. This was from their time in what we now know as Slovakia.