The Intellectual Depth of Anabaptism

[Wayne in Maine]

I think that the same holds true for what I'll refer to as "neo-anabaptism" - a reinterpretation of history to fit concepts that are really not consistent with positions held by the early 'anabaptists' - called the 'baptism-minded' in the Dutch setting. (Since the terms 'Mennists' and then 'Mennonites' arose in that settings, sometimes I have said 'real Mennonites', but I wouldn't want to quibble over names, especially when what THEY were doing was attempting to be Biblical followers of Jesus the Christ.) Perhaps none of us are entirely innocent of this tendency to stir up a revitalization movement that emulates those people, rather than emulating the One they were attempting to emulate. I'm not saying that I think they did it badly, but it is the introduction of new 'causes' into their vision, injecting these things into the 'original movement' without subjecting them to the same scrutiny they utilized that can cause us to loose our way. This is where this 'intellectual Biblicism' in needed, in my opinion.
One example from my own 'revitalization' from 'Evangelical Mennonitism'. As influenced by the Hippie Peace movement, and the women's liberation cause, we looked back through the old writings and 'highlighted' anything that could be used to suggest that women had leadership roles in that early period. And we did the same thing to cast them as 'charismatics', tongues speakers. The real issue is not centrally whether either of these were actually the case in any of those early settings, but rather how these questions stack up against Scripture. Our questions need to be settled on the basis of the Scripture, not on even a true interpretation of what any of the early anabaptists in the Swiss setting wrote, or what Menno or Deitrich said or thought. I don't throw them out - I use their example of how they desired to follow Christ. They didn't do it all perfectly, and following them instead of the One they followed is a bit like hanging a picture of yourself up in front of your mirror and looking at that while shaving.

And this is why I refer to “Anabaptism” as a hermeneutic. It is entirely reasonable to emulate how the earliest Anabaptist approached the scriptures.

[Wayne in Maine]

Okay. This is not a thread about how inconsistent plain Mennonites are. We have plenty of those. Could we move these black bumper post to bunny trails an get back on track!!!!!

[Bootstrap]

So what is intellectual depth good for if following Jesus and building the Kingdom of God is our goal?

I think there are very healthy churches without much intellectual depth but great spiritual depth. I think there are very sick churches full of educated, intelligent people who have a solid understanding of many complex topics. What are the benefits of intellectual depth, and what does the right kind of intellectual depth look like?

Hint: since we're discussing intellectual depth, justify your answer ;->

[Soloist]

Is Anabaptism intellectually palatable? Does it lend itself to critical analysis and critical thought? Have ethnic Anabaptists abandoned the "intellectual depth of Anabaptism" in favor of tradition, authority and rote dogmatism?


"The intellectual depth of Anabaptism", if that's not the exact phrase it captures the essence of something a young "seeker" said in one of those late night round the table discussions at an "Anabaptist Identity" conference some years ago. I don't think it was just because of the particular group of seekers that gathered at that table (Josh was there), I think my young friend had an insight that is seldom appreciated when Anabaptism is so often associated with undereducated farmers using primitive farming methods, or fundamentalist anti-intellectualism.

I was on the telephone chatting with brother Michael Harris (who used to participate on this forum) and he said "In the 16th century I would have been a mountain man, joining the Anabaptist in the Alps of Switzerland". That gave me the thought: In the 16th century I would have joined the Anabaptists at the University of Basil where Conrade Grebel and Felix Manz were "graduate students" of Huldrich Zwingli, exceeding their professor in digging down to the roots of the message and mission of Jesus and challenging the status quo bringing the words of Jesus to the masses in the common tongue instead of the ecclesiastcal language (Latin, not King Jamesian at the time) that hid pearls of great price.

What do you think? Is Anabaptism anti-intellectual or does it indeed have an intellectual depth that should be mined today?

Even though Conrade Grebel was highly educated, I believe his statement "I believe the word of God without a complicated interpretation, and out of this belief I speak." - Conrad Grebel Is in opposition to the intellectualism of the day. A very simple statement and if applied today would result in some teachings of the CM's being called into question. I think this is the cost of traditionalism. One could ask the question, why did Menno Simons teach this and you don't? "Well he was wrong on some things" Are we so arrogant to believe we don't have the same flaws?
While I see danger in college and a high view of one's own self understanding, I also see a danger in "this is the way we have always done it" Especially when that "way" has only been that way for maybe the last two generations.

How did the colleges of the day teach doctrine? how did the Anabaptists teach doctrine?
How do we teach doctrine now and which makes more sense?

Was it purely persecution that limited the intellectual side of anabaptists? Or was there a deeper concern evidenced by the poor and the uneducated actually converting to begin with?

[HondurasKeiser]

So what is intellectual depth good for if following Jesus and building the Kingdom of God is our goal?

I think there are very healthy churches without much intellectual depth but great spiritual depth. I think there are very sick churches full of educated, intelligent people who have a solid understanding of many complex topics. What are the benefits of intellectual depth, and what does the right kind of intellectual depth look like?

Hint: since we're discussing intellectual depth, justify your answer ;->

This isn't an exact answer to your question but an hour ago I read an old interview of Ken Meyers (editor/producer/creator of Mars Hill Audio) that Andrew Ferguson wrote about in the now defunct Weekly Standard back in 2013. Mr. Meyers began his career as the Arts Editor at NPR back in the 1970's and then, after bouncing around to different jobs in the evangelical publishing world, began taping interviews with Christian intellectuals, artists, theologians and professors in his garage in 1993. I myself have been a subscriber to his quarterly volumes of interviews since 2015 and have found my intellectual life as well as my faith deeply enriched by his thoughtful and beautiful conversations. I write all that simply as introduction to what Mr. Ferguson had to write about him, which I think gets at in a way, the question that I think you're asking:

The Journal demonstrates how closely the interests and worries of a conservative Christian intellectual overlap those of any curious traditionalist or cultural conservative, believing or non. Myers’s own curiosity is inexhaustible. On the website’s topic index​—​choosing a letter at random​—​you’ll find under “M” segments on Mondrian (Piet) and Moore (Michael), memory and money, Mendelssohn and Marsalis, masculinity and materialism. I popped in Issue 102 the other day and heard Myers’s pleasant tenor saying, by way of preface: “Is creation meaningful, and if it is, is its meaning perceptible?” This rousing intro opened a series of ruminations and interviews with a variety of scholars and writers. A brief explanation of the split between nominalism and realism in the Middle Ages led to a discussion of Jacques Maritain’s relationship with avant garde painters and musicians in 1920s Paris, then moved through the Fibonacci sequence and the mathematical value of Bach fugues as examples of inherent order, topped off with a tribute to the paintings of Makoto Fujimura by the philosopher Thomas Hibbs. The pace is unhurried, the discussions pretty easily comprehensible. Imagine NPR if NPR were as intelligent as NPR programmers think it is.

One of Myers’s recurring themes is the ways in which the dumbing down of the general culture has infected American Christianity and conservatism. These are two spheres where we might expect the work of “preserving cultural treasures” to be taken up. Yet wander into a Mass or worship service in any suburban Catholic or Protestant church and you’ll hear “praise songs” that might have been lifted from Sesame Street or, if the service is High Church, the soundtrack of Phantom of the Opera. It’s hard to believe this is the same religion that inspired Bach and Palestrina, whose choral works are no more familiar to the average pastor or parishioner than the chants at a Kikuyu circumcision ceremony. The liturgy, what’s left of it, is either pedestrian or absurd. (The Shepherd who used to maketh you to lie down in green pastures will now, if you’re a Catholic, “in verdant pastures give you repose.”) Among clergy no less than the laity, a desire for beauty and reflection is deemed prissy and dull.

“I’ve always thought that beautiful art was a great apologetic resource,” Myers says. Beauty is the chief attribute of God, said Jonathan (not Bob) Edwards. “Beauty points to a Creator.” Yet the church, Myers says, “capitulates more and more to the culture of entertainment.”

“It’s a way of keeping market share. But they’re digging their own grave. There’s a short-term benefit, but in the long term the kinds of cultural resources they need to be faithful to the Gospel won’t be there.”

“I had Christian friends on Capitol Hill,” he says, “and when they came home from work in the evening, they’d watch MacNeil/Lehrer,” the earlier incarnation of today’s hyphenless NewsHour. “It would never occur to them to get their news from The 700 Club. They would read the Atlantic, never one of the Christian magazines. I thought, why does the secular culture have Harper’s and the Wilson Quarterly and MacNeil/Lehrer, and all that Christians have are these kinds of pop-entertainment, jokey, show-biz cultural outlets?”

In the mid-eighties he was offered the editorship of an evangelical magazine with the hard-to-live-up-to title Eternity. He brought out issues dedicated to primitivism in American art, Tocqueville’s understanding of religious freedom, androgyny in popular culture .  .  . and was fired by the board of directors within a year.

“It’s not that they thought what we were doing was evil,” he says. “Just frivolous. There wasn’t any preaching in it. What use was it?

“Here is where the religious right and the secular left are in complete agreement: They both think God doesn’t care about culture.” The secularists believe this because God doesn’t exist; the religious conservatives believe it because God is beyond such questions. Which is why religious culture nowadays bears such a close resemblance to the larger culture, where most talk of religion is considered in bad taste.

“Richard Weaver had this phrase, ‘our metaphysical dreams of the world.’ He meant the way we understand reality and our place in it. I think most practicing Christians have a metaphysical dream of the world that has more in common with their secular neighbors than it has with Augustine or Aquinas or Calvin or Edwards.”

[mike]

While I see danger in college and a high view of one's own self understanding, I also see a danger in "this is the way we have always done it" Especially when that "way" has only been that way for maybe the last two generations.

How did the colleges of the day teach doctrine? how did the Anabaptists teach doctrine?
How do we teach doctrine now and which makes more sense?

Was it purely persecution that limited the intellectual side of anabaptists? Or was there a deeper concern evidenced by the poor and the uneducated actually converting to begin with?

You are definitely on to some of the conundrum of conservative Anabaptists these days. Both intellectualism and anti-intellectualism are problematic. We know that high intellect is not a necessary hallmark for a follower of Jesus, but at the same time the idea of trading in the God-given gifts of intellect and logic for non-thoughtful traditionalism is repulsive.

[HondurasKeiser]

Incidentally, Mars Hill Audio Volume 150 was just released today and the following are the titles to the 6 different yet interconnected interviews that Mr. Meyers recorded:

David I. Smith on how Christian schools can make wise decisions about the use of educational technologies

Eric O. Jacobsen on how living in a world mediated by screens encourages loneliness

Matthew Crawford on how the “promise” of self-driving cars threatens the capacities of agency enabled by driving

Andrew Davison on how the metaphysical concept of participation helps us understand God’s relationship with Creation (and with us)

Joseph E. Davis on the medicalization of suffering and the reductionism promoted by neuroscience

Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung on the wisdom of the tradition of understanding faithfulness and morality in the framework of virtues, vices, and spiritual disciplines

[Ken]

Incidentally, Mars Hill Audio Volume 150 was just released today and the following are the titles to the 6 different yet interconnected interviews that Mr. Meyers recorded:

David I. Smith on how Christian schools can make wise decisions about the use of educational technologies

Eric O. Jacobsen on how living in a world mediated by screens encourages loneliness

Matthew Crawford on how the “promise” of self-driving cars threatens the capacities of agency enabled by driving

Andrew Davison on how the metaphysical concept of participation helps us understand God’s relationship with Creation (and with us)

Joseph E. Davis on the medicalization of suffering and the reductionism promoted by neuroscience

Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung on the wisdom of the tradition of understanding faithfulness and morality in the framework of virtues, vices, and spiritual disciplines

Interesting. He casts a seriously wide net when it comes to topics.

[Wayne in Maine]

So what is intellectual depth good for if following Jesus and building the Kingdom of God is our goal?

I think there are very healthy churches without much intellectual depth but great spiritual depth. I think there are very sick churches full of educated, intelligent people who have a solid understanding of many complex topics. What are the benefits of intellectual depth, and what does the right kind of intellectual depth look like?

Hint: since we're discussing intellectual depth, justify your answer ;->

If part of intellectual depth is critical thinking, even “scientific” scrutiny then it is, in my opinion, very good because these are methods by which we can discern what is authentically true and what is mere tradition or dogma or even outright falsehood. Faith is not believing in something that you know is not true, and to be authentic something must be true for everyone.

I think it was critical thinking among young scholars that lead to a break with Zwingli and lead the earliest Anabaptists to ask “what if Jesus meant every word that He said?”

[Wayne in Maine]

Even though Conrade Grebel was highly educated, I believe his statement "I believe the word of God without a complicated interpretation, and out of this belief I speak." - Conrad Grebel Is in opposition to the intellectualism of the day.

Can you really defend that last statement? It seems to me that Grebel was very much in line with the leading intellectuals of the day, in particular Erasmus. And as for your quotation of Grebel, did he mean “the word of God” in the same sense as Protestant Fundamentalists use the term?

A very simple statement and if applied today would result in some teachings of the CM's being called into question. I think this is the cost of traditionalism. One could ask the question, why did Menno Simons teach this and you don't? "Well he was wrong on some things" Are we so arrogant to believe we don't have the same flaws?

Or worst flaws?

While I see danger in college and a high view of one's own self understanding, I also see a danger in "this is the way we have always done it" Especially when that "way" has only been that way for maybe the last two generations.

How did the colleges of the day teach doctrine? how did the Anabaptists teach doctrine?
How do we teach doctrine now and which makes more sense?

It seems that the Anabaptists did not “teach doctrine” but believed and did everything Jesus (the Word of God) commanded. It seems to me that “doctrine” came later when the descendants of the Anabaptists turned to raising their children as “Anabaptist”.

Was it purely persecution that limited the intellectual side of anabaptists? Or was there a deeper concern evidenced by the poor and the uneducated actually converting to begin with?

Was it the poor and uneducated or the indoctrinated progeny of the later “Anabaptists” that were “converted” when Mennonites turned away from critical analysis of the scriptures and the world around them?