I suspect none of the historic Anabaptists / Mennonites are posting here, since they died long ago. And I'm not always convinced that we contemporaries are particularly accurate when we try to reconstruct history. We often reconstruct histories that reinforce our current beliefs.Ernie wrote:Contemporary Anabaptist perspective perhaps but not historic.Sudsy wrote:So my posts are going to be more from a different Anabaptist perspective.
If we want to discuss earlier Anabaptists / Mennonites, I think we really need to examine their individual writings carefully together. Otherwise, we run a real risk of doing social construction instead of real history. Menno Simons and Jakob Hutter, for instance, were quite different people, and perhaps neither would recognize their contemporary spiritual descendants.
To me, careful study of original sources is useful. Exchanging opinions about how we, as contemporaries, live out our lives is useful. But broad generalizations about "historical Anabaptism" always come down to the authority of the speaker. There's Ernie's historical Anabaptism, Wenger's historical Anabaptism, Ziegler's historical Anabaptism, etc. Each of these has a basis in the writings of some historical Anabaptists, but also a lot of later influences. We do the same thing when we look at the early Church.
And isn't that why Menno Simons kept insisting that we return to Scripture instead of putting our faith in these other things?