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Can Political Factors Account for the Fact that Calvinism Rather than Anabaptism Came to Dominate the Dutch Reformation?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Peter De Jong
Peter De Jong
Affiliation:
Smithers, British Columbia
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Extract

It is not surprising that the sixteenth century Anabaptist movement should gain increasing attention among American church historians. Anyone who becomes even slightly acquainted with that movement cannot help but observe that many of its features, such as its individualism, its rejection of infant baptism, its subjectivism, and its fragmentation into many diverse groups, seem to anticipate the kind of ecclesiastical developments that characterize much of North American church history. The parallel even extends to a number of individual phenomena: Many modern premillennialist movements hold views remarkably like those of Melchior Hoffman. The efforts of Jan de Bakker and Jan Beukelzoon to set up a Kingdom of God at Miinster were very like those of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and the Latter Day Saints who followed them, to achieve a similar objective in the United States. In this case the parallel even extends to the polygamy that was introduced in both movements. Among the early Anabaptists Adam Pastor held beliefs which did not differ markedly from the anti-trinitarian doctrines of the present Jehovah's Witnesses. The existence of many such similarities makes the study of early Anabaptism a profitable one to the student of American church history.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , December 1964 , pp. 392 - 417
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1964

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