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Conception of the Anabaptists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Robert Friedmann
Robert Friedmann
Affiliation:
Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana
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Extract

Who is an Anabaptist? There seems to be a certain amount of confusion with regard to this term and its conception, and a lack of objectivity is still here and there to be met. Emotional prejudices, misleading tradition, insufficient research material, and a mixture of different groups and attitudes prevented church history scholars almost to the present time from reaching a just judgment of these Christian radicals in Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To find out the right place of Anabaptism in history it might be useful to begin with some negative statements.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , December 1940 , pp. 341 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1940

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References

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3 This word does not mean to-day only “an enthusiast,” as it did in the sixteenth century, but also in general “confused people,” or shortly “an emotionalist,” without sober judgment.

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12 In an unpublished paper which I had the privilege to study.

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21 That becomes clear by the inclusion in this category of the Free Masons who are very far from our groups. As for the distant relations between the Bohemians and the Anabaptists, see Friedmann, K., in Mennonite Quarterly Review, XIV (1940), 112/113.Google Scholar

22 In several papers, published in local periodicals, 1888–1895.

23 The same situation was repeated when some ten years later Heinrich Boehmer launched his thesis of the origin of Anabaptism as a whole in Thomas Müntzer. Although this statement was wrong, it has prompted valuable research in many new directions.

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26 Bunyan's teaching of the cross is in some regards akin to Anabaptist tenets, but he does not derive it primarily1 from social attitudes. Even he was not really convinced of non-violence, the genuine demand of Christian love.

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