Entries (RSS)So last night I am teaching on the Radical Reformation, that would be the Anabaptist and all their descendants: Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, Moravian Brethren, some Baptists etc, and I was reminded of what a viral combination it is when you unite principles like liberty of conscience with an authoritative document like the Bible. Liberty of conscience at the time of the Reformation was a revolutionary concept that was understood primarily as a social or political theory, but the power structures of Europe had never allowed it the opportunity afforded by time and space to grow and expand as a social or political experiment. The Bible had always been a revolutionary document, but full access to its ideas had been denied to the average person until the sixteenth century and the work of Martin Luther and other reformers. The magisterial reformers were all about providing vernacular access to the Bible as a theological text, but they were not keen on promoting liberty of conscience as a foundational principle for biblical interpretation, enter the Anabaptists.
Anabaptist were the true sola scriptura decendants of the Reformation, if by sola scriptura we mean “the Bible alone as the church’s source of authority”. These bad boys (and girls) combined the Bible alone idea with liberty of conscience as their main interpretive method and, as they say, “it hit the fan” in a big way. Liberty’s rhetoric and practice is a powerful drug that once tasted becomes addictive, and when you combine that addiction with the Bible as one’s primary source of authority, you have a recipe for revolution. Revolution can be defined as creating the circumstances in which the authority of tradition, station, and education are challenged by freedom, equality, and representation. Luther, Calvin and Zwingli were focused on reform; the Anabaptists insisted on revolution.
The religious and political powers of Europe were able to control this viral combination for a time because Europe was a restrictive environment in which ideas and movements could be geographically quarantined, but with the opening of the new world, all bets were off. Let’s just say that America represented a nonrestrictive environment that offered both the time and space for the Anabaptists’ scions and others to experiment with this viral combination of liberty of conscience and the Bible. America became the laboratory where liberty’s rhetoric and practice and the Bible’s authority could be uncritically mixed and fused together to create a powerful, revolutionary sentiment that would permeate more than theology. It would become the populist language for social and political revolution as well. If you are interested in reading more about the role of liberty of conscience and the Bible in creating the powerful impulse of American popular sovereignty, read Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity.
