Do they know who they are following?

A colleague of mine was sitting in church history class at seminary. “Why do Luther and Calvin spend so much time talking about baptism and the Lord’s Supper?” a fellow student inquired, “Did they just not have good teaching?” The professor, a solidly Reformed scholar, then proceeded to chide this pupil for his arrogant comment. Of course, this instance illustrated a widespread conundrum: lots of evangelicals pay lip service to various Protestant Reformers, only to be shocked and even dismayed by the actual writings and efforts of those same Reformers.

Obviously, everyone is a sinner and can err, and that includes our Protestant forbears. But, at other times, today’s evangelicals can chafe against standard historic Protestantism. It can seem too “medieval” while lacking the casualness, enthusiasm, spontaneity, idealism, and individualism that self-described evangelicals typically prize.

The truth is, many evangelicals unwittingly take their cues not from the Protestant Reformation but rather from the Radical or Anabaptist Reformation. The Radical tradition is characterized not only by its rejection of infant baptism and ecclesiastical hierarchy but also by its unique political theology. Many of the earliest Anabaptists (not to be confused with today’s Baptists) were thoroughly plagued by doctrinal and moral anarchy, with several Radical groups engaging in licentiousness, cultish behaviors, violent revolts, and political utopianism. This dismal state of affairs occasioned the writing of the Schleitheim Confession, which totally renounced “the sword.”

That means that exercising magisterial authority is denied for those wishing to be faithful, biblical disciples of Christ. In general, Anabaptists have deemed military service, policing, capital punishment, self-defense, and even passing “sentence in worldly disputes and strife such as unbelievers have with one another” as “worldly” and “outside the perfection of Christ.” According to this logic, if a pagan emperor were to convert to Christianity, one of his first orders of business should be to renounce his role as emperor, which would apparently be taken up by another pagan. In this rendering, Constantine’s reign was an overwhelmingly negative turning point in church history.

The biblical hermeneutic of the Schleitheim Confession merits more investigation. For one thing, it assumes that several of Christ’s gospel teachings are not refuting specific man-made corruptions championed by the first-century scribes and Pharisees. For another, it perceives more dissonance between the “red letters” of Jesus’ teaching and the rest of the Bible than one finds with historic Protestantism.

Most Protestants, on the other hand, had different political theologies that offered guidance for magistrates to fulfill their vocations ethically and wisely. The reformers actively looked to political leaders for protection and eviscerated the grandiose ultramontanist political claims of the papacy in their writings and sermons. All of this discourse didn’t appear out of thin air. It arose from a centuries-long conversation that was also informed by historical experience and an ad fontes approach to primary sources of authority, particularly the Bible and church fathers. One might say that all the Reformations (Protestant, Radical, and Counter) arose from changes in historical consciousness, with Protestants coming out as more “conservative” or “moderate” than many contemporary Christians often think.

Of course, doing politics—even when guided by rigorous principles—is going to be messy. With the likes of the Habsburgs, the Borgias, Henry VIII, and Philip of Hesse strutting about the world stage, of course it would be messy. Yet Protestants—in both established and non-established church contexts—have always desired Christian magistrates to pursue good and sometimes distinctly Christian ends, with even American Protestants praying for God to “direct and dispose the hearts of all Christian Rulers, that they may truly and impartially administer justice, to the punishment of wickedness and vice, and to the maintenance of thy true religion, and virtue.”

Anabaptism would cast this espousal of political power as a fatal compromise and incompatible with the life of Jesus. St. Paul in Romans 13 cannot provide us guidance. In Radical renderings, the sword can only be used for imperfect ends that fall short of the Kingdom of God, and that which is not perfectly ideal in the political realm must be forsworn. It’s an absolute, all-or-nothing arrangement, which helps explain why some first-generation Radicals and their later imitators were so dangerously utopian. Pacifism or violent revolutions are the only options in the Anabaptist worldview, and many evangelicals today are opting for an inconsistent variant of pacifism. They, too, espouse a politics of perfection that prevents them from engaging in “worldly” political activity.

Many evangelicals are squeamish about compelling anyone to do anything, even though statecraft and policy-making does this all the time. Such evangelicals get especially upset when compulsions are oriented toward moral ends over and against other factions, even though the magistrate is called to punish evildoing. They assume all power is bad, the state is bad, and therefore positive uses of power must be disavowed.

Maybe, as ad fontes classical learning and Protestant ressourcement continue to exert their quiet, beneficial influence in evangelical circles, such radical-leaning evangelicals will think better of the Protestant way and reject the Radical. We should thank God for our goodly heritage. May we pass on its wisdom for generations to come.