The Anabaptist Spirituals
The Anabaptists originated among the poor of the Reformation although their leaders were often highly educated Christian Humanist scholars. All Anabaptists had/have in common the basic idea that membership of the Church should be a matter of voluntary association. Hence the rite of adult baptism was/is for them, not so much a fetish – ‘a thing necessary for salvation’ (as it sometimes can be with Strict/Particular Baptists who, it appears, are not part of the genuine Anabaptist lineage). Rather it is a sign that membership of the Church should be voluntary – which goes against the traditions and instincts of Magisterial Protestantism. Indeed one of the driving forces for religious toleration in Europe was that the rest of the Church finally came round to reading the scriptures as the Anabaptist did/do on this point – namely, that in the pre-Constantinian Church there was no compulsion to join (and this is the correct interpretation surely?).
Also the Anabaptists shared common ideas about not buying into the coercive state. Hence the reluctance to take oaths, to bear arms, and for some sects, even the advocacy of a type of Christian Anarchism in which all good are held in common (all of this being perceived as an enormous threat by Magisterial Protestantism – never mind the Munster debacle).
The Anabaptists divided into two distinct groups. There were the Scriptural Anabaptists – the Mennonites, the Hutterites (and latterly the Amish) – who emphasised the authority of the Word as scripture (interpreted with their own distinctive theology). The first Universalist sect of Scriptural Anabaptist that we know of was/are the Tunkers/Dunkers who originated in Germany in 1708 and later became the Church of the Brethren of Christ (one of the historic Peace Churches in the USA today). To my knowledge, before this time the mainstream traditions of Scriptural Anabaptists were annihilationist in eschatology.
Alongside the Scriptural tradition developed the Spiritualist tradition. The Spiritualist tradition traces its lineage to Hans Denck – the Christian Humanist scholar who was in Basle at the same time as Erasmus. The Spiritual Anabaptists emphasised both the Authority of the Word as Scripture, and the Authority of the Word as the Logos/Light that is within every human being (a theme that Origen with his emphasis on Christ as Wisdom would have agreed with). One reason for Denck’s Spiritualist emphasis was compassion for the poor and the illiterate who had recently been deprived of the comfort of Catholic sacramentalism but did not have the level of education required to comprehend the subtleties of Protestant doctrine. Denck’s emphasis was not on correct doctrine; rather he emphasised putting on the life of Christ in a spirit of Love and living this life gently with all one’s heart (I’ll have more to say about this later). This emphasis is certainly consonant with Erasmus’ Christian Humanism and many think Denck was directly influenced by Erasmus.
As Morwenna Ludlow argues in ‘Universal Salvation – the Current Debate’ Denck was accused at least three times of holding to a doctrine of Universal Salvation. However, his extant writings only suggest that he believed that God desired to save everyone – but this alone was an important departure from the Continental Magisterial Protestant tradition at the time.
The Anabaptist Spirituals – like the Anabaptist Scripturals – deplored the religious wars and religious persecutions of early modern Europe. Indeed it was an early sect of continental Spirituals that seem to have influenced the Quaker tradition of meetings for Worship; this sect known as the Collegiants, decided to suspend the practice of Holy Communion because divisions over its meaning were the cause of so much bloodshed at the time in Europe. So they met in silence as a sign of inaugurated mourning to their fellow Christians; they asserted that they would only resume the practice of Communion when all were pure enough in heart to comprehend its spiritual meaning which is ‘the Peace of Christ’.
The writings of the Spirituals had a big influence in England from the reign of James I onwards when, for example, the Anglican Rector of St Martin’s in the Field, Dr John Everard clearly taught in the manner of the Spirituals. These writings also had a massive influence on the sects that grew up during the English Civil War that approximated to Universalism – notably the Quakers and the Diggers/True Levellers.
Reading Scripture with the Anabaptist Spirituals
The Anabaptist Spirituals stressed the spiritual sense of scripture and John Everard – an Anglican clergyman in the reign of James I who was greatly influenced by the Spirituals – is a very articulate spokesperson for their approach. So I will cite him rather than Denck or Frank or any of the other continental spiritual reformers.
Everard tells us of how after his ‘spiritual’ conversion he came to know ‘Christ and the scriptures experimentally rather than grammatically, literally or academically’ (see Rufus Jones, p.240 of ‘Spiritual Reformers). He came to think lightly of ‘’notions and speculations and he ’centred his spirit on union and communion with God’. So he was writing the same language as George Fox when Fox was still a mere boy living in obscurity. (Rufus Jones again, see p 244 of Spiritual Reformers): ‘Unless we know Christ’, Everard says, experimentally so that ‘He lives within us spiritually, and so that all which is known of him in the letter and historically is truly done and acted in our won souls – until we experimentally verify all we read of Him – the Gospel is a mere tale to us.’ It is not saving knowledge to know that Christ was born in Bethlehem but [it is saving knowledge] to know that he is born in us. It is vastly more important to know experimentally that we are crucified with Christ than to know historically that he died in Jerusalem many years ago, and to feel Jesus Christ risen again in you is far more operative than to have’ notional knowledge’ that He rose on the Third day. ‘’When thou begins to find and know not merely that He was conceived in the womb of a virgin, but that thou art that virgin and the He more truly and spiritually, and yet more really, is conceived in thy heart so that thou feelest the Babe beginning to be conceived in thee by the power of the Holy Ghost and the Most High overshadowing thee; When thou feelest Christ a stirring to be born and brought forth in thee; when thou beginnest to see and feel all those mighty, powerful actions done in thee which thou readest that did He in the flesh – here is a Christ indeed, a real Christ who will do thee some good’, ( from Everard’s Epiphany Sermon ‘The Star in the East’).
In his ‘Gospel Treasures’ Everard tells us that ‘Men should not so much trouble themselves [who are eagerly expecting the second coming]about ‘ a personal reign of Christ here upon earth, if they saw that the chief and real fulfilling of Scriptures was in them; and that, whatever is externally done in the world or expressed in the scriptures, is but a typical and representative [Symbolic/allegoric], an points out [to] a more spiritual, a more saving, and a more divine fulfilling of them’. And famously he concludes: ‘If you be always handling the letter of the Word, always licking the letter, always chewing upon that, what great thing do you do? No marvel you are such starvelings!’
I think we can make a case that what Everard advocates as the true use of scripture (in the same manner as Denck and the other Spirituals) derives ultimately from the old religion of Catholic liturgy as experienced by the simple believer in the sacraments and the cycle of the church year. For example, In the medieval Catholic Church, the Athanasian Creed functioned as part of the liturgy – it was chanted solemnly and beautifully – in Latin; at the same time incense was wafted from a censer, bells were chimed, and candles were lit to illuminate the darkened church to indicate that here the central mysteries of the Christian faith were being set forth, both revealed and concealed. And these were the same mysteries that the believer experienced imaginatively during the liturgical year moving that moves through nativity, epiphany, ministry, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and judgement. Obviously there were draw backs to this approach – the deliberate obscurity could enhance the hold of the priests over the laity. However, there is something to be said for not seeing this creed as a repository of purely rational formulas; for its words point to something beyond our ability to grasp in completeness. As the author of the medieval English manual of mystical prayer, ‘The Cloud of Unknowing,’ put it – ‘By love God is gotten and holden; by thought alone, never’. And surely the rationalism of the Reformers reversed this older Catholic understanding of the function of the Creed so that it became a check list of things that have to be believed if a person is to be saved; in my view this was a swing too far in the opposite direction. Indeed, I note that a proper Evangelical criticism of the mainstream/magisterial Reformers approach to this creed suggests that the mainstream reformers take on things implies that people are to be be saved through their own efforts of rational assent to a set of doctrines, rather than through faith and grace.
I think we can also see the Anabaptist Spirituals use of scripture as influenced by Origen who argued that scripture contains different levels of meaning – the literal/historical level, the moral level (the level that gives us practical lesson on how to live), and the allegorical/symbolic level – and this became mainstream tradition of ‘exegesis’ in the early Church. (Origen was the first of the Fathers to set this method of exegesis out systematically – but it did not begin with him). The weight given to each level of interpretation could be different for different portions of scripture. For example for the stories of the massacre of the Canaanites in the Book of Joshua some Origen prioritised the moral level – the stories teach us of a struggle against sin and we should not get hung up on the seemingly repugnant literal level of meaning. Likewise with the interpretation of the creation stories in Genesis – that even in the light of Hellenistic science known to the Church Fathers seemed farfetched on a literal level– he prioritised the allegoric level of interpretation. Obviously Origen’s method was open to abuse and could result in some very strange and forced reading sometimes. However, reading the scriptures thus does seemed to have provided the imaginative discipline for understanding sanctification/theosis as the imitation of Christ and therefore had real influence on the development of the Incarnational liturgy of the Church.
Luther sometimes used Origen’s method of exegesis; Calvin distrusted it focussing on the literal level (although he was no simple fundamentalist); Erasmus was an enthusiast for Origen – and Erasmus had a profound influence on the Anabaptist Spirituals.
Again and again we find the ‘what does it profit me to know the literal historical truths of the Bible’ in Anabaptist Spiritualist discourse. The leaders of the movement were all biblical scholars involved in efforts of scriptural translation – they loved the Bible. However, I note that the likes of Christopher Hill – the Marxist historian - have suggested that the ‘what does it profit’ theme suggest scepticism about scripture (but then he would say that wouldn’t he?). I prefer to take them at their word – even if this is sometimes expressed in hyperbole; what they are driving at is that the letter is dead unless we penetrate through to the spirit and live according to that spirit.
I think it is interesting that the Anabaptist Spirituals had special concern for the illiterate poor. The illiterate poor had been deprived of the consolations of Catholics sacraments and of the ‘easy to understand’ picture language presentation of the Gospel in medieval Christianity – with its stained glass windows and mystery plays communicating the story of God made Man in direct and earthy terms to direct and earthy people. The Reformation with its iconoclasm and its emphasis on literacy had, for good and for ill, largely destroyed this tradition in Protestant lands. It seems to me that with their teaching of the Gospel centred on sanctification with the allegoric/symbolic/ imaginative and pictured empathy level of scripture highlighted, they Anabaptist Spirituals were enabling the poor and illiterate to internalise the older and half remembered traditions of the Church liturgy without all of its medieval baggage of authoritarian control.
Also the Spirituals were showing real compassion because the literate Refomers, especailly the Calvinist, were persecutnig ordinary peole at the time for not having a percise notional understadngin of the forensic formulas of the mainstream Protestant faith; which would be a bit like us persectuing Christians today who are not computer litterate (the inventions of the internet in recent hisotry and the printing press in early modern history have many parrallels both in terms of beneficial advances and in terms of uphevals causing misery).
The next post will be on Jackob Boheme, The Family of Love, and the Seekers (with a nod to Roger Williams and the story of the struggle for Religious Tolerance). That will be enough background to the Quakers.
No hat homage for now please (if you feel tempted). Any questions of probing scrutiny - hat on to hat on - are gratefully accepted. And forgive me for my little leg pulls in the last post (I have to keep cheerful too)
All the best
Dick
Your winsome, informative and encouraging contributions here are very much appreciated, bro. 
