Clothing the Naked Anabaptist

The Naked Anabaptist: this title recommended by the editors of Stuart Murray’s book certainly helped sales for a text certainly worth reading (note 1).

Early Anabaptist beginnings have resonated with many twenty-first century Christians in the global north who seek new post-Christendom expressions of church.

Here is Murray’s summary of those sixteenth-century convictions:

• to follow Christ in life whatever the consequences;
• to regard the Bible as authoritative not only in debate, but also in living and with ethical issues;
• to hold to the separation of church and state;
• to live in mutual accountability with other baptized members of the community, which includes using church discipline to maintain distinctiveness;
• to share resources;
• to live non-violently and to tell the truth;
• and to expect that suffering is normal for faithful disciples and is a mark of the true church (note 2).

Indeed, most of those themes can be found clustered together in some early Anabaptist communities, for example, in Bruges. While these communities were short-lived, they were never “naked.” Each came with unique cultural baggage; their members were as human as you or I, and their context determined how and why they "clothed" and presented themselves as they did.

Are the “clothed” Anabaptists—i.e., especially those “next generations” of Mennonites who actually did the work of experimentation and construction of Anabaptist models in their contexts and who passed on a tradition—at all helpful for post-Christendom recoveries?

At the very point when the Mennonite projects in Soviet Union had almost completely collapsed with Josef Stalin’s purges (1937), J. Winfield Fretz, America’s first Mennonite sociologist, concluded that the “Russian Mennonite” community had successfully developed “at least fifteen different types of mutual aid activities” in a unique attempt to build a “holy community,” that is, “economic and social institutions that were in keeping with their religious convictions.” These experiments were governed by “a commonly accepted ethic, the centre of which was the principle of mutual aid” (note 3).

The activities and institutions mentioned by Fretz included:

• fire insurance;
• schools and agricultural associations;
• an orphan fund and credit banks;
• mutual ownership of breeding stock;
• financial assistance to younger generations;
• care for the aged;
• care for the village poor and assistance to widows;
• medical assistance;
• cooperative marketing of products;
• co-responsibility for village problems;
• cultural support with regard to schools, music, and gatherings for funerals and weddings.

Though not unique or original to Menno Simons, mutual aid or the idea of watching and caring for fellow travellers on the journey of faith “where no one is allowed to beg” (note 4) was a pillar of his teaching, and forms one of the most consistent threads in the Anabaptist–Mennonite story.

Of course, many of these Mennonite commitments in Greater Russia matured over time; and Fretz’s assumption that these developed with “complete freedom from interference by the State” is very far from accurate.

Yet Fretz noted correctly, however, that it was not church leadership that directly encouraged “the formation of mutual aid societies”—though it “exerts its influence” and is at the “centre of the community.”

Rather, when permitted, this is “the course Mennonitism will take where it is free to apply its principles, economic and social as well as political, to every-day life” (note 5).

While Fretz’s account of uniquely Anabaptist-Mennonite achievements in the Russian Mennonite story would require much more contextualization and demythologization today, it is a large and important claim—especially when some had long agreed that “[f]rom the standpoint of the vision of the Anabaptists, however, the Mennonite Russian experiment was a failure. It was a failure in so far as it depended largely upon cultural supports and ethnic lines of continuity instead of pure spirituality” (note 6).

That critique too is rooted in myth without context, assuming “naked” Anabaptists with a "pure spirituality."

Russia’s 100,000 Mennonites (pre-WWI pop.) pulled on some very important Anabaptist strands to develop their own "Anabaptist clothing" for a very unique and welcoming host community: a multi-confessional, multi-cultural Imperial Russia which was very different from Western Europe or North America.

Of course there were many inner-contradictions in what they developed, and gross failures along the way as well.

But when the context changed—e.g., with a very toxic and eventually brutal form of Soviet post-Christendom—there was consensus among those charged to bring the Mennonite experiment to end that the clothing was quite difficult to remove! Here a few examples:

1. 1925: Report by the Central Bureau of the German Section to the Communist Central Committee: The Mennonite population is uniquely “characterized by a narrow-national [German-Mennonite] outlook, lack of class stratification, [and a] passive attitude … toward Soviet social life”—which makes party and Soviet work among them “more difficult” (note 7).

2. 1925: Commission of the Presidium Commission: “It is extremely difficult to conduct [communist] party work in Mennonite colonies because it is carried out among a population saturated with religious fanaticism and caste isolation” (note 8).

3. 1926: German Section of the Zaporozhye Okrug Committee: “Extraordinary difficulties” are reported in the Chortitza Colony, where authorities are having little success in drawing Mennonites “to active participation in the construction of the Soviet order” and into “the public life of village clubs and [communist] reading rooms.” The committee concludes that the youth are both “restrained by parents” and “by preachers in meeting houses [churches]” (note 9).

By 1937-38 when the terror and executions reached their peak in the Mennonite communities, there were again many naked, severely tested Anabaptists—with only a few bare (but critical) threads of the tradition left; arguably these were enough to survive and begin anew to cloth another generation.

While the “clothing” of the Russian Mennonite experience and heritage was certainly stitched with cloth patches from the sixteenth century, as it were, it also offers modern Anabaptists a broader “wardrobe” of important options to try on and adapt for their own more or less toxic post-Christendom contexts.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Stuart Murray, The Naked Anabaptist: The Bare Essentials of a Radical Faith (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 2010).

Note 2: Murray, Naked Anabaptist, 152f. The necessity of suffering was a unique emphasis amongst the Bruges Anabaptists like de Roore. Cf. Martha J. Reimer-Blok, “The Theological Identity of Flemish Anabaptists: A Study of the Letters of Jacob de Roore,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 62, no. 3 (July 1988), 318–331; 326f.; 331.

Note 3: J. Winfield Fretz, “Mutual Aid Among Mennonites (I),” Mennonite Quarterly Review 13, no. 1 (1939), 28–58.

Note 4: Complete Writings of Menno Simons, edited by J. C. Wenger (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1984), 558.

Note 5: Fretz, “Mutual Aid Among Mennonites (I),” 36; 58.

Note 6: J. Lawrence Burkholder, The Problem of Social Responsibility from the Perspective of the Mennonite Church (Elkhart, IN: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 1989), 144. Cf. also (no author given), Russian Mennonites (Ephrata, PA: Eastern Mennonite, 2002), 49f.: “The Mennonites who went to Russia desired to preserve their faith, their German language, and their agricultural way of life. Yet, from the very beginning, they forfeited aspects of the early Anabaptist view of the church.” See also Robert Kreider, “The Anabaptist Conception of the Church in the Russian Environment, 1789–1870,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 25, no. 1 (January 1951), 17–33.

Note 7: “Minutes of a joint session of the Central Bureau of the German Section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine with German sections of okrug committees about work with Mennonites November 10–12, 1925,” in J. Toews and P. Toews, Union of Citizens of Dutch Lineage in Ukraine (1922–1927): Mennonite and Soviet Documents, translated by J. B. Toews, O. Shmakina, and W. Regehr (Fresno, CA: Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies, 2011), 318–324, https://archive.org/details/unionofcitizenso0000unse.

Note 8: “Conclusions of the Commission of the Presidium Commission following inspection of the Union of Citizens of Dutch Lineage, Late July 1925,” in J. Toews and P. Toews, Union of Citizens of Dutch Lineage, 291–296; 294.

Note 9: “Report of the German Section of the Zaporozhye Okrug Committee, January 4, 1926,” in J. Toews and P. Toews, Union of Citizens of Dutch Lineage in Ukraine, 324–329.

Note 10: Thieleman J. Van Braght, The Martyrs’ Mirror: The Story of Fifteen Centuries of Martyrdom (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 2001), 655f., https://archive.org/details/TheBloodyTheaterOrMartyrsMirrorOfTheDefenselessChristians/page/n653.

Note 11: Most famously a "Group of 12" Anabaptists were martyred in Bruges in 1561. A hymn was written to remember these “twelve friends killed in Bruges”; the entire story is sung in twelve verses and each martyr is individually named. Cf. hymn in Philipp Wackernagel, Lieder der niederländischen Reformierten aus der Zeit der Verfolgung im 16. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1867), 130, https://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb10591883_00156.html.

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To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “Clothing the Naked Anabaptist,” History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), July 12, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/07/clothing-naked-anabaptist.html.