Menno Simons and the quiet revolution
The Mennonites and nonviolent reformation
Menno Simons is a Dutch Catholic priest who has been reading the New Testament with uncomfortable attention for years. He cannot find infant baptism in it. He cannot find the mass in it. He cannot find the hierarchical church in it.
When his brother Pieter is killed in 1535 — part of the disastrous Münster uprising, in which radical Anabaptists took control of a German city and established a violent theocratic commune that ended in massacre — Menno is confronted with what happens when Reformation energies go without wisdom or restraint.
He leaves the priesthood in 1537 and joins the surviving peaceful Anabaptist movement, becoming its most important leader and theologian.
The movement he shapes — the Mennonites, named for him — is defined by three commitments that the surrounding culture finds puzzling: absolute nonviolence, complete separation of church and state, and the visible community of disciples as the primary form of Christian witness.
Menno argues with equal force against the state-church Reformers and against the violent radicals. The true church, he insists, is neither the Constantinian institution nor the revolutionary commune. It is the gathered community of the baptized who demonstrate the kingdom by how they live.
The Mennonites are still persecuted by both Catholics and Protestants for the next two centuries. They migrate to Prussia, to Russia, to America, to Canada, carrying with them a theology of the church that the twentieth century will find newly compelling.
“True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant. It clothes the naked, it feeds the hungry, it comforts the sorrowful, it shelters the destitute.”
— Menno Simons, c. 1539 AD
“for I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in; naked, and you clothed me; I was sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me.'”
True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant.
Menno's definition of genuine faith is entirely external: what does it do? Not what does it believe, not what does it feel, not what does it confess — what does it do in the presence of hunger, nakedness, sorrow, homelessness?
This is Matthew 25 as ecclesiology: the church that feeds the hungry is not doing social work alongside its real spiritual mission. The feeding is the mission. The clothing of the naked is the demonstration that the faith is alive.
Dormant faith is not weak faith. It is dead faith. The proof of life is the visible action.
What is your faith doing?