Thus it was that when Franklin assessed the gross immorality of those German Christians who sanctioned the Holocaust, he drew on his deep acquaintance with those
Anabaptists of the sixteenth century.
Young Center books in
Anabaptist and Pietist studies
Fundamental to
Anabaptist belief is the concept of discipleship, or following Jesus.
Part of the threat was theological; some
Anabaptists adapted decidedly unconventional beliefs.
These Sabbatisten, like most
Anabaptists, were pacifists, as were Seventh Day Baptists in their early days).
Among Global Southern
Anabaptists, 39 percent of members have completed high school and 8 percent have completed college.
The territorial princes who executed
Anabaptists were operating fully within the boundaries of Imperial Law.
Anabaptists faced decades of persecution from both Catholics and Protestants for their beliefs, which included separation of church and state, adult baptism, nonviolence and the importance of discipleship over doctrine.
The devotion of the concluding sections of the 1644 Confession (51) to the civil magistracy is not surprising given that the whole exercise arose out of a false identification of Calvinistic Baptists with
Anabaptists, charging them with disclaiming the magistracy, "denying to assist them either in persons or in purse in any of their lawful commands.
Final chapters, in no apparent sequence, are "Resistance Justified," which includes much on the Schmalkaldic War and theological conflicts within Lutheranism; "Radicals," on peasants,
Anabaptists, and the debacle in Munster; "Toleration," mainly from the traditional intellectual point of view; and "Unbelief" and its limitations.
These particular martyrs discuss the attempt to ban Dirk Phillips following the Frisian-Flemish split, the Catholic accusation that the Mennonites would have behaved similarly to the Munster
Anabaptists had they had the opportunity, or the difference between Adam's flesh, which comes from the dust of the earth, and Christ's flesh, which is the heavenly word.
Rejecting Richard Niebuhr's characterization of
Anabaptists as theoretically spurning culture, Friesen endeavors to provide an
Anabaptist/Believers-Church theology of culture that constructively engages the broader world.
In his concluding overview, he identifies seven regional groupings of the
Anabaptist reformation moment: Swiss Brethren; South German and Austrian
Anabaptists; Hutterites; Lower German, Netherlandish, English and Prussian
Anabaptists following Melchior Hofmann and Menno Simons; the revolutionary Munsterites; North Italian
Anabaptists; and Polish-Lithuanian Brethren.
In the light of the fervent opposition to these same activities on the part of many other
Anabaptists, Marpeck's position is best explained as his attempt to resolve the apparent discrepancy between his professional and religious activities.
As with his 1993 book, No Permanent City, Loewen tells stories from
Anabaptists and Mennonites in Europe, Russia, and North and South America that range from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century.