Assignment

Assignment

The Anabaptist Network began in 1991 in response to this growing interest in order to offer resources for Christians (and others) to investigate the Anabaptist tradition. Study groups, conferences, a journal, newsletters and an extensive website have provided various opportunities for people to encounter and explore Anabaptism. In 2005 the first book in the 'After Christendom' series was published by Paternoster, a developing series written from the perspective of the Anabaptist tradition.

Not only by Reformers but also by their counterparts, Radical Reformers, the Reformation's "left wing", was the idea of deification embraced. This is the conclusion of Thomas Finger, a Mennonite theologian, who has compared Eastern Orthodox theology with Anabaptism. Finger maintains that Anabaptism can be seen as a sixteenth-century expression of an ascetic impulse originating in Eastern cenobitic monasticism. He shows evidence that for these persecuted people, the doctrine of theosis brought hope and encouragement. Finger lists a host of Mennonite leaders, such as Hans Denck, Melchior Hofmann, Menno Simons, and others who have championed the idea of divinization.

According to the classic study of E. Troeltsch, Anabaptists and Spiritualists (the latter group of which has contemporary "relatives" in the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements) translated the radical implications of sola fide into a practical life-style and everyday religion without cultus. Anabaptists, as well as their successors, focused on sanctification much more than Reformers, even to the point of being accused by Reformers for "salvation by works". Modern Pentecostals and Charismatics inherited from Anabaptists and Spritualists an intensive eschatological awareness coupled with the emphasis on the Holy Spirit's transforming power.

In line with Eastern Christians, but in difference from Reformers, Anabaptists understood grace as a transforming divine energy. According to the groundbreaking research of Alvin J. Beach, grace brings about "a reversal of the incarnation in which the eternal Word becomes man in order that man may become God". The Swiss Anabaptist theologian Balthasar Hubmaier often characterized redemption as rebirth through the Spirit. Similarly, among South German-Austrian Anabaptists, clear references to divinization abound; the same can be said of the Hutterites of the same area, as well as of the Dutch Anabaptists.

It is amazing how Eastern sounds the text from Dirk Phillips, a colleague of Menno Simons:

All believers are participants of the divine nature, yes, and are called gods and children of the Most High? they yet do not become identical in nature and person itself to what God and Christ are. Oh, no! The creature will never become the Creator and the fleshly will never become the eternal Spirit itself which God is? But the believers become gods and children of the most high through the new birth, participation, and fellowship of the divine nature?



J. A. Osterhuus makes a highly interesting ecumenical claim that whereas Catholicism considered grace an accident of the human soul, bestowed in somewhat mechanical fashion, and the Reformers considered it a divine activity, yet one making little direct contact with the human, for the Dutch Anabaptists, grace played a far more comprehensive role: it was ...