Christian moral philosophers in Germany think that a special Christian ethics is not possible:
1. Christians have no better ideas about the solution of ethical problems in today’s society than other people. There is only one natural or general human ethics which Christians observe, like other people. There are no specifically Christian solutions to questions about nuclear energy or genetic engineering.
2. Christians have to act as pragmatically and responsibly in society as other people.
3. In disputed ethical questions there is no common answer to which all Christians assent. The differences in public opinion run right through Christianity as well. When the Roman Catholic Church sets up ethical norms, these are based not on Jesus’ teaching but on natural law, because that makes them reasonable and generally acceptable.
The upshot of these arguments is that, as far as public ethical action is concerned, Christians are indistinguishable. According to the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms as we have described it, Christians act in worldly matters according to law and reason, even if also in love. According to the Reformed doctrine about the royal rule of Christ, they make special identifiable characteristics of the Christian community relevant in a general human sense in civil society. But the Christian origin of their good orientations and decisions are no longer seen.
Underlying the unidentifiable quality of a specifically Christian ethos explained in this way is not just a fundamental problem of Christian ethics; there is also the fundamental theological problem of Christology itself. If Jesus is the Christ who has come into the world, as the confession of Peter and Martha affirms (Matt. 16.16; John 11.27), then he is the Messiah promised by the prophets. But indispensible to the Messiah is the messianic era and the changes the Messiah brings to his people and the world of the nations: indispensible to the Messiah is divine justice for the wretched and the peace of the nations. So the discussion about the Christian character of an ethics has to do with nothing less than the acknowledgment of Christ itself. The question asked of Christian ethics is not whether it has good or better solutions for general social or political problems. The question is preeminently whether the way and teaching of Jesus has to be taken seriously. Christian ethics should first and foremost put its stamp on a form of living which accords with Jesus’ way of life and his teaching. That is where its identity lies. The question about general relevance then follows, but it cannot take first place.
Ever since the era of the Reformation, this has been precisely the question posed by the Anabaptists, the Mennonites and the Gemeinschaft der Brüder to the Lutheran state churches and to the Reformed congregational churches.[1]The knowledge that Christ alone is Lord cannot be confined to faith. It must encompass the whole of life. Why is the saving significance of the cross of Christ at the centre of Lutheran belief, and the resurrection of Christ at the centre of Reformed belief, and in neither of them is the way of life and the teaching for which Christ was crucified by the Romans and which as the Gospels show were endorsed by God when he raised him from the dead? Jesus’ self-surrender to death on the cross and his raising and exaltation to be Lord are events in the vertical dimension—the dimension of eternity—but his way of life and his teachings are horizontal recollections in time and hopes for the future of his kingdom. Faith is related to Jesus’ giving of himself for many; hope is related to his raising and exaltation to be Lord; but the discipleship of Jesus corresponds to his way of life and his teaching. The ethical idea of discipleship was ‘a stepchild of the Reformation’.[2] But for the Anabaptists, the idea of discipleship was fundamental.
Christo-logic and Christo-praxis form a unity. It is not only with our reason that we know Christ, and it is not only with the faith of the heart that we trust him; we also confess him through the way we live. That was the fundamental perception of the Anabaptists in the years of Luther, Zwingli and Calvin. As Hans Denk put it: ‘No one is able verily to know Christ unless he follows him with his life.’[3]
The praxis of the discipleship of Jesus becomes intellectually relevant when it contributes to the assurance of faith as well as in witness to other people. The slogan of the Reformers was solus Christus. The slogan of the Anabaptists was totus Christus. The only place I have found a ‘Chapel of the Sermon on the Mount’ was in the Mennonite seminary in Elkhart, Indiana.
The third force in the Reformation of the sixteenth century were the so-called Anabaptists, or ‘re-baptizers’. Although they were condemned, persecuted and put to death in great numbers by Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed Christians, the Anabaptist movement sprang up among the people and was a Christian reformation of a special kind. One root of this movement reaches back to the beginnings of the Reformation in Zurich. In 1525 a group of people around Felix Mantz, Jörg Blaurock and Konrad Grebel met together in the fishing village of Zollikon and baptized each other afresh, in order to surrender their lives entirely to Christ. They had been moved by Zwingli’s sermons and had learned from Erasmus of Rotterdam. They were educated people. With their believers’ baptism they called into question obligatory infant baptism, which was the very foundation of the state church in the Corpus Christianum. By doing so they called into question the Corpus Christianum itself. The movement spread rapidly in southern Germany and Bohemia. Michael Sattler, formerly prior in the monastery of St Peter in the Black Forest, gathered Anabaptist congregations in Swabia and in 1527 drew up the Schleitheim Confession,[4] the first confession of the Anabaptists. A few months later Sattler was taken prisoner in Rottenburg together with his adherents, was interrogated, tortured and executed. His wife was drowned in the River Neckar. Other regions where the Anabaptists spread were the Netherlands and Friesland. Whereas when the princes and the free imperial cities adopted the Reformation they were always simultaneously pursuing political interests, the Anabaptist movement was a reformation for Christ’s sake. It was often monks who carried into worldly life the monastic way of consistent discipleship of Jesus and founded Christian communes. Many priests were converted; Balthasar Hubmaier was rector of the university in Ingolstadt and cathedral preacher in Regensburg; Hans Denk was a humanist; Pilgram Marbeck was an honourable citizen of Augsburg; there were also many theologians among the ranks of the Anabaptists.
What is generally known is only the attempt by the Anabaptists to establish ‘the New Jerusalem’ in Münster by force and the catastrophe of 1534. Because of the violent persecutions, one section of the Anabaptists, the ‘Gladiari’, took to the sword, while another group, the ‘Stabulari’, refused to do so. Both groups were punished as heretics ‘by fire, sword and the like, as the occasion demanded’. Between 1529 and 1555 at least fifty thousand Anabaptists were put to death in the Netherlands alone. Not a few of them shared the protest of the peasant farmers against their oppression and exploitation and together with Thomas Müntzer participated in the peasant revolts. The well-known Anabaptist missionary Hans Hut was one of them. Even after their catastrophic defeat in the battle of Frankenhausen in 1525, they held on to the economic and social demands of the peasant rebels and tried to realize them through the ideal of the community of property. Anabaptists founded the communities of the Hutterite brethren in Moravia and organized social networks for mutual help.
According to Article 6 of the Schleitheim Confession and the influential teachings of Menno Simons (1496–1561), the Anabaptist movement in the broad sense was committed to a violence-free life of nonresistance, following ‘the way of the cross’. For the Anabaptists, the kingdom of God on earth was not to be established in Münster but was to be found in the heavenly Christ. For them, Jesus’ way of life and teachings were the presence of the kingdom of God in person. The Anabaptists of the Reformation period lived out the great refusal and suffered and died for it. They refused infant baptism. They refused service with the sword, because ‘the sword is an ordinance of God outside the perfection of Christ’, as Article 6 of the Schleitheim Confession says. They refused to participate in tasks imposed by the authorities because ‘the rule of the powers that be’ was ‘according to the flesh, but that of Christians is according to the Spirit’. They refused to swear the oath of allegiance, following Jesus’ command, rejecting for themselves this foundation of the Corpus Christianum although accepting it for others. The sword is a ‘divine ordinance’ but not for Christians. They wanted to live only in the voluntary community of Christ. The ‘powers that be’, both Catholic and Protestant, saw the Anabaptist refusal as an attack on the Corpus Christianum which imperilled its life. In 1528 the emperor issued a mandate against them which in 1529 was raised to an imperial law. This reactivated against ‘Anabaptists’ a thousand-year-old law promulgated by the Emperor Justinian which imposed on them the sentence of death. Catholic and Protestant authorities alike persecuted the Anabaptists with the sanction of the imperial law, because the ‘Holy Empire’ was under attack.
The theological thinking of the Anabaptists was as varied as their dissemination, but about one thing they were united: this old, corrupt world is going to be replaced by a completely new creation.[5] With Christ, the new Adam, the heavenly human being, has appeared, one who has nothing more to do with the old Adam, the earthly human being. They replaced the apocalyptic dualism of the two eras of the transitory and the coming world by the ontological dualism of heaven and earth. As the bride of Christ, the heavenly man, the church is itself heavenly in nature and can have nothing more to do with the earthly, fleshly institutions of the ‘world’. Responsibility for the world gives way to denial of the world and detachment from worldly affairs.
For this viewpoint, the sixteenth-century reformer Melchior Hofmann developed a specifically Anabaptist Christology which was in fact Gnostic: at his incarnation, the heavenly Christ did not take upon himself flesh from Mary but brought his heavenly humanity with him. In this way he became the new Adam, who had nothing more in common with the old one. According to Roman Catholic teaching, Christ’s humanity was supposed to be of a sinless nature; consequently, Mary had to be excepted from original sin by way of her own immaculate conception. The Anabaptists were only going a step further along the same docetic path when they identified sin with the flesh of earthly human beings and replaced it with the new heavenly humanity.
Anthropologically, what follows from this is a doctrine not of rebirth but of new birth. Melchior Hofmann’s theology (also followed by Menno Simons, who gave his name to the Mennonites) was marked by the absolute antithesis between the heavenly and the earthly in Christology, soteriology and ecclesiology. ‘His theme was not the reconciliation of the human being with God but the deification of the human being—not the justification of the godless but the sanctification of the redeemed—not the sanctification of believers through their incorporation in the body of Christ but the presentation of the church as Christ’s holy bride through the gathering of the saints.’[6] In this way the mission of the community of Christians following the sending of Christ into the world was replaced by the gathering of the heavenly community and the zeal for their purity.
‘No one is able verily to know Christ unless he follows him with his life’, declared the Anabaptist leader Hans Denk (1500–1527). This discipleship though the believer’s life takes its impress from the path and teaching of Jesus, above all from the Sermon on the Mount, and is accentuated through its antithesis to ‘the world’. ‘It shall not be so among you’ (Matt. 20.26).[7] Christ became human ‘just like us, yet without sin’. Jesus was the one who was sinless and pure. To follow him ‘with one’s life’ makes believers sinless and pure in a new human existence. In the heavenly fellowship of believers there is only admonition, no coercion; forgiveness, no judgment; love, no retaliation. This voluntary community is the counter-picture to the violent society of laws and constraints. ‘The perfection of Christ’ is manifested through the refusal to participate in state violence. The Anabaptists did not believe, like Luther, that hangmen and soldiers ‘could belong to a blessed estate’. The discipleship of Jesus demands a life lived for peace, with defencelessness and vulnerability for oneself and hence with preparedness for suffering and martyrdom. A moving Anabaptist hymn of 1527 begins ‘Wie köstlich ist der Heilgen Tod (‘How precious is the death of the saints’). Michael Sattler was an Anabaptist leader martyred in 1527. When during his interrogation in Rottenburg he was asked about resistance against the Turks, with their threat to the Christian empire, his answer was ‘Live defencelessly’.[8] The sole concern of the Anabaptists was to come to resemble Christ through discipleship but not to regulate the powers of this earth justly and peacefully. They confronted the world with a great rejection, but they did not want to transform it. They were not revolutionaries, although through their rejection they shook the foundations of the Corpus Christianum and through the voluntary principle they maintained they anticipated the coming age of subjectivity and the autonomous individual.
As history went on, the Mennonites, and even more the Baptists, became increasingly tame and were less and less persecuted. ‘The quiet in the land’ were peaceful and were left in peace. Their forms of life developed best in agricultural settings and in rural communes. The Hutterites in the United States and Canada are a good example. In communities of the brethren, they can arrange their affairs for themselves and can preserve a pure communal life.[9]
In the sixteenth century, Catholics, Lutherans and Reformed defended the Holy Empire Constantine had once established. They were prepared to transform ‘swords’ into Christian swords. The Anabaptists wanted to live in accordance with the standards of the early and pre-Constantinian church. They let swords be swords, withdrawing to the ploughshares. But the essential thing is to reforge the swords into ploughshares.
In the twenty-first century, Stanley Hauerwas took up a position similar to that of the Anabaptists in the sixteenth century.[10] But he did so not in the context of the old Corpus Christianum but in the liberal democracy of the United States. If the context changes so much, the results of a similar position can be very different. In the sixteenth century the Anabaptists were persecuted under imperial law. Modern liberal democracy does not persecute any religious communities but makes them ineffective through relativist tolerance.
What is ‘post-liberal’ in the United States today? In the nineteenth century, liberal Christianity extolled its era as ‘the Christian century’. Church and culture, faith and morality, Christianity and democracy merged to the point of unrecognizability. This civil religion became the soul of the American empire. Modern post-liberal theologians in the United States link on to the new era of dialectical theology which emerged from German culture-Christianity after the First World War. Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer are the sources and authorities for the new retreat from compromised Christianity to the church of Christ: it is only in the church that Christian identity in faith and life is to be found. Worldly disengagement and political disentanglement are required so that the church can come to itself and therefore to Christ. ‘The Christian must be uninvolved in the politics of our society and involved in the policy that is the church.’[11] Theology becomes church dogmatics in the sense that it can be understood only in church circles. According to George Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic theory, religion, like a language, can be understood only in the light of its own presuppositions; it cannot be translated into other discourses.[12] In this way theology becomes the witness of its own concern but not a partner in the public discourse. The ‘Yale school’ maintains this position in American theology and calls it ‘post-liberal’. But one asks what then really happened at Pentecost?
Hauerwas is a moral philosopher and transfers into life this retreat by theology into the church. The result is a radical antagonism between what ‘church’ is supposed to be and what ‘world’ is. In the church there are ‘forgiven sinners’, in the world unforgiven sins; the church is obedient to God, the world is disobedient; the church is holy, the world is full of lies and violence; the church is the peaceable kingdom, the sinful world is marked by violence; the church shows the unity of human beings, the world is engaged in permanent conflict and disunity. The church’s prime task is to follow Jesus’ way of life and teaching, in this way showing the world that it is ‘world’. The church does not proclaim any social ethic but is itself an alternative social reality of truth and peace in a world of violence. Nonviolence and a rejection of every war through a refusal to perform military service is a fundamental obligation of the church of Christ.[13] Like the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, Hauerwas too condemns the ‘Constantinianism’ in which the Christian witness is superfluous and Christians have become unrecognizable. God becomes visible through the holiness of the church; the church must leave it to God to change the world. The heart of the church is worship. Christian ethics takes its bearings from the essential parts of the liturgy, especially the Eucharist, and describes life in Christ. Christian ethics is ethics for Christians, no more than that. Hauerwas rightly traces Christian ethics back to Christian identity and its resources, but he wrongly surrenders the public relevance of God, or of liberal democracy in its postmodern do-as-you-like form.[14] He has therefore been reproached with sectarianism. But my own impression is that with the crass antagonism he postulates between church and world, he fails to confront the world with the gospel at all and does not disturb the world either, let alone call it into question. Why does he follow the Mennonite Yoder and not the Baptist Martin Luther King? Why does the pure but innocuous little flock seem to him holier than the march on Washington of the blacks, the poor and the opponents of the Vietnam War?[15]
Here I would like to add a few critical comments:
1. The righteousness and justice of God in the world does not begin with the justification of the perpetrators of sin; it begins with the justification of the victims of sin, injustice and violence. The justification of sinners comes into effect by way of the justified victims. That is why justification cannot be reduced to the forgiveness of sins. The forgiveness of sins is only half the truth, for Christ has been raised for our justification (Rom. 4.25). It is only through that that the conversion will be complete.[16]
2. Do the ‘forgiven sinners’ acknowledge only their own sins or the sins of their people too? In 1945, in the Stuttgart Confession of Guilt, the Protestant churches acknowledged not only their own failures but also the wrongs done to other countries by Nazi Germany. But if the forgiven sinners confess the sins of their nation too, then the confession must be public, must be an impeachment of public lies, and must be a call to public conversion. Here again Martin Luther King is the best example.
3. Nonviolence is good, but it is merely the presupposition for the creation of peace through justice. The nonviolent creation of peace is not a powerless creation of peace. It will be brought about by intelligence and the force of conviction. Nonviolence, like the forgiveness of sins, is only a negation of the negative, out of which nothing positive as yet proceeds. Positive conclusions can never be drawn from negative premises.
4. We are not told: ‘Blessed are the peaceful’ but ‘blessed are the peacemakers.’ Eirenopoesis is what the Preacher on the Mount calls blessed. So the church of Christ is not a ‘peaceable kingdom’, as Hauerwas calls it; it is the peacemaking kingdom.
5. Finally, ‘church’ as a nonviolent community of forgiven sinners is an ideal construction. In the church as it really exists there are violent people too. And ‘world’, again, is the description of an ‘ideal’ type of non-churchly reality. In the world as it exists there are many nonviolent people who do what is good and right simply in order to preserve the life of this world in spite of its corruption. Consequently, the confrontation between these constructs of ideal types is abstract and impracticable.
6. In the United States, the Hutterites were always peaceable and did not protest against any war; nor did they protest against racism, poverty and homelessness. Apparently, the general rejection of war hinders practical involvement in the protest against particular wars. Apparently, the protest against particular wars also requires the principles of ‘the just war’ in order to declare as lawless and unjust the undeclared war in Vietnam and the unjustified war against Iraq.
5. Goertz, Die Mennoniten, 23ff., 32ff. ↵
8. Fast, Der linke Flügel, 74–75. ↵
It was the Baptist Martin Luther King who was required ‘to show the Mennonites that Jesus’ teaching about non-resistance in fact possesses a power to change society and that the love of enemies proves itself in the streets.’[17]W. Klassen in Goertz, Die Mennoniten, 51. ↵
16. See Jennifer McBride, The Church for the World, with reference to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. ↵