Legacy of Menno Simons “A Vital Part Of Our Common Christian Heritage”

By Timothy George

In the summer of 1985 my family and I moved to Switzerland so I could study at the University of Zurich. As a student of the Reformation, I wanted to be close to the epicenter of the events that did so much to reshape the course of Christianity in the West. At lunchtime, I would often climb the steep stairs leading to the famous Lindenhof, an open space from Roman times overlooking the Limmat River.

As I sat there looking down on the swirling waters, I often thought of an event that took place just a few feet below. In January 1527, Felix Manz became the first Anabaptist to be drowned in Zurich. As Ulrich Zwingli and other leaders of the city looked on, Manz was placed in a cage and forcibly lowered beneath the icy waters of the river until he was dead. The last words he was heard to utter were "Into thy hands, oh Lord, I commend my spirit."

Later that same year, Michael Sattler, the former prior of a Benedictine monastery who had become an Anabaptist pastor, was burned alive at the stake in Rottenburg, Germany. His wife, Margaretha, was executed by drowning two days later. Like her husband, she had refused to save her life by recanting her beliefs.

In the following year, a similar fate befell Balthazar Hubmaier, another Anabaptist leader, was burned at the stake in Vienna. His wife was drowned three days later. In 1529, the imperial Diet at Speyer revived the ancient Code of Justinian, which specified the death penalty for the practice of rebaptism.

When Manz, Sattler and others were suffering and dying for their faith, Menno, the son of Simon of Witmarsum, was busy serving as a Catholic priest in the Dutch village of Pingjum. By 1531, when he was transferred to the Catholic Church in his home village of Witmarsum, he was beginning to have doubts about the dogma of transubstantiation and the meaning of infant baptism as taught in the tradition of the church.

Even though he had questions, he was most reluctant to break with his church; his ordination vows also weighed heavily on his soul. For several years he continued to "toy with Babylon," as he later described this phase of his life, pulled between his conscience on the one hand and the tradition he had always known on the other.

In the midst of this spiritual turmoil, he experienced an evangelical awakening: "My heart trembled within me. I prayed to God with sighs and tears that he would give to me, a sorrowing sinner, the gift of his grace, create within me a clean heart, and graciously through the merits of the crimson blood of Christ forgive my unclean walk and frivolous easy life."

After this experience, Menno was baptized as a believer in Christ. In 1537 he was ordained an elder by Obbe Philips, an Anabaptist preacher from Leeuwarden. From then, until he died in 1561, Menno exerted a remarkable influence on the Anabaptists of the Netherlands and northern Germany. During most of those years he lived the life of a hunted heretic, preaching by night to secret conventicles of brothers and sisters, baptizing new believers in country streams and out-of-the-way lakes, establishing churches and ordaining pastors from Amsterdam to Cologne to Danzig.

When we consider the dangers Menno faced, it’s amazing that he died a natural death at the age of 66. For instance, in 1542 Emperor Charles V published an edict against Menno, offering one hundred guilders for his arrest. Menno referred to himself as a "homeless man," but he did not have only himself to think about. His wife, Gertrude, and their three children suffered the same fate. In 1544 he lamented that he could not "find in all the countries a cabin or hut in which my poor wife and our little children could be put up in safety for a year or even half a year." Gertrude and two of their children preceded Menno in death.

Today it is difficult for us to conceive that something like baptism was once deemed so important that some Christians were willing to die for it—and others to kill over it. In contemporary North American culture, baptism seldom involves personal sacrifice or hardship of any kind. Today where (or whether) one goes to church and what one thinks about the practice of baptism or the meaning of the Lord’s Supper are usually matters of supreme indifference, issues of personal preference, like choosing vanilla or chocolate at the local ice cream shop.

Back then, however, these things mattered a great deal. Something was decisively at stake for people like Menno, and for others who were willing to accept the loss of livelihood, the forfeiture of home, land, and family, and even torture and death "for the testimony of God and their conscience" as he put it.

From the beginning of his career, Menno knew that there was no way for the true Christian to avoid the cross. "If the Head had to suffer such torture, anguish, misery, and pain," he said, "how shall his servants, children, and members expect peace and freedom as to their flesh?"

For Menno, following Jesus—discipleship—was at the heart of true Christianity. The church, he believed, could not be defined ultimately in terms of budgets, programs, ceremonies, or clerical leaders. The true church was a covenanted community of brothers and sisters in Christ, separated from the world for the sake of service in the world. The Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch had more sympathy for Thomas Müntzer than for Menno Simons, but he has written a fitting epitaph for Menno and all the radical reformers, who struggled against the stream for the sake of conscience.

Despite their suffering,
their fear and trembling,
in all these souls
there glows the spark from beyond,
and it ignites the tarrying kingdom.

Their legacy is a vital part of our common Christian heritage.

Timothy George is a Dean of Beeson Divinity School and a Senior editor of Christianity Today. This article is adapted from his foreword to The Fugitive, the story of Menno Simons, by Myron Augsburger.