The Believers' Church: Baptism, Discipleship, and the Refusal of the Sword
As taught in the Anabaptist / Mennonite tradition
How the Anabaptist tradition reads the church as a voluntary, disciplined, nonresistant fellowship
The Anabaptist tradition is organized around a single governing conviction: the church is a believers' church — a community composed only of those who have personally repented, confessed faith, and freely asked to be joined to it. This is the seedbed from which every other distinctive grows. Where the medieval and magisterial models assumed that to be born in Christendom was to be a member of the church, the early Anabaptists held that no one is a Christian by birth, citizenship, or the act of a parent. A person enters the church the way an adult enters a covenant: knowingly, voluntarily, and at cost.
By the end of this lesson
- Explain why the Anabaptist tradition holds baptism must follow a personal confession of faith and therefore excludes infant baptism.
- Describe the believers' church as a voluntary, gathered community maintained through loving discipline (the ban) aimed at restoration.
- Summarize the Anabaptist ethics of nonresistance and the refusal of oaths and trace them to the Sermon on the Mount.
- Distinguish, descriptively, where Anabaptists diverge from Catholic and magisterial Protestant views on baptism, the sword, and church-state relations.
- Attribute the tradition's distinctives to the Schleitheim Confession (1527), the Dordrecht Confession (1632), Menno Simons, and the Martyrs Mirror.
Scripture
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