Nonresistance and the Peace Witness
As taught in the Anabaptist / Mennonite tradition
Why the Anabaptist tradition reads Christ's cross as a command to renounce the sword.
For the Anabaptist tradition — the spiritual ancestors of today's Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, and Brethren — the refusal to take up the sword is not a marginal scruple but a load-bearing wall of discipleship. Where the wider church has often distinguished between a private ethic of forgiveness and a public ethic of force, the Anabaptists read the Sermon on the Mount as binding on the whole of a Christian's life, including the dealings of the magistrate and the soldier. From the very first generation in the 1520s, this conviction set them apart from both the Roman church and the Reformers of Zurich, Wittenberg, and Geneva, and it cost thousands of them their lives.
By the end of this lesson
- Explain why the Anabaptist tradition treats nonresistance (Wehrlosigkeit) as obedience to Christ's plain command rather than as a temperament or strategy.
- Distinguish the two-order framework in which the sword is 'ordained of God' yet stands 'outside the perfection of Christ,' so that the state is honored and obeyed but its sword is refused.
- Trace how Matthew 5:38-48, Romans 12:17-21, John 18:36, and 1 Peter 2:21-23 together ground the refusal of revenge, the love of enemies, and the imitation of the suffering Christ.
- Summarize the witness of Schleitheim (1527), Dordrecht (1632), the Martyrs Mirror, and Menno Simons, including the tradition's repudiation of the violence at Münster.
- State fairly where the Anabaptist position parts from the just-war and two-kingdoms readings of the wider church, without collapsing the disagreement into one answer.
Scripture
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