Justified True Belief

(●) The Frisian parish priest who walked away from his altar after a massacre and gathered the wreckage of Dutch Anabaptism into a church that would not fight. + In the spring of 1535 a few hundred armed men and women seized a monastery in the Frisian countryside, held it for a week, and were cut down by soldiers. A village priest a few miles away had spent the previous year arguing publicly against exactly the doctrines those people died for, and he was good at it. He was also, by his own account, a man who drank and gambled with his fellow priests and preached a gospel he had not troubled to obey. The dead had at least been serious. That was the thought he could not get out of his head, and it ended his career. The people who died in that monastery were called Anabaptists, and it is worth knowing what the word carried before going any further. It is a nickname, from the Greek for "one who baptizes again," fastened on people who baptized adults who had already been christened as babies. They hated it, since in their view an infant christening had never been a baptism in the first place, so there was nothing to do again. What their neighbours heard in the word, though, was a good deal worse than a quarrel about ceremonies. At Münster, a German city off to the east, a militant wing of these people set up a violent kingdom and were slaughtered for it, and after that catastrophe the name meant roughly what "terrorist" means now. Menno Simons is the most important leader Dutch Anabaptism produced, and the reason it came through the wreck of Münster as a movement that would not fight. He spent twenty-five years, most of them with a price on his head, making the word mean something else. He belongs on a Christian apologetics site for a plain reason: he is the clearest sixteenth-century case of a man who changed his entire life because of a text he finally sat down and read. And here is the fact that stays with you. Nobody knows what he looked like; every portrait of him is a later artist’s guess. Nobody knows where he is buried, because the hamlet he was laid to rest in was wiped off the map in the Thirty Years War. What survives is the books, and a communion in sixty-odd countries that still carries his first name.

(●) 1496 AD: Born at Witmarsum in Friesland, a flat country of dairy cattle and sea dikes. + No register anywhere records the year he was born. What there is instead is a remark he let slip about himself long afterwards: writing his own story, he says that in 1524 he was in his twenty-eighth year, which puts the birth in 1496. That is the whole of the evidence, which is why careful historians often print it as "c. 1496", and why every age given for him afterwards is counted back from that single sentence. Witmarsum sits in Friesland, the northern Dutch province where the land is below the sea and stays dry because people keep building dikes. His father was called Simon, so the boy was Menno, Simon’s son; the surname is a patronymic, a name made out of a father’s name, which is why later writers could never settle on whether to file him under S or M. The family were ordinary country people. He was sent young to a monastic school, most likely the Franciscan house at Bolsward, to be trained for the priesthood. He came out of it with Latin, a little Greek, some of the church fathers, and, as he later admitted with real bitterness, no acquaintance whatever with the Bible.

(●) 1524 AD: He was ordained at twenty-eight and sent to Pingjum, a priest who had never opened the Scriptures. + He was consecrated a priest at Utrecht, most likely in March, and sent back down the road to Pingjum, his father’s village, as he calls it himself, a short walk from Witmarsum. Three young priests served the place between them, and Menno, looking back, is merciless about how they spent their time: "playing, drinking, and all manner of frivolous diversions," and if the talk ever turned to Scripture he could not say a word without being laughed at, because he did not know what he was talking about. His verdict on himself runs: "I had not touched them during my life, for I feared, if I should read them they would mislead me. Behold! such a stupid preacher was I, for nearly two years." Then something happened at the altar. Handling the bread and the wine at Mass, he kept thinking that they were not the flesh and blood of the Lord. The church taught transubstantiation, the doctrine that at the priest’s words the bread and wine cease to be bread and wine and become the body and blood of Christ while still looking and tasting the same. Menno believed it. He simply could not stop doubting it. He confessed the doubt, he sighed and prayed over it, and it would not leave. So at last he did the thing he had been avoiding. "At length I resolved that I would examine the New Testament attentively. I had not proceeded far therein, ere I discovered that we were deceived." Luther’s books were circulating by then, and Menno says they encouraged him in one conviction in particular: that no human authority can bind a man to eternal death. Said plainly, no authority, however high it sits, can make a teaching binding on a conscience at the price of a soul. It is a short sentence with a long fuse in it. Within a couple of years the parish had him down as an evangelical preacher, which he says he did not deserve, because he was enjoying the reputation and living exactly as before.

(●) 1531 AD: A tailor was beheaded at Leeuwarden for being baptized a second time, and the question would not let Menno alone. + The man’s name was Sicke Freerks, and Menno calls him Sicke Snyder, snijder being simply the Dutch word for tailor. He was executed in the provincial capital in March 1531 for having been rebaptized. Menno had never heard of such a thing. "It sounded strange to me, to hear a second baptism spoken of." What he did next is the shape of his whole life in miniature. He went looking for infant baptism in the Bible and could not find it. He put the question to his own pastor, who after much argument conceded there was no scriptural ground for it. Not trusting his own judgment on it, he went next, in his own phrase, to the ancient authors, the writers the church had been reading for centuries, and found them saying that baptism washes a baby clean of original sin, the guilt and corruption every human being inherits from Adam. That answer troubled him more than the question had. If the water takes the guilt away, then a ceremony has been set down in the place where the blood of Christ belongs. So he wrote to the reformers. Luther told him infants are baptized on account of their own faith. Martin Bucer, the reformer of Strasbourg, told him it was so that whoever raised the child would take the job more seriously. Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor at Zurich, pointed him to the covenant with Abraham and to circumcision. Three great men, three different answers, none of them the same. "Having thus observed that authors varied greatly among themselves, each following his own opinion, I became convinced that we were deceived in relation to infant baptism." That same year he moved to his home village of Witmarsum as its priest, and he is savage about why. "Covetousness and a desire to obtain a great name, were the inducements which led me to that place." He knew a great deal by now and was living none of it, and he says so in as many words: a hypocrite making disciples of his own stamp.

(●) 1535 AD: About three hundred Anabaptists seized a monastery near his church and were killed for it, a Peter Simons among them. + To see what this cost him you have to know about Münster. In 1534 a militant wing of the Anabaptist movement took control of that German city, expelled everyone who would not join them, and set up what they called the New Jerusalem, with a tailor from Leiden named Jan reigning as king, polygamy enforced, property held in common, and the sword taken up to bring in the kingdom of God. The city held out until June 1535 and was then stormed; the leaders were tortured to death and their bodies hung in iron cages from a church tower, where the cages still hang. The fever spread into the Low Countries, and Menno watched it reach his own parish. He had not kept quiet about any of it. His first book, an attack on Jan van Leiden’s claim to be a new David, a king set over God’s people by God’s own appointment, was written about 1535 and then sat unprinted for another ninety years. He argued with one of their leaders twice as well, once privately and once in public, and his neighbours drew the obvious conclusion. "The report spread far abroad, that I could readily silence these persons. All looked to me." Then, on 30 March 1535, about three hundred of them, men and women, occupied the Oldeklooster, the Old Cloister at Bolsward, a short ride from Witmarsum, and armed themselves. On 7 April the governor’s troops stormed the place. About a hundred and thirty fell in the fighting. Of those taken alive, thirty-seven were beheaded on the spot, and a hundred and thirty-two more were carried to Leeuwarden, where fifty-five of them were executed after a short trial. Among the dead was a Peter Simons. The sources generally take him to be Menno’s brother, though the identification is not beyond question, and if they are right then the priest who had argued these people down in public had just lost his brother to the thing he had argued against. What broke Menno, even so, was not the grief alone. It was the comparison. "I saw that these zealous children willingly gave their lives and their estates, though they were in error, for their doctrine and faith. And I was one of those who had discovered some of their abominations, and yet I myself remained satisfied with my unrestrained life and known defilements. I wished only to live comfortably and without the cross of Christ."

(●) 1536 AD: In January he laid down the priesthood, and from that day he had no lawful address. + He did not bolt. For about nine months he stayed in his own pulpit and preached repentance out of it, warning his people against Münster by name: against kings, polygamy, dominion, the sword. Only then did he go. "I voluntarily renounced all my worldly honor and reputation, my unchristian conduct, masses, infant baptism, and my unprofitable life, and at once willingly submitted to distress and poverty, and the cross of Christ." The month was January 1536, and the day is usually given as the twelfth. There is a complication, and it is worth naming rather than smoothing over. An old account of his death has him taking a turn for the worse on the anniversary of this renunciation and dying the next day, which would put the renunciation on the thirtieth instead. Nobody has ever reconciled the two datings. About a year later, while he was living quietly in hiding and doing nothing more dangerous than reading and writing, six, seven or eight people came and asked him to take up the ministry among them. He is vague about the number, which is itself a mark of how small the thing was. He describes the request as the worst moment of his life, and lists the reasons he did not want it: his own small gifts, his ignorance, his timid flesh, the tyranny of the world, and the certainty of a heavy cross. He took it anyway. He was baptized, he married a woman named Gertrude, and around 1537 at Groningen he was ordained an elder by Obbe Philips. An elder, oudste in the Dutch, was the office that baptized, presided at the Lord’s Supper, and ordained other ministers. There is a sad footnote there: Obbe, who laid hands on him, lost heart within a few years and left the movement altogether.

(●) 1542 AD: The emperor put a hundred gold guilders on his head, and he worked the rest of his life as a hunted man. + On 7 December 1542 a placard went out at Leeuwarden under the seal of Charles V, who ruled the Netherlands along with Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. A placard was a government’s public notice, posted up and read aloud where people gathered, so that nobody could claim afterwards not to have known. This one named Menno Simons, and it offered a hundred gold Carolus guilders, along with a pardon for past crimes, to anyone who would hand him over. Rebaptism had been a capital crime across the empire since 1529, and what the placard added to that was a price and a name. Sheltering him was a capital crime too, and people did it anyway and were executed for it. Tjard Reynders of Kimswerd took him into his house, confessed his faith freely when they came for him, and was broken on the wheel. That is the fact Menno mentions most often and most painfully in his letters. So he moved, and kept moving: Friesland, Groningen, Amsterdam and the Dutch towns, East Friesland, the Rhineland, and eventually north Germany. For a hunted man he was remarkably willing to argue in the open, and he did it whenever anyone would give him a hearing. At Emden, over four days from the twenty-eighth to the thirty-first of January 1544, he sat down with John a Lasco, the Polish nobleman who had become the Reformed superintendent of East Friesland, which is to say the senior minister set over its churches, Reformed being the name for the Calvinist side of the Reformation rather than the Lutheran one. The two of them worked through original sin, sanctification, baptism, the calling of ministers, and the incarnation. They found they agreed on the first two and on nothing else, and both men published afterwards. Menno was treated courteously and allowed to leave the city in peace, which by the standards of the decade was remarkable. Much of the time he paid for his own bread with his hands, and an injury at Wismar left one leg permanently bad, so that he went lame through his last years. One of his daughters used to tell a story out of those years. A man had taken money to point her father out to the authorities, and the moment came: Menno went by in a small boat on a canal, in plain sight, with the informer and an officer standing together. The informer said nothing. He went on saying nothing until the boat had landed and Menno was away, at which the officer beside him nearly went out of his mind. His excuse, she said, was that he could not speak, because his tongue was bound, and he lost his own head for the failure. Maybe the story grew in the telling, the way family stories do. It is worth remembering who was telling it, though: a woman who had grown up inside that life.

(●) 1561 AD: He died on the last day of January at Wüstenfelde in Holstein and was buried in his own garden. + The last stretch of his life was the quietest. A nobleman named Bartholomew von Ahlefeld, who had served as an officer in the Netherlands and had watched these people being burned there, let them settle on his estate at Fresenburg, between Hamburg and Lübeck. The hamlet was called Wüstenfelde, the desert field. An old chronicler tells how, when orders came down from the king that he was to tolerate no Anabaptists, Ahlefeld sent one servant to deliver the order and a second, privately, to advise the men to absent themselves for a week or two or else keep to their houses. Around 1552 Menno got hold of a small printing outfit of his own, and after years in which he could hardly get a page printed anywhere, the books began coming out steadily again. Two griefs closed the account, and neither of them was the emperor. His wife and his son John died before him, and only his daughters outlived him. Then the churches he had gathered fell out bitterly over the ban, the question of how far a congregation must withdraw from a member it has excluded. He did not live to see it settled, and it was not. An old and trustworthy account tells the end this way. He gave what everyone took to be his last exhortation from his deathbed, then rallied and was better for several days, then relapsed on the anniversary of his renunciation of Rome, and died the following day, a Friday, in his sixty-sixth year. The date was 31 January 1561. Older printings that give 13 January have transposed the digits, and the calendar settles the matter, because in that year the thirty-first was a Friday and the thirteenth was a Monday. They buried him in his own garden. Seventy years later the Thirty Years War erased Wüstenfelde so completely that no one has ever found the grave.

What He Taught

(T1) A person becomes a Christian by being born again, not by being born inside a Christian country. + Picture the Friesland Menno served. A baby is carried to the font within days of birth, the water goes on, the name goes in the book, and in that one motion the child becomes a member of the church and a subject of Christendom. There is no other way to be Dutch. The parish is the village and the village is the parish, and when you ask how many Christians live there, you count the houses. Menno’s objection was not that the babies were insincere. It was that this arrangement had quietly replaced the thing the New Testament says makes a Christian, which is regeneration: being born again, born from above, given a new heart and a new nature by God’s Spirit (John 3:3; Titus 3:5). He hammered at it in tract after tract, and he was blunt about the alternative. Masses, confessions, pilgrimages, holy water, and yes, infant baptism itself, comfort people in vain if the heart is unchanged. Nothing there would have surprised Luther or Calvin; the new birth is common Christian teaching, and they preached it too. The conclusion Menno drew from it is what set him apart. If the new birth is what makes a Christian, then the church is the company of people in whom it has actually happened, gathered out of the world and visible as a body, and not the population of a territory. That single step is the ancestor of the free church: a congregation you join, supported by its members, which no magistrate fills for it. A magistrate, in the language of the century, is any officer holding the power of the state: a town councillor, a governor, a prince, the men whose placards were nailed up in the market square.

(Q) "We must be born from above, must be changed and renewed in our hearts, transplanted from the unrighteous and evil nature of Adam, into the true and good nature of Christ, or we can never be saved by any means, whether human or divine." + Source: Menno Simons, The New Birth (Funk edition, 1871). He adds a parenthesis a sentence later that is easy to miss and matters a great deal: "I speak of adults." The argument is about people old enough to repent and believe, which is precisely the point at issue in the baptism of infants (T2).

(T2) Baptism comes after the preaching and after faith, and so it is not for infants. + Think of an apprentice signing his indentures. The signature is not what creates the agreement and it is not what makes him willing; it is the public mark that he has agreed, and it goes on the paper afterwards. Put the signature first and you have not gained anything, you have only made the mark meaningless. Menno’s whole case on baptism is an argument about order, and he takes it straight from the Great Commission, the charge the risen Christ gave the eleven disciples before he left them. Go and make disciples, baptizing them; whoever believes and is baptized will be saved (Matthew 28:19; Mark 16:15–16). Notice the sequence in those two sentences, because the sequence is the whole of his case. Faith comes by hearing, so the hearing has to come first, and the water has to come after the faith it signifies. He is careful to say what baptism is not: it does not wash away original sin, because the blood of Christ does that, and to say otherwise is to put a ceremony where the cross belongs. He knew perfectly well that he was contradicting almost everybody. He had asked the leading reformers for their grounds and set their three separate answers side by side, and he treated the fact that they could not agree with each other as evidence that none of them was reading the practice out of the text. He also knew the price of the conclusion. Since the Diet of Speyer of 1529, an assembly of the princes and free cities of the empire, rebaptism had carried the death penalty throughout the empire, which is why his book on baptism stops in its tracks to address the noble lords and princes and all the judges of the land, and to testify before God, before his holy angels, before them and before the whole world that nothing but a God-fearing faith in the word of God moves his people to baptize and to be baptized.

(Q) "He has commanded that we shall first preach the gospel and then baptize those who believe." + Source: Menno Simons, Christian Baptism (Funk edition, 1871). The sentence sits in the middle of a long argument that the two ceremonies Christ left his church, baptism and the Supper, cost nothing in money or trouble and were commanded by the Son rather than through a servant, so there is no excuse at all for altering them.

(T3) Faith that is real cannot lie still. + A fire that gives off no heat is not a fire that is resting. It is not a fire. That is exactly how Menno argues. It cannot be otherwise, he says, than that a good tree brings forth good fruit; every tree that does not, however full its foliage, is accursed and burned; and faith that is genuinely there produces the life that belongs to it. He is not adding a requirement to faith. He is describing what the thing is. Then comes the list, and the list is the most quoted thing he ever wrote, because it is not abstract at all. Clothes the naked. Feeds the hungry. Consoles the afflicted. Shelters the miserable. Returns good for evil. Serves those that injure it. Prays for those that persecute it. Binds up what is wounded. It reads like a description of a congregation that has to look after refugees, which is what his congregations were. You might think, here is a man about to tell me I am saved by what I do. He is not, and it is worth seeing how firmly he shuts that door. Writing to his wife’s sister, who was ill and troubled that she did not live as well as Scripture told her to, he answered that no one under heaven has ever perfectly fulfilled the righteousness God requires except Jesus Christ alone, so that nobody, "however god-fearing, righteous, holy and unblameable he may be," comes to God except through Christ’s righteousness. In and by herself, he told her, she was a poor sinner; in Christ she was a daughter of God. The works are the evidence of the life, never the price of it.

(Q) "For true evangelical faith is of such a nature that it cannot lay dormant; but manifests itself in all righteousness and works of love; it dies unto flesh and blood; destroys all forbidden lusts and desires; cordially seeks, serves and fears God; clothes the naked; feeds the hungry; consoles the afflicted; shelters the miserable; aids and consoles all the oppressed; returns good for evil; serves those that injure it; prays for those that persecute it." + Source: Menno Simons, The Reason Why Menno Simon Does Not Cease Teaching and Writing, 1539 (Funk edition, 1871). The sentence runs on past the end of the quotation, through teaching and reproving with the word of the Lord, seeking what is lost, binding up what is wounded, and healing what is diseased. The line straight after it says that persecution and suffering and anxiety borne for the truth of the Lord are to such a faith "a glorious joy and consolation." Evangelical here carries its plain sixteenth-century sense, gospel-shaped, and does not yet name a party.

(T4) The weapons of Christ’s people are patience, hope, and the word of God, never the sword. + He had seen what the other answer produced. A king in Münster with a sword and a Bible, a cloister full of corpses at Bolsward, and his own brother, in all probability, among them. So when Menno teaches nonresistance, the refusal to use violence even in self-defence or in a just cause, he is not theorizing. He is writing about people he buried. The teaching itself is simply the Sermon on the Mount taken as a command rather than an ideal, together with what Christ said to Peter in the garden: "Put your sword back into its place" (Matthew 26:52). Menno makes the same move Paul makes and says the weapons are of another kind altogether (2 Corinthians 10:4). His people did not resist arrest. The great Dutch martyr book, the Martyrs Mirror, records them by the hundreds, and that is the practical shape of the doctrine. Two things keep this from being a cheap position. First, Menno did not say the magistrate’s sword was illegitimate. He explicitly set it aside from his argument, calling it "the sword of justice which is given as a punishment to the wicked and protection of the good," and he petitioned rulers respectfully rather than defying them, on the ground Paul lays down in Romans 13:1. What he denied was that it is the church’s instrument, or that anyone may be brought to faith by it. Second, most of the church has never agreed with him. The older and wider Christian judgment, held by Augustine and Aquinas and by every magisterial reformer, meaning every reformer who worked hand in glove with the civil magistrate instead of apart from him, is that a Christian may bear the sword as a soldier or a magistrate without sin, and it points to soldiers who are told to be content with their wages rather than to quit (Luke 3:14). Menno’s reply was that the disciple follows his Lord, and his Lord did not fight.

(Q) "Christ is our fortress; patience our defence; the word of God our sword; and our victory is a candid, firm, unfeigned faith in Jesus Christ." + Source: Menno Simons, Foundation of Christian Doctrine, the section headed A Christian and Affectionate Exhortation to All in Authority (Funk edition, 1871). He is addressing rulers who have been told that his people are the Münster rebels under another name, and the next sentence lets a little iron show: "We let those take spears and swords, who, alas, regard human blood and swine’s blood alike."

(T5) A congregation that never disciplines anyone is not a church. + Imagine a hospital that admits the whole town at birth, keeps every name on the register for life, and never treats or discharges anybody. It would still be a large building full of people. It would not be doing the thing a hospital is for. That, to Menno, was the state church. Everyone was baptized in, nobody could leave, and open sin drew no consequence, so the word Christian ended up naming a population instead of a people. His remedy was the ban: excommunication, the church’s formal exclusion of a member who will not repent, done by the steps Christ lays out, privately first, then with witnesses, then before the congregation (Matthew 18:15–17). He calls the exercise a dreadful and a severe one, and holds that a church cannot do without it, and he is not alone in the judgment. Martin Bucer pressed for discipline in Strasbourg for years and never got it working, and he thought its absence was the very reason the Anabaptists were carrying off the simpler hearts. Two things he says about it are worth holding on to, because they are usually reported the other way round. He did not claim a congregation could be made pure. What is inwardly wicked and not apparent to the church, he wrote, as the betraying of Judas was not, God alone judges. And he did not think every private sin had to be dragged into the open: where a man has sinned secretly, has repented, and no scandal has followed, Menno wrote in 1558 that there is no commission from Christ to shame him before the church. The ban was for the unrepentant and for the public offence, and its purpose was to win the person back. That is worth remembering, because the place where Menno went wrong was not the principle. It was how far into a household he was willing to push it.

(Q) "The key of loosing is the abundantly cheering and delightful word of grace, the pardoning, consoling and unbinding gospel of peace." + Source: Menno Simons, A Fundamental Doctrine, or an Account of Excommunication, Ban, Exclusion, or Separation from the Church of Christ (Funk edition, 1871), the treatise printed elsewhere as Instruction on Excommunication, 1558. He has just described the other key, the key of binding, as the law of God that locks a man under the curse until he receives Christ. The point of the pair is that the church holds both, and that the second one is where the whole exercise is meant to end up.

(Q) "This is my only joy and desire of my heart, that I may extend the borders of the kingdom of God, publish the truth, reprove sin, teach righteousness, feed the hungry with the word of the Lord, lead the stray sheep into the right path, and win many souls to the Lord through his Spirit, power and grace." + Source: Menno Simons, Foundation of Christian Doctrine, the close of the answer to the counter arguments of Babylon and its builders (Funk edition, 1871). He wrote it as a hunted man, and the sentence before it says he is ready to suffer with the people of God rather than enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. It is the closest thing he left to an account of what he thought he was for.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The people who would not fight took his name, and it stuck for five centuries. + He did not found a church and never claimed to. What he did was give a scattered, terrified, and thoroughly discredited movement a public theology that was visibly not Münster, and then defend it in print under his own name for twenty-five years while the empire hunted him. That is why, as early as 1545, John a Lasco was writing of Mennisten, and why the countess of East Friesland used the word in an edict at Emden to mark off the peaceable Anabaptists from the followers of David Joris and Jan van Batenburg. The nickname was a convenience for officials and opponents before it was a badge for anyone. The name outlived him by a long way. The Mennonites are still there, and so are the Amish, who separated from them in 1693 under Jakob Ammann over, of all things, how strictly to apply the ban. Count the family today and the arithmetic is not what a story beginning in a Frisian village would lead you to expect. The Mennonite World Conference gathers close to 950,000 baptized members in 109 national churches across 60 countries, and the wider Anabaptist family runs to about two million baptized believers in 87 countries. Roughly two in three of them are African, Asian, or Latin American, and nearly half of the whole family lives in Africa. The largest national churches carrying a Frisian priest’s first name are now in Ethiopia, Congo, India, and Indonesia. His books had a stranger career. Written in Dutch and printed in hiding, they were gathered into Dutch folio editions in the seventeenth century, then largely forgotten outside the Mennonite world, then put into English by John F. Funk of Elkhart, Indiana, in 1871, and given a modern scholarly translation by Leonard Verduin under John C. Wenger’s editing in 1956. Church historians ignored them for a very long time, which is the odd part of the story, because they are the best single source anyone has for what the peaceable Anabaptists actually believed.

(†) Convictions that looked seditious in 1540 are now so ordinary that they are nearly invisible. + Four things Menno was hunted for are now assumed by most of the English-speaking church without anybody noticing where they came from. A church you join rather than are enrolled in at birth. Baptism on profession of faith. A congregation paid for by its members and not by the state. And the conviction that heresy is answered with argument rather than with the executioner. Honesty requires two qualifications, and they matter. The first is that he was not the origin of any of it. The Swiss Brethren had said most of it already in the articles they agreed at Schleitheim in 1527, nine years before Menno left his parish, and they paid for saying it in the same coin he would. The second qualification is about how the convictions travelled. The line of descent to the English-speaking world does not run through Menno personally so much as through the country his people made habitable. The Dutch Republic became the place in Europe where dissenters could live, and it was not a coincidence that Mennonites were thicker on the ground there than anywhere else; their sheer presence was the standing argument that a country can hold more than one confession and not fall apart. English dissenters went there too. John Smyth’s exiled English congregation, the first Baptists, gathered in Amsterdam in 1609 alongside the Waterlander Mennonites, one of the Dutch Mennonite groups, and in 1610 asked to be received into their fellowship, and the Pilgrims spent a decade in Leiden before they ever saw Plymouth. What can be said without overclaiming is this. Menno took a set of convictions that, after Münster, every government in Europe associated with armed insurrection, and by dogged writing and a spotless record made them look like what they were: a reading of the New Testament, held by people who would rather be killed than kill.

(†) Where his own record has to be read against him: the flesh of Christ, and the ban pushed into a marriage. + Two things have to be set against him, and both come out of his own books rather than out of anything later admirers or enemies did with them. - The flesh of Christ. Menno held that the Lord did not take his human nature from Mary’s substance. The Word "became flesh," he insisted, reading John 1:14 with great literalness, and was born in Mary rather than of her, as wheat is the fruit of a field without being made out of the field. His reason was serious and it was about salvation: flesh inherited from Adam would be flesh under judgment, and a man who owes a debt himself cannot pay yours. But Scripture says the Son was "descended from David according to the flesh" (Romans 1:3) and that "he had to be made like his brothers in every respect" (Hebrews 2:17), and a humanity that comes from nowhere is not a humanity like ours. Two things should be said in fairness. Menno was not denying that Christ was truly man or truly God; he confessed both natures in so many words, and when Adam Pastor began teaching that the Son had no existence before his birth, Menno wrote a whole book against him defending the eternal deity of Christ. And the doctrine was not his invention. He inherited it from Melchior Hoffman, the wandering preacher whose teaching shaped Anabaptism in the Low Countries before Menno was part of it, by way of the Obbenites, the circle gathered around Obbe Philips, the elder who would later ordain him. He says himself that when he first met the doctrine he was amazed and startled, and that he fasted and prayed over it for months before he would hold it. His own heirs let it fade. The Dordrecht Confession of 1632, the standard Dutch Mennonite statement of the next century, says only that the Word became flesh and man and was conceived in the virgin Mary, and puts no weight at all on the point Menno pressed. - The ban inside a marriage. The ban itself he defended well (T5). What he could not leave alone was how far it reached. The elders who met at Wismar in 1554 set down rules in that direction, though their text survives only in later and imperfect copies. Menno’s own position, at any rate, is not in doubt. In his book on the ban of 1558, and in writings up to the end of his life, he argued that avoiding an excluded member covers not only the Lord’s Supper and the kiss of peace, the greeting believers gave one another when they met for worship, but the "bodily communion, such as eating, drinking, daily actions and conduct," and that this holds between a husband and a wife as much as between strangers. Which means, in the plainest terms, that a wife was not to sit down to supper with her own excommunicated husband. His sixth reason for pressing it was pastoral and sincere: he had known "no less than three hundred married persons" who ignored the rule and, in his words, ran "together into perdition," and he concluded from that he must teach the ordinance more plainly than he had. The apostle, though, takes up the mixed marriage directly and rules the other way: "If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him" (1 Corinthians 7:13). In 1557 some fifty elders from Switzerland, Alsace and Moravia, meeting at Strasbourg, sent word begging Menno and his colleagues not to press the ban to extremes, since it was breaking up families. He did not yield. The dispute darkened his last years and split the churches he had gathered, and Mennonites have been arguing about it ever since. Neither fault touches the thing he printed on the title page of book after book, which is the verse his masterwork is named for: "For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 3:11). He got some of the building wrong. He was not confused about the foundation.