Anabaptism and Reformation in Switzerland: An Historical and Theological Analysis of the Dialogues Between Anabaptists and Reformers (review)

Anabaptism and Reformation in Switzerland is a translation from German of two of John Howard Yoder's earliest writings. Part 1, a historical study of dialogues between Anabaptists and Reformers in Switzerland in the first two decades of the Reformation, was originally written as a doctoral dissertation in theology at the University of Basel and then published in 1962 as Täufertum und Reformation in der Schweiz I: Die Gespräche zwischen Täufern und Reformatoren 1523–1538. Part 2, a dogmatic-historical analysis of those dialogues, was published in 1968 under the title Täufertum und Reformation in Gespräche. Yoder himself regarded these two books as parts of the same work, and their inclusion together in this translation is meant to reflect that opinion. A noted historian of sixteenth-century Anabaptism, Yoder is better known as one of the foremost Mennonite theologians and ethicists of the twentieth century. As C. Arnold Snyder notes in his editor's preface to the volume, these texts are historical not only in the sense of providing us with the fruit of Yoder's scholarship as an historian, but also as important milestones in Yoder's development as a theologian.

This book will interest scholars of the Renaissance and Reformation most as the work of Yoder the historian. The picture of Anabaptism he presents here is a familiar one. The early Anabaptists were products of the Zwinglian Reformation, and the Swiss Brethren are treated as a template for Anabaptism generally. Although they gradually parted company with their mentor, it was the Anabaptists and not Zwingli who held firmly to the original ideals of the Reformation. The visible point of rupture between the Zurich Reformer and his erstwhile followers came with the adult baptisms in Zurich during January 1525, but the true parting of ways occurred when Zwingli abandoned his original vision of the true Christian community in 1523. The real point of conflict, then, was not the question of infant or believers' baptism, but a more significant ecclesiological one. For Yoder, Anabaptism was fundamentally religious, and he denies that it had any connections to the social unrest that accompanied its appearance in parts of Switzerland.

In some ways Yoder's portrayal of the beginnings of Swiss Anabaptism is surprisingly current. His treatment of church history as a branch of theology and the picture he paints of early Swiss Anabaptism blends well with some recent post-revisionist scholarship in the field, especially Andrea Strübind's Eifriger als Zwingli: Die frühe Täuferbewegung in der Schweiz (2003). And his focus on inter-confessional dialogue as the point to capture theological developments parallels recent focus in the field on the importance of conflict in the formation of confessional identity, as, for example, in Michael Driedger's Obedient Heretics: Mennonite Identities in Lutheran Hamburg and Altona during the Confessional Age (2002). On the whole, however, Yoder's analysis of early Swiss Anabaptism shows its age. His insistence on the normative nature of Swiss Anabaptism and denial of any connections between it and the great social movements of the age remain out of step with some of the most important research in the field in the last thirty-five years.

Nonetheless, this is still an impressive book. The translation flows well while remaining true to the meaning of the original German text. Snyder's editor's preface does an excellent job of laying out the history of the text and placing it in the historiographical context from which it came. No less valuable is Neal Blough's introduction that focuses more on Yoder the theologian and the relationship between history and theology in his thought. Given Yoder's status as a theologian and the importance of history in his theology...