Crossroads

After Jesus had returned to his friends, eaten breakfast with them, let them touch him, he ascended to heaven and was never on earth again in body. What followed, as recounted in Acts, was a radical insurgency. The earliest Christians had all things in common—sold their possessions, shared whatever they had—and were militant in their counterculture. They never passed up a chance to remind the Pharisees of their hand in nailing the Christ to a tree. Their leaders were persecuted and forever on the run, but their ranks kept growing. It no doubt helped that Peter and Paul could perform miracles, but more crucial was Peter’s inspiration to extend his ministry to the Gentiles. From a fire that had started within the Jewish community and might have been safely contained there, sparks flew into the greater Roman Empire. Paul, who’d begun his career as the most zealous of persecutors, holding the cloaks of the mob that stoned Stephen to death, was the most tireless of the fire spreaders. When last seen, in Acts, he’d made it all the way to Rome and was living, unmolested, in a rented house. Unmolested but still an outsider, still an insurgent.

What gave the new religion its edge was its paradoxical inversion of human nature, its exalting of poverty and rejection of worldly power, but a religion founded on paradox was inherently unstable. Once the old religions had been routed, the insurgents became the Pharisees. They became the Holy Roman Church and did their own persecuting, fell into their own complacency and corruption, and betrayed the spirit of Christ. Antithetical to power, the spirit took refuge and expressed itself in opposition—in the gentle renunciations of Saint Francis, the violent rebellion of the Reformation. True Christian faith always burned from the edge.

And no one understood this better than the Anabaptists. They began as a rebuke to the Reformation in northern Europe, which had retained the practice of universal infant baptism. For the Anabaptists, the voluntary choice of baptism, as an adult, was decisive. The book of Acts, an account of Christians so original that some of them had known Jesus personally, abounded with stories of adults seeing the light and requesting baptism. The Anabaptists were radical in the strict sense, returning to the earliest roots of their faith. They were correspondingly feared by Reformation authorities, such as Zwingli, and cruelly persecuted—banished, tortured, burned at the stake—in the first half of the sixteenth century. The effect was to confirm the radicalism of the Anabaptists who survived. In the Bible, after all, to be Christian was to suffer persecution.