Well, we have to look at our foundational document, our constitution, the Bible. And it makes it so clear that these two things are two kingdoms. They don't mix and the end of what They don't mix and the end of what Constantine started in the 1500s wasn't great. It ain't going to be good if we do it now. And I think we're actually experiencing something right now where Christians are trying to make that happen and it's going to be a disaster. All right, well, it's an honor to do this.
I don't think I've ever interviewed both you, Dean Taylor, and you, Stephen Russell, at the same time in more of a roundtable discussion. But this is really exciting. Just for some reference, we're doing another project here at Anabaptist Perspectives, a documentary series on the origins of the Anabaptism and all of that, which we'll have linked and so forth.
We wanted to have a conversation about things relating to that and the issues that were involved with the beginnings of the Anabaptist movement. And we're recording this in 2025. So we're right at the 500th year since the Anabaptism started, in 1525. So the big question I have for both of you is, do the debates that were happening around the Reformation time and that the Anabaptists were changing their views on and writing all this stuff and so forth, do those debates still matter today?
And if so, how does it relate to our churches today? Basically, why should we care about the disagreements they had way back when? So Mr. Russell. You want to start us off. Well, one of the things that's important to me is I think that after the Reformation—there are two things that have really shaped the modern world and there are other things, but the Reformation itself set the Western world in a certain direction and so did the Enlightenment.
And I think both of those things have pushed us more towards becoming hyper-individualistic. And so I think that one of the things that I really hope I can encourage people to do is to recognize how the modern and postmodern world and way of thinking has shaped us. And we need to go back where we were still thinking in a way that was more aware of there's something transcendental. But our world has—the Western world has become, if not intellectually recognizing it, it's become materialistic.
It's lost the transcendental. And so we can go back to a time, the Reformation, when they actually believed there's really a God and this really matters. And unfortunately, they killed each other because of that. That's a bad thing. But they actually believe this. And I think a lot of us modern Christians, we talk about God. But I don't know if we aren't acting more out of a non-transcendental kind of mindset, kind of a materialistic mindset. And we've got to do this.
So I think going back to the Reformation and what the Church did before that can be very helpful because I think we've bought into something even without—always without recognizing it. So that's where history comes in. We bought into an approach to life that doesn't call for a real awareness of God. So I think that is one reason to go back while they still did believe that.
Now, part of the place that we're at now came out of all of the disruption and all of the fighting and killing that happened in the Reformation. So there's some actual blame on the Reformation for us becoming individualistic and pulling back from the transcendental. But it's there that they still believe that. Everyone basically believe that very deeply. And so I think that can be helpful for us evaluating where we're at right now. Are we more like the non-believer in a way we think?
Or is there a way to move away from that? And I think learning some of this stuff can help us there. What would you like to add? I remember when I was getting ready to do a class with ancient history and I was doing Greek and taking students to Athens and reading through Herodotus and some of these, Thucydides and that. And I remember I was really in the middle of them, reading that and everything. And at the same time, right around that time period, I went to the Sugar Creek Fair. I remember.
So I'm reading the Thucydides and Herodotus and I'm showing up to Sugar Creek, Ohio in a little city fair. And as I'm there, I couldn't help but ponder all these sacrifices and assemblies that the ancient Greeks had. And then comparing it to I'm here at this Sugar Creek Fair. But if there was one thing I thought that would be categorically different is how secular we are.
That in every culture up into the day, this is going to what you said, what you made me think of this, is that there would have been this sacrifice to this and that, God, that and this guy would have been doing something weird, but he'd been doing it in the sense of to Zeus or whatever. But now we are just remarkably secular and we almost have to put in our mind what you're saying there. And I think that's profound what you said there.
It's that putting yourself in the ancient mind is that, is the recognition. And so when they talk about it and they meant this stuff. I remember when I went years ago to on a tour like similar to this in Amsterdam and we were with an archivist. This is way back in 2010 or so. And the guy was running it was an atheist. You know, I remember he was telling us all this stuff about the Mennonites and all this thing and ... was there, you know, and he's getting all upset.
You know, he's like so at first he said, well, you all this, you know, all this if you must be a Mennonite. I'm not a Mennonite. He said, well, I mean, you must be a Christian. I'm not a Christian. He said, you're an atheist. And it was like you could tell ... in his innocence and everything was like, whoa, how can that even be? And he said, well, we believe these things and amen we do. And so it's not just empty history. It's not just things left, you know, that tapping in.
That was good, Stephen. I think tapping into that is profound. And the reality of that and that we do believe Christ has come. We do believe he's given us the word of God. We do believe that he wants his kingdom to be established on this earth. And yeah, let's drink those waters where they're there. Yeah. And I would like to give a little advertisement for two authors that could be helpful in this. One of them is C.S. Lewis.
And if you read his autobiography, he says very clearly, I started as a complete atheist. He moved towards belief in something transcendental. And then he says the spirit dragged him kicking and screaming into the, he didn't want to convert. But, and so he went from being what I would call a modern man, a modern thinker to he said of himself, I'm, I'm pre-modern in how I think. And I think that he could give us some help in that as well as G.K.
Chesterton, who also was, he believed in what God was doing. And he, he, he foresaw so much of where the Western world was going. Hadn't gotten there yet in the early 1900s, but he saw where it was going and gave us a big warning. And sometimes when I read him, I feel like this man was a prophet.
Yeah. Yeah. And think of what we're doing that he said, you know, the whole orthodoxy work, it were getting in a boat and we're discovering England and thinking that we're creating our, and we're discovering it's already there. And it's kind of like our path into Europe here is that digging into the ancient, the unchangeable, the faith that was there kind of goes with his whole concept too. Yeah. That's, that's amazing.
Yeah. So, so to drill into it a bit more, the one we're talking about these debates that were happening in the reformation, and you start reading about these things, it gets pretty wild. Because people, like you were saying, they took this stuff really seriously and you get the sense that they felt the supernatur, the layer between the material, what you see world and the supernatural was hardly even there. Like it was just like the supernatural was just ready to break in at any moment.
Yeah. Right. And so it really is a big deal to them. Tell me about some of the debates that were happening here. And I'm thinking specifically around the Anabaptists, like why you obviously have the Protestant Reformation is happening and Luther and all of these things, but the Anabaptists are doing something different here. What were the things that they were pointing at as like, that's not, that needs to change. It's not right. What specifically, what are the debates we're talking about?
Well first I'd want to say they didn't disagree with everyone completely. I think so. There's Trinitarian, the Orthodox Anabaptists or the evangelical Anabaptists are as Orthodox about the Trinity as a Catholic or a Protestant. So there were a lot of things where they agreed. I think it's important to recognize that. But then what I, part of the reason I am where I am is they recognize that the church had lost its concept of how to form the church.
You form it by preaching the gospel to people who can understand, helping them see their own need and then calling them to repentance and conversion. And then you, that forms a special, and then through baptism, you form a special community that recognizes there's a lifestyle that goes with this. And both of those things clash with both the Catholics and the Protestants because they had brought together the secular, the social, the governmental I should say, and the religious.
And the Anabaptists said that doesn't, most of them said it doesn't work. In fact, it's our problem right now. Now, just wrote, and the reason it's the problem is because they stopped forming the church the right way. Are you really a Christian? And in the Schleitheim Confession of Faith, Sattler points out in the first article that the chief abomination of the Pope was infant baptism. That's the root of the problem and the Protestants didn't change it.
So I think they saw clearly what the problem was. That didn't mean that everything else was wrong. Yeah. So infant baptism is a specific tangible one you could, like that was a huge division point. And the other thing that everybody was, so that always came up. And the other thing that always came up was the Lord's Supper and the Anabaptists, I would say, recognize that we have to recognize the body of Christ.
It even says that in 1 Corinthians 11, and they recognized it as the people that were gathered to partake. And so there's something, it's not just symbolic, we are actually the physical body of Christ here. And so we're recognizing that the source of grace is from God, but it comes to me through my brothers and sisters. And so they also had a lot of conflicts with that. Wasn't that one of the big issues specifically for Menno Simons as a Catholic priest? Oh yeah.
The transubstantiation issue of the Catholic Church that, well, first off, describe a little bit of transubstantiation just define that and then like some of his pick with that specific issue there. Well, very early on, I think within the first year of his being ordained a priest, he wondered as he was, the main job of a priest, the main way to bring grace to his people and to give them the opportunity to receive Jesus is communion.
And he began to wonder, is this bread and wine really becoming the body and blood of Christ? That's the transubstantiation that the Catholics believe and the Orthodox believe that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. The Lutherans believe that the real body of Christ comes into the bread and wine. The bread and wine is still there. Calvin believed that spiritually you receive Christ and Zwingli said it's just a symbol. So those were the categories that were out there.
And I'm going to say there were like oceans of ink probably spilled on this, right? More than anything. And blood too, right? This was a huge deal. There's so much writing from all of these different parties involved. And then of course, Menno Simons wrote about this a lot and he goes through this whole process of, is this real? This transubstantiation thing. Anyway, continue on with that then because that was a main point for him initially.
Yes. But then the second crisis of faith is he hears about a man in his area being executed because of a second baptism. He said, I didn't know of a second baptism. So he looks at the scripture and he becomes convinced of what is the most important point, how you form a church. You don't form it by infant baptism.
You form it by getting people who actually understand who they are and then see from the scriptures, the preaching of God's word, what they are in God's eyes and then how God has provided a rescue from that. And then you form a church by these people coming together. So that's the first thing, although it's the second thing that he stumbled on, that Menno stumbled on. Yeah. Anything you'd like to add on this? Yes, good. You're asking the question, do these debates still matter?
And I agree with Stephen that fortunately most of the things we agreed with and like, for instance, describing themselves within the apostles creed was common. Oh, absolutely. The Hutterites did this with Peter Riedemann's work explicitly going through the apostles creed and many of the different confessions were worked in that way. So that's good. And I'm really thankful for that to be part of that ancient tradition in the catholicism with a small C of being that they didn't strip that off.
On the other hand, what they did do in that the idea of faith and the idea of following Jesus, I do think is very important and pertinent today. In the sacramental concept, yeah, one of the things that they were common to fight against was what the Catholics and even some of the reformers would have taught, but the reformers did go against this concept. It was ex opera operato, which means by the work, the thing is happening.
So in other words, you could have a priest without faith technically go through the motions because he's properly ordained through apostolic succession and this church performing something that would give grace and would give it to someone apart from faith in both the priest or the believer. Oh, wow. It's happening. It's ex opera operato. By the work, it's happening. They pushed hard against this. So the idea of faith and everything was so important that the sacraments need faith.
So like for instance, you have Pilgram Marpeck arguing against, he said, provide all the semantics on all these different levels of different trans-substantiation, con-substantiation, and all this type of thing. In 1 Corinthians, it says that what you're doing when you come together, it's not the Lord's Supper. And so your life, your community, you're not getting the grace ex opera, you're not getting it automatically. And that's the scripture you're ignoring.
And that's a part of the conversation that on sacramental theology today that I think the Anabaptists have something very profound to say. And this idea of it being more than just the real presence in the bread in the gathered real presence in a theosis kind of way amongst the gathered community, it's powerful stuff. And that was brought up. And I think that's also something that needs to be said today.
But with the Jesus following things, I'm so glad that people aren't killing each other for the most part these days. Yeah, because that happened a lot. It happened a lot. I mean, and C.S. Lewis talked about that. If you think someone's a witch, you've burned them. C.S. Lewis makes the point. Yeah, it's kind of what you do. But here's the thing. Some churches have formally repented of Some churches have formally repented of some of that theology that was backed it.
I think Rome has to some degree, apologize. The Swiss Reformed have done that. I mean, explicitly, there's a plaque there. They talk about it when you're there in Zurich. But not everyone. And I would say that here's my worry. The same theology, given the same situation, will very likely create the same result. We have different situations now. We have different environment. We have a very tolerant. But notice how quickly things go crazy.
I mean, remember, World War II was just not in my own father and grandfather's lifetime. Or at least my father-in-law, at least. Yeah, my father's too. So in that only lifetime, you had passionate, Bible-believing Christians supporting Hitler, supporting Nazism. There was something wrong in the theology that did not change. The circumstances change, and the result repeated.
So my point is that when we come to face the teachings of Jesus, and I mean this charitably as possible, and I mean this also to me, can a person be a follower of Christ without following Christ? I don't know. It should be something that we go down to the core again. Let's start with Jesus. Let's put his plan for humanity back into action, and let's do it. And these doctrines do matter.
And when you start to look at some of the statements and stuff, and you start to see wars bubble up in our own generations in our own life, you're like, the reason you're acting that way is because you don't get that basic point. And then I get very sad when I see even Anabaptists who don't understand the fundamentals, and they're so washed in just American pop evangelicalism that they don't even know these core basics of Jesus following teaching.
And certainly they sound like 1942 Mennonites in Germany, and that's a shame. So that's why I think this matters. I think that the arguments still matter, and we still need to say, okay, I'm glad. Some churches have publicly repented of this. Amen. Keep it up. Keep going. And there are many things we have publicly repented of, or maybe even more public, but nevertheless, I think the arguments still matter. We still need Jesus's cure for humanity be placed.
And just tacked on in an esoteric, speculative theology kind of way is not what Jesus, I think, want. So the challenge that the Anabaptists had, let's put this stuff to practice, I think, needs to be said again. Okay, so I have to ask them what sparked the changes, like 500 years ago?
So what were the things, these were pretty clearly radical changes, and it was a big deal, and you're describing all these different debates that were happening around transubstantiation, say or this or that, or infant baptism. What was the initial piece that got this started? Why did those early Anabaptists take that initial step back and say, "Wait, something's got to change here?" And that's a huge question. Because of our grandfather Erasmus.
You might want to call Grebel our father, but Erasmus is the man who put together the first published Greek New Testament, and people started reading and seeing what the original said, and it sparked a lot of discussion. Whether it's Luther or Zwingli, we know they all got what... See, Erasmus didn't just publish the Greek New Testament. He also put out some things that said, "Obviously, the early church followed the Great Commission to form the church."
And then he looks at the book of Acts and shows how that happened. And we've kind of dropped that. We've lost that. And Luther discussed it, thought about it. So did Zwingli. They even talked about maybe starting a little church, specifically Luther, a little church in the big church of those people that really have committed to Christ. And so I would just say, if you want to... Well, the Catholics said about Erasmus, that you laid the egg that Luther hatched.
So I think if you want to just make it simple, Erasmus. And that came from the text and the Bible coming out in the Greek. Wait, there's a Greek text to the Scriptures. I thought it was just the Vulgate. How dare you even look at what the Greeks said. And also the world's going crazy for Europe, for Western Europe. I mean, it was bad enough to have the plagues. Now you've got Constantinople falling in 1453. You've got Jihad coming against Europe taking different places. You've got now...
And because of that, the kings that could have just dealt with Protestantism now had to fight two battles. Charles V had to fight both the Protestants rising up and the Jihad coming against them. And then now the Anabaptists are in there. It's a perfect storm. And a lot of things was happening and people were asking questions. And when you have these plagues, we saw a little bit of this in the COVID. People start to get introspective when all you got family members dying and all that.
And that was just... I mean, I saw... Have you ever seen that chart that shows the comparison of the people that died in COVID versus the Black Death or the crazy differences? Yeah, it's not even close. Yeah. And so when you're seeing people that are already like you started off with saying that we're spiritual and we believe God is behind all these things, we're asking questions. What's wrong? And so there was a lot of things that looked like the end of the world was happening.
And yeah, it tipped it. Yeah. Yeah. We used to... A couple of us have used the word radical. And often in modern world, that means just overthrow everything. And these people were radical. The word itself means go to the root. And I think we should... Christians should be radical in that sense. Not as in radical burn it all down. Not as burn it all down because as I've already said, the Catholic influence is very clear both in Protestantism and in the Anabaptists. There was good there.
And they didn't burn it all down. You mentioned the Creed, the Apostles Creed. Meno, in his writings, very specifically says, "I believe the 12 articles and I believe the 18 articles." And what he means there is the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed. Yeah. He quotes from them. Yes. So it's not like I'm dumping the whole faith, but you guys aren't committed. You're not living it. And that's what you were saying. That's where the real issue came in.
Are you willing to commit as an adult and live it out? And then that's also why the ban became important. The Protestants and Catholics killed us if we wouldn't commit to their approach. And the Anabaptists said there does need to be some sense of discipling or I mean, disciplining. And so they said, "That's the ban. We always want a person to be able to come back if we tell him he has strayed away." Amen. Now, that's an interesting philosophical difference.
We want the person to be able to come back if he's strayed away, whereas the other groups are like, "We will execute you." Yeah. And that's what you brought up in Schleitheim that our limit is the ban. Yeah. Where you guys have execution. We don't go any further than that. It's interesting. It's kind of sad. Talk about the time. Wow. That Schleitheim Confession, the discussions in Strasbourg from Michael Sattler, early Dutch Confessions had articles on not killing heretics.
Man, that's... I mean, it's amazing that that's a part of the conversation. What a bizarre world. It's almost like culture shock. But they did believe. They believed. That's part of it. You know, if I'm a Catholic, if I'm the bishop, and you're spouting, whether it's Protestantism or Anabaptism, and he's listening, I'm worried you're not just the only one going to hell. You're trying to drag him to hell with you. Yeah, yeah. You have to root evil out. Yeah, you have to root... They're wrong.
They're taking the wrong... Once again, it's that church and state getting intertwined with each other that makes the church go the direction it does. You know, and you brought up a couple times already this concept of the community. You got to understand how radically different that is. They thought as a state. You were baptized as a baby into the state. The state and the church were together, and that's been like that for a long time.
I might be having this wrong, but if I remember reading this correctly, you baptized the infant, and now, oh, now they're in the record of this... Now you're liable for tax and tithes and all this stuff. Everything's in there. You're a citizen. Yeah, it was almost like you're a citizen, pay for your... Yeah, okay. So now if someone was like... So now you have a church that's gathered as a local community in faith, that is radically different. And they saw this as truly...
So when you're saying, "My brother, my sister," it meant something to them in a way. And you were talking about what got me thinking about that is when you see them talk about the Apostles' Creed and the passage where it says, "And we believe in the communion of the saints," several of them use that word communion in the Latin and the German sounds like in the community of saints.
Peter Riedemann specifically says, when he's arguing to Philip of Hesse and such, he says, this is the gathering of the people of God, the communion of saints. He sees it more physically, more actual in this world and not being wrapped up in just to the state or washed into just the state. It's the gathering of the people of God into a community.
And I think, again, this is something that Anabaptists are threatened to lose when you just kind of get your mind so washed up and it's just about this, the other. That gathering of the community is an essential tenet. It's hard to kind of articulate doctrinally sometime, but it's there. It's very much there and it's a big difference than the magisterial and the Catholic Reformation.
And Witten also the enemy love and not fighting back, that would have been a huge piece that comes in here as well, right? Absolutely. And it's not just enemy love and not fighting back. The essence of non-resistance is love for everyone. And I would argue that that is the motive force behind the Anabaptist evangelism. You love your neighbor, you love your enemy. Well, what does that mean? You tell them about the cure for their problem.
And really, the Catholics were sending out missionaries, especially after the discovery of the new world, all over the world. Even the Calvinists did some, but I think that the fact that it was in the state church kind of framework made it something very different. The Anabaptists were calling people to a relationship to God that forms this new community. This is powerful.
I remember one of my favorite quotes by Peter Riedemann, who at the time they were the Marine Corps of the Anabaptists in this mission thing you're talking about and the idea of love being there. He has this beautiful quote where he says, "Love is like fire." He gives us an analogy. He says, "Anybody who makes a fire knows that at the very beginning of the fire, if you put a big stick on it, it's going to snub it out.
But if you let that fire get really big, you could throw a whole lot of houses, whatever you want on there, and it'll just keep burning. So it is with love. That if our love is small, small little things make us offended, and we will argue with each other or whatever, and it'll snub out the love. But if we let our love burn, then we can handle any of these things. I love the idea of bringing that God's love and yeah, that's a powerful thought. The Bruderhof used to publish that.
I don't know if you still do. Love Is Like a Fire if you want to read that. It's excellent. So here we are 500 years later. What ways, practically speaking, do these conversations, debates, differences from back then affect us right now in daily life? People coming away from the side. We've already hit some, but let's try to get real practical here. What does this look like now? Because it's not like we're being threatened with execution.
It's just a totally different environment that we're in right now. I'll say this and I hope this doesn't hurt your thing. For 30 years or 25 years at least, I and other people, and you Stephen too, have been preaching things on non-resistance and such like that and talking about these things. When I see evangelicals, conservative evangelicals, or I even see even worse so, Amish, conservative Anabaptists getting wrapped up in the nationalism and the patriotism that I see, I'm just broken hearted.
I think somehow you don't get the very origin of who you are. Somehow the Jesus following kingdom building that somehow we have traded now what we think we had the answers that we were in Jesus Christ, now do we really think the state and politics is going to somehow... No. No. And so yes, it matters. And let's be reminded that we have a blueprint and it's easy and the world is not going to come up with it. It's not going to be any different now than it was in any time era. So yeah.
Well, strangely enough, well, we look at where the Christian church was in 1500 and with its entanglement with the state and we see how bad that was. The Protestant church didn't do a whole lot better, but then here in the states, first the British colonies and then the states, we didn't have that entanglement. The last state church was in Massachusetts and it was disbanded in 1833. So after that we have no state church, but we still have this kind of Protestant civil religion sort of a thing.
And I just can't understand why these people don't see that in the early church we didn't have this. And then from Constantine on, it starts getting more and more entangled and it didn't go good places. Why do we think we're going to do any better? But we also need to look at... Now this is something not... Well, we have to look at our foundational document, our constitution, the Bible. And it makes it so clear that these two things are two kingdoms.
They don't mix and the end of what Constantine started in the 1500s wasn't great. It ain't going to be good if we do it now. And I think we're actually experiencing something right now where Christians are trying to make that happen and it's going to be a disaster. It already is. Because one of the core issues in 1525 and on when the early Anabaptist movement is getting its feet on it, so to speak. Yeah, you read this stuff and it's just constantly like, "No, we're trying to pull it away."
Like you're saying that the community of believers versus the state and how those were inseparable. They were so to the point where if you're not part of the way the church is run here, you don't even fit into society in any way because this is just how it is. And yeah, I think you're onto something there. It does feel like there is a movement or doesn't feel there is a real movement to try to...
And we say this, that's Americans at least, we can't say globally, I guess, but trying to push those back together. And it's like, you know what? How this thing started actually does really speak to that. It's very specifically to that exact issue. This is not a new one at all. Same theology given similar circumstances will very likely create the same results. Something that I think is more likely to happen than a resurgence of state church connection in the states.
I mean, right now, it almost looks like it could happen. But I think that because of our modernistic and post-modernistic way of thinking, our materialistic way of thinking in the West, I think that what's going to happen is, despite what's happening presently in the United States with the political world, I think what's going to happen is it's already starting to happen. I can't remember the author, but there's an author who said we used to have a positive attitude towards Christianity.
Then for maybe 20 years, like the 1990s, for early 2000s, it was neutral. And then from 2010 on, there's a growing negativity towards Christianity in the Western world and both in Europe and the United States. I think that's where we're actually going to have the conflict. It's going to swing that way.
And I think there are going to be Christians who I already know there are Christians outside my tradition who are becoming more and more open to what the Anabaptist position said about love of neighbor and things like that. And now the people who are presently trying to work with the government, take it over, they may have a problem there. They may want to fight against it, literally fight against it. Right.
But that's where our challenge is for us is to help Christians see that's not what we are called to. And people can hear that. I think you're right on it. When I was first converting in the army and I visited my first Mennonite, one of my first Mennonite Churches I ever visited, And I was there and we were singing and presenting things. I looked and suddenly I saw on the wall there were these over in Europe, you know how they have plaques of all the people that served during the different wars.
Oh, yeah. And so I was like, after I went back, here I'm becoming a conscious objector and going to this Mennonite church in Germany. I'm like, so I was talking to this old guy who was like 70 years old here in 1990, 89. And I said, so I'm just curious. I thought you were a non-resistant. This whole reason I'm even, you know, and he just looked at me and said, oh, yeah, World War II. I was a little boy. He said, I could take you to my house and I have a barn there.
And my dad, we were raised Quakers, but then we came into the Mennonites, He said, but I've left this there, that there was a painting on our barn that was a symbol to vote for Nazis. And he said, I've left it there as a memory, you know, to remember these things. And I said, well, how did, you know, we said, Dean it, it came on us like a revival. It came on us like, I never forget those words. It came on us like a revival. We were just swept into it.
And, but what happened was after that, people like, so this is Christianity. I mean, now, you know, the popular people, it was the conservative Christians. It was not just the Mennonites, it was all the conservative evangelical. The more Bible believing you were, the more likely you were to go into that.
I mean, you can go to the Berlin church and the reformed church in Berlin, you've got literally on the pulpit an etching of Hitler, you know, you've got him there in the, you know, and so the people were like, well, what is this? You know, what is this? So the reaction then, ever since then, you've had kind of an agnostic. I'm worried that what's happening right now, you could end up with an agnostic. America, even another level, like what's Christianity?
A bunch of weird, you know, things like that. Well, this, this is where I think the Anabaptist understanding of the two kingdoms is essential and we need to try to help other Christians see this. In Hitler's time, you know, Hitler was saying we have been mistreated and I think the German nation was after World War I. I really was. Yeah, me too. He, so he had a kind of an argument that spoke to the heart and, you know, he didn't start killing people at the beginning.
I think we're in danger of the same thing right here. There are reasonable issues that are problematic and we can get sucked in to, that's what happened there. I talked to both, not Quaker, but conservative people who were young, conservative Anabaptists in Southern Germany and a real believer up in Northern Germany, who at the time was a Lutheran minister when I was talking to him. He was a young man and he was drafted into Hitler's army.
And these people, all of them told me we were not treated well and he sounded like he's bringing us release, a relief maybe is a better word. And it's only after he got basically all the power in his hands that he started doing the really, really bad things. And people were either cowed or didn't know it or, well actually some of my German friends said, we didn't want to know it. There you go. There you go. They said we could have known it, but we didn't want to know it.
And that's what strikes me as like the Anabaptists, you know, saying this is not okay, like pointing out things that like, we may not want to know that, but it's not okay. That's not right. Yeah. You know, that's not right. Wow. Well, y'all definitely brought it to the current reality, you know, that we're in. But no, these are important conversations to have.
And I guess as far as where to leave it here with the audience is I would encourage people listening to go back and read some of this stuff from the early Anabaptists, like the things they were wrestling with and the decisions they were making, especially that extracting the church away from the state was a real thorny one, you know, and what they had to go through and had to suffer for that. That's significant. That's significant.
So any closing comments from either of you as we as we wrap this up? The simplicity of Christ, you know, again, I go back to Grebel's point, I believe the word of God without complicated interpretation. And out of that, I speak, let's be a people of the Bible and let's put it into practical application as a blueprint for humanity and that the words of Jesus were meant to be put into practice.
If we can meet there at Jesus in a practical way, not just a theological way, but a practical real way of meeting Jesus and bringing his cure to humanity, I think we'll see a better world. I really do. And I can get behind that message. I get excited about that message and I pray for it over all of us and my generations, my children, my grandchildren, I want them to have that. I'm not disagreeing with him at all. He's exactly right.
But then I'm going to point out the other side, which is these guys didn't burn everything down. And we have a tradition that goes all the way to the time of the resurrection of Jesus and the ascension and then the Pentecost when the church started. And there are good lessons that they wrestled with issues and we don't have to reinvent the wheel. So yes, the commitment idea to Jesus is absolutely premier.
But there were people 2000, 15000. I'm sorry, 2000, 1500 a thousand years ago, 500 years ago, who were equally committed and they wrestled with issues that have shaped the church. And so I'm also going to say, let's recognize the heritage we've been given and we've got to evaluate it. Looking at the history of the Reformation can help us with that, but let's not just chuck it. Totally agree. Amen. Yeah. Wow. Well, I think that you gave us some things to think about. I'm pretty sure.
I'll be curious what the comments are on this one. This is really good. This is really important things to wrestle with. And I just say that to people listening. Like we love to hear from our listeners, like what are they thinking and processing and wrestling with. We want to hear that. So put it in the comments or send us an email. But yeah, thank you both for sharing today. I really appreciate you taking the time. You're welcome.
Thanks for listening to this discussion with Dean Taylor and Stephen Russell about Reformation debates and the origins of the Anabaptist movement. As we mentioned briefly in this episode, we're doing a documentary series on the origins of the Anabaptist movement and that's its own YouTube channel and its own website. You can find all of that links down below in the description. You can also go to that website at AnabaptistOrigins.org.
We'll be filming that in June of 2025 that we don't have a final release date set yet for the entire documentary series. So make sure you're subscribed to follow along for updates on that project. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.