Marpeck & Christ in our Midst

Books

Walter Klaassen and William Klassen. Marpeck: A Life of Dissent and Conformity. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2008.
Neal Blough. Christ in our Midst: Incarnation, Church and Discipleship in the Theology of Pilgram Marpeck. Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 2007.

Reviewer

Stephen B. Boyd, Chair, Religion Department and Easley Professor of Religion, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC

For those interested in the remarkable career and enduring significance of Pilgram Marpeck, these two books constitute a watershed in Marpeck studies -- presenting earlier research, contributing new data and perspectives, and inviting future scholarship and reflection.

There could be no better prepared biographers than Klaassen and Klassen, who translated Marpeck’s known writings in 1978, spurring a renaissance of interest in him by a new generation of students and scholars. Following a chronological trajectory of his career, the authors’ narrative illuminates important aspects of Marpeck’s work in relation to his historical context.

Examples include his technological expertise and relationship to the civil governments in Strasbourg, St. Gall, and Augsburg; the various audiences and arguments of his three Strasbourg publications; and his position regarding women and their roles in the Anabaptist movement.

Two appendices provide excellent guidance in reading Marpeck’s extended Response (Antwort) to Caspar Schwenckfeld and the disparate collection of writings called the Kunstbuch.

As reflected in the title, Marpeck: A Life of Dissent and Conformity, Klaassen and Klassen characterize Marpeck as “a dissenter to injustice and a conformist to the highest human values” (Klassen and Klassen [hereafter K&K], 22).

As a dissenter, Marpeck defied the Constantinian domination of people’s lives and faith either by traditional, feudal ruling elites (Charles V and Ferdinand I) or by newer, urban elites (city councilors, such as Strasbourg’s Jakob Sturm). As a conformist, he strove to build communities of mutual respect from the bottom up, including miners and laborers as well as those of noble birth. Affirming personal sovereignty in matters of faith and ethics, he rejected coercion in matters of faith and violence as a means to settle differences.
Marpeck’s position on the various oaths common to the period reflects these dual tendencies. Refusing to split “religious realities into inner and outer, spiritual and material,” Marpeck believed the gathered Body of Christ must “affirm joy and make peace and justice available not just to members of the kingdom of God but to all humanity” (K&K, 353).

Recognizing the claims on him by others outside the conventicle, Marpeck directed “public works projects in various cities, resulting in the direct improvement in people’s living and working conditions” (K&K, 352). Therefore, while he rejected oaths that required the use of deadly force, he embraced those that acknowledged his responsibilities to the well-being of those in or outside the Body of Christ.

In these and other areas, Klaassen and Klassen effectively synthesize earlier scholarship and lay the foundation for further investigations.

Blough’s fine book is a re-working of Christologie anabaptiste. Pilgram Marpeck et l’humanité du Christ (Geneva, 1984), the French publication of his dissertation. The author has substantially revised four chapters of the earlier book and introduces three new ones (Exposé of the Babylonian Whore, Salvation and Ethics, Incarnation, Church and Discipleship).

Blough focuses on four areas in which Marpeck makes creative contributions to his communities and to theology more generally: authority within the church, the link between internal and external dynamics of faith, the connection between justification and sanctification, and the relationship of church and state.

Along with other reformers, Marpeck insists on an Christological reading of Scripture. However, his Christology --focused on a persecuted gathered community of believers -- led to a theological position more critical of the use and abuse of power by ecclesiastical and civil authorities than magisterial reformers.

Combining a “Lutheran sacramental logic” emphasizing the external, physical media of grace with “an almost Calvinist understanding of the ‘real’ (though) spiritual presence,” Marpeck affirms “the visibility of the church and a communal Spirit-filled presence that reflected the humanity of Christ in the world” (Blough, 22).

By refusing to separate justification from sanctification, Marpeck, according to Blough, was truer to the positions of Augustine of Hippo and much of the medieval church than was Luther. His insistence on justification by faith and that “infused grace” flows not through institutional sacraments ex opere operato, but as a direct gift of the Holy Spirit, places him closer to Protestant views.

The inherent connection of justification to sanctification led Marpeck to criticize the social and political quietism of many under the sway of Luther’s justification by faith alone. According to Blough, Marpeck believed that the “victory of resurrection over the forces of evil and the subsequent sending of the Holy Spirit” brings not only “forgiveness and reconciliation” but also empowers disciples in the present for such things as feeding the hungry and the “confrontation of false theological, political or ethical options.” The gathered community of believers is Christ’s humanity continuing to act in history (Blough, 220, 226).     

Emphasizing the cross of Christ and the non-coercive nature of the Holy Spirit, Marpeck rejected the use of the sword in matters of faith, whether wielded by the Anabaptists at Münster, the princes of the Schmalkaldic League, or Charles V. Believers are empowered to follow Christ and are “transformed collectively in his image,” thereby constituting the “unglorified” body of Christ, which is sent “into the world to take on the same form as Jesus of Nazareth, the form of self-giving and nonviolent love” (Blough, 220). 

For the reader interested in the intersection of Christian faith, ecclesial life, the common good, and the state, an image emerges from these books of a position that may be of help today.

Marpeck’s theological posture, informed by his familiarity with intellectual streams of the day and by his experience in civil government, balanced a responsive and responsible engagement of others (within and without the conventicle) and a healthy, critical distance from and leverage against the strategies of domination employed by ruling elites by means of the ecclesiastical mechanisms of a sacerdotal priesthood or the ministrations of a state-supported evangelical clergy.

Those strategies, as Marpeck had seen first-hand, did little to vitalize the church or promote the common good; in fact, they served to disrupt both.

Klaassen and Klassen catalog Ferdinand I’s persistent attempts, through threats of deadly force, to impose a catholic uniformity throughout the empire. They, along with Blough, present Marpeck’s vision of voluntary communities committed to mutual spiritual, social, and economic service and struggling to free themselves from the deadening virus of domination spread by such ecclesiastical practices as infant baptism.

These voluntary communities are, at once, more likely to see most clearly the forces that distort human life and freer to resist them, though nonviolently. I quibble, therefore, with Klaassen and Klassen when they say:

But Marpeck was politically quite traditional. He upheld the legitimate authority of emperors, kings, and councils for the maintenance of social order. He had no vision for a new social order or political order such as was held by the Anabaptists of Münster in Westphalia or by John Calvin. But he believed in the autonomy of God’s kingdom in the midst of the kingdoms of this world, and he devoted himself to that vision. (K&K, 26)

Marpeck did give qualified support to civil authorities as they regulated the exchange of goods and services necessary for the flourishing of an interdependent humanity. However, his commitment to the autonomy of small, voluntary communities of mutual support and discipline led to the possibility of a new, more just social and political order.

That order, in his view, could not be imposed by force as in Münster and Geneva, but it could grow and spread as others were drawn to it. For him, the Kingdom of God -- no matter what the next world may hold -- was intended to be manifest in this one.

In that vein, Blough asserts, “only an internationally embodied Gospel can combat the disparities of wealth and privilege” in the world. Therefore, to increase the social resources available for the struggle against those disparities, Blough urges Mennonites to engage “other traditions and theologies” in a “catholic” effort to address them.

Blough’s explorations of Marpeck’s use of “traditional theological categories of Incarnation and Trinity” offers entry points for the possibility of ecumenical collaboration for a more just and peaceful world. It is a call consistent with the spirit of the Marpeck whom all three authors offer to us.