Abstract
An unlikely crosscurrent in the Reformation-schism was the violent reaction of both the Reformation and Roman Catholic establishments in the 1520s to Anabaptist Churches. What evoked this reaction was the Anabaptists’ recognizably distinct church polity, which the Radical Reformers understood to be directly continuous with the socially transformative politics of Jesus and of the first Christians of the Roman Empire. In a spirit of contrition for Christian disunity, this research is a commemoration that aims to identify prophetic aspects of early Anabaptist polity. Secondly, the essay demonstrates that the way the Radical Reformers practised church is pertinent for ecclesiology five centuries later – not least in contemporary South Africa and North America where church capture to neoliberal economic values and commitments prior to following Jesus, calls into question orthodox Christian witness and presence. Thirdly, the essay imagines a South African re-appropriation of the politics of Jesus as amplified in the Radical Reformation tradition, in a tentative, heuristic invitation to the Church in South Africa today, to become ‘God’s left wing’.
Highlights
A reading of the New Testament, at face value, or from almost any hermeneutical stance, presents a Trinitarian grammar of God’s Kingdom that parses Jesus as subject.5 The transitive verb is the action of Father, Son and Spirit in the workings of God’s Trinitarian economy throughout creation
The essay demonstrates that the way the Radical Reformers practised church is pertinent for ecclesiology five centuries later – not least in contemporary South Africa and North America where church capture to neoliberal economic values and commitments prior to following Jesus, calls into question orthodox Christian witness and presence
This study has suggested that the early Anabaptists practised an alternative politics grounded in the peace-making of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as norms for discipleship in the life and growth of congregations
Summary
A reading of the New Testament, at face value, or from almost any hermeneutical stance, presents a Trinitarian grammar of God’s Kingdom that parses Jesus as subject. The transitive verb is the action of Father, Son and Spirit in the workings of God’s Trinitarian economy throughout creation. Jesus’ Gospel invitation remains, for local churches to embody the grammar of God’s Kingdom through a politics that germinates social healing and transformation, as a sign of the new creation In such a milieu, questions that decisively shaped the church struggle in South Africa under apartheid need to be asked again with renewed urgency: How are South African Christians to follow Christ in a prophetic witness and presence that undoes social injustice and exercises the common good, in the tradition of Christ and the prophetic communities of the early church?23 The related question of whether coercion and violence have any place in Christian discipleship, in the face of injustice, has fresh contemporary relevance.. 32 So, Cobus Van Wyngaard, ‘The Church as Alternative Community and the Struggle for Justice in the Work of David Bosch,’ Dutch Reformed Theological Journal, vol 54, no. 3–4 (September, December 2013): 1–11
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