This is the end of a very long fight between the Anabaptists and the Lutherans
From Wiki: Thieleman J. van Braght’s Martyrs Mirror describes the persecution and execution of thousands of Anabaptists, such as Dirk Willems, in Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and other parts of Europe between 1525 and 1660. Continuing persecution in Europe was largely responsible for the mass immigrations to North America by Amish, Hutterites, and Mennonites. There is no known account in history of persecution of other Christians by Anabaptists as a group.
A denomination known for peacemaking and forgiveness celebrated both in Pittsburgh Tuesday by welcoming a Lutheran bishop who reiterated his church’s apology for past persecution of Mennonites.
Bishop Donald McCoid, ecumenical executive for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the former bishop of Pittsburgh, received a standing ovation from delegates of the Mennonite Church USA at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.
“We acknowledge that we are guilty of the ways in which we acted that caused others to lose property, [suffer] imprisonment and even death,” Bishop McCoid said, echoing last year’s formal statement by the 70 million-member Lutheran World Federation to the 1.6 million-member Mennonite World Conference. Bishop McCoid was instrumental in drafting the apology.
The Lutheran World Federation asked forgiveness not only for past violence but “for the ways that Lutherans subsequently forgot or ignored that persecution” and continued to demean Anabaptists, he said. Anabaptist refers to churches, including the Mennonites, that reject infant baptism and practice nonviolence.
Persecution by fellow Protestants and Catholics shaped early Anabaptists, who died refusing to resist those who tortured and killed them. Although active persecution by Lutherans ceased long ago, a foundational document for Lutherans, the Augsburg Confession, condemns Anabaptists as heretics and schismatics.
The Rev. Andre Gingerich Stoner, director of interchurch relations for the Mennonite Church USA, called on Mennonites to move beyond a worldview in which Anabaptists are primarily victims and other churches are the enemy.
“If Mennonites and other Christians are part of the body of Christ, we cannot be satisfied simply to live next door to each other …. We need blood flow and nerve connections between these parts,” he said.
Several Mennonite leaders said the apology ought to change dynamics on a congregational level, breaking down walls of suspicion.
Richard Thomas, the moderator-elect of the Mennonite Church USA, recently attended a conference at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg to examine how the apology may impact both churches.
“If we fully accept that apology from the Lutherans, that will change us,” he said. “We will need to tell some of our history differently than we have told it in the past. The Lutherans and Mennonites who have been working on this dialogue have done a book on how we can tell our history together. We need to talk about more than our Anabaptist martyrs.”
The term anabaptist was used to describe and define certain Christians during the Reformation.These Christians rejected infant baptism, choosing instead believer’s baptism.
Since many of them had been baptized in their infancy, they chose to be baptized as believing adults.
So their enemies called them anabaptists — “re-baptizers.”
Even though we now embrace that term as part of our identity, it really is an inaccurate term to describe them. The Anabaptists never considered that any rebaptism took place — they outright rejected and refuted the entire concept of infant baptism. To them, infant baptism would have been an oxymoron; the individual words themselves, mutually exclusive.
The differences between the Anabaptists and the Magisterial Reformers lie much deeper than any outward sign, including that of baptism. The Anabaptists were earnestly concerned with the restitution of the true church on an Apostolic model.
