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Conception of the Anabaptists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Robert Friedmann
Affiliation:
Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana

Extract

Who is an Anabaptist? There seems to be a certain amount of confusion with regard to this term and its conception, and a lack of objectivity is still here and there to be met. Emotional prejudices, misleading tradition, insufficient research material, and a mixture of different groups and attitudes prevented church history scholars almost to the present time from reaching a just judgment of these Christian radicals in Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To find out the right place of Anabaptism in history it might be useful to begin with some negative statements.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1940

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References

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26 Bunyan's teaching of the cross is in some regards akin to Anabaptist tenets, but he does not derive it primarily1 from social attitudes. Even he was not really convinced of non-violence, the genuine demand of Christian love.

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