Erasmus, the Anabaptists, and the Great Commission.

Abraham Friesen. Erasmus, the Anabaptists, and the Great Commission. Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998. xii + 196 pp. $18. ISBN: 0-8028-4448-0.

Friesen seeks to identify the intellectual origins of Anabaptism. He rejects the polygenesis argument which underestimates Erasmus's role and which even suggests that he had led some away from Anabaptism. Friesen locates the core of Anabaptism, the believer's baptism, in Erasmus's New Testament paraphrases and annotations treating Christ's Great Commission, i.e., His last will and testament in which He charges His disciples to teach the "good news." First, they are to instruct, then to convert and finally to baptize those prepared to follow evangelical doctrine. Although Erasmus's views on baptism have been recognized as problematic, Friesen shows how Erasmus's words on the Great Commission are both consistent and unique and how one finds in them and in the Enchiridion the key to Erasmus's Philosophia Christi, the transformation of the life of a mature individual.

Friesen surveys the scholarship on the origins of Anabaptism and on Erasmus and the Anabaptist movement. In his examination of Erasmus's humanism, he shows how his Neoplatonism not only figures in his deemphasis of external ritual but also provides a protective screen that defends him from attacks by Catholic contemporaries. If one were to remove this Neoplatonic perspective, Friesen suggests that one might think Erasmus was an Anabaptist. Although conservatives led Erasmus gradually to temper his enthusiasm for classical authors, Plato included, the Enchiridion shows how Plato in conjunction with the Gospel makes the search for the inner reality a central and enduring element in Erasmus's Philosophia Christi. Friesen also gives evidence that Erasmus quite probably influenced Anabaptist thought on pacificism, the oath and community of goods.

In treating the Great Commission, Friesen focuses on paraphrases and annotations dealing with it and on the preface to the New Testament (1522) which calls for the instruction of Christian youths and advocates the possibility of their rebaptism. He shows how Erasmus in these works looks beyond the Arian controversy and its Matthean Trinitarian baptismal formula and returned to the "pure" Christianity of the Apostolic period when catechized converts were baptized in the name of Jesus. By reviewing the thought of early Anabaptists on baptism, Friesen convincingly demonstrates how Erasmus's exegesis and paraphrases of baptismal passages permeate the core of their baptismal theology and how Erasmus alone accounts for the origin of the movement. Friesen's survey of early Anabaptist writings indicates that Erasmus's interpretation became the norm for Swiss/South German Anabaptism, for Menno, and for post-Munsterite Dutch Anabaptism. The Erasmian view is absent in others who practiced rebaptism and who have been ca lled, perhaps imprecisely, Anabaptists. Friesen gives the positions of the "Magisterial Reformers" and Catholic polemicists vis-a-vis Anabaptism and shows how they were forced to refute the Erasmian position.

Not only does Erasmus offer the source of Anabaptist thought on "believer's baptism" but his paraphrase on the Great Commission provides a key for understanding the movement as a whole: "After you have taught the people these things and they have believed what you have taught them, have repented of their prior life, and are ready henceforth to walk according to evangelical doctrine then immerse them in water" (103). The rationality of this Apostolic process along with the Anabaptist's desire to return to "pure" Christianity has led some to look upon them as "undogmatic" and as followers of a Christ, who was more a teacher than a redeemer. The same charge has been made against Erasmus, who, like the Anabaptists, was convinced that late medieval Christianity had accommodated the Gospel to contemporary reality. Erasmus and the Anabaptists found scholastic theologians' speculations nonessential for Christian piety and sought a simplified dogma based on the Apostle's Creed. Because the Anabaptists had few highly trained theologians, they avoided controversy; when forced into it, they relied on Scripture. The inquisition of Herman van Flekwijk, who died at the stake at Bruges on 10 June 1569, shows an Anabaptist admirer of Erasmus defending himself with Scripture and Erasmus's exegesis of it and, at the same time, trusting in the dogma that teaches salvation lies in Christ's death and resurrection.

Friesen concludes with the hope that the theological views of Erasmus and of the Anabaptists influenced by him can today reconcile Evangelical and liberal Mennonites and Evangelical and liberal Christians. In the sixteenth century when literature had dissimulation as a major quality, it is not surprising to see Erasmus admired and despised by both Catholics and Protestants, by both liberals and radicals. Friesen has taken the surest way to him -- his biblical humanism. If one seeks knowledge about a crucial moment in the history of Christianity and Erasmus's role in it, Friesen gives expert guidance on the intellectual origins and development of early Anabaptism.