A History of the Mennonite Brethren Church, Ja Toews

onsibility to the state. Church historians generally agree on the course taken by the early Christian church. Roland Bainton states categorically that the "early Church was pacifist to the time of Constantine." 1 He also claims that Christians abstained from politics for three hundred years, and that involvement came later as a result of the union of church and state. 2 The Anabaptist-Mennonites of the sixteenth century returned to the New Testament and early church pattern as a model for the true church in their day. They were neither anarchists nor revolutionaries (except for the revolutionary fringe at Muenster). They accepted the state as a divine institution and insisted that Christians must be "subject to the powers that be." 3 However, the Anabaptists placed a major limitation on the authority of the state: it had no jurisdiction in the spiritual realm. A government attempting to rule the hearts of men, they declared, was overstepping its functions and tasks. In spite of their acceptance of the divine origin of the state, the Anabaptists rejected all participation in government (magistracy) or holding of government office. The basic rationale for this attitude is given in the earliest Anabaptist Confession of Faith: "The sword is ordained of God outside of the perfection of Christ." 4 Inside the "perfection of Christ" (Christ's kingdom or the church) the members are 342 GIVING TO CAESAR 343 governed by the example of Christ and the teachings of the Apostles. A speaker at the Zofingen debate of 1531 said, "Jesus gave us an example as is stated in 1 Peter 2, that we follow His footsteps under the cross." 5 The Anabaptists believed that the church of Christ is by definition an element in society, not society as such. Their opponents, whether Protestant or Catholic, were unwilling to accept this view and continued to look upon the church as coextensive with society. This was the great theological watershed of the Reformation: "In the one view the Church is the Corpus Christi the body of Christ, which consists of believing folk, and of them solely ; in the other view the Church is Corpus Christianum, the body of a 'christened society'." 6 Their view of the church enabled the Anabaptists to reject participation in government, while at the same time becoming redemptively involved in the life of society. The unwillingness of Mennonites to participate in the political life of the nation, and especially their rejection of military service, has been a major cause of their persecution and migration through the centuries. The Mennonites of Russia, as spiritual heirs of the early Anabaptists, have in their confessional documents generally adhered to the "Anabaptist Vision." However, at the time of the founding of the M.B. Church in 1860 the historical situation was vastly different from that encountered by the sixteenth-century Anabaptists. In South Russia the Mennonite colonies enjoyed almost