Journal of European Baptist Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, January 2009

ch interpretations exerted a strong influence on the church, there arose a movement, associated with the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century, which rejected Luther’s distinction between Christians’ moral obligations to the state and their spiritual life in relation to God. Menno Simons, a significant leader of the early Anabaptists, insisted that obedience to Jesus’ teachings in every sphere of life was indispensable to one’s being a Christian. ‘It is vain’, maintained Simons, ‘that we are called Christians, that Christ died, that we are bom in the day of grace, and baptised with water, if we do not walk according to His law... and are not obedient to His word.’ 6 Thus the Anabaptist historian, James Stayer, is correct in arguing that, for the Anabaptists, Jesus’ sayings were not ‘counsels of perfection’, but ‘absolute commands’. 7 8 In the twentieth century, however, the tendency to moderate the radical ethical demands of the Sermon was revived in the writings of the renowned ethicist, Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr argued that the counsel to perfection in Matthew 5:48 (‘be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’) is an impossible ideal to which humans should nevertheless strive because it represents the noblest o conception and highest end of human moral endeavour. The regrettable result of this ‘hermeneutics of evasion’ - as Glen Stassen calls it - has been the misguided assumption that Jesus’ teachings are ‘too high and too hard for us to follow, and so instead we should follow some other 5 See, Luther’s Works, edited by J. Pelikan, 55 volumes (St. Louis: Concordia, 1956), volume xxi, p. 113 (emphasis added). 6 M. Simons, in. The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, translated by L. Verduin, edited by J. C. Wenger (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1956), p. 111. 7 J. Stayer, Anabaptists and the Sword (Lawrence: Coronado Press, 1972), p. 37. 8 The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, edited by A. Hastings, A. Mason and H. Pyper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 655. Niebuhr argues that even an ‘impossible ethical ideal’ can make a positive contribution to ‘ordinary morality’. See, R. Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (London: SCM Press, 1948), p. 124. Several other interpretations which have sought to moderate the ethical demands of the Sermon could be mentioned but since this essay is offered as a positive contribution to this important debate of the moral efficacy of the Sermon, it seems superfluous to enumerate, one by one, such interpretations. For a helpful overview, see Loyd Allen, ‘The Sermon on the Mount in the History of the Church’, Review and Expositor, 89 (1992), pp. 245-266. For a more detailed and up-to-date account, see The Sermon on the Mount through the Centuries, edited by J. Greenman, T. Larsen, S. Spencer (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2007). 40 Journal of European Baptist Studies pragmatic ethic’. 9 At the root of such evasion lies an unexamined