Historians have long accepted the influence of humanism on Anabaptist origins. The emphasis on text-based support of early reforms and critiques of the Catholic Church characterize the brand of ...humanism in northern Europe and the Protestant Reformation. However, little attention has been given to the precise dynamics, networks, and mechanisms exposing early Anabaptists to humanism years before they even began to consider a more drastic reformation of the Church. As the martyred Balthasar Hubmaier was a central figure and the only university doctor of the early Radical Reformation, this article will study the personal, textual, and curricular components of his academic career at the universities of Freiburg-im-Breisgau and Ingolstadt; it is important for revealing a commitment to humanism that is deeper than was previously thought. It throws light on how the New Learning affected some Anabaptists, which humanists influenced their radical reforms, and which academic disciplines inspired their reforming methodologies.
In both the Mennonite-Anabaptist and Eastern Orthodox traditions, the eucharist is an agency of the ecclesial community's transfiguration. While the precise manner in which this characterizes the ...Mennonite eucharistic community is more ambiguous, the Eastern Orthodox Church is clear that the gestation of Christ in the womb of the pure, all-holy Theotokos, who was nevertheless not consumed, inspires the transfiguration of the faithful to insure that they ingest the body and blood of Christ as worthily as Mary bore Christ in her womb. However, this model is comparable to early Anabaptist expressions, especially in the writings of Pilgram Marpeck (d. 1556), from which Mennonites can draw to explain to their Orthodox counterparts the manner in which this transfiguration capacitates the worthy communicant for peacemaking and nonviolence.
The relatively nascent study of religion, conflict, and peacebuilding seeks to activate religious values, principles, beliefs, practices, rituals, symbols, and narratives that can potentially ...mobilize religious leaders and laity to devise nonviolent ways of preventing or transforming conflict. A storehouse of Muslim and Orthodox Christian values and teachings offers resources for interreligious peacebuilding in regions where these two faith traditions live side by side. Further, the conflict transformation theory and methods of Mennonites, a historic peace church whose peacebuilding pedigree has earned them worldwide credibility, have been shaped by historically-conditioned religious values that have preserved their peace convictions and inspired them to work in relief, development, and peacebuilding. The Mennonite narrative may serve as a template for comparable peace-cultivating indigenous Islamic and Orthodox Christian values that can be incorporated into conflict transformation theory, methods, exercises, and initiatives.
Klager investigates St Gregory of Nyssa's ascetic treatise De vita Moysis, focusing on his affirmation and conception of the freedom of the will in light of his epistemology and his portrayal of ...human culpability and the divine response. Gregory could foresee the restoration of God's creation because his understanding of human culpability did not reject the notion that mercy trumps retribution.
Hubmaier's appeal to the fathers was inspired by humanist principles, especially ad fontes, restitutionism, and rejection of scholastic syllogism and glosses in favour of full, humanist editions of ...the fathers based on an improved focus on grammar and philology. However, Hubmaier confessionalized Humanism by commandeering its disciplines, principles, and accomplishments to advance a reforming program that centred around credobaptism and freedom of the will. This confessionalization of Humanism is reflected also in the way Hubmaier exploited a perceived Nicodemism in the disparity between Erasmus' private and public statements on baptism and appropriated his endorsement of the docete–baptizantes–docentes baptismal sequence in Mt. 28:19 and defence of free will. Further, Hubmaier's Catholic, nominalist, and humanist academic background ensured that study of the fathers was an intuitive activity as his Anabaptist convictions developed. His nominalist education under the mentorship of Johann Eck also seems to have factored into his moderate Augustinianism and use of the African bishop in defence of free will against the hyper-Augustinianism of Luther. Hubmaier used carefully selected, amenable patristic theologians and historical witnesses to verify that credobaptism was preserved by the fathers in continuity with the practice of the apostolic era, while infant baptism was introduced only later and gradually accepted in the second to fifth centuries until definitively ratified by Augustine and universally embraced by the Catholic, papal "particular church." This increasing confusion during the patristic era was thought by Hubmaier to reflect the hesitant acceptance of paedobaptism in his own day especially by Zwingli and Erasmus, which inspired his desire for a new ecumenical council to decide the correct form of baptism on the basis of Scripture and supporting patristic exegesis. Ultimately, Hubmaier not only cognitively accepted the teachings of the fathers on baptism and free will, but embraced them as co-affiliates with himself in the one, holy, apostolic ecclesia universalis in protest against the errant papal ecclesia particularis as per the composition of his ecclesiology.
Hubmaier's appeal to the fathers was inspired by humanist principles, especially ad fontes, restitutionism, and rejection of scholastic syllogism and glosses in favour of full, humanist editions of ...the fathers based on an improved focus on grammar and philology. However, Hubmaier confessionalized Humanism by commandeering its disciplines, principles, and accomplishments to advance a reforming program that centred around credobaptism and freedom of the will. This confessionalization of Humanism is reflected also in the way Hubmaier exploited a perceived Nicodemism in the disparity between Erasmus' private and public statements on baptism and appropriated his endorsement of the docete–baptizantes–docentes baptismal sequence in Mt. 28:19 and defence of free will. Further, Hubmaier's Catholic, nominalist, and humanist academic background ensured that study of the fathers was an intuitive activity as his Anabaptist convictions developed. His nominalist education under the mentorship of Johann Eck also seems to have factored into his moderate Augustinianism and use of the African bishop in defence of free will against the hyper-Augustinianism of Luther. Hubmaier used carefully selected, amenable patristic theologians and historical witnesses to verify that credobaptism was preserved by the fathers in continuity with the practice of the apostolic era, while infant baptism was introduced only later and gradually accepted in the second to fifth centuries until definitively ratified by Augustine and universally embraced by the Catholic, papal "particular church." This increasing confusion during the patristic era was thought by Hubmaier to reflect the hesitant acceptance of paedobaptism in his own day especially by Zwingli and Erasmus, which inspired his desire for a new ecumenical council to decide the correct form of baptism on the basis of Scripture and supporting patristic exegesis. Ultimately, Hubmaier not only cognitively accepted the teachings of the fathers on baptism and free will, but embraced them as co-affiliates with himself in the one, holy, apostolic ecclesia universalis in protest against the errant papal ecclesia particularis as per the composition of his ecclesiology.
