We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

How the Anabaptists Emphasized the Cross
Because the Anabaptists have generally emphasized faith that is evidenced by works and thus on Jesus’ life as an example to be followed, it may prima facia appear that the saving work of the cross was less central to the early Anabaptists than it was to the Reformers and to Evangelicals. In reality, I would argue, this is not at all the case.
Given how persecuted the early Anabaptists were, it’s not surprising that they rarely discussed atonement theories in a formal way, let alone that they never embraced any particular theory. However, when Sattler, Hubmaier, Denck and other Anabaptist leaders did write and speak about the work of Christ on the cross, they actually reflect aspects of each of the major models of the atonement in Church history. Yet, in summing up their views, Thomas Finger observes that, “[a]mong traditional models … Christus Victor can be called historic Anabaptism’s primary expression of Jesus work.” This is true, however, only “providing we add that they experienced this as more present and participatory, and more specifically shaped by Jesus’ life than most.”[1]
In other words, the central emphasis tended to be on the manner in which Jesus’ humble, self-sacrificial life and death defeated forces of evil. Yet, this emphasis was not only regarding what Jesus did for us; it included what Jesus does in us and through us. To use Finger’s terminology, their Christus Victor model was not only “conflictive” but “transformative.”[2] Because they understood Jesus’ cruciform way of defeating the powers to be something they are called to participate in, they refused to engage in violence, even as an act of self-defense when persecuted and martyred by other Christian groups.
In this light, I would argue that, in a wholly informal way, the early Anabaptists tended to integrate Jesus’ death with every other aspect of his life, which is precisely the position I argue in Crucifixion of the Warrior God. And so, while one doesn’t typically find as strong a formal emphasis on the saving significance of the cross among them as one finds among the Reformers and Evangelicals, I would argue the cross was no less thematically central to them than it was to these others.
If anything, I would argue it is more central inasmuch as the Anabaptists understood the cross not only to be the thematic center of everything Jesus was about, but also as the thematic center of everything his followers are to be about. As is the case in the NT, the early Anabaptists generally understood that to follow the one who lived a cruciform life and died a cruciform death, one must be willing to adopt a cruciform lifestyle.
[1] T. Finger, A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology: Biblical, Historical, Constructive (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2006), 350.
[2] ibid., 341, 343
Photo credit: Nick in exsilio via Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-SA
Category: General
Tags: Anabaptists, Christus Victor, Cross, Cruciform Theology, Jesus
Related Reading

Does God Inflict Physical Disabilities?
In Exodus 4, we find Moses claiming that he could not be used by Yahweh to get the children of Israel out of Egypt because he was “slow of speech and tongue.” To this Yahweh replies, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them…

The “Third Way”: Seeing God’s Beauty in the Depth of Scripture’s Violent Portraits of God
A publishing house recently sent me an advance copy of a book written by a well known scholar on the topic of the non-violent God revealed in Jesus, asking me to endorse it. (Publishing protocol stipulates that endorsers not critique a book before it’s released, so I will not mention the name of the author…

How NOT to be Christ-Centered: A Review of God With Us – Part II
In Part I of my review of Scott Oliphint’s God With Us we saw that Oliphint is attempting to reframe divine accommodation in a Christ-centerd way. Yet, while he affirms that “Christ is the quintessential revelation of God,” he went on to espouse a classical view of God that was anchored in God’s “aseity,” not…

Does the Old Testament Justify “Just War”?
Since the time of Augustine, Christians have consistently appealed to the violent strand of the Old Testament to justify waging wars when they believed their cause was “just.” (This is Augustine’s famous “just war” theory.) Two things may be said about this. First, the appeal to the OT to justify Christians fighting in “just” wars…

Uncrossed
Did any of you catch SNL this weekend? They did a parody of Tarantino’s DJango Unchained called DJesus Uncrossed. Many were deeply offended by the depiction of Jesus in this, but David R. Henson blogged about how this skit revealed what we’ve already been doing for quite a while as a culture. In his blog…

Jesus, the Word of God
“[T]he standing message of the Fathers to the Church Universal,” writes Georges Florovsky, was that “Christ Jesus is the Alpha and Omega of the Scriptures both the climax and the knot of the Bible.”[1] It was also unquestionably one of the most foundational theological assumptions of Luther and Calvin as well as other Reformers. Hence,…