63 - Anabaptists

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Well, it's been a little while, but we are not too far from wrapping things up.

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Basically, we want to look at the Anabaptist movement, some leading

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Anabaptists, then we're going to look at one of the key events as to how

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Anabaptists were viewed by the rest of the church, specifically we will look at the rebellion at Munster, which in some ways is an unfair thing to do to Anabaptists as a whole, but we'll talk about all that.

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And then we finish up with Calvin, and that will be that. I haven't decided where we're going to go from there yet, but we'll go back to something in the

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Bible. We have been doing the Synoptic Gospels for almost a decade, and so we will wrap up the church history.

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People are like, why don't you go up to the modern period? I've never taught after Medieval Reformation church history, and so it would be a whole lot of extra study that I don't have time to do right now.

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If you want me to do something that I'm actually studying right now, then we'll start into coherence -based genealogical method the week after that, and nobody will be attending in the morning.

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So that's just sort of how that will work. So years ago when

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I first started coming here, Brother Ed, who isn't here this morning, directed me to a book or gave me a book by Leonard Verdine, actually two books,

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The Reformers and Their Stepchildren, and Anatomy of a Hybrid. And at the time, Dr. Verdine was still alive.

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He actually lived out, he lived the end of his years out in Apache Junction.

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Did you ever meet Dr. Verdine? A couple of times. He spoke to her.

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Did he? He did some preaching there. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, I only met him once.

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I was probably, it was about 1990 -ish, maybe a little after that, maybe 91,

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I forget when it was. Anyway, drove out to Apache Junction and spent some time with him.

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I think he lived to like 105, if I recall correctly. Anyway, he was very elderly in his upper 90s when

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I met with him at a little mobile home out in Apache Junction.

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Wasn't a rich man, and you wonder how someone who certainly wasn't born in the United States, I don't believe, I think it was, was he

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Belgian or something like that? I think it was Belgian. How you end up, how anyone ends up in Apache Junction is actually a fairly decent question,

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I think. But evidently liked the heat, because you've got to like the heat if you're going to live in Apache Junction.

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Well, anyway. But anyway, at the time I was teaching church history at Grand Canyon, and so I went out and we spent some time in his home talking about Luther.

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And I've told the story before, he told me something that Luther had said, and I'd never heard anybody,

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I had not read that and like that, and I said, really? And I said, Luther said that? And this is a man in his upper 90s.

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And he says, would you like the citation in German, Dutch, or English?

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So in his 90s, he could quote Luther by memory in three different languages.

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And after we talked about church history and stuff, we walked around outside his little place and he was pointing out all the flowers, and obviously had spent hours minutely examining these flowers, and knew all about the different genus and species, the guy was brilliant, he was really, really smart.

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Still don't understand the Apache Junction part, but really, you know, maybe by the time you get into your late 90s, you don't really want to be around people anymore.

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Which I can understand today. You know, if you spent your life on Twitter and Facebook, yeah,

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I'd move to Mars, but that wasn't the case back then, we hadn't completely lost our civilization at that point.

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So anyway, the outline that I have in an introductory way to this subject comes from Verdien's book

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The Reformers and Their Stepchildren, where he spent a lot of time discussing various terms that I've put on the board, descriptive of, these were insults that were used against the radicals by both

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Catholics and Protestants. And he does not limit his discussion to just from Luther forward, but recognizes that there had always been an anti -sacral movement that waxed and waned, and one of the biggest problems in dealing with what history has identified as the

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Anabaptist movement is simply the matter of definition. We live in a day where people make connections based upon some of the flimsiest reasoning, and as a result come up with horrific ideas that historically are just absolutely laughable.

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But the fact is, that term, Anabaptist, which of course was rejected by the movement itself, they did not believe themselves to be re -baptizing anyone, but it is so massively vague that it encompasses

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Trinitarians, non -Trinitarians, people that used violence and people that were complete pacifists, and people that had some sort of sacramental theology and people that rejected all sorts of sacramental theology, and just the breadth of belief that ends up underneath that name is so broad that it really leaves you going, well, can't we get a little more specific?

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Because you end up painting with such huge broad strokes, and of course much of the history is written by the people who hated these people.

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They were a deeply hated people for a lot of different reasons. They were very much opposed to what people thought was good societal norms.

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And so, as a result, whenever you hear somebody today, there's a lot of people in the

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Southern Baptist Convention that want to try to put the Anabaptist forward, well, you have to be very specific as to who you're talking to, and even then, with some of the names on the left -hand side of the board, there's a tremendous amount of disagreement and argument over exactly where Grebel and Manz and Reubel and Brotley and Sattler and Blaurock and the others, they were each different from one another.

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And the average lifespan of an Anabaptist leader was about three and a half to four years.

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It's sort of hard to develop much in the way of a systematic theology or an extensive bibliography of written materials, let alone research, dialogue with other people, when everybody,

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Catholic and Protestant, was trying to tie you to a stake and burn you alive. And so there are a lot of things that go into why it is somewhat difficult to nail everything down here, and there is a reality that the

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Anabaptist movement that Luther, Zwingli, Bützer, Calvin, and then hence all that came after them in the second and third generations of the

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Reformation, they were primarily focused upon a form of religious belief that did flourish and come out of primarily the

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Reformation itself. The problem is, while we can trace them, for example, both

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Grebel and Manz were part of the inner circle of Zwingli.

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They were trained by Zwingli. They were Zwinglians. And so their introduction to what we would call

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Anabaptist concepts came from Zurich.

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Yet they shared things in common with movements and groups and people that pre -existed them, even though they did not know about those people.

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There was no historical genealogical connection between the

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Cathari of 300 years earlier and them, but there was intellectually and conceptually.

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And so, again, we have to be very, very careful. We can draw lines back to groups like the

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Albigensians and Waldensians, and again, even identifying who they were, what they believed is next to impossible in light of the documentation we have.

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There are lots of books on the subject. The problem is, most of them were written during a period of time where the people writing them had a point to prove.

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And so you get to select your data based upon what point you're attempting to prove.

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And again, these are groups that were hunted down. And sometimes, in one instance, by the

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Inquisition, herded into a huge cave and then they lit a huge fire at the mouth of the cave to suck all the oxygen out and killed everybody, men, women, and children, hundreds of people.

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Then who ends up writing about that? The people who won. And so how accurate are their accounts going to be of what these people actually believed?

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You can still dig through them, and by comparing different accounts of different people and going, oh, this person, this person, maybe that did really represent what they believed, but then this person says this and nobody else says that.

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But it's a highly selective and difficult process, and you're always left going, well, we can theorize this, but it's really hard to say one way or the other.

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And so just from a historical perspective, we are looking at a particularly difficult group to get a firm grasp on.

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But what is interesting, I've mentioned it before, and I mentioned it when we were talking about Luther and Zwingli, this issue of sacralism, the state church, in general, to one extent or another, the

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Anabaptists desired a free church. They desired a church that was not under state control, did not, in fact, for example, if you've watched

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The Radicals, you know that one of the big things that Michael Sattler pressed for at Schleitheim, and that Wilhelm Roeblin opposed him on, but then he eventually gave in on, but then

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Roeblin ended up apostatizing anyways, was the acceptance of the protection of princes.

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It was a radical, radical, radical idea that a church could exist without the protection of the princes, the governmental authorities.

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This was a crazy thing, but that's one of the things that connects the post -Reformation

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Anabaptist radicals and pre -Reformation groups. Even though you can't say, oh,

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Michael Sattler read the writings of people from 300 years ago and said these things, there's no evidence that he did.

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So where did he get these ideas? Well, a lot of these ideas just come from reading the

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New Testament and going, you know, when I read the New Testament, the church there doesn't look much like the church we have today.

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It looks like a persecuted church, and I don't see that the government was enforcing

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Christian theology on everybody, and hmm, this is strange, and so these ideas start to come up.

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And there are, like I said, a number of books, one of the, oh, what's the guy's name,

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Williams. Williams' two -volume, huge book,

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The Radical Reformation, well, it's a series, I guess, it's two books, set, I guess we'll call it, is going to give you the vast, you know, the huge amount of documentation.

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I'd love to be able to find that electronically. I haven't yet, but I would, if I could get it in PDF, I could convert it to mp3, it would probably, man,

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I'd probably be about 60 hours of audio, of wonderful computer -read audio that would be a lot of writing and writing, but I'd still like to do it someday.

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But there are sources out there, and before you came in, brother, I was talking about Leonard Verdine, and you're having, introduced me as a reformer to your stepchildren and anatomy of a hybrid, so we already gave you due credit for the materials there.

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So the very title of that book, The Stepchildren of the

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Reformers, is a, you know, says something. The Reformation as a whole is going to, you know, because remember

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I told you, Luther, when the Zwickau prophets first came into Wittenberg, Luther was not immediately throw them in prison, hang them from the highest yardarm.

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He actually said, well, we need to listen to what they have to say, and a few things like that. It took a year, you know, not, that's not a long time back in those days.

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For us, where everything depends on the president's last crazy tweet, things happen like that.

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And the vast majority of our population has forgotten what the greatest controversy was a year ago.

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That's not how humanity has existed for a very, very long time. Things moved a whole lot more slowly in the past than they do today.

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And so a year difference is not a lot.

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So Luther did pretty quickly come to the conclusion these people are dangerous. But from Luther, Zwingli at the same time period is coming to the same conclusions.

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And Felix Manz, I have stood on the bridge close to the cathedral in Zurich over the river right there where they tied his hands and his feet and drowned him, gave him his third baptism.

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He was the first Anabaptist martyr in Zurich, would not be the last. And that was in January of 1527.

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So by 1530, there is a generalized acceptance amongst the

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Reformed that Anabaptists minimally must be driven out of your territories.

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And by the middle 1530s, right around the same time as the conversion of Calvin, by the middle 1530s, because of Münster, which we're going to spend some time looking at later on, because of Münster, they are considered a grave threat to all governmental order.

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Because of Münster, they were. And the numbers, well, 1534, 1535, at least 15 ,000

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Anabaptists executed in northern Germany and surrounding countries, at least.

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And you need to remember Baptists as a whole. There is a Baptist burned in London in 1611, the year the

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King James Version came out. And in some of the northern European countries, the

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Baptist martyrology extends into the early 18th century. So, in Europe, Anabaptists slash

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Baptists, and unfortunately people have rarely made much of a distinction, have an extensive martyrology, an extensive history of death at the hands of Catholics in southern

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Europe, yeah, but probably more at the hands of Protestants. And you will not find in the writings of Luther, certainly not

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Zwingli, because Zwingli dies early on and so, but he was certainly involved at the beginning of the martyrology,

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Calvin, you will not find any sympathy toward Anabaptists.

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And primarily because of what happened at Munster, which is why we're going to spend some time looking at it, aside from the fact that it is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating stories in all of church history, it just is, it's incredible.

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And if you want to beat me to the punch, there is a book available, Kindle and paperback, called

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The Taylor King, which is the story of the rebellion at Munster, and it's fascinating.

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So we'll get to that fairly quickly. But let's look at some of these terms, lest I have to write them again next week, which

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I might, we'll see. Wiedertaufer, or Anabaptist, simply is a term that makes sense from outside the movement.

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Because, and again, you can have all sorts of groups that insist upon believers' baptism, and the reason it became a re -baptism was because in a sacral society, your entrance into both church and state was by the same mechanism, infant baptism.

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We've, I don't know how many times I've mentioned that the tax roles and basically the citizenship roles of European countries were based upon baptism roles of the church.

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And so your baptism was your entrance into society as a whole, which was a state church.

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And so if you become convinced that the biblical form of baptism is credo baptism, that there is an element of knowledgeable repentance and profession of faith that is necessary for Christian baptism to be

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Christian baptism, then from outside the movement, you would look like an

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Anabaptist. You would look like you were baptizing again. That's the

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Greek form. Taufen is to baptize, so do it again.

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But from inside the movement, you're going, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm saying that what happened to me before was not

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Christian baptism, and what's happening to me now is Christian baptism. And many of them would then go on and say, and if you haven't done what

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I'm doing now, you've actually never been baptized. So I suppose you can come up with sort of a negation of baptism, and that's what they would call everybody else.

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I'm not sure if they did. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in their literature someplace they referred to their enemies as the non -Baptists or the not having been baptized or people or whatever.

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But this concept, of course, this term was used by Catholics and Protestants both who were sacralists and who supported sacralism.

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So both of them together, this would, opposition to anabaptism united Catholics and Protestants.

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And in fact, we'll see at Munster that it was a united Catholic and Protestant Lutheran force that eventually crushed the rebellion in Munster.

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They could get together on this because the Catholics and the

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Protestants together were both sacralists, and these people were saying, nyet to that.

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And of course, to this day, especially Catholic writers and apologists will say that the secularism that has now utterly taken over all of Europe had its origin in this movement.

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Because well, and they would blame the Reformation as well, but especially seen in something like this, you have the rejection of the centrality of religious faith to culture, et cetera, et cetera.

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Now that was not, obviously. None of the anabaptists envisioned a secular Europe. No one can even think of something like that.

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But they will make the argument that, looking back, that's how these things took place.

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So it's interesting that something, that a sacramental view, a view of the ordinances or the sacraments, and we're going to get down to sacramentschwermer down here, that has become the primary descriptive that holds together a wide variety of people.

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I mean, I'm sorry, but that's as silly as connecting us with Jehovah's Witnesses who also believe in creedal baptism.

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Yeah, but what do they believe about all this other stuff? Well, it doesn't really matter. And that's the problem with this wide, wide, wide, wide, wide, wide, wide term, is it held together such massively diverse views of much more fundamental things, much more important things than that.

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Donatiston, the Donatists, remember? I know it's been a long time now, but if you need to, you can look at either

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George's or Sean's notes, and they can take you back there.

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That was so long ago. I think it was before Kelly's work schedule changed, and she was taking notes, too. But if you recall what the

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Donatist schism was all about in North Africa, the Donatists were the separatists.

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They were the ones that rejected an incipient early form of sacralism.

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And eventually, Augustine gave in to the utilization of state power to suppress the theological heresies of the

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Donatists, which didn't work, never has. But so when this type of term, you're a

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Donatist, is being used, there is both an ecclesiastical as well as sacral element to that as an insult.

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We see, you guys are heretics because you're associated with those heretics back then, you know, and Augustine stood against them, so Augustine would stand against you, and they recognized the anti -state church attitude of the vast majority of the

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Anabaptists. Now, again, you can look at Grable and Mounce, for example, for a couple years under Zwingli, and you're not going to find that as a primary element of their thinking, but once the council turns against them, once the state church turns against you, it's pretty easy to start questioning the validity of the state church, as long as you remain convinced that what you believe elsewise, that you're being told to stop believing by the state church, is true, then it's pretty easy to see where you start going, maybe the state church thing isn't such a grand idea.

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And so that term was used of them along those lines. Stabler means a staff carrier, a person carrying like the shepherd's staff, and some, and this had happened before the

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Reformation, this is going back into the Cathari and the

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Valdensians, and the, there's a staff right there, the Valdensians, and it falls over, but it's the same thing, not quite exactly the same thing, but the

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Valdensians and the Albigensians and things like that, it was a protest against the fact that the church used force to compel men to believe as she believed, and so it's a rejection of the sword and the substitution of a staff, like the shepherd uses his staff to rescue the sheep, not coerce the sheep into believing something that they don't want to believe, or I'm not sure that sheep actually believe much in one way or the other, if you know what

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I mean, but the point is the shepherd's staff is more often associated with rescuing, you know, the shepherd's heart rather than the stern type of picture that you would have from the sacral church.

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I've mentioned the Cathari, the Catharer, was turned way back into the

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Middle Ages, there had been many who had died, especially under the

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Inquisition, but even before then, for being Cathari, literally of course,

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Cathartic, it means pure, and originally it would have reference to the fact that they are seeking a pure church, a church where Christ is formed and its members, even

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Luther admitted that many of these groups had moral lives that were better than those in his own church, and as I mentioned, at one point he had recognized that if a holy church was the goal, it would have to be a free church, it could not be a state church, but he became convinced that that was incorrect, but there was a recognition initially, up until Munster, and afterwards as well on an individual level, but Munster painted the whole movement, literally to this day, because of the insanity that broke out in Munster, and the things that they did, and the immorality of what took place there, really the insanity of what took place there, but still, there was a recognition, especially with later

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Anabaptist leaders, that they were extremely moral men, they were just seen as being extremely moral, dangerous men, and you can be a moral man, but still be very dangerous to prevailing social order, and so they would be called the

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Cathar. Sacrament Schwermer, of course, is in reference to the, from the outside, disrespect, and even the point of despising the established order of the sacraments in the church.

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What would be a normal translation of Schwermer? That, interestingly enough, the common

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Donatistan would be more of the technical term, but maybe a priest would use it coming from the Latin. Schwermer would be like the common man's term, but it's almost like sacramentalist.

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It's like enthusiasts about this subject. So they talk too much about the sacraments?

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Yeah. But it would be in a negative sense. Yeah, all in the historical context of who these people were.

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Right. So today you said sacramentalist, you get a different thought. Yeah, definitely, definitely, yeah. It was a prevalent part of, in the earlier groups, and then in the

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Anabaptists after Zwingli, when you're trying, you know, these people had to be very evangelistic.

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They had to, they're trying to build a church. So you're trying to get people to accept your viewpoints, so you have to have arguments that are going to grab people's attention.

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So, for example, when Jehovah's Witnesses come to your door, sometimes they will, if it's a holiday season, they'll use the holidays as their in to try to say, have you ever noticed that the

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Bible doesn't say anything about this, that, or the other thing? Or, if it's not the holiday season, one of the things that I talk about is the shape of the cross.

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You know, maybe you have a cross in your home or something, or on your car or whatever, and they'll use that and say, well, you know, that's not the way it was shaped.

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It was actually just a pole, and, you know, Jesus was impaled upon a pole, and nobody else talks about it, but we do, and that way they're sort of getting the foot in the door with something you may have never thought of before, and they're trying to establish a foothold of authority.

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Well, you read the published writings, few that there were, but the published writings, when

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I say few, I mean major works. As we're going to see, one of the things that was fascinating in Munster was they had a printing press, and boy did they use it.

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Just about must have worn that thing out, the tracks and stuff that they were cranking out of Munster, which worked.

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I mean, they distributed those things all over northern Europe, and many people tried to get to Munster to join the rebellion and were cut down on the way.

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Imprisoned, burned, whatever, I mean thousands of people, and it was primarily because they had,

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Bernard Rothman had a printing press, and he was a good writer, and you read those tracks and things like that, what were they focused on?

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The mass, and baptism, and all the seven sacraments of the

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Roman church, and it's pretty easy to demonstrate, they don't have a biblical basis, and so you go after that, and then of course it's real easy to go after all the, you know, we think what happened this week with the report from Pennsylvania is somehow some new and shocking thing for Rome.

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It's not. It's been that way for a long, long, long, long, long, long centuries, and so it's real easy to point to the most recent scandal for whatever bishop has how many wives and how many children, whatever else it might be.

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And this would be highly effective, a very, very effective methodology. Now, that doesn't mean that they were united as to what they then believed positively.

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It's sometimes easier to unite negatively against a common enemy than it then is to get together and come up with something positive that you are all agreed upon.

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Big difference between the two. It's real easy to get a bunch of people together to go, they are bad.

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It's a whole lot tougher to get that same group of people to all sit down and go, and this is what we believe positively.

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Boy, you could fill volumes with how many times that's happened over the course of church history.

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And so they might have been unified as Anabaptists, but exactly what that baptism as an adult accomplished, baptismal regeneration versus non -regeneration.

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What about the Lord's Supper? How would the Lord's Supper have to be celebrated, and in what context, and what did it mean?

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And you didn't have nearly as much unity there, though generally you would have more of an obviously memorialist view in the

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Supper, but most of them were baptismal regenerationists.

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Most of them would view baptism sort of as the gateway into salvation. So there were tons of fundamental compromises of justification by faith among Anabaptists.

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No question about it. But then again, that wasn't a big issue for them. That wasn't their fight.

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They had a fight against sacralism, and that's what defined their particular perspective.

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Sacramentalism is, of course, absolutely central to the sacral system, and so since they're rebelling against that state church concept, then you can see why they would go there.

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Winkler refers to someone who meets in secret and in private. So we're going to get together over at John's house, and we're going to talk about fishing.

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Well, no, you're actually not, but in the vast majority of places.

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Now, there were some times when the Anabaptists would sort of become a majority in an area.

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As we'll see, this happened outside of Zurich, and so you could have larger meetings that were sort of open, but in the vast majority of places before the

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Reformation, under the Inquisition and stuff like that, and then even afterwards, whether in Protestant Europe or in Roman Catholic Europe, your meetings were in secret.

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There was always the danger of someone who you don't know, if they show up,

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I mean, you're really going to be asking them questions about who they are, where they're from, and even then, you know, it's that tension.

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You want to have fellow believers, and you have to somehow grow your movement, but on the other hand, this person could go running off to the authorities, and next week, you know, you've got soldiers waiting for you at the place where you met the week before.

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Didn't the early church have the same issue? So the early church were ganglers also?

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In a sense, yeah. Yeah, in a sense, that's true. Very much so.

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Yeah, there's definitely a parallel at that point between the two, except that the prosecuting authority in the early church is the pagan

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Roman Empire, which is a sacral empire. It's just different religion, and of course, they made that parallel.

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They definitely saw themselves as the heirs of the early church, the pure early church, in that way.

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Rottengeister was a term that referred to one who formed factions or parties.

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A factious, well, the very term heretic is one who makes a choice, and so it's very similar to the term heretic along those lines.

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They desired the freedom to follow their conscience as it was led by the Spirit of God and Scripture. The exact balance between those two is what will become a very important area of discussion and a balance that is completely lost in Munster and other places.

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Munster wasn't the only place that happened. It just happened most spectacularly there because Munster happened to be a big, rich, super fortified town.

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And so once it was taken over by the Anabaptists, lock the gates, you've got cannon up there, got lots of food, lots of money, and you end up with over a year -long siege and all the weirdness that happens in that time period, which, like I said,

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I'm really surprised they haven't made a movie out of it because it would be a blockbuster. It really would be because you wouldn't have to make almost anything up, that you really would not have to exaggerate anything to make it just one of the most...

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You're kidding. That actually happened? Yeah, that actually happened. And I can think of some actors to represent, you know,

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Jan Mathias. Yeah, I can think of a bunch of heavy metal rock stars that would fit his role real well.

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And then Jan of Leiden, whoever the current 20 -something heartthrob dude is, that would be

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Jan of Leiden. And, oh yeah, we could make some real money with that one.

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But anyway, they obviously, rejecting governmental interference, had to then deal with, well, is there any way for us to actually have anything in common?

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I mean, when you look, for example, at the Schleitheim Confession, Michael Sattler, Wilhelm Reublin, 1527, when you look at Schleitheim, the realm of agreement was hard fought and still isn't super, super, super wide.

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I mean, they're feeling their way along, and they're meeting in barns. You know,

41:36

I mean, it's not like they can put together statements.

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And, you know, there's a statement being put together right now, for example, that'll come out in a few weeks.

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And I'm a part of the ones that have been working on it. And you send out an email, there's a link, you all can go read the same thing, you can make comments on it, and, you know,

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Google Docs and all the rest of that kind of stuff. And, ah, that's easy. Couldn't quite do that that way.

42:10

You had to travel back roads. And, again, if you've watched The Radicals, you've seen them gathering at Schleitheim and things like that and what took place even there.

42:23

So the point is, from the peoples outside looking at the movement, these are dividers, these are people who demand a right to define things themselves.

42:39

And so for many, they were people who are spiritually immature, they're ignoring history, they just live to make divisions, and, you know what, there are people like that.

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And did the Anabaptist movement attract people like that? Sure did. Sure did.

42:58

It does make me just wonder, when I look at the people that were attracted to Munster, what attracted them?

43:05

It is very difficult. Yes, sir. So what would Andrew Jackson have said about that? No, I'm sorry.

43:10

This is a big question, but I wonder sometimes why, for more practice, they're so ready to call themselves

43:22

Calvinists, when it's abundantly obvious that Calvin, at least in the context of his day, would have been totally fine with a bare minimum throwing us out of the land and not just outright killing us, and how

43:37

Calvin himself would be very confused that we would call ourselves Calvinists. Because Calvin never ran into one of us.

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And our pedigree is historically, genealogically, straight out of the

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English Puritans, Presbyterians, Calvinists in the

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UK, and not from these folks. We have a connection to them conceptually in regards to baptism, for example.

44:13

But even the basis upon which we would argue that would be different than the

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Anabaptists. We would argue that on the same sola scriptura ground and with a connection to history, that the

44:26

Anabaptists would say, that's fatal, don't do that. Well, we don't know if there were Anabaptists, though. There may have been, like you said, they didn't have any writings who did.

44:35

No, I, well, okay, but there would be no, there is no historical evidence of a developed, covenantal form of Reformed Baptist teaching that Calvin would have had any encounter with.

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In fact, what's interesting, what we'll see next week, and left close to this, is it was

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Zwingli's debate with these guys that first led to the concept of a covenantal view of infant baptism in the history of the church.

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So, if the infant baptism side is just now developing it,

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I can guarantee you the Baptist side hadn't even started considering that stuff yet, because there wasn't a position against which to respond at that point.

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So, Calvin would have kicked us out, but Calvin never met one of us.

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The Anabaptists that he met were much more the Munsterite type, which we ourselves would go, ah, and we would run from.

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We are a minute past, so we will have to continue, we will have to continue that conversation, or the door is going to open and the kids are going to run in, and we're not going to know what in the world is going on.

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So, we've gone late. Let's close with a word of prayer. Father, thank you for this time. We ask now that you would calm our hearts and minds for worship.