“For some, on hearing that liberty is promised in the gospel, a liberty which acknowledges no king, no magistrate among men, but looks to Christ alone, think they can receive no benefit from liberty so long as they see any power placed over them. Accordingly, they think that nothing will be safe until the whole world is changed into a new form, where there will be neither courts, nor laws, nor magistrates, nor anything of the kind to interfere, as they suppose, with their liberty.”
John Calvin
Institutes, Book IV, ch. 20, pg. 1168
Calvin here is complaining about the Anabaptists who turned Gospel liberty into licentiousness. The Anabaptists earnestly desired to war against hierarchy and distinctions. The Reformed churches today are showing their anabaptist slips by disciplining men who are maintaining distinctions that have been held by all men, at all times, in all places.
When Calvin writes above that the Anabaptists, “they think that nothing will be safe until the whole world is changed into a new form, where there will be neither courts, nor laws, nor magistrates, nor anything of the kind to interfere, as they suppose, with their liberty.” I would note that the “nor anything” points to the current Anabaptist impulse in the Reformed churches to want to deny the reality of race. The current incarnation of NAPARC/CREC/SBC churches is to insist that Christian liberty means a world where “all colors bleed into one.” These denominations are levelers who insist that all because all men everywhere are commanded to repent that therefore all men who do repent lose their racial/ethnic identity and so can form one nation. These denominations are teaching that grace destroys nature when the historic teaching is that graces restores nature. When a Japanese man repents, he doesn’t lose his Japanese-ness in conversion. Instead, he increasingly becomes the best expression of what it means to be Japanese.
Depart the NAPARC/CREC/SBC churches.
“Regarding our eternal salvation, it is true that one must not distinguish between man and woman, or between king and a shepherd, or between a German and a Frenchman. Regarding policy, however, we have what St. Paul declares here; for our, Lord Jesus Christ did not come to mix up nature, or to abolish what belongs to the preservation of decency and peace among us….Regarding the kingdom of God (which is spiritual) there is no distinction or difference between man and woman, servant and master, poor and rich, great and small. Nevertheless, there does have to be some order among us, and Jesus Christ did not mean to eliminate it, as some flighty and scatterbrained dreamers [believe].”
John Calvin
Sermon on 1 Corinthians 11:2-3
It seems that levelling or anarchistic doctrines are (ironically) “naturally” connected to anti-natural ascetic notions that detest the physical material world (thus the connection to anti-incarnationalist notions of some Anabaptists), and the hierarchies that it imposes, not wanting to believe that this could have been God’s will. “How could a loving God have created such an unequal, oppressive world as this”, goes the perverse Gnostic logic of many Leftists.
This is an interesting and fruitful, concise academic study (even though it is apparently written by a Jew) about pacifism among Christians in pre-Constantinian times, which also touches the issue at hand:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228277490_Christian_Pacifism_Before_Constantine
“The Marcionite and other forms of Gnostic pacifism have a reasonable internal logic. If the entire world and every human body is repulsively unclean (if one looks on the whole creation the same way that the Old Testament regarded a leprous corpse), then it makes sense never to lift a finger to defend a human being who is being attacked. Why try to preserve the evil human body from destruction? And how sinful it would seem, in the Gnostic view, to involve oneself in the material world so greatly that one would actually use a physical weapon.
The earliest Christians seem to have foreseen that something like Gnosticism would attempt to substitute itself for Christianity. In the First Epistle to Timothy, Paul specifically warned about the false teaching that would arise from “doctrines of devils.” The evil doctrines that would arise in “latter times” would be “Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving.”69
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91. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the only early Christian sects which were officially pacifist were heretical sects which hated the created world. The hostility to Creation is directly opposed to Jewish and Christian doctrine from the first chapter of Genesis all the way through the New Testament.
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Tertullian is the most famous pacifist of early Christian writers, but he cannot be considered representative of mainstream Christian thought. His pacifism was the one of the products of a heresy founded on hatred of the material world, and a longing for human suffering. Tertullian does not speak for Christians and others who view the natural world and the human body as glorious gifts from God, and who therefore reject Tertullian’s command that force must never be used to defend those wonderful gifts from torture or destruction.”
The Anabaptists may well deserve lots of criticism, but still, I cannot help feeling, observing their history, that I can see some illustration of Our Lord’s striking words: “But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first” (Matt. 19:30) – how in the providential progress of history can turn the former stereotypes on their heads.
As was observed here:
https://occidentaldissent.com/2019/12/19/luther-and-liberalism/
“It is a Catholic myth that the Reformation inexorably led to liberalism. The Anabaptists were the most radical fringe group that came out of the Reformation. Today, Anabaptists are the most socially conservative religious group with the highest birthrate in the United States. The Amish population has exploded since the 1960s. In fact, the Amish are projected to overtake the current American population in 200 years.”
The original Anabaptists were the most wild-eyed radicals of the Reformation era, but (at least some) their descendants are now bywords of reactionary conservatism! That is irony indeed.
It is also cruel truth that the descendants of hierarchical 16th century Reformers might be in their DEEDS, or in their everyday life, much less patriarchal than conservative Anabaptists are these days. And from the racialist point of view, the Old Order Amish and Mennonites are like “living fossil” survivals of the kind of vital folkish spirit that made the White Protestant conquest and settlement of North America possible in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.