Tough question in the bookstore today: a customer called asking for books about the connection between Friends and Anabaptists. Remarkably, we couldn’t come up with much of a list. But let’s be interactive here, readers! What books did I forget about? And what’s this phenomena of denying Quaker/Anabaptist common roots and cross-pollination?
Peter Brock talks about it in “The Quaker Peace Testimony 1660 to 1914”:http://www.Quakerbooks.org/get/1 – 85072-065 – 7 and Doug Gwyn has some stuff in “Seekers Found”:http://www.Quakerbooks.org/get/0 – 87574-960 – 7 but there _should_ be more than that. We tried going from the other end and surfed over to “Anabaptist Books”:http://www.anabaptistbooks.com/ and typed in “Quaker” but not much there.
After telling our customer that we couldn’t come up with too much on Quaker/Anabaptist cross-pollinization, he said that’s what he had been discovering. He asked me why I thought that was. Good question. I told him that Quakers had spent much of the twenthieth century distancing themselves from Anabaptists, and on giving up on our shared ‘peculiar’ testimonies on plainness and separation from the world. This really coincides with the rise of the Quakers-as-Protestant theme and with the renaming of the testimonies in modern secular language.
It’s often a mystery to me why there isn’t (or is) a book on some subject or
another. But ARE there Quaker/Anabaptist common roots and cross-pollination?
I’d be interested in hearing what you know that leads you to wonder where
the books are.
I know the Germantown Declaration was a joint Quaker/Mennonite action, as
were the CPS camps, but I don’t know of others.
Rufus Jones promoted a connection between George Fox and German pietists,
but historians since then seem to have debunked that (perhaps part of the
denial you mention, but then again, there’s lots about Rufus that’s been
appropriately discarded or reinterpreted).
There are a couple of books about plain dress, an old one by Gummere (a
standard of Quaker cultural history) and a contemporary one by the
information center out in Intercourse. I don’t remember if the new one
comments on how the two separate traditions of plain dress have influenced
one another, but it is an interesting read.
Hi Kenneth,
I really don’t know about all the cross-overs, it’s just obvious there are some and I wish some thorough historian would disentagle the myths pro and con to show us the connections.
Certainly there were a lot of similar ideas swirling around and a lot of English & continental dissenters were influencing each other from John Wyclif and Jan Hus’s time onward. Sixteenth-century Protestant dissent seems to have been quite a swirl of cross-influences, often converging in safe havens like Amsterdam. William Penn’s mother was Dutch and as a Quaker he traveled Europe inviting Anabaptists to his new American colony. Certainly the proximity of Friends and Anabaptists in Pennsylvania would have created some cross-fertilization. Friends and Anabaptists historically share distinctive testimonies, pacifism and plain dress being the two obvious ones, and certainly each group has influenced the other this way. The long history of joint projects in the Americas that you mention also point to ongoing historical connection.
Gummere’s book is part of that twentieth-century project of dismissing all Quaker pecularities as outdated empty forms (“costumes”) and readying Friends for the coming one-world socialist utopia that will come from embracing the modern age (as I remember she had some flowery language to this effect in the front). Certainly Friends have now come to resemble mainline Protestants more than anything else but when the distinctives were followed more there was a much stronger resemblance to Anabaptists. (For those unfamiliar with the two books Kenneth mentions, I have references to them on my Plain Dress Resources page).
So I don’t know how seriously to take Anabaptist influences. They’re there, certainly, but are they largely coincidental or fundamental?
See here:
this site quotes from the book MAINTAINING THE RIGHT FELLOWSHIP, Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History, No. 26, a narrative account of life in the oldest Mennonite Community in North America, by John L. Ruth( Herald Press, Scottdale, PA 15683 and Kitchener, Ontario 1984. Library of Congress #83 – 18579; ISBN 0 – 8361-1259 – 8)
The quotes tell how 17th C English Quakers,including William Penn and George Keith, evangelized among the Mennonites in the German Palatinate, and converted several. Some of these ex-Mennonite Quakers emigrated to Germantown in Pennsylvania with William Penn(including Pastorius, who co-signed the Germantown protest against slavery in 1688).
Also, look at this site:
This essay titled “Radical Women Activists and the Beginning of the Pietist Movement”, by Lucinda Martin, tells of the attempts that these same Quakers made to convert Princess Elizabeth and her brother, Karl Ludvig, Elector of the German Palatinate(cousins to Charles II of England). Apparently they failed, but they were able to enlist Elizabeth’s support in pursuading Charles to free Quakers from prison, and in pursuading her brother the Elector of the Palatinate to stop punishing Mennonite and Quaker converts in his state(some of whom are mentioned in the book cited above), as well as allowing them to emigrate to Pennsylvania 5 years later.
This site:
quotes from a 1902 Edition of a “Guidebook to Historic Germantown”. It describes various interactions between the Quakers, Mennonites, Dunkards and Bretheren in Germantown from the 1680’s through the Revolution. It states that the first Germantown Friends Meeting and the first Mennonite congregation both worshipped in the same private residence until 1708, and that German was the language of most residents until well into the 18th C. There must have been a lot of theological “cross-pollination” happening.
then, in this site:
the essay “Bridging the Gap:Cultural Brokers and the Structure of Transatlantic Communication”, by Rosalind Beiler, describes how various Quaker tracts were translated into Dutch, German, and French and then deseminated throughout Europe to various anabaptist theologians and communities.
It seems to me that Quakers were actively preaching to the anabaptists in the late 17th C., and, where they did not successfully convert them fully to RSoF, these Quaker missionaries suceeded in convince the anabaptists of some Quaker doctrines.
I have not yet seen how the reverse(anabaptists preaching to the Quakers) happened, at least in the 17th C.
Another possible indirect Anabaptist influence could have been through Fox’s uncle. In the first chapter of his Journal, he states that in 1644 he travelled to London to visit his uncle Pickering, a Baptist. In England at this time there were two sects that were called Baptist(see here). One sect, the General Baptists, were a dissenters who had migrated to Holland in the early 1600’s, had become very influenced by the Mennonites in Amsterdam, adopted several Anabaptist doctrines, including adult baptism, and then returned to England in 1612. The other stream was the Particular Baptists,who originated in England in the mid-1630’s from dissenters who had incorporated adult baptism with Puritan doctrines. If Uncle Pickering was a General Baptist, this might have influenced Fox at the time he was being led to Quakerism.
Hi James,
Thanks for your good research. It’s great to have this online here. If you type “quakers anabaptists” into Google, this discussion comes up first, so others curious about the connections will find your contributions.
Michael J Sheeran’s “Beyond Majority Rule”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000246.php (“available from Quakerbooks”:http://www.quakerbooks.org/get/0 – 941308-04 – 9) has a fascinating little addendum about Quaker influences, which contains stories about the English General Baptists:
bq. Uncertain as we are about the method of transmission, we can be more confident in claiming that, at a minimum, Smyth’s congregation [of General Baptists] was the principal medium through wich Continental Anabaptism was transferred into England. Part and parcel of that Anabaptism was the belief in divine guidance of communities seeking God’s will together. George Fox and his early followers read little other than their Bibles. Their doctrine came from beliefs that were in the air and in the various religious communities which they visited. p. 128
I didn’t realize that George Fox’s uncle was a Baptist. That might indicate a rather more direct influence. I’ll have fun looking up your references. It’s a shame I didn’t take the phone number of the chap whose inquiry to the bookstore started all this interest!
Hi. Interesting conversation! I’m a member of the Church of the Brethren. Our roots are in German Pietism but our faith and practise have always had a lot in common with Anabaptism — in fact that’s how we usually designate ourselves.
We have historically lived in the same communities with lots of intermarrying — the Mennonites would say it’s a falling away on the part of their members.
(We Brethren have had a harder time hanging onto our distinctive witness.)
Anyway, the sternest Mennonite will not acknowledge us as Anabaptist because of our strain of Pietism. To them, the Pietist’s emphasis on the individual experience is the complete antithesis of their community centered theology.
I’ll end with a joke told in my joint-affiliated congregation (Mennonite/Church of the Brethren): The Mennonites pray for the Brethren who vote for the Quakers.