Fall 2025 · Vol. 54 No. 2 · pp. 258–269
Reformed and Anabaptist
When I married my wife, she was a member of the Mennonite Brethren Church, and I was a member of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC). In our traditional vows, borrowed from The Book of Common Prayer, we solemnly vowed to each other “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death.” But these vows also created a personal paradox for me. When I joined the CRC, I answered “I do” to the question: “Do you heartily believe the doctrine . . . taught in this church . . . to be the true and complete doctrine of salvation . . . ?” Among the doctrinal standards of the CRC is the 1561 Belgic Confession that states, in Article 36, that “we detest the Anabaptists and other seditious people . . . .” 1 Hence my paradox: I was simultaneously committed to loving and cherishing my wife and to detesting her heartily.
My thesis is that Anabaptism is a logical extension of a Reformed theology.
As this slightly amusing (I hope) anecdote suggests, relationships between the Anabaptist and the Reformed traditions have changed since the sixteenth century. This change was highlighted in the May 29, 2025, celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of the p. 259 Anabaptist movement. This celebration featured a footwashing ritual by César García, general secretary of Mennonite World Conference (MWC), and Setri Nyomi, interim general secretary of the World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC). During a moving service of footwashing, the gathered congregation read a litany drawn from the recently adopted joint MWC-WCRC statement, “Restoring Our Family to Wholeness: Seeking a Common Witness.” One part of that statement reads,
Together, we acknowledge that our two traditions, though born in the same renewal movement, have been divided by deeply held convictions concerning baptism, the nature of the church, biblical hermeneutics, and the role of the state. We confess and lament that we have lived alongside each other for many centuries without questioning or exploring this division in the Body of Christ. 2
I hope that the present essay will make a small contribution to the project of restoring these two parts of the Christian family to wholeness.
Raised in the Reformed Tradition
I have occasionally described myself theologically as a “completed Calvinist.” I had some friends who were Messianic Jews and referred to themselves as “completed Jews.” That is, they continued to affirm their Jewish upbringing, but they regarded their affirmation of Jesus as the Messiah as the fulfillment of the biblical story. I think that a similar thing can be said about the relationship between the Reformed tradition and the Anabaptist tradition. My thesis is that Anabaptism is a logical extension of a Reformed theology.
This essay is hard to classify in terms of its genre. It is partly personal reflection, partly (informed) historical speculation, and partly philosophical explanation. So it may be helpful to provide a little bit of personal context. I was born and raised in western Michigan in the CRC. I attended elementary and secondary schools closely associated with the CRC. I graduated from Calvin College (now Calvin University) with degrees in philosophy and English. The community in which I was raised proudly identified as Calvinistic, and we learned the TULIP acronym (Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, Perseverance of the saints) as a quick summary of Calvinist theology. But these elements were not seen as the heart of what it meant to be a Calvinist. We were aware of disagreements about how to understand the various elements of TULIP. p. 260
There were, for instance, lively debates about how to understand predestination and reprobation. Prominent thinkers within the community held libertarian accounts of free will in contrast to the more common compatibilist accounts in the Reformed tradition that emphasize God’s sovereignty. Libertarian accounts of free will hold that at least some human choices are entirely within the control of the person making the choice. Compatibilists hold that we need to understand human freedom in a way that is compatible with determinism; that is, an action can be free for a person but also be outside of that person’s control. The Calvinist view that God chooses who will and will not be saved seems to require a compatibilist approach to human freedom.
Most of my adult life I have lived in a Mennonite Brethren context teaching philosophy at Tabor College. I chose to teach at Tabor because I had become persuaded through reading various Mennonite writers, including Ron Sider, that the Anabaptist commitment to peacemaking through nonviolent means is the way of Jesus. After longer exposure to the Anabaptist community, I became aware of the foundational role of discipleship, of following Jesus.
It is helpful, perhaps, to note two shorthand summaries of theology. In the Christian Reformed community in which I grew up, we learned this summary: sin, salvation, and service. In the church I attend currently, we have adopted Palmer Becker’s three essentials of Anabaptism: Jesus is the center of our faith; community is the center of our life; reconciliation is the center of our work. 3 Both of these summaries are shorthand for much more complex discussions. But while the language is different, I am comfortable with both of these short summaries, and I think that the second one represents a fulfillment of what I was taught early in my life as the heart of Christian faith.
I am not a historian. When I say that I am a completed Calvinist, I am not making a claim about what various historical luminaries in the Reformed or Anabaptist traditions held. What I am suggesting is that there is a methodological similarity between the contemporary expression of the Reformed tradition in which I was raised and the contemporary expression of the Anabaptist tradition in which I have lived most of my adult life. I think the idea of being a completed Calvinist can best be explained by beginning with a very broad stroke account of the intersection of church history, philosophical history, and political history. Since I am not a historian, this may be somewhat idiosyncratic. This should not be understood as professional academic history but rather as a “what if” story. What if we think about church as well as intellectual and political history in the way that the following story suggests? p. 261
Constantine Joins Church and State
The story begins with the move—begun by Emperor Constantine in the fourth century—to link church and state, a change that made the Christian church the dominant cultural institution in Europe. For our purposes, the most important consequence is that the church became the authority in all areas of life—religious, intellectual, and civil. While many types of dispute were solved locally, major issues could ultimately be decided by the church. It might take a long time to reach a resolution. It might even require a major assembly of church authorities. But there was a mechanism for resolving conflicts.
As the centuries wore on, challenges to church authority arose. Princes, kings, and emperors began to challenge the civil authority of the church. For instance, Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV pressed for more independence from Pope Gregory VII in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In the intellectual arena, increasingly empirical methods began to conflict with the received Aristotelian science that dominated the church-based university system. And in the religious realm, the challenges of the Protestant Reformation undermined church authority in religion in the sixteenth century.
The result of this loss of authority was chaos—at least in the civil and religious areas. Prolonged wars of religion plagued Europe, and Protestantism generated more and more schisms. In many ways, Europe was facing a crisis of authority. There was no universal, or even widely acknowledged, authority that could resolve political and theological disputes. It seemed that war—physical coercion—was the only way to overcome the conflicts.
On the other hand, the intellectual arena seemed to offer a more helpful alternative. Genuine progress was being made in mathematics and the natural sciences. There were numerous discoveries in geometry, chemistry, astronomy, and biology, and agreement was achieved across political and theological divides. As a result, some thinkers—most notably the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes—looked to mathematics and the sciences as the paradigm for how to solve intellectual conflicts. Their view was that human reason used properly would yield certainty.
Descartes envisioned knowledge as a building consisting of a foundation with a structure erected on the foundation. He begins Meditation 1 of Meditations on First Philosophy as follows:
It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful p. 262 was everything I had since constructed on this basis; and from that time I was convinced that I must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structure in the sciences. 4
This vision of human reason properly used as the authority that can resolve conflicts—civil, intellectual, and theological—captured the imagination of the Enlightenment era. 5
A Philosophical Puzzle
But that vision also revived a philosophical puzzle called “the problem of the criterion.” 6 Roderick Chisholm, one of the most prominent American philosophers of the late twentieth century, writes,
“The problem of the criterion” seems to me to be one of the most difficult of all the problems of philosophy. I am tempted to say that one has not begun to philosophize until one has faced this problem and has recognized how unappealing, in the end, each of the possible solutions is. 7
Chisholm summarizes the problem as follows. 8 There are two questions that need to be answered:
a. What do we know?
and
b. What are the criteria of knowledge?
To be justified in answering (A), we first need an answer to (B). But to be justified in answering (B), we first need an answer to (A).
Chisholm suggests three possible responses to this problem. The first is skepticism. One can respond by saying that since one cannot offer a justified answer to either (A) or (B), we have shown that we cannot make any legitimate claims of having knowledge. In fact, we know nothing.
The second possible response is what Chisholm calls “methodism.” The methodist is one who answers question (B). He or she says that in fact we have a criterion for knowledge. Chisholm says that empiricists, such as John Locke and David Hume, were methodists. A knowledge claim was genuine only if it was made on the basis of evidence of the senses. On the basis of the answer to (B), the methodist works out an answer to (A). Of course, the answer to (B) need not be empiricism. Other options are available, but empiricism is a familiar example. p. 263
The third possible response is what Chisholm calls “particularism.” The particularist says that we have an answer to (A) and then develops an answer to (B) on the basis of the answer to (A). Presumably one works somewhat inductively, asking questions such as, What is it that the things mentioned in my answer to (A) have in common?
I have argued elsewhere both that modernism and postmodernism choose the methodist route (in Chisholm’s sense) and that there is good reason to prefer the particularist approach instead. The Enlightenment commitment to human reason, properly used as the ultimate authority, is an example of a methodist approach to the problem of the criterion. Descartes’s proposal is that the proper way for human reason to function is to start from a set of propositions that are beyond any kind of doubt and are thus propositions about which one is absolutely certain. These initial likely candidates for such propositions are propositions that report one’s state of mind rather than reporting something about external reality.
So, a claim about external reality, such as, There is a tree outside my window, can be doubted; perhaps I am hallucinating or dreaming. On the other hand, a proposition about my own state of mind, such as, It appears to me that there is a tree outside my window, is beyond doubt. Even if I am hallucinating or dreaming, my mental state is still that of seeming to see a tree. Others can cause me to doubt that I actually see a tree, but no one can cause me to doubt that I seem to see a tree. I am the only one with direct access to my internal mental states. So, on Descartes’s picture, the foundation of proper human reason is the internal mental state of human beings.
Once these absolutely certain propositions have been identified, then one can build additional beliefs on top of them using truth-guaranteeing rules of logic. If an individual starts from propositions that are beyond doubt and hence are true, and that individual uses truth-guaranteeing logical rules, then the results of her or his reasoning will also be true. If all human beings follow this method, then all will reach the same conclusions. In some ways it is similar to a geometric proof. If all geometers start with the same axioms and use the same logical rules, all will end up with same conclusions.
On Descartes’ view, a person only knows something if they know the basis for their knowledge. So human reason, used in this way, is authoritative. It is this “knowing that you know” that makes human reason a universal authority. He thought that he could provide a logical pathway from our internal mental states to claims about the external world, the world outside of our minds. Unfortunately, his proposed pathway failed. Other philosophers proposed other paths, but those failed as well. Only a p. 264 few philosophers challenged the entire Cartesian project. 9 Though philosophers debated the details of Descartes’s proposal, the vision of human reason being the authority that can resolve civil, scientific, and religious conflict had captured the imagination of Enlightenment thinkers.
Enlightenment and Reformed Epistemologies
The Reformed tradition (at least the part in which I grew up) did not buy into the Enlightenment vision of human reason being the ultimate authority in theological and religious matters. One example of this disagreement is in the epistemology of contemporary Reformed philosophers Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (and others), often called “Reformed epistemology.” 10 Reformed epistemology is an example of a particularist approach to the problem of the criterion. 11
In Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga identifies two foundational sources of Christian belief: the sensus divinitatis and the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Of the first, he writes, “Calvin’s basic claim is that there is a sort of instinct, a natural human tendency, a disposition . . . to form beliefs about God under a variety of conditions and in a variety of situations.” 12 In addition, he writes, “the basic idea, I think, is that there is a kind of faculty or cognitive mechanism, what Calvin calls a sensus divinitatis or sense of divinity, which in a wide variety of circumstances produces in us beliefs about God.” 13
The sensus divinitatis is corrupted by sin and can be corrupted to a greater degree in some people than in others. Note that this is not a method like the Cartesian approach. Rather, one has a faculty by which one has an awareness of the presence of God or of the way that God has worked in the world, analogous to those having healthy ears being able to hear sounds. We don’t believe this on the basis that it cannot be doubted. Other people can doubt the believer’s perception of the world, but that person may be ignorant of God just as a deaf person is ignorant of sound. An individual may not even realize that what he or she knows is known by means of the sensus divinitatis. In all likelihood, the person is not even aware that there is such a thing as the sensus divinitatis. So, the person does not know how she acquired her beliefs about God. Nonetheless, she finds herself with these beliefs. On Plantinga’s account, her beliefs are warranted. They are warranted even if she is not aware of the grounds of her knowledge. On Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology, we start building knowledge from particular beliefs.
A second source of Christian beliefs for Reformed epistemology is the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Plantinga writes, p. 265
By virtue of the work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of those to whom faith is given, the ravages of sin (including the cognitive damage) are repaired, gradually or suddenly, to a greater or lesser extent. Furthermore, it is by virtue of the activity of the Holy Spirit that Christians come to grasp, believe, accept, endorse, and rejoice in the truth of the great things of the gospel. It is thus by virtue of this activity that the Christian believes that “in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting men’s sins against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). 14
The Holy Spirit brings about the opportunity to believe, for instance, that the Bible is trustworthy and the Word of God, or that God is calling someone to follow after Jesus. The person may not be aware of the Holy Spirit’s role in bringing about these beliefs. So, as with the sensus divinitatis, the testimony of the Holy Spirit generates particular beliefs, but it does not do so by means of a kind of reason that will be authoritative for any rational person.
So, Enlightenment epistemology has a vision of human reason as the ultimate tool for conflict resolution. To do so, it proposes a method that, if followed properly, will bring all rational people into agreement. Reformed epistemology rejects that vision of human reason. A good example is the way Wolterstorff responded to Immanuel Kant’s famous work titled Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone (that is, faith must be restricted by reason) by his own book titled Reason Within the Bounds of Religion (that is, reason must be restricted by faith). Reformed epistemology proposes an account of rationality in which some people acquire warranted beliefs about God but possibly without the ability to explain how they acquired those beliefs. Human reason does not play the authoritative role that Enlightenment thinkers envisioned.
Reformed and Anabaptist Ethics
However, when the Reformed tradition addressed questions of ethics, it did not take the same approach as it did in epistemology. Instead, it approached ethics with the Enlightenment assumption that a good account of ethics is an approach that will be persuasive to any rational person. Christian philosopher Robert Roberts, in describing Enlightenment approaches to ethics, explicitly invokes Descartes’s metaphor of knowledge as a building. “The metaphor that guides modern ethical theory,” he writes, “is that of an architectural structure—a building—with special attention to its foundation . . . .” 15 p. 266
Roberts goes on to identify three desiderata of a foundation of ethics. The first is that it must have “complete generality”; that is, “the foundation has to support the whole of morality.” 16 Secondly, an ethical theory must have “compelling appeal.” He writes, “A proper foundation, according to advocates of moral theory, has to be undeniable by rational people.” 17 He adds, “Any proposal for the foundations of ethics must garner universal adherence, at least among rational people of good will.” 18 The third, and final, desideratum of an ethical theory is that it must be the “basis of agreement about moral issues.” He writes, “A proper moral theory . . . would allow us to resolve these disagreements by appeal to the fundamental principle of ethics.” 19 These principles are remarkably similar to the Enlightenment approach to epistemology. More specifically, they represent a methodist (in Chisholm’s sense) approach to ethics just as Enlightenment epistemology was methodist.
Anabaptist ethicists, however, did not make the assumptions of modern ethical theory in their approach to ethics. James Wm. McClendon Jr. begins his Systematic Theology with a volume on ethics, and in that volume he addresses the lives of particular historical figures—Sarah and Jonathan Edwards, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day—rather than focusing exclusively on general moral principles. 20 Similarly, Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger is an example of a particularist approach to ethics. His starting point for ethical reflection is the question, “What is God’s attitude toward the poor and oppressed?” He elaborates on that question saying, “We can only answer the questions about God’s ‘bias’ toward the poor after we have searched for biblical answers to five related questions.” The first of those questions is, “What concern for the poor did God disclose at those pivotal points (especially the exodus, the destruction of Israel and Judah, and the Incarnation) where he acted in history to reveal himself?” 21 The argument of the book starts from specific events rather than from a general moral principle. I became aware, in this and other works by Mennonite writers, that starting from specific practices and events was common in Anabaptist ethics.
In my experience, the Reformed tradition has adopted a modernist approach to ethics. That is, like the Enlightenment vision for epistemology, they want ethics to be completely general, have compelling appeal, and be the basis for moral agreement. Thus, defenses of a moral position that are based solely on an appeal to scriptural authority are suspect. One must also be able to make a case that would persuade “any rational person of good will.” Since many rational people of good will do not recognize the Bible as authoritative, an ethical position that is grounded exclusively in p. 267 Scripture is inadequate. For example, when I would argue against the use of violence on the basis of Jesus’ teaching and example, the response would often be that not enough people would be persuaded by the argument. It did not have a general-enough appeal.
A Completed Calvinist
We are now in a position to explain the idea of being a “completed Calvinist.” I am inclined to believe that the reason the Reformed tradition has embraced the modernist view of ethics is because of the Reformed acceptance of Constantinianism. Constantinianism is the perspective—named after the fourth century CE Roman emperor who began the process of uniting church and state as recounted above—that says (among other things) that the Christian church is responsible for ensuring the moral health of the community of which it is a part. It is the responsibility of the church to make the nation a Christian nation. In Constantinianism, Christians accept the role of being the institution that has the authority to resolve moral conflicts.
Calvinists rejected the claim that human reason is the ultimate epistemic authority. They acknowledged the role that God plays—by creating us with a sensus divinitatis and by the testimony of the Holy Spirit—in the formation of our belief in God. I completely accept this part of Calvinism. But the Calvinism of my experience failed to extend that same approach to thinking about ethics. The Anabaptist tradition, on the other hand, extended the Calvinist approach regarding epistemology to ethics by rejecting the Constantinian temptation.
The Anabaptist acceptance of certain practices—such as nonviolent resistance to evil and the rejection of violent resistance that are taught and modeled by Jesus—is the logical continuation of the Calvinist rejection of “methodist” accounts of human reason. These two areas—epistemology and ethics—were crucial to my own understanding of faith, and I found that in many other ways the Reformed tradition and Anabaptism complement each other well. For instance, each tradition wrestles with questions about how the Christian community relates to the culture in which it finds itself. I have learned from both approaches. Similarly, both traditions are committed to peace and the restoration of shalom.
Now I am committed to the way of Jesus as presented in the New Testament Gospels and followed by the apostles and the early church. My faith is now completed. Further, I no longer feel any compulsion—logical or ecclesial—to detest my wife. p. 268
Notes
- Board of Publications of the Christian Reformed Church. Psalter Hymnal: Doctrinal Standards and Liturgy of the Christian Reformed Church. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Board of Publications of the Christian Reformed Church, 1976.
- MWC and WCRC, Restoring Our Family to Wholeness: Seeking a Common Witness (29 May 2025), https://mwc-cmm.org/en/resources/restoring-our-family-wholeness-seeking-common-witness/.
- Palmer Becker, Anabaptist Essentials: Ten Signs of a Unique Christian Faith (Harrisonburg, VA: Herald, 2017).
- René Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 144.
- For present purposes, I use the terms Enlightenment and modern/modernist as synonyms to mean the period of intellectual history beginning with Descartes in the seventeenth century and continuing (in some ways) until the present.
- This section of the essay draws from David S. Faber, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Problem of the Criterion,” Direction 30 (Fall 2001), 162–76.
- Roderick M. Chisholm, “The Problem of the Criterion,” in The Foundations of Knowing (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 61.
- Chisholm, 65.
- See, for example, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
- Published works include Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds., Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983); Alvin Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); idem, Warrant and Proper Function (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); idem, Warranted Christian Belief (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Nicholas Wolterstorff, Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984).
- Note that this is an implicit response to the problem of the criterion; I am not aware of any explicit discussion of that puzzle in the Reformed epistemology literature.
- Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 171.
- Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 172.
- Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 243–44.
- Robert C. Roberts, Virtue Ethics in Christian Perspective (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2024), 79. p. 269
- Roberts, 81.
- Roberts, 81.
- Roberts, 82.
- Roberts, 83. Note that Roberts is not endorsing these desiderata; he is describing some assumptions made by modern moral theory.
- James Wm. McClendon Jr., Ethics: Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1986).
- Ron Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study, rev. and exp. ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1984), 53, 54.
