A revisionist (and reductionist) classic which displays the broad diversity of Anabaptist teachings on non-violence. Using the critical standard of realpolitik, this is a different way of telling the Anabaptist story and denies non-violence as an ethical possibility. Subsequent scholarship has questioned Stayer’s theoretical grid, his failure to understand the motivation of the Anabaptists and asked why his reading of the data is more plausible than the traditional Mennonite view. It’s not just that circumstances made non-violence inevitable, rather they came to see non-violence at the heart of the gospel.
ISBN: 9781592440191 (2002) 412pp