THE POPULARITY OF MARTYRDOM
As the twentieth century faded and the twenty-first century dawned, many North American Christians-living in the midst of unprecedented prosperity, prestige, and comfort-renewed their interest in the martyr story as a way of giving meaning to Christian faith and life. Among evangelical Christians, for example, the story of Cassie Bernall-the young teenager who was said to have acknowledged her belief in God before being gunned down at Columbine High School-revived a popular interest in martyrdom that spilled over into mainstream American culture. She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, a book authored by Cassie's mother and focusing on Cassie's journey from troubled teenager to youthful Christian made the New York Times Best Seller list. A similar book about Cassie's classmate Rachel who was also a Christian and also killed at Columbine has joined numerous other popular books about the Columbine shootings. Popular Christian music groups have helped to promote these martyr stories. Christian artist Michael W. Smith penned the afterword to the latest version of She Said Yes, describing his experience of singing at the memorial service for Columbine victims. The contemporary Christian music band D.C. Talk released a collection of martyr stories entitled Jesus Freaks, which draws from the long history of the Christian martyr tradition and cites as one of its sources the Martyrs Mirror.
North American evangelical Christians have been attracted to the martyr story for some time. As a youngster I remember reading numerous books from evangelical publishing houses about the martyrdom of modern Christians, who were usually either missionaries or believers living in communist regimes. Elizabeth Elliot's book Through Gates of Splendor told the story of the killing of her husband Jim Elliot and his fellow missionaries by the Auca Indians in the 1950s. Richard Wurmbrand's organization, The Voice of the Martyrs, promoted books and provided stories that described in vivid detail the persecution of evangelical Christians behind the Iron Curtain. I remember a book telling the story of Judith, a young Jewish woman who was converted to Christianity and eventually murdered by communist soldiers because of her missionary work. Corrie ten Boom's book The Hiding Place described the brutal persecution of a Dutch Christian family who hid Jews during the Holocaust. Many of these earlier books were published while evangelicals still saw themselves as marginal in American culture and such martyr stories presumably helped to reinforce that sense of opposition between the church and surrounding culture. What is perhaps surprising is that at this time when evangelical Christians have come to dominate the religious and cultural landscape of the United States, the martyr story still seems to have persuasive power.
Of course, it is not just evangelicals who are fascinated with martyrs. A recent book published by Orbis-a Catholic publishing house-is entitled Martyrs. It collects the stories of over twenty Christian martyrs of the twentieth century, including people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Oscar Romero, and Steven Biko. And evangelicals share with mainline Protestants and Catholics, as well as with Anabaptists, a long and honored martyr tradition, captured for Protestants in the pages of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, and for Catholics in collected writings about the lives of saints. The first detailed comparative study of three distinctive Christian martyrological traditions-Protestant, Anabaptist, and Catholic-has just been published by Brad Gregory, a young history professor at Stanford University. This book, entitled Salvation at Stake, demonstrates how significant martyr stories have been for these three distinctive Christian traditions and argues that if we are to adequately understand the continuing divisions among Catholics, Protestants, and Anabaptists, we must develop a better appreciation for how fiercely the stories of martyrdom secured these divisions, especially since these stories often included as the villainous perpetrators members of one of the other Christian communities.
MARTYRDOM AND MENNONITE IDENTITY
It is within this broader context of Christian martyr stories-both in its ancient form going back through the Reformation to the early church and in its contemporary popular manifestations-that we can place the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition of martyr narratives and images. Like other Christians we have relied on the strength and courage of martyrs to help us remember who we are, what we believe, and why it is important. Like other Christians, we have updated our martyrs' roll with stories of the persecution of twentieth-century Russian Mennonites by Stalin, of the torture and death of the Hofer brothers at the hands of the U.S. military during World War II, and of the disappearance of young MCC worker Clayton Kratz in 1920 during his term of relief work in the Ukraine. During the 1990s Mennonites invested themselves significantly in reconsidering the tradition of the martyr story. This has included a number of communication venues: the Mirror of the Martyrs exhibit and its magnificent catalog, at least two different CDs of martyr music, a play that has made the rounds at the Mennonite colleges called Dirk's Exodus, and numerous books that popularize the accounts of martyrdom from the Martyrs Mirror. The latest item I'm aware of is a lower-priced paperback edition of the Martyrs Mirror itself.
All of this interest in martyr stories raises the question of why North American Christians in general and Mennonites in particular remain fascinated with martyrdom, with the giving up of one's life in the name of a greater good, a higher cause, and the right thing. Why would people living in the midst of great wealth and unprecedented consumption be drawn to accounts of faithful disciples who gave up their property, their loved ones, indeed their very lives, for the sake of their beliefs?
James Lowry offers one of the most persuasive answers I have seen to this question in his analysis of the two dramatic phrases which appear in the title of the book: Martyrs Mirror and Bloody Theater. Lowry provides a splendid survey of the use of the word "mirror" in biblical, Anabaptist, and other historical sources and also suggests why "Martyrs Mirror" has won out over "Bloody Theater" as the title by which the book is best known. For Lowry, the metaphor of the mirror captures the power of the martyr accounts to challenge us by encouraging us to compare our lives with those of the martyrs. "When we look into a literal mirror we see ourselves as we are-rather than as we ought to be," Lowry writes. "We need another image for what we ought to be." For Lowry the biblical picture of Jesus as well as the images of the martyrs who witnessed to the way of the cross provide this "figurative mirror." As a person who studies the communicative and persuasive power of North American consumer culture, I might add that during a time when slick advertising floods our minds with superficial images that make us unhappy with who we are, popular martyr stories can provide a therapeutic response by offering the authenticity of commitments worth dying for in a culture that insists everything worthwhile can be bought or sold.
But if Lowry celebrates the power of these martyrs' stories to name our allegiance to Christ and to provide reflections of who we want to be, others have been less certain that such stories are helpful to church identity any longer. At a time when the church has taken up significant social responsibilities within the social order how can it be helped by stories that focus on the evil of the world and the persecution of church?
In an essay of response to the staging of Dirk's Exodus at Bethel College, which appeared in Mennonite Life back in 1992, Melvin Goering argued that "the theological assumptions and social context of Mennonites at the end of the 20th century are so different" from the world of the martyrs that the stories of these martyrs no longer provide useful guidance. According to Goering, the assimilation of Mennonites into the North American societal institutions has challenged traditional two-kingdom theology and led to a process of cultural immersion. Goering claims that the stories of the martyrs emphasize two-kingdom dualism, a sharp dichotomy between good and evil, rejection of earthly authority, purity over prudence, preaching rather than dialogue, and the individual over community. As such, he writes, "the messages call people to psychological patterns which do not foster cooperative institutional life, certainly not life with those outside the church." Perhaps most damning of Goering's critiques is that the martyr story fosters a quest for theological purity that detracts from generosity to others, promoting justice for the poor, and involvement in necessarily compromised political action and social change movements. Finally Goering argues that the new context of cultural immersion requires stories that "assist Mennonites to obedience with flexibility, beliefs without dogmatism, faithfulness within culture, ethical leadership within institutions, love and justice within social structures, conviction in the midst of ambiguity, dialogue without arrogance, care without condescension, openness without disintegration" and "responsible caring for God's creation-the world." The martyr tradition represented by the story of Dirk Willems "is not such a story," Goering concludes.
Whether we agree with Goering's conclusion or not, we must acknowledge that there is some truth in his description of the effect of the martyr tradition on Mennonites. There is no doubt in my mind that the present struggles over Mennonite Church integration are symptomatic of "psychological patterns which do not foster cooperative institutional life." Mennonites who have been shaped by the martyr tradition are often not the polite, liberal, tolerant, flexible citizens that Goering hopes culturally assimilated Mennonites might become. And insofar as prosperous and comfortable Mennonites have identified too easily with dispossessed and persecuted martyrs, dysfunctional psychic complexes are sure to develop-from unwarranted self-righteousness to unwarranted self-loathing. Looking at ourselves in the Martyrs Mirror may indeed lead us to complacency about a heroic heritage or to despair at ever measuring up. For this reason, I want to suggest that the time has come for North American Mennonites not to turn away from the Martyrs Mirror but rather to shift our perspective. Rather than only seeking in vain to identify with the martyrs, perhaps we should take up honestly the position of spectator, looking at the terrifying and triumphant images from a safe distance and wondering at what we see. In short, we might come to see these stories and images as "bloody theater"-as a drama that has been staged for our benefit, that inspires us to dream and fantasize, and ignites hope and desire for what could yet be. Such a perspective is certainly encouraged by Thieleman J. van Braght in his preface to the Martyrs Mirror, where he compares the dark yet hopeful scenes of Christian martyrdom with the merry comedies and pleasurable performances of the Greek theatre. Moreover, in the first edition of the Martyrs Mirror, van Braght privileges the words "Bloody Theater" as the first phrase in a very lengthy title in which "Martyrs Mirror" actually appeared down near the bottom, thirteen lines from the top. While later editions of the book moved the phrase "Martyrs Mirror" back toward the top as the second phrase in the title, "Bloody Theater" remains to this day as the first phrase in the title.
Without discounting the value of the "mirror" metaphor I want to highlight two gains that we might make in thinking of these martyr scenes as theatrical spectacles for which we are more the audience and less the participant. First of all, we can begin to understand these stories and pictures as captivating human dramas in which we come to admire the central characters for their extraordinary courage and stamina, people who "went boldly onward to meet their death" or, having escaped death, nevertheless "bear the marks of Jesus, their Saviour, on their bodies." In other words, we can simply see these martyrs as heroes of the faith, even larger than life, transcending circumstance and constraint to make an outstanding witness. Secondly, having been persuaded by the witness of these martyrs, we can seek to live as if their stories were true, to assume that there are commitments worth having that are greater than life itself, and to recognize the triumph of stubborn defenselessness over brute force. In being convicted of the truth of the martyrs' witness, it is less important that we are able to see ourselves as capable of martyrdom-an identification encouraged by the "mirror" metaphor-and more important that we see the martyrs' witness as speaking into our own time. Indeed, while many of these martyr stories were originally told and published to encourage and inspire a persecuted church, the Martyrs Mirror in its present form was originally compiled for an audience of increasingly wealthy Mennonites living in the Dutch Golden Age in circumstances that in many respects more closely resemble our own than those of the martyrs. While van Braght himself sought identification with the martyrs and urged solidarity with their witness, he also wrote passionately "of the greater danger there is at this time than in the bloody and distressing times of the martyrs," a time during which "arises that shameful and vast commerce which extends far beyond the sea into other parts of the world, but which notwithstanding cannot satisfy those who love it." Among the symptoms of this "shameful commerce" are "numerous large, expensive, and ornamented houses," the "wearing of clothes from foreign countries," "strange fashions" that "are as changeable as the moon," and "the giving and attending great dinners, lavish banquets and wedding-feasts… where everything is in profusion, and where the beneficent gifts of the Lord which should not be used otherwise than with great thankfulness, and of which a portion naturally belongs to the poor, are squandered and consumed without the least necessity, even by those who are considered sober and temperate…" Does it not seem as if van Braght is describing postmodern American consumer culture? Is it not sobering to consider that our time may be a time of greater challenge and danger for disciples of Jesus than was the perilous sixteenth century for Anabaptists and other radicalized Christians?
During the remaining part of this essay, I want to suggest how the martyr witness might speak to our own dangerous time by suggesting some ways in which their dramatic performance of faithfulness under violent persecution by religious tyrants might inspire us to an equally dramatic performance of faithfulness in face of manipulative seduction by consumer culture.
BLOODY THEATER AS ALTERITY POLITICS
In a book entitled Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity, Jeffrey Nealon contrasts the focus on identity politics that characterized much of the 1990s cultural and political climate in North America with what he describes as a performance-centered politics. While identity politics plays the game of difference to shore up social selfhood, a performance-centered alterity politics "considers identity as beholden and responsive first of all to the other." This move from identity politics to alterity politics corresponds to the shift from mirror to theater in the radical Christian discipleship of performance for which I am calling. Elsewhere I have argued that such a discipleship of performance makes our bodies members of Christ's body, vulnerable in our corporate and bodily witness to the world created and loved by God, a world from which we have also been set apart in the sense that we are called to make God's love known in both word and deed. I use the term performance to describe our discipleship because I think it can help us better grasp the bodily, material character of our witness and perhaps extend into the worship of our everyday lives a stronger sense of the roles we play in the drama of God's redemptive story.
Such a performative discipleship is characterized by consciousness of audience, attending to the response of the Other to the acts of the disciple, without simply acceding to conventional wisdom or the status quo. Similar to the alterity politics of performance described by Nealon, this performative discipleship is focused less on abstract ideals that are unachievable and more on the concrete actions that are called forth by the neighbor. As Nealon writes, "it is not a necessary failure or the resentment of a broken promise that drives alterity politics; rather, it is the positive promise and concretization of different actions, practices, and organizations that orient and give force to an alterity politics of response." This commitment to concrete, material, bodily solidarity with the Other-with that which is on the Way-prevents an Anabaptist discipleship of performance from becoming a merely respectable adaptation of the gospel to mainstream values and comforts, an adaptation that a critique such as Goering's seems all too prepared to accommodate in my view. Indeed, for Anabaptists, such a solidarity with the Other has most often been expressed in terms of conscientious objection to any program, institution, law, or practice that conscripts self or neighbor into a politics of the uniform, a rendering of the Other as the same, whether by baptizing the child or by killing the enemy. Such a comprehensive conscientious objection is the central narrative thrust of the Martyrs Mirror from beginning to end, to my way of thinking. And this objection is a full-bodied witness that employs both body and tongue, word and deed, to struggle defenselessly, yet stubbornly, against demonic forces and powers that blaspheme God and "regard human blood and swine's blood about alike," to repeat the memorable words of Menno Simons.
What are the features of this stubborn witness for freedom against the politics of conscription as they are depicted in the Bloody Theater of the Martyrs Mirror? How might acknowledging the truth of such a drama change our own perceptions of the world within which we live and act and thus perhaps transform our ways of life? I suggest four postures that are visible in the performative, bodily witness of the martyrs in this Bloody Theater. These are not abstract ideals, commendable virtues, or theological principles so much as they are roles taken up in a radical performance of Christian discipleship, in an alterity politics that sticks close to the ground, as it were.
POSTURES DEPICTED IN THE BLOODY THEATER
In describing postures taken up by the protagonists of the bloody theater, I am seeking to describe a social stance that takes up a position in relationship to others-whether friend, foe, neighbor or stranger-and toward the powers that reinforce the status quo-be they political, cultural, economic, or religious. Here I am trying less to convey principles on which martyred Anabaptists stood and more to notice styles of engagement or attitudes toward the social order that we may find dramatically inspiring and thus capable of reorienting our own perspectives and of refiguring our social roles.
Spectacle
The martyrs we read about in the Martyrs Mirror are generally self-conscious about the way their witness would be viewed by others. Today we would call them media-savvy. Far from manifesting sectarian naivete, Anabaptist martyrs gave much attention to the public character of their witness. We find, for example, that Anabaptists resisted mightily the temptation of public officials to take them away under cover of night and execute them in secret, thus avoiding a potentially dangerous public spectacle. In 1553, two Anabaptist invalids-one a bachelor named Tijs and the other a "maiden" called Beerentge-are captured by the authorities in Friesland. As the Martyrs Mirror tells the story, Tijs and Beerentge "were two zealous followers of Christ; for this reason they had a great desire to meet at some time for the purpose of rejoicing with each other in the Word of God." This desire had gone unfulfilled since neither one was capable of traveling but after being apprehended by Anabaptist hunters, these two were finally brought together in prison. After being sentenced to drowning, Tijs was offended by the sentence because, as he put it, "Cats and dogs are drowned." Tijs and Beerentge then petitioned for the opportunity to be executed in public at the standard place of execution, "so that they might obtain the crown with their beloved brethren, and that the people present might hear and see for what cause they died." This petition was refused and at midnight the authorities put the two invalids "together into a bag, with their mouths gagged, threw them into a boat, and had them cast into the moat on the outside of the wall, and having been tied to the boat, the two were dragged along the moat until death ensued." The story of Anabaptist resistance to secret executions is not uncommon in the Martyrs Mirror. Indeed, the publication and circulation of accounts of executions is itself an effort to bring to public light a witness that authorities sought to silence. For example, in the account of Digna Pieters, executed by drowning November 23, 1555 at Dordrecht, we find the following observation: "This was the end of this valiant heroine of Jesus, who, though she was secretly murdered in a tower, like Joris Wippe and others, will hereafter, in the great day of the Lord, be brought openly to light…."
Another way that Anabaptists sought to make their witness public was to insist on public disputations with religious authorities rather than private interrogation sessions behind prison doors. Joos Kindt, burned at the stake in 1553, writes, for example that after a long interrogation by religious officials they proposed a disputation with him. Kindt reports his own answer: "Before the hall of justice, but not here." The officials responded that they would not take him there and asked him what he thought of the sacrament. Kindt responds in typical provocative Anabaptist fashion: "An idol, a little flour; and if I had your oil, I would grease my shoes with it." As Kindt described it, "then a contention arose, and they thought to fall upon me; but I defended myself valiantly with the Word of the Lord…And the Lord gave me such a mouth to speak, that for three hours I did not make one assertion, which they were able to refute." One senses here a keen public relations sensibility, an effort to shape public perception of discussions between imprisoned Anabaptists and the authorities-an Anabaptist post-debate spin control if you will. Indeed, one finds many such private disputations behind prison doors which appear in the Martyrs Mirror because Anabaptist disputants took the time to write down how they recollected the exchange. Thus the Anabaptists actually struggled mightily to make public a witness the authorities sought to suppress and keep secret.
Those who seek to do public communication on behalf of the church today-whether they are pastors, lay leaders, denominational servants, or communication professionals-should find ample precedent in the Martyrs Mirror for media-relations skills. Working to present the actions of the body of Christ to the world in a persuasive light-to make an effective public witness by running a well-designed public relations campaign on behalf of God's people is a valid and laudable calling. The reason this is so is that the church of Jesus Christ should be a fascinating and attention-getting spectacle for the world, even when it is not under persecution. The church of Jesus Christ should present itself as an attractive alternative to the regime of conspicuous consumption just as the Anabaptist martyrs took pains to present the witness of their underground church as an attractive and winsome alternative to the regime of prescribed piety in their time.
Antagonism
The Anabaptist protagonists described in the Martyrs Mirror were relentless critics of all forms of tyranny and idolatry; thus, they are shown again and again to have been in a relationship of antagonism with the powers of their social order as represented by icons and symbols of authority. The Anabaptists as depicted in the drama of bloody theater were not passive victims or withdrawn separatists; rather, they engaged in public acts of civil disobedience against symbolic figures of unwarranted and overextended authority. Two engravings by Jan Luyken capture well this dimension of nonviolent antagonism to social and political and religious tyranny. Neither of these engravings were reproduced in the Herald Press version of the Martyrs Mirror, which is unfortunate, because they are a powerful reminder of the dramatic challenge posed by the Anabaptist movement to the social order of Reformation Europe, and also a reminder that the Martyrs Mirror does not really provide justification for Mennonite quietism.
The first engraving depicts Simon de Kramer, a marketplace vendor of Bergen op Zoom in the Netherlands, who made a public witness by refusing to kneel down before a communion procession as it passed through town According to the account in the Martyrs Mirror, "when the priests passed him with their idol, this Simon did not dare give divine honor to this idol made by human hands, but, according to the testimony of God presented in the holy scriptures, would worship and serve only the Lord his God." This defiant posture quickly gave him away as a heretic and within a few days he was burned at the stake in a public execution. I am grateful that Jan Luyken chose to represent in his engraving not Simon's execution but rather his act of civil and religious disobedience. By looking closely at this engraving we can perhaps begin to get a feel for why the Anabaptists were experienced by authorities as such maddening and frustrating problems. There Simon stands, serenely and stubbornly, with his arms folded, with clearly no intention of kneeling, even though the good citizens of Bergen op Zoom are horrified and even terrified by his act of impiety. "Please, Simon, kneel," his colleagues are no doubt imploring. "Please don't make trouble. Won't you please just kneel down?" Simon's response may be nonverbal, but every inch of his body is communicating a determined and confident "no."
Simon's act of refusal was surely an unmasking of the idolatrous powers of his time. The consecrated communion wafers being paraded down main street by the religious authorities represent nothing less than the authority and power of the civil religion of Reformation Europe. Simon's posture of antagonism to such idolatrous mixing of civil authority with religious meaning reorients our own relationship to the icons and rituals of civil religion in our time. Whenever we refuse to say the pledge of allegiance or to sing the national anthem or to be involved in a military parade, either as spectators or participants, or to fly the American flag, or to pray during civic functions, or to pay war taxes, we are taking up a similar stance. When we engage in public demonstrations by marching against U.S.-led wars, protesting the marketing of war toys, challenging the legitimacy of the School of the Americas, standing vigil for the dying children in Iraq, and seeking repeal of the death penalty we are standing against the idolatries of violence and allegiance demanded by the powers of our own time and thus we are in those moments, like Simon, making our bodies into symbols of resistance, challenge, and refusal. Such antagonism too is a prominent posture of the protagonists in Bloody Theater.
The socially radical potential inherent in such acts of defiance and antagonism is captured well in the engraving that depicts the execution of Jorian Simons and Clement Dirks. When Jorian, a bookseller, is burned at the stake together with Clement, the authorities decide to also burn the forbidden Anabaptist books being published by Jorian. The Martyrs Mirror describes what happened: "When the books were perceived to be on fire, there arose such an uproar among the people, that the lords took to flight, whereupon the books were thrown among the multitude, who reached for them with eagerness; so that, through divine providence, the truth, instead of being quenched, as it was sought to do, was spread the more, by the reading of so great a number of these books." This engraving captures in a truly breathtaking manner how the powers are subverted by nonviolent resistance. On the one hand, the authorities are able to carry out their execution. On the other hand, the execution becomes an occasion for Anabaptist books to be distributed and the agents of tyranny to be run off the scene. Put differently, Anabaptist executions in the Martyrs Mirror are not merely occasions in which martyrs triumph by dying willingly. Rather, we are shown that such costly witness has the concrete potential to liberate people from oppression and injustice in the here and now. I like to think of this engraving as the most explicit depiction of the political potential of radical Christianity: costly witness to the triumph of the Lamb on the one side is shown to result in social and intellectual liberation on the other side. This is an image that can sustain hope in our own time that the disciple's faith is not without material fruit even in the here and now. I am also moved by the idea that liberation can be found in books-especially Anabaptist ones, especially now when everyone is bowing down to the televisual and internet gods-but that is perhaps not the most important point here.
Defenselessness
It is in the broader context of spectacular and public resistance to overextended political authorities that we must grasp another crucial posture of the martyr heroes in bloody theater: the defenselessness of the follower of Jesus. Perhaps the majority of the engravings by Jan Luyken depict with great pathos the submission of Anabaptists to torture and execution, rather than to recant, to betray fellow Anabaptists, or to take up the sword against the oppressor-which was a thinkable option taken up by some Anabaptists, most notably those associated with the Anabaptist kingdom at Münster.
Some Anabaptist scholars today and even some church leaders have come to doubt that nonviolence was absolutely central to pacifist Anabaptists' understanding of the gospel. While it is true that Anabaptists did not articulate in formal theological terms that peace is at the center of the gospel and thus should shape every theological category, it is clear that in the drama of salvation and redemption which they saw being played out around them, defenselessness was the most obvious and in some cases the singular criteria that distinguished the true church from the false church. Surely the Anabaptist movement came into being with the goal of reforming sacramental practices in general and baptismal theology in particular. And arguments about the validity and meaning of the sacraments appear all throughout the Martyrs Mirror. Yet, again and again, in the context of fierce persecution, what comes to convince pacifist Anabaptists most powerfully of the falsehood of the official religions is the willingness of church authorities to defend their theology with the sword of the prince.
One such example in which defenselessness becomes the posture that distinguishes true Christians from false Christians is found in the account of an execution of a number of unnamed believers at Rotterdam in the year 1544. Having described the clandestine assembly of Anabaptists in Rotterdam and the subsequent betrayal and capture of the congregation, the account in the Martyrs Mirror sets the scene in the following narrative which I quote at length:
The defenseless sheep having thus fallen into the claws of the wolves, these, according to their nature, treated them in the most cruel manner, in order to draw them away from the truth; all of which they willingly suffered and endured in patience for the name of Jesus, in the firm hope of his imperishable kingdom. Therefore, since they could by no tortures be brought to apostasize, they were sentenced to death, which sentence was executed in the following manner: The men were beheaded with the sword at the said place, while the women, in the most cruel manner were thrown into a boat, and thrust under the ice until death followed. Thus these two assemblies, or classes of people, that is the church of God, and the congregation of Satan clearly evinced of which spirit they were children; which can easily be seen by their fruits and nature. The anti-Christians by this, that, as ravening and devouring wolves, they were born by nature to seize and destroy. The congregation of Jesus Christ by this, that, as humble sheep and lambs, dumb, and with no desire for revenge, they were thus led to the slaughter, and willingly gave their bodies for the name of the Lord.
Such a singular focus on violence versus nonviolence as defining the difference between Jesus' followers and Jesus' detractors is not uncommon in the stories of the Martyrs Mirror. As such, it is not surprising that throughout the text and in the longer title of the Martyrs Mirror, the word "defenseless" is a critical qualifier for the kind of Christian being described. It is important that the Anabaptist critique of sword-bearing Christians is understood for what it was in its historical context: a critique of Christians who sought to enforce their views with the sword. Rather than being seen as a sectarian statement the Anabaptist position here should be seen rather as the condition of possibility for any meaningful ecumenicity: Christians who conclude disputations and arguments and discussions by executing their opponents (or handing them over to be killed) cannot be seen as followers of Jesus nor can they be taken seriously as partners in ecumenical discussion. I would add that while this defenselessness would clearly rule out participation in any kind of military force, it also has implications for struggles in the United States about the public sanction of religious expression or training. Such public sanction of religious ritual also has the effect of delegitimating and even shaming that which is not officially sanctioned or promoted. Furthermore powerful questions for interreligious and ecumenical dialogue are raised when a particular form of Christianity-say Anglo-Protestantism-has social hegemony by virtue of precedent, history, and habit. And in a time when evangelical Christians are becoming increasingly arrogant about their right to impose their religious paradigm on public life (whether it is public recital of the Lord's Prayer or insistence that civil codes reflect the presumed Christian view of exclusively heterosexual marriage, or that abortion laws reflect a particular biblical interpretation), any radical Christian witness must seek to make clear its commitment to defenselessness and its refusal to demand rights of privilege beyond those granted to any religion in a liberal democracy. At the same time I want to stress that defenselessness must be practiced always in a context of an explicit public challenge to those dimensions of the status quo which blaspheme the worth and sanctity of any of God's creatures.
Solidarity
I conclude with a direct challenge to Melvin Goering's claim that Anabaptist martyrdom was individualistic. A careful reading of the Martyrs Mirror will reveal that nothing could be farther from the truth. The witness of the martyrs is a witness made possible by a profound group solidarity, practices of mutual admonition and encouragement, and the extending of mutual aid both within and without the community of faith. A primary devotional genre found in the martyrs mirror is the letter of encouragement written by prisoners to one another, to their brothers and sisters in Christ, and between family members. In these letters Anabaptists urge one another to remain faithful to Christ even in the midst of great persecution and suffering and describe in detail their own experiences of struggle and survival.
The communal and social solidarity that sustained Anabaptist martyrs was made explicit quite movingly in love letters between Anabaptist marital brothers and sisters who came to see their marriage as an expression of their prior love for the brothers and sisters of Christ's struggling suffering people.
In one such letter Thomas von Imbroich, a Swiss Brethren writer imprisoned and executed for his faith, wrote to his wife: "Since we are surrounded by weakness, my dear sister in the Lord, and the persistence of the old Adam is hard to put to death, it seems reasonable to me that each stir up the other with the grace he has received from the Lord, so that we do not go back to the half-way point, nor complain with Israel in the desert, for a log can indeed be placed into water that is bitter, which sweetens everything." Imbroich's words to his "marital sister"-as Anabaptists often called their spouses-were a moving example of Anabaptist passion that was greater than the traditional marital bonds of human love between partners. He in prison and she outside could "each stir up the other" and make the bitter water sweet. The weakness of the merely human could be overcome by the companionship of these two lovers, who did not even require one another's physical presence in order to be "stirred up" by the grace they offered one another. For these two people, their partnership was an extension of the Christian fellowship they found among the people of God and thus the love they shared was indeed the fellowship of saints, not merely of husband and wife.
But such solidarity was not merely an in-group identity formation. It also included compassion and justice for the poor and oppressed and for the neighbor in need wherever he or she was found. In Anna Janz's well-known letter to her son Isaiah, she not only urged him to join "a poor, simple, cast-off little flock which is despised and rejected by the world" and to "flee the shadow of this world" but also to "let the light of the Gospel shine through you," to "love your neighbor," to "deal with an open, warm heart thy bread to the hungry," to "clothe the naked" and to avoid having two of anything, since "there are always some who lack." This was not an individualistic Christianity but rather a radical posture of hospitality to the neighbor in the context of a defenseless antagonism to the unjust structures of the "world."
I hope I have shown that the postures of spectacle, antagonism, defenselessness, and solidarity, which are featured throughout the drama of Bloody Theater, can provide inspiration and orientation for Mennonites or any community of Christian disciples today. I also hope to have encouraged you to dig into the Martyrs Mirror to see what strange and wonderful stories are there. I cannot guarantee, of course, that spending a lot of time viewing the drama of Bloody Theater will make us all polite, chastened, flexible, cheerful, and well-assimilated citizens. I do believe, however, that this is a show that can inspire greater faithfulness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I urge you to see it for yourself!