Mennonite Weekly Review

On my desk is Marpeck: A Life of Dissent and Conformity by Walter Klaassen and William Klassen, published by Herald Press, 2008, 377 pages, $32.99.

Robert Kreider, of North Newton, Kan., is a retired historian, professor and college president.

Here is biography at its best. Two distinguished historians of the 16th century have brought Pilgram Marpeck out of the shadows to recognize him as a central figure in shaping early Anabaptism. Walter Klaassen and William Klassen write with authority, having collaborated in translating many of Marpeck’s writings.

Marpeck was born in 1495 in Rattenberg in the idyllic valley of the Inn River in the Austrian Tyrol. He exhibited early talent: at 25 a member of the city council, two years later elected mayor, at 30 appointed by Archduke Ferdinand as superintendent of mines. He lived a long life, dying in 1556 at the age of 61.

In the 1520s the winds of Lutheran Protestantism swept through the Inn Valley. Marpeck moved to a more radical stance, leading him in 1528 to embrace the Anabaptist faith.

This precipitated for him a crisis of conscience. Archduke Ferdinand issued a mandate requiring public servants to prosecute Anabaptists in their employ. This Marpeck could not do. He resigned and abruptly left town. Soon thereafter he was baptized and quickly emerged as an Anabaptist elder, writer and pastor. He lived on the run.

The authors describe vividly those exciting and violent times. Religion was the talk of town and countryside. Religious tracts poured from the presses. Peasant discontent erupted. Armies of the emperor clashed with armies of the Protestant princes. Turkish forces threatened from the East. Towns asserted their independence. The civic and religious unities of feudal society were disintegrating. One is captivated by a sense of awesome change.

Klaassen and Klassen surround Marpeck’s life story with contextual richness. They describe in detail domestic life, the role of women, perils of working in the mines, management of forests, hazards of travel, building a city water system, quartering of the archduke’s army in citizens’ homes, burial practices of the Anabaptists and manipulations of municipal politics.

Marpeck is a biography not only of an Anabaptist leader but also of a movement. The authorities cracked down with arrests, prison, torture, executions. We see a harassed faith community seeking to cope — survival in scattered places, varied personalities and factions contending, a quiet network of nurture and pastoring. We see Marpeck wending his way from place to place to encourage and to guide in biblical study the faithful. We see an Anabaptist movement taking shape.

With his engineering and managerial skills, Marpeck appears to have found ready employment in cities to which he moved. His competency trumped his Anabaptist heresy.

Critically important were his four years in Strasbourg, 1528-1532, where he found an Anabaptist community of some 250 and where he soon became a key spokesman. He engaged the city’s leading Reformed preacher, Martin Bucer, in a series of intense but respectful debates. Responding to charges of breaking the unity of church and state, Marpeck spoke passionately for separation of church and state and for the magistrate’s disavowal of coercion in matters of faith.

He argued with sectarians who pressed for a more subjective and mystical spirituality. He counseled against hard-edged legalism in church discipline.

Marpeck may be regarded as the most modern of early Anabaptists. He had a gift for balancing life in two worlds — civil servant by day and writer-pastor by night. He was a gentle, thoughtful Anabaptist, the sort of person with whom one would welcome a long conversation.