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.Persecuted by the secular authorities, rejected and cast out by the magisterialreformers, it was natural for these sects to gravitate towards isolation.And once itbecame clear that the mainstream Protestant movements would not accommodatethem, the radicals no longer thought in terms of a church that encompassed the pureof faith under the guardianship of the state (though the evidence would suggest thatthis had been the initial idea); instead, they set out to recreate a community ofapostolic Christianity separate from the impurities of the world.Suffering becameone of the marks of the true church.38The character of a community inspired by thought of this kind is best illustrated byone of the success stories of Moravian Anabaptism: the Hutterites.Followers of Jacob 106 CommunitiesHutter (circa 1500 36), the Hutterite communities were conceived as tangibledemonstrations of the conviction that faith brings with it a transformation of theChristian man, that true religion entails a graduation from understanding to rebirth (oras the theologians put it, from fides historica to fiducia).The first substantial synthesis ofHutterite belief was written by Peter Riedemann (1506 66), one of the men who tookover after the death of Hutter.In a work entitled Account (1540), drafted while he wasin prison, Riedemann summarized the essentials of the faith.Paramount was the idea ofseparation, a notion in keeping with Hutter s sense of mission as well as his tendency tothink of himself as an apostle of the latter days whom [God] has established aswatchman, shepherd, and guardian over His holy people, over His elect, holy, Christiancongregation. 39 It was thus natural that Riedemann would act on this sense ofelection, calling on the community of saints to break away from the world in orderto preserve the true church from corruption.God s covenant with the nation of Israelprovided the faithful with a prefiguration, but for the Hutterites more than just law wasat issue.Riedemann believed that the community itself was the outward expression ofinner sanctification.According to Riedemann, the Old Testament covenant had beenreplaced by the covenant of the Spirit, restored by Christ.The elect, those few who hadbeen renewed by the Spirit, were guided by Christ alone and would necessarily behavein a Christian manner.40 Hence the importance of separation and community: bothwere manifest proofs of the eternal covenant with God.For the Hutterites themselves, the most profound demonstration of their electionwas the practice of community of goods.The idea itself was not new.The well-knownreferences in the Acts of the Apostles had been the foundation text for a number ofmedieval experiments.Moreover, the communalization of goods and the redistribu-tion of property had been one of the main demands of the revolutionary manifestoes of1525.41 Despite the associated hazards, the idea surfaced again in some Moraviancommunities and ultimately became the distinguishing feature of the Hutteritereligion.It followed logically from the notions of faith and sanctification defendedin works such as Riedemann s Account.What better proof of the living faith wrought bythe Spirit than the ability of men and women to live together in harmony without desireor need for worldly goods? That is why God had established community of goods,argued one sixteenth-century apologist, for in a just community there is no placeamong its people for the sinful tokens of finance and swindle, buying and selling,egotism and stinginess, usury and the excesses of vain creatures, and other and sundryunholy works. 42 This was the ultimate testimony to the radical ideal of renunciationand the indwelling effect of the Word.It also confirmed and preserved the idea ofseparation, for those who could not meet the demands of such a community of saints in other words, those who were lacking in the Spirit did not belong.It was a self-confirming, eternal covenant, for faith created the community and the communityfacilitated faith, and over the course of the century it became dogma, a precondition forsalvation.It also gave rise to a dynamic religious culture.Historians have identified up to¬ ¬120 Hutterite settlements (Bruderhofe) in this period, each having between 200 and400 residents, living, working, raising families, and worshipping together in a com-munal environment.43In many of their particulars, the Hutterites mirror how the radical communities of thesixteenth century perceived both themselves and others within the narrative of Communities 107Christian history.Yet they were part of a religious tradition that is difficult tocircumscribe.The radicals did not comprise a unified confessional community.Therewas no fixed corpus of ideas or sanctioned orthodoxy binding them together as therewas with Catholics or Lutherans.Nor were the German and Swiss radicals anchored inplace and time to the same extent as the members of these churches.Restitutio was not aconcept that cultivated close ties with the present.Historically, the religion of theradicals was shaped less by formal thought than by aspirations; their rejection oftraditional Christianity was not captured in lengthy dogmatic treatises but registeredthrough gestures, rituals, actions, and language.The unavoidable outcome of areligious culture that placed so much stress on inspiration and conscience at the¬expense of forms was heterodoxy.As Muntzer put it, closing up the distance betweenGod and the believer had opened the mouths of believers, unstopped their ears, andenabled them to converse with heavenly voices. 44The radical tradition was thus rich, and continued to be rich, in disagreement,contradiction, and speculation.But all of this just reminds us that the very notion ofradical was in the eye of the beholder.One man s enthusiasm was another man sreligion.To seek further purity or authenticity remained the prime objective of theradicals throughout the confessional age, and it would be profoundly articulated inthe late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries with the rise of revivalist move-ments in continental Europe.But even before the radical spirit was reawakened in thehomelands of the Lutheran and Reformed traditions, the dialogue resurfaced inEngland, where Puritan critics of the Elizabethan and Jacobean settlements began tobreathe new life into the Protestant discourse of purity and essence, with some of themost pressing of the Puritans taking up themes that had not been discussed in anysubstantial sense since the defeat of the first-generation of radicals in Saxony andSwitzerland.Godly peopleTo an extent the Puritan episode in England was simply the reenactment of thedebates and developments that had shaped the Lutheran and Reformed communities inEurope: the same dialogue deferred.But there was a difference, and it provedfundamental for the making of seventeenth-century Protestants.For nowhere incontinental Protestantism had the dialogue ever been so personal or so charged witha heightened ethical and psychological dimension, to the point, indeed, where thefuture of the church really did turn on the pricking of conscience.And nowhere else inProtestant Europe had the implications of belief for daily life ever been probed sodeeply, and so publicly, by so many minds, and in large part because what separated thePuritans were less issues of principle than questions of degree
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