Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian Experiments during the Reformation

Christian Century, March 19, 1997 by Petr Macek

By Werner O. Packull. Johns Hopkins University Press, 440 pp., $59. 95.

Werner Packull has written a detailed, insightful and innovative account of the presuppositions and decisive events of early Hutterite history. The first part of the book is a collection of topical studies, each presenting new hypotheses or discoveries on a particular subject, but all contributing to an understanding of a group organized around the idea of a "community of goods." The second part is a painstakingly detailed and essentially sympathetic survey of the presumptions, conditions and actual story of the movement. Three appendices add to the book's usefulness: one contains the synopsis of the "Three Early Anabaptist Congregational Orders," which are the subject of chapter two; another lists the locations and leaders of"The Pre-Hutterite Communities"; and the third lists the "Known Prisoners at Passau in 1534."

Packull traces the genesis and the orientation of Anabaptist biblicism back to Ulrich Zwingli's pulpit at Zurich. The polemical direction of Zwingli's biblicism and his preoccupation with the New Testament are the grounds for both the popular support of the sofa scriptura principle and the emergence of an alternative "hermeneutic community" once the principle was abandoned for strategic reasons. In discussing the latest hypothesis concerning the mutual influence of the three Anabaptist congregational "orders," Packull argues that the Swiss Order of 1527 was a "living text" known in many distant areas and influencing the formation of such documents as the Hutterite Discipline (1529) and the Common Order used by the circle of Pilgram Marpeck, a German Anabaptist, in the 1540s. Packull surveys the peculiar situation of Moravia, the unsurpassed "promised land" of religious dissent in that century, and traces the origin of tile Austerlitz community of common goods to the controversy between magistrate-like Anabaptism, masterminded by Balthasar Hubmaier, and its more apocalyptically oriented counterpart represented by Hans Hut.

The story and fate of the less rigorous communitarians, the Philipites of Auspitz and the Gabrielites of Rossitz, have received relatively little scholarly attention. Packull makes up for that deficiency with a detailed survey of their historic roots, the lives of their leaders, and their responses to new situations and issues. He concludes the book with a careful and imaginative examination of their possible ends.

The book's second part presents a new and fresh perspective on the emerging Tyrolese Anabaptism and also deals with the fanatic attempt by Ferdinand I, king of Bohemia and Hungary, to root out sectarianism at any cost. His 11 decrees issued between 1527 and 1534 launched an unprecedented campaign of terror. Packull makes clear that once the Anabaptist movement was driven underground and into exile, its survival would have been impossible without the "effective countermeasures, supportive network and intelligent leadership" that grew out of the movement itself. Jacob Hutter was the key leader and organizer. The core of the surviving community formed the "Pusterers," who, influenced by Hutter, looked to the community of goods at Austerlitz as their model.

After the success of Ferdinand's measures everywhere else, the Austerlitz community became the only hope of the persecuted Anabaptists. It quickly tripled in numbers, a growth that brought tensions and eventually schisms. Although Hutter enjoyed the support of the surviving community in Auspitz, the Hutterites were forced temporarily to dismantle their communities. Hutter decided to return to Tyrol, where he and his company fell into the hands of the authorities. He died a martyr, as did many of his followers.

Commemoration of the martyrs in prose and song helped to form and mold the spiritual identity of the entire group for generations. Foundational was the "conviction that by retaining the apostolic ideal of community of goods, a practice considered an essential mark of the true apostolic church, they alone represented the faithful remnant." This sense of identity and purpose, together with clear leadership structures, helped them to cope with hardships to a degree beyond the reach of other Anabaptist groups. Only the followers of Hutter or those with the kind of leadership and self-defense strategy he personified could survive the new waves of persecution that followed after 1545. An essential part of this strategy was the consequent communitarianism practiced in Moravia.

Reviewed by Peter Macek, professor of theology at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Charles University in Prague, Czechoslovakia.