 The phrase, the earth is the Lord's, reverberates throughout Anabaptist history. Why is that? I'm here today with John Roth on another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. John, it's an honor to have you. Could you just a fact to introduce yourself to our listeners? I grew up in Holmes County, Ohio, came to Goshen College as a student in the mid-1970s. Well in love with history, while I was here, went on to graduate school in history, and then in 1985 I returned to Goshen College as a professor of history. My training was in German social history, but at Goshen part of the job was serving as director of the Mennonite Historical Library, which is an amazing collection of Anabaptist Mennonite Amish and Hatterite materials. So I retooled as a historian of Anabaptism. A couple years later I became editor of the Mennonite Quarterly Review, and so for the last 36 years I have been at Goshen College teaching, serving as editor, directing the Mennonite Historical Library, until this past summer when I retired from those positions I still have an office here on the campus of Goshen College, but I retired from those positions and took up a new position as project director of an initiative called Anabaptism at 500. So that's what I'm doing currently. Very interesting. So in this episode wanting to unpack this concept of the earth is the lords, which is a quote from Psalm 24-1. You and many others have looked at this from a historical perspective. How did that phrase influence the Anabaptist movement? And I'm thinking particularly in the early days. Yeah. Well, there are a number of scriptural passages that Anabaptists seem to have gravitated towards. Of course, we know about the Sermon on the Mount. Some of Paul's writings and 1 Corinthians have become important in terms of the Lord's supper or some other themes. But that verse from Psalms 24, almost from the very beginning, I first encountered it when I was reading a story of a young woman, her name was Elsie Baumgartner, who in April of 1525 was arrested by authorities in Zurich and charged with the crime of rebaptism. And she was sentenced to prison. And the authorities told her that they would release her from prison if she would promise never to return to the canton of Zurich again. And she refused, citing the verse, the earth is the lords, and she said that she had as much right to be here as the authorities did, which was a kind of interesting way to use that biblical argument. That verse then reappears repeatedly in the source material on 16th and then 17th century Anabaptism. It shows up in interrogations. It shows up in confessions, confessions of faith. It shows up in hymns. It's a verse that in 1614, so almost a century later, the well-known Anabaptist leader Hans Landis, 60-year-old farmer who had emerged as the leader of Swiss Anabaptism in that region just before his execution, he cited it as well, the earth is the lords and the fullness thereof. So it clearly captured the imagination of the early Anabaptists. And I think there are some strong reasons why that's so. We can maybe talk more about those, but there's no doubt about what it is, a recurring theme in Anabaptist source material. And right at the beginning from what you're saying as well, correct, like 1525, right when this whole thing is starting. Let's unpack that a bit more. How does this perspective fit into the larger context of other things that the Anabaptist cared about and would have emphasized it, especially in that time, I'm thinking more historically but even throughout history? As I've tried to sort of untangle the way that Anabaptists used this verse and why it becomes such an important light motif in their theological thinking, I've sort of identified three different themes that are associated with the earth is the lords. And the first is the one that Elsie uses. It's a statement about sovereignty. It's almost a political statement about allegiance and identity. The Anabaptists always were anchored in particular regions. We continue today to be citizens of particular countries. We carry passports. We have generally acknowledged the biblically sanctioned authority of government leaders. There were some Anabaptists who were revolutionaries, but by and large, the Anabaptist tradition has honored the authority of governments. Romans 13 government is an ordering of God. It serves a recognized function. So there is that sort of baseline respect for government authority, and yet throughout their history there also has been this radical assertion, ultimate allegiance, ultimate sovereignty belongs to God alone. And when God looks on this world, God does not see political boundaries, and God's people ultimately do not identify themselves most completely by their political allegiances. And in that sense, it made it clear to the Anabaptists that if they were in circumstances where the government could no longer tolerate them, if their beliefs were outside the limits of what governments could abide by, they would move. That God would be present wherever God's people gathered. And so in that sense, there has been a kind of disinclination to regard political identity as at the heart of what it means to be a Christian, a follower of Jesus. There's a reason, I think, why Anabaptist groups traditionally have been hesitant to say the pledge of allegiance or to sing the national anthem. I think that's changing in many contexts. I think the allure of political identity is becoming more and more powerful. And I would hope that this verse might be a kind of antidote or a warning to those of us who think that the Kingdom of God is hanging in the balance on the outcome of a presidential election, or if certain legislation does or doesn't get passed somehow the fate of the Christian identity is at stake. No, the whole earth is the Lord's and God's sovereignty and our allegiance extends beyond those political boundaries. So I think that's a really crucial element of that verse. There's a second theme that comes through repeatedly, and that's an economic claim. When we say the earth is the Lord's, the Anabaptists and I think the Amish, Mennonite, Hutterites who come in the stream of Anabaptism are reminding themselves that ultimately everything that we have comes to us as a gift from God and that we are merely stewards of that gift. The Hutterites, of course, is the group that identified this economic aspect of the Christian faith most clearly. For the Hutterites, the centrality of sharing the warnings against private possessions go back to the Garden of Eden. The original sin is the idea of mine and thine and if you are in their understanding, if you have accepted Christ, if you are a new creature in Christ, you give up that claim to what's mine and thine and you see everything as a gift and everything to be shared with those in need. Now the majority of Anabaptists in that tradition have not practiced community of goods. Most of us have said something like, yes, there is a place for private property and yet we also have had a long-standing practice of mutual aid, of understanding the kind of sharing that goes on in families to extend beyond our nuclear family, beyond our blood relations to those in the church and ultimately to wherever we encounter needy people. And I think that claim that the earth is the Lord's serves as an ongoing powerful reminder that the seductions of economic wealth and security should be actively resisted. It's one of the ironies in Anabaptist Mennonite history that virtually wherever Anabaptists have landed, whether it was the steplands of South Russia or the forests of Penns Woods in Pennsylvania or the wheat fields of Kansas or the green hell of the Potta Guayan Chaco wherever Mennonites have gone, we've started out poor and then through a combination of hard work and big families and social capital and the blessing of God, Mennonites have done very well. So we tend to have become prosperous and there is a strong temptation to look up in the second or third generation and assume that what we have came about by the work of our own hands and we lose sight of the fact that it's a gift from God. And I think this verse reminds us, should remind us, that in good times or in bad everything comes to us as a gift from God. Another theme that I see in the Earth as the Lord's motif is a kind of deep theological recognition that evil has already been defeated in this world. Now the Anabaptists, they encountered the stark reality of violence, oppression in their own lives. They were not naive. When they said, turn the other cheek or forgive enemies, they were not assuming that that was going to automatically turn enemies into friends. They went to their deaths as martyrs, many of them singing. But the reason they could do that, the reason they could be so naive about enemy love or responding to violence with generosity, is because they were convicted by a deep awareness that in this cosmic struggle between good and evil, good has already won. That in the death and resurrection of Jesus and in the promise of Christ's return, we live in the awareness that the Earth is already the Lord's, that the victory has been won, and it frees you up to be vulnerable. It frees you up to take risks. It frees you up even to put your own mortality into a bigger perspective. If you have that awareness that Christ has won the victory, that the Earth is already the Lord's. We don't have to fight for it. It belongs to God. And I think those three motifs, the political one, the economic and this deep sense that God is in control, have been themes that have helped to sustain this 500-year-old tradition, and each generation needs to remind itself again of what it might mean for us. That is powerful. I've never heard it described like that before. That is fascinating. Are you pulling a lot of this directly from studying history, or is there other theological explanations of how the Anabaptist came to it? Particularly, I'm thinking of these three points he mentioned. Can you walk me through a bit more how you dug into this? Well, you know, I am extrapolating. It's not as if any single Anabaptist sat down and said, let me provide a commentary on Psalm 24 and mapped out these three points. Some of this is my reading back into the deeper themes of the Anabaptist story, aspects that have seemed to have sustained importance for them that are often associated, sometimes indirectly, with the Psalm 24. So naturally, in developing theological and ethical understandings, the Anabaptist appealed to many, many scriptures. And first and foremost, to the life and teaching the example of Jesus, not an isolated verse from the Psalms, but I think there's continuity there. And I think there are themes there that one can legitimately identify in the larger Anabaptist story, and that I continue to take inspiration from. Segway's nicely into the next question I had for you, and this is pivoting a bit from some of the other things we were discussing with the earth as the Lords, but how does this fit with the global Anabaptist movement? As a historian, I've become keenly aware that we are living as Anabaptists. We're living in the midst of a really significant moment, a profound transformation of our little corner of God's kingdom. I mean, if you think of a 500-year-old tradition, we have basically been in Europe and North America. At the beginning of this century, there were maybe 200,000 Anabaptists in the world, mostly in Europe and North America. By 1980, 600,000 still mostly in Europe and North America. But in the last 40 or 50 years, our numbers have gone from around 600,000 to 2.2 million. And so we mean the graph or the curve goes something like this, and it's in our lifetime. In your lifetime, Reagan, I mean that something profound has been happening to the Anabaptist movement. And it's happening at a time when it feels, to me at least, like the Anabaptist movement in North America has become somewhat brittle and fragile. And we've divided in lots of different ways. And that's another story. There are perhaps reasons for that. But it sometimes feels a little worrisome, like, where are we heading? What's the future of this movement? Well, from a big perspective, the future of the movement is in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Because today, by the largest Anabaptist groups by far, groups that identify as Anabaptists, are in places like Ethiopia, in India, in Zimbabwe, in Indonesia. The reasons for that transformation, it seems to me, are fascinating, complicated, always fascinating, and they raise really interesting questions about identity. What does it mean to be an Anabaptist today? Not surprisingly, perhaps. The primary motor for that transformation has been the mission movement that started with, when we say missions in North America, we mostly have a picture, I think, of sort of classic missionaries, folks who sacrificially give up a portion of their lives in the trajectory of their careers and move to another country where they share the good news of the gospel. Well, that's important part of it. But the real story is not North American or European missions. The real story is the indigenous inculturation and mission. So the growth that has happened has been when local Christians say to the North American missionaries, something like, thank you very much, we'll take it from here. And when their mission initiatives that translate the good news into an idiom, into cultural forms, into songs, into ways of thinking that are suitable for those contexts, that the church has exploded. And it's been one of the delights for me as a historian kind of retool. And I still care about the 16th and 17th century. But in the last 15 years, primary focus of bi-energies have been on the global church and trying to understand what is happening. And what does it mean to be church? What do we mean when we say we are part of a church? And that, I think, calls for some rethinking of assumptions that many of us have made for a long time. I feel like that bit you just shared really brings it full circle from how this thread begins in the early days of the Anabaptist movement up to today. And as you were saying, this incredible growth, not just in the places we typically think of that have Mennonites, but all around the world, that's really exciting. And I think that's a powerful piece that I almost feel like we need to do a whole episode just on that story and tell more of that story. That's the last question I had on my list, but I wanted to ask one more thing. Are there any resources or things you would recommend that could tell us more of that story? Or is there anything else that you would like to add to this episode? I will say as a historian, for many years, I have taught a course in Anabaptist Mennonite history, and it was a course that I loved to teach. I taught it so often I didn't need notes. I knew this story, and I would tell the story in a very sensible way, which is what God had in mind in January of 1525 was, well, us, that the arc of the story moved in a straight line from 1524 through Europe to North America, and we use it to say, how did we get to, how did we get here? And there's, it's not a wrong way of telling the story, but in the last 15 years, I've asked myself, how would I have to tell the story differently? If I assume that from the very beginning, what God had in mind in January 1525 with those first baptisms was not just us, what God had in mind was 2.2 million Anabaptists in more than 80 countries around the world expressing their faith in cultural contexts that are very different from my own, and that that was the arc of the story from the beginning, that it was not a kind of accidental add-on. So often we tell, we write our histories, you know, that if it's 12 chapters, well, the 11 chapters are about Anabaptist Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, Plain Anabaptists, the Mission Movement, and then the last chapter is the Global Church. It's a kind of add-on, an extension of us. It's a different way of thinking about identity. If you say, no, it's a global church, what it means to be part of this Anabaptist movement is pointed towards that from the outset, and it's hard to reframe. It takes a different kind of imagination and a different narrative, but I think it's a healthy narrative in that it decenters us from the story. We're an important part of the story, but we, that is, Anabaptists in North America, are one branch of a much bigger, broader, interesting, dynamic narrative, and that we would look on our own identity in a different way if we reframed it. And I think maybe we would be a little less quick to claim certainty about our theological positions and our ethical stances. Not that we would give them up, but we would be a little humbler about our clarity of conviction on many of those, those themes. And it's an exercise that I have been doing in my own writing. And about 15 years ago, I started something called the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism. And we've done a number of things. We've done a global survey. We've worked closely with Mennonite World Conference in trying to cultivate historical narratives from the groups around the world that are part of this family. Again, all as a part of reorienting our identity in a way that opens up a space to regard those groups as brothers and sisters, not just an appendix that gets added on at the end. Well, thank you so much for sharing, John. I feel like that's a great spot to leave this particular topic. I'll think about the theme, The Earth is the Lord's quite the same way again. That was some very helpful insight. So thank you for sharing.