Caught between Christ and Christendom

Already in his 1503 Enchiridion some five years before his work on the New Testament the great Christian humanist Desiderius Erasmus observed: We are living in a world that has grown alien to the world of Christ in life and doctrine. In the Paraklesis the introduction to the first 1516 edition of his New Testament he explained how this had come about: We drag down the teachings of heaven and force them like a Lydian rule to fit our own life-patterns. To explain this phenomenon however he made a slight change in Romans 12: 11 of his 1519 New Testament: Never be lacking in zeal but keep your spiritual fervour serving the Lord to serving the time. Based on a passage in Chrysostom s writings this change allowed Erasmus to explain if not justify the Church s accommodation of Christ s teachings to the changing times. Several years later in 1522 he published his Paraphrase on the Gospel of Matthew. Blaming the problem on the absence of any teaching in the practice of infant baptism Erasmus in the preface proposed teaching basic Christian doctrine to young people when they had reached the age of puberty. But then in his paraphrase on Matthew 20: 18-20 known then as Christ s command to baptize he laid out a comprehensive interpretation of adult believer s baptism. Ulrich Zwingli picked up Erasmus accommodation in 1522; Erasmus radical followers chose believer s baptism on January 21 1525. Unresolved in Erasmus mind these two conflicting positions were thus introduced to the Swiss Reformation causing the conflict this study depicts.