Anabaptist and Mennonite Identity: Permeable Boundaries and Expanding Definitions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article provides an overview of Anabaptist and Mennonite historical and theological scholarship, supporting the claim that the field of study is becoming increasingly multi‐faceted and complex. This is due in part to the increasingly global character of the Anabaptist‐Mennonite tradition that traces its roots to the 16th‐century Radical Reformation. The first Anabaptists emerged in Zurich Switzerland in 1525, but their reforming brand soon spread to the environs of Austria, Moravia, Germany, and the Netherlands. The name ‘Mennonite’ is associated with Menno Simons, (1496–1561), a Dutch reformer who left the Roman Catholic Church to join the Anabaptist movement in 1536. He became an important leader, organizing congregations and providing counsel for reforming groups. In the 1540s, ecclesial and state authorities in the Netherlands began to identify the followers of this Dutch reformer as ‘Menists’ or ‘Mennonists.’ As the centuries past, Menno Simons's name was embraced by various Anabaptist groups in Europe and North America. More recently, the name has also been adopted by Christian communities in the global south. Today, some 1.7 million baptized Mennonites live in over 80 countries. An additional number of people identify themselves as Mennonite in the sense of having an ethnic, rather than religious, connection to the name.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".