ABSTRACT
To see communism being introduced beyond the boundaries of monastic and ecclesiastical communities, people must turn to the Holy Roman Empire at the time of the Reformation. Central to the establishment of ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ is ‘the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of the heaven from God’, and from which God will rule his empire: ‘By its light shall the nations walk’. The itinerant preachers who formed the leaders of these movements hoped to resurrect the apostolic church by living in voluntary poverty. Plato restricted the communist lifestyle to the ruling elite. When Plato sailed to southern Italy around 389 BC, he found Pythagoreans, led by one Archytas, in charge of the city-state of Tarentum. In their own imagination, the communist Taborites had seen themselves taking the world by storm, in advance of Christ’s second coming. By far the most significant tendency among the Radical Reformation to adopt a communist perspective was Anabaptism.
