Pilgrim Aflame

by Myron S. Augsburger

Myron S. Augsburger's story of 16th-century Anabaptists Michael and Margaretha Sattler who paid the ultimate price for their faith in and obedience to Jesus Christ. 292 pages.

292 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

Reviews

[Doug Kauffman]

Read aloud to my students, grades 6-12. I did quite a bit of summarizing and skipping, due to large sections of fairly dry text, some of it evidently taken directly from source material. Less historical fiction, more a lightly fictionalized biography. Not great literary quality, either.

Interesting historical note: Augsburger arbitrarily chose Margareta for the name of Sattler's wife in the story, as her name was unknown at the time. As far as I can tell, Sattler's wife is now known to actually have been named Margaretha. Interesting coincidence.

[Larry Wegman]

The definitive biography of Michael Sattler, one of the early leaders of the Anabaptist reformation. It's slightly fictionalized due to the lack of available historical material. An excellent story of the beginnings of the Anabaptist movement, and about the development of its doctrine.

[Nathan Weaver]

I love Anabaptist History and this very detailed and accurate historical fiction read didn't disappoint.

[Leroy Seat]

This is a historical novel, but I am not putting it on my fiction shelf as it is based so closely on the true story. The author wrote his Th.D. dissertation on Sattler (at Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, in 1964), so he had plenty of factual material at hand when he wrote the book. It is a novel for the amplification of details for which no historical materials are available. Even the name of Sattler's wife is not known, so Margareta was chosen arbitrarily by Augsburger.

For those interested in the beginnings of the Swiss Anabaptists, this is a valuable book. Since it is a work of fiction, the details cannot be assumed to be historically accurate. But the faith and the thinking of Sattler and other Anabaptists shines through the pages, and some historical documents are produced, in part, in the book.

[pG Ra]

I really wanted to enjoy this book, since as a young radical Mennonite I have really found inspiration in the stories of the early martyrs of the Reformation. I even used the book title in my email address and used Pilgrim Aflame as my graffiti tag. By the time I got around to reading the book, expectations were quite high. I only got through the first chapter, however, as the writing is quite horrible, actually. The authors foreshadows CONSTANTLY and hold no suspense while doing so. The book is not factual enough to informs readers of actual Mennonite history, and never gets past alluding to the grandiosity of what's about to happen in history. This book may be appropriate for children, but is otherwise pretty blandly delivered.