Hubmaier's Christian Catechism

Nikolsburg, Moravia · written December 1526 · Eine christliche Lehrtafel, die ein jeder Mensch, bevor er im Wasser getauft wird, wissen soll — A Christian Catechism, That a Man Should Know Before He Is Baptized in Water.

he title is the argument. Luther and Calvin wrote catechisms to instruct children who had already been baptized, preparing them for the Lord's Table. Balthasar Hubmaier wrote his to instruct adults who had not been baptized, preparing them for the font. Everything that separates the Anabaptists from the magisterial Reformation is contained in that reversal.

It is the first Anabaptist catechism, and the work of the only early Anabaptist leader who held an earned doctorate in theology. C. Arnold Snyder, the leading historian of the movement, calls it an unusually comprehensive early statement of Anabaptist fundamentals and the best single starting point for identifying what the Anabaptists actually held.¹

Why It Was Written

By the middle of 1526 Hubmaier had found refuge at Nikolsburg in Moravia, under the protection of the lords of Liechtenstein. Nikolsburg had become a haven for religious refugees of every description — Lutherans, Utraquists, the Unitas Fratrum, and some two thousand Anabaptists holding a wide range of opinions. Into that crowded landscape Hubmaier had to say what an Anabaptist church actually believed.

The request came from Martin Göschl, formerly an auxiliary bishop in Moravia and by then Hubmaier's friend and fellow believer. Hubmaier explained the need in his introduction: a Christian life must begin with teaching, from which faith flows, and baptism follows afterward as the public confession by which a person enters the church. Everyone agreed, he wrote, that a candidate must be instructed before baptism. What was still needed was to say plainly what it is that he should first learn and know.

That is a modest way of describing a founding document. Hubmaier wrote it in December 1526; it went to press at Nikolsburg soon after, which is why the date is sometimes given as 1527.

Teach, Then Baptize

Hubmaier's whole case rests on the order of the words in the Great Commission. Christ told the apostles to make disciples by teaching, then baptizing, then teaching again — and Hubmaier took the sequence to be binding rather than incidental. Baptism belongs after instruction and confession, not before them.

His practice in Waldshut and Nikolsburg followed that order exactly:

The catechism exists to fill the first step. And baptism, in Hubmaier's account, is not merely a testimony but a pledge: the candidate binds himself to love his brethren to the point of death and to submit to fraternal admonition should he fail. Water baptism he describes as an external and visible sign of the inward baptism of the Spirit, by which a man confesses his sins before all.

This is why the three marks of a true church, in Hubmaier's reckoning, are the water baptism of adults, the Lord's Supper, and fraternal admonition — the ban. Take away the ban and believers' baptism becomes an empty ceremony, because nothing holds the baptized to the promise they made.

What It Covers

The catechism runs as a dialogue and moves through the ground a candidate would need before the font: the knowledge of sin and the law that reveals it, the gospel and faith in Christ, the meaning and manner of baptism, the pledge the baptized person makes, fraternal admonition and the ban, and the Lord's Supper as the memorial and the covenant meal of a gathered church.

It is comprehensive in a way the movement had not managed before. Most early Anabaptist writing was occasional — a defense, a disputation, a letter from prison. Hubmaier had the training to set out a whole position in order, and he did.

The Man Who Wrote It

Hubmaier was born at Friedberg in Bavaria about 1480. He took his doctorate at Ingolstadt in 1512 under Johann Eck — the same Eck who would face Luther at Leipzig — and became cathedral preacher at Regensburg.

He met Erasmus and Glarean at Basel in 1522, and by the Second Zurich Disputation of 1523 he was standing with Zwingli and stating the principle that would eventually divide them: in all disputes concerning faith, the Scriptures alone, proceeding from the mouth of God, ought to be our rule. Applied to baptism, that principle led him where Zwingli would not follow.

In 1524 he published On Heretics and Those Who Burn Them, one of the earliest pleas for religious toleration written in the Reformation, and far ahead of anything the magisterial reformers were prepared to say. At Easter 1525 Wilhelm Reublin baptized him along with sixty others; Hubmaier then baptized some three hundred more from a milk pail filled at the town well.

The years that followed were brutal. He fled to Zurich seeking refuge and Zwingli had him arrested; under torture he recanted, and afterward retracted the recantation. He reached Nikolsburg in 1526. In May 1527 he lost a public disputation to Hans Hut over whether a Christian may bear the sword — Hubmaier said yes, against the strict pacifism of Hut's party. Not long after, the Austrians took him to Vienna, and on March 10, 1528, he was burned at the stake. Three days later his wife Elisabeth was thrown into the Danube with a stone tied around her neck.

His motto was Die Wahrheit ist untödlich — the truth is unkillable.

The Shadow on His Name

Honesty requires the rest of the story. In 1519, while cathedral preacher at Regensburg, Hubmaier helped incite a violent expulsion of the city's Jews and the destruction of their synagogue, and afterward promoted a pilgrimage shrine on the ruined site. It is not a footnote; it was a public campaign, and people died.

He appears to have come to see it differently. In 1527 he wrote that he ought rather to show friendship toward Jews, so that they might be drawn to the Christian faith by Christian example — which is at least a repudiation of what he had done, from a man who by then knew what it was to be hunted.

Both things are true of him, and a site that claims to steward this history has no business reporting only the second. The man who was burned for his conscience had once helped burn out his neighbors for theirs.

Historic Significance

It is the first Anabaptist catechism. Before this, the movement had confessions, disputations, and martyr letters. This is the first attempt to state the whole position in an orderly way for the purpose of teaching, and it remains the clearest early window into what Anabaptists believed rather than what their opponents said they believed.

It established catechesis before baptism. The pattern set here — instruct, profess, then baptize — is the practice of credobaptist churches to this day. Every believer's baptism class in a Baptist congregation is working from the logic Hubmaier set down at Nikolsburg.

It gave the movement a theologian. Hubmaier was the only early Anabaptist leader with a doctorate, and the difference shows. He argued from Scripture, from the fathers, and from history rather than from inner light, and he engaged Zwingli and the Catholic scholars on their own ground.

It belongs to the history of religious liberty. Hubmaier's conviction that faith cannot be coerced runs through the catechism as it does through his 1524 treatise. He held that position when almost nobody did, and he died at the hands of people who did not.

A Reformed Assessment

This site holds the Reformed confession, and the disagreements here are substantial and not to be papered over.

The first is baptism. Hubmaier's case rests on the sequence in the Great Commission and on the absence of an explicit New Testament command to baptize infants. The Reformed answer rests on the unity of the covenant of grace: the sign of the covenant was administered to the children of believers under Abraham, the promise is to you and to your children, and nothing in the New Testament withdraws them. The argument turns on how the Testaments relate, and it is not settled by counting proof texts.

The second cuts deeper. Hubmaier wrote Freedom of the Will in 1527 as a direct answer to Luther's Bondage of the Will, and defended a genuine liberty in fallen man to respond to grace. His formation under a nominalist teacher and his reading of Erasmus both show. On this a Reformed reader stands with Luther, and the Canons of Dort would answer the same position a century later.

What we hold in common is not small. Hubmaier's statement that Scripture alone proceeding from the mouth of God is our rule is sola Scriptura without qualification. His view of the Supper is closer to Zwingli's than to Rome's. His insistence that a church is a confessing body under discipline is something Reformed churches have confessed too, in the third mark named by the Scots Confession. And unlike the Schleitheim party he accepted the legitimacy of the magistrate's sword, which places him nearer the magisterial reformers than most of his brethren.

He is presented here because the radical Reformation is part of this history and deserves to be represented by its best mind rather than by its worst excesses, and because a man who wrote for toleration in 1524 and was burned in 1528 has a claim on our attention whatever we conclude about his baptismal theology.

Catechisms