Anabaptists

They were the largest and most influential company of the Radical Reformation, and they were born in a Bible study. The men who first re-baptized one another in Zurich in 1525 had been Zwingli’s own students, reading the Greek New Testament with him and pressing him to obey what they read. Within two years one of them had been drowned in the Limmat by the city that Zwingli was reforming.

Their story is therefore not a simple one, and it is not honestly told either by the older Protestant histories that reduced them to fanatics or by the modern accounts that make them the only consistent men of the century. They held a great deal in common with the magisterial reformers. They departed from them at points that were neither small nor incidental. And a portion of the movement defected from the faith altogether, in doctrine, in morals, and in the ordering of society. All three things are true at once, and this page attempts to say all three.

A Name Their Enemies Gave Them

“Anabaptist” means re-baptizer. They did not choose the word and did not accept it; they answered that infant baptism was no baptism at all, so that what they administered was not a second washing but a first. They preferred Brethren, or simply believers.

The label was not merely rude. It was lethal. The imperial law code had, since Justinian, made rebaptism one of two heresies punishable by death. To fix the name “Anabaptist” on a man was to place him under an existing capital statute without any fresh trial of his doctrine.¹ It is worth remembering that the word was a legal instrument before it was a description.

The name also flattened real distinctions. Quiet Swiss farmers, communitarian Moravians, apocalyptic Dutch prophets, anti-Trinitarian rationalists, and armed revolutionaries were all swept under one heading by magistrates who had no interest in telling them apart. The student of this period has to do the sorting that the sixteenth century declined to do.

The Break in Zurich

In October 1523 the Zurich council held its second disputation on the reform of worship. The council concluded that the pace and manner of change lay in its hands. Zwingli submitted. The young men around him did not, and the protest of one of them—that such decisions did not belong to the civil power—marks the exact seam along which the movement tore.²

The rupture came on January 21, 1525, in the house of Felix Manz. Conrad Grebel baptized George Blaurock on his confession of faith, and Blaurock baptized the others present. The quarrel had begun over the council’s authority; it now had a visible sign attached to it, and that sign made every household in the city a matter of dispute. In a society where the baptismal register was the citizen roll, refusing to present a child was not read as a private scruple. It was read as secession.

Where They Stood With the Reformers

The agreements were broad, and they were not incidental agreements. On the great questions that divided Wittenberg and Zurich from Rome, the Brethren stood with the reformers.

They held Scripture to be the final authority over councils, canons, and popes. They rejected the sacrifice of the Mass, purgatory, indulgences, the invocation of saints, relics, pilgrimages, and monastic vows. They wanted the Bible in the language of the people and preaching that expounded it. They insisted that the church is a body of people and not a building or a hierarchy, and that every believer has direct access to God through Christ alone. They took sin seriously and demanded that faith show itself in a changed life. They pressed for church discipline—a concern Bucer, Oecolampadius, and Calvin shared and labored to institute in their own cities.

Two further points deserve mention because Reformed readers often assume the opposite. Some Anabaptist leaders were serious theologians, not merely enthusiasts: Balthasar Hubmaier produced a catechism in 1526 that is recognizably a work of Reformation teaching.³ And their refusal to coerce conscience, however inconsistently the wider movement applied it, was a conviction that Baptists and others in the Reformed tradition would later take up and defend from Scripture.

Where They Departed

The departures cluster around one question: what is the church, and how does it stand toward the society around it? The reformers wanted to reform the existing church of a whole territory. The Brethren wanted to restitute the apostolic church as a gathered company of the believing, separated from the rest. Those two programs cannot be combined.

Baptism. The reformers read the covenant as one across both Testaments, and the children of believers as included in its sign. Schleitheim answered that baptism belongs only to those taught repentance who ask it for themselves, and called infant baptism the chief abomination of the pope.⁴

The magistracy. The reformers held civil office to be a good work of God that a Christian may hold. Schleitheim excluded the disciple from the magistracy altogether, on the ground that the sword is an ordering of God outside the perfection of Christ.⁴

The oath. Reformed confessions permit a solemn oath when truth and justice require it. Schleitheim forbade every oath without exception—which, in a society ordered by sworn civic obligation, amounted to withdrawal from public life.

Tradition. The reformers distinguished between corrupt tradition and the catholic inheritance of the creeds. The radical impulse was to treat twelve centuries as a single fall, to be repudiated whole. The resulting freedom from the past was also a freedom from every check the past supplies, and the movement paid for it.

Luther, watching men leave who had at first walked with him, put it in the language of 1 John:

For they were not of us even though for a while they walked with us.⁵ Martin Luther

They returned the judgment. One manifesto from their side granted that Luther had begun well against Rome, and then charged that when he sought the protection of the secular power he was like a man who in mending an old kettle only makes the hole bigger.⁶

Schleitheim, 1527

Two years after the first rebaptisms, representatives of the Swiss Brethren met at Schleitheim near Schaffhausen and agreed on seven articles: baptism, the ban, the breaking of bread, separation from the world, shepherds, the sword, and the oath. Michael Sattler, a former Benedictine prior, gave the meeting its leadership and is generally taken to be the author of the letter.

Schleitheim is the movement’s charter, and it is also its self-correction. It was written against two dangers at once—the revolutionary radicals on one side and the libertines on the other—and its opening letter says so plainly, warning of men who mistook the freedom of the Spirit for the wanton freedom of the flesh. The document that most clearly defines Anabaptism is also the earliest internal witness that parts of the movement had already gone bad.⁴

Within weeks Sattler was tried at Rottenburg, tortured, and burned on May 20, 1527. His wife Margaretha refused to recant and was drowned two days later. The fifth article had provided for a shepherd being led to the Lord through the cross. It was not a figure of speech.

The Sword Turned Against Them

On March 7, 1526, the Zurich council made rebaptism punishable by drowning. The cruelty was deliberate and the mockery was the point: drowning was called the third baptism, and the jest ran that he who dips shall be dipped.⁷ On January 5, 1527, Felix Manz—Zwingli’s former student and Hebrew scholar—was bound and pushed from a boat into the Limmat, the first Anabaptist put to death by Protestants.

The Empire acted next. An imperial mandate of January 4, 1528 grounded its severity on the ancient law, reciting that the imperial code ordered on pain of death that no one shall have himself baptized a second time.¹ When the sect kept growing, the Diet of Speyer issued the mandate of April 23, 1529, which directed that every rebaptizer and rebaptized person of accountable age, man or woman, be put to death by fire or sword, without any prior examination by spiritual judges.⁸ Catholic and Lutheran estates agreed to it together. In the same session the evangelical princes were making the protest from which the name Protestant comes.

This has to be said without softening. The execution of the Anabaptists was a sin, and the men who carried it out and the theologians who justified it were wrong. Scripture gives the magistrate a sword for the punishment of evildoers, not for the correction of conscience, and the Reformation’s own principle—that the Word alone binds the conscience—condemns the drownings in the Limmat as surely as it condemns the fires at Smithfield. Estimates of those executed in the first century of the movement run into the thousands.

Münster, 1534–1535

Then came the episode that hardened every authority in Europe against them.

Melchior Hoffman had carried a visionary, date-setting Anabaptism into the Netherlands and the Rhineland. Jan Matthys, a baker of Haarlem, took up the mantle, abandoned Hoffman’s nonresistance, and identified the Westphalian city of Münster as the New Jerusalem. His emissaries entered the city early in 1534, the preacher Bernhard Rothmann accepted rebaptism, and in the council election of February 23, 1534 the Anabaptists took the city. Catholics and Lutherans were driven out. Property was pooled, debt records and books other than the Bible were burned, and the prince-bishop Franz von Waldeck laid siege.

Matthys led a sortie of a handful of men on Easter Sunday, 1534, expecting deliverance, and was cut down. Jan van Leiden, a tailor, succeeded him, proclaimed himself king in the line of David, took royal regalia, and legalized polygamy; he is reported to have taken sixteen wives.⁹ The city was stormed on June 24, 1535. On January 22, 1536, van Leiden, Bernhard Knipperdolling, and Bernhard Krechting were tortured and executed in the marketplace, and their bodies were hung in iron cages from the tower of St. Lambert’s church. The cages are still there.¹⁰

Münster was not the Anabaptist movement. It was a minority of a minority, and the peaceable Brethren repudiated it. But it was not an accident either. It was the harvest of principles the wider movement had sown and could not everywhere control: immediate revelation above the written Word, a gathered kingdom to be built now, separation from the world so complete that no external authority remained to say no.

Menno Simons and the Recovery

The man who salvaged the movement was a Frisian parish priest. Menno Simons had already begun to doubt the Mass and infant baptism when, in 1535, a band of Münsterite sympathizers seized a monastery near Bolsward and were slaughtered; his own brother was among the dead. He renounced Rome in January 1536 and gave the rest of his life to gathering the scattered and disillusioned into peaceable congregations, against both the revolutionaries and the spiritualists.

His labor is why the name Mennonite exists and why Anabaptism has a respectable later history. It is also why an honest account cannot end with Münster. What it cannot do is pretend that Menno’s own doctrine of Christ was sound; that is treated below.

The Defections

What follows are not the ordinary differences between Reformed and Anabaptist convictions. These are the points at which parts of the movement left the faith, or left the bounds of Christian conduct, or left the created order of human society.

Theological

The flesh of Christ. Melchior Hoffman taught that Christ received nothing from Mary—that His flesh was heavenly, passing through her as water through a channel. Menno Simons held the same doctrine and defended it. However it was framed, it denied that the Son took our nature, and therefore denied the ground of the atonement, for it is precisely because the children share in flesh and blood that He likewise partook of the same (Hebrews 2:14). The Belgic Confession answers it by name:

Therefore we confess (in opposition to the heresy of the Anabaptists, who deny that Christ assumed human flesh of his mother) that Christ is become a partaker of the flesh and blood of the children.¹¹ The Belgic Confession, Article 18

The inner word above the written Word. The spiritualist strand—Thomas Müntzer, Hans Denck, Caspar Schwenckfeld, Sebastian Franck—held that God still speaks directly, and disparaged men who possessed only the letter of Scripture. Hoffman set dates for the end by revelation. Once the living voice within outranks the written Word without, there is no court of appeal left, and Münster is what follows. This is the defection that most directly contradicts the Reformation’s own discovery, and the Augsburg Confession condemns it in a single sentence, of those who think the Holy Spirit comes to men without the external Word, through their own preparations and works.¹²

Sin, will, and justification. Because they could not grant that an infant needed the sign of grace, some were driven to soften original guilt and to credit the will with more than Scripture allows; Hubmaier wrote a tract on free will in 1527 that is frankly semi-Pelagian. And while the movement’s insistence on real obedience was a healthy protest against cheap grace, in several writers discipleship crowded out the imputed righteousness of Christ as the ground of acceptance with God. Their opponents called them work-saints. The charge was unfair to some of them and fair to others.

Last things and the Trinity. Some taught that the punishment of the condemned will end; some revived a carnal, this-worldly kingdom before the resurrection; some in the Netherlands taught the sleep of the soul. Augsburg condemns the first two by name.¹² Further out on the same wing, Michael Servetus and the men who became the Socinians denied the Trinity outright—not Anabaptists properly, but bracketed with them at the time and rightly named here, because the same impatience with the catholic creeds produced both.

Moral

Polygamy and tyranny at Münster. Marriage was made compulsory, plural marriage was imposed, and a king reigned in the name of David over a starving city. One report has van Leiden beheading a wife in the marketplace for wishing to leave; the story may be a later embellishment, and should be cited with that caution.⁹

Libertinism. Schleitheim’s opening letter is itself the evidence: false brothers had turned Christian liberty into license and supposed that nothing could condemn them because they believed. The later career of David Joris—who taught a spiritualized Christianity that loosened outward obligation and lived out his years in Basel under an assumed name—shows where that road ended.

Violence. After Münster fell, Jan van Batenburg gathered a band that held plunder, polygamy, and the killing of the ungodly to be lawful for the elect. The peaceable Brethren disowned them; the magistrates did not trouble to.

Social

The refusal of the magistracy and the oath. A Christian who may not hold office, may not judge, may not serve, and may not swear has effectively withdrawn from the civil order God ordained for the restraint of evil. The Augsburg Confession replies that lawful civil ordinances are good works of God, and that it is right for Christians to bear civil office, to sit as judges, to hold property, and to take an oath when the magistrate requires it—and then condemns the Anabaptists who forbid these offices to Christians.¹²

Community of goods. Held peaceably by the Hutterites in Moravia and coercively at Münster, the doctrine was read everywhere as a threat to the social order. The Church of England answered it in the Articles, teaching that the riches and goods of Christians are not common as touching the right, title, and possession of the same—as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast—while requiring liberal alms of every man according to his ability.¹³

Revolution. Thomas Müntzer did not practice rebaptism and was not an Anabaptist in the strict sense, but he preached the sword against the godless and died after Frankenhausen in 1525, and his name was joined to theirs ever after. The Belgic Confession gathers up the whole social indictment in one clause, detesting the Anabaptists and other seditious people who reject the higher powers, introduce community of goods, and confound the good order God has established among men.¹⁴

Separation hardened into withdrawal. Schleitheim’s fourth article divides all creation into two kinds and requires separation from every civic association and public assembly. Applied strictly, and joined to a rigorous ban, it produced communities that could not love a neighbor they were forbidden to sit with, and households divided by the shunning of a father or a wife.

Cautions and Counterarguments

Four cautions belong on any page that says the above.

First, Münster is not a fair summary of Anabaptism, and using it as one is a polemical convenience the sixteenth century indulged in and we need not. The Swiss Brethren, the Hutterites, and the Mennonites were, for the most part, industrious, chaste, and peaceable people who died rather than strike back.

Second, the case against the reformers is real and has been pressed by serious scholars. Leonard Verduin argued that the reformers inherited the Constantinian assumption that church and society are coextensive, could not shake it, and persecuted their own stepchildren for pointing it out—and he documented the persecution from the sources.¹⁵ A Reformed reader may reject his reading of the covenant and still concede that he has the better of the argument about the sword.

Third, not every Anabaptist distinctive is an error. Believer’s baptism is held by confessional Baptists who are thoroughly Reformed on sin, grace, election, and the magistracy. The question of who receives the sign is a serious disagreement within the household of faith; the celestial flesh of Christ is not.

Fourth, the confessional condemnations quoted here were aimed at the doctrines their authors had in front of them, often reported at second hand and in wartime conditions. They are reliable witnesses to what the Reformation churches judged intolerable. They are not always reliable witnesses to what any particular Anabaptist actually taught.

Why This History Is Kept

The Anabaptists put a question to the reformers that the reformers had not fully faced, and they were killed for asking it. That is a shame the Reformed churches own. But the answer a man gives is not validated by the cruelty of his opponents, and the movement that asked the right question about the church gave, in places, disastrous answers about Christ, about the Word, and about the world God made.

The dividing line runs through one issue. When the Spirit is expected to speak apart from the Scripture He inspired, everything is possible: a new revelation, a new Jerusalem, a new king, a new marriage law. When the written Word stands over the church as its only unchallengeable authority, prophets can be tested and kings can be refused. Tyndale had the order right—the Word is before the congregation, because the Word makes the congregation.

That is the lesson this page is kept for. Zeal for a pure church is a good thing, and it is not a safe thing unless it stays tethered to the text. The Christ who is preached must be the Christ of the Gospels, flesh of our flesh, or there is no salvation in Him; and He is known nowhere but in the sacred writings, which are able to make us wise for salvation through faith in Him.

Sources

Imperial law from the time of Justinian (A.D. 529) made rebaptism one of two heresies penalized by death, the other being anti-Trinitarianism; the first imperial mandate against the Anabaptists (Speyer, January 4, 1528) grounded its severity on that code. See Mennonite Encyclopedia, s.v. “Anabaptist,” excerpted online. ↩
Leonard Verduin, The Reformers and Their Stepchildren (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), ch. 1, citing the Zurich sources on the second disputation of October 1523 and the objection raised when Zwingli submitted the question of reform to the city council. ↩
See Anabaptist Catechism (1526) on this site. ↩
See The Schleitheim Confession (1527) on this site, with the full text of the opening letter and the seven articles. ↩
Luther, quoted in Verduin, The Reformers and Their Stepchildren, Introduction. Luther is alluding to 1 John 2:19. ↩
A manifesto from the Second Front, quoted in Verduin, The Reformers and Their Stepchildren, ch. 1. ↩
The Zurich mandate of March 7, 1526. On the drowning penalty, the phrase used in mockery, and the six executions at Zurich between 1527 and 1532, see Sam Storms, “Zwingli and the Anabaptists.” ↩
Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, “Diet of Speyer (1529),” summarizing the mandate of April 23, 1529 from the texts printed in the Reichsabschiede and in Bossert’s Quellen. ↩
The sixteen wives are reported consistently; the beheading of Elisabeth Wandscherer in the marketplace is reported but may have been attributed to van Leiden after his death. Preach the first as fact and the second as report. ↩
The city was taken June 24–25, 1535; the executions followed on January 22, 1536, and the cages were then hung from the tower of St. Lambert’s, where they remain. Note that some popular accounts collapse the two dates. ↩
The Belgic Confession (1561), Article 18, in Philip Schaff, ed., The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877), 402–403; parallel French and English text at CCEL. See also The Belgic Confession on this site. ↩
The Augsburg Confession (1530), Articles V, IX, XII, XVI, and XVII, which name the Anabaptists in each case. See the full text on this site. ↩
The Thirty-Nine Articles (1563/1571), Article 38, “Of Christian Men’s Goods, which are not Common.” See The Thirty-Nine Articles on this site. ↩
The Belgic Confession (1561), Article 36, on the civil magistrate. ↩
Verduin, The Reformers and Their Stepchildren, Introduction and chs. 1–8. Verduin writes as an advocate of the radicals’ ecclesiology and should be read as such, but his documentation of the persecution is sound. ↩

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