There was never one Anabaptist movement. There were several, with different origins, different convictions, and in some cases open hostility toward one another. The sixteenth-century authorities had no interest in the distinctions, because a single label brought a single legal penalty. We have no such excuse.

Sorting them is not a scholar’s nicety. It decides whether the polygamy of Münster belongs in the same sentence as a Swiss farmer who went to the stake refusing to strike back, and whether a denial of the Trinity can be laid at the door of men who confessed it. What follows is a working guide, with the caution that these families overlapped and that individuals moved between them.

A Framework

The standard modern division of the Radical Reformation is threefold: the Anabaptists proper, who gathered visible congregations of believers and baptized on confession; the Spiritualists, who subordinated the outward Word, ordinances, and church to the inner light and often dispensed with them entirely; and the Evangelical Rationalists, who submitted the creeds to reason and ended by denying the Trinity.¹

Only the first group is Anabaptist in any useful sense. The other two are treated at the end of this page because they are so often folded in, and because the boundary between the first and second was genuinely porous.

Within the Anabaptists proper, a second division matters: those who held to nonresistance and those who took up the sword. That line, and not the line between Reformed and Anabaptist, is what separates Michael Sattler from Jan van Leiden.

The Swiss Brethren

The original body, born in Zurich on January 21, 1525, out of the circle around Zwingli. Their charter is the Schleitheim Confession of 1527: believer’s baptism, the ban, the breaking of bread, separation from the world, congregational shepherds, refusal of the sword, refusal of the oath.

They were disciplined, literate in Scripture, and thoroughly nonresistant. They spread through the Swiss cantons, the upper Rhine, Alsace, and the Palatinate, and they were hunted in all of them. Their descendants are the Swiss and South German Mennonites, and ultimately the Amish.

The South German and Austrian Anabaptists

A distinct stream, shaped less by Zurich than by the mysticism of the late medieval German tradition and, at its origin, by Thomas Müntzer. Hans Hut carried it through Franconia and Austria with an expectation of the imminent end; Hans Denck gave it a more inward and less ecclesial cast.

Left to itself this stream would have dissolved into spiritualism. It did not, largely because of Pilgram Marpeck, who spent his life insisting against Schwenckfeld that God works through outward means—a real Word, real water, a real congregation. The South German congregations that survived did so on Marpeck’s terms.

The Hutterites

Refugees from Tyrol and elsewhere gathered in Moravia, where a measure of noble protection made settled community possible. Jacob Hutter organized them from 1533 around a full community of goods, understood as a mark of the true church rather than an expedient. Peter Riedemann’s confession, written largely in prison, remains their standard.

They are the one communal experiment of the century that survived, and they survived by catechizing, by disciplined work, and by an internal chronicle that kept their history in front of them. Their community of goods was voluntary and peaceable, which distinguishes it absolutely from what was imposed at Münster—though it is the doctrine the Thirty-Nine Articles answer in Article 38.

The Melchiorites

The northern movement, named for Melchior Hoffman, who brought Anabaptism into the Low Countries about 1530. Two marks define them and both proved costly: an apocalyptic expectation fixed to dates, and the doctrine that Christ brought a heavenly body through Mary rather than taking flesh from her.

Hoffman himself was nonresistant. After his imprisonment his followers split—some toward the violent path that led to Münster, some toward quietism, and some, eventually, to Menno Simons. Nearly everything that happened in the Netherlands after 1533 runs back through this group.

The Münsterites

The revolutionary wing of the Melchiorites: Jan Matthys, Jan van Leiden, and Bernhard Rothmann, who held the city of Münster from February 1534 until June 24, 1535, under a compulsory community of goods, compulsory rebaptism, plural marriage, and a self-crowned king in the line of David.

They were a minority of a minority, and every other Anabaptist body repudiated them. But they are the reason the word Anabaptist carried the sense of sedition for three centuries, and no account that omits them is honest. The fuller narrative is on the Anabaptists page.

The Batenburgers

The remnant that refused to learn. Jan van Batenburg gathered the survivors of the Münster debacle into a secret band that held plunder, plural marriage, and the killing of the unbaptized to be lawful for the elect. They operated as brigands into the 1540s. Menno Simons wrote against them explicitly; the magistrates, understandably, did not trouble to tell them apart from him.

The Mennonites

The recovery. Menno Simons and Dirk Philips gathered the scattered and disillusioned Dutch and North German believers into peaceable, disciplined congregations from 1536 onward, repudiating both the revolutionaries and the spiritualists. Their mature confession is the Dordrecht Confession of 1632.

They divided repeatedly, and almost always over the strictness of the ban and shunning: Flemish, Frisian, and Waterlander parties from the 1550s onward. The Waterlanders were the mildest, and it was among them that English Separatists in Amsterdam found a hearing early in the next century—one of the threads that runs toward the English Baptists.

The Amish

A later split from the Swiss and Alsatian Mennonites, led by Jakob Ammann in 1693, again over the rigor of shunning along with foot washing and plainness of dress. They are not a sixteenth-century body and appear here only because they are the Anabaptist group most Americans have actually seen.

Spiritualists — Adjacent, Not Anabaptist

Thomas Müntzer, Caspar Schwenckfeld, Sebastian Franck, and David Joris belong to a different family. What unites them is the conviction that God speaks directly and presently, so that the written Word is at best a witness to the inner voice and the outward ordinances are dispensable.

Schwenckfeld suspended the Supper altogether and rejected water baptism, which by itself disqualifies the label. Franck dissolved the visible church into an invisible fellowship of the spiritual. Joris ended in an accommodation that let him live comfortably in Basel under a false name. Müntzer preached the sword and died in the Peasants’ War in 1525 without ever practicing rebaptism.

This is the family the Augsburg Confession has in view when it condemns those who think the Holy Spirit comes to men without the external Word.² It is also the family that shows why the distinction on this page matters: the peaceable Anabaptists and the spiritualists were at war with each other, and Marpeck spent his life on that war.

Rationalists — Adjacent, Not Anabaptist

Michael Servetus, Lelio and Fausto Sozzini, and the Polish Brethren submitted the catholic creeds to the bar of reason and denied the Trinity. The Socinian movement that took its name from the Sozzini went on to deny Christ’s deity, satisfaction, and much else, and stands behind later Unitarianism.

They rejected infant baptism, which is why they were bracketed with the Anabaptists at the time and why imperial law treated rebaptism and anti-Trinitarianism as the two capital heresies together.³ On the doctrine of God they stand outside the Christian faith altogether, and the Swiss Brethren, the Hutterites, and the Mennonites all confessed the Trinity.

Using These Distinctions

Three practical rules follow.

Name the group, not the movement. What is true of the Batenburgers is not true of the Hutterites, and saying “the Anabaptists taught” almost always conceals more than it reveals.

Keep the confessional condemnations attached to their targets. Augsburg Article XVII on the end of punishment, Article XVI on the magistracy, and the Belgic on the flesh of Christ are each aimed at real positions held by identifiable men—but not by all of them.

Do not let the sorting become an excuse. Distinguishing the peaceable from the revolutionary is honest history; it is not a way of quietly setting aside the errors the peaceable ones actually held, which are set out on the Anabaptists page.

Sources

1. The threefold division is George H. Williams’s, in The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2000). It is the standard framework, though Williams himself notes how much variety the category still contains. ↩
2. The Augsburg Confession (1530), Article V. See the full text on this site. ↩
3. Imperial law from the time of Justinian made rebaptism and anti-Trinitarianism the two heresies penalized by death. See Mennonite Encyclopedia, s.v. “Anabaptist,” excerpted online. ↩

Further Reading

• George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2000)
• C. Arnold Snyder, Anabaptist History and Theology: An Introduction (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 1995)
• Walter Klaassen, ed., Anabaptism in Outline: Selected Primary Sources (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1981)
• John A. Hostetler, Hutterite Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974)
• Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, gameo.org

Anabaptists Movement Leaders