Radical Reformation History

From Medieval Dissent to the Free Churches

Manny Pereira

Manny Pereira

5 min read

The Radical Reformation was not one movement but a cluster of movements that arose alongside the Reformation and judged it unfinished. Its people sought the radix, the root, of the apostolic church, and most of them concluded that the church must be set free from the state. The Anabaptists page treats their convictions and errors, Movement Leaders sketches the men, and Types of Anabaptists sorts the families. This page traces the movement’s course from its medieval seedbeds to its settled descendants, and the Major Events table sets out the dates.


Seedbeds of Dissent

Long before 1517, scattered movements had protested the union of church and empire that began with Constantine. The Waldensians of the Alps, the English Lollards, and the Czech Hussites all appealed to Scripture against the established church. In Bohemia, Peter Chelčický grieved when the Taborites took up the sword in the 1420s. He taught that the state was necessary but belonged to another order than the kingdom of Christ: “These two divisions, the temporal order of force and Christ’s way of love, are far removed from each other.” His followers formed the Unity of Brethren.1

These were kindred spirits, not a chain of ancestors. Some older Baptist historians tried to trace an unbroken succession from the apostles through such groups, but their own sources admit that the leaders “seem to have had no special connection with each other.”2 When the Reformation came, the Waldensians joined the Reformed churches at Chanforan in 1532, and the Lollards fed English nonconformity.3

Wittenberg and the Peasants, 1521–1525

The first radicals appeared in Luther’s own city while he was hidden at the Wartburg. On Christmas Day 1521 Andreas Karlstadt gave communion in both kinds without vestments. Days later three laymen arrived from Zwickau claiming direct revelations. Roland Bainton says of them, “They had no need of the Bible but relied on the Spirit,” and they rejected infant baptism. Luther came home in March 1522 and restored order by preaching.4 In 1524 Karlstadt laid aside his vestments to become a “new layman” and declined to baptize infants.5

Thomas Müntzer carried the inner-word principle into revolution. He taught that faith comes not through Scripture or sacrament but through the struggle of the soul, and he joined the Peasants’ War of 1525 believing it to be the last judgment. At Frankenhausen on May 15, 1525, the peasants were crushed. Müntzer was executed on May 27.6 He never practiced rebaptism, but his name was joined to the Anabaptists ever after. To the magistrates, every radical now looked like a rebel.

Zurich and the Free Church, 1523–1527

The decisive break came in Zurich, where Zwingli’s young disciples demanded that Scripture, not the city council, govern the church. On January 21, 1525, they baptized one another on confession of faith. Within days a congregation of thirty-five converts had formed at nearby Zollikon.7 Zwingli saw at once what he faced. In a letter of May 28, 1525, he called the struggle with the Catholic party “but child’s play” compared with this new “Second Front.”8 Two years later, on February 24, 1527, the Swiss Brethren gathered at Schleitheim and adopted seven articles that gave the movement its charter.9 The fuller story is told on the Anabaptists page.

Spread and Suppression, 1525–1533

The movement spread with astonishing speed, because its preachers took the Great Commission as their own. In those years no text was quoted more often in their court hearings.10 Hans Denck led an assembly at Augsburg by 1526. Hans Hut planted congregations across Austria. In Moravia, under the protection of the Lords of Liechtenstein, refugees began a common life in 1528 that Jacob Hutter later organized. Melchior Hoffman met the Anabaptists at Strasbourg in 1529 and carried their views to the Netherlands the next year.11

The authorities answered with exile, prison, fire, water, and the sword. The Diet of Speyer in April 1529 revived the Code of Justinian against rebaptism, and Catholic and Protestant rulers enforced it alike.12 The movement “lost virtually all its leaders in the first two years.” Yet surviving court records count 12,522 Anabaptists in South and Central Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, scattered across 2,088 towns and villages.13

Münster and Its Aftermath, 1534–1536

In the north, Hoffman’s date-setting turned to tragedy. Melchiorite prophets seized Münster in February 1534 and proclaimed it the New Jerusalem. Jan van Leiden ruled the city as king, with compulsory community of goods and plural marriage, until it fell on June 24, 1535. The rest of the Anabaptists repudiated Münster, but the name “Anabaptist” meant sedition for three centuries afterward. As one account puts it, speculation about the last days “fell into disrepute” among those who had once indulged it.14

Consolidation and Survival, 1536–1700

The movement survived because it was gathered and taught. Menno Simons renounced Rome in January 1536 and gave twenty-five years to gathering the scattered Dutch and North German believers. His Foundation of Christian Doctrine (1539–1540) became their handbook.15 Pilgram Marpeck held together the South German congregations, and the Hutterites built disciplined communities in Moravia. On the far wing, Michael Servetus was burned at Geneva in 1553. The Socinians later denied the Trinity outright, but they were neither Anabaptists nor heirs of the Swiss Brethren.

The peaceable Anabaptists kept their witness through suffering. In 1569 Dirk Willems, fleeing arrest across a frozen lake, turned back to save his pursuer from the ice and was burned for it.16 The Dutch Mennonites confessed their faith at Dordrecht in 1632, and their martyrs were gathered into the Martyrs Mirror in 1660. In Amsterdam, the English Separatist John Smyth baptized himself and his congregation in 1609; after Thomas Helwys and a few others parted from him and returned to England, Smyth’s followers joined the Mennonites.17 The Amish separated from the Swiss Brethren in 1693.18

Kindred, Not Ancestors

The Radical Reformation asked the right question about the church and paid for it in blood. It recovered the conviction that the church is a company of believers, that faith cannot be coerced, and that the sword belongs to the magistrate, not to the church. It also produced the inner-word spiritualism of Müntzer, the apocalyptic violence of Münster, and the Christological errors of Hoffman and Menno. The Reformers were wrong to persecute the radicals, and the radicals were often wrong in what they taught.

Baptists share several of these convictions, but they are not the theological children of the Anabaptists. Timothy George warns against the habit of treating the Reformation as “a hunting ground for the ‘missing link’” between modern Baptists and ancient dissenters.19 The English Baptists came out of Puritan and Separatist soil and confessed the faith of the Reformation. Their watchword was the Reformation’s own: ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei, the church reformed and always being reformed according to the Word of God. See The Particular Baptists and Church and State.

Radical Reformation   Major Events   Next: Contrasting Approaches

Notes

  1. Heritage of Freedom: Dissenters, Reformers, Pioneers, “Renewal in Czechoslovakia” and “The Birth of the Czech Brethren.” ↩
  2. John T. Christian, A History of the Baptists, as quoted in Manny Pereira, “Baptist Church History Notes,” Parts 3 and 4 (slides, “Non-succession of Baptists”). ↩
  3. Heritage of Freedom: Dissenters, Reformers, Pioneers, “The Birth of the Czech Brethren.” ↩
  4. Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Nashville: Abingdon, 1950), ch. 12, “The Return of the Exile.” ↩
  5. Christian History, “The Radical Reformation: The Anabaptists” (1985), timeline, 1521 and 1524. ↩
  6. Christian History, “The Radical Reformation: The Anabaptists” (1985), “A Gallery of Factions, Friends and Foes: Thomas Müntzer.” ↩
  7. Christian History, “The Radical Reformation: The Anabaptists” (1985), timeline, 1525. ↩
  8. Leonard Verduin, The Reformers and Their Stepchildren (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), Introduction. ↩
  9. Christian History, “The Radical Reformation: The Anabaptists” (1985), “A Fire that Spread: Anabaptist Beginnings.” See The Schleitheim Confession. ↩
  10. Heritage of Freedom: Dissenters, Reformers, Pioneers, “God’s Left Wing.” ↩
  11. Christian History, “The Radical Reformation: The Anabaptists” (1985), “From Switzerland to South Germany to Austria to the Netherlands.” ↩
  12. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), ch. 6, “Menno Simons.” ↩
  13. Christian History, “The Radical Reformation: The Anabaptists” (1985), “Did You Know?” ↩
  14. Heritage of Freedom: Dissenters, Reformers, Pioneers, “A Violent Aberration.” On the events, see the Anabaptists page. ↩
  15. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), ch. 6. ↩
  16. Christian History, “The Radical Reformation: The Anabaptists” (1985), “Did You Know?” ↩
  17. Manny Pereira, “Baptist Church History Notes,” Part 4 (slides on the General Baptists). ↩
  18. Christian History, “The Radical Reformation: The Anabaptists” (1985), “Did You Know?” ↩
  19. Timothy George, “The Reformation Roots of the Baptist Tradition,” Perichoresis 1, no. 2 (2003): 67. ↩

Sources

  • Bainton, Roland H. Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. Nashville: Abingdon, 1950.
  • Christian History. “The Radical Reformation: The Anabaptists.” (1985).
  • George, Timothy. “The Reformation Roots of the Baptist Tradition.” Perichoresis 1, no. 2 (2003): 65–81.
  • George, Timothy. Theology of the Reformers. Rev. ed. Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013.
  • Heritage of Freedom: Dissenters, Reformers, Pioneers.
  • Pereira, Manny. “Baptist Church History Notes,” Parts 1–4, with accompanying slides (teaching notes).
  • Verduin, Leonard. The Reformers and Their Stepchildren. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964.