Tradition · 1525

Anabaptist

The Radical Reformation movement that baptised believers only, sought churches separate from the state, and in most branches refused oaths and violence.

History

Roots

Anabaptism began as an argument inside Huldrych Zwingli’s reform in Zurich. Young humanists around him, led by Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz, read the New Testament with Zwingli and concluded that it knew nothing of infant baptism and nothing of a church run by the city council. Zwingli had briefly voiced doubts about baptizing infants himself. He drew back when it became clear that a church of the baptized-by-choice would break the unity of church and town that his reform depended on.

The break came in January 1525. On 18 January the council ordered every parent to have their children baptized within eight days, and Grebel had refused to baptize his newborn daughter. On 21 January a small group met at the house of Manz’s mother, where Grebel baptized the former priest George Blaurock, who then baptized the others (Felix Manz, secondary). Opponents called them Wiedertäufer, “rebaptizers”, which became “Anabaptists” in English. They called themselves brethren and denied that they rebaptized anyone, since they held infant baptism to be no baptism at all.

Causes

The movement grew out of the Reformation itself. Martin Luther and Zwingli taught that Scripture alone should rule the church, and the Anabaptists pressed that principle further than either reformer would go. If a practice could not be found in the New Testament, they dropped it. Infant baptism, the state church, the oath and the sword all failed that test for them.

Social unrest fed it too. The Peasants’ War of 1524–1525 left many in southern Germany and Austria hungry for a just society, and some radicals, like Hans Hut, came to Anabaptism by way of Thomas Müntzer’s apocalyptic preaching. In the Netherlands and northern Germany, Melchior Hoffman spread a version shaped by his expectation of the imminent end of the world (Melchior Hoffman, secondary).

Persecution was immediate and came from every side. In March 1526 Zurich made rebaptism punishable by drowning, and on 5 January 1527 Manz was drowned in the Limmat, the first Anabaptist executed by Protestants. Michael Sattler was burned by Catholic authorities at Rottenburg in May 1527 (Michael Sattler, secondary). Balthasar Hubmaier, the movement’s most learned theologian, was burned in Vienna in 1528. The Imperial Diet of Speyer in 1529 made rebaptism a capital crime across the Holy Roman Empire. The Lutheran Augsburg Confession of 1530 condemned the Anabaptists twice by name: for rejecting the baptism of children (art. IX) and for forbidding Christians to hold civil office (art. XVI). John Calvin wrote against them in his Brief Instruction for Arming All the Good Faithful Against the Errors of the Common Sect of the Anabaptists (1544).

Münster and the turn to peace

The disaster that shaped the movement’s later image came at Münster in 1534–1535. Followers of Hoffman’s apocalyptic teaching took over the city, expelled those who refused baptism, and declared it the New Jerusalem. Under Jan of Leiden they practised community of goods and polygamy and defended the city by force until a Catholic-Lutheran siege ended it in slaughter (Münster rebellion, secondary). For centuries “Anabaptist” meant Münster to most Europeans.

Menno Simons, a Dutch priest who left Rome in 1536, gathered the scattered peaceful Anabaptists of the Low Countries in Münster’s aftermath. He rejected the sword outright and gave the northern movement a settled, disciplined, non-resistant shape. His followers came to be called Mennonites (Complete Writings of Menno Simons, Archive.org).

Branches and influence

Three main families descend from the sixteenth-century movement. The Swiss Brethren and the Dutch and North German Mennonites became the Mennonite churches. The Hutterites, organized in Moravia under Jakob Hutter (burned in 1536), hold all goods in common following Acts 2 and 4 (Hutterites, secondary). The Amish split from the Swiss Brethren in 1693 when Jakob Ammann demanded stricter church discipline, including shunning of the excommunicated (Jakob Ammann, secondary). Persecution pushed all three east to Prussia and Russia and west to Pennsylvania, and later on to Canada, Paraguay and beyond.

The tradition’s wider influence came through the ideas more than the churches. John Smyth, the founder of the first English Baptist congregation, sought union with the Waterlander Mennonites in Amsterdam around 1609, and the question of Mennonite influence on the early Baptists is still argued. The Anabaptist idea of a voluntary church separate from the state anticipated later arguments for religious liberty. In the twentieth century Anabaptist writers, above all John Howard Yoder, gave non-violence and church-as-alternative-community a hearing far outside the Mennonite world, and movements like the Bruderhof drew openly on the tradition (Bruderhof, secondary).

Key ideas and contributors

A believers’ church. The church is the gathered community of those who have repented, believed and chosen to follow Christ. Believer’s Baptism is the sign of that choice and of entry into the community, and Infant Baptism is rejected because an infant can neither believe nor commit (Matthew 28:19, Acts 2:38). Hubmaier argued this case at length in On the Christian Baptism of Believers (1525) and also wrote one of the first pleas for religious tolerance, Concerning Heretics and Those Who Burn Them (1524) (Balthasar Hubmaier, secondary).

The Schleitheim Confession. Gathered under Sattler’s leadership at Schleitheim in February 1527, the Swiss Brethren agreed seven articles: baptism of believers, the ban (church discipline), the breaking of bread for the baptized only, separation from the world, pastors chosen by the congregation, the sword, and the oath (facsimile of the 1527 text, Museum Schleitheim; summary, secondary). Its sixth article placed the sword “outside the perfection of Christ” (ausserhalb der volkomenheit Christi, 1527 text, Museum Schleitheim): God ordains the magistrate to punish evil, but a Christian may not take the magistrate’s office or use lethal force.

Discipleship. Hans Denck’s line that no one can truly know Christ unless he follows him in life (Nachfolge) sums up the tradition’s emphasis on obedience as part of faith, an emphasis that sits close to what later Protestants called Lordship Salvation. Salvation was not only a verdict of acquittal but a new life, visible in the community.

Non-resistance. Following the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:38–44), most Anabaptists refused to bear arms, swear oaths or go to law. The Dutch Mennonite Dordrecht Confession of 1632, still used by the Amish and Old Order groups, kept these commitments (Dordrecht Confession, secondary).

The church’s own order. Congregations chose their own ministers and disciplined their own members, which made Anabaptism an early form of Congregational Polity. The Lord’s Supper was a memorial and a covenant meal of the committed community, close to Zwinglian Memorialism.

The martyr memory. Thieleman van Braght’s Martyrs Mirror (1660) gathered hundreds of accounts of executed Anabaptists, and it remains, after the Bible, a defining book in many Amish and Mennonite homes (Archive.org; Project Gutenberg).

Other contributors: Pilgram Marpeck, an engineer who worked out a middle path between Swiss separatism and spiritualist individualism; Dirk Philips, Menno’s colleague and a stricter voice on discipline; and Harold S. Bender, whose 1944 essay The Anabaptist Vision reframed the tradition for modern Mennonites around discipleship, the church as brotherhood, and love and non-resistance (summary, secondary). Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus (1972, Eerdmans) argued that Jesus’ life gives a binding social ethic of non-violence for all Christians.

Key controversies

Infant baptism and the state church. The founding quarrel. Zwingli, Luther and Calvin answered that baptism is the covenant sign given to the children of believers, as circumcision was in Israel (Colossians 2:11–12), and that a Christian society needs a common church. To them rebaptism was both bad theology and sedition, since it cut the bond between the church and the civil order. The Anabaptists answered that faith cannot be coerced and that the New Testament church was a fellowship of the willing. The magisterial reformers’ answer cost thousands of lives; the Anabaptist answer is now, in its religious-liberty form, nearly universal.

Was Münster Anabaptism? Sixteenth-century opponents treated Münster as the true face of the movement. Mennonite historians, led by Bender, drew a sharp line between the “evangelical Anabaptists” of Zurich and Menno and the revolutionaries of Münster, whom they excluded. In 1975 James Stayer, Werner Packull and Klaus Deppermann argued in “From Monogenesis to Polygenesis” that Anabaptism had several separate origins (Swiss, South German–Austrian and Melchiorite) and that the violent and peaceful streams were tangled together from the start (Anabaptism: polygenesis, secondary). Most historians now accept a plural origin, which makes the “Anabaptist Vision” read more like a later choice among strands than a description of the whole.

The sword. Schleitheim’s refusal of the magistrate’s office and of lethal force was the most contested Anabaptist claim, and it divided Anabaptists themselves: Hubmaier held that a Christian ruler might bear the sword (Romans 13:1–4). Augsburg Article XVI and Calvin argued that refusing civil office abandoned the neighbor to injustice. In the twentieth century Reinhold Niebuhr pressed the same point against Christian pacifism generally, and Yoder replied that the cross, not effectiveness, is the measure of Christian action.

The ban and shunning. Church discipline was meant to keep the community pure, but it caused split after split. The Dutch Mennonites divided repeatedly over how strictly to ban, and the 1693 Amish division turned on whether the excommunicated must be shunned at table and in marriage. Critics inside and outside the tradition call strict shunning legalistic or cruel to families; defenders call it the loving discipline of Matthew 18:15–17.

Doctrinal outliers. Hoffman and Menno taught a “celestial flesh” Christology, in which Christ did not take his human flesh from Mary. Opponents, including the Reformed, saw it as a denial of Chalcedonian Christology, and later Mennonites quietly dropped it. A few radicals at the fringe moved toward anti-Trinitarian views, which helped make “Anabaptist” a catch-all term of abuse.

Reconciliation. In 2010 the Lutheran World Federation, meeting in Stuttgart, formally asked God and the Mennonites for forgiveness for the Lutheran persecution of Anabaptists in the sixteenth century (Lutherischer Weltbund, secondary). In Zurich, a 2004 day of encounter between the Reformed churches and Anabaptists ended with a memorial plaque on the Limmat where Manz and other Anabaptists were drowned (Felix Manz, secondary), and official talks between the Mennonite World Conference and the Vatican ran from 1998 to 2003, the first since the sixteenth century (Mennoniten, secondary). These steps reopened a further question: whether the condemnations still bind the churches that issued them.

What remains unresolved

The historical argument over origins has largely settled on plurality, but the theological argument it carried has not: which strand counts as the real tradition, and whether separation from the state was a principle or a survival strategy. Modern Mennonites range from Old Order Amish who keep the world at a distance to urban churches active in politics and peacebuilding. The open question is whether a believers’ church can stay distinct once the state no longer persecutes it.