The Radical Reformation

Not far enough

Luther and Zwingli had challenged the authority of the pope in the name of Scripture. But if Scripture alone was the rule, some of their followers asked, why stop where the Reformers stopped? Where in the New Testament were babies baptized? Where did Jesus tell his followers to use the sword, swear oaths, or let the government run the church?

The people who pushed these questions are called the Radical Reformation, a term popularized by the historian George Williams. "Radical" comes from the Latin radix, "root." They wanted to go to the roots. They were extremely diverse. Brad Gregory's chapter in the Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation stresses that "radicals" did not form one movement but many, united mainly by their rejection by both Catholic and mainstream Protestant authorities [check].

The first Anabaptists: Zürich, 1525

In Zürich, a group of Zwingli's most enthusiastic young followers, including the humanist Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz, became frustrated that Zwingli let the city council decide the pace of reform. Studying the New Testament, they concluded that baptism should follow personal faith and repentance. Babies cannot believe, so infant baptism was not true baptism. The church should be a community of committed believers, not the whole population.

When the council ordered them to stop meeting and to baptize their babies, they defied it. On the evening of 21 January 1525, in Manz's mother's house, a former priest named George Blaurock asked Grebel to baptize him. Grebel did, and Blaurock then baptized the others. This was the birth of the Swiss Brethren. Their enemies called them Anabaptists, "re-baptizers." They themselves said they were not rebaptizing, because infant baptism was not a real baptism.

The reaction was swift. Re-baptism was a crime under ancient Roman law, and it was seen as an attack on the whole social order, in which church membership and citizenship were the same thing. In January 1527 Zürich drowned Felix Manz in the river Limmat, a cruel mockery of his "third baptism." He was the first Protestant executed by Protestants.

Schleitheim: what Anabaptists believed

In 1527 a group of Swiss and South German Anabaptists met at Schleitheim near the Swiss border. Led by Michael Sattler, a former Benedictine prior, they agreed seven articles, the Schleitheim Confession:

1. Believers' baptism: only for those who have repented and believe.
2. The ban: church discipline. Members who fall into sin are warned and, if unrepentant, excluded.
3. The Lord's Supper: a memorial meal for baptized believers only.
4. Separation from the world: believers must separate from evil and "abominations," including (in their view) the state church.
5. Pastors: chosen by and accountable to the congregation.
6. The sword: the sword is ordained by God "outside the perfection of Christ" for governments, but Christians must not use it. No violence, no war, no serving as magistrates.
7. No oaths: following Jesus' command "Do not swear at all" (Matthew 5:34).

Months later, Sattler was arrested by Catholic authorities, tortured, his tongue cut out, and burned at Rottenburg. His wife Margaretha was drowned. The scholarly Anabaptist theologian Balthasar Hubmaier, who unlike Schleitheim accepted the use of the sword by Christian rulers, was burned in Vienna in 1528. His wife was drowned in the Danube.

Varieties of radical reform

	Peaceful Anabaptists	Revolutionary radicals	Spiritualists	Anti-Trinitarians
Key figures	Grebel, Manz, Sattler, Menno Simons	Müntzer, Jan of Leiden (Münster)	Schwenckfeld, Franck	Servetus, Socinus
Central idea	A disciplined church of baptized believers, separate from the world	God's kingdom to be set up now, by force if needed	The inner Spirit matters more than outward forms	Reason and Scripture reject the Trinity
Violence	Rejected (pacifist)	Embraced	Generally peaceful	Peaceful
Fate	Persecuted; survive as Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites	Crushed in 1525 and 1535	Small circles	Persecuted; later Unitarians

Persecution and martyrdom

Anabaptists were persecuted everywhere, by Catholics and Lutherans and Reformed alike. A 1529 imperial law made re-baptism punishable by death. Perhaps 2,000–3,000 Anabaptists were executed in the 1500s, burned, drowned or beheaded, a huge number for a small movement. Men and women died with remarkable courage, often singing hymns. Their stories were collected in the Martyrs Mirror (1660), still treasured in Mennonite and Amish homes. The most famous story is that of Dirk Willems, who in 1569 escaped across a frozen pond and then turned back to rescue his pursuer, who had fallen through the ice. He was recaptured and burned.

Why such hatred? Anabaptists threatened the whole idea of Christendom, a society where everyone was baptized into one church and the state enforced religion. Refusing oaths seemed to undermine courts and loyalty. Refusing military service seemed dangerous when the Turks were at the gates of Vienna. And then came Münster.

The kingdom of Münster

Not all radicals were peaceful. The apocalyptic preacher Thomas Müntzer had died leading peasant rebels in 1525 (see Martin Luther). In the Netherlands and northern Germany, a lay preacher named Melchior Hoffman taught that Christ's return was near and the faithful would gather in a "New Jerusalem."

In 1534 radical Anabaptists took over the city of Münster in Westphalia. They expelled those who would not be rebaptized, abolished private property, and prepared for the end of the world. When the Catholic bishop besieged the city, a young Dutch tailor, Jan of Leiden, declared himself king of the New Jerusalem, introduced polygamy (he took sixteen wives), and ruled by terror. In June 1535 the city fell. The leaders were tortured to death, and their bodies were hung in iron cages from the tower of St Lambert's church. The cages still hang there today.

Münster was a disaster for Anabaptism. For centuries, "Anabaptist" meant "dangerous fanatic," and the peaceful majority were tarred with the same brush.

Menno Simons and the Mennonites

The movement was rescued by Menno Simons (1496–1561), a Dutch Catholic priest who had doubted transubstantiation and infant baptism. Moved by the deaths of misguided Anabaptists, including his own brother at a Münsterite skirmish, he left the priesthood in 1536 and became a leader of the scattered peaceful Anabaptists of the Netherlands and northern Germany. For 25 years he lived as a hunted man with a price on his head, preaching, writing and organizing. He insisted on nonviolence, discipline and holy living. His favorite verse was 1 Corinthians 3:11: "No one can lay any foundation other than the one that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." His followers became known as Mennonites.

Other Anabaptist groups included the Hutterites in Moravia, who shared all property in common, following Acts 2. Later, in 1693, the Amish split off from the Swiss Mennonites under Jakob Ammann over strict church discipline.

Spiritualists and rationalists

Other radicals went in different directions:

• Spiritualists, like the Silesian nobleman Caspar Schwenckfeld and Sebastian Franck, emphasized the inner work of the Spirit so strongly that outward churches, sacraments and even the written Word seemed unimportant. Schwenckfeld suspended the Lord's Supper among his followers until Christians could agree.
• Anti-Trinitarians or rationalists, like Michael Servetus (burned at Geneva) and the Italian Faustus Socinus, rejected the Trinity as unbiblical and irrational. Socinians flourished for a time in tolerant Poland, where they issued the Racovian Catechism (1605). They were ancestors of later Unitarianism.

The long legacy

In their own century the radicals lost. They were marginal, persecuted, scattered. But many of their ideas eventually entered the mainstream:

• the voluntary church of committed believers, rather than a state church everyone is born into;
• the separation of church and state;
• religious liberty for all;
• believers' baptism, later central to Baptists, who were influenced by Mennonites in Amsterdam (see Puritans, Baptists and Quakers);
• pacifism and conscientious objection.

Today's Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites and Brethren, the "historic peace churches," are direct descendants. Many evangelical, Baptist and Pentecostal churches share the radicals' ideal of a church of committed disciples.