The Modern Church

The Radical Reformation

Zwickau, Zürich and Münster - where believer's baptism, the "inner word" and the self-appointed prophet first appear, and what Luther said about them.

You are reading the brief version. Switch the depth control to Complete for the full treatment.

Within five years of Luther's protest of 1517, a second movement had appeared beside his, and he spent much of the 1520s fighting it. Historians call it the Radical Reformation. Luther called its people Schwärmer - enthusiasts or fanatics.

It had three strands, and most of the modern movements in this section descend from one or more of them.

The spiritualists claimed that God spoke to them directly, apart from Scripture and sacrament. The Zwickau Prophets arrived in Wittenberg at Christmas 1521 claiming visions and conversations with God. Thomas Müntzer preached an "inner word" and a coming kingdom of the elect, and died leading peasants into battle in 1525.

The Anabaptists ("re-baptisers") held that only those who can confess faith may be baptised. On 21 January 1525, in a house in Zürich, Conrad Grebel baptised George Blaurock, and Blaurock baptised the others present. That evening is the beginning of believer's baptism as the practice of a church.

The revolutionaries expected Christ's kingdom to be set up by force. At Münster in 1534-35, Anabaptist prophets seized a city, expelled everyone who would not be rebaptised, abolished private property, introduced polygamy and crowned a king, before the city fell and its leaders were executed.

Most Anabaptists rejected Münster. Menno Simons gathered the survivors into peaceful communities, and the Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites still live by that tradition.

The historic Church had baptised infants since at least the second century, and every church of the Reformation - Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican - kept the practice and condemned the Anabaptists. The Augsburg Confession condemns those "who reject the baptism of children" and those "who think that the Holy Ghost comes to men without the external Word".

The record of how the Anabaptists were treated is a shame on every side. Catholic and Protestant authorities alike drowned, burned and beheaded them, and the Anabaptists' courage under persecution is one of the most moving things in this section.

Verdict: believer's baptism and the claim to direct revelation apart from the Word are not apostolic recoveries. They are sixteenth-century innovations, and the Reformers said so at the time.

What is believed

The Radical Reformation was never one church, and its heirs today range from quiet Mennonite farmers to Baptist megachurches. But a set of convictions held most of them together, and they would put them something like this:

The Church is the gathered company of true believers, not the whole population of a Christian territory. You join it by choice, not by birth.
Baptism belongs only to those who can repent and confess faith. Infants cannot, so infant baptism is no baptism at all, and those baptised as infants must be baptised properly.
The Christian life is discipleship - a visible, costly following of Christ, which the state churches had replaced with a nominal religion of the parish register.
The Church must be separate from the world and from the state. Many Anabaptists refused oaths, refused to bear the sword, and refused to serve as magistrates.
The Spirit speaks to the believer. For the spiritualist wing, the "inner word" of the Spirit in the heart was more important than the outer word of Scripture and sacrament.

The Swiss Anabaptists put several of these into seven articles at Schleitheim in February 1527 - on baptism, the ban, the breaking of bread, separation from the world, pastors, the sword and the oath. Its first article reads: baptism "shall be given to all those who have learned repentance and amendment of life, and who believe truly that their sins are taken away by Christ... This excludes all infant baptism, the highest and chief abomination of the pope."

Where it came from

Wittenberg, Christmas 1521: the Zwickau Prophets

While Luther was hidden in the Wartburg castle after the Diet of Worms, Wittenberg moved faster than he had. On Christmas Day 1521 his colleague Andreas Karlstadt celebrated communion in ordinary clothes, without vestments, giving the cup to the laity and omitting the words of sacrifice. Images were pulled down in the churches in the new year.

Two days after Christmas, three men arrived from Zwickau: Nicholas Storch, a weaver, Thomas Drechsel, and Marcus Thomae Stübner, a former student. They claimed that God spoke to them in dreams and visions, that infant baptism was worthless, and that the overthrow of the ungodly was at hand. They impressed Melanchthon, who wrote anxiously to the Elector that he could not easily refute them.

Luther came back. In March 1522 he preached eight sermons in eight days - the Invocavit sermons - restoring order, slowing the reforms, and warning against compelling consciences. When he met the prophets, his test was simple: what did their revelations rest on, other than their own word? He found nothing, and they left.

Thomas Müntzer and the inner word

Thomas Müntzer had preached at Zwickau and knew Storch. He came to believe that the Bible was a dead letter without the "living word" spoken by God directly into the soul of the elect, that the true Church had fallen away soon after the apostles, and that the godless must be removed so that the kingdom could come.

At Allstedt he wrote one of the first German liturgies. In July 1524 he preached before the Saxon princes on the second chapter of Daniel, calling them to take up the sword against the ungodly or have it taken from them. He called Luther "Doctor Liar" and "the soft-living flesh at Wittenberg". In 1525 he joined the peasants' revolt in Thuringia, preaching that God would fight for them. At Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525 the peasant army was destroyed in a few hours. Müntzer was captured, tortured and beheaded on 27 May.

Karlstadt and the Supper

Karlstadt, meanwhile, had moved from liturgical reform to a wholesale rejection of the sacraments as means of grace. He denied that Christ's body and blood are present in the Supper, arguing that when Christ said "this is my body" He pointed to Himself. He denounced infant baptism, renounced his doctoral title and dressed as a peasant. Expelled from Saxony in 1524, he spread his views in pamphlets, and Luther answered him in a long treatise, Against the Heavenly Prophets (1525).

Zürich, January 1525: the first rebaptisms

In Zürich, a group of young radicals around Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz had been Zwingli's most eager supporters. By 1524 they had concluded that Zwingli was moving too slowly, letting the city council set the pace of reform, and that infant baptism had no basis in Scripture.

On 17 January 1525 the council held a disputation on baptism, found for Zwingli, and ordered all unbaptised infants to be baptised within eight days on pain of banishment. Four days later, on the evening of 21 January, the radicals met in the house of Manz's mother. George Blaurock, a former priest, asked Grebel to baptise him. Grebel did, and Blaurock then baptised the others. It is the first recorded instance of a group of Christians, all baptised as infants, baptising one another again on profession of faith and forming a church on that basis.

Pause and thinkPause: why does the date 1525 matter so much when a Baptist friend tells you that believer's baptism is the practice of the early Church?

Persecution

The Anabaptists' rejection of infant baptism was treated as both heresy and sedition, because it broke the bond between church and civil community that every government of the time assumed. They were persecuted by Catholics, Lutherans and Reformed alike.

Felix Manz was drowned in the river Limmat in Zürich on 5 January 1527 - the first Anabaptist executed by a Protestant government.
Michael Sattler, author of the Schleitheim articles, was tried by the Catholic authorities at Rottenburg in May 1527. His tongue was cut, his flesh torn with hot tongs, and he was burned. His wife was drowned days later.
Balthasar Hubmaier was burned in Vienna in March 1528; his wife was drowned in the Danube.
In 1529 the imperial Diet of Speyer, with Catholic and Lutheran estates agreeing, made rebaptism a capital crime throughout the Empire.

Thousands died. The Mennonite Martyrs Mirror (1660) records many of them, and the dignity with which most went to their deaths - often singing - impressed even their judges. This is part of the record and should not be passed over: the Anabaptists' heirs have a long memory of it, and they are right to.

Münster, 1534-35

A Dutch and North German stream of Anabaptism followed Melchior Hoffman, a furrier and lay preacher who taught that Christ's return was imminent and named Strasbourg as the New Jerusalem for 1533. He was imprisoned in Strasbourg and died there about ten years later.

His followers looked elsewhere. In 1534 Anabaptists took control of the city council of Münster in Westphalia. Jan Matthys, a baker from Haarlem, declared it the New Jerusalem. Those who refused rebaptism were driven out of the city in winter; private property was abolished; books other than the Bible were burned. When the prince-bishop besieged the city, Matthys led a sortie on Easter Sunday 1534, believing God would protect him, and was killed.

His successor, Jan Bockelson (Jan van Leiden), a tailor, proclaimed himself king of the New Israel. He introduced polygamy in the summer of 1534, citing the patriarchs, and took some sixteen wives; he publicly beheaded one who defied him. The city fell in June 1535. Bockelson and two other leaders were tortured and executed in January 1536, and their bodies were hung in iron cages from the tower of St Lambert's church. The cages are still there.

Menno Simons and the peaceful Anabaptists

Münster horrified most Anabaptists, and Menno Simons, a Dutch priest who left the Catholic Church in 1536, spent the rest of his life rebuilding the movement as a strictly non-violent, separated church. He rejected Münster explicitly, rejected the sword and oaths, and taught believer's baptism and church discipline. The Mennonites take their name from him; the Amish split from them in 1693, and the Hutterites, who hold goods in common, descend from Jakob Hutter, burned at Innsbruck in 1536.

These communities are the gentlest of all the movements in this section, and they should not be confused with Münster. They are, however, the origin of believer's baptism as the practice of a church, and every Baptist church today stands, through the English Separatists of the next century, in their debt.

What the historic Church taught

On infant baptism. The New Testament records the baptism of whole households - Lydia's, the Philippian jailer's, Stephanas's (Acts 16:15, 33; 1 Corinthians 1:16). Peter at Pentecost says the promise is "unto you, and to your children" (Acts 2:39). Paul calls baptism the circumcision of Christ (Colossians 2:11-12), and circumcision was given to infants.

The early evidence is consistent:

Irenaeus (c. 180) says Christ came to save all who are born again to God through Him - "infants, and children, and boys, and youths, and old men".
Hippolytus's Apostolic Tradition (early third century) directs: "baptise the little ones first. All who can speak for themselves, let them speak. For those who cannot, let their parents speak, or someone from their family."
Origen (c. 240) says the Church "received from the apostles the tradition of giving baptism even to infants".
Cyprian and a council of sixty-six bishops at Carthage (c. 253) were asked whether infants should wait until the eighth day, like circumcision. They answered that baptism should not be withheld even from a newborn.
Tertullian (c. 200) advised delay, which shows the practice already existed; he did not call it invalid.

On the inner word. The Church has always taught that God gives His Spirit through means: through the preached word ("faith cometh by hearing", Romans 10:17), through baptism (Titus 3:5; Acts 2:38) and through the laying on of hands. It has always been suspicious of private revelation set against Scripture and the Church's teaching. The second-century Church faced the same thing in Montanism, whose prophets claimed the Paraclete spoke through them in ecstasy, and rejected it.

On the kingdom by force. The creeds confess that Christ "shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end". The kingdom comes with Him. No one sets it up in advance.

The verdict

Measured against the creeds and the practice of the Church in every century before 1525, the Radical Reformation's distinctive teachings are innovations.

Believer's baptism only cannot be found as the practice of any church before Zürich in 1525. The Nicene Creed confesses "one baptism for the remission of sins", and the Church has always applied that baptism to infants.

The inner word apart from the outer is the claim the Lutheran Confessions call enthusiasm, and they reject it as the root of all heresy.

The kingdom by force, as at Münster, contradicts the creeds' confession that the kingdom comes with Christ's return.

None of this touches the courage of the Anabaptist martyrs, the integrity of the Mennonite tradition, or the justice of their complaint that nominal Christianity was common in the state churches. They were right that the Church was full of the baptised who did not believe. They were wrong that the remedy was to stop baptising infants.

How the four traditionsthe Catholic Churchthe Orthodox Churchthe Lutheran Churchthe Anglican Communion responded

Lutheran

Luther met every strand of the Radical Reformation in person, and the Lutheran Confessions were written with them in view.

Against the Heavenly Prophets (1525) is his answer to Karlstadt and the spiritualists. Its central principle is the order in which God gives grace: "Now when God sends forth his holy gospel he deals with us in a twofold manner, first outwardly, then inwardly... The inward experience follows and is effected by the outward. God has determined to give the inward to no one except through the outward."^† Of Karlstadt's claim to the Spirit, he wrote that he "has swallowed the Holy Spirit feathers and all".^†

Concerning Rebaptism (1528), a letter to two pastors, argues that baptism rests on God's command and word, not on the faith of the person baptised: if baptism depended on certainty about our own faith, no one could ever be sure he was baptised. The Large Catechism puts the same point in one line: "my faith does not make Baptism, but receives Baptism".

The Augsburg Confession (1530) names the Anabaptists in five articles. Article V: "They condemn the Anabaptists and others who think that the Holy Ghost comes to men without the external Word, through their own preparations and works." Article IX teaches "that children are to be baptized who, being offered to God through Baptism, are received into God's grace. They condemn the Anabaptists, who reject the baptism of children."

The Smalcald Articles (1537) give the fullest statement: "we must firmly hold that God grants His Spirit or grace to no one except through or with the preceding outward Word, in order that we may be protected against the enthusiasts... Enthusiasm inheres in Adam and his children from the beginning to the end of the world... and it is the origin, power, and strength of all heresy." And: "whatever is extolled as Spirit without the Word and Sacraments is the devil himself." The Formula of Concord (Article XII) lists the Anabaptists' errors one by one and rejects them.

The Lutheran record on persecution should also be stated. In Concerning Rebaptism Luther wrote that it was not right that the Anabaptists were "so pitifully murdered, burned, and tormented to death", and that each should be let believe what he will. ^† But in the 1530s he signed memoranda, drafted by Melanchthon, agreeing that Anabaptists who taught sedition or blasphemy could be put to death by the magistrate. Lutherans should know both.

Catholic

The Catholic Church condemned the Anabaptists' teaching at the Council of Trent. In its decree on baptism (Session VII, 1547), canon 13 anathematises anyone who says that infants, because they have not actual faith, are not to be counted among the faithful after baptism, and must be rebaptised when they come to the age of discretion, "or that it is better that the baptism of such be omitted". Canon 11 rejects rebaptism of those validly baptised; canon 12 rejects the claim that no one should be baptised except at the age Christ was baptised or at the point of death.

Trent also taught, against the spiritualists, that the sacraments confer grace ex opere operato - by the work performed, because Christ acts in them - and not merely as signs that stir up faith (Session VII, Canons on the Sacraments, 6-8).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states the continuous practice: "The practice of infant Baptism is an immemorial tradition of the Church. There is explicit testimony to this practice from the second century on, and it is quite possible that, from the beginning of the apostolic preaching, when whole 'households' received baptism, infants may also have been baptized" (CCC 1252).

Catholic authorities executed Anabaptists in large numbers - Sattler at Rottenburg, Hubmaier at Vienna, many in the Habsburg Netherlands and the Tyrol. The Church has since asked forgiveness for the use of force in the service of truth, notably in John Paul II's Day of Pardon in 2000, and the Catholic-Mennonite international dialogue report Called Together to Be Peacemakers (2003) addresses this history directly.

Orthodox

The Orthodox Church had no direct contact with the Anabaptists in the 1520s, but its teaching is plain and was set down in answer to Protestant questions in the following century. The Confession of Dositheus, adopted at the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, teaches in Decree 16 that "infants ought to be baptized", citing Christ's command and the Church's practice, and rejects the view that baptism is merely a sign.

Orthodox practice makes the point more strongly than words. An Orthodox infant is baptised by triple immersion, chrismated (confirmed) at once, and given communion from the chalice at the same service, and continues to receive communion from then on. The Orthodox would put it this way: the question is not whether an infant can understand, but whether God can give His life to an infant. Every Orthodox child is a living answer.

On the inner word, the Orthodox tradition has always tested spiritual experience by the Church's faith and by obedience to an experienced spiritual father, and it warns that visions and voices sought or trusted for their own sake lead into prelest, spiritual delusion.

Anglican

The Church of England's Articles of Religion were written partly with the Anabaptists in mind, and several articles answer them directly:

Article XXVII: "The Baptism of young Children is in any wise to be retained in the Church, as most agreeable with the institution of Christ."
Article XXXVIII: "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."
Article XXXVII affirms that it is lawful for Christians to bear arms at the command of the magistrate, and Article XXXIX that a Christian may take an oath when the magistrate requires it - both against Anabaptist teaching.

The Prayer Book's service for the Public Baptism of Infants expresses the Anglican position in its prayer that God would "give his Holy Spirit to this Infant, that he may be born again".

England persecuted Anabaptists too. Dutch Anabaptists were burned in London under Henry VIII; Joan Bocher was burned in 1550 under Edward VI for denying the Incarnation; two Dutch Anabaptists were burned at Smithfield in 1575 under Elizabeth I. Anglicans should hold this history alongside the Articles.

Key personalities

Huldrych Zwingli1484–1531Full profile · 7 min Reformer of Zürich whose memorial view of the Lord's Supper divided Protestantism at Marburg in 1529

Affiliation: Catholic priest; people's priest at the Grossmünster, Zürich, from 1519; leader of the Swiss Reformation
Appears in: Zwingli, the Puritans and the first Baptists, The Radical Reformation
Profile: Link to this profile

Life

Toggenburg, Basel and Vienna

Huldrych Zwingli was born on 1 January 1484 at Wildhaus in the Toggenburg valley, in the eastern Swiss Confederation, the son of a prosperous farmer and local magistrate. His uncle, a priest, took charge of his education. He studied at Vienna and Basel, where he took his master's degree in 1506 and absorbed the humanism of the age, and was ordained priest that year.

Glarus and Einsiedeln

From 1506 to 1516 he was parish priest at Glarus. He taught himself Greek, read the Church Fathers and corresponded with Erasmus, whom he met in 1516 and revered. Twice he went with the Glarus troops as chaplain to Italy, where Swiss mercenaries fought for the Pope, and the slaughter at Marignano in 1515 turned him into an opponent of the mercenary trade. From 1516 he was priest at the pilgrimage shrine of Einsiedeln, where he preached against the abuse of pilgrimages and indulgences, though he had not yet broken with the Church's doctrine. He later admitted to a sexual lapse during his years at Glarus and Einsiedeln, which nearly cost him his appointment at Zürich.

Zürich

On 1 January 1519, his thirty-fifth birthday, he became people's priest at the Grossmünster in Zürich. He announced that instead of following the lectionary he would preach through the Gospel of Matthew from beginning to end - the lectio continua that became a mark of the Reformed tradition. Later that year he nearly died of the plague, which deepened his sense of dependence on God's providence.

The break with Rome

In Lent 1522 a group of his friends, meeting at the house of the printer Christoph Froschauer, ate sausages in defiance of the fast; Zwingli, who was present but did not eat, defended them in a sermon, On the Choice and Freedom of Foods. That year he also married Anna Reinhart, a widow, in secret, making the marriage public in 1524. In January 1523 the city council held a public disputation at which Zwingli defended his Sixty-seven Articles, and the council resolved that he should continue to preach from Scripture. A second disputation in October 1523 debated images and the Mass. Images were removed from the churches in 1524, and at Easter 1525 the Mass was abolished and replaced by a simple communion service, with bread and wine on wooden plates carried to the people in their pews.

The radicals

Among Zwingli's most ardent early followers were young men, including Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz, who wanted him to move faster and to abolish the Mass without waiting for the council. When at the second disputation he deferred to the council's timetable, they broke with him. They came to reject infant baptism, and in January 1525 began baptising adults. Zwingli opposed them in writing, and the council imprisoned and banished them; in March 1526 it decreed death for rebaptism, and Manz was drowned in the Limmat in January 1527. Zwingli supported the council's measures.

Marburg

Zwingli's view of the Lord's Supper as a memorial brought him into conflict with Luther. After years of pamphlet warfare, Philip of Hesse brought the two together at Marburg in October 1529, hoping to unite the Protestants politically. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles but not on the presence of Christ's body and blood in the Supper. Luther chalked "Hoc est corpus meum" on the table, and at the end refused Zwingli's hand of fellowship as a brother.

Kappel

Zwingli worked for an alliance of the Reformed cities and pressed Zürich to use force to open the Catholic cantons to evangelical preaching. A first war at Kappel in 1529 ended without battle. In 1531 Zürich imposed a food blockade on the inner cantons, which responded by attacking. On 11 October 1531 the Zürich forces were defeated at Kappel, and Zwingli, who had gone out as chaplain and armed, was killed on the field.

Key dates

1 January 1484 - Born at Wildhaus
1506 - Ordained; parish priest at Glarus
1515 - Chaplain at Marignano
1516 - Priest at Einsiedeln; meets Erasmus
1 January 1519 - People's priest at the Grossmünster, Zürich
Lent 1522 - The affair of the sausages
January 1523 - First Zürich disputation; the Sixty-seven Articles
October 1523 - Second disputation
1524 - Images removed; marriage to Anna Reinhart made public
Easter 1525 - Mass abolished in Zürich
1525 - Commentary on True and False Religion
1527 - Felix Manz drowned
October 1529 - Marburg Colloquy
1531 - Zürich Bible (Froschauer) completed
11 October 1531 - Killed at Kappel

Teachings and claims

Scripture alone

Zwingli taught that Scripture is clear and sufficient, and that whatever is not commanded in it is to be removed from the Church's worship. He applied this more strictly than Luther, who retained what Scripture did not forbid.

The Lord's Supper

He taught that in "This is my body" the word "is" means "signifies", that Christ's human body, ascended into heaven, is at the right hand of God and cannot be present in many places, and that "the flesh profiteth nothing" (John 6:63). The Supper is a memorial of Christ's death, a thanksgiving (eucharist) and a public pledge by which believers declare their faith and their membership of the body. In his later writings he spoke of Christ being present to the contemplation of faith.

Baptism

Against the Anabaptists he defended infant baptism as a covenant sign, the successor to circumcision, by which children of believers are marked as belonging to God's people. He did not, however, hold that baptism conveys grace.

Providence and election

He taught a strong doctrine of providence and of God's free election, and held that God might elect even virtuous pagans; he expected to see Socrates and other ancients in heaven.

Church and state

He saw the Christian city as one community, in which the magistrate, guided by the preacher, orders the outward life of the Church.

Christology

To defend his eucharistic teaching, he used a figure of speech he called alloeosis, by which what Scripture says of one of Christ's natures is attributed to the other. Luther believed this divided the person of Christ.

Documented controversies

The Anabaptists

He supported the persecution of his former followers, including the death penalty for rebaptism. Mennonite and Baptist historians, and many Reformed scholars today, regard this as a grave wrong.

Marburg

His disagreement with Luther divided Protestantism permanently. Luther believed his teaching on the Supper and on Christ's person to be a different spirit; Zwingli regarded Luther's view as a remnant of the papacy.

War

His advocacy of armed force against the Catholic cantons, and his death on the battlefield, were criticised by Luther and others as the fruit of mixing the gospel with the sword.

Death

He was killed at the battle of Kappel on 11 October 1531, aged 47. The victorious Catholic troops found his body on the field, tried it as a heretic and traitor, quartered it and burned it with dung, so that no relics would remain.

Legacy

Zwingli is the founder of the Reformed tradition, though its classic form was given by Heinrich Bullinger, his successor at Zürich, and by John Calvin, who modified his eucharistic teaching to affirm a true, spiritual feeding on Christ. The Consensus Tigurinus of 1549 united the Zürich and Genevan churches. His memorial view survived among the Anabaptists' successors, the Baptists and the free churches, and is now the common view of most evangelical and non-denominational churches. His lectio continua, his simplified worship and his ideal of a reformed Christian commonwealth shaped Reformed Protestantism for centuries.

Measured against the creeds

Zwingli confessed the creeds and the doctrines of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ, and his preaching recovered the reading of Scripture in the language of the people.

His teaching on the Supper, however, departs from what the Church had confessed since the Fathers. Ignatius of Antioch called the Eucharist "the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ"; Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Cyril of Jerusalem and Augustine all confessed that the bread and cup are Christ's body and blood. The Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran churches hold to the real presence, and the Anglican Articles reject a "bare figure" (Article 28 speaks of partaking of the body of Christ). Luther's response, in Confession Concerning Christ's Supper (1528) and the Formula of Concord (Article 7), was that Zwingli's argument from the location of Christ's body divided His person and made human reason the judge of His words. The Formula of Concord rejects the teaching that the words of institution are to be taken figuratively.

On baptism, he defended the practice of the Church but emptied it of its gift; the historic churches confess "one baptism for the remission of sins". And in the persecution of the Anabaptists, the Reformed churches, like the Lutheran and Catholic, share a guilt that their modern heirs have acknowledged.

Major writings

Sixty-seven Articles (1523)
Commentary on True and False Religion (1525)
On Baptism, Rebaptism and Infant Baptism (1525)
On the Lord's Supper (1526)
Friendly Exegesis (1527)
Fidei Ratio (1530)
An Exposition of the Faith (1531)

Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt1486–1541Full profile · 6 min Luther's colleague who moved from liturgical reform to rejecting the real presence and infant baptism, prompting "Against the Heavenly Prophets"

Affiliation: Professor at Wittenberg and Luther's senior colleague; later a Reformed theologian at Basel
Appears in: The Radical Reformation, Zwingli, the Puritans and the first Baptists
Profile: Link to this profile

Life

The Wittenberg professor

Andreas Rudolff-Bodenstein was born in 1486 in the town of Karlstadt am Main in Franconia, from which he took his name. He studied at Erfurt and Cologne and in 1505 went to the new University of Wittenberg, where he became a doctor of theology in 1510, archdeacon of the Castle Church and a leading member of the faculty. A scholastic theologian of the Thomist school, he was Luther's senior colleague; in October 1512 he presided over the ceremony at which Luther received his doctorate. In 1515-16 he studied law in Rome.

Converted to Augustine

In 1517, after reading Augustine, he turned against scholastic theology, and in April of that year, months before Luther's Ninety-five Theses, he posted 151 theses on grace and the will. He became one of Luther's most energetic allies. At the Leipzig Disputation of 1519 he debated Johann Eck for a week before Luther took his place, and in 1520 the papal bull threatening Luther with excommunication named him also.

The Wittenberg movement

While Luther was hidden at the Wartburg in 1521-22, Karlstadt led the reform in Wittenberg. On Christmas Day 1521 he celebrated the first evangelical communion, without vestments, in German, omitting the sacrificial prayers and giving the cup to the laity. In January 1522 he married Anna von Mochau, a girl of fifteen; the city council adopted an ordinance abolishing private Masses and removing images, and in the following weeks images were destroyed in the churches. The disorder alarmed the Elector, and in March 1522 Luther returned and, in his eight Invocavit sermons, reversed much of what had been done, insisting that changes must be made in love and with regard for the weak.

Orlamünde

Karlstadt withdrew from academic life. He renounced his doctorate, dressed as a peasant and asked to be called "Brother Andrew". In 1523 he took the parish of Orlamünde, which was attached to his archdeaconry, and there carried out his reforms: images removed, infant baptism dropped, the Supper as a memorial. In August 1524 Luther, on a visitation tour, met him at the Black Bear inn at Jena; after a heated exchange Luther gave him a gold gulden as a pledge that he should write against him openly. Shortly afterwards the Elector expelled Karlstadt from Saxony.

Exile

He travelled to Strasbourg, Basel and Zürich, publishing tracts against the real presence which Luther answered in Against the Heavenly Prophets (1524-25). During the Peasants' War of 1525 he was at Rothenburg ob der Tauber, where he was suspected of sympathy with the rebels. Destitute and in danger, he wrote to Luther, who sheltered him secretly in his own house in Wittenberg in June 1525 on condition that he submit his writings for approval. He lived for some years as a farmer and shopkeeper near Wittenberg, under restrictions, but in 1529 he fled again.

Basel

After time in Holstein and East Frisia, where he took part in the sacramental controversies, he went to Zürich in 1530, where Zwingli found him work, and in 1534 became preacher at St Peter's in Basel and professor at the university, where he spent his last years in comparative peace.

Key dates

1486 - Born at Karlstadt am Main
1510 - Doctor of theology at Wittenberg
October 1512 - Presides at Luther's doctoral promotion
April 1517 - Posts 151 theses on grace
1519 - Leipzig Disputation with Eck
Christmas Day 1521 - First evangelical communion in Wittenberg
January 1522 - Marries; the Wittenberg ordinance
March 1522 - Luther returns and reverses the reforms
1523 - Pastor at Orlamünde
August 1524 - Meeting with Luther at Jena
September 1524 - Expelled from Saxony
1524-25 - Luther's Against the Heavenly Prophets
June 1525 - Sheltered in Luther's house
1529 - Flees Saxony
1534 - Preacher and professor at Basel
24 December 1541 - Dies of plague at Basel

Teachings and claims

Images

Karlstadt taught that images in churches are forbidden by the first commandment and must be removed, and that the magistrate and the congregation have a duty to remove them without waiting for the weak.

The Supper

He came to deny that Christ's body and blood are present in the sacrament. In "This is my body", he argued, Christ pointed to His own body, not to the bread (the Greek touto, "this", being neuter while artos, "bread", is masculine). The Supper is a remembrance of Christ's death, and its benefit lies in the believer's ardent remembrance of it.

Baptism

He held that baptism without faith is of no value and gave up the baptism of infants at Orlamünde, though he did not practise rebaptism.

Lay religion and mysticism

Influenced by German mysticism, he taught that true religion is the inward "abandonment" (Gelassenheit) of the soul to God, and he valued the lay Christian and the peasant above the learned doctor.

Documented controversies

Wittenberg 1522

His reforms, made in Luther's absence and accompanied by iconoclasm, caused disturbances which Luther and the Elector regarded as dangerous. Luther's Invocavit sermons established the principle of reform through preaching and patience.

Against the Heavenly Prophets

Luther's long reply, written in 1524-25, accused Karlstadt of making outward law of what should be freedom, of confusing the inward and outward word, and of reading his own reason into Christ's words. Luther grouped him with Müntzer and the "fanatics", which Karlstadt resented, since he rejected violence.

The Peasants' War

His presence at Rothenburg during the revolt led to suspicion that he supported it; he denied this and wrote an apology.

Death

He died of plague at Basel on 24 December 1541, aged about 55.^†

Legacy

Karlstadt has been called the first Puritan. His insistence that worship must be restricted to what Scripture commands, his iconoclasm and his symbolic view of the Supper anticipated, and in part influenced, Zwingli and the Reformed tradition. Some historians also regard him as a forerunner of the Anabaptists and of later lay and spiritualist movements. His conflict with Luther shaped the Lutheran Reformation's conservative attitude to liturgy and images.

Measured against the creeds

Karlstadt's early recovery of Augustine on grace stood within the catholic faith, and his concern for the participation of the laity and the reform of abuses was shared by Luther.

His later teaching, however, departs from the historic faith. On the Supper, he denied what the Church had confessed since the Fathers - that the bread and cup are the body and blood of Christ - and his grammatical argument from touto was rejected even by Zwingli. The Formula of Concord (Article 7) rejects his interpretation by name among the figurative readings. On images, the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787) defended the veneration of images as an expression of the Incarnation, and while the Lutheran and Anglican churches did not follow Nicaea II in every respect, Luther insisted that images were not forbidden and that their removal by force was a new law imposed on consciences.

Luther's central objection remains the most searching: that Karlstadt replaced the outward word and sacrament, through which God gives the Spirit, with an inward spirituality that made the Christian's own experience the measure of the gospel. "God will not give you his Spirit without the external word," Luther wrote, "but through it."

Major writings

151 Theses (1517)
On the Removal of Images (1522)
Whether One Should Proceed Slowly (1524)
Dialogue on the Abominable and Idolatrous Misuse of the Most Worthy Sacrament (1524)
Apology (1525)

Thomas Müntzerc. 1489–1525Full profile · 7 min Apocalyptic preacher of the "inner word" who called the princes to slay the ungodly and died leading the peasants at Frankenhausen

Affiliation: Catholic priest; briefly a follower of Luther; preacher at Zwickau and Allstedt; leader in the Thuringian Peasants' War
Appears in: The Radical Reformation
Profile: Link to this profile

Life

Early life and education

Thomas Müntzer was born at Stolberg in the Harz mountains, probably in 1489 or a little later; the exact year is not recorded. His family seems to have been comfortably off. He studied at Leipzig (1506) and Frankfurt an der Oder (1512), took degrees in arts and possibly theology, and was ordained priest in the diocese of Halberstadt by about 1514. He read widely - the Church Fathers, the German mystics Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Suso, the abbot Joachim of Fiore - and that reading shaped everything he later taught.

From Luther's camp to his own

By 1517-19 he was in contact with the Wittenberg reformers and was seen as one of Luther's men. In May 1520, on Luther's recommendation, he became preacher at St Mary's in Zwickau, a weaving town in Saxony. There he quarrelled bitterly with the Franciscans and then with the humanist preacher Johannes Egranus, and fell in with a group of artisans around the weaver Nikolaus Storch who claimed direct revelations from God. These were the "Zwickau prophets" who later unsettled Wittenberg in Luther's absence. The town council dismissed Müntzer in April 1521 after unrest that his sermons had stirred.

He went to Bohemia, the land of Jan Hus, and in November 1521 posted the Prague Manifesto, announcing that the Church had been a whore since the death of the apostles' disciples and that a new apostolic Church would rise in Bohemia. It did not; he was expelled, and spent 1522 wandering through central Germany without a post.

Allstedt

At Easter 1523 he became pastor of St John's in Allstedt, a small town in electoral Saxony. This was his most constructive period. He married a former nun, Ottilie von Gersen, and produced the first complete German-language orders of worship - a German Mass and German offices with Gregorian chant set to German words - well before Luther's own German Mass of 1526. Crowds came from surrounding Catholic territories to hear him. He also formed a "League of the Elect", a covenanted band sworn to defend the gospel, and in March 1524 his followers burned a pilgrimage chapel at nearby Mallerbach.

In July 1524 Duke John of Saxony and his son visited Allstedt, and Müntzer preached before them on the second chapter of Daniel - the Sermon to the Princes. He urged them to become the new Daniels, take the sword and root out the godless, warning that if they did not, the sword would be taken from them. The princes did not take up his offer. Summoned to Weimar for questioning, he fled Allstedt by night in August 1524.

Mühlhausen and the Peasants' War

He moved to the imperial city of Mühlhausen in Thuringia, where the former monk Heinrich Pfeiffer was already agitating for change. Expelled within weeks, he travelled to Nuremberg, where he had his Highly Provoked Vindication - a savage attack on Luther - printed, and to the south-west, where the peasants' risings were beginning. He returned to Mühlhausen in February 1525, where a new "Eternal Council" had taken power.

When the Peasants' War spread into Thuringia that spring, Müntzer became its prophet. He signed his letters "Thomas Müntzer with the sword of Gideon" and wrote to the miners of Mansfeld: "At them, at them, while the fire is hot! Do not let your sword grow cold!" In May 1525 he led some 300 men from Mühlhausen to join the peasant army gathered at Frankenhausen.

Key dates

c. 1489 - Born at Stolberg in the Harz
1506-12 - Studies at Leipzig and Frankfurt an der Oder
1520 - Preacher at Zwickau on Luther's recommendation; meets the "Zwickau prophets"
1521 - Dismissed from Zwickau; issues the Prague Manifesto
1523 - Pastor at Allstedt; publishes German orders of worship; marries Ottilie von Gersen
July 1524 - Preaches the Sermon to the Princes
August 1524 - Flees Allstedt; Luther publishes his Letter to the Princes of Saxony
February 1525 - Returns to Mühlhausen
15 May 1525 - The peasant army is destroyed at Frankenhausen
27 May 1525 - Beheaded outside Mühlhausen

Teachings and claims

The inner word

Müntzer's central claim was that Scripture is a dead letter unless God speaks His "living word" directly into the soul. He accused Luther of preaching a "honey-sweet Christ" and of trusting in the bare text, which, he said, anyone could read without being changed. True faith comes only after the soul has been stripped of every creaturely comfort in a long agony of doubt and desolation; then God speaks, as He spoke to the prophets, through visions, dreams and inner certainty. The elect can be recognised by having passed through this ordeal.

The fallen Church and the age of the elect

He held that the Church had fallen away soon after the apostles, that the clergy of every party were scribes and Pharisees, and that the present age was about to end with the separation of the elect from the godless. Drawing on Daniel and on Joachim of Fiore, he expected a final age of the Spirit in which the elect would rule.

The sword

In his reading of Romans 13 and Daniel 2, rulers hold the sword to protect the godly and destroy the godless. If rulers refuse, the power passes to the common people. "The godless have no right to live," he preached at Allstedt, "save what the elect choose to grant them." This joined the claim to direct revelation with a programme of holy violence.

Worship

Against both the old Latin Mass and the Wittenberg reformers' gradualism, he insisted that the people should worship in their own language at once. His liturgies kept a great deal of the traditional structure and chant.

Documented controversies

Attacks on Luther. In the Highly Provoked Vindication (1524) he called Luther "Doctor Liar", "Brother Fatted Pig" and "the soft-living flesh at Wittenberg", and accused him of flattering princes.
Violence at Allstedt. His followers burned the Mallerbach chapel in March 1524; he defended the act and resisted the authorities' attempts to punish those involved.
Luther's response. Luther's Letter to the Princes of Saxony Concerning the Rebellious Spirit (1524) warned that a spirit that refuses to be examined and turns to the fist is not the Holy Spirit. In 1525 he wrote Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, which in its turn has been heavily criticised.
The peasants' defeat. At Frankenhausen Müntzer assured the peasants that God would protect them and that he would catch the cannon-balls in his sleeves.

^† A rainbow seen over the field was taken as a sign of victory. The princes' army attacked during negotiations; some 5,000-6,000 peasants were killed and the princes lost only a handful of men.

Death

After the battle on 15 May 1525 Müntzer was found hiding in a house in Frankenhausen, reportedly in bed pretending to be ill. He was handed to Count Ernst of Mansfeld, interrogated under torture, and signed a confession. Before his death he wrote a letter to the people of Mühlhausen urging them not to rebel further, received communion in one kind according to the old rite, and was beheaded with Pfeiffer outside Mühlhausen on 27 May 1525. Their heads were displayed on stakes.

Legacy

Müntzer became a hero of later revolutionary movements. Friedrich Engels made him a forerunner of class struggle, and the German Democratic Republic named towns and streets after him and put him on its five-mark note. Among historians, the Marxist reading has given way to a picture of an apocalyptic mystic for whom social revolution served a religious end.

For the history traced in this section, he is the first and clearest example of a pattern that recurs: the claim to direct revelation above Scripture, the conviction that the Church has fallen and must be restored by a new elect, and the expectation of an imminent kingdom to be established by the saints. His influence on the peaceful Anabaptists is disputed; Hans Hut, who spread Anabaptism in south Germany, had been his follower, but the Swiss Brethren wrote to him in 1524 to reject his use of the sword.

Measured against the creeds

Müntzer did not deny the Trinity or the person of Christ; his departure was elsewhere. By setting an inner word above the written word, he made each believer's private experience the test of truth and left no way for the Church to examine a prophet - the very thing St John requires ("test the spirits", 1 John 4:1). The creeds confess "one holy catholic and apostolic Church"; Müntzer taught that the Church had ceased to exist for fourteen centuries. And his call to slay the godless contradicts the Lord's own refusal of the sword (Matthew 26:52; John 18:36). Luther's verdict, that a spirit which will not be tested and reaches for the fist is not the Holy Spirit, has been shared across the four traditions.

Major writings

Prague Manifesto (1521)
German Church Office and German Evangelical Mass (1523-24)
Protestation or Proposition and On Counterfeit Faith (1524)
Sermon to the Princes (1524)
Special Exposure of False Faith (1524)
Highly Provoked Vindication (1524)

Michael Sattlerc. 1490–1527Full profile · 6 min Author of the Schleitheim Confession, tortured and burned by the Catholic authorities

Affiliation: Benedictine prior of St Peter's in the Black Forest; Swiss Brethren leader
Appears in: The Radical Reformation
Profile: Link to this profile

Life

The monastery

Michael Sattler was born around 1490 at Staufen im Breisgau, in Austrian-ruled south-west Germany. Almost nothing is known of his early life. He entered the Benedictine abbey of St Peter's in the Black Forest, near Freiburg, and rose to be its prior, second in authority to the abbot. He probably studied at the University of Freiburg, and he had a good knowledge of Latin and Scripture.

Leaving the cloister

During the early 1520s the reforming writings of Luther and others reached the Black Forest, and Sattler, by his own later account, was troubled by the worldliness of monastic life and by Paul's epistles. In 1525, during the Peasants' War, rebel peasants occupied St Peter's; it is possible that Sattler sympathised with their grievances. He left the monastery about this time and married Margaretha, a former Beguine.^†

Zürich and Strasbourg

By 1525 he was in the Zürich area among the Swiss Brethren, and he was probably rebaptised there. He was among those arrested in Zürich and expelled in November 1525. He then worked as an evangelist in the region north of Zürich and in Württemberg, and in 1526 spent some time in Strasbourg, where he discussed baptism and the Church with the reformers Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito. They treated him with respect, though they could not agree. On leaving the city he wrote them a courteous letter setting out twenty points of disagreement.

Schleitheim

On 24 February 1527 a meeting of Swiss Brethren leaders was held at Schleitheim, near Schaffhausen. The movement had been troubled by disagreements and by some who claimed that spiritual freedom placed them above moral rules. The assembly agreed on seven articles, the Brotherly Union, now known as the Schleitheim Confession. Sattler was almost certainly its principal author, and its cover letter is in his style.

Arrest and trial

Shortly after Schleitheim, Sattler, his wife and members of the Anabaptist congregation at Horb, on the Neckar in Austrian territory, were arrested. Letters and papers found on him, including the Schleitheim articles, were used against him. He was tried at Rottenburg on 17-18 May 1527 before a court of the Austrian authorities. The charges included violating the imperial mandate, denying the real presence of Christ's body and blood in the sacrament, rejecting infant baptism, rejecting the sacrament of extreme unction, despising the Mother of God and the saints, refusing oaths, leaving the monastery and marrying, and saying that if the Turks invaded he would not resist them, and that if war were right he would rather fight Christians who persecute the faithful than Turks.

He answered each charge from Scripture, calmly. The court sentenced him to have his tongue cut, to be torn with red-hot tongs at the market place and five more times on the way to the place of execution, and then to be burned to powder.

Key dates

c. 1490 - Born at Staufen im Breisgau
c. 1515-25 - Benedictine monk and prior of St Peter's in the Black Forest
1525 - Leaves the monastery; marries; joins the Swiss Brethren
November 1525 - Expelled from Zürich
1526 - In Strasbourg with Bucer and Capito
24 February 1527 - Schleitheim assembly; the seven articles
Spring 1527 - Arrested at Horb
17-18 May 1527 - Trial at Rottenburg
20 May 1527 - Executed at Rottenburg
c. 28 May 1527 - Margaretha Sattler drowned in the Neckar

Teachings and claims

The seven articles of Schleitheim

Baptism is to be given only to those who have learned repentance and amendment of life, believe that their sins are taken away by Christ, and ask for it. Infant baptism, "the highest and chief abomination of the pope", is excluded.
The ban: those who fall into sin are to be admonished twice privately and then publicly, according to Matthew 18, before the breaking of bread.
The breaking of bread is a remembrance of Christ's broken body for those united by baptism into one body.
Separation: believers must separate themselves from the "abomination" of the world - from the churches, civic life and the use of force.
Pastors are to be chosen by the congregation, of good report, and supported by it.
The sword is ordained by God outside the perfection of Christ; Christians may not use it, serve as magistrates, or go to law.
Oaths are forbidden, according to Matthew 5:34-37.

Love and suffering

His letters and the Schleitheim articles stress that the Christian life is obedience to Christ in love, with suffering as its expected portion.

Documented controversies

Separation

Schleitheim's sharp division between the Church and "the world" was criticised by Zwingli, who wrote a refutation of it in 1527, and by Calvin, who answered it in his Brief Instruction (1544). They held that it denied that a Christian could serve God as a magistrate.

The Turks

His statement about the Turks, reported at his trial, horrified his judges and was used against the Anabaptists for generations as proof of disloyalty.

The execution

Contemporary reports of his execution circulated widely, and Bucer and Capito, though they disagreed with him, called him a martyr of Christ. Wolfgang Capito wrote to the authorities of Horb pleading for the other prisoners.

Death

The sentence was carried out at Rottenburg on 20 May 1527. Before he was burned, according to the account that circulated among the Brethren, he prayed for his persecutors, and when the ropes on his hands had burned through he raised two fingers, the sign he had promised his friends to show that the suffering was bearable. His wife Margaretha refused to recant, and was drowned in the Neckar some eight days later. Several other members of the Horb congregation were also executed.

Legacy

The Schleitheim Confession remains the classic statement of Anabaptist teaching on separation and non-resistance, and the Amish, Hutterites and conservative Mennonites still recognise it. Sattler's trial and death, recorded in the Martyrs Mirror, are among the most honoured in Anabaptist memory. His insistence on discipline, on a believers' church and on the refusal of the sword passed into the Mennonite, Baptist and free-church traditions.

Measured against the creeds

Sattler confessed the Trinity and the creeds' teaching on Christ, and his courage, his charity towards his judges and the manner of his death command respect. The cruelty of his execution was a crime; the Catholic and Protestant churches alike have since repudiated the killing of heretics.

His teaching, however, departs from the historic faith on baptism and the Church. The creeds confess one baptism, which the Church had given to infants from the earliest centuries, and which the Anabaptists rejected as no baptism. Schleitheim's separation of believers from all civil life, including the office of the magistrate, goes beyond the New Testament, which calls the ruler "the minister of God to thee for good" (Romans 13:4), and records soldiers and officials who believed without being told to leave their posts (Luke 3:14; Acts 10; 13:12). The Augsburg Confession (Article 16) and the Anglican Articles (Articles 37-39) explicitly reject the teaching that Christians may not bear civil office, serve as soldiers or take oaths.

His teaching on the Supper as a memorial of the body only, and his rejection of the real presence, also departs from the faith of the Fathers and of the Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran churches.

Major writings

Brotherly Union of a Number of Children of God Concerning Seven Articles (Schleitheim Confession, 1527)
Letter to Bucer and Capito (1526)
Letter to the church at Horb (1527)
On the Satisfaction of Christ and other tracts attributed to him

Menno Simons1496–1561Full profile · 6 min Rebuilt Anabaptism after Münster as a strictly peaceful, separated church of believers

Affiliation: Catholic priest in Friesland; from 1536 an Anabaptist elder; founder of the Mennonites
Appears in: The Radical Reformation
Profile: Link to this profile

Life

A village priest with doubts

Menno Simons was born in 1496 at Witmarsum in Friesland, in the northern Netherlands. Little is known of his family or schooling; he learned Latin and some Greek, probably in a monastery school, and was ordained priest at Utrecht in

He served as a parish priest first at Pingjum and then, from 1531, in his

home village of Witmarsum.

By his own account in his later Reply to Gellius Faber, he spent his first years as a priest playing cards and drinking with his fellow priests. Within a year of ordination he began to doubt that the bread and wine at Mass became the body and blood of Christ. He had not read Scripture, he wrote, for fear of being misled; when he did, he found no support for transubstantiation as he understood it, and Luther's writings encouraged him to trust Scripture above human authority.

In 1531 he heard that a tailor named Sicke Freerks had been beheaded at Leeuwarden for being rebaptised. "It sounded very strange to me to hear of a second baptism," he wrote. He searched Scripture and the Fathers and concluded that infant baptism had no basis in the New Testament - but he remained a priest, preaching what he now believed in parts while keeping his comfortable post.

Münster and the turning point

In 1534-35 Anabaptists inspired by the prophet Jan Matthys seized the city of Münster in Westphalia and proclaimed it the New Jerusalem. Their cause drew followers from Friesland. In April 1535 some three hundred Frisian Anabaptists, among them Menno's brother Pieter (on most readings of the evidence), seized the Oldeklooster monastery near Bolsward and were killed when it was retaken. ^†

Menno blamed himself for having taught the truth about baptism while leaving simple people without shepherds against false prophets. He wrote a tract against Jan van Leiden, The Blasphemy of John of Leiden, condemning his claim to be king. On 30 January 1536 he left the priesthood and went into hiding. Within a year he was rebaptised, probably by Obbe Philips, and was asked by a group of peaceable Anabaptists to become their elder. He accepted, he says, only after long reluctance, and was ordained by Obbe around January 1537.

Twenty-five years on the run

For the rest of his life Menno lived as a fugitive. In 1542 the Emperor Charles V put a price of 100 gold guilders on his head, and anyone who sheltered him risked death; in 1539 a man named Tjard Reynders was executed for having taken him in. He married a woman named Geertruydt, who travelled with him with their children.

He worked first in Groningen and Friesland, then from 1543 in East Friesland and the Rhineland, and finally along the Baltic coast. He preached, baptised, ordained elders and, above all, wrote: some twenty-five books and tracts, in Dutch, aimed at both his own people and their persecutors. His Foundation of Christian Doctrine (1539-40) became the movement's basic text.

Last years

From about 1554 he found refuge on the estate of a sympathetic nobleman, Bartholomäus von Ahlefeldt, at Wüstenfelde in Holstein, where he had a printing press. These years were darkened by the movement's internal quarrels over discipline. He was lame by then and walked with a crutch.

Key dates

1496 - Born at Witmarsum, Friesland
1524 - Ordained priest at Utrecht; begins to doubt transubstantiation
1531 - Hears of Sicke Freerks's execution and questions infant baptism; priest at Witmarsum
1534-35 - The Anabaptist kingdom at Münster
April 1535 - Oldeklooster seized and retaken; many Frisian Anabaptists killed
30 January 1536 - Leaves the Catholic priesthood
c. 1537 - Ordained an Anabaptist elder by Obbe Philips
1539-40 - Foundation of Christian Doctrine
1542 - Imperial price on his head
1554 - Settles at Wüstenfelde, Holstein
31 January 1561 - Dies at Wüstenfelde

Teachings and claims

A church of the reborn

Menno's chief theme was the new birth. The true Church, he taught, consists of those who have been regenerated, have repented, believe, and show it in an obedient life - "a church without spot or wrinkle" (Ephesians 5:27). Baptism belongs only to those who can confess faith; infant baptism, he wrote, was an invention of men. The Lord's Supper was a memorial and a sign of the fellowship of the reborn, not a sacrifice or the true body and blood.

Non-resistance and separation

He rejected Münster completely. Christians, he taught, may not use the sword, swear oaths, take part in war or hold the office of magistrate in which they would have to shed blood. "The regenerated do not go to war, nor engage in strife... They are the children of peace who have beaten their swords into ploughshares." The Church should be visibly separate from the world in dress, conduct and association.

The ban

Discipline was essential. Members who sinned openly and did not repent were to be excluded from the Supper and shunned in daily life, so that the Church would stay pure and the sinner might be shamed into repentance.

Celestial flesh

Following Melchior Hoffman, Menno held that Christ did not take His human flesh from Mary but that "the Word became flesh" in her, passing through her "as water through a pipe" - so that Christ's humanity was heavenly, not inherited from fallen Adam. He defended this at length against Reformed critics such as John a Lasco. Later Mennonites quietly abandoned it.

Documented controversies

The ban and shunning of spouses. In the 1550s stricter leaders, notably Leenaert Bouwens and Dirk Philips, insisted that shunning extend even to husbands and wives (marital avoidance). Menno at first resisted, then largely sided with the strict party. The disputes split the Dutch movement into "Waterlanders" (milder) and stricter groups, and the divisions multiplied after his death.
His Christology. Reformed and Lutheran opponents, and Catholic ones, charged that the celestial-flesh doctrine revived ancient errors about Christ's humanity; the debate with a Lasco at Emden in 1544 is the best-known exchange.
Persecution. He was the target, not the agent, of persecution: Catholic and Protestant authorities alike executed Anabaptists, and Menno's writings include pleas to magistrates to stop shedding innocent blood.

Death

Menno died at Wüstenfelde in Holstein on 31 January 1561, apparently of natural causes after years of illness, twenty-five years to the day after leaving the priesthood. He was buried in his own garden. The village was later destroyed in the Thirty Years' War and the grave lost; a memorial stone now marks the area.

Legacy

The Mennonites, and through a 1693 schism led by Jakob Ammann the Amish, carry his name and tradition. They emigrated in waves - to Prussia, Russia, Pennsylvania, Canada, Paraguay - and today number some two million baptised members, more than half of them in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Mennonite communities are among the most peaceable Christian communities in the world: pioneers of conscientious objection, disaster relief (Mennonite Central Committee, from 1920) and restorative justice. They also carry forward a lasting tension in his teaching between purity and love, seen in repeated splits over discipline.

Measured against the creeds

Menno affirmed the Trinity and the Apostles' Creed, and his life showed courage, humility and care for the persecuted. He also turned Anabaptism away from Münster's violence - something the four traditions can only honour.

His teaching departed from the historic faith in three ways. First, by rejecting infant baptism and treating the sacraments as signs of a regenerate community, he broke with the universal practice of the ancient Church, East and West. Second, his "celestial flesh" Christology is incompatible with the Council of Chalcedon (451), which confesses Christ "of one substance with us as regards His manhood... born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, as regards His manhood". If Christ's flesh was not taken from Mary, He did not take our nature in order to heal it - the point St Gregory of Nazianzus made: "what is not assumed is not healed". Third, his ideal of a pure church of the visibly reborn sets aside the Lord's parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24-30), which the Church has long read as warning against trying to separate the true from the false before the judgement.

Major writings

The Blasphemy of John of Leiden (c. 1535)
The Spiritual Resurrection and The New Birth (c. 1537)
Foundation of Christian Doctrine (1539-40, revised 1558)
True Christian Faith (c. 1541)
Brief and Clear Confession (1544), against John a Lasco
Reply to Gellius Faber (1554), which contains his account of his conversion
Instruction on Excommunication (1558)

Conrad Grebelc. 1498–1526Full profile · 6 min Performed the first rebaptism in Zürich on 21 January 1525 - the beginning of believer's baptism as the practice of a church

Affiliation: Zürich patrician and humanist; disciple of Zwingli; founder of the Swiss Brethren
Appears in: The Radical Reformation, Zwingli, the Puritans and the first Baptists
Profile: Link to this profile

Life

A patrician son

Conrad Grebel was born around 1498, probably at Grüningen near Zürich, into one of the leading families of the city. His father, Jakob Grebel, was an iron merchant, magistrate and member of the Zürich council. Conrad was educated at the Latin school of the Grossmünster and then at the universities of Basel (1514), Vienna (1515-18), where he studied under the humanist Joachim Vadian, and Paris (1518-20), on scholarships from the Emperor and the King of France. His student years were turbulent: he quarrelled with his father over money, and his letters speak of brawling and dissipation. He returned to Zürich in 1520 without a degree. Vadian married his sister Martha.

Zwingli's disciple

In Zürich Grebel joined a circle of young humanists who studied Greek, Hebrew and the Scriptures with Huldrych Zwingli. In 1522 he married Barbara, a young woman of lower rank, against his parents' wishes. About the same time he experienced a religious conversion and became one of Zwingli's most zealous supporters, and his letters to Vadian show his growing conviction that the Church must be restored to the New Testament pattern.

The break

At the second Zürich disputation in October 1523, Zwingli agreed that the Mass was unscriptural but left the timing of its abolition to the city council. Grebel and his friends, among them Felix Manz and Simon Stumpf, objected that the council had no authority over the word of God. From that point they began to meet separately for Bible study. Over the following year they concluded that infant baptism had no warrant in Scripture and that the true Church was a gathered community of committed believers, separate from the state.

The letter to Müntzer

In September 1524 Grebel wrote, for the group, a long letter to Thomas Müntzer, whose writings they had read. They praised his opposition to infant baptism but urged him to abandon liturgical chant and German Masses for the simple Supper of believers, and to renounce the sword: "true believing Christians are sheep among wolves". The letter was probably never delivered, but it is the earliest statement of the Swiss Brethren's views.

The first baptisms

In January 1525 the council held a disputation on baptism, ruled against the radicals, ordered all unbaptised infants to be baptised within eight days and forbade the group to meet. On the evening of 21 January 1525, in the house of Felix Manz's mother in Zürich, the group prayed, and George Blaurock, a former priest, asked Grebel to baptise him. Grebel did so, and Blaurock then baptised the others present. A few days later a congregation of believers was formed at the village of Zollikon. This is usually regarded as the beginning of the Anabaptist movement.

Mission and prison

Grebel preached in Schaffhausen, St Gallen (where hundreds were baptised in the river Sitter in April 1525) and the Grüningen district. He was arrested in October 1525, tried with Manz and Blaurock in March 1526 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Within two weeks the prisoners escaped. The same month the council decreed death by drowning for anyone who rebaptised. Grebel's father was executed in October 1526 for having received foreign pensions, a charge some historians connect with the pressures of the family's position.^†

Key dates

c. 1498 - Born near Zürich
1514-20 - Studies at Basel, Vienna and Paris
1522 - Marries; joins Zwingli's circle; conversion
October 1523 - Second disputation; the break with Zwingli
5 September 1524 - Letter to Thomas Müntzer
17 January 1525 - Disputation on baptism; radicals ordered to desist
21 January 1525 - First believer's baptism in Zürich
April 1525 - Mass baptisms at St Gallen
October 1525 - Arrested
March 1526 - Sentenced to life imprisonment; escapes
Summer 1526 - Dies of plague at Maienfeld

Teachings and claims

The gathered church

Grebel taught that the Church consists only of those who have repented, believed and committed themselves to follow Christ, and that it must be separate from the civic community. Membership is voluntary and marked by baptism.

Believer's baptism

He held that baptism must follow faith and the person's own request, since the New Testament records no infant baptisms and since infants cannot repent or confess. He regarded infant baptism as the "greatest and first abomination of the pope".

The Supper

He taught that the Supper is a memorial meal of the gathered church, to be eaten with ordinary bread, without vestments or chant, and only by those living in brotherly love.

Non-resistance and discipline

He held that Christians must not use the sword, either in war or as magistrates, and that the church must exercise discipline by the "ban" of Matthew 18.

Documented controversies

Breaking from the Reformation

His insistence that the Church's reform be carried out without regard to the city council was regarded by Zwingli as sedition and by the council as rebellion. To the Reformers, the Anabaptists threatened the unity of Christian society.

Rebaptism

The act of 21 January 1525 was, in the eyes of every established church, a repetition of a sacrament already validly given, and in imperial law a capital crime. The Anabaptists held that infant baptism was no baptism, so that theirs was the first true one.

Persecution

Grebel was imprisoned for his faith, and his friends were executed: Manz was drowned in the Limmat in January 1527 and Blaurock burned in the Tyrol in 1529.

Death

He died of plague at Maienfeld in the Grisons in the summer of 1526, aged about twenty-eight, perhaps eighteen months after the first baptisms.^†

Legacy

Mennonites, Amish and many Baptists regard Grebel as a founder of their tradition, and the Swiss Brethren, who produced the Schleitheim Confession in 1527, continued his teaching. The Mennonite college Conrad Grebel University College in Ontario bears his name. Historians honour him as the first to put into practice the idea of a free church of believers separate from the state.

Measured against the creeds

Grebel confessed the faith of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, and his longing for a Church of holy lives, his refusal of violence and his courage under persecution deserve respect. The persecution he and his friends suffered at the hands of the Reformed authorities was a wrong that the Reformed churches have since acknowledged; the Lutheran World Federation also asked Mennonites' forgiveness in 2010 for the persecution of Anabaptists by Lutherans.

But his doctrine of baptism departs from what the Church had received. The creed confesses "one baptism for the remission of sins"; the Church from the second century baptised infants (Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Origen, Cyprian), and the household baptisms of Acts (16:15, 33; 1 Corinthians 1:16) and the promise "to you and to your children" (Acts 2:39) were read in that light. To baptise those already baptised in the triune name treats Christ's baptism as no baptism, which the Church had rejected in the Donatist controversy. Luther's Concerning Rebaptism (1528) argued that baptism rests on God's word and command, not on the faith of the one baptised, and that the Anabaptists made their own faith the foundation of the sacrament.

His idea of the Church as a gathered community of the visibly holy also differs from the creeds' "holy catholic Church", which the Fathers and Reformers alike understood as a mixed body in which wheat and tares grow together until the harvest (Matthew 13:24-30).

Major writings

Letter to Thomas Müntzer (5 September 1524)
Letters to Joachim Vadian (1517-25)
Protestation and Defence (1524-25)

Jan van Leiden (Jan Bockelson)1509–1536Full profile · 5 min Proclaimed himself king of the New Israel at Münster, introduced polygamy, and was executed when the city fell

Affiliation: Dutch tailor; Melchiorite Anabaptist; "king" of Münster
Appears in: The Radical Reformation
Profile: Link to this profile

Life

Tailor and actor

Jan Bockelson (Beuckelszoon) was born in 1509 near Leiden in Holland, the illegitimate son of a village mayor and a serving woman from Westphalia. He was apprenticed as a tailor, travelled as a journeyman to England and Lisbon, and on his return married a widow and kept an inn in Leiden. He was a member of a chamber of rhetoric, the amateur dramatic societies of the Low Countries, where he wrote and acted in plays - a talent his enemies later saw in his conduct at Münster.

The Melchiorites

In the early 1530s he came under the influence of the followers of Melchior Hoffman, the apocalyptic Anabaptist preacher who taught that the end of the world was near and that Strasbourg would be the New Jerusalem. After Hoffman's imprisonment in 1533, leadership of the movement in the Netherlands passed to Jan Matthys, a baker of Haarlem, who declared himself the prophet Enoch and abandoned Hoffman's peaceful waiting: the godly, he taught, must now take the sword against the ungodly. In November 1533 Matthys baptised Bockelson and sent him as an apostle.

Münster

In the Westphalian city of Münster, the Lutheran preacher Bernhard Rothmann had moved towards Anabaptist views, and the city council had largely accepted the Reformation. In January 1534 Bockelson arrived, followed in February by Matthys. That month the Anabaptists gained control of the council in elections; Catholics and Lutherans who refused rebaptism were driven out of the city in a snowstorm, and the city's property was held in common. The prince-bishop, Franz von Waldeck, laid siege.

King of the New Israel

On Easter Sunday, 5 April 1534, Matthys, convinced by a revelation, rode out against the besiegers with a handful of men and was killed. Bockelson succeeded him. He replaced the council with twelve elders, on the pattern of the tribes of Israel, and imposed a severe code of laws in which many offences carried the death penalty. In July 1534 he introduced polygamy, citing the patriarchs and the shortage of men in the city; an uprising against it was crushed and its leaders executed. He married Divara, Matthys's widow, and took about fifteen more wives.

In September 1534, after the repulse of a major assault, a prophet named Johann Dusentschuer declared that God had made Bockelson king of the whole world. He was crowned, held court in splendour with a royal guard, and ruled as King John of the New Zion, while emissaries were sent out to raise support in the Netherlands and Westphalia.

Famine and fall

Through the winter and spring of 1535 the blockade tightened, and the city starved. The king told his people that the cobblestones would be turned into bread; many died of hunger, while the court ate. Dissenters and those who tried to leave were executed. One of his wives, Elisabeth Wandscherer, who asked to leave, was beheaded by Bockelson himself in the market place, and he and the other wives danced round her body.^† On the night of 24-25 June 1535 two deserters guided the besiegers through a gate, and the city fell after fierce fighting. Most of the defenders were killed.

Captivity

Bockelson was captured alive. For months he was exhibited in chains in the towns of the region and interrogated by Catholic and Lutheran theologians, including the Lutheran Antonius Corvinus, to whom he admitted some errors but defended others.

Key dates

1509 - Born near Leiden
November 1533 - Baptised by Jan Matthys
January 1534 - Arrives in Münster
February 1534 - Anabaptists take control; non-Anabaptists expelled; siege begins
5 April 1534 - Matthys killed; Bockelson succeeds him
July 1534 - Polygamy introduced
September 1534 - Proclaimed king of the New Israel
1535 - Famine in the besieged city
24-25 June 1535 - Münster falls
22 January 1536 - Executed at Münster

Teachings and claims

The New Jerusalem

He taught, following Matthys, that Münster was the New Jerusalem, that Christ's kingdom had begun there, and that the godly must destroy the ungodly to prepare for His return.

Kingship

He claimed to be the king of the last days foretold in Scripture, the successor of David, whose rule would extend over the whole world.

Community of goods and polygamy

He enforced common property on the model of Acts 2-4, and justified polygamy from the Old Testament and from the command to "be fruitful and multiply".

Prophecy

He claimed direct revelation from God, and governed by prophetic decrees given in visions and in trances.

Documented controversies

Violence and tyranny

His rule was a theocratic dictatorship in which dissent was punished with death. Accounts of the executions come mainly from hostile sources, notably the Catholic chronicler Hermann von Kerssenbrock, but they are corroborated by the testimonies of survivors and the confessions of the leaders.

Polygamy

The introduction of polygamy, and the coercion of women into marriage, scandalised every church of the time and has remained the most notorious feature of the Münster kingdom.

Responsibility for the Anabaptists

His kingdom was used by both Catholics and Protestants to justify the persecution of all Anabaptists, including the peaceful majority who had rejected him.

Death

On 22 January 1536, in the market place of Münster, he and two other leaders, Bernhard Knipperdolling and Bernhard Krechting, were tortured for about an hour with red-hot tongs and then killed with a dagger to the heart. Their bodies were hung in three iron cages from the tower of St Lambert's Church as a warning. The cages still hang there.

Legacy

Münster became the standard warning against Anabaptism for every church of the sixteenth century and long after; the Augsburg Confession's condemnations and countless sermons pointed to it. The peaceful Anabaptists, under Menno Simons, Dirk Philips and others, spent generations distancing themselves from Münster, and Menno's conversion was partly a response to it; he wrote against Jan's teaching in 1535. Historians debate how far the Münster kingdom reflected Anabaptist ideas and how far it was produced by apocalyptic fervour and the pressure of the siege.

Measured against the creeds

The creeds confess that Christ "shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead: whose kingdom shall have no end". The Münster kingdom represents, in its most extreme form, the error that this kingdom can be established by human force before His coming. The Augsburg Confession (Article 17) condemns "certain Jewish opinions" that before the resurrection of the dead the godly will take possession of the kingdom of the world, the ungodly being everywhere suppressed - a condemnation written with Münster's forerunners in view.

His polygamy contradicted Christ's teaching on marriage (Matthew 19:4-6), his claim to kingship and prophecy placed his own revelations above Scripture, and his tyranny was the opposite of the kingdom of Him who said, "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). The torture of Bockelson and his companions was itself a cruelty that the Church now repudiates.

Every personality in this section

Answering a modern Christian

"Infant baptism isn't in the Bible. Every baptism in Acts follows faith." Every baptism of an adult convert in Acts follows faith, and the four traditions agree that adult converts must believe before they are baptised. The question is what happened to their children. Acts records whole households baptised, Peter says the promise is "to you and to your children", and the earliest Christians we can read after the New Testament baptised infants without any sign that it was new or disputed. If it had been an innovation, someone would have objected. No one did until the sixteenth century.

"A baby can't believe, so baptism means nothing to it." That assumes baptism is chiefly something we do - a declaration of our faith. The New Testament describes it as something God does: He washes, regenerates, buries and raises, and gives His Spirit (Titus 3:5; Romans 6:3-4; Acts 2:38). If baptism is God's act, an infant is the clearest case of it, because the infant brings nothing. Christ said of children, "of such is the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:14).

"The Anabaptists were the true heirs of the early Church, persecuted by the state churches." They were persecuted, terribly, and that should be admitted without qualification. But persecution does not prove doctrine. The early Church they claimed to restore baptised infants, celebrated the Eucharist as a real communion in Christ's body and blood, and was led by bishops. On every one of those points the Anabaptists departed from it.

"Luther himself said Scripture alone. The Anabaptists were just more consistent." Luther did not think so, and said so in print within months. He held that God gives His Spirit through the outward word and sacraments, and that those who claim the Spirit apart from them are enthusiasts. The Augsburg Confession condemns the Anabaptists by name. The Reformation was a reform of the sacramental Church, not a licence to abolish it.

Sources and further reading

Acts 2:38-39; Acts 16:15, 33; 1 Corinthians 1:16; Colossians 2:11-12; Titus 3:5; Mark 10:13-16; Romans 10:17
Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.22.4; Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 21; Origen, Commentary on Romans 5.9; Cyprian, Letter 64 (to Fidus); Tertullian, On Baptism 18
The Schleitheim Confession (1527), in John H. Yoder, ed., The Legacy of Michael Sattler (Herald Press, 1973)
Martin Luther, Eight Sermons at Wittenberg (1522), LW 51; Letter to the Princes of Saxony Concerning the Rebellious Spirit (1524), LW 40; Against the Heavenly Prophets (1525), LW 40; Concerning Rebaptism (1528), LW 40
Augsburg Confession V and IX; Smalcald Articles III.8; Large Catechism IV; Formula of Concord, Epitome XII - in Concordia Triglotta (Concordia, 1921)
Council of Trent, Session VII (1547), Canons on Baptism 11-14
Confession of Dositheus (Synod of Jerusalem, 1672), Decree 16
Thirty-Nine Articles (1571), Articles XXVII, XXXVII, XXXVIII, XXXIX
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1250-1252
George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Truman State, 1992)
C. Arnold Snyder, Anabaptist History and Theology (Pandora, 1995)
Mark U. Edwards, Luther and the False Brethren (Stanford, 1975)
Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Thomas Müntzer: Apocalyptic Mystic and Revolutionary (T&T Clark, 1993)
Anthony Arthur, The Tailor-King: The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster (St Martin's, 1999)
Thieleman J. van Braght, Martyrs Mirror (1660; Herald Press, 1938)
Catholic Church and Mennonite World Conference, Called Together to Be Peacemakers (2003)

Work with it

Check yourself

Where and when did believer's baptism first become the practice of a church?

Check yourself

What happened at Münster in 1534-35?

Check yourself

What does the Augsburg Confession (Article IX) say about the Anabaptists?

Check yourself

Which early writer advised delaying baptism - and what does that tell us?

Objection drill

The New Testament pattern is clear: hear, believe, be baptised. Infant baptism reverses that order and turns baptism into a superstitious rite that makes people think they are Christians because something was done to them as babies.

Write your answer first. You will remember it far better than one you only read.

Objection drill

The Anabaptists were drowned and burned by Catholics and Protestants alike for following their consciences. A church that kills people for their baptism has no business lecturing anyone about the true faith.

Write your answer first. You will remember it far better than one you only read.

Memory work

Turn each card over, then say honestly whether you knew it. Cards you miss come back sooner.

I have worked through this section