Baptized Again: The Anabaptists from Zurich to Munster and Menno Simons

In 1525 nearly everyone in western Europe was baptized as an infant, and baptism was also the record of citizenship. A child born in Zurich was baptized within days, and the parish was the same community as the city. In 1523 the city council, not a bishop, had decided to follow the Bible preaching of Huldrych Zwingli at the Grossmunster. The council also decided how fast things would change: when images would come down, when the Mass would end, what would happen to the tithe.

Late Roman law, passed during the Donatist dispute in North Africa, made rebaptism a crime punishable by death, and the Holy Roman Empire still held to it. The Peasants' War of 1524-25 had just shaken south Germany, and Thomas Muntzer was executed in May 1525 after the defeat at Frankenhausen. Ottoman armies took Belgrade in 1521, won at Mohacs in 1526 and stood before Vienna in 1529. Rulers saw any group that split the community as a danger to public order.

The first Anabaptists were not outsiders. Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz came from Zurich families of standing and had studied Greek and Hebrew with Zwingli's circle. Georg Blaurock was a former priest. They thought the reform had stopped halfway. Their question was also a Western one. The Orthodox, Coptic, Ethiopian, Syriac and Armenian churches baptized infants and had no such quarrel.

All sides in this quarrel had a Bible open on the table, and all agreed that Christ commanded baptism in Matthew 28:19-20. They differed on what to do with a practice the New Testament does not plainly describe: the baptism of an infant. The Anabaptists read the New Testament as the rule for the church and the Old Testament as preparation for it. In the commission, the order is to make disciples, then baptize, then teach. In Mark 16:16 belief comes before baptism, and in Acts 2:41 and 8:12 those who were baptized had received the word or believed. Where Scripture gives no example of baptizing someone who could not believe, they would not supply one. They read the rest of the Bible through the Gospels and the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7).

Zwingli, Luther, Calvin and the Catholic church read the two Testaments as one story of God's dealings with one people. Zwingli and, later, Calvin argued from the covenant: God told Abraham that the sign was for him and his children (Genesis 17:7-14), and Paul links baptism to circumcision in Colossians 2:11-12. They pointed to household baptisms (Acts 16:15, 16:33; 1 Corinthians 1:16), to Jesus welcoming children (Mark 10:14) and to Peter's words that the promise is for you and your children (Acts 2:39). Luther added that God can give faith to an infant, as John the Baptist leapt in the womb (Luke 1:41). Catholic and Orthodox writers also pointed to the church's practice, which they said went back to the apostles' time, as a guide to what the texts meant. The Anabaptists noticed that the Reformers, who claimed to hold to Scripture alone, here argued from inference and from custom. The Reformers answered that the Anabaptists drew a rule from silence.

A second question was who reads. The Anabaptists gave the local congregation the task of weighing Scripture together (1 Corinthians 14:29-32) and of settling disputes (Matthew 18:15-20). Their critics feared that the result would be a private reading by every group of enthusiasts. On the sword, the two sides picked different anchors: Romans 13:1-7 and 1 Peter 2:13-14 for magistrates who bear the sword, and Matthew 5:38-48, Matthew 26:52 and John 18:36 for the disciples who do not. Church history is not Scripture; both sides here are to be tested by it.

The group began in Zurich in 1523-24. Grebel, Manz and other young scholars met in homes to read the New Testament, and they grew impatient when the council slowed Zwingli's reforms. Grebel's circle said that Zwingli himself had once doubted infant baptism; he now held that the council had to move with the city, and he would not go faster than it would. In January 1525 the council held a disputation and ruled that infants must be baptized within eight days or the parents face exile. Grebel and Manz were forbidden to teach.

On 21 January 1525, in the house of Manz's mother, the little group prayed. Georg Blaurock asked Grebel to baptize him on his confession of faith, and Grebel did so. Blaurock then baptized the others present, perhaps a dozen or more. They said this was not rebaptism, since they did not count the baptism of their infancy as baptism at all. Their opponents called them Anabaptists, 'rebaptizers', a label they refused. The movement spread within weeks to the village of Zollikon and then to St Gallen and Appenzell, where large numbers were baptized, in some accounts in the river. Zurich answered with fines, jail and exile. In March 1526 it set death by drowning as the penalty for rebaptism.

Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat on 5 January 1527. Zwingli had written against the Anabaptists in 1525 and again in 1527, and the council acted with the support of its pastors. A later chronicle reports that he sang as he was taken to the water and said, 'Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit' (Luke 23:46). Grebel had died of plague in 1526; Blaurock was whipped out of Zurich and burned in the Tyrol in 1529.

In the meantime scattered groups of Swiss Brethren needed to agree on what they believed. On 24 February 1527 a meeting at Schleitheim, near Schaffhausen, adopted seven articles: baptism only for those who repent and believe; the ban, a public exclusion of members who persist in sin, following Matthew 18; the Lord's Supper only for baptized believers; separation from the Mass, the state churches, taverns and weapons; pastors chosen and, if needed, disciplined by the congregation; no Christian use of the sword, including the office of magistrate; and no oaths, on the strength of Matthew 5:33-37 and James 5:12. Michael Sattler is credited with the main work. Within weeks he was arrested at Horb in the Black Forest. At his trial at Rottenburg he was accused of rejecting infant baptism and the sacrament, of refusing the oath and, as the charge was put, of wanting to leave the Turks unresisted. He answered from Scripture. He was condemned, his tongue cut, his flesh torn with red-hot tongs, and he was burned in late May 1527. His wife Margaretha was drowned a few days later.

In those years Catholic and Protestant authorities that agreed on little agreed on this. The Second Diet of Speyer in 1529 renewed the old imperial law that rebaptism was punishable by death. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 condemned the Anabaptists (Article 9 on baptism, Article 16 on civil government), and Lutheran theologians, Melanchthon among them, came to accept the death penalty for some. Luther at first wrote that error should be met with the Word, not the sword, but his position hardened. Calvin wrote against them in 1544 and Bern, Basel and Zurich executed them. Habsburg Austria and Bavaria drowned, beheaded and burned them in large numbers. Hubmaier was burned in Vienna in 1528. Estimates of the total executed in the century run from a few thousand upward; the number is uncertain. In 1660 a Dutch Mennonite, Thieleman van Braght, published the Martyrs Mirror, a book of over a thousand pages collecting the stories of believers, including the early Christians and the sixteenth-century dead. It is still read in Amish and Mennonite homes.

In the Low Countries the movement took a different form. Melchior Hoffman, a furrier, preached the nearness of Christ's return and had baptized followers in Strasbourg before he was imprisoned there about 1533. His followers, the Melchiorites, expected a New Jerusalem. In the Westphalian city of Munster the preacher Bernhard Rothmann moved from Lutheranism to adult baptism, and in January 1534 the Dutch baker Jan Matthys arrived and named Munster the New Jerusalem. Citizens were told to be baptized or leave. Goods were held in common. The bishop, Franz von Waldeck, besieged the city. Matthys led a sortie at Easter 1534 and was killed. Jan van Leiden took power, introduced polygamy that summer and had himself proclaimed king in September. The city starved. It was retaken on 25 June 1535 with great slaughter; Jan van Leiden and two others were tortured and killed in January 1536, and their bodies were hung in iron cages from the tower of St Lambert's church.

Munster was a catastrophe, and it fixed the picture of the Anabaptist in the mind of Europe as a polygamist, a revolutionary and a fanatic. Most Anabaptists, then and later, had nothing to do with it, and the Swiss Brethren had written nonresistance into their confession eight years before. Two men gave the survivors a shape. Menno Simons, a priest at Witmarsum in Friesland, had doubted the Mass and infant baptism for years. In 1535 his brother was killed in an armed Anabaptist band. He left the Catholic church in January 1536 and spent the rest of his life writing and moving from place to place with a price on his head; his Foundation Book of 1540 set out his teaching. He died in 1561 in Holstein of natural causes. Jakob Hutter led refugees to Moravia, where the nobles protected them, and organized households that held all things in common on the model of Acts 2:44-45 and 4:32. He was burned at Innsbruck on 25 February 1536. His followers, the Hutterites, moved through Hungary, Transylvania and Ukraine and in the 1870s to the American plains.

The movement kept dividing and spreading. In 1693 Jakob Ammann, an Alsatian elder, broke from the Swiss Brethren over how strictly to shun the banned, and the Amish took his name. English exiles in Amsterdam, among them John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, formed a church in 1609 on believer's baptism, and Helwys wrote in 1612 that the king has no power over the souls of his subjects. Today most Mennonites live outside Europe and North America. The Meserete Kristos Church in Ethiopia, founded in the 1950s, is among the largest Mennonite bodies and survived the jailing of its leaders under the Derg regime.

Three questions were at stake. The first was infant baptism. Catholics, Lutherans and the Reformed agreed that a child could be baptized, but gave different reasons. Catholics and Lutherans said baptism washes away inherited guilt and gives new birth (John 3:5; Acts 2:38), so there was no reason to leave a baby unprotected. The Reformed said it was the sign of entry into the covenant, as circumcision had been (Genesis 17; Colossians 2:11-12). The Anabaptists said that the New Testament knows only believers' baptism (Matthew 28:19-20; Acts 8:12; 18:8), and that a church made up of everyone born in a town is no longer the body of the saved. The Reformers replied with Matthew 13:24-30, the weeds and the wheat that grow together until the harvest: the visible church always holds the mixed and the unbelieving, and no one can sort them. The Orthodox, who did not enter the debate in the sixteenth century, have baptized infants with anointing and communion at once, and see no gap to fill.

The second was church and state. For Luther, Zwingli and Calvin the magistrate was God's servant for the good of the people (Romans 13:1-7), and a Christian prince had a duty to keep both tables of the law; heresy was a public offence. Catholic rulers held the same principle for the old church. The Anabaptists read the New Testament as separating the two kingdoms. Christ's kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36), and the disciple who is struck turns the other cheek (Matthew 5:39). Many Anabaptists would not swear oaths (Matthew 5:34-37; James 5:12), though their opponents answered that God himself swore (Hebrews 6:13-17) and Paul called God as witness (2 Corinthians 1:23). For the Anabaptists, the fact that they were being killed by Christians for baptizing believers proved their point. Their critics held it showed their rebellion, and Munster seemed to confirm that.

The third was the nature of the church: a gathered company of the converted who discipline one another (Matthew 18:15-18; 1 Corinthians 5), against a church that includes all who are born into it. Critics charged that this made salvation a matter of rules; the Anabaptists answered that faith without a changed life is dead (James 2:17). None of these questions was settled by 1560.

The Anabaptists put Christ at the center in a particular way: as the master to be followed. Menno Simons printed 1 Corinthians 3:11 on the title page of his Foundation Book, 'For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ'. They read Matthew 16:24 and 1 Peter 2:21 literally: the disciple takes the cross and walks where Christ walked. The martyrs held that their suffering shared in the suffering of the Lamb. Some accounts in the Martyrs Mirror record prayers for the judges and executioners.

Their critics accused them of less. Reformers charged a religion of rules in which obedience took the place of grace, and a gathered church that looked, to its enemies, like a church of the self-righteous. There was also a doctrinal charge. Melchior Hoffman and Menno taught that Christ's flesh was given from heaven and was not taken from Mary. Lutheran, Reformed and Catholic writers said this ended the full humanity of Christ. Menno denied that he meant to, and the idea was not common to all Anabaptists; many in the Swiss and Hutterite groups did not hold it.

The Christ the persecutors confessed was the same Christ. Zwingli, Luther, Calvin and the Catholic bishops all confessed the Son of God, crucified and risen, and they put believers to death for baptizing them, often by drowning, in his name. Later Lutherans, Reformed and Mennonites have said so publicly: the Lutheran World Federation asked forgiveness of the Mennonites in 2010, and in 2004 leaders of the Reformed church of Zurich did the same at the Grossmunster. At Munster, the Christ of John 18:36 was set aside for a king in his name. The story shows the Gospel obscured at both ends of the quarrel.