Radical Anabaptism

Rebaptizers, a name given by the opponents

The word comes from the Greek ana, "again", and baptizein, "to baptize": the "rebaptizers"^[6]. It was their opponents who imposed it, and those concerned almost always refused it: in their eyes, the debate was not about repeating a baptism, but about the validity of the first one, since a child sprinkled without personal faith had, in their view, never been baptized^[7]. They called themselves "Brethren", "children of God", "witnesses", or simply "the Church".

Historical usage nevertheless reserves this name for the groups which, in the 16th century, denied the validity of infant baptism and made believers' baptism the sign of entry into the community^[8]. Calling it "radical" therefore aims first not at violence, since many Anabaptists were hunted pacifists, but at the root (radix): where Luther and Calvin kept the baptism of infants, the alliance of throne and altar and the territorial Church, the Anabaptists wanted to take everything back to the root, Scripture alone and the Church of converts only^[9].

The historians' "Radical Reformation"

Since George H. Williams's book The Radical Reformation (1962), historians have grouped under the name "Radical Reformation" the movements recognized by neither Rome, nor Wittenberg, nor Zurich, nor Geneva: Anabaptists, spiritualists, evangelical rationalists^[10]. The expression has the merit of recalling that these movements are not a mere appendix to Luther: they are born of the same appeal to Scripture alone, pushed to the point of breaking with the territorial Churches and with infant baptism^[11].

But it has a drawback: putting the peaceful Swiss Brethren, the Zwickau visionaries and the Münster polygamists on the same level crushes decisive differences^[12]. This article therefore distinguishes three families and one deviation, without ever losing sight of what unites them in the eyes of Catholic judgment: the refusal of the baptism of little children and of a Church that carries them from birth^[13].

Three families, one same rupture

This table calls for two clarifications. First, the Zwickau prophets (1521), often presented as the fathers of the movement, did not practise rebaptism: they are its agitated forerunners, not its founders^[14]. Second, Thomas Müntzer, the preacher of the Peasants' War, rejected infant baptism in theory but kept it in practice: he is a false brother, not an Anabaptist^[15].

The "prophets" who did not rebaptize

In 1521, three men from Zwickau in Saxony, the weaver Nicholas Storch (d. 1525), Thomas Müntzer, a former supporter of Luther (c. 1490-1525), and their companions, carry to Wittenberg the attack on infant baptism, the absolute equality of all men and the community of goods^[16]. Luther, back from the Wartburg, has them driven out of the city by dint of preaching; Storch then travels through Germany and Thuringia, where he numbers among the instigators of the Peasants' War (1524-1525)^[17].

The episode matters for our subject on two counts. It shows first that the invocation of Scripture alone by each individual, joined to private inspiration, logically leads to extreme theses: this is the diagnosis the Catholic Encyclopedia makes of the lineage between the Lutheran principle and the Anabaptist escalation^[18]. It shows second that the first blood shed is shed between Protestants: the peasant revolt, crushed notably at Frankenhausen in 1525, scatters at the same time the first radical networks of Saxony and Thuringia^[19].

Thomas Müntzer: the false brother

Müntzer deserves a paragraph of his own, because he is too quickly counted among the Anabaptists. Preacher at Allstedt then absolute master of Mühlhausen with the apostate Heinrich Pfeifer, he holds worship in German, attacks Luther and the established order, and leads crowds of peasants and townsfolk to pillage^[20]. Beaten at Frankenhausen by the troops of the Elector of Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse and the Duke of Brunswick, found hidden in a bed, he is delivered to the executioner, though not without having first received the sacraments of the Catholic Church, while Pfeifer dies impenitent^[21].

Yet Müntzer, who rejected infant baptism in theory, maintained it in practice: he never rebaptized anyone^[22]. To hold him for the father of Anabaptism is to confuse millenarian social revolution with rebaptism properly so called. The distinction matters, because the Church does not condemn the two under the same heading: armed revolt belongs to the temporal sword, rebaptism belongs to the sacramental heresy judged at Trent^[23].

Disciples turned opponents

As Luther at Wittenberg, Zwingli sees his best disciples outflank him on the left. Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz and George Blaurock, young Zurich humanists among his most fervent supporters, draw from the principle of Scripture alone a conclusion he refuses: since the New Testament shows only believing adults receiving baptism, infant baptism would be groundless, and the true Church should be a Church of the pure, separated from the State, composed of rebaptized believers^[24]. The detail of the Zurich confrontation, the 67 Articles, the Prophezei, the theocracy of the Council, belongs to the neighbouring article Zwinglianism; here, only the break concerns us.

Zwingli, whose whole Reformation rested on alliance with the magistrate and on a Church coextensive with the city, saw in this demand a mortal danger for social order as much as for doctrine^[25]. The Zurich Council decides in his favour: the January 1525 mandate imposing the baptism of newborns and the expulsion of the rebaptizers, the November 1525 disputation lost in advance by the dissenters, then, in 1526, the severest penalties against their adherents^[26].

21 January 1525: the first adult baptisms

On 21 January 1525, Grebel baptizes Blaurock on confession of faith, in a house at Zollikon: this is the birth of Swiss Anabaptism^[27]. Grebel disappears as early as 1526^[28]; Manz, arrested, is drowned in the Limmat on 5 January 1527, a torment chosen in derision as a parody of the baptism by immersion he defended, the first Anabaptist martyr, and one of the first Protestants put to death by other Protestants^[29].

Zwingli answers with the treatise Von der Taufe (May 1525): baptism becomes in it a mere sign of commitment and covenant (Pflichtzeichen), the counterpart of circumcision, with no gracious effect of its own^[30]. It is little to say that the Catholic answer is not content with this: for the Church, baptism is neither the empty sign of the Zwinglians, nor the seal reserved to adults of the Anabaptists, but real regeneration, offered also to little children (Jn 3:5)^[31].

Seven articles for a separated Church

On 24 February 1527, the feast of St Matthias, representatives of the Swiss Brethren gathered at Schleitheim (canton of Schaffhausen) adopt the first Anabaptist confession of faith, the Fraternal Union of several children of God concerning seven articles, very probably written by Michael Sattler, a former prior turned Anabaptist^[32]. The first article sets the tone, and deserves to be read in the text:

"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.": Schleitheim Confession, article I, 24 February 1527^[33]

The seven articles hold in one programme: baptism of believers only, excommunication (the "ban"), the Supper in memory of the broken body reserved to the baptized, separation from the world and its works, Catholic and Protestant worship, taverns, civic affairs, oaths, blameless pastors, refusal of the sword and refusal of the oath^[34]. It is at once an ecclesiology and a code of secession: to come out of Babylon and earthly Egypt so as no longer to be "partakers of the plagues which the Lord will bring upon them"^[35].

Michael Sattler: from Stauffen to Rottenburg

The presumed author of the charter does not enjoy it for long. Arrested at Horb with other Brethren before 18 March 1527, Sattler is tried at Rottenburg: his tongue cut out, his flesh torn with red-hot tongs, he is burned on 20 May 1527 while praying for his persecutors; his wife Margaretha, a former Beguine, is drowned in the Neckar a few days after him^[36]. The torment, of calculated cruelty, tells the dismay of the authorities before a sect that refused both the baptism received and the oath sworn, the two bonds by which the city held its members^[37].

Balthasar Hubmaier, the theologian

The most learned of the Anabaptist leaders is a doctor: Balthasar Hubmaier, parish priest of Waldshut, who receives believers' baptism at Easter 1525 and rebaptizes part of his parish^[38]. Imprisoned then released at Zurich after retraction, he founds in 1526 the important community of Nikolsburg in Moravia, and writes the bulk of the first theology of adult baptism, while pleading, alone among his peers, for a tolerant Christian government and a measured use of the sword, which the other leaders reject^[39].

Arrested in July 1527 on King Ferdinand's order, tried at Vienna, he is burned on 10 March 1528; his wife is drowned in the Danube three days later^[40]. As early as 1526, in his Short Apology (A Short Apology, Op. 13), he had left a saying that paints him entire:

"I may err, I am a man, but a heretic I cannot be, because I ask constantly to be instructed by the Word of God.": Balthasar Hubmaier, Short Apology, 1526, Op. 13^[41]

The saying is fine, and it calls for the Catholic answer: to ask to be instructed is precisely to recognize a judge above one's own judgment, and that judge, for the Church, is not private inspiration, but the transmitted faith, of which the baptism of little children has been part from the origins^[42].

Hans Denck, Hans Hut: the visionary wing

Beside the theologian, the visionary wing. John Denck, a Nuremberg humanist become one of the Swiss leaders with Hubmaier, carries the spiritualist current that makes Scripture a dead letter without inward illumination^[43]. Hans Hut, an apocalyptic preacher of the South, wins over the malcontents whom Hubmaier's moderation disappoints and spreads the expectation of an imminent judgment^[44]. With them, southern Anabaptism shifts from believers' baptism to armed millenarianism: this is the soil in which Münster will grow^[45].

Melchior Hoffman: the Strasbourg expectation

The passage from South to North is called Melchior Hoffman, a furrier turned itinerant prophet: it is to his activity that Anabaptist diffusion in Lower Germany and the Netherlands owes most^[46]. He announces the return of Christ for Easter 1533 and makes Strasbourg the city of waiting; the date passes, the Strasbourg magistrate, wearied, throws him into prison, where he ends his days^[47]. But his disciples, the Melchiorites, have already taken the road to Münster, where Strasbourg's failed apocalypse will become a successful revolution, for sixteen months^[48].

The seizure of the city

At Münster, in Westphalia, the ground is prepared: the chaplain Bernard Rothmann and the cloth merchant Knipperdolling have already spread Lutheran ideas there before joining the Anabaptist movement^[56]. At the beginning of January 1534, disciples of Hoffman enter the city and introduce adult baptism there; Rothmann accepts "rebaptism" and more than a thousand adults are soon baptized^[57]. In February 1534, Knipperdolling is elected burgomaster: the city passes under the complete and undivided control of the supporters of rebaptism^[58].

What was to be Strasbourg becomes Münster: the city is proclaimed the "New Jerusalem", the starting point for the conquest of the world, and the signal is given by a reign of terror, treasures of literature and art destroyed, goods held in common, non-Anabaptists expelled^[59]. Two Dutchmen take the lead: John Matthijs, a former baker, and John Bockelson, a Leiden tailor gone down in history as John of Leiden^[60].

The reign of John of Leiden

On Easter Sunday 1534, Matthijs, who has prophesied for that day God's judgment on the godless, leaves the city with twelve companions as a new Gideon: he is cut to pieces with all his troop^[61]. John of Leiden succeeds him and turns power into a carnivalesque theocracy: in July 1534 he introduces polygamy, then in September has himself proclaimed king of the "New Zion", while Prince-Bishop Franz von Waldeck, temporal lord of the city, has already begun the siege^[62].

The figures reported by contemporary Catholic sources give the measure of the orgy: Rothmann takes four wives, John of Leiden sixteen, including Divara, Matthijs's widow, made queen^[63]. The winter of 1534-1535 brings famine to the besieged city; the king, who parades in sumptuous costumes and promises to lead his people to victory by miracle, has one of his wives, Elisabeth Wandscherer, who had rebelled against his authority, beheaded on 12 June 1535, a deed which some later accounts falsely say was attributed to the king, so quickly did the black legend cover the facts^[64].

The fall

In June 1535, defence becomes hopeless: John prepares the burning of the city as a last resort, but the besiegers seize it by surprise in the night of 24 to 25 June^[65]. The "king", his lieutenant Knipperdolling and his chancellor Krechting are taken, John found hidden in a cellar, and, after six months of prison and torture, executed on 22 January 1536 by a cruel death, torn with red-hot tongs; their bodies, locked in iron cages, are hung from the tower of St Lambert's church as a terrible warning^[66]. Rothmann, for his part, probably perishes in the final assault^[67].

Speyer 1529: the imperial mandate

The crushing of Münster must not make us forget that the repression had begun ten years earlier, and that for once it unites Catholics, Lutherans and Zwinglians. The Diet of Speyer, in April 1529, adopts the mandate against the Anabaptists: every rebaptized person, man or woman, of age of reason, must be put to death by fire, sword or other torment, according to the persons, without prior inquisition of the ecclesiastical judges^[76]. The German text, preserved by the Protestant historian Philip Schaff, deserves to be read:

"That each and every rebaptizer and rebaptized person, men and women of age of reason, be put to death [...] without prior inquisition of the ecclesiastical judges.": Recess of the Diet of Speyer, April 1529^[77]

Luther, who had approved civil repression in 1527-1528 while writing against the doctrine, lets remorse escape in his book Against the Rebaptizers (1528):

"It is not right, and I deeply regret that such wretched people should be so miserably murdered. [...] Why should they be tortured in this life also?": Martin Luther, Von der Wiedertaufe (1528)^[78]

The sentence honours the man without absolving the system: the Speyer mandate remains the common charter of the persecution, signed by Protestant hands as well as Catholic ones^[79].

The price of blood

The repression strikes everywhere: Zurich drowns, Bern banishes, the Lutheran princes expel, and the hereditary lands of Ferdinand of Austria, Tyrol, Moravia, furnish the fullest stakes^[80]. The Hutterite Chronicle counts 2,169 executed under the reigns of Charles V and Ferdinand, a figure historians cross-check with local archives without being able to close it definitively^[81].

Two Catholic remarks are called for here, in honesty. The first: the Church does not canonize rebels who wanted to destroy the Church, but neither does she bless every stake; the judgment she makes at Trent is doctrinal, and it does not retroactively turn every temporal sentence into an act of justice^[82]. The second: those executed, in their error, remained men of often heroic sincerity, Hubmaier praying at the stake, Sattler praying for his executioners, and the Catholic looks on them as souls to be pitied and entrusted to mercy, not as trophies^[83].

The baptism of little children

Everything else, oath, sword, separation, follows from a single negation: the baptized child is not baptized. The Catholic dossier holds in three bundles, Scripture, Tradition, magisterium, which the table summarizes before the detail.

On the Scripture side, the argument of the households is no conjecture: when Luke notes that the jailer "was baptized, he and all his", in that very night, with no prior catechumenate, he describes a household baptism in which age is no obstacle^[88]. On the Tradition side, the chain is unbroken: St Irenaeus, disciple of Polycarp who was himself a disciple of John, writes about 180 that Christ came to save "all who through Him are born again to God: infants, and children, and boys, and youths, and old men"^[89]; Origen affirms that the Church holds from the apostles the tradition of baptizing even little children; St Cyprian, consulted on the eighth-day delay, answers that none must be waited for; St Augustine makes the baptism of infants the crowning argument against the Pelagians^[90].

The Catechism of the Catholic Church decides in the same sense, and deserves to be quoted rather than summarized:

"Born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin, children also have need of the new birth in Baptism to be freed from the power of darkness and brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God, to which all men are called. [...] The Church and the parents would deny a child the priceless grace of becoming a child of God were they not to confer Baptism shortly after birth.": Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1250^[91]

The Tertullian objection, and its answer

The most honest objection the Anabaptists can allege comes from a Father: Tertullian, in his treatise On Baptism (chapter 18), advises delaying the baptism of little children according to persons and circumstances^[92]. Must we conclude that the primitive Church hesitated? No, for three reasons: Tertullian writes as a rigorist, on the verge of falling into Montanism, and his advice of delay belongs to his personal severity about post-baptismal penance; no one around him disputes the validity of the baptism of infants, only its opportuneness; and from the following century on, Origen, Cyprian and all the African Church baptize newborns as a matter of course^[93]. An isolated pastoral advice weighs nothing against a unanimous tradition; this is exactly the reverse of the Anabaptist method, which makes an exception into a rule.

The oath, the sword, the magistracy

Schleitheim refuses the oath ("swear not", Mt 5:34), refuses the sword ("resist not evil") and forbids the Christian all magistracy^[94]. The Catholic answer distinguishes. The oath sworn in truth is not forbidden by Christ, who aims at frivolous swearing: St Paul swears ("I call God to witness", 2 Cor 1:23) and the Epistle to the Hebrews recalls that "men swear by one greater than themselves" (Heb 6:16)^[95]. The magistrate's sword is not murder: "he who takes the sword will perish by the sword" (Mt 26:52) condemns private violence, while the Apostle calls the prince "God's minister for good", who "does not bear the sword in vain" (Rom 13:1-4), and Christ Himself recognizes power "given from above" (Jn 19:11)^[96]. As for the Church, she is "the pillar and bulwark of the truth" (1 Tim 3:15), not a congregation of the pure that would excommunicate the world: the parable of the weeds (Mt 13:24-30) forbids uprooting before the harvest^[97].

The Supper as mere memory

On the Eucharist, the Anabaptists hold the memorial position: a meal of remembrance among the baptized, with no real presence^[98]. The complete dossier, Scripture (Jn 6:55; 1 Cor 11:27-29), Fathers (Ignatius of Antioch, Justin, Irenaeus), Trent (13th session, 11 October 1551, canon 1: anathema on whoever denies the presence to see in it only a sign)^[99], belongs to the neighbouring article The Real Eucharistic Presence and to the refutation of Zwinglian memorialism; we do not return to it here, except to note that Münster communicated in memory while Trent prepared the anathema.

Four sessions of Trent

As with Zwinglianism, it is the Council of Trent that strikes, and it strikes four times, one of them at the very heart of our subject.

Canon 13 of the 7th session aims by name at the thesis: to deny that little children, once baptized, must be counted among the faithful, and to claim they must be rebaptized at the age of reason, is to incur anathema^[103]. No benevolent reading is possible: between Schleitheim, article I, and Trent, canon 13, the contradiction is frontal, and the Church has chosen, infallibly, in an ecumenical council, her side.

Even the reformers refute

A remarkable fact, and one that tells against: the magisterial reformers, who had every interest in sparing allies against Rome, unanimously condemned rebaptism. Luther writes from late 1527 On Rebaptism, to Two Pastors (WA 26), prefaces in 1530 Justus Menius's book against the rebaptizers and returns to the charge in 1532 against the "clandestine preachers"^[104]. Zwingli makes baptism a sign, but keeps infant baptism against his former disciples^[105]. Calvin publishes at Geneva, in 1544, his Brief Instruction to arm all good faithful against the errors of the common sect of the Anabaptists, which refutes article by article, beginning with infant baptism, in fifteen pages drawn from the Institutes, the Schleitheim charter^[106]. When Rome, Wittenberg, Zurich and Geneva agree in condemning, nothing remains to rebaptism but Münster for absolution, and Münster has burned.

The dossier of Protestant objections as a whole, Scripture, Fathers, sacraments, is treated in the neighbouring article Answers to Protestantism; the present article retains only the conclusion that concerns our subject: on infant baptism, the magisterial Reformation remained Catholic without knowing it.

Neither hatred nor black legend

Condemning the error is not hating those in error, and this article does not. The executed Anabaptists were neither monsters nor saints: Christians led astray by a literal and solitary reading of Scripture, often courageous unto death, sometimes criminal unto orgy^[107]. The Church, which struck them with anathema in council, asks no one to rejoice over the stakes, and the Catholic of today, reading the 2,169 names of the Hutterite Chronicle as the empty cages of St Lambert, entrusts one and the other to the mercy of God, firmness on the truth, charity toward persons^[108].

Menno Simons and the peaceful path

The effect of the fall of Münster, joined to the determined repression of Catholics, Lutherans and Zwinglians, was the pronounced then complete elimination of the violent traits of the movement^[109]. The man of this turning point is a Frisian Catholic priest who joins the party in 1536: Menno Simons, whose beneficent influence refounds the scattered remains into peaceful communities, separated but not violent^[110]. His biography, his break and his doctrine belong to his own article; let us retain here only that Mennonitism, which still exists today principally in Holland, Germany and the United States, is the softened, and disarmed, heir of Anabaptism^[111].

Hutterites, Amish, Baptists

The Moravian communities, gathered by Jakob Hutter before his stake of 1536, become the Hutterite brethren, who still practise community of goods without polygamy or the sword^[112]. The Amish are born of a 1693 split around Jakob Ammann, in the name of stricter discipline^[113]. As for the English then American Baptists, they adopt the Anabaptist doctrine on infant baptism without historically descending from Münster: a filiation of idea, not a simple filiation, since the Baptists trace back to the English Separatists exiled in Holland, in contact with the Mennonites^[114]. The antitrinitarian drift of certain late fringes belongs to another dossier: Socinianism.

• On the Zurich Reformation from which the Anabaptists came out: Zwinglianism and Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531).
• On the two other magisterial Reformations, which kept infant baptism against the rebaptizers: Lutheranism and Calvinism.
• On the peaceful heir of the movement: Menno Simons (1496-1561).
• On the Eucharistic dossier (the memorial Supper): The Real Eucharistic Presence.
• On all Protestant objections and their answers: Answers to Protestantism.
• On the antitrinitarian drift of the late radical fringes: Socinianism.