§ 147.1. The Anabaptist Movement in General.—The name of Anabaptists has always been repudiated by those so designated as a calumnious nickname and term of reproach. And, in fact, it is clearly inadequate, inasmuch as it does not characterize either the regulating principle or the essential core and nature of the aim of the party, which had been already fully developed before rebaptism had been set up as a term of membership. Within their own constituted congregations no second baptism found place, but only one baptism of adults on the ground of a personal profession of faith. Nevertheless, the rejected designation had, at the time at which it had originated, this justification, that then all the members of this community actually were rebaptizers or had been rebaptized; and the introduction of a second baptism, as it was the result and consequence of their fundamental principle, became also the occasion, means, and basis for their incorporation into an independent denomination.—The representatives of the Anabaptist movement showed their ultra-reforming character by this, that while at one with Luther and Zwingli in seeking the overthrow of all views and practices of the Roman Catholic church regarded by them as unevangelical, they characterized the position of the reformers as a halting half way, and so denounced them as still deeply rooted in the antichristian errors of the papacy. And because the reformers firmly repudiated them, and vigorously opposed and refused to countenance those radical demands and fanatical chiliastic expectations of theirs that went so much further, they turned upon them and their reformed institutions often with a fury and bitterness even more intense than they manifested to their Romish opponents. Most offensive to them was the attitude of the reformers toward the civil authorities. They were especially indignant at the reformers for not rejecting with scorn the help of magistrates in carrying out the Reformation movement, for recognising, not only the right, but the duty of civil rulers to co-operate in the reconstruction of the church, to exercise control over the ecclesiastical and religious life of the community as well as of each individual, to see to the maintenance of church order, and to visit the refractory with civil penalties. Then their innermost principle was the endeavour to make a complete and thorough distinction between the kingdom of nature and the kingdom of grace, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world, of the converted and the unconverted, so as to restore a visible kingdom of saints by gathering together all true believers from all sections of the utterly corrupted church into a new holy communion of the regenerate. Thus they would prepare the way for the promised millennium, when the saints shall rule the world. The State, with its penalties and punishments, belongs essentially to the domain of evil, and is to be endured only so long as there are unbelievers and unconverted people, who alone are under its jurisdiction. The community of true Christians, on the other hand, is in no need of any secular magistracy, for this law, which the civil power administers, concerns only the unrighteous and evildoers. But in matters of religion and the inner man, the civil authority can have no manner of right to interfere; as, on the other hand, believers ought not to accept any sort of magisterial office or civic rank. Freedom in matters of conscience, religion, worship, and doctrine is a fundamental axiom, which forms the primary privilege of every religious denomination, and the only admissible punishment in connection with religious questions is exclusion from the particular community. The only unconditionally valid legislative code for Christians is the Bible. To the law of the State, however, he is not to submit at all in spiritual things, and even in temporal things only in so far as Holy Scripture and his own conscience, enlightened by the Spirit of God, do not enter a protest; but where the injunction of a magistrate oversteps the limit, he must offer strenuous resistance, and contend even to blood and death.—With respect to the mode of life and activity within the ranks of the community, the peculiarly high claims which they put forth to be regarded as a congregation of chosen saints demanded that they should insist upon the actual personal conversion and regeneration of each individual member, the exclusion of everything sinful and worldly by means of a rigidly strict discipline, and where necessary by expulsion from church fellowship, as well as the avoiding of all needless intercourse with the unconverted and unbelieving, and the exercise of true and perfect brotherly love toward one another, which also, so far as present circumstances might admit, should evidence itself in the voluntary sharing of goods. As a condition of the admission of any individual into the community proof had to be given of repentance and faith, and as an authenticating seal on the one side of the entrance being granted, and on the other side of the obligation being undertaken, baptism was administered, which now, as infant baptism was denounced as an invention of the devil, was understood simply of adult baptism, for the most part administered in the usual way by sprinkling. The ecclesiastical constitution of the regularly formed congregations was modelled after what they regarded as the apostolic type. Their congregational worship was extremely simple, quite free of any ornament or ceremony. Their doctrinal system, owing to the prominence given to the practical and the ethical, was but poorly developed, and was therefore never set forth in a confession of faith obligatory on all the communities. Upon the whole, they inclined more to the Zwinglian than to the Lutheran type of doctrine, especially in their views of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The grand Reformation dogma of justification by faith alone was rejected, as also the idea that even the regenerate may not in this world attain unto perfect sinlessness. Here and there, too, antitrinitarian views found entrance, but the majority firmly adhered to the œcumenical faith of the church, or at least soon returned to it. Chiliastic theories and expectations were widely spread, but the attempts to realize them in the present by means of revolutionary movements were soon recognised and denounced as mischievous, and so, too, the fanatical, pseudo-prophetic craze by which many of the leaders of the movement were carried away came by-and-by to be discredited.
§ 147.2. Keller, in his Reformation und die ält. Reformparteien of 1885, has undertaken to give a historical basis to a view of the origin and character of the Anabaptist movement diverging in several important respects from the one that has hitherto been generally accepted. He sees in the tendency of the Swiss Anabaptist to go beyond the position taken up by Luther and Zwingli not merely, as several earlier investigators had already done, a revival of certain mediæval endeavours at reform, but an actual, uninterrupted continuation of these, involving, not only a relationship, whether conscious or unconscious, but also a close historico-genetic and personal connection with “those old evangelical brotherhoods, which through many centuries, under many names,” in spite of persecutions that raged against them, still survived in secret remnants down into the 16th century. Of these brotherhoods, during the 12th century, the Waldensians formed the heart and core. Their precursors were the Petrubrusians [Petrobrusians], the Apostolic Brothers, the Arnoldists, the Humiliati, etc.; their successors and spiritual kinsmen were the heretical Beghards and Lollards, the Spirituals together with Marsilius of Padua and King Louis of Bavaria, the German mystics, the Friends of God and Winkelers, the Dutch Brethren of the Common Life, and, in specially close association with the German Waldensians, the Bohemian and Moravian Brethren; of like character, too, were John Staupitz, the Zucker family of Nuremberg, Albert Dürer, and a great number of other notables belonging to the first decades of the 16th century. And these all, as belonging to one and the same spiritual family, and forming an unbroken chain, link joined to link, when church and State raged against them with fire and sword, found always nurseries and places of refuge in those “noble corporations of builders and masons,” whose tried organization was made by them the basis of the church constitution, and has thus been handed down to modern times. Luther, who, moved by Staupitz and the study of Tauler and the “Deutsche Theologie,” was at first inclined to throw himself into the spiritual current, from A.D. 1521 more and more withdrew himself from it, and even Zwingli detached himself from it on account of some proceedings which he did not approve. The origin of the so called Anabaptism is thus, not merely traced back to these two great reformers, but rather is conditioned by the firm maintenance of a primitive evangelical tendency, from which those two turned aside. In the one case we have “new evangelicals,” founding a new communion; in the other, “old evangelicals,” conserving and continuing the old communion. And not Zürich, where the Anabaptist movement began to get a footing in A.D. 1524, but Basel, was its true birthplace. There in A.D. 1515 the liberal-minded printers Frobenius, Curio, and Cratander, who first printed the reformatory writings of the Middle Ages, repeatedly gathered the secret representatives and friends of those old brotherhoods from their hidings in the mountains of Switzerland and Savoy, as well as from the south of France and Germany, in their “chapter sessions,” held there in order to consult about the founding of new brotherhoods; and from thence the opposition to infant baptism was first transplanted to Zürich.—But these “chapter sessions” served quite another purpose than the fostering of Waldensian and Anabaptist societies, and were rather devoted to advancing the interests of liberalistic humanism and scholarship. And the embracing together of all the above-named sects as representing one and the same spiritual current, though supported by a great many combinations, guesses, suppositions, and deductions, which from their very boldness and the confidence with which they are stated are often startling, seems to be utterly untenable, and to proceed not so much from an unbiassed study of original sources as from a prejudiced judgment manipulating the facts with great art and skill. In conclusion, then, Keller proceeds to deal with the later actors in the Anabaptist movement, and finds them not only in the Mennonites and Puritans, but also in the freemason lodges, the Rosicrucians, and Pietists. Even the spiritual tendencies of Lessing, Kant, to a certain extent also of Schiller, also of Schleiermacher, through his connection with the Brethren of Herrnhut, seem to him determined and dominated by this same fundamental principle! The baselessness of Keller’s arguments has been thoroughly exposed by Kolde and Carl Müller, yet he continues unweariedly to repeat and set them forth.
§ 147.3. The Swiss Anabaptists.—Even in German Switzerland, although the reformers of that country had proceeded much further than the Saxon reformers in the direction of removing every vestige of Roman Catholicism in constitution, doctrine, worship, and discipline, ultra-reforming tendencies soon made their appearance among those who thought that such changes were not radical and thorough enough. Here, too, the refusal to recognise infant baptism was made specially prominent. Indeed even Zwingli himself at first pronounced against its necessity and serviceableness. According to him, baptism was not, as with Luther, a means of grace, but analogous to the circumcision of the Old Testament—a sign of obligation, by means of which the subject of baptism accepted the Christian faith and life as binding upon him. Thus he was inclined for a time to depreciate infant baptism, without however declaring it absolutely unallowable. But when subsequently it became apparent that the radical opposition to it on the part of its former friends, and their insisting upon the obligation to observe only adult baptism, proceeded from an ultra-reforming tendency, which threatened with ruin much that was necessary to ecclesiastical and civil order, and tended to make the extremest consequences of these views the very foundation of their system, he expressed himself all the more decidedly in favour of having infant baptism obligatorily retained.—The most zealous leaders of the Anabaptist movement in Switzerland were Conrad Grebel, a cultured humanist, son of a distinguished Zürich senator, already designated by Zwingli as “the coryphæus of the Baptists;” Felix Manz, also a humanist, and famous as an earnest promoter of Hebrew studies, but drowned in A.D. 1527 by order of the Zürich council; George Jacobs, a monk of Chur in the Grison country, commonly called Blaurock, on account of his dress; Louis Hätzer of Thurgau, etc. Besides these native Swiss, the following also wrought with equal enthusiasm for the promotion of the Anabaptist cause: William Röubli, a priest banished from Rottenburg on the Neckar on account of his evangelical zeal; Simon Stumpf, who had migrated from Franconia, and Michael Sattler from Breisgau; but above all the famous Balthazar Hubmeier, a scholar of John Eck, distinguished as a popular preacher and an indefatigable apologist and skilful polemical writer on the side of the Anabaptists. He was, in A.D. 1512, professor of theology at Ingolstadt, in A.D. 1516 pastor of the cathedral church of Regensburg; from whence, in A.D. 1522, already powerfully influenced in favour of evangelical truth by Luther’s writings, he removed to Waldshut, and there entered on the work of the Reformation, but afterwards decided against the continuance of infant baptism and in favour of Anabaptism. The Austrian government, under whose protectorate Waldshut was, demanded that he should be delivered up, which the governor steadfastly refused to do. But when, in Dec., 1525, Waldshut was obliged to surrender at discretion, he fled to Zürich, was there taken prisoner, and was driven, through fear of being delivered up to Austria, to make a public recantation. He then left Zürich and passed over into Moravia.—The original home of the Anabaptist movement in Switzerland was Zürich and its neighbourhood. At Wyticon and Zollicon, Röubli publicly preached in A.D. 1524 against infant baptism, and persuaded several parents to refuse to have their young children baptized. When, in Jan., 1525, the Zürich council voted for the expulsion of all ultra-reform agitators, these assembled together on the evening preceding their departure for mutual edification and establishment by prayer and Scripture reading. Then Blaurock rose, and besought Grebel “for God’s sake to baptize him with the true Christian baptism into the true faith,” and, when this was done, imparted it himself to all others present. The same sort of thing happened soon after at Waldshut, where Hubmeier on Easter Eve received baptism by the hand of Röubli, and then on Easter Day conferred it upon 110 and afterwards upon more than 300 individuals. In this way a thorough break was made, not only with the old Catholics, but also with the young reformed Church, and the foundation of an independent Anabaptist community laid, which now with rapid strides spread over the whole of reformed Switzerland. Thus originated, e.g., the twelve Anabaptist congregations that existed in Zürich and neighbourhood as early as A.D. 1527, the twenty-five in the Zürich highlands, and also the sixteen which in A.D. 1531 were to be found in the Zürich lowlands. An attempt was next made to diffuse information among the sectaries and convert them from their errors by means of discussions and controversial tracts, Zwingli lending his aid by word and pen; and then resort was had to fines and imprisonment. In June, 1525, St. Gall, following the example of Zürich, issued sentence of banishment against the Baptists. But as the expulsion of the leaders in no degree contributed to the crushing of the communities, which rather gathered strength in secret, and as the exiles were now for the first time fully able to spread over all lands the seeds of their Anabaptist doctrines, it was finally concluded that capital punishment was a necessity. The Zürich council, in March, 1527, issued an edict, according to which all rebaptizers and rebaptized were without exception to be drowned, and this example was followed by the other magistrates.In consequence of the general persecution that followed the Anabaptist agitation in Switzerland might be regarded as stamped out in A.D. 1531, although here and there little groups meeting in remote and hidden corners, under constant threat of prison and death, dragged out a miserable existence for some twenty years more.[421]
§ 147.4. The South German Anabaptists.—The Anabaptists expelled from Switzerland in A.D. 1525 spread first of all over the neighbouring south German provinces. Blaurock, publicly whipped in Zürich, returned to the Grison country, and, when again driven out of that refuge, to the Tyrol, where the Anabaptist views found uncommonly great favour. Röubli and Sattler retired to Alsace, where Strassburg especially became one of the chief nurseries of Anabaptism, and from thence they carried on a successful mission work in Swabia. Louis Hätzer and John Denck (§ [148, 1]) gathered a large following in Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Strassburg; also in Passau, Regensburg, and Munich; then pressing eastward along the Inn and the Danube, their adherents founded Anabaptist communities in Salzburg, Styria, Linz, Stein, and even in Vienna. They found the greatest success of all among the industrial classes, and travelling artisans proved their most zealous apostles. Although, beyond carrying on an unwearied propaganda on behalf of their own religious confession, they almost invariably refused to identify themselves with any other sort of social and political agitation, they were on all hands most cruelly persecuted; no city, no country town, no village was beyond the reach of inquisitorial scrutiny. Their radical extirpation was, by the decision of the diet at Spires in A.D. 1529, represented as a duty to the empire resting upon all; for the sixth section of its decrees enjoined that “each and all of the rebaptizers and rebaptized, both men and women, come to years of discretion, should be brought to the stake and block or suchlike death without any trial before the spiritual judge.” Most blood was indeed shed in lands under Catholic governments. In the Tyrol and in Görz, for example, it is said that, even in A.D. 1531, the number executed was over 1,000, among whom was Blaurock, who was burnt in A.D. 1529. Sebastian Franck, in A.D. 1530, estimated the number of the slain at somewhere about 2,000, and the heat of the persecution only began with that year. Duke William of Bavaria went furthest, with the atrocious order, “Whoever recants, let him be beheaded; whoever refuses to recant, let him be burnt alive.” But also Protestant governments, princes, and magistrates took part more or less zealously in the work of extermination recommended in the interests of the empire. Only the Landgrave Philip of Hesse and the magistrates of Strassburg kept at least their hands clean from blood, although they also by imprisoning and banishing did their best to prevent the spread of this heresy in their domains.
§ 147.5. The Moravian Anabaptists.—Balthazar Hubmeier, banished, in A.D. 1526, from Zürich, had found in Nikolsburg in Moravia a place of refuge. Under the powerful and far-reaching protection of the lords of Liechtenstein, which he obtained for his gospel, Moravia became “a delightsome land,” and Nikolsburg a “New Jerusalem” to the sorely oppressed Anabaptists, who had been hunted like wild beasts and made homeless wanderers. And there they remained, notwithstanding severe hostile attacks, from which they repeatedly suffered, especially between the years 1536 and 1554. This was followed by “the good time,” from A.D. 1554 to 1565, and from A.D. 1565 to 1592 by “the golden age” of the community, now consisting of 15,000 brethren. With A.D. 1592 began again “the times of tribulation,” until their church, as well as Protestantism generally throughout the country, received its deathblow. According to their numerous “chronicles” and “memoirs,” describing to their posterity the fortunes of the community, dating from A.D. 1524, the number of Anabaptists put to death up to A.D. 1581 in Switzerland, South Germany, and throughout the Austrian States was 2,419. Hubmeier had already, by the end of A.D. 1527, after Moravia had come under Austrian rule, been made prisoner in Vienna, along with his wife; and there, in the spring of A.D. 1528, he went to the stake with the heroic spirit of a martyr. Three days later his wife, showing the same bold contempt for death, was drowned in the Danube. In A.D. 1531 James Huter, from the Tyrol, stood at the head of the Moravian Anabaptists. Owing to the persecution which from A.D. 1529 raged there against his companions in the faith, he migrated thence with 150 brethren. He succeeded in composing the many splits and quarrels which had broken out in consequence of these migrations among the various sorts of Anabaptists from Silesia, Bavaria, Swabia, and the Palatinate, and managed to organize them in one united body with the earlier settlers. His reputation and influence were consequently so great that the community took the name from him of the “Huterian Brethren.” During the persecution which was directed against them in A.D. 1535 he fled to the Tyrol, but was there taken prisoner and burnt in March, 1536.—The Moravian Anabaptists, who had been with perfect propriety designated “the quiet of the land,” were characterized by exemplary piety, strict discipline, moral earnestness, industrial diligence, conscientious obedience to the laws, unexampled patience and gentleness amid all sufferings, but, above all, by the astonishing courage of their martyrs and fortitude under torture. In regard to doctrine, with the exception of a few “false brethren” affected with Socinian views, they unanimously and from the first acknowledged their adherence to the œcumenical symbols. Their mode of worship was of an extremely simple character. As sacraments, i.e. as “symbols of a holy thing,” they recognised
- true Christian baptism, i.e. that of grown up people who professed repentance and faith;
- the Lord’s Supper as a festival, in memory of the sufferings and death of Christ, as well as a thanksgiving for the grace of God thereby enjoyed, and as expression of the church’s faith in it;
- Marriage as a symbol of the espousals of Christ and His church (Eph. v. 23-32); and in some fashion
- the laying on of the hands of the elders in the ordination of the clergy.
Mass, confirmation, extreme unction, confession, and indulgence, worship of images, saints, and relics, as well as infant baptism, were utterly rejected by them. They were equally decided in denying all merit in fasting and observing the feast days, in repudiating the doctrine of purgatory, and many of the ceremonies of the Romish church. They also rejected the Lutheran and Zwinglian doctrine of justification, which they regarded as a remnant of antichristian Romanism. But as the true and only communion of saints they regarded themselves as alone constituting the true church. At the head of their community stood
- a bishop; and
- next him the ministers of the Lord, divided into apostles with the missionary calling for the spread of the church, preachers, and pastors over particular congregations, and helpers to give assistance to these;
- ministers of benevolence, i.e. dispensers to the poor and administrators of the possessions of the church; and
- the elders, as representatives of the church in conducting its government.
A particularly important factor for maintaining the union of the scattered communities was the synodal constitution introduced by Hubmeier. The superintendents of the smaller circuits met together for consultation weekly, and the deputies from the larger circuits met together once a month; while the general synods, embracing also the brethren beyond the bounds of Moravia, were convened for purposes of administration once a year, when that was possible.—Continuation, § [162, 2].
§ 147.6. The Venetian Anabaptists.—Down to the year 1540 the evangelical reform movement in Italy (§ [139, 22-24]) had an essentially Lutheran orthodox character. But after that an Anabaptist current set in, coming probably from Switzerland, and communicated through Italian refugees residing there, which subsequently took the direction of a unitarian rationalistic movement. Its main centre was in the domain of Venice, and its most zealous promoter an Italian, an exile from home on account of his faith, Tiziano, who, with no fixed place of abode, resided sometimes on this side, sometimes on the other side of the Alps. Fuller knowledge of him we owe to the confessions of one of his scholars, Manelfi, recently discovered in the Venetian archives, which he wrote out voluntarily and penitently before the Inquisition, first at Bologna and then at Rome, in Oct. and Nov., 1551. Don Pietro Manelfi, priest at San Vito, was led, in A.D. 1540 or 1541, by the preaching of a Capuchin, Jerome Spinazola, to the conclusion that the Romish church is contrary to Holy Scripture, and is a human, yea, a devilish invention. This same priest also introduced him to Bernardino Ochino (§ [139, 24]), who furnished him with several writings of Luther and Melanchthon, and taught him that the pope is antichrist and the mass satanic idolatry. Called by the “Lutherans” of Padua, he now for two years travelled through all northern Italy and Istria as Lutheran “minister of the word.” Then in Florence he made the acquaintance of Tiziano, and after long resistance yielded at last to be baptized by him. During a conversation which, in A.D. 1549, Tiziano had with him and several other friends at Vincenza, the question was raised, over Deuteronomy xviii. 18, whether Christ is God or man. It was agreed in order to decide the matter to summon an Anabaptist council, to meet at Vienna in Sept., 1550. There were somewhere about sixty deputies who responded, of whom between twenty and thirty were from Switzerland, mostly Italian refugees, who at the fortieth session of their secret conclave, “after prayer, fasting, and reading of Scripture,” laid down the following doctrinal propositions as binding upon all their congregations:“Christ is not God, but man, yet a man full of Divine power, son of Joseph and Mary, who after him bore also other sons and daughters: There are neither angels nor devil in the proper sense; but when in Holy Scripture angels appear, they are men sent by God for special purposes, and where the devil is spoken of the fleshly mind of man is meant: There is no other hell than the grave, in which the elect sleep in the Lord till they shall be awaked at the last day; while the souls of the ungodly, as well as their bodies, like those of the beasts, perish in death: To the human seed God has given the capacity of begetting the spirit as well as the body: The elect will be justified only by God’s mercy and love, without the merits, the blood, and the death of Christ: Christ’s death serves merely as a witness to the righteousness, i.e. ‘the mercy and love’ of God.” On their specifically Anabaptist doctrine, because not the subject of controversy, there was no deliverance. The denial of the supernatural birth of Christ, however, led to a limitation of the fundamental doctrine of the absolute authority of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament by the exclusion of the first chapters of the gospels of Matthew and Luke, which it was now affirmed had been forged by Jerome at the command of Pope Damasus. The decrees of the council were adopted by all the communities, with the exception of that of Citadella, which in consequence was cast out of the union. Manelfi, elected bishop, travelled in this capacity during a whole year among the churches assigned to him, always accompanied by a brother. Then he became penitent, and cast himself upon the grace of the papal Inquisition. His confessions, especially as bearing on the names and whereabouts of his former companions, Lutherans as well as Anabaptists, were sent from Rome to the Venetian tribunal of the Inquisition, which now began its work of persecution and vengeance with such zeal and success, that after some decades every trace of Lutheranism and Anabaptism was rooted out. Many escaped imprisonment by opportune flight; many also failed in courage, and retracted; but the steadfast confessors were burnt or drowned in great numbers. Meanwhile this fiery tribulation had proved in most of the communities a purifying fire. The radical heretic tendency that had prevailed since the council gave place by degrees to the more moderate views of earlier days. This change was greatly furthered by the close intimacy existing between the Italian Anabaptists and the Moravian Brethren from about the middle of A.D. 1550. The credit of having effected this alliance, and securing its benefits to their fellow countrymen, belongs especially to two noble-minded men, Francesco della Saga, formerly a student of Rovigo, and Giulio Gherardi, formerly subdeacon at Rome. But the latter, in A.D. 1561, the former a year later, fell into the hands of the Venetian Inquisition. After all attempts at conversion proved in vain, both were thrown by night into the Venice canal, Gherardi in A.D. 1562, and Saga in A.D. 1565.