The Anabaptists were Christians at the time of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s who wanted a more radical break with the past and return to the truth of the Bible.
The Anabaptists were a very eclectic collection of different people and causes, united only by the fact that they did not align with the Roman Catholic church nor with the so-called Magisterial Reformers. "Anabaptist" means "rebaptiser" because in many if not most cases they rejected the longstanding practice of baptising infants, and instead practised believer's baptism on profession of faith.
The Anabaptists are called the "stepchildren" of the Reformation - at times disowned and unloved, but clearly the product of the time and in some ways more consistent and radical than their Protestant counterparts.
The first iteration of Anabaptism were the Carlstadt and the Zwickau prophets, who sought a more radical reformation that Luther espoused.
A second expression came in the form of a popular uprising in Germany, as peasants sought redress in the light of the truths of the Reformation, but did not receive the support of Martin Luther, who in the end called for their slaughter in 1525.
The best-known starting point of Anabaptism was at Zurich, where some of the followers of Zwingli considered his Swiss Reformation too slow and disagreed with his decision to retain a strong link with the secular power and the practice of infant baptism. Early one morning in January 1525, a group of men headed out to a fountain not far from the Grossmunster church where Zwingli preached, and kneeling down were baptised on profession of faith. The movement spread from this small group as others came to embrace believer's baptism and a vision of a church based on voluntary membership and separate from the state. These men, which included Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz and Georg Blaurock, would come to pay with their lives for this daring move.
In 1527, just two years after the Zurich baptism, a conference was held at Schleichtheim, and a confession agreed. The articles of faith are not theological, but rather expressed shared convictions on things like taking up arms, or taking oaths.
The leading theologian among the Anabaptists was Balthasar Hubmaier, a Catholic theologian prior to embracing Anabaptist faith. He debated and wrote in defence of his beliefs. On at least two occasions he was pressured into recanting his views. Eventually he spent time pastoring in Moravia before he was caught and burnt at Vienna in 1528.
As the movement spread, there were various very different expressions of Anabaptism. Some moved in the direction of rationalism, denying central truths of the Christian faith in the name of reason. This was the path of the Sozzini brothers, originally from Italy but settled in Poland. Others pursued a political course, instigating insurrections not dissimilar to the peasants uprising at the time of Luther. The siege of Munster in 1535 was a bloody example of this, and became a by-word for Anabaptist excess. There were Anabaptists such as Hutter who focused on community of goods along Communist lines. Finally, there were what we may call the evangelical Anabaptists.
The leading figure among evangelical Anabaptists was Menno Simons, himself a former Catholic priest, who came to lead the Anabaptists in the Low countries (what would become the Netherlands). Menno Simons led the circles he moved in away from violent insurrection to embrace a pacifist position. His beliefs, expressed in his 1540 Fundamentboek, were orthodox with the exception of a strange belief in the "heavenly flesh" of Christ, which held that Christ did not take his human nature from Mary his mother. This latter belief was abandoned in due course.
Menno Simons died in 1561. By this time Mennonite congregations were established throughout Germany and the Netherlands, and also in Poland where they had settlements near Danzig. The Swiss Brethren survived mainly outside the big cities in rural areas, and some of them emigrated to the Palatinate and Alsace (western Germany and eastern France). In 1660, some of the Swiss Brethren based in Alsace accepted the Mennonite Dordrecht Confession of faith of 1632. Later, there were disagreements over church discipline which led to various splits. The modern-day Amish are the product of one such split.
Later, in the 1700s, many Mennonites would move from Poland to Russia where Catherine the Great offered them land to farm in what is now Ukraine and where they were free to practise their faith.
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