The Anabaptists and the radical Reformation
Radical reformers in Zurich baptise one another as adults, founding a movement of believers' churches that both Catholics and other Protestants persecute.
- Anabaptist History and Theology: An Introduction — C. Arnold Snyder, Pandora Press (1995)
- Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490–1700 — Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane (2003)
- Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World — Alec Ryrie, Viking (2017)
On 21 January 1525, in Zurich, Conrad Grebel and his friends, impatient with Zwingli’s caution, baptised each other as adults, rejecting infant baptism as unscriptural. To their enemies they were “Anabaptists”, re-baptisers. They wanted churches of committed believers, separate from the state, refusing oaths and, in the Schleitheim Confession of 1527, the sword.
- Anabaptist History and Theology: An Introduction — C. Arnold Snyder, Pandora Press (1995)
- Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490–1700 — Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane (2003)
Catholic and Protestant authorities alike saw them as a threat to the social order. Felix Manz was drowned in Zurich in 1527, and over the following decades a few thousand Anabaptists were executed across Europe. The violent takeover of Münster in 1534–35 by apocalyptic radicals, crushed with great bloodshed, stained the movement’s name for generations.
- Anabaptist History and Theology: An Introduction — C. Arnold Snyder, Pandora Press (1995)
- Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490–1700 — Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane (2003)
- Anabaptist History and Theology: An Introduction — C. Arnold Snyder, Pandora Press (1995)
- Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World — Alec Ryrie, Viking (2017)
Why it matters today
Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites descend directly from the Anabaptists, and their ideas, that church membership should be a free adult choice, that church and state should be separate, and for many that Christians should not take up arms, passed into Baptist churches and into modern notions of religious freedom. Anabaptist martyr stories are still read in Amish and Mennonite homes.