Due to his outlaw status, Martin Luther is forced to remain in the shadows of the Reformation while others assume leadership positions in his church, which quickly develops into an institution. Meanwhile, Ulrich Zwingli, a prominent Swiss reformer laboring apart from Luther, spearheads an important reform movement in the Swiss Confederacy that gives rise to radical Protestants who create yet another denomination: the Anabaptists.
Show Transcript
Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.
Part 26: Radical Reformers
Martin Luther had led the Reformation movement in Germany for years, but in 1530, there were many prominent Reformers who had risen to leadership positions, filling a space that Luther could no longer occupy. A summit conference held that year in Augsburg was convened without Luther’s presence, because he was still considered an outlaw. The purpose for the conference—which was even attended by Lutheran princes—was to present a clear statement of faith, or confession, for what had come to be known as Lutheranism, and the man at the helm was a young Wittenberg professor named Philip Melanchthon. Like Catholicism the Augsburg Confession proclaimed that the Lutheran church held the power and authority to excommunicate members who rejected any fundamental Lutheran doctrine.
While Charles V did all he could to prevent the spread of the movement, which was deemed heresy, it thrived. In defense of the new denomination, Lutheran princes joined forces and fought intermittent battles in what was basically a civil war from 1546 to 1555. Peace was later reached through compromise, and the princes were left to decide the religion of their lands, which they all insisted be Lutheran, to the exclusion of all other Protestant movements that had lately emerged. Former Catholic bishops had to divest themselves of all property received from the church as well. After a time, Lutheranism became the state religion throughout much of the empire, and spread from Germany to Scandinavia.
Despite the popularity of this new Protestant belief, however, some felt there was need for a reform within the reform. They were considered radical Protestants. While Luther was spearheading the Reformation in Germany, a Swiss Reformer working apart from him was spearheading a similar movement in Zurich. His name was Ulrich Zwingli.
“Luther might have sparked the Protestant Reformation, much to everyone’s surprise, but he was far from alone, and not even the first in his generation to challenge Rome.”
Writes Carlos M. N. Eire, in his book Reformations.
“The Swiss city of Zurich is 468 miles southwest of Wittenberg. There, in Zurich, before Luther took on Johann Tetzel, another young cleric had been challenging the whole of the Catholic tradition for a few years. In some ways, he was far ahead of Luther when it came to envisioning a thorough reform of the Christian religion. His vision was more systematically consistent and less paradoxical, and focused on a different set of theological issues. Most significantly, his reforming vision involved symbols and rituals at its very center, and linked this concern to a conception of church/state relations very different from Luther’s. This Reformation tends to get second billing, largely because of chronology and of its initial impact. The Reformation led by this Swiss cleric, Ulrich Zwingli, progressed more slowly and cautiously on a smaller stage, almost as if hidden from view by the towering Alps.”
Neither did Zwingli’s protestations erupt with the kind of fire that ignited Luther’s. Zwingli never stood before the emperor at an Imperial Diet, nor was he whisked away by prominent nobles to live in disguise while enjoying sanctuary in a castle. The Swiss Reformation never gained the international acclaim that Luther’s did, nor did its writings reach as wide an audience. It also failed to mature as much or survive as long as Luther’s movement did.
“But being the first to bolt from the starting gate, or having the larger, splashier stage setting, or the wide readership, or the longer life does not necessarily mean all that much in terms of the eventual unfolding of history.”
Writes Carlos M. N. Eire.
“The Swiss Reformation proves this to be true, several times over, for when all is said and done, this Reformation would end up affecting a greater array of countries and a larger number of people than Luther’s ever did.”
A year before Martin Luther burst onto the scene with his ninety-five theses, Zwingli was already laboring in Switzerland to bring reform in the Catholic church. After 1517 he was often compared to Martin Luther, or mistaken for one of his followers, despite the fact that he preceded Luther, and in fact sharply disagreed on many theological points. So much did the two dislike each other that Luther himself was offended whenever someone suggested that Zwingli was his disciple. The two men were born six weeks and about 330 miles apart, but aside from being ordained Catholic priests who had become disillusioned with their religion and took pains to reform it in their own way, the two had little else in common.
Ulrich Zwingli was born to a peasant family in the village of Wildhaus, located in the mountainous county of Toggenburg—part of the Swiss confederacy. Being typical Swiss citizens of the day, the Zwingli family was devoted to their land, and they treasured the independence of their region, for which they were willing to fight. Self-sufficient, military-minded, and defiant against the nobles who lorded over them, the peasants, who had formed Swiss cantons—or administrative communities—won independence from the Holy Roman Empire in the previous century, though that independence had gone unrecognized by the emperor. Thus, their independence was de facto, not de jure—they were independent in fact, but not by law. Regardless, the Swiss were military experts who were seasoned in warfare, so they were a formidable foe best left to their own devices. This also meant that they could be hired out as mercenaries throughout Europe at a good price—hence the pope’s Swiss Guard, originally a mercenary force founded by Pope Julius II on January 22, 1506.
The Swiss Reformation, which was by all accounts an urban one, was spearheaded by a man who grew up tied to rural land and surrounded by rustic settings that would figure prominently in his sermons and theological writings as metaphors. During Zwingli’s day, the Swiss Confederation was a unique entity, comprised of several mini states or cantons, each governed by secular councils. These secular councils, however, also decided religious matters, which is a key to how Zwingli, an Erasmian at heart, rose to a leadership position within the Swiss reform movement.
“A powerful and a persuasive preacher, Zwingli gains a significant following, and he grows popular in the first few years in Zurich.”
Says Professor Brad S. Gregory, who teaches history at Stanford University.
“He moves from Erasmus’s strong emphasis on Scripture, to the view that all preaching and worship must be based exclusively on the bible. It’s a subtle but an important difference: from an emphasis to saying exclusively on the bible. And this mandate—that all preaching be based on Scripture—is a mandate that is laid down and established by the city council of the city of Zurich in 1520. Now this is a crucial point: Zwingli’s reforms in the 1520s—beginning right here and going through the essential completion of them in 1525—Zwingli’s reforms are the story of a kind of symbiotic cooperation and negotiation between a preacher, theologian, and reformer on the one hand, and the political authorities in the city on the other.”
Of note, Zwingli was personally awarded a seat on the city council in 1521, which gave him daily access to its members. By the next year, he began denouncing various Catholic traditions in his sermons, which he felt did not line up with the Scriptures.
“The city council decides his—that is Zwingli’s preaching—was Scriptural, and that all disputed religious issues were to be decided on the basis of Scripture.”
Says Professor Gregory.
“Now note: this is the city council making this decision. This amounts to political authorities making decisions, not only about religious policy, but indirectly about religious content too. In effect they’re claiming that Catholic claims to religious authority in the city are no longer going to be acknowledged. A political decision about religious content.”
The city council then, existing as the lay oligarchy with complete rule over cities like Zurich, would use its civil powers to not only approve the Reformation in the Swiss Confederation, but through this and other acts it would in effect abolish the old Catholic religion, with its devotion to idols and relics, and establish a whole new one, together with a new societal structure. Other Swiss cities would follow Zurich in abolishing Mass and idolatrous practices. In the city of Bern, zealous mobs tore through the city’s churches and destroyed the religious art and ritual objects they housed. While the mobs sacked the churches, children sang in the streets of being saved from the baked deity, meaning the idol at the heart of the eucharist, which they no longer had to partake in. The very next day, Zwingli praised the rioting and considered the Reformation a triumph, saying, “Victory has declared for the truth.”
More mobs eventually stormed other towns in other Swiss cantons, sparked by the actions in Bern. Wagons loaded with rubble from the destruction were carted away to be burned, while precious items like gold and silver were melted and jewels safely stored. The wealth that was not distributed among the poor went into the town treasury. Indeed, over the next few years, much of northern Switzerland would witness the burning of many idols and images, with the approval of the city councils that governed the various localities. But as each city and town moved to destroy its idols and sack its churches, conflict arose and tensions mounted throughout the confederacy. Those who clung to the old Catholic traditions in some areas exacted violence on those who had abandoned the religion. Given these sharp religious differences, there was soon talk of civil war in Switzerland.
“The Reformation had split the confederation and seemed destined to destroy it.”
Writes Will Durant in his book, The Reformation.
“Bern, Basel, Schaffhausen, Appenzell, and the Grisons, favored Zurich; the other Cantons were hostile. Five cantons—Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, and Zug—formed a Catholic League to suppress all Hussite, Lutheran, and Zwinglian movements in 1524. Archduke Ferdinand of Austria urged all Catholic states to united action, promised his aid, and doubtless hoped to restore the Hapsburg power in Switzerland. On July 16, all the cantons, except Schaffhausen and Appenzell, agreed to exclude Zurich from future federal diets. Zurich and Zwingli responded by sending missionaries into the Thorgau district to proclaim the Reformation.”
One of the missionaries was arrested, but friends came to his rescue, and shortly thereafter led another wild mob in the sacking of another monastery and several churches, which saw their images and idols burned and looted as well.
“Three of the leaders were executed, and a martial spirit rose on both sides.”
Writes Will Durant.
“Erasmus, timid in Basel, was alarmed to see pious worshippers, aroused by their preachers, come of church ‘like men possessed with anger and rage painted on their faces … like warriors animated by their general to some mighty attack.’ Six cantons threatened to leave the confederation if Zurich were not chastised. Zwingli, enjoying his new role of war leader, advised Zurich to increase its army and arsenal, to seek alliance with France, to build a fire behind Ferdinand by fomenting Revolution in Tirol, and to promise Thorgau and Saint-Gall the properties of their monasteries in return for their support.”
Zwingli offered the Catholic League peace as well, but on conditions they could not agree to, thus, Zurich ordered that the abbey in Saint-Gall be seized, which caused the league to yield. Zwingli’s influence was strong at this point, but by January of 1525, a new movement would spring from two of his former supporters.
We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]
We now continue with our podcast.
While Ulrich Zwingli had disagreed with Luther on various theological points, in Switzerland, as pretty much everywhere else in Christian Europe at this time, infant baptism had been the norm. A few men in Zurich held strong reservations against this particular custom, however. Two of their leaders, Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz had that day been ordered to cease teaching bible classes. Four days before that, the council had told hesitant parents to see to the baptism of their infants within eight days of their births or suffer banishment from the region.
In response to these measures, around a dozen men made their way to the house of Felix Manz in the dark of night during that cold winter month. There, they would decide on the next steps they needed to take. That night, the men shared rumors and reports that had recently circulated, and to quiet their fears, they bowed their heads in prayer. When they rose from that moment of supplication, Christianity would have a new Protestant denomination. Though they were baptized Catholics, all those who were gathered decided to be baptized again that night. Thus, they were later called Anabaptists by their Christian enemies, a word meaning rebaptizer (that is, to be baptized again). This label marked them as heretics and brought severe persecutions from their rivals. Anabaptists did not, however, consider themselves to be rebaptizers, since they rejected the sprinkling they received from Catholic priests in infancy. They preferred to be called simply Baptists, and that is the name that eventually stuck. Some of their foundational beliefs also remain with us to this day.
Of all the Christian sects of the sixteenth century, the Anabaptist reformers were the most radical. However …
“There were sects within this sect.”
Writes Will Durant.
“Most Anabaptists adopted a puritan severity of morals, and simplicity of manners and dress. Developing with rash logic Luther’s idea of Christian liberty, they condemned all government by force, and all resistance to it by force. They rejected military service on the ground that it is invariably sinful to take human life. Like the early Christians, they refused to swear oaths, not excepting oaths of allegiance to prince or emperor. Their usual salutation was ‘The peace of the Lord be with you,’ an echo of the Jewish and Moslem greeting, and a forerunner of the Quaker mode.”
The Quakers (who never referred to themselves as Quakers, but the Society of Friends) in a way descend from the Anabaptists, as do the modern branches of the evangelical Protestant church that call themselves Baptist, whether Northern or Southern. The Mennonites, as well as their orthodox offshoot, the Amish (named for their founder Jacob Amman), are also Anabaptist sects. Like all Protestants, the Anabaptists arrived at their beliefs and convictions through their personal study of Scripture. Luther and other leading reformers had taught that believers had the right to search the Scriptures for themselves, and so the Anabaptists did, but they failed to find evidence for the existence of a church and state alliance, or the justification for Christendom itself. They saw in the Messianic Writings that the assemblies established by the twelve emissaries were merely close communities of like-minded believers who had chosen to serve and follow the Messiah.
To the sixteenth-century Christian, this was a revolutionary concept. While Luther preached about believers having personal spiritual experiences, the Lutheran denomination was not a far cry from Catholicism. They were an established institution with a clerical hierarchy of ordained men. More than that, the clergy, as well as Lutheran princes, considered the citizenry of entire territories members of the Lutheran church. Salaries and protection were also provided to the Lutherans by the state, thus Protestantism, in an official capacity, differed little from the mother church it sought to reform, and from which it had split.
The Anabaptists were intent of redressing all of that, but it meant a radical approach that would extricate them from society on a whole, which they viewed as inherently wicked.
“Agreeing with Luther’s view that the secular state was little more than organized banditry, they concluded that Christians should therefore have nothing to do with it.”
Writes Alec Ryrie, in his book Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World.
“They should obey its orders, but not swear its blasphemous oaths, serve on juries that hang the hungry for stealing bread, or fight in armies that plunder the innocent. Perhaps, they should not even pay taxes that funded such things. All they should do is live their lives in peaceful separation, and prepare for the persecution that these rejections would inevitably bring down on their heads. The most enduring strand of Anabaptism was marked by pacifist withdrawal from a corrupt world.”
The Anabaptists were radical in the extreme. During the mid-1530s, they were seen as a real threat to both Catholics and Lutherans, particularly with the Münster rebellion. Münster was an independent episcopal city in Germany’s Westphalia region, not far from the Netherlands. By 1532 the Reformation reached Münster, and the Lutherans established a strong center in the city. Soon, others immigrated to the region, Protestants who were disciples of a charismatic figure named Jan Matthijs. These disciples spread fanaticism to the Lutheran leadership, teaching an older doctrine that the kingdom of the world was to submit to the Kingdom of the Messiah, but the aim was to forge an alliance between the two so that the violent nature of the worldly kingdom could be used to force the establishment of the Heavenly Kingdom.
That apocalyptic view had been the brainchild of an Anabaptist preacher and nemesis of Luther’s named Thomas Müntzer.
“Müntzer tried to turn the peasant rebellions of 1524 – 25 in this direction to no avail.”
Writes Alec Ryrie.
“But the idea did not die with him. It was taken up most notoriously in the Western German city of Münster. When the city’s pastor and several of its leading citizens were converted to apocalyptic Anabaptist doctrines in 1532, Anabaptists from across the region converged there, and succeeded in throwing out the bishop and taking over the city’s government.”
Jan Matthijs, a Dutch baker who had gathered followers by claiming to have received visions from the Creator, prophesied that the city of Münster was the New Jerusalem mentioned in the Book of Revelation, to which the Messiah would soon return. Surprisingly, many believed this report, and …
“Over a thousand adults accepted baptism. They began to muster an army. They expelled bishop-raised forces too and laid siege to the city in 1534. Matthijs was killed in a suicidal sortie early in the siege. But one of his comrades, a tailor named Jan Bockelson, was now proclaimed king, and the successor of King David.”
Yes … yes. You heard that right. Alec Ryrie goes on to say:
“Within his besieged Jerusalem, he abolished private property. All goods were held in common. Notoriously, he legalized polygamy, taking sixteen wives for himself. We are told that when one of them crossed him, he beheaded her himself in public. The Kingdom of Münster ended as violent apocalyptic cults usually do. After a yearlong siege, the city was overrun. Bockelson and his fellow prophets were tortured and executed. The gibbets on which their bodies were displayed still hang from the cathedral tower.”
Münster was seen as an atrocious city rife with infamy. Fears of Anabaptist fanaticism spreading throughout Christendom were rampant, and that growing apprehension created a sharp divide among Protestants in this period.
“Protestants who wished to claim respectability now scrambled to distance themselves from the radicals. They distinguished radicals sharply from so-called magisterial Protestants, those who sought reformation in alliance with existing princes, magistrates, and other secular powers.”
Those who aligned with state representatives still harbored radical sentiments, however, disagreeing with the idea of infant baptisms, swearing oaths, and paying church taxes. So Anabaptist beliefs were deeply held by many who did not proclaim to be part of the denomination outright. These particular Protestants, who depended on princes, magistrates, and other civil authorities, were called Magisterial Anabaptists, and figured in what was the Magisterial Reformation. These Protestants even employed intellectuals known as magisters, who were university-trained teachers, or masters, to teach their rituals and doctrines to the masses who lived within their given territories. These Protestants also depended on the civil arm to enforce those teachings. Radical Protestants, however, who did not align with the civil powers, rejected all aspects of the Magisterial Reformation, being true nonconformists.
There were other branches within the Anabaptist movement as well, including the Hutterites, who were founded by Jacob Hutter in 1527, emerging within the Radical Reformation. This particular group took to heart what they read in the book of Acts, chapter 2 verse 44:
“And all who believed were together and had all things in common.”
“This remained a point …”
Says Professor Brad S. Gregory.
“… their insistence on communal ownership of goods that not only distinguished them, but also divided the Hutterites from other Anabaptist groups who were quite critical of this practice.”
The Anabaptists can be seen as the forerunners of the Congregationalist church, in that there was no ecclesiastical oversight in the form of priests and bishops. Each congregation was self-governing, with decisions being made by the membership as a whole. The more radical Anabaptists were also the first in modern history to preach and hold staunchly to the separation of church and state, which gave rise to notions of religious liberty. For many Anabaptists, however, persecution snuffed out their zeal to evangelize, and taking flight in an effort to survive as disparate communities became paramount. Their legacy became that of being skilled farmers, and quiet people on their lands. The Mennonites and Amish continue in this mode today. But while the Anabaptist fervor died out, other movements within the leavened Christian religion took root and made their spread throughout Europe and beyond.
That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.
Keywords: Augsburg Confession, Melanchthon, Lutheran, Ulrich Zwingli, Wittenberg, Wildhaus, Toggenburg, Swiss cantons, Swiss Reformation, Erasmus, Zurich, Anabaptists, Mennonite, Amish, Baptist, Quakers, Münster, Thomas Müntzer, Jan Matthijs, Jan Bockelson, Jacob Hutter, Hutterite, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers
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