There are Roman Catholics and Protestants.
One of the legacies of the Reformation is the emergence of these two main religious groups in Western Europe claiming to be Christian. And though they disagreed with each other on key matters that this column has already noted – issues like the nature of salvation and the question of religious authority – it is important to recognise that both groups were agreed that the state had a vital role to play in the life of the church. Like their RC opponents, most 16th-century Protestants could not envision a world where state and church were not working together for the cause of Christ.
Rejecting a state church
There were, however, a small number of individuals who refused to identify themselves with this way of thinking. These men and women rejected the idea of a national church to which every individual in the state belonged, along with its support in infant baptism. In other words, they rejected the idea of Christendom and repudiated what Canadian historian Ken Davis once described as ‘all attempts at political coercion of human conscience or a coerced Christianisation of culture’.
Instead, they advocated a radical alternative: churches should be composed solely of believers who were admitted on the basis of a personal confession of faith and believer’s baptism. These Anabaptists (‘Re-baptisers’), as they came to be called, also denounced the idea of spreading the gospel by force of arms. Rather they sought to spread it by evangelism, martyrdom and good works.
Believer’s baptism
The key issue that marked the emergence of this radical wing of the Reformation was that of baptism. In his 1520 tract On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther had argued that the efficacy of a sacrament was linked to the recipient’s faith. He had been thinking of the Lord’s Supper. But it was not long before some people applied this conviction to baptism.
In Luther’s own camp at Wittenberg, one of the first to do so was Luther’s ‘pernickety’ academic colleague Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (1486–1541) around 1523. Two years later this position had been reached by a group of Swiss Anabaptists based in Zurich, where Huldreich Zwingli was active in reform, and whose key leaders were Conrad Grebel (c.1498–1526) and Felix Manz (c.1498–1527).
The meaning of baptism
What did baptism mean for these early Anabaptists? Conrad Grebel put it this way in a letter he wrote to a fellow Anabaptist, Thomas Müntzer, in 1524. Baptism signifies that, by faith and the blood of Christ, sins have been washed away for him who is baptised… it signifies that a man is dead and ought to be dead to sin and walks in newness of life and spirit… the water does not confirm or increase faith,… Also baptism does not save.
When a person is baptised as a believer, the German Anabaptist leader Balthasar Hubmaier (c.1480–1528) argued in his tract The Sum of a Christian Life (1525), that a person indicates that he or she has already surrendered himself according to the Word, will, and rule of Christ to live henceforth for him, to regulate all his actions according to him, to fight under his flag unto death, and to allow himself to be baptised with external water in which he publicly confesses his faith and intention.
Their main concern
For these early Anabaptists, believers’ baptism was the doorway to a life of ongoing transformation, as they sought to live as disciples of Christ in community with like-minded believers. Baptism thus followed from the conviction that the local church was a voluntary fellowship.
By and large these Swiss and German Anabaptists shared the conviction with Luther that ‘faith alone makes us righteous before God’, to quote the words of Hubmaier. But the Anabaptists’ main concern was elsewhere: it was on the Christian life as a life of holiness and on discipleship. They were concerned primarily with the question, ‘How should a Christian live?’ And answering this question shaped their distinctive witness that we shall look at in more detail next month.
