The baptistery was a great wooden cask. Gall, in a work published in , records the success of the Baptist movement. The only reason they needed a cask and not a dish was because they practiced immersion. In the southern German territories, the Anabaptists practiced immersion.
They held a general synod in They baptized by immersion. VII, p. The Protestants generally looked with indifference upon the mode, but they nevertheless preffered immersion. Luther recommended it. Bromiley, Ibid. The Schleitheim confession does not mention the mode, but this because the Anabaptists were not condemned on account of practicing immersion, not because they regarded the mode as indifferent. Baptism was important to the Anabaptists because of its meaning. Neither pouring nor sprinkling of water symbolizes properly the spiritual event portrayed in baptism.
The proofs in favor of immersion are overwhelming. If there were indeed exceptions from immersion in Anabaptist practice, these were scarce and were due to the transition period of the persons involved from Catholicism or Protestantism to Anabaptism. The Doctrine of Church Discipline. The doctrine of church discipline was another important point of difference between the Anabaptists and their opponents. In that age this doctrine was an Anabaptist distinctive since they were the only ones who practiced it after the New Testament pattern.
The Catholic Church practiced only excomunication, by which it taught the loss of salvation. No moral purification was enforced among its ranks, but only a doctrinal one. But no one was ever burned for being depraved and immoral. The issue of discipline among the Protestants was similar with the one from the Catholic camp, even though the Reformers wished for a moral improvement in their converts. But, keeping the vision of the sacral society, they could not exclude one from the church unless he was also excluded from society.
They preffered to try to correct this handicap from within, but their failure is well known. The Anabaptists applied the New Testament model, found in Matthew 18, for the purging and purification of the assembly. Exclusion was necessary both for the perseverance unto holiness of the members and for the maintance of spiritual and scriptural leadership of the church.
The Schleitheim Confession states:. We are agreed as follows on the ban: The ban shall be employed with all those who have given themselves to the Lord, to walk in His commandments, and with all those who are baptized into the one body of Christ and who are called brethren or sisters, and yet who slip sometimes and fall into error and sin, being inadvertently overtaken. The same shall be admonished twice in secret and the third time openly disciplined or banned according to the command of Christ.
But this shall be done according to the regulation of the Spirit Matt. The doctrine of discipline throws a supplementary light on the Anabaptist view of the church. First, such a practice shows that the Anabaptists did not think the church to be just a fellowship of believers in which significant differences in doctrine and practice were tolerated. For them, the church was a body whose unity and purity was kept by a strict discipline.
This was the main purpose of disciplining. The secondary purpose of the ban was the straightening of the disciplined. It was not a revenge of the community against the one fallen into sin, but a means to restoration, by helping the disciplined to return to the blessed fellowhip of the church, which he lost by being excluded. Later, among the Dutch Mennonites, the ban came to affect not only the relationship of the excluded with the church, but also with his family.
It was recommended that no kind word should even be said to the excluded by his family until he repents and returns to the church. Among Anabaptists the disciplining was performed publicly, by the whole congregation who acted democratically. The doctrine of church discipline was one of the Anabaptist particularities that kept them from gross sins, contributing to their living virtuous lives. For the Catholics, the Eucharist, or the Mass, was a perpetual sacrificing or offering of Christ by the clergy.
Under the intercession of the priest, the bread and the wine were transformed miraculously into the body and the blood of Christ. This dogma is called transubstantiation. The Mass was considered a sacrament, meaning that it conferred grace to the participants. It was one of the most important rites, since it united around it the whole society, whose borders were confounded with those of the Church.
This doctrine is called consubstantiation. Zwingli rejected both the Catholic and the Lutheran doctrines, this being one of the reasons why the Lutherans and the Zwinglians never collaborated.
This was one of the doctrines Zwingli defended from the very beginnings of his reformation. Christ, who has once offered himself as a sacrifice, is for eternity a perpetual enduring and efficacious sacrifice for the sins of all believers.
According to Zwingli, Christ is spiritually, not physically present in the Supper. The rite presents the past work of Christ, but also the present one — this making the rite important. The Radicals rejected the doctrine of the real presence as held by the Catholics and the Protestants. The most ardent opponent of it was Carlstadt, who published treatises against this doctrine.
Some historians consider that Luther never gave up the doctrine of the real presence because of his ongoing controversies with Carlstadt. All who opposed him, Protestants, Spiritualists or Anabaptists were persecuted by Luther and his followers on this account.
Even though the Anabaptists believed, like Zwingli and Carlstadt, in the Supper as a memorial, in the elements as symbols, they went further than them. Zwingli could only go as far as declaring that those who partook of it in an unworthy manner condemn themselves. For the Anabaptists, the Supper represented not only the remembrance of the death of Christ, but also the unity of the church.
In the breaking of bread we are of one mind and are agreed as follows : All those who wish to break one bread in remembrance of the broken body of Christ, and all who wish to drink of one drink as a remembrance of the shed blood of Christ, shall be united beforehand by baptism in one body of Christ which is the church of God and whose Head is Christ. For as Paul points out, we cannot at the same time drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of the devil.
That is, all those who have fellowship with the dead works of darkness have no part in the light. Therefore all who follow the devil and the world have no part with those who are called unto God out of the world. All who lie in evil have no part in the good. The Anabaptist stand implied the purification of the church before the rite, by admonition, discipline or the exclusion of those who were not in spiritual unity with them. The church unity that was so much desired by the Protestants — yet so absent in their churches as a whole — was magnificently and most simply attained by the local congregations of the Anabaptists.
The Anabaptist Public Worship. Public worship was an important part in the religious life of the Anabaptist people. Their church service differed largely from those of the other camps. Catholic public worship was a complex ritual, announced in the community by the sounding of bells. The places of worship, of a unique and meaningful architecture, were decorated with many representations of God and the saints statues, paintings and coloured glass windows. The services were liturgical, that is, they were carried on according to specifically prescribed rites.
Their yearly liturgy was developed according to the celebrations of the Church. They chanted their prayers, Scripture reading and certain ritual sermons. In keeping a clergy, in the performing the rite of infant baptism, in keeping the holidays, in their liturgy, in taking over the Catholic church buildings where they gained majority of population, the Protestants had a public worship that was similar with the Catholic one.
The Reformers, however, opposed images and chanting, though they continued to keep them for some time. They emphasized preaching instead of rituals. Their meetings were not announced with bells, but were most of the time, held in the utmost secrecy, because of persecution.
They never took over a church building, but met in private houses, in forests, in fields and sometimes on boats. They had no sacerdotal class, since they thought that every believer is a priest before God. Even though they opposed the chanting of sermons and prayers, they did sing in their services. The tunes were taken from popular folk songs of the day. Their songs expressed, probably even better than their writings, their spiritual and emotional state.
The following is an example. The song from which the following excerpts were taken was composed by Annelein of Freiberg. Nothing is known about this woman except that she was drowned and then burned in , some sources indicating that she was only seventeen years old when imprisoned.
I call on you so ardently,. Do not let me turn from you. Keep me in your truth. Until my final end. O, God, guard my heart and mouth. Lord, watch over me at all times,. Let nothing separate me from you,. Be it affliction, anxiety or need,.
Keep me pure in joy. My everlasting Lord and Father,. Show and teach me,. Poor, unworthy child that I am,. That I heed your path and way. In this lies my desire. To walk through your power into death. Through sorrow, torture, fear and want,. Sustain me in this,. O, God, so that I nevermore. Be separated from your love. They have imprisoned me. I wait, O God, with all my heart.
With very great longing,. When finally you will awake. If you would only stir. And set your prisoners free. Snyder and Hecht, Profiles of Anabaptist Women, p. The Anabaptist church service was of an amazing simplicity.
It had three distinct elements: prayer, singing and the preaching or exposition of the Bible. They were most emphatic on the latter, since knowing the Scriptures was necessary in order to be faithful to Christ in all things, as their desire was. Church Ministers.
In a church of the Anabaptists, all members were equal. The preachers and the pastors were considered to be the servants of the church, and they did not form a special class, a ruling clergy. The churches of the Anabaptists thought their ministers had to know a craft that could bring them an income if the church was unable to support them. They opposed taxes for the support of the clergy, considering that the needs of the ministers and the expenses of the ministry should be met by the local churches.
All the Anabaptists felt a strong aversion toward preachers paid from the public budget. To have been an Anabaptist preacher or pastor in that time meant to be in constant peril. If ordinary members were fined or banished, the leaders were always executed.
They did not enjoy priviledges or recognition from either the civil or ecclesiastical authorities of the established religions. Repeatedly, the Anabaptist ministers were called to seal their testimony with their own blood.
Even in such times, they sought to honor their King, to be an example and an encouragement for their little flock. The Roles of the Believer and of the Church in Society. If seen only from outside, Anabaptism best strikes the eye because of its radical stand on the place the Christian and the church must occupy in society. The Catholic Church preached the doctrine of Constatine the Great, the merging of the borders of the Church with those of the State.
In the Middle Ages, the pope installed and dethroned kings. The civil authority also had to serve the ecclesiastical one. The king had to serve the pope. The magistrate had to serve the priest.
This doctrine was not a mere theoretical scholastic subtlety, but an instrument frequently used by the papacy to reach its goals, when negotiation or persuasion failed. The Reformers could not free themselves from this Constantinian doctrine.
In this respect they always remained tributary to Rome. Wherever Protestants gained power, infant baptism continued to be imposed by law upon all citizens. The duty of the magistrates was to ensure the well-being of the citizens, including their spiritual well-being. Those who undermined the authority of the Church and led the people astray had to be punished by the magistrates. Just as in the case of infant baptism, when the Anabaptists requested from the Protestants Scripural proofs for this doctrine, they brought the most fanciful interpretations in order to support the union of church and state.
And with what power did Paul smite Elimas blind? Was it with the power vested in the Church? Of course not. The Anabaptists believed in the complete separation of Church and State. They affirmed in the Schleitheim Confession:. We are agreed as follows concerning the sword: The sword is ordained of God outside the perfection of Christ. It punishes and puts to death the wicked, and guards and protects the good… In the perfection of Christ, however, only the ban is used for a warning and for the excommunication of the one who has sinned, without putting the flesh to death - simply the warning and the command to sin no more Mark Noll, Ibid.
The Anabaptists did not try to overthrow the social order. They were not anarchists, neither were they revolutionary fanatics, even though they were accused of these things. They opposed a sacral, monolithic society, in which there was no difference between the church and the world. But in the society to which they belonged, in which the church meant the totality of the citizens, and the state meant the totality of the Christians, the true believer could not serve the state as a magistrate, since that meant also to bring service to a church that he thought to be apostate.
Therefore, the Anabaptists affirmed that a Christian could not occupy public offices. The Anabaptists required nothing from the authorities. They only requested the right — banal now, but unacceptable then — to be allowed to worship God according to the dictates of their conscience.
They taught that a Christian cannot persecute, but rather suffers quietly all things. They envisioned a society different from all the orders of the day — a society in which the civil authorities supervised only social matters, a composite society in which all its citizens could exercise the right to choose if they wanted to be part of a certain church or not. The Struggle for Freedom. Baptists always have been the champions of human rights and liberties.
In this, they followed their Anabaptist predecessors. Anabaptist thought was superior to the age in which they lived. The whole of modern free society is based on the principles for which the sixteenth century Anabaptists lived and died. It cannot allow dissidence, faction, sect [this word comes from the latin sequor which gives the idea of following, and in religious context — following other ways than the one recognized or imposed].
It cannot allow the luxury of granting freedom to the individual to judge for himself and make a decision regarding his faith. In this vision, a centralized and controlled religion is absolutely necessary for the good order of the society. By its definition, tolerance is an allowable deviation from the standard. In a sacral society, the State recognizes as valid only one faith.
The rest of them are considered deviant. The Catholic Church is the best example of this monolithic mentality. Armed with the doctrine of the two swords, the papal church started the battle of converting all those who differed from it.
Before , waves of persecution led to the beheading of early Anabaptism. Numerous other local leaders were also killed. Words cannot describe the cruelty of these acts. The trial and execution of Michael Sattler, on May 21st, , is an illustrative example. Pieces of flesh were torn from his body twice with red-hot tongs. He was then forged to a cart. On the way to the scene of the execution the tongs were applied five times again.
In the market place and at the site of the execution, still able to speak, the unshakeable Sattler prayed for his persecutors. After being bound to a ladder with ropes and pushed into the fire, he admonished the people, the judges, and the mayor to repent and be converted. After , not only the leaders were executed, but ordinary Anabaptists as well.
Seeing that the public executions only thickened their ranks, the authorities of Suabia called a special militia for the tracking down of the Anabaptists. This militia had authority to kill on the spot, with no trial and indifferent of sex and age, all those suspected of being Anabaptists. Many thousands Anabaptists perished this way. Cornelius, the Roman Catholic historian, described part of the results of the persecution that followed the Diet of Spires.
At Linz seventy-three were killed in six weeks. Duke William of Bavaria , surpassing all others, issued the fearful decree to behead those who recanted, to burn those who refused to recant… Throughout the greater part of Upper Germany the persecution raged like a wild chase… The blood of these poor people flowed like water so that they cried to the Lord for help… But hundreds of them of all ages and both sexes suffered the pangs of torture without a murmur, despised to buy their lives by recantation, and went to the place of execution joyfully and singing psalms" Quoted by Vedder, Ibid.
The Anabaptists did not face a better treatment in Protestant territories. The initial position of the Reformers, when they were threatened by the Catholics, was similar to that of the Anabaptists.
But the Muenster rebellion caused Luther to recommend the usage of the sword against all Anabaptists, peaceful or revolutionary see Durant, Ibid. It is wrong to compel anyone by force or coercion to embrace the faith, or to put to death anyone for the sake of his erring faith. It is an error that in the church any sword other than that of the divine Word should be used. The secular kingdom should be separated from the church, and no secular ruler should exercise authority in the church.
The Lord has commanded simply to preach the Gospel, not to compel anyone by force to accept it. But as soon as the reformers gained the support of the authorities in a certain region, they went back on their words and promoted the old Catholic doctrine.
The persecution suffered by the Anabaptists in Protestant territories was as cruel as the Catholic persecution. In Protestant territories, Felix Manz was condemned to death by drowning, Grebel and Denck, hunted and weakened physically, fell pray to an epidemic, escaping, thus from the hands of the executioners.
Balthasar Hubmaier reproached the Protestants of Zurich for locking up in a tower some twenty Anabaptists, men, young women, pregnant women, and widows, sentencing them to be left there, on bread and water, without ever seeing the sun again, until they will all die in that cell.
After Zwingli gained control of the religious affairs in Zurich , he advised that those who were immersed in baptism should be drowned. Calvin, in his turn, was just as intolerant: "Whoever shall now contend that it is unjust to put heretics and blasphemers to death will knowingly and willingly incur their very guilt. This is not laid down on human authority; it is God who speaks and prescribes a perpetual rule for his Church. It is not in vain that he banishes all those human affections which soften our hearts; that he commands paternal love and all the benevolent feelings between brothers, relations, and friends to cease; in a word, that he almost deprives men of their nature in order that nothing may hinder their holy zeal.
Why is so implacable a severity exacted but that we may know that God is defrauded of his honor, unless the piety that is due to him be preferred to all human duties, and that when his glory is to be asserted, humanity must be almost obliterated from our memories?
Christ Himself teaches that the tares, should be allowed to grow with the wheat. He did not come to burn, or to murder, but to give life, and that more abundantly. We should, therefore, pray and hope for improvement in men as long as they live. If they cannot be convinced by appeals to reason, or the Word of God, they should be let alone. One cannot be made to see his errors either by fire or sword. But if it is a crime to burn those who scornfully reject the Gospel of Jesus Christ, how much more it is a crime to burn the true expounders and exemplars of the Word of God.
Such an apparent zeal for God, the welfare of the soul, and the honor of the church is a deception. The Anabaptists were among the first defenders of human rights. They militated for all the people, not only for those of the same faith with them. The Anabaptist martyrs, whether illustrious scholars or unknown peasants, sealed with their own blood their plea for liberty. If their cry had been heard, the history of the world and of Christianity would have been different in these past five centuries.
Who were the Anabaptists, and what was their place in history? Bender quotes the answer given by Rufus Jones: "Judged by the reception it met at the hands of those in power, both in Church and State, equally in Roman Catholic and in Protestant countries, the Anabaptist movement was one of the most tragic in the history of Christianity; but, judged by the principles, which were put into play by the men who bore this reproachful nickname, it must be pronounced one of the most momentous and significant undertakings in man's eventful religious struggle after the truth.
It gathered up the gains of earlier movements, it is the spiritual soil out of which all nonconformist sects have sprung, and it is the first plain announcement in modern history of a programme for a new type of Christian society which the modern world, especially in America and England, has been slowly realizing — an absolutely free and independent religious society, and a State in which every man counts as a man, and has his share in shaping both Church and State" Hershberger, Ibid.
We salute the arrival of those times, and rejoice that the Anabaptists are finally aquitted from the many calumnies brought against them. We salute the enthroning of human rights and of the freedom to chose, the liberation of the State from servitude to a religious or political dogma, and the constitution of a democractic and composite society.
Truth flourishes in freedom!!! What does the Anabaptist movement mean to us? A dramatic chapter of history, buried in the dust of time? In what measure are their doctrines, practices, and vision still actual? Indeed, they were not utterly destroyed. Their spirit is alive and they still live and speak through their successors. Even though the Anabaptist positions are largely deserted, they are as true today as five hundred years ago, the attacks of their opponents are just as furious as then, the controversies they raise are just as fiery.
Their followers are under the same siege and are called today to stand and defend the doctrines of their predecessors, the doctrines of the Scriptures.
The fundamental Anabaptist doctrine — The Scripture as final authority — is mightly assaulted. Never was the authority of the Bible so much discredited and undermined as it is now. The doctrine of separation is assaulted by those involved in the ecumenical movement. Baptist leaders seek and accept the support of secular authorities, they recognize false churches as sisters, as equals, and work together with them, betraying the position for which their predecessors lived and died!
Those who take a stand for separation are accused of legalism, hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness. But this is the old Baptist position! Baptism was for the Anabaptists a sign of separation, of identity. They refused to accept the baptisms practiced by the parties that did not stand doctrinally with them, they did not recognize them to be true churches, and their rites were considered null and void. In England, the early Baptists were persecuted. John Bunyan, the Baptist author of The Pilgrim's Progress , for example, wrote his book while imprisoned for his unauthorized preaching.
In England and then in America, Baptists were first drawn from the ranks of Congregationalists whose beliefs had modified to align with Baptist beliefs.
In New England and elsewhere in America, Baptists were persecuted during the 17th century. Roger Williams, who had been persecuted for his anti-establishment sermons in Massachusetts, exiled himself out of reach of his Puritan opponents and established the colony of Rhode Island.
He helped found what was probably the first Baptist Church in America in Providence in During the 17th and 18th centuries, Baptists found the religious freedom they sought, at the beginning in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, but then elsewhere. Their ranks were enlarged by converts from Congregationalism, but also from other Nonconformist sects.
In addition, they embraced the movement of religious revival during the Second Great Awakening, and found an enthusiastic mass of converts as they spread down the Appalachians into the South and West.
Baptists played a crucial role in influencing the framers of the Constitution to insure freedom of religion and conscience in the new Republic, and to promote the idea of a "wall of separation" between church and state. The highly autonomous nature of a Baptist congregation, recognizing no higher "worldly" authority over the religious beliefs and practices of its members, proved to be a good fit in many ways with the democratic, populist character of America.
It also appealed to African Americans, who could found their own churches with little religious interference from others. William H. I have already hinted at this in the previous discussion. In the first place, Baptists did not begin with the original Reformation groups. Baptists should not be identified historically with the 16th-century Swiss Brethren Anabaptists, the so-called Radical branch of the Reformation, but they are a part of a broader movement that began simultaneously with the Swiss Brethren in —Free Church Separatism.
It is in stark contrast to the magisterial Reformation of the mainline Protestant groups who retained, to some degree, sponsorship of the state. Secondly, Baptists did not directly or physically come out of the Roman Catholic system unless we acknowledge an indirect departure via Puritan separatism from the episcopal Church of England.
Rather than saying that Baptists are not Protestants, it is better to say that they are not an integral part of the Protestant Reformation, in the technical sense of those terms. That is, Baptists, unlike Luther, Calvin, or Zwingli, have no wish to reform the institutional church, but to restore and retain the doctrines and practices of the primitive New Testament churches. Like the earlier Anabaptists, Baptists have contended that one cannot reform or revive a corpse the Roman Catholic system , nor do they need some comprehensive networking denominationalism to maintain themselves.
Where exists a local assembly of regenerate believer priests, under the headship of Christ and the proper leadership of pastor and deacons, practicing the New Testament ordinances, preaching and obeying the Word of God in purity and clarity, separated from worldliness and external ecclesiastical and civil control, there you have the church, emphatically protesting against the world, the flesh, and the Devil.
He is now retired and lives in Greenville, SC.
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