Baptism as Revolution
Nicholas P. Miller January/February 2025This year marks 500 years since a largely forgotten act of defiance helped birth modern religious freedom.
Baptism as an act of political revolution? It certainly was viewed as such 500 years ago in the city of Zurich, Switzerland, where Anabaptist leader Conrad Grebel and his companions debated with Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli the question of infant baptism. Today the rite of baptism is generally viewed as a highly personal decision, to be made either by consenting adult or guiding parent. The form or method or age of the participant is understood as a private religious matter, one that has no real meaning or impact on our civil order.
But such was not the case in early-sixteenth-century Europe, where the choice to not baptize one’s infant could draw civil punishment, up to and including exile. In the eyes of civil and ecclesiastical leaders, infant baptism was the glue that kept community of the church and the state together. It was the linchpin that ensured that all subjects of the civil community were also members of the church. This connection allowed religious leaders to rely on civil leaders to enforce the beliefs, teachings, and morality of the church on all members of the community.
The perceived importance of this ecclesiastical-civil connection meant Grebel and Zwingli carried out their debate with vigor and seriousness. They squared off before the city council of Zurich on January 17, 1525. Unfortunately for the Anabaptists, the council ruled in favor of Zwingli and infant baptism. It ordered the Grebel group to cease their activities and directed that any unbaptized infants must be submitted for baptism within eight days. Failure to comply with the order, the council declared, would result in exile from the canton.
Grebel stood firm. He had an unbaptized infant daughter, Issabella, yet he refused to submit to the council’s ruling. The group met again secretly on January 21 in the home of Felix Manz. There, a former priest, George Blaurock, requested rebaptism from Grebel on confession of faith. Blaurock, in turn, baptized a number of those also present at the gathering.
In this little episode church historians have seen the beginnings of the free church movement. As one put it, “the decision of Conrad Grebel to refuse to accept the jurisdiction of the Zurich Council over the Zurich church is one of the high moments of history, for however obscure it was, it marked the beginning of the modern ‘free church’ movement.”1 The fact that this protest took place over infant baptism—the linchpin of the connection between church and state—made it all the more significant. The church was being clearly defined as a separate body of committed believers who could not be controlled by the state.
Toward Free Will Theology
Lying heavy over these events in Zurich was the influence of another Anabaptist, Balthasar Hubmaier, who was not present at the January meetings but whose writings in good part guided the disputation. Hubmaier was trained as a priest, and his skillful engagement with the issues had already earned him removal from Zurich. But he had committed his arguments to writing, and his On The Christian Baptism of Believers served as the foundation of the arguments of Grebel and the others.2 Hubmaier’s influence was felt beyond the issue of adult baptism, as he had articulated a theological framework of grace and freedom in which freely chosen adult baptism made sense, but also had implications for a range of matters, including civil and religious freedoms.
Hubmaier, along with an Anabaptist colleague, Hans Denck, articulated an Anabaptist theology of free will and human choice that predated the contributions of free-will theologian Jacob Arminius by about 80 years. It stood in contrast to the theologies developed by magisterial Protestant leaders Martin Luther and John Calvin, which emphasized the bondage of the human will. While Calvin and Calvinism has come to be most closely associated with theologies of determinism, Luther also emphasized the inability of the human will to choose either goodness or God. These determinist theologies generally emphasized the importance of a guiding community, rather than the freedom of the individual. Both Luther and Calvin had significant roles for the prince or magistrate in the guidance and oversight of the church, and both Lutheranism and Calvinism developed generally as state churches—hence the name magisterial reformers.
But Anabaptism, with its emphasis on human free will and choice, developed differently.
In 1526 Anabaptist Hans Denck, no doubt provoked by the Luther/Erasmus debate over the will that had occurred the previous year, set out his own views on human freedom. The title of Denck’s work reveals his true concern—Whether God Is the Cause of Evil. In this book Denck dealt with the problem of evil and free will. He avoids Luther’s wholly captive will and Erasmus’s humanist/Pelagian will. He argued that “salvation is in man but not of man,” and that while man naturally could not choose to oppose evil, he did have the capacity to submit to God. Thus, evil was a result of man’s chosen failure to submit to God and could not be attributed to God.3
Hubmaier wrote similarly on human nature and salvation.4 He likewise believed in a fall, and in a sinful human nature and soul.5 But he asserted that “whomever denies the freedom of the human will denies and rejects more than half of the Holy Scriptures.”6 Not only did all people have the capacity to choose God, but once this choice was made, they gained the ability through Christ’s power to choose good. “Enlightened by the Holy Spirit, [the soul] now again comes to know what is good and evil. It has recovered its lost freedom. It can now freely and willingly be obedient to the spirit against the body and can will and choose the good.”7
Freedom for the “Turk or Heretic”
The views of Hubmaier and Denck on human free will came to generally characterize the views of the evangelical Anabaptists, including those in Austria and the Netherlands, where Menno Simons articulated similar views. These evangelical Anabaptists represent an early Protestant free will heritage that is as early as Luther’s teachings on the topic, and predate Calvin’s writings by more than a decade.8 The theology of free will articulated by Hubmaier, Denck, and others very early on served as the basis for arguing for civil and religious freedoms. This included freedom not only for Christians but also for Jews and Muslims. As early as 1524, Balthasar Hubmaier, wrote one of the earliest Reformation statements on religious liberty. Entitled Concerning Heretics and Those That Burn Them (Von Ketzern und ihren Verbrennern), the work argued that heretics should be “overcome with holy knowledge” and the arguments of Holy Scripture. If they do not respond, he wrote, to “strong proofs or evangelical reasons, then let them be, and leave them to rage and be mad.”9
Hubmaier acknowledged the right of the “secular power” to put to death “criminals who injure the bodies of the defenseless.” But the godless who do not “injure body or soul” should be left unmolested.10 He advocated religious freedom as a universal principle, arguing that it should be extended to both the “Turk or a heretic,” who will not be won by “sword or fire but alone with patience and prayer.” In a sad irony, Hubmaier himself was burned for heresy about three years later in Vienna.11
Hubmaier’s beliefs in principled toleration, however, lived on within the Anabaptist movement. In the year prior to Hubmaier’s death, other Anabaptist leaders, guided by Michael Sattler, set down their distinguishing list of seven beliefs at Schleitheim in 1527. The sixth, and longest, belief had to do with the civil sword and the inappropriateness of using it to enforce religious beliefs.12
Enduring Legacy
Because of their small numbers and generally outlawed status, it has been generally considered that the Anabaptists had little direct intellectual influence within Europe. While their influence was likely modest, one commentator overstates the case in saying that the Anabaptist “espousal of [religious liberty] was stillborn.”13 Small though it was, the influence they did have was important.
The Anabaptists were the only organized Protestant movement in the Netherlands until the 1550s, when the Reformed churches became more active.14 Menno Simons, the great organizer of the Anabaptist wing eventually known as the Mennonites, worked and wrote in the Netherlands.15 The influences of Anabaptist thought on Dutch Protestants was one of the factors that helps explain the repute—or ill repute—that the country developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for its religious toleration. A number of persons prominent in the story of the development of religious freedom in America had connections with the Netherlands and the Anabaptists. These include the early English Baptists, whose writings on soul freedom were known to have influenced Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, as well as William Penn and John Locke.16
The Anabaptists’ example of suffering, as much as their ideas and writings, influenced the developing case for toleration and religious freedom in England and eventually America. Their bloody experiences and patient endurance at the hands of civil and religious authorities caused a number of other figures, including Williams, Penn, and Locke, to reflect on the inherent injustice of religious persecution and intolerance. These authors—disturbed especially by the widespread cruelty toward Anabaptists—began weaving a fuller tapestry of spiritual and civil freedom. This alternate view emerged as a competing, if minority, dissenting vision to the model of coercion maintained within mainstream confessional Protestantism.
Most of the Anabaptists who met in the house of Felix Manz in January 500 years ago died either as martyrs or on the run. But their idea of a free church, within a free state, lived on after them. It never really gained controlling influence in any European country, most of which have some form of state-sponsored church until the present day. But when America was finally founded as a constitutional republic, it was not founded, at least nationally, as a magisterial Protestant nation. Rather, it was a nation shaped by the dissenting Protestant, free-church tradition that Manz, Grebel, Hubmaier, and Denck started in 1525. Any group seeking to restore America to any sort of authentic greatness needs to keep this historical fact firmly in mind.
1 Harold Bender, Conrad Grebel (Goshen, Ind.: Mennonite Historical Society, 1950), pp. 99, 100.
2 William R. Estep, The Anabaptist Story: An Introduction to Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism (Grand Rapids: 1975, 1996), pp. 17, 60.
3 George Huntson Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2000), pp. 257, 258.
4 Ibid., p. 257, n. 28.
5 Ibid., p. 335. Hubmaier had an unusual view of the human’s spirit-will not participating in the fall, but this meant nothing and could not operate until the fallen soul received regeneration through Christ.
6 Henry Clay Vedder, Balthasar Hubmaier: The Leader of the Anabaptists (New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, Knickerbocker Press, 1905), p. 197.
7 Williams, p. 335.
8 Cornelius J. Dyck, An Introduction to Mennonite History, 3rd ed. (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1993), p. 142; C. Arnold Snyder, Anabaptist History and Theology: An Introduction (Kitchener, Ont.: Pandora Press, 1995), pp. 89, 90.
9 Torsten Bergsten, Balthasar Hubmaier: Anabaptist Theologian and Martyr (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1978), pp. 72, 73, 130-132.
10 Henry C. Vedder, Balthasar Hubmaier: The Leader of the Anabaptists (New York: AMS Press, 1971), pp. 84-88.
11 William R. Estep, Revolution With the Revolution: The First Amendment in Historical Context, 1612-1789 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1990), pp. 30, 31.
12 Williams, pp. 288, 289, 293, 294; Guy F. Hershberger, ed., The Recovery of the Anabaptist Vision. A Sixtieth Anniversary Tribute to Harold Bender (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1957), pp. 65, 192.
13 Hershberger, p. 290.
14 Ibid., pp. 19, 57-59.
15 Williams, pp. 589-596.
16 I have told this story, its connection with the American colonies, and its eventual influence on James Madison and the First Amendment in my book The Religious Roots of the First Amendment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Article Author: Nicholas P. Miller
Nicholas Miller, Ph.D., is an attorney and associate professor of church history at Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan. He is the author of the The Religious Roots of the First Amendment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), which more fully develops the theme of this article.