The Anabaptists and their Stepchildren

The Anabaptists and their Stepchildren - F.N. Lee

F O R E W O R D

By Reverend Richard Bacon

It has been my good pleasure to know Doctor Francis Nigel Lee for many years. This is the third booklet by him that Commonwealth has been privileged to publish. His previous two works from us are Revealed to Babies and Pentecostalism. Both works are presently sold out in the United States.

Doctor Lee is author of over three hundred books and pamphlets. His subject matter has covered such topics as the covenantal Sabbath, Christianity and Communism, a Christian view of the history of philosophy, church architecture, the importance of family devotions, Baptism and the Lord's Supper, etc.

This present work on Anabaptists and their history is another fine, well-documented book that is much in need by the Reformed community. Dr. Lee explains both the history and the strange beliefs of the groups that were on the radical fringes of Christendom during and shortly after the Middle Ages.

This work breaks some interesting ground in the ongoing controversy between modern-day Baptists and the rest of Christianity over the subject of paedobaptism. In this booklet, Dr. Lee demonstrates conclusively that the mainstream of the Church has always baptized covenant infants. He further demonstrates that when a body or Church departs from the precious doctrine of paedobaptism, it usually departs in other fundamental teachings of Scripture as well.

The reader may be surprised to discover that the early Anabaptists did not submerse candidates for baptism, but either sprinkled or poured. What is even more surprising, is to learn that the Mediaeval Roman Church did submerse, and that the Romanist Council of Nemours allowed the Scripture mode of sprinkling only in the case of "emergencies."

Modern Baptists are fond of claiming that the Reformers simply adopted their doctrines concerning the Sacraments (especially Baptism) from the mediaeval Roman Church. Anyone who has studied the history of the Reformation knows better, but Dr. Lee has brought together a multitude of documents written by the Reformers themselves. In these various documents, the Reformers from Wycliffe to the Westminster Assembly consistently argue against the false doctrine of anti-paedobaptism from Scripture as well as the whole history of the Church.

The Reverend Professor Doctor Francis Nigel Lee is Professor of Systematic Theology at Queensland Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Brisbane, Australia. His doctoral degrees include those in philosophy, jurisprudence, education, and theology. Dr. Lee's career has included callings as: official Translator for the South African Congress; Barrister of the Supreme Court of South Africa; Minister of the Word and Sacraments in both the United States and the Republic of South Africa; Professor of Philosophy; Scholar-in-Residence at a Christian "think-tank"; and Academic Dean at a North American College.

Dr. Lee's articles and booklets include publications on history, law, philosophy, politics, theology, etc. His major publications include: About Sunday; Calvin on Creation; Calvin on the Sciences; A Christian Introduction to the History of Philosophy; Communism Versus Creation; Communist Eschatology; Effective Evangelism; Origin and Destiny of Man; The Central Significance of Culture; and The Covenantal Sabbath.

Richard Bacon, First Presbyterian Manse, Rowlett, Texas.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

By Rev. Prof. Dr. F.N. Lee

In recent years, Paternoster Press published a book with a very surprising title: The Reformers and their Stepchildren. The author was the noted Pro-Mennonite or neo-Anabaptist theologian, Dr. Leonard Verduin. Its aim was to try and establish an affinity between consistent Christianity and the Anabaptists.

This present work is a reply to that of Verduin. Hence its title: The Anabaptists and Their Stepchildren. It seeks to show the affinity between those earlier wildcat heretics on the one hand, and their modern sectarian descendants on the other.

To a lesser extent, it also seeks to show that Reformation Protestantism alone is the true daughter of the patristic Catholic Church. In particular, it would demonstrate that especially Calvinism is the true granddaughter of Biblical Christianity -- of which contemporary churches need to be, and yet shall become, the true great-granddaughters.

I am grateful to my friend Rev. Richard Bacon, President of Commonwealth Publications in Dallas, for printing up the first edition of this work several years ago. I have kept his own Foreword thereto, also for this present publication. Since the production of the first edition, however, this work was expanded to twice its original length -- in the second edition. And now, it has been expanded yet further (with the addition of new Calvin material) into this its third edition (1996).

As with the previous two editions, this work goes forth with the prayer that it may open the eyes of many sincere yet hitherto misguided (Ana)Baptists. May they, as did Mrs. John Calvin of old, repudiate their religious deviations -- and then join the historic Christian Church of the Protestant Reformation, and thus come into true apostolic succession with unadulterated Christianity!

-- Rev. Prof. Dr. Francis Nigel Lee, Department of Systematic Theology, Queensland Presbyterian Theological Hall, Brisbane, Australia. 1996

THE ANABAPTISTS AND THEIR STEPCHILDREN

Who were the Anabaptists and who are their stepchildren?

The Anabaptists were various sixteenth-century sects. They all repudiated infant baptism. They baptized -- and often rebaptized -- adults alone. Such Anabaptists as were trinitarian, generally did so by pouring. Unitarian Anabaptists, however, did so largely by a novel single submersion (at variance with the sprinkling previously practised by the Early Church till A.D. 250ff).

In the Middle Ages, the ritualistic Romanists had usually baptized by total immersion. The Protestant Reformers alone re-asserted Biblical baptism. Such is baptism only of believers and their babies and their other children. It is baptism also precisely by way of Scriptural sprinkling.

The Baptists are the (equally antipaidobaptistic) stepchildren of the Anabaptists. Baptists, however, have baptized by single submersion -- at least ever since about 1638. In this, they have followed Mediaeval Romanism -- and repudiated both the Protestant Reformation and most Anabaptists.

In modern times, Pro-Mennonite Leonard Verduin has written a book on the Anabaptists with the very misleading title: The Reformers and their Stepchildren.¹ He would represent the latter as being but the disowned children of Luther and Calvin -- and, more remotely, of Waldo and Wycliffe. However, the truth is -- the Anabaptists disclaimed dependence upon the Reformers. For the Anabaptists actually represent re-emergent variants of neo-paganized sub- christian early-mediaeval and mid-mediaeval heresies.

Anabaptism was syncretistic. On the one hand, it descended from the communal concepts of Romish monasticism. On the other hand, its ancestors included the semi-Manichaean Paulicians and the neo-Marcionitic and antipaidobaptistic Petrobrusians (who denied even the possibility of infant salvation).

The Anabaptists were principally clustered in Central Europe --from Germany to Italy. Yet they also had great influence in Western Europe from Frisia to Flanders, and in Eastern Europe from Lithuania to Hungary. Indeed, scattered groups also functioned from Russia to Spain -- and even in France and England.

Professor Dr. G.H. Williams, the foremost sympathetic authority on Anabaptism, has called it 'The Radical Reformation.'² That is a real misnomer. 'Radical' -- yes! 'Reformation' -- no! For, as Williams himself rightly pointed out -- Anabaptism "broke on principle with the Catholic-Protestant corpus christianum and...induced currents in history and the interpretation thereof which pulsate today..., through democratic progressivism to Marxism."³ Servetus the Anabaptist rides again!

Harvard's Dr. Williams has not hesitated to describe himself⁴ as "a professor who, and in a university which, has spiritual connections with Calvin's principal foe, Michael Servetus." Extolling the neo-Anabaptist Karl Barth as "the greatest modern theologian," Williams has saluted the Anabaptists as architects of the modern post-Christian pluriform society. Indeed, he has expressed the wish to "salute them from afar -- as the honored citizens of that larger community which is the commonwealth of all mankind."⁵

The Anabaptists, then, were sixteenth-century antipaidobaptists. As to their doctrine of God, they were variously Unitarian, Binitarian, Tritheistic -- or, occasionally, even quasi-Trinitarian. As to creation and providence, many were either anarchistic or neo-Manichaean. Indeed, some were very lascivious -- and either adulterers or polygamists.

Nearly all maintained a heretical neo-Gnostic christology. Several claimed to be prophetic visionaries and/or glossolalists, and more than a few were thoroughly communistic. Most were millenarian, fanatically predicting the imminent return of Christ. Nearly all of them taught both soul-sleep and the final annihilation of the wicked (thus denying the eternal punishment). Absolutely all of them were either antinomian or legalistic. What was good in them, was not original. What was original in them, was not good.

They all agreed in hating the Biblical and patristic practice of infant baptism. They all resurrected and rehashed various heresies already decisively rejected many centuries earlier and only after a thorough evaluation by the Early Church.

Very demonstrably, their modern stepchildren comprise various contemporary ecclesiastic revolutionaries. Such include the Christadelphians, the Mormons, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Jehovah witnesses, the Pentecostalists, and the left- wing liberationists.

Anabaptist views in general altogether foreign to Holy Scripture

Many, then, were the errors of Anabaptism. There were also different varieties of Anabaptists. Yet all agreed in rejecting infant baptism⁶ -- and, more importantly, also the historical continuity and therefore the social stability which it promotes.

In Holy Scripture itself, there is neither antipaidobaptism nor submersionism. The Bible insists that both believers and their infants were to be circumcised, before Calvary. There, however, circumcision was replaced by baptism -- and hence infant circumcision by infant baptism. Genesis 17:7-14; Acts 2:38f; Romans 4:11f; Colossians 2:11-13.

For an exhaustive demonstration of this, see Francis Nigel Lee's dissertation titled Baby Belief Before Baptism.⁷ However, both the Anabaptists and the Baptists deny that the babies of believers should be baptized.

The modern Baptists (just like the mediaeval baptismal regenerationists) further insist that baptism should be administered only by way of submersion. That method, however, is totally foreign to the Word of God -- which knows only of sprinkling and pouring. Isaiah 32:15 & 44:1-5 & 52:15f; Ezekiel 36:25-27; Daniel 3:33 & 5:21; Joel 2:16,23,28f; Acts 1:5f & 2:1-4a,16f,33,38f and Hebrews 9:10-21. For abundant proof of this, see Francis Nigel Lee's monograph titled Sprinkling is Scriptural.⁸

The antipaidobaptism of the Anabaptists strongly characterizes their Baptist stepchildren today. Also the other views of the Anabaptists are still encountered -- among many of their other different stepchildren. The latter include: sacramentalists like the Campbellites; unitarian Christadelphians; 'charismatic' Pentecostalists; premillenial Dispensationalists; polygamous proto-Mormons; state-hating "Jehovah's witnesses"; soul-sleeping Seventh-day Adventists; and various assorted deniers of everlasting punishment.

At this point, we merely mention the various heresies of Anabaptism which spawned this seed. There was the anti- trinitarianism of Jan Denck, David Joris, Jan Campanus, and Miguel Servetus (against Genesis 1:1-3 and Matthew 28:19 and Revelation 4:5-8f). There was the denial of Christ's incarnation by Melchior Hofmann and Menno Simons (against Luke 1:31f and Romans 1:3f and Hebrews 2:9-17 & 5:1-8).

There was the repeated adultery of Louis Haetzer -- and the polygamy of the demagogue Jan Beukels of Leyden and of the murderer Jan Matthys of Haarlem (against Malachi 2:14-16 and Matthew 19:4-9 and First Thessalonians 4:3-8). Indeed, there was also the revolutionism of Thomas Muenzer, Bernard Knipperdolling and even David Joris (against Romans 13:1-7 and First Peter 2:13-17 and Titus 3:1f).

Then there was their communism (alias community of goods and community of wives) -- squarely condemned by Exodus 20:15-17 and Acts 5:4 and Ephesians 4:24-28. There were the pseudo-pentecostal babblings of Thomas Muenzer, and the false prophecies of Menno Simons -- against Matthew 6:7 and First Corinthians 14:7-21 and First John 4:1-6. There was an anarchical opposition to oathing -- against Deuteronomy 10:20 and Jeremiah 4:2 and Second Corinthians 1:23. There was also a heretical doctrine of soul-sleep -- against Luke 23:43 and Second Corinthians 5:1-9 and Philippians 1:21-23. Indeed, in some cases, there was even a denial of everlasting punishment --against Isaiah 34:8- 10 and Mark 9:42-48 and Revelation 14:11 & 20:10.

Anabaptist views contrary also to the history of the Early Church

Not just Holy Scripture but Early Church History too clearly substantiates the above claims. The Early Church Fathers opposed communism,⁹ revolutionism,¹⁰ soul-sleep,¹¹ and pseudo-pentecostalistic babblings¹² etc. Here, however, we now focus our attention specifically on antipaidobaptistic deviations from Biblical baptism.

There are few post-biblical extant records about baptism at all, until Cyprian in 250 A.D. Yet, many pre-250 works do yield fragmentary traces of either sprinkling or infant baptism or both -- but none of antipaidobaptism.

Such pre-250 works include:¹³ the Tanna; the Talmud; the Old Testament Apocrypha, and the Pseudepigrapha. They include the writings also of: Philo; Josephus; Clement of Rome; the Didachee; (Pseudo-)Barnabas; Ignatius; Pliny; Aristides; Matheetees (to Diognetus); Papias; the Shepherd of Hermas; the New Testament Apocrypha; Justin Martyr; Polycarp; the mid-century martyrs around 150 A.D.; Athenagoras; Theodotus; Irenaeus; Polycrates; Clement of Alexandria; Tertullian; the Old Egyptian Ordinance; Hippolytus; Origen; Dionysius of Alexandria; and archaeological evidence.

Even the Baptist A.W. Argyle -- Regent's Park College tutor at Oxford -- has made some important concessions. He conceded¹⁴ that there indeed "appears to be [at least] one cryptic reference to infant baptism in an allegorical passage of the Paedagogus" written by the 195f A.D. Clement of Alexandria.

Indeed, Baptist Argyle has further conceded that the 230 A.D. Origen describes "the practice of infant baptism not only as a custom of the church, but as an apostolic custom." Nay more! Argyle also conceded the indisputable fact that (the 250f A.D.) "Cyprian Bishop of Carthage...directs that infants should be baptized."

Yet sadly, we also find in Cyprian the evidence that submersionistic paganism was just then beginning to infiltrate the Christian Church. Until that time, ever since the apostles, baptisms of believers and their children had been administered in the Universal Church by way of sprinkling.

Only heretics had previously rejected infant baptism, and had begun to insist on neo-paganistic submersionism. The Church, however, sprinkled believers' babies. See Francis Nigel Lee's three theses Baptism Does Not Cleanse and Rebaptism Impossible and Baby Belief Before Baptism.¹⁵

After 250 A.D.: submersionism and other baptismal heresies

From the 250 A.D. time of Cyprian onward, however, the Church Universal degenerated -- by syncretizing with paganism. More and more water now got used at baptisms. This was because of the false and new theory that the greater the quantity of water at baptisms (and the more naked the candidate), the greater the quantity and quality of sins were thereby washed away. Enter baptismal regenerationism.¹⁶ So, too, from 350, baptism was often deferred till death.

Fortunately, however, there was no attack against infant baptism as such. For even the romanizing Church Universal rightly regarded babies too as sinners -- all stained with Adam's original sin. Thus, paidobaptism was clearly enunciated by: Lactantius; Asterius; Basil; Gregory of Nazianze; Gregory of Nyssa; Hilary; Ambrose; Chrysostom; Jerome; and Augustine. Yet Biblical sprinkling decreased, and magical submersion increased.

In the Middle Ages, the neo-paganistic doctrines of the inherent goodness of babies and the denial of their original sin (in certain circles) -- sometimes expressed itself in a rejection of infant baptism. This was found in various heretical sects outside the Church Universal.

Thus the wildcat adoptionistic Paulicians now arose in Armenia at the end of the seventh, and increased especially in the ninth century. Drawing from Marcionism and Manichaeism, most of the Paulicians rejected the Christian sacraments altogether.¹⁷

The non-baptizing Paulicians and the infant-damning Petrobrusians

As Prof. Dr. Edwin Yamauchi has pointed out¹⁸ in his important article Manichaeans: "The Paulician movement, which spread in Armenia from the seventh to the twelfth century --though it repudiated Manichaeism -- resembled it in its dualistic views. The Paulicians came to Bulgaria in the tenth century and helped to develop the Bogomils, who flourished in the Balkans in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The latter in turn stimulated the important Manichaean-like heresy of the Cathars or Albigensians in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries."

In 1012, neo-Manichaeans appeared even in Germany. A group in Treves rejected infant baptism. These were the so- called Cathari -- called 'Bogomils' in the East, and 'Albigensians' in the West. Instead of Biblical baptism, they substituted their own rite (called the consolamentum) -- which also women were allowed to administer. Thereby, they laid on hands -- and imposed John's Gospel onto the candidate's breast.¹⁹

As Prof. Dr. Paul D. Steeves has indicated²⁰ in his article The Paulicians and the Bogomils, "the Paulicians...held that only the Gospel and letters of Paul were divinely inspired. An evil deity...had inspired the rest of the New Testament, and the Old Testament. The Paulicians claimed that this evil deity was the creator and god of this world. The true God of heaven, they said, was opposed to all material things.... Physical and material...sacraments...must have come from the same evil spirit....

"Some of the Bulgars adopted Paulician ideas into a new religious system that acquired the name 'Bogomilism'.... Around the middle of the tenth century, Bogomils began to teach that the first-born son of God was Satanael.... This deity was expelled from heaven. He made a new heaven and earth, in which he placed Adam and Eve. Satanael and Eve became the parents of Cain.... Moses and John the Baptist, according to Bogomil teaching, were both servants of Satanael.... The Bogomils...despised marriage.... They rejected baptism and communion as Satanic rites."

In Western Europe and especially in France, a group of neo-Marcionistic antipaidobaptists arose at the beginning the twelfth century. Around 1105, Peter de Bruys and his 'Petrobrusians' and Henry of Lausanne and his 'Henricians' rejected infant baptism and practised rebaptism.

Unlike nearly all modern Baptists, however, these Petrobrusians held that infants are incapable of being saved! They also revived the Donatistic view that piety is essential for the valid administration of a sacrament. Indeed -- even according to the modern Baptist Erroll Hulse -- just like the later Anabaptists, "Peter de Bruys...rejected large parts of Scripture and embraced the false doctrine of 'soul-sleep.'"²¹

According to the great British Puritan Rev. Dr. William Wall,²² "the Petrobrusians -- otherwise called the 'Henricians' -- did own water-baptism, and yet deny infant-baptism.... Peter Bruis and Henry [of Lausanne were] the two first antipaedobaptist preachers in the world."

However, in denying infant baptism they had no long-term historical stability. Consequently, concluded Wall,²³ they "quickly dwindled away -- or came over to those that owned it." Indeed, with the exception of these non- ecclesiastical and disorganized infant-damning twelfth-century Petrobrusians, "there is no certain evidence of any church or society of men that opposed infant baptism" -- till the antireformational German and Swiss Anabaptists from about 1522 onward.

The Waldensians maintained the infant baptism of tiny Christians

Ritualistic Rome, with her rigid heresy of baptismal regenerationism, increasingly practised baptism specifically by submersion. Yet from about 1180 onward, we also encounter the protests of the proto-Protestant Waldensians.

While rejecting the various ritualistic additions to baptism, these disciples of Peter Waldo did not repudiate the validity of baptisms as such -- not even when performed in the Church of Rome. Indeed, when unable to avail themselves of the rather scarce services of their own mostly itinerant pastors -- some of them very questionably permitted their own children, rather than to remain unbaptized, to be baptized even by Romish priests. Still others, with reluctance, even delayed those baptisms (because not necessary for salvation) -- until their own Waldensian pastors were later available and able to officiate.

"The Waldensians," Martin Luther rightly wrote,²⁴ "baptize little ones.... They proceed, then, to baptize little children." Indeed, as Dr. Wall explained,²⁵ apart from the infant-damning Petrobrusians "there is no certain evidence of any church or society of men that opposed infant baptism -- till those in Germany, A.D. 1522.... For the main body of the Waldenses, there is no probability at all." So too the Baptist A.H. Newman, in his History of Antipedobaptism:²⁶ "The early Waldensian pastors...had scarcely anything in common with Baptists."

For "the Waldenses," as Rev. Prof. Dr. Samuel Miller rightly pointed out in his work Infant Baptism,²⁷ "in their Confessions of Faith and other writings drawn up between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries...for several hundred years before the Reformation...have indeed written on the subject." However, the evidence leads to only one conclusion: "The great body of the Waldenses, were Paedobaptists."

Miller then cited from Waldensian historians themselves: "'Baptism,' say they, 'is administered in a full congregation of the faithful, to the end that he who is received into the church may be reputed and held by all as a Christian brother.... We present our children in baptism.... The things which are not necessary in baptism, are -- the exorcisms; the breathings; the sign of the cross upon the head or forehead of the infant'" and/or the adult.

Later, under the influence of Calvinism, the Waldensians linked up with the Reformed Faith. The Waldensians' own historic adherence to infant baptism is clearly seen in their 1655 Waldensian Confession. For there, they state²⁸ "that we do agree in sound doctrine with all the Reformed Churches of France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland...and others as it is set forth by them in their Confessions -- as also in the Confession of Augsburg."

Indeed, that Protestant Augsburg Confession -- endorsed also by Calvin and the Calvinists -- states²⁹ "that children are to be baptized." It then goes on to "condemn the Anabaptists, who allow not the baptism of children."

The impact on baptism of Thomistic Roman Catholicism

However, it was not the Biblical but rather the magical view of baptism which predominated in the Late Middle Ages. For around 1250, Thomas Aquinas programmed 'baptismal regeneration' as the only view which would soon be standardized officially -- in the Roman Catholic Church.³⁰

Sometimes, Thomas upheld the right view -- for the wrong reason. Thus:³¹ "A sacrament is a sign of a sacred thing -- inasmuch as it sanctifies a man." By the latter he meant, wrongly, that baptism itself regenerates. Again wrongly, he also held that originally it was administered by submersion.³²

Indeed, centuries of baptismal regenerationism had by this time made submersionism very popular. Yet even Thomas conceded that "pouring and sprinkling are also allowable."³³

Sadly, he also opined that baptism is itself an "instrumental cause" initiating saving grace and bringing it to man.³⁴ "Baptism is given this ability, so that anybody is regenerated through it itself":³⁵ ex opere operato.

Baptism, believed Thomas, is therefore the door to the kingdom of heaven.³⁶ It is essential to salvation -- except for those desiring to be baptized yet who die before this can be accomplished. Baptism, he insisted, is regeneration.³⁷ Lay-baptism was and still is permitted -- chiefly because all unbaptized children were and are regarded as being excluded from heaven.³⁸

Under practically-universal baptismal regenerationism, submersion (whether triple or single) was now thought to be a "safer" mode of baptism than sprinkling. This can still be seen throughout ritualistic Eastern 'Orthodoxy' -- as well as in the entire Eastern Rite of Romanism.

However, the water still needed to be applied to the head --as the most important part of the human body.³⁹ The 1284 Council of Nemours limited head-sprinkling to cases of necessity.⁴⁰ But the Pre- Reformation, and especially the Protestant Reformation, would erelong restore that Biblical mode to its rightful place. Acts 2:1-4,16a,33 and Revelation 7:3f & 22:4.

Meantime, the Deformed Church had long abandoned the fourth century's tendency unnecessarily to delay baptism. It had instead, now for many centuries, administered it all too hastily. Yet it now did this -- chiefly because it was superstitiously terrified that all unbaptized persons, including babies, could not go to heaven. Hence also babies were baptized, and often by submersion.

Wycliffe and Huss and their followers on infant baptism

Fortunately, however, the Christian Gospel was still preserved --especially in Northern Europe. In 1377, the English 'Pre-Reformer' John Wycliffe (1324-84) assailed the Romish mass.⁴¹ In 1402, the Wycliffite Huss did the same in Bohemia.⁴²

Neither of them ever questioned infant baptism. To the contrary, Wycliffe declared: "On account of the words in the last chapter of Matthew [28:19], our church introduces believers who answer for the infant....

"The child of a believer is carried into the church to be baptized, according to the rule of Christ." Yet "it seems hard...to assert" like the Romanists, "that this infant will be lost" if dying unbaptized. Nevertheless, "without a doubt, infants are duly baptized with water."⁴³

Wycliffe and his English followers the Lollards rejected baptismal regenerationism. As the great Puritan Rev. Dr. Wall has pointed out,⁴⁴ "one of the articles usually enjoined [by their enemies] for the Lollards...to recant, was (as the martyrologist John Foxe⁴⁵ recites it) this: 'that an infant, though he die unbaptized, shall be saved.'"

Indeed, the Norfolk and Suffolk followers of the 1424 Wycliffite William White were constantly "speaking against [Romish] women baptizing new-born infants in private houses, [and] against the opinion of such as think children damned who depart before they come to their baptism.

"Wycliffe had said that the water itself, without...the Spirit, is of little efficacy.... He and his followers had said that if the parents be good Christians and pray for their child, there is hope that it may be saved -- though it do by some sudden chance die before it can be baptized."

England's great 'Pre-Reformer' John Wycliffe was thus not only a convinced paidobaptist, but apparently both an antirebaptist and opposed to baptismal regenerationism. England's King Richard's Queen Anne was herself a Wycliffite, and the sister of Wenceslaus King of Bohemia (in the modern Czech Republic). It was probably chiefly through her agency that Wycliffe's views were taken over almost without amendment by the Bohemian 'Pre-Reformer' John Huss -- and also by his friend Jerome of Prague, who had become a Wycliffite while at Oxford University before returning to his native Bohemia.⁴⁶

The followers of Huss were called the Hussites. "The Hussites of Bohemia," according to the great Puritan Rev. Dr. Wall,⁴⁷ were of the "opinion...that infants dying unbaptized, may be saved by the mercy of God.... Indeed, they were disciples of our Wycliffe."

The influence of Wycliffe through Huss upon Luther

The Wycliffite Huss would influence Martin Luther himself -- and thus launch the Protestant Reformation. Rome's 'Holy Council' itself pronounced "John Huss to have been and to be...the disciple...of John Wycliffe."

Thus the Romish controversialist Eck, Luther later exclaimed, "vilifies me as a 'heretic' and a Bohemian" -- even "publicly accusing me of the heresy of and support for the Bohemian 'heretics.'" For Eck was indeed accusing Luther: "Many of the things which you adduce, are heresies of...Wycliffe and Huss!"

Luther himself, however, insisted that "John Huss and Jerome of Prague were good Christians." Luther also insisted that "Paul and Augustine are in reality Hussites." And again: "All this is not Luther's work. The credit belongs to John Huss." Thus, "it is high time that we seriously and honestly consider the case of the Bohemians, and come into union with them.... I have no desire to pass judgment...upon John Huss's articles.... I have not yet found any errors in his writings."

Luther even went back behind the Wycliffite Huss -- to the Englishman Wycliffe himself. Declared Luther: "As far as the [papal] 'decretals' are concerned..., they are...things it is not necessary to believe -- as John Wycliffe said." Indeed, in 1520 Luther boldly admitted: "I shall be called a Wycliffite!"

So, according to both Luther himself and his Romish opponent Dr. Eck, Luther was both a Wycliffite and a Hussite. For proof of all the aforesaid claims, see the documentation given in Francis Nigel Lee's 1989 monograph Luther and Calvinism on Antichrist in the Bible.⁴⁸

The rebaptismal error of the Bohemian 'Minor United Brethren'

Now after Romanism's murder of Huss, his numerous followers unfortunately soon split up three different ways. Thus arose the partially-Reformed Calixtines, the militant proto-Protestant Taborites, and finally the separatistic 'Bohemian Brethren' (alias the later 'Moravians').

They, the church historian Dr. Philip Schaff explains,⁴⁹ rightly "denounced the Pope of Rome as Antichrist." Yet they also wisely recognized that something of the historic Christian Church (though grossly deformed) was still to be found even within Romanism, despite its numerous papal perversions.

"At first, they received the sacraments from Calixtine and Romish priests who joined them." Indeed, "in 1467 they effected an independent organization...under the lead of Michael, formerly a Catholic priest." This was the 'Minor United Brethren' -- a minority party within the antirebaptist Bohemian Brethren as a whole.

Yet the minority party then over-reacted. Misinterpreting Joshua 5:2f and Acts 19:3f, it forgot that in Biblical times Josiah and Paul had not recircumcisingly discarded or rebaptizingly jettisoned but retrieved and reformed -- the deformed Church of God.

Too, in Ezekiel 34:11-15, God does not say He would send new shepherds to build new sheepfolds for new sheep. He says He Himself would re-gather His scattered sheep; bring them back into their old sheepfold; and punish not them but the false shepherds who had scattered them.

In Bohemia, however, the ex-priest Michael and his Minor United Brethren did something rather different. They forgot that baptism had replaced circumcision; and that re-baptism is therefore just as impossible as is re- circumcision. Romans 6:1-5f cf. Colossians 2:11-13. They revolutionarily went and elected by lot three priests from their number, and then laid their own ex-Romish hands on them. Then they themselves were all solemnly 'rebaptized' by those three priests.

This latter act was a neo-Donatist and a catabaptistic error, itself certainly not devoid of sacramentalism. Never, however, did these Bohemian Brethren either abandon infant baptism as such -- nor rebaptize as adults those they deemed to have been baptized in infancy. Thus, these Bohemians -- though indeed confused Catabaptists -- were not antipaidobaptistic Anabaptists. Still less were they adult-submersing Baptists.

As even the Pro-Mennonite Verduin has admitted:⁵⁰ "The Brethren did practice infant baptism...of children born to 'believing parents'.... The point was not anti-pedobaptism, but anti-Constantinianism" -- or rather an exaggerated anti- Romanism and a wrongly-'invalidating' Neo-Donatism quite contrary to Holy Scripture (cf. Exodus 4:24-26).

The United Bohemian Brethren recanted the error of rebaptism

Fortunately, some of the later and better theologians of the 'minor party' Bohemian Brethren soon resiled from their catabaptistic position. They then abandoned that 'rebaptismal' radicalism -- perhaps still during the fifteenth century. Indeed, already by the time of their 1504 Bohemian Confession (subsequently published in 1535) -- they had also abandoned a 'purely symbolical' sacramentology similar to that of the later Baptists.

Perhaps under Luther's influence from 1520 onward, they opted for consubstantiation. Later yet, they also gradually abandoned even that -- for the purer truth of Calvinism. See their letter sent to Beza in December 1575 -- and, further, their Bohemian Confession of that same year.

Now it seems this 1467f Bohemian Brethren 'minor party' had already abandoned its catabaptistic doctrines -- by 1504. No doubt its leaders informed the antirebaptismal Luther about this, before he supported them in 1520. At any rate, in their 1504 Bohemian Confession -- as well as in its 1535 Prologue -- they courageously distantiated themselves from the previous rebaptistic lapse of their own ancestors.

Thus, in the 1535 Prologue, the Ministers of the Church of the Bohemian Brethren assured the King of Bohemia and Hungary (Ferdinand I) that they were certainly not Anabaptists. This disclaimer was necessary. For their Romish opponents were then quite falsely alleging that very thing.

Explained these 'Bohemian Brethren':⁵¹ "It is not unknown to anybody that we do not belong to the party of the Anabaptists. For we take our origin from the Church of the Bohemians.... We had already existed many years before them [the Anabaptists], and we do not defend their error-filled teachings.

"We have nothing in common with the Anabaptists...and have taken over nothing from them.... Our association has been in existence for much longer -- from before anyone ever first heard anything about the Anabaptists....

"However, although our ancestors were wont to rebaptize those who had been baptized by Romish priests in former years -- they [our ancestors] still had an altogether different viewpoint and another purpose and an entirely other reason than the Anabaptists. Now, however, even this rebaptism has been abolished completely among us. Pre-eminently hereanent, a short account will be given in this writing -- by the most excellent men of our Church....

"Further. Whenever we are, because of this rebaptism, regarded as Anabaptists -- by the very 'sophisticated' [Romish] priests of Bohemia -- even this weapon is necessarily turned against them. For their ancestors too 're-re-baptized' those who had been baptized by papal priests, but who had thereafter been dedicated in [re]baptism" by the Bohemian Brethren. For the Romish priests then, "by way of reprisal, once again repeated the baptism [already given] by the Bohemian Brethren -- to those [re-]renewed as papists." The Romish priests in Bohemia thus "[re-]rebaptized those [re-]baptized by both us and by our ancestors -- and they forced people, even with violence, to receive their baptism....

"Yet the [Romish] priests maintain they had not faltered nor erred when they rebaptized those baptized by us. For they regarded us as heretics, sectarians and ecclesiastical excommunicatees. Thus it also seemed very right to them -- that our baptism was of no significance, effect and power. This is why they rebaptized....

"We answer that we...like they give nothing to [administering] baptism...among ourselves.... We used to regard the baptism administered by them as invalid, and void.... It is therefore clear that they have just as much guilt toward us, as we have toward them -- in rebaptizing the baptized!"

**The Bohemian Confession(s) on rebaptism from 1504 onward**

Thus the 1535 Prologue. However, even earlier -- also before Luther's conversion to Protestantism alias his return to Biblical Christianity -- we already encounter a 1504 Bohemian Confession to King Vladislav (which was thereafter constantly updated). We now cite from the 1535 version.

Article 12 declares "that children are baptized...and dedicated to Christ...according to His words: 'Permit the children to come to Me, and do not hinder them; for of such is the Kingdom of heaven' [Matthew 19:14]. Therefore, we baptize ours."

For we all "rest upon the words of the Lord for children, in the Name of the Holy Trinity. Indeed, this statement [Matthew 28:19] is general: 'Teach all nations, inasmuch as you baptize them in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.' We do not baptize them again thereafter; and we no longer rebaptize....

"They [a former generation of 'Bohemian Brethren'] previously rebaptized those who wished to be taken up into our churches from others.... When the Romanists violently fought against the 'Bohemians' in matters of faith and religion, the leaders of both Churches clashed with Scripture....

"In several localities the one repeated the baptism of the other, for as long as they persevered in the greatest hatred. For the ancestors of our faith, who then completely separated themselves from them [and indeed from all others], had their own particular association, and administered the sacraments -- and rebaptized all who wished to join their churches....

"This kind of rebaptism existed in our churches -- until we acquired a better insight about this. However, in the course of time -- after through the goodness of God the light of truth illuminated our men more brightly, and after they had investigated the Scriptures more carefully, and after they had at the same time been supported by the help of several learned men -- they realized that rebaptism is not necessary for the Church. And they then immediately discontinued and abolished it, with the approval of all.

"Hence, with the general agreement of our men, every repetition of baptism was abolished.... Nowhere is baptism any longer repeated among us. Yet some priests of the so-called Bohemian-Romish party, just as in former times, even now still rebaptize our people -- although for the most part against their wishes, and in opposition to the parents."⁵²

God maintained His baptism despite the Church's mediaeval meanderings

To a much lesser extent than in Britain under the Wycliffites and in Bohemia under the Hussites, Christianity had continued even in darkest Southern Europe. It had continued not only in the stagnant southeast, but also in the papal southwest -- in spite of the tyranny there. In 1520, Luther called this The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.⁵³ Also the Frenchman Calvin described the woes of the Western Church with great precision.

For, as the great genius of Geneva explained,⁵⁴ even among "the papists" -- there were and are "vestiges of a Church which the Lord has allowed to remain among them.... The Lord...deposited His covenant in Gaul, Italy, Germany, Spain and England.

"When these countries were oppressed by the tyranny of antichrist -- He [the Lord], in order that His covenant might remain inviolable, first preserved baptism there, as an evidence of the covenant. Baptism..., consecrated by His lips, retains its power -- in spite of human depravity."

Luther on infants' faith and reason before their infant baptism

According to Scripture, it is the Spirit-empowered Word which regenerates. James 1:18. According to the Anabaptists, the Spirit alone regenerates -- unmonitorable by the Word. Rome, however, said that regeneration is effected by baptism -- and that baptism then produces faith.

Rome thus held that infants could not believe savingly until after and because they had been baptized. The Anabaptists held that infants cannot believe (nor even profess belief), so that infants should not be baptized -- but that adults could receive baptism (yet only after professing their faith). The Protestant Reformation objected first to Rome and then to the Anabaptists. Instead, it pointed both of them -- back to the Bible.

Probably even before his formal break with Rome, Luther had realized -- through studying Holy Scripture -- that baptism presupposes faith within the baptizee himself. From the Bible alone, Luther was led to deny the Romish error (and the later Anabaptist heresy) that unbaptized infants cannot believe -- and to demonstrate the contrary. On this, see Francis Nigel Lee: Revealed to Babies (Confederate Series, Commonwealth Publishing, Rowlett, Texas, 1987).

To Luther, Genesis 17:7 teaches that the Triune God is the Lord not only of adult believers but also of their seed. Himself the seed of believing parents, John the baptizer believed while yet in his mother's womb. Luke 1:41.

Luther also saw that Matthew 18:6f refers to little ones who believe in Jesus. Indeed, in Matthew 19:14 -- Jesus even declares that only those adults are fit for the kingdom of heaven, who believe like such infants.⁵⁵

Thus Luther rightly realized that John the baptizer -- as when a baby born to believing parents -- was himself already a believer in Christ, even before John's own birth. Luke 1:36-44. That was prior to any possible circumcision and/or baptism John may have received either in infancy or thereafter.

Referring to Christ's blessing of the children in Mark 10:14f, Luther insisted⁵⁶ that infant faith is present "before or certainly in the baptism.... If any baptism is certain of success, the baptism of children is most certain... In adults there may be deception, because of their mature reason. But in children there can be no deception, because of their slumbering reason." And if such infants indeed have a "slumbering reason" -- then why not also: a slumbering faith?

Now what exactly is this 'slumbering' reason? Luther explains: "Tell me, is the Christian deprived of his reason when he is asleep? Certainly, then, his faith and God's grace do not leave him! If faith remains with the sleeping Christian while his reason is not conscious of the faith -- why should there not be faith [with]in children, before reason is aware of it? A similar situation obtains, when a Christian is engaged in strenuous labour and is not [then] conscious of his faith and reason. Will you say that, on account of this, his faith has come to an end?" Of course not!

Luther later told the Anabaptists that Mark (16:16) does not say 'he who confesses he has faith and is baptized, shall be saved.' For Mark says instead that 'he who believes and is baptized, shall be saved.'

Explained Luther:⁵⁷ "It is true that a man should believe, for baptism.... But his faith, you do not know.... Because all men are liars, and only God knows the heart.... I do not get baptized because I am sure of faith, but because God has commanded it.... Who then can exclude the little children? ... We have a command to offer every one the universal gospel and the universal baptism. The children must also be included. We plant and water; and leave God to give the increase."

Luther on covenant infants' faith at or even before their baptism

Well-known is Luther's (quasi-Calvinian) emphasis on 'infant faith' at and even before infant baptism. For, he insists, "children must themselves believe -- lest the majesty of the Word and sacrament be obscured."⁵⁸ So "we are of the opinion and the expectation that the child should believe, and we pray that God give it faith. Yet we do not baptize it for that reason, but because God has so commanded."⁵⁹

Already in 1521, Luther clearly stated⁶⁰ that "without faith no sacrament is of any use.... The sacrament of baptism is a divine sign or seal given by virtue of the promise and Word of Christ in the last chapter of Mark [16:16]. 'He that believes and is baptized, shall be saved.'"

Again, Luther insisted⁶¹ the Church prays for God to pour out His blessing upon the one to be baptized -- "so that he may become worthy to come to grace at his baptism.... The children themselves believe...and have their own faith which God works within them -- through the faithful intercession of their parents who faithfully bring them to the Christian Church.... Through their [parental] intercession and assistances, the children receive their own faith from God."

Luther appealed to infant circumcision (Genesis 17:10f), and asserted against the Anabaptists that children actually believe. Matthew 18:6 & 19:14. Also against the Romanists he insisted: "Baptism helps no one. It is also to be given to no one --except he believes for himself. Without personal faith, no one is to be baptized." Anabaptists and Lutherans, listen to Luther!

The roots and the rise of the Anabaptist heretics

Only around 1522 did the Anabaptists emerge. They were subdivided into many different varieties, with great differences among each another. The great German church historian Rev. Prof. Dr. Albrecht Ritschl, in his famous three-volume History of Pietism, attributed their origin to the mediaeval 'spiritual Franciscans.' Drs. G. Kramer, the noted Dutch historian of doctrine, considered⁶² the Anabaptists to have agreed with Romanism in many weighty matters of faith.

Indeed, some of Anabaptism's views seem to derive -- also via Francke and Paracelsus -- even from the neo- paganistic Pre-Renaissance. This is unquestionably so in the cases of Campanus, Denck, Muenzer and Servetus. See Francis Nigel Lee: A Christian Introduction to the History of Philosophy, Craig, Nutley N.J., 1969, pp. 142ff.

Even modern Baptist(ic) church historians have agreed with many of these assessments. Thus, in his book The Anabaptist Story, Prof. Dr. W.R. Estep rightly insisted⁶³ that "not one of the Swiss Anabaptist leaders came from a Waldensian background.... All of the early Anabaptist leaders came originally from the Roman Church...or directly out of Catholicism into Anabaptist life."

Even more interesting is the admission of history professor Dr. K.R. Davis in his book Anabaptism and Asceticism, published by the modern Mennonite Anabaptists themselves. "The Marburg Anabaptists," explained Davis,⁶⁴ "question[ed] prospective members and those requesting the sign of baptism thus: 'If need should require it, are you prepared to devote all your possessions to the service of the brotherhood?'" Behold the dechristianizing advocacy of communism at anabapticized baptisms!

Indeed, based on his Hutterite studies, the authority Friedmann has observed "that Anabaptist baptism might perhaps be compared to a monastic vow.... Novak advocates the same idea...that in general 'Anabaptism represents a laicization of the Catholic monastic spirituality.'"

Now most Anabaptists departed much further from Scripture than Romanism had -- and upheld even a neo-paganistic denial of the incarnation. Admitted Williams:⁶⁵ "The ancient heretical christology (originally developed by Valentinus and assimilated by Apollinarius)...was variously communicated to the sixteenth-century Radicals..., in part indirectly by the perpetration of the 'celestial flesh heresy' in Bogomile and Cathar circles."

True, some of the simpler Anabaptists -- such as the widow Idelette Stordeur, even before she presbyterianized and married the Protestant Reformer John Calvin -- were indeed sincere Christians. Yet as to their distinctives, even when at their very best, the Anabaptist leaders can most appropriately be described as sub-Christian. What was good in them, did not originate with them. What originated with them, was not good.

The Anabaptists were divided into many varieties. Yet they were nevertheless all apparently influenced by the dualistic, neo-Manichaean, anti-Old-Testamentistic and antipaidobaptistic⁶⁶ Oriental sect of the ninth-century Paulicians.

Indeed, most of the Anabaptists were also tinged by the French Petrobrusian neo-Marcionistic antipaidobaptist soul- sleepers of the twelfth century. Thus the modern Baptist church historians Rev. Prof. Drs. H.C. Vedder and W.M.S. West.⁶⁷

Dr. West divided those "Anabaptists" inter alia into 'Spiritualists' and 'Anti-Trinitarians.' He has held that the 'Spiritualists' include "Thomas Muenzer...and...eventually Andreas Carlstadt.... The most famous names among the 'Anti-Trinitarians' are Miguel Servetus...and Faustus Socinus."

Some Anabaptists believed babies were 'safe.' Others believed they were lost -- because deemed to be incapable of professing, or even of possessing, any faith in Christ at all. Again, some Anabaptists believed baptism was merely a sign of faith; others believed it made prior faith secure. Yet others believed faith was vain without baptism. But all Anabaptists believed it was wrong, and sometimes even sinful, to baptize babies.

The Anabaptist attack against the Protestant Reformation

The Protestant Reformation commenced when the paidobaptist Martin Luther of Wittenberg issued his Ninety-Five Theses against the Romish deformation of Christ's Church. That occurred on Reformation Day, 31st October, 1517. However, by 1522, not just reactionary Romish priests (from the ultra-right wing) but also revolutionary Anabaptist weavers (from the lunatic left) were fanatically and viciously attacking the great Reformer.

As the famous Lutheran scholar Steimle has explained:⁶⁸ "In December [1521] the Zwickau prophets Niclas Storch, Thomas Drechsel...and Marcus Stuebner...appeared in Wittenberg claiming direct divine inspiration." They then went on "and preached the overturn of present conditions....

"The City Council, in the endeavor to restore order, on January 24th 1522...adopted a 'Worthy Ordinance for the Princely City of Wittenberg' in which...a date was fixed on which the images should be removed from the parish church.... But the excited populace did not await the day. Taking the matter into its own hands it invaded the church, tore images and pictures from the walls, and burned them up."

As Prof. Dr. Robert D. Linder has pointed out,⁶⁹ the weavers "Nicholas Storch, Thomas Drechsel and Marcus Stuebner...preached a radical biblicism -- which included rejection of infant baptism; denial of the need for a professional ministry and organized religion, because all 'godly' men were under the direct influence of the Spirit; special revelation through visions and dreams; the imminent return of Christ; and perhaps psychopannych[ian]ism.

"Driven from the Saxon town of Zwickau where they originated and where they had influenced Thomas Muenzer, they visited Wittenberg in December 1521 during Luther's absence.... Their millenial 'enthusiasm' and outspoken criticism of the Wittenberger's liturgy, led to their expulsion in 1522."

Significantly, also the modern British Baptist historian Erroll Hulse has rightly called⁷⁰ these first German Anabaptists "radical prophets." Explained Hulse: "The leaders of this group were Storch, Stubner and Muenzer -- the latter of ill-fame, because of his...claim of prophecy: the ability of inspired speech similar to the claims of neo- Pentecostals today.... Carlstadt, a well-known personality in town, was much influenced by the visitors. Eventually, he came to the position where he refused to administer infant baptism."

The historian Prof. Dr. Robert G. Clouse has described⁷¹ how "when Luther returned to Wittenberg, Carlstadt left for Orlamuende...and renounced his academic degrees. He took an anticlerical attitude, began dressing as a peasant, wearing no shoes.... These actions were based upon his conviction that inner religious experience demanded social equality. Luther visited Orlamuende.... In a debate with him, Carlstadt claimed he spoke by direct revelation of the Holy Spirit rather than with the 'papistical' talk of Luther."

Anabaptism's Muenzer or Muentzer: the monster of Muhlhausen

In his important article on Thomas Muen(t)zer, Clouse rightly indicated⁷² that "he preached in a violent way.... He also organized his followers into bands, ready to take up arms....

"Some of these disciples destroyed a shrine.... This action...caused Duke John and Duke Frederick of Saxony to order Muenzer to preach before them. In his sermon...he demanded that the rulers use force to establish the true Gospel....

"After some months in South Germany, he appeared at Muhlhausen, where he preached to the townsmen and helped to involve them in the Peasant Revolt.... His teaching against infant baptism and his emphasis on the [alleged new] inspiration of the Holy Spirit, influenced other Anabaptists.... Marxist historians emphasize Muenzer, because he anticipated later social revolutionaries."

Even Harvard's sympathetic Prof. Dr. G.H. Williams has admitted⁷³ "that Thomas Muenzer was a fierce fanatic, possessed of a demoniac spirit." When previously a Romanist, "he became father confessor in a Bernadine convent" -- yet was plagued with "radical doubt as to the existence of God."

However, after "he entered the circle of the three so-called Zwickau prophets," Muenzer went "preaching a radical Biblicism characterized by direct revelation in visions and dreams..., the abandonment of infant baptism, [and] belief in the millenium --to be preceded by the ascendancy of the Turk as Antichrist.... He appears to have encouraged the postponement of baptism until children should be of sufficient age to understand the action."

In his communistic 1524 Sermon Before the Princes, Muenzer called apparently Luther "Brother Fattened Swine" and "Brother Soft Life" and even "Mr. Liar" -- and the Lutheran theologians, "vicious reprobates."⁷⁴ Preaching revolution, Muenzer called upon the common people to crush the 'godless.'⁷⁵

As Williams has explained:⁷⁶ "Muenzer reinterpreted the politically conservative text of Romans chapter thirteen -- into a revolutionary passage...making the Ernestine princes by hortatory anticipation the executors of God's wrath against the godless and the protectors of the revolutionary saints. At the same time, Muenzer warned that if the princes should fail to identify themselves with the 'covenantal people' -- the sword would pass from them to the people....

"Sovereignty resided in the godly people" -- meaning Muenzer's people! "He took the outpouring of the Spirit in himself and others as confirmation of the prophecy of Joel (chs. 2:27-32 & 3:1-4)." This, Muenzer combined "with the equalization of the saints in the common possession both of the gifts of the Spirit and the goods of life."

Also today, the message of Muenzer is alive and well on planet Earth. Compare George Orwell's Animal Farm and his Nineteen Eighty-Four, and even Ron Sider's 1984 Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.

Huebmaier the Anabaptist and the road to revolution

Muenzer was apparently much encouraged by his fellow South German, Balthasar Huebmaier of Wausthut (or Waldshut). He had been a Roman Catholic priest who had studied under Luther's implacable opponent, Dr. John Eck. Huebmaier himself had persecuted Jews -- and helped promote the burning down of their synagogue in Regensberg.⁷⁷

According to the Baptists Vedder and Estep,⁷⁸ "foot washing was practised by Huebmaier even before believer's baptism was introduced." Yet by Easter 1525, after not baptizing but merely 'dedicating' most infants (yet still baptizing them when parents demanded it), Huebmaier introduced rebaptism in Waldshut. He himself rebaptized some three hundred Christians. This he did by sprinkling or pouring, but not by submersion.⁷⁹

Now those who practise infant baptism, averred Huebmaier, "rob us of the true baptism.... One must not baptize infants.... If so, I may baptize my dog or my donkey; or I may circumcise girls.... I may make idols out of St. Paul and St. Peter -- I may bring infants to the Lord's Supper!"⁸⁰

To Huebmaier,⁸¹ "infant baptism is a deception invented...by men.... The sprinkling of infants...is no baptism, nor is it worthy of such a name."

1527 saw the publication of his work The Reason and Cause Why Every Man Who Was Christened in Infancy Is Under Obligation to be Baptized According to the Ordinances of Christ Even Though He Be One Hundred Years Old.⁸² And in his last polemic writing (On Infant Baptism),⁸³ he not only condemned infant baptism but even declared that it actually does the infant harm.

Moreover, Huebmaier was also an anti-pacifistic Anabaptist. See his work On the Sword (translated by the Baptist Vedder).⁸⁴ Huebmaier made common cause even with the revolutionistic Anabaptist Thomas Muenzer.

Bullinger charged Huebmaier with a restless spirit of innovation. The latter certainly was extremely brazen. Boldly, Huebmaier had claimed even Luther in support of his views.

So Luther retorted that "Balthasar Huebmoer [Huebmaier] quotes me, among others, by name -- in his blasphemous book on rebaptism -- as if I were of his foolish mind. But I take comfort in the fact that neither friend nor foe will believe such a lie --since I have sufficiently in my sermons shown my faith in infant baptism." In addition, Luther classed the Anabaptists with the Jewish fanatics at the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. He also compared them to the Donatistic circumcellions who later ravaged the African Church.⁸⁵

The Anabaptists and the 1525 Peasant War in Germany

Matters exploded early in 1525, upon the publication of the Twelve Articles of all the Peasants (allegedly and indeed apparently authored by Huebmaier). As the Lutheran theologian Charles M. Jacobs has pointed out:⁸⁶ "The social ferment out of which the Peasants' War arose, had its beginning far back of the Reformation. It had been in progress for a full century before the Reformation began.... Heretical ideas of many kinds had combined.... The hope of the coming millenium glowed most brightly in the hearts of those who had the least to hope for this side of it....

"This view of it was zealously spread by radical...preachers of religious revolution. The best know of these men, were Thomas Muenzer and Balthasar Huebmaier.... [Now] Muenzer, Huebmaier and others were preaching religious revolution.... The Twelve Articles...were adopted originally by the peasants...from January or February 1525....

"On the basis of extensive research, Wilhelm Stolze [Peasant War and Reformation 1926] has suggested that they were written by Huebmaier.... A valuable edition of the most important sources, is that of Boehmer: Documents for the History of the Peasant War and the Anabaptists, Bonn, 1910."

Also the Dutch Christian Encyclopaedia has linked Huebmaier to the Peasant War.⁸⁷ Indeed, the Schaff- Herzog Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge⁸⁸ even mentions his acquaintance with the monster Muenzer.

Now of the 1525 Twelve Articles of all the Peasants, the Fourth condemned the "custom hitherto that no poor man has had the power to be allowed to catch game, wild fowls, or fish in running water.... This seems to us altogether improper." Further, the Tenth Article communistically demanded what it called "the common fields" -- which, it alleged, "once belonged to a community. We would take these back again into the hands of our communities!"⁸⁹

Revolutionary insurrection spread rapidly across the whole of Southwestern and Central Germany. Soon, all was in uproar. Palaces, castles, convents and libraries were all put to the torch by Muenzer's Anabaptists. Ten years later, they even ruled -- from the City of Muenster.

As Karl Marx's colleague the famous communist Friedrich Engels remarked,⁹⁰ "the peasants and plebeians...united in a revolutionary party whose demands and doctrines were most clearly expressed by Muenzer.... The millenium and the day of judgement over the degenerated church and corrupted world proposed and described by the mystic, seemed to Muenzer imminently close....

"Under the cloak of Christian forms, he preached a kind of pantheism...and at times even approached atheism.... There is no heaven in the beyond.... There is no devil but man's evil lusts.... His political program approached communism.... Even on the eve of the [1848] February Revolution, there was more than one modern communist sect that had not such a well-stocked theoretical arsenal as was Muenzer's in the sixteenth century....

"By 'the kingdom of God' Muenzer understood a society in which there would be no class differences or private property and...authority independent of or foreign to the members of the society.... A union[!] was established to implement all this.

"Muenzer set to work at once to organize the union. His sermons became still more militant and revolutionary.... He depicted the previous oppression in fiery colours, and countered it with his dream vision of the millennium of social[istic] republican equality. He published one revolutionary pamphlet after another and sent emissaries in all directions. 'All the world must suffer a big jolt' [proclaimed Muenzer]. 'There will be such a game, that the ungodly will be thrown off their seats and the downtrodden will rise!'" Thus the classic communist Friedrich Engels.

Proclaimed Muenzer:⁹¹ "All things shall be common, and occasionally they shall be distributed according to each one's necessity.... Whatever prince, count or lord will not submit to this, and being forewarned -- his head shall be stricken off or he shall be hung!"

Muenzer then collected together eight thousand peasants, and ransacked the cloisters and the houses of the rich throughout Thuringia. However, he was solidly defeated at the Battle of Frankhausen in 1525, and beheaded shortly thereafter.

Muenzerite Anabaptists still continued to help spread the sedition

The death of Muenzer was by no means the end of the bloodshed. From Thuringia, the peasant revolt now spread to Swabia. There, the preaching of Melchior Hofmann -- later the leading Anabaptist -- inspired the peasants to make their demands, as laid down in the Twelve Articles.

Without waiting for the nobility to reply, the peasants revolted. In eight days, one hundred and seventy-nine castles and twenty-eight cloisters were burnt down. Many of the nobility were butchered. But the princes finally arose against the fanatics, and the revolt ended in the bloody death of nearly one hundred thousand peasants.

Friedrich Engels was by no means the only leading communist to praise these Anabaptists (in his 1850 book The Peasant War in Germany). Marx's other associate, Karl Kautsky, did the same --in his 1894 book Communism in the Middle Ages and in the Time of the Reformation, and also in his 1897 other book Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation. Ever since, communist text-books world-wide have been doing exactly the same.

In the same year of the Peasant War, Luther published his 1525 essay Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants. Clearly referring to the Anabaptist Thomas Muenzer and his supporters, Luther insisted⁹² that the Peasant War was "the devil's work...and in particular...the work of the archdevil who rules at Muhlhausen....

"The peasants are not content to be themselves the devil's own, but they force and compel many good people against their wills to join their devilish league and so make them partakers of all of their own wickedness and damnation.... How many martyrs could now be made -- by the bloodthirsty peasants and the murdering prophets!"

Luther on the antinomian and antipaidobaptistic Muenzerites

Luther later asked:⁹³ "What was Muenzer seeking, except to become a new Turkish emperor? He was possessed of the spirit of lies, and therefore there was no holding him back. He had to go at the other work of the devil, take the sword and murder and rob, as the spirit of murder drove him -- and he created such a rebellion, and such misery."

Then Luther again warned⁹⁴ against "poisonous and dangerous preachers who take the side of one party alone and call the lords names -- in order to tickle the people and court the peasants like Muenzer, Carlstadt and other fanatics.... If Muenzer and Carlstadt and their comrades[!] had not been allowed to sneak and creep into other men's houses and parishes whither they had neither call nor command to go -- that whole great calamity [of the Peasant War] would not have happened."

Luther further contrasted the Biblical basis of the Lutherans with the pseudo-spiritualistic fanaticism of Thomas Muenzer's Anabaptists. "They devised the slogan: 'Spirit! Spirit! The Spirit must do it! The letter killeth!'" -- exclaimed Luther. "Thus Muenzer [derisively] called us Wittenberg theologians, 'men learned in the Scriptures' -- and [deludedly called] himself, 'the man taught of the Spirit'.... There you see how the devil had armed himself -- and built up his barricades!"⁹⁵

Indeed, Luther soon regarded⁹⁶ Revelation 8:8 as a picture of those "who boast their spirits above all the Scripture and move -- like this 'burning mountain' -- between heaven and earth." Such, he insisted, "in our day, do Muenzer and the fanatics." The average German Anabaptist, wrote Luther, wished to have "nothing to do with baptism" (meaning infant baptism). Yet that was just one of the many errors of these Anabaptists. For -- added Luther -- "another rejects the sacrament; still another teaches that there will be another world between this one and the last judgment; and some assert that Christ is not divine."⁹⁷

All the Anabaptists rejected infant baptism. Indeed, many of them further rejected even adult baptism -- whenever administered by the Romanists, or even by the Protestants. Clearly, the Anabaptists were not interested in the Reformation of Christ's Church.

However, with their new and sectarian "gathered church" concept -- the Anabaptists were indeed interested in revolution against what they regarded as a Christless social order. Consequently, in 1525 Luther now rightly called them "the new false prophets"⁹⁸ of Germany.

Luther's antirebaptismal work Concerning Rebaptism

In his own work Concerning Rebaptism (1528), Luther thrashed the Anabaptists. They had over-emphasized the subjective and downgraded the objective side of the rite. Yet, Luther retorted, important as faith is -- the Word, and not faith, is the basis of baptism. Any would-be baptizer who regards faith on the part of the baptizee as essential for the validity of the baptism -- can never consistently administer baptism. For he can never be certain that faith really is present.

It is possible, conceded Luther, that some might conceivably doubt the validity of their own infant baptisms. For they might well have no irrebutable evidence that they even then already truly believed. They might then conceivably wish to request (re-)baptism -- when adults.

That request, however, should not be granted. Instead, insisted Luther, the one making this request should be told that even if he were thus to be 'baptized' a second time -- Satan might well soon trouble him again, as to whether he then too really had faith. Then he would have to be 'baptized' yet again -- a third time -- and so on, ad infinitum, for just as long as any such doubts kept recurring.

"For it often happens that one who thinks that he has faith," explained Luther, "has none whatever -- and that one who thinks that he has no faith but only doubts, actually believes. We are not told 'he who knows that he believes' [shall be saved]..., but 'he that believes [and is baptized] shall be saved!' [Mark 16:16]....

"The man who bases his baptism on his faith -- is not only uncertain.... He is...godless and hypocritical.... For he puts his trust in what is not his own -- viz., a gift which God has given him -- and not in the Word of God alone." Consequently, even though at the time of baptism there be no faith -- the baptism, nevertheless, is still valid.⁹⁹

The condemnation of Anabaptism in the Lutheran Symbols

The 1530 Augsburg Confession (later endorsed also by John Calvin), declared¹⁰⁰ that the Lutheran churches "condemn the Anabaptists...who imagine that the Holy Spirit is given to men without the outward Word, through their own preparation and works.... They condemn the Anabaptists who allow not the baptism of children....

"They condemn the Anabaptists...who teach that those who have once been holy, cannot fall again.... They condemn the Anabaptists who...contend that some men may attain to such a perfection in this life that they cannot sin.... They condemn the Anabaptists who forbid...civil offices [to Christians].... They condemn the Anabaptists who think that there shall be an end of torments to condemned men and the devils."

Also in the Formula of Concord, the later Lutherans declared¹⁰¹ that "the Anabaptists are divided into many sects -- of which some maintain more, some fewer, errors. Nevertheless, in a general way -- they all profess such a doctrine as can be tolerated neither in the Church; nor by the police and in the commonwealth; nor in daily [domestic and social] life."

The Formula then mentions "Anabaptist Articles which cannot be endured in the Church." It claims that "this 'righteousness' of the Anabaptists consists in great part in a certain arbitrary and humanly-devised sanctimony, and in truth is nothing else than some new sort of monkery."

These intolerable Anabaptist Articles include the one "that infants, not baptized, are not sinners before God -- but just and innocent." Concerning "baptism," continues the Lutheran Formula of Concord, "in the opinion of the Anabaptists, they [infants] have no need" of baptism or of salvation. "Infants [say the Anabaptists] ought not to be baptized until they attain the use of reason, and are able themselves to profess their faith....

"They [the Anabaptists] neither make much account of the baptism of children, nor take care to have their children baptized -- which conflicts with the express words of the divine promise (Genesis 17:7 sqq.). For this only holds good to those who observe the covenant of God and do not contemn it."

The Anabaptists again quite wrongly further teach "that a godly man ought to have no dealings at all with the Ministers of the Church who teach the Gospel of Christ according to the tenor of the Augsburg Confession, and rebuke the preachings and errors of the Anabaptists." Thus, they 'shunned' saints!

The Formula also condemns "Anabaptist Articles which cannot be endured in the Commonwealth. I. That the office of the magistrate is not, under the New Testament, a condition of life that pleases God. II. That a Christian man cannot discharge the office of a magistrate with a safe and quiet conscience. III. That a Christian man cannot with a safe conscience administer and execute the office of a magistrate if matters so require against the wicked, nor subjects implore for their defence that power which the magistrate has received of God. IV. That a Christian man cannot with a safe conscience take an oath, nor swear obedience and fidelity to his prince or magistrate. V. That the magistrate, under the New Testament, cannot with a good conscience punish criminals with death." Anabaptism spurns the Bible's death penalty!

The Formula next condemns "Anabaptist Articles which cannot be endured in daily life. I. That a godly man cannot with safe conscience hold or possess any property, but that whatever means he may possess he is bound to bestow them all as common good. II. That a Christian man cannot with a safe conscience either keep an inn, or carry on trade, or forge weapons. III. That it is permitted married people who think differently in religion to divorce themselves, and to contract matrimony with some other person who agrees with them in religion." Anabaptism hates capital, weapons, and marital fidelity!

The Formula further condemns the following "Errors of the [Anabaptist] Schwenkfeldians. I. That all those who affirm Christ according to the flesh to be a creature, have no true knowledge of the heavenly King and His reign. II. That the flesh of Christ through its exaltation has in such wise received all the divine attributes, that Christ as He is man is altogether like to the Father...and that the flesh of Christ pertains to the essence of the Blessed Trinity. III. That the ministry of the Word...is not that instrument whereby God the Holy Ghost teaches men.... IV. That the water of baptism is not a means whereby the Lord seals adoption in the children of God."

Switzerland disturbed by the Anabaptist heresies

In the years culminating in 1525, the Anabaptists had torn Germany apart. Ominously, a similar situation was now threatening to develop in Switzerland too. For the rumblings of the Peasant War in Germany soon reached especially the German-speaking areas also of Switzerland.

Zwingli was rightly alarmed. The Anabaptists were radical revolutionists. Their baptismal views, he felt, were relatively unimportant. But their social views -- as reflected in their demand that Christians get themselves rebaptized -- made Luther's previous controversy even against Rome now seem peripheral.

Schaff has shown¹⁰² that "radicalism was identical with the Anabaptist movement, but the baptismal question was secondary. It involved an entire reconstruction of the Church and of the social order. It meant revolution.... Nothing is more characteristic of radicalism and sectarianism, than an utter want of historical sense and respect for the past.... It rejects even the Bible as an external authority, and relies on inward inspiration....

"The radical opinion...rejected Luther's theory of forensic, solifidian justification." The radical Anabaptists replaced sola fide (by faith alone) with sola revolutione (by revolution alone). "They hoped at first to carry Zwingli with them, but in vain.... They then charged him with treason to the truth, and hated him worse than the pope.... The demand for rebaptism virtually unbaptized and unchristianized the entire Christian world, and completed the rupture with the historic Church." Thereby, the Anabaptists existentialistically cut the continuous cord connecting the present to the past generations --and to the future.

Unlike the communists, modern antipaidobaptists are understandably embarrassed by the German Thomas Muenzer. Instead, they hasten to claim their descent rather from the 'milder' Anabaptists -- such as Conrad Grebel and his Swiss circle. Thus, as regards all of the Anabaptists, the modern British Baptist Hulse has claimed¹⁰³ that to be "the first baptism -- when Grebel baptised Blaurock in the home of Manz on January 21 1525." However, Hulse was silent about an adulatory letter from Grebel to Muenzer some four months earlier, already written on September 5th 1524.

It was addressed¹⁰⁴ "to the sincere and true proclaimer of the Gospel, Thomas Muenzer at Allstedt in the Hartz, our faithful and beloved brother with us in Christ." Grebel started off: "Dear Brother Thomas." Soon thereafter, it further stated: "Thy book against false faith and baptism was brought to us, and we were more fully informed and confirmed, and it rejoiced us wonderfully that we found one who was of the same Christian mind with us....

"On the matter of baptism, thy book pleases us well, and we desire to be further instructed by thee. We understand that even an adult is not to be baptized without Christ's rule of binding and loosing.... All children who have not yet come to the discernment of the knowledge of good and evil and have not yet eaten of the tree of knowledge...are surely saved by the suffering of Christ the new Adam....

"As to the [Protestant and Non-Anabaptist] objection that faith is demanded of all who are to be saved -- we [Non-Protestant Anabaptists] exclude children from this and hold that they are saved without faith[!].... We do not believe that children must be baptized.... Infant baptism is a senseless, blasphemous abomination[!] -- contrary...even to the papacy....

"Thou knowest this ten times better, and hast published thy protests against infant baptism.... I have already begun to reply to all (excepting thyself) who have hitherto misleadingly and knowingly written on baptism and have deceived concerning the senseless blasphemous form of baptism -- as, for instance, Luther.... I, C[onrad]. Grebel, meant to write to Luther in the name of all of us, and to exhort him to cease from his caution --which he uses without Scripture."

Then, in a "Postscript or Second letter," Conrad Grebel continued: "Dearly beloved Brother Thomas!" Condemning again "the idolatrous caution of Luther," Grebel then stated that especially the Zwinglians "rail at us as knaves from the pulpit in public, and call us 'Satan changed into angels of light' [cf. Second Corinthians 11:14]....

"Establish and teach only...unadulterated baptism! ... Thou art better informed than a hundred of us.... Ye are far purer than our men here, and those at Wittenberg.... [Signed:] Conrad Grebel..., Felix Manz...and seven new young Muenzers against Luther."

Zwingli's first condemnation of the Anabaptists' views on baptism

When first contacted by Anabaptists in Zurich, even as early as 1525 the Protestant Reformer Zwingli never countenanced the rebaptism of those already baptized in infancy. To the contrary, even then he was already declaring:¹⁰⁵ "I leave baptism untouched.... We must practice infant baptism, so as not to offend our fellow men."

Zwingli first enjoyed some little friendship with the incipient Anabaptists in Switzerland. They seemed allies against Romanism, and initially supported his reforms. But when he clung to paidobaptism, they opposed him.

For the Swiss Anabaptists at length began not only to get themselves 'rebaptized' -- but also stedfastly to refuse baptism to their own covenant infants. So Zwingli later condemned their views in his 1525 Christian Introduction of the Zurich Council to the Pastors and Preachers (in the section Concerning the Abrogation of the Law).

Now Zwingli had invited the Anabaptists to have private discussions with him. In vain. So a public disputation followed -- by order of the magistrate -- on January 17th 1525.

In his accompanying letter to Vadian, Zwingli wrote: "The issue is not baptism, but revolt!" Still, Zwingli rightly believed that John the baptizer had baptized not just God-professing adults but also their babies.¹⁰⁶ He further believed that First Corinthians 7:14 implies those babies' eligibility also for visible church membership.¹⁰⁷ So he rightly launched a vigorous verbal attack against the Anabaptists.

Exclaimed Zwingli: "Their rebaptism is a clear sign that they intend to create a new and different Church. Biblical baptism, however -- just like circumcision -- can be performed once only. Once in the covenant, a man remains there. The New Testament knows only one baptism [Ephesians 4:4-6]. Neither Christ nor the holy Apostles ever repeated it -- or taught that it needed to be repeated."¹⁰⁸

Zwingli further pointed out that "the soul is cleansed by the grace of God, and not by any external thing whatever." Consequently, "baptism cannot wash away sin." Furthermore, Zwingli rightly saw that "the children of Christians are not less the children of God than their parents are -- or than the children in Old Testament times were." So, seeing they "belong to God -- who will refuse them baptism?"¹⁰⁹

The antitrinitarian Anabaptist leaders Jan Denck (a pantheistic universalist) and Ludwig Haetzer (an adulterer and accused bigamist)¹¹⁰ then denounced Zwingli. He was, they said¹¹¹ -- worse than the pope. The Anabaptists had stubbornly rejected the baptism of covenant infants. So Zwingli now finally -- and publically -- condemned their views.¹¹²

The Reformer Bullinger was an eye-witness at that great debate. It took place in the Zurich Council Hall on January 17th 1525. The Anabaptists argued that infants cannot believe. But Zwingli showed that infant baptism had replaced infant circumcision (Genesis 17 cf. Colossians 2:11-13), and that the infants of Christians are themselves 'holy' (First Corinthians 7:14). He published his arguments (five months later) in a book. That bore the very appropriate title: On Baptism, Rebaptism, and Infant Baptism.

Zwingli won that debate, hands down. Another disputation was held in March, and a third in November -- with the same result. As Bullinger later declared, the Anabaptists just could not answer Zwingli.¹¹³

The formal birth and constitution of Switzerland's Anabaptists

Within four days of being trounced by Zwingli in the great debate of 17th January 1525, at one of their sectarian meetings the ex-priest Blaurock defiantly asked his colleague Grebel to rebaptize him in the home of Manz. Blaurock then in turn rebaptized all the others present. Thus was Swiss Anabaptism formally launched.

The Baptist Hulse has well described¹¹⁴ this situation. "This idea crystallised in the first baptism, when Grebel baptised Blaurock in the home of Mantz on January 21 1525.... Evening gatherings in the homes of the dissenters continued, and represented the first informal beginnings of gathered Baptist churches in the area. In the course of the week following the first baptism, thirty-five were baptised by affusion (pouring) at Zollikon."

What a concession from the Baptist Hulse! The members of "the first...Baptist churches" -- Hulse has assured us -- were "baptised by affusion" alias pouring, and not by submersion. Subsequently too, Blaurock baptized by sprinkling; and Manz by pouring.¹¹⁵ As Richard Nitsche has shown, in his History of the Anabaptists in Switzerland at the Time of the Reformation: "We hardly encounter a single formal submersion, such as indeed occurred later."¹¹⁶

Blaurock himself then lashed out. According to the 1525 Anabaptist Hutterite Chronicle,¹¹⁷ Blaurock insisted that both Luther and Zwingli had "let go of the true baptism of Christ" -- and had "followed instead the pope, with infant baptism..., into a false Christianity.... Luther and Zwingli defended...this false teaching [pedobaptism] -- which they really learned from the father and head of Antichrist."

It will be recalled that Grebel had rebaptized Blaurock in the home of Manz. Fortunately, Manz had rightly told his Swiss Anabaptist colleagues that John the baptizer had sprinkled [and not submersed]. Consequently, the three of them now did the same. Unfortunately, however, they did not follow John's sprinkling of also the babies of believers. Nor did they follow John (who baptized but once and for all) -- in their henceforth frequent 'rebaptisms' of those already baptized.

Manz himself later recounted these dramatic events among the Swiss Grebelites. He then wrote:¹¹⁸ "Just as John baptized..., so they -- were poured over with water."

However, having thus upheld the right mode of baptism, Manz then wrongly prescribed the wrong age for that ordinance. It should, he insisted, be received not merely in adulthood -- but also specifically at age thirty. For he bizarrely decreed that "infant baptism...is also against the example of Christ Who...was baptized at thirty years.... Christ has given us an example, that as He has done -- so also ought we to do."

Yet according to the Baptist Hulse,¹¹⁹ after "Grebel baptised Blaurock in the home of Manz," the latter Anabaptist himself was subsequently killed when only twenty-nine. Consequently, in getting himself (re-)baptized before his early death, Manz rejected his own inane injunction that baptism "ought" to be received precisely when thirty.

We have already referred¹²⁰ to the Anabaptist hymnwriter Haetzer and his colleague the pantheistic universalist Denck, both of whom hated Zwingli even more than they did the pope. However, Denck himself has been described by the famous church historian Rev. Prof. Dr. J.H. Kurtz as 'the pope of the Baptists.'¹²¹ And Haetzer was not only antitrinitarian, but also a repeated adulterer and a bigamist.

According to the New International Dictionary of the Christian Church,¹²² in 1523 Denck became involved in the trial of the three impious painters of Nuremberg, where "the ideas of Thomas Muenzer and Andreas Karlstadt influenced him greatly.... About October 1525, he was forced to leave Nuremberg, and he became a wanderer.... He was rebaptized by Huebmaier...[and became] a leader of the Anabaptists.... He opposed the doctrines of predestination, the bound will, justification by faith, the sufficiency of Christ's atonement, the authority of the Scriptures...and the ministry."

Also in the New International Dictionary, the Scottish Baptist J.G.G. Norman has stated¹²³ that Haetzer "came to Zurich, and wrote advocating an iconoclasm like that of Carlstadt.... Tending to antitrinitarian spiritualism, he was accused of adultery.... He composed hymns which were highly prized." Indeed, to this the English Baptist Hulse has added: "Haetzer, Huebmaier and Blaurock, all ex-priests..., were other influential characters involved in the Anabaptist movement."¹²⁴

G.H. Williams has explained¹²⁵ how "Haetzer in Worms in 1527...was engaged with Denck in translating.... He attacked the Magisterial Reformation for disparaging the apocryphal books.... The clearest evidence of Haetzer's final antitrinitarian spiritualism, is a stanza from one of the many hymns that he composed and which were cherished....

"There survives the following explicitly antitrinitarian utterance placed in the mouth of God: 'I am He who created all things.... I am not three persons, but I am one! And I cannot be three persons, for I am one!'"

Williams continued: "Haetzer was exposed in the house of Georg Regel to his besetting temptation, for which he earlier had been asked to leave Basel. This time, however, it was adultery with the mistress herself of the little Anabaptist maid he had earlier taken to wife.... He was clearly guilty."

The Anabaptists, rebaptizing defiantly, expelled from Switzerland

From the above, it is very clear that both Zwingli and Zurich would be well rid of the likes of Haetzer and his Anabaptists. The latter had been trounced in three successive public debates against Zwingli -- respectively in January, March and November 1525. After the first debate, they had: defiantly started rebaptizing Christians in and around Zurich; created public disturbances; and threatened the very maintenance of law and order.

So the City Council of Zurich then decided against them. Yet it still followed Zwingli's clement advice. Anabaptist parents with unbaptized children, should be given eight days to get them baptized -- or face banishment from the city and canton (yet with full benefit of their goods) as obvious seditionists.

The great church historian Schaff has rightly described¹²⁶ what then ensued. "The Anabaptists refused to obey, and ventured on bold demonstrations. They arranged processions and passed as preachers of repentance in sackcloth and girdles through the streets of Zurich...abusing 'the old dragon' (Zwingli) and his horns [Revelation 12:9 & 13:11 & 20:2], and exclaiming: 'Woe, woe unto Zurich!'"

Schaff continued: "The leaders were arrested.... A commission of ministers and magistrates were sent to them, to convert them. Twenty-four professed conversion, and were set free.... Fourteen men and seven women were retained...but made their escape April 5 [1526]. Grebel, Manz and Blaurock were rearrested, and charged with communistic and revolutionary teaching.

"After some other excesses, the magistracy proceeded to threaten those who stubbornly persisted in their error.... Six executions in all took place in Zurich [not for rebaptism but indeed for revolutionism], between 1527 and 1532.... The foreigners were punished by exile, and met death in Roman Catholic countries.... [The German Anabaptist] Huebmaier, who had fled from Waldshut [or Wausthut in Germany] to Zurich [in nearby Switzerland], was tried before the magistracy...and was sent out of the country."

Zwingli's various writings against the errors of the Anabaptists

According to Zwingli, "the Anabaptists have their wives in common and meet at night...for lewd practices." He accused them openly: "As often as you [Anabaptists] confess Christ, you make a confession which is worse than that of the demons. For they had experienced His power in such a measure that they sincerely confessed Him to be the Son of God. But you, when you confess Him, do so hypocritically."¹²⁷

Again, insisted Zwingli:¹²⁸ "Give up the oath in any state, and at once -- and in keeping with the Anabaptists' desire -- the magistracy is removed.... [Then,] all things follow as they would have them -- what confusion and up- turning of everything!"

In 1527, Zwingli wrote his refutation of the Anabaptist Balthazar Huebmaier's little book Concerning the Christian Baptism of Believers.¹²⁹ In that same year, Zwingli also published his own Polemic against the Catabaptistic Catastrophe. There, he showed that rebaptism amounts to recrucifying Christ [Hebrews 6:1-6].

In that latter work, he rightly remarked that "the Hebrews' children, because they with their parents were under the covenant, merited the sign of the covenant [circumcision]. So also Christians' infants -- because they are counted within Christ's Church and people -- ought in no way to be deprived of baptism, the sign of the covenant."¹³⁰

Zwingli thus saw that the Church "distributes the sacrament [of baptism] -- to those who according to human judgment are to be regarded as elect."¹³¹ He therefore insisted that Christ-professing people (and their infants) are to be regarded as saved -- before their baptisms. For "by the time the sacrament is administered, [even] the Anabaptist does not need it." This is so, because baptism certifies "something already given and accomplished in the heart" of a person "who knows that God has forgiven his sins long ago."

While conceding (as above) that some Anabaptists were indeed Christians, Zwingli did not accept that all of them were. For Zwingli also insisted that many Anabaptists were more immoral than even the weakest paidobaptists. Indeed, precisely their revolutionary rebaptisms helped lead on to the communism of the Anabaptists (both as to goods and as to wives) -- and also to their revolutionary and epilepsy-like "babbling under the claim of inspiration."¹³²

Zwingli's antirebaptismal Questions Concerning Rebaptism

Zwingli also published a work about Questions Concerning the Sacrament of Baptism. Indeed, in his Confession of Faith, he declared¹³³ that "specifically the children of Christians belong without exception to the Church of God's people and are Members of His Church.... However, the children [of Israel] just as much as the [adult] Jews themselves belonged to that Church. No less do our children belong to the Church of Christ, than was formerly the case with the children of the Jews....

"All who descend from them according to the flesh, were reckoned to the Church. Yet if ours were not counted together with the parents, Christ would appear to be mean and stingy toward us --if He had denied us what He gave to the ancients.... Hence, in my opinion, those who damn the children of Christians -- are acting godlessly and arrogantly. So many open testimonies of Scripture speak against them, that the Gentile Church would become not merely just as large but larger than that of the Jews." Behold Zwingli's optimism -- versus the pessimism of the Anabaptists!

Continued Zwingli: "Were John and Paul not chosen -- even when they were still children -- and indeed, from the foundation of the world? However, the word 'Church' is taken quite generally -- namely for all who pass as Christians; that is, for those who relate themselves to Christ.... [In Old Testament times,] Isaac, Jacob, Judah and all descendants of Abraham were members of this Church -- even in their childhood; yes, even those children whose parents turned to Christ through the preaching of the apostles at the start of the [New Testament] Church....

"That was also the case of the young children of the first Church. For this reason, I believe and acknowledge that they were marked with the sacrament of baptism.... For the promise is not given to our children more narrowly but rather more extensively and more richly than it was to the children of the Hebrews in olden times. These are the foundations according to which the children are baptized and the Church is to be commanded. The attacks of the Anabaptists have no power against this....

"Isaac was circumcised as a child, even though he did not [then] make a profession of faith.... Whereas we are prepared --without the sacrament -- so that we may receive the sacrament. The Spirit works with His grace, before the sacrament. The sacraments serve as general testimonies of that grace which already previously inhabits each one in particular. Thus, baptism is conferred in front of the congregation -- to him who already has the promise before he receives baptism.

"From this, it is acknowledged that he is a member of the Church.... Our children are no less regarded as belonging to the Church than were those of the Hebrews. When members of the Church bring their child, it is baptized. For as a child of Christian parents it is regarded as belonging among the members, according to the promise. By baptism the Church thus openly takes in him who was previously already accepted by grace.

"Consequently, baptism does not bring grace; but the Church testifies that he who is entitled to baptism, already has receiv-ed grace.... The sacrament is the sign of something holy, namely of the grace already received.... The Anabaptists err thoroughly, inasmuch as they refuse baptism to the children of believers -- and err in many other ways too.... But now, by God's grace, this pest in our midst has much abated."

Zwingli's antirebaptismal Declaration of Christian Faith

Finally, in Zwingli's Declaration of Christian Faith, he declared¹³⁴ that "the sacraments...are for us signs and symbols of holy things, not the things themselves which they imply. For who could be so simple as to regard the sign as the thing signified?

"The sacraments are to be honoured.... For they signify the holiest things -- both those things which have happened, as well as those things we should do.... Thus, baptism indicates that Christ has cleansed us with His blood; and that, as Paul teaches, we 'put Him on' or are to live according to His example. Romans 13:14 & Galatians 3:27....

"Would the sacraments then have no power? No, they have a big power! Firstly, they are holy and honourable. For they were constituted and received by Christ the High Priest. For He not only instituted but also Himself received baptism....

"Secondly, they testify about an event.... Because baptism now indicatively proclaims the death and the resurrection of Christ, these must have been actual events.... Thirdly, they represent the state of things which they indicated. This is why they also receive their names.... Fourthly, they signify high things....

"Fifthly, the signs are similar to the things signified. For in each sacrament, one can measure two things. The one is the external sign, like the water in baptism.... The other and the more important, is the essential in the sacrament.... In baptism, through the water of grace, the really essential matter is that we are inwardly cleansed and washed from sins by the blood of Christ; that we are a congregation of Christ; that we are incorporated into Christ; that we are buried with Him in His death; and that we are raised with Him to a new life, etc.....

"Sixthly, the sacraments offer support and help to faith.... The sacraments thus support faith.... The hearing and the feeling are all attracted to the operation of faith.... For the faith of the Church or of those baptized, acknowledges that Christ died and rose and triumphed for His Church. One hears and sees and feels that -- during baptism....

"Seventhly, it represents the condition of an oath.... The Anabaptists...hold all things in common.... [They say that] a man could have...more than one wife, in spirit.... They have distantiated themselves from us, and they never belonged to us.... That anabaptistic pest crawls particularly into places where the pure doctrine of Christ begins to emerge.... From this...it can clearly be seen that it is sent by Satan -- in order to strangle healthy seed while the latter is germinating."

Early Anabaptists outside of Switzerland and Germany

Anabaptism now spread further, also outside of Germany and Switzerland. In 1526, Denck rebaptized the Austrian Hans Hut --a sword-swaying visionary and former follower of Muenzer.¹³⁵ According to the American Baptist Vedder,¹³⁶ Hut declared that shortly before the end of the age "all the 'godless' will be destroyed -- and that, by 'true Christians.'"

Going to Nicolsburg and joining the Anabaptists there, Hut "placed in an intensely eschatological framework the expendable role of the magistrate and the pre-eminence of agapetic communism.... He had been anticipating Christ's second advent three and one half years, from the outbreak of the Peasants' War.... Hut their fiery spokesman...had apparently preached that Christ would usher in His Kingdom during the approaching Pentecost [of 1528]...and had in this pitch of eschatological excitement exhorted them 'to sell house and goods.'" Thus the sympathetic Dr. G.H. Williams of Harvard.¹³⁷

"In Nikolsburg," explained the Baptist Estep,¹³⁸ "Jacob Wiedemann, an Anabaptist preacher who held that community of goods should be a cardinal principle..., joined forces with Hut.... Growing division finally compelled the Lichtenstein barons to expel Wiedemann and his party from their lands. From this group...the Hutterite expression of sixteenth-century Anabaptism developed....

"Old Jacob...dominated the Bruederhof [alias 'The Court of the Brethren'] in a rather highhanded manner. He directed the young women of the Bruederhof to marry the eligible young men available, threatening to secure heathen wives for them if they failed to follow his admonition.... Among other things, he accused the elders of unequal distribution of goods and hypocrisy."

In Moravia, the Austerlitz Anabaptists adopted a twelve-point 'communist manifesto' in 1529. There they resolved: to "receive all gifts from God [and] hold them in common"; to worship "at least four or five times a week"; to discourage their own practice of "two or three standing up in meeting to speak at once"; and to be "ever watching for the imminent advent of the Lord."¹³⁹

By 1532, the Hutterite Peter Riedemann had started producing his Anabaptist Confession of Faith. He who would not forsake private property, insisted Riedemann, could not be a disciple of Christ. Christian community of goods was practised, and all shared alike.¹⁴⁰ Foreshadowing the modern Moonies, Riedemann's Anabaptist Confession of Faith also provided for wives to be selected not by their husbands but instead by the community's elders.¹⁴¹

All this was perfected in 1537 by Ulrich Stadler. In his Cherished Instructions on...the Community of Goods, that Anabaptist Bishop insisted:¹⁴² "There is one communion... All are baptized.... In this community everything must proceed equally, all things be one and communal.... 'Common builds the Lord's house, and is pure. But mine, thine, his, own -- divides the Lord's house, and is impure. Therefore, where there is ownership...one does not wish to be one with Christ.... He is outside of Christ and His communion, and has thus no Father in heaven....

"As the sun with its shining is common to all, so also the use of all creaturely things. Whoever appropriates them for himself and encloses them, is a thief.... Whoever is...unhampered and resigned in the Lord for everything, [is ready] to give over all his goods and chattels -- yea, to lay it up for distribution among the children of God.... Men should be ordained who take care that everything proceeds equally in the whole house of the Lord.... They also should be fatherly with all the little children of God, and also do all the buying and selling....

"Wherever...each sets up his [own] kitchen, there it can[not] be said in truth that there is the one heart...which must however (and always should be) among the children of God.... 'Thine' will not be disclosed in the house of the Lord, but rather equal love.... The free unencumbered community-minded and yielded hearts must still be and remain precisely those who have everything in common with the children of God....

"It is true abandon (Gelassenheit) to yield and dispose oneself with goods and chattels in the service of the saints. It is also the way of love.... We learn it in Christ, to lose oneself...and become poor and to suffer want, if only another may be served -- and further, to put aside all goods and chattels, to throw them away in order that they may be distributed to the needs.... A brother should serve, live and work for the others; none for himself!" Per contra, however: Ephesians 5:28-29 & First Timothy 5:7-8.

Pseudo-Clement, Pseudo-Isidore, and Anabaptist communism

Comments Harvard's sympathetic G.H. Williams:¹⁴³ "The Hutterite coenibites...were a household of faith. Theirs was a communism of love and production.... The Hutterites also found substantiation for their communism in the Pseudo-Clementine Epistle IV...developed in Ebionite anti-Pauline circles. Neo-Pythagorean and Stoic ideas of a golden age were here conflated with the 'memory' of a primitive communism.

"In the ninth century, the [Pseudo-]Clementine letters were incorporated into the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals.... [The Anabaptist Sebastian] Franck excerpted the letters, in his Chronica of 1531. It is quite probably from Franck that a later Hutterite article quotes 'Clement' -- supposedly writing in A.D. 92 [cf. Philippians 4:3]....

"The Hutterites believed that God from the beginning had commanded the communitarian way of life.... There was the eschatological paradisic interpretation of the community as the true church."

Even more important than the fourth was the so-called Fifth Letter of (Pseudo-)Clement. As given in the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals, it contains the vital phrase: "without doubt all things and also wives ought to be common to friends."¹⁴⁴

According to the sympathetic Williams and Mergal, in "Moravian communism...the Fifth Letter of [Pseudo-]Clement of Rome was no doubt influential."¹⁴⁵ For "[Pseudo-]Clement is quoted in the Hutterite Article Book (1547)."¹⁴⁶

Yet the above-mentioned Pseudo-Isidoreanized Pseudo-Clementine Epistles influenced not only the communism of both the Austrian and the Moravian Anabaptists. They infected also Early-Dutch and Later-German Anabaptism. As Williams and Mergal themselves have admitted, "by way of Campanus...Franck's evaluation of Pseudo-Clement reached Bernard Rothmann in Muenster."¹⁴⁷

The article Campanus on that above-mentioned man -- in the 1882 Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge -- is most illuminating. "Campanus," it records, was born near "Liege in the beginning of the sixteenth century.... Differing equally-much from the Reformed, the Lutheran and the Roman-Catholic" viewpoints -- Jan Campanus was, "during his stay in Saxony, imprisoned on suspicion of antitrinitarian and anabaptistic heresies" during that time of great religious upheaval especially among the Saxons.

When Campanus was later released, "he caused great excitement among the peasants -- by preaching that the end of the world was speedily approaching." For thus sowing sedition anew, he "was again imprisoned -- and died insane. His antitrinitarian and anabaptist views he developed in...Against the World.... He held there were only two Divine Persons" ('Father' and 'Son').

Anabaptist polygamy and community of wives: its roots

Now this binitarian Belgian Campanus,¹⁴⁸ a friend of Sebastian Franck, turned Anabaptist under the influence of Melchior Hofmann.¹⁴⁹ Franck himself -- the excerpter of the Pseudo-Isidoreanized Pseudo-Clementine Letters¹⁵⁰ -- was not only sympathetic to Anabaptists like Denck and Servetus, but also to the one he called his "dear Campanus." From Franck, to Campanus, and then apparently through Hofmann -- the practices of polygamy and of community of women reached Rothmann in Muenster, and then too also David Joris and the Batenburger Anabaptists.¹⁵¹

Melchior Hofmann, the Anabaptist mentor of Campanus, was a colourful Swabian. Already in 1525, while he was in Dorpat, there was uproar and iconoclasm.¹⁵² The same year he clashed with the Lutheran ministers there, began to show deviant views about political government, and rejected the oath. After he falsely predicted that Christ's second coming would occur in 1533, the King of Sweden forbad him to preach there. Lutheran ministers then attacked him, and Luther himself opposed him. Next succumbing to the influence of Schwenckfeld, Hoffmann slid even more deeply into the various heresies of Anabaptism.

Hofmann denied Christ's humanity,¹⁵³ alleging that Jesus merely travelled through Mary 'like water through a pipe.' To Hofmann, the Saviour 'has not two but only one nature' and was solidified as heavenly dew in the womb of Mary -- like a spiritual pearl in a carnal oyster.

In April 1530, Hofmann was rebaptized.¹⁵⁴ Understandably, his fanaticism then increased. For now he wrote¹⁵⁵ that baptism "is the sign of the covenant God instituted solely for the old..., not for...immature children.... There is absolutely no order enacted by the apostles or Jesus Christ...about it.... It has not been discovered that they ever baptized any child, nor will any such instance be found in all eternity....

"Pedobaptism is absolutely not from God, but rather is practised out of wilfulness by anti-Christians and the satanic crowd in opposition to God and all His Commandments.... Verily, it is an eternal abomination to Him. Woe, woe to all such blind leaders who wilfully publish lies for the truth -- and ascribe to God that which He has not commanded and will never in eternity command. How serious a thing it is to fall into the hands of God! ... Their inheritance and portion, is rather eternal damnation!"

Hofmann next claimed that baptism was bridal: "The bride of the Lord Jesus Christ has given herself over to the Bridegroom in baptism...and has betrothed herself and yielded herself to Him, of her own free will, and has thus in very truth accepted Him and taken Him unto herself." This language is almost erotic. It doubtless played a major role in promoting the emergence of polygamy and even community of wives among many of the Hofmannites.

While preaching in the border region of Germany and Holland, Hofmann made many converts. They themselves later 'converted' the Dutch lechers Matthys and Beukels. Two of Matthys's own 'apostles' then rebaptized and ordained the Dutchman Obbe Philips as well as Muenster's Rothmann. Hofmann himself was then imprisoned in Strassburg, where he died in captivity.

Hofmann was a false prophet. His prediction that 144 000 would soon go forth from Strassburg and convert the world,¹⁵⁶ never came to pass.

The Dutch Anabaptist Leaders Obbe and Dirck Philips

After the imprisonment of Hofmann in 1533, the Hofmannite baker Jan Matthys alias 'Elijah' emerged as the new leader. His 'commissioned apostles' Boekbinder and Cuyper then rebaptized the famous Dutch Anabaptist Obbe Philips in the same year -- before they then went forth to Muenster and rebaptized its cathredal's ex-priest Rothmann.

Obbe himself then ordained his own brother Dirck Philips, and then rebaptized and ordained the famous Anabaptists David Joris in 1534 and Menno Simons around 1536. So renowned did Obbe become, that the Dutch Anabaptists were then often called Obbenites.¹⁵⁷

Obbe's brother Dirck or Dietrich later became the leading Mennonite theologian. As History Professor Dr. K.R. Davis pointed out:¹⁵⁸ "Son of a Dutch priest, he...left the Franciscans and converted to Anabaptism in 1533.... His elder brother Obbe ordained him an elder in 1534.... He wrote extensively and systematically, and was probably the leading theologian of the early Dutch and North-German Mennonites. But largely because of his greater severity and rigidity, he was...responsible for schism within the Mennonite brotherhood."

Dirck Philips spurned the Old Testament, rejected the incarnation, and denied infant baptism. As the Pro-Mennonite Leonard Verduin has rightly maintained:¹⁵⁹ "In the words of Dirck Philips, one of the most influential thinkers in the camp of the Anabaptists: 'The false prophets cover and disguise their deceptive doctrines by appealing to the letter of the Old Testament.... It is from this fountain that the sacrilegious ceremonies and pomp of the Church of Antichrist [alias Rome] and the deplorable errors of the seditious sects [alias the Lutherans and the Calvinists] have come.'"

The Hofmannite Dirck Philips' christology and sacramentology were not original. He derived both from the 'bridal baptisms' of Melchior Hofmann himself, and of Hofmann's convert Jan Campanus.

As Harvard's sympathetic Dr. Williams has explained:¹⁶⁰ "In Campanus...we have a clearly-enunciated binitarianism which, in denying personality to the Holy Spirit as in the case of Servetus, nevertheless postulates an eternal binity of persons. God the Father and God the Son [are] in one essence and one nature -- just as man and wife are two persons but one flesh....

"Campanus saw in the 'birth' of Eve from the side of Adam...the nuptial-generative union.... One may compare here the baptismal-nuptial theology of Hofmann..., extending from the latter through Menno Simons and Dietrich Philips into the whole of Netherlandish and North-German Anabaptism.... The ancient heretical christology, originally developed by Valentinus and assimilated by Apollinarius...was variously communicated to the sixteenth-century Radicals...by the perpetration of the celestial flesh heresy in Bogomile and Cathar circles."

To Dirck Philips, there is no link between the infant circumcision of the 'carnal' Old Covenant and the adult baptism of the 'spiritual' New Testament.