Anabaptism
Anabaptism was a radical Christian movement that emerged during the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. Anabaptists rejected infant baptism and instead advocated for adult baptism, emphasizing personal faith and voluntary church membership. They also promoted the separation of church and state, nonviolence, and communal living. Anabaptism had a significant impact on the development of religious and political thought in Europe.
8 Key excerpts on "Anabaptism"
eBook - ePub- Brian C. Brewer, Brian C. Brewer(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- T&T Clark(Publisher)
...Mennonite and other free-church scholars enhanced this new appreciation in the ensuing decades “that described Anabaptism as a legitimate and coherent expression of Christian reform.” 3 Anabaptism became valued as the movement that brought about the American religious experiment of voluntary expression of faith, freedom of conscience, and the detachment of the church from the secular state. 4 Along with massive studies to classify sixteenth-century nonconformist individuals and groups into categories under a new umbrella label, the “Radical Reformation” (here “radical” intending to convey “to the root of”—a reference to its primitivistic impulses—instead of implying a value judgment of extremism), confessional historians tended to distinguish the antecedents of their own denominational tradition as “evangelical Anabaptists,” in contradistinction to contemplative and revolutionary Anabaptists and from other radicals now categorized as Spiritualists and Evangelical Rationalists. 5 Such denominating of disparate groups was a helpful tool at the time for introducing the variety of nonconformity in the Reformation era, even if continued nuance to these categories was necessary and predictable in the following decades. 6 By the mid-twentieth century, scholars from various disciplines (historical, sociological, and theological) utilizing various persuasions (secular, confessional, and post-confessional) and for various intended ends (European history, denominational identity, and even devotional/hagiographical purposes) overlapped in building new resources for the study of Anabaptism...
eBook - ePub- Robert A. Baker, John M. Landers(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- B&H Academic(Publisher)
...19 ANABAPTISTS AND THE RADICAL REFORMATION Origins of the Radical Reformers Radical Biblicists Radical Chiliasts Radical Mystics Radical Rationalists Other Radicals The Significance of These Reformers For centuries the principal historians either ignored or grossly misunderstood what is now recognized as one of the important movements of the Reformation period. This movement was called Anabaptism for centuries, although with some reservations by those most familiar with it. A. H. Newman, for example, recognized—as scholars now agree—that the name Anabaptist was a pejorative term because it was long identified with fanaticism, schism, and lawlessness. As early as the fifth century, the Theodosian Code decreed the death penalty for anyone who rebaptized another. This law was aimed at the Donatists, who sometimes were referred to as Anabaptists because they insisted on performing the rite of baptism on anyone coming from the corrupted Catholic churches, which, said the Donatists, had lost the power to administer saving baptism. With this sort of background, the name Anabaptist came to be applied to any religious iconoclast or fanatic. To find someone referred to as an Anabaptist in the sixteenth century does not necessarily mean that such a person rebaptized; it may simply mean that the person's views were considered radical. For this reason the name Anabaptist, emphasizing the single doctrine of believer's baptism, can hardly be applied properly to all religious radicals who were threatened or condemned by being classed in this category. George Hunston Williams has discussed the Reformation under two categories: the Magisterial Reformation and the Radical Reformation. Luther and the other magisterial reformers used governmental authority to reform the doctrine and practice of the established churches. The radical reformers gathered believers into local fellowships based on intentional community...
eBook - ePub- Hans-Jurgen Goertz(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...INTRODUCTION Much has been written on the origin, development and nature of Anabaptism, yet there is still no unanimous judgement-indeed quite the opposite. By some commentators, Anabaptism has been regarded as a fanatical sect and a splinter group from the mainstream churches of the Protestant Reformation, while for others it has represented a courageous self-sacrificing attempt to revive the community of the New Testament: Anabaptists as apostates on the one hand, martyrs on the other. These polarised views are explained by the confessional or denominational bias which used to dominate the history of Anabaptism. This approach has its roots in the confessional polemic of the Reformation period itself. Catholic apologists regarded Anabaptism as the inevitable, extremist consequence of the Reformation which Martin Luther had unleashed by his break with the Roman church. Lutheran and Zwinglian polemicists denied the charge and, in their turn, accused the Anabaptists of undermining their message with their claim to be completing a reform process which had become bogged down. In the eyes of the Protestant reformers, all Anabaptists were rebels or Schwarmer (fanatics) and deserved to be executed. For their part, the Anabaptists denied such accusations and condemned the reformers for betraying the recently rediscovered Gospel and persecuting those who had resolved to walk in the footsteps of the Lord. Mutual recriminations led to a war of religion coloured by apocalyptic imagery: the ‘Great Affliction’ had visited the people and the land and the ‘Children of Light’ were beginning to separate themselves from the ‘Children of Darkness’...
eBook - ePub- J. H. (Johann Heinrich) Kurtz(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
...§ 147. Anabaptism. 420 The fanatical ultra-reforming tendencies which characterize the later so called Anabaptism, first made their appearance within the area of the Saxon reformation. They now broke forth in wild revolutionary tumults, and were fundamentally the same as the earlier Wittenberg exhibitions (§ 124). In this instance, too, passionate opposition was shown to the continuance of infant baptism, without, however, proceeding so far as decidedly to insist upon rebaptism, and making that a common bond and badge to distinguish and hold together separate communities of their own, inspired by that fundamental tendency. This was done first in A.D. 1525 among the representatives of ultra-reform movements, who soon secured a position for themselves on Swiss soil. And thus, while in central Germany this movement was being utterly crushed in the Peasant War, Switzerland became the nursery and hotbed of Anabaptism. Its leaders when driven out spread through southern and south-eastern Germany as far as the Tyrol and Moravia, and founded communities in all the larger and in many of the smaller towns. And although in A.D. 1531 the Anabaptists, with the exception of some very small and insignificant remnants, were rooted out of Switzerland, yet in A.D. 1540 they were able to send out a new colony to settle in Venice, in order to carry on the work of proselytising in Italy.—Chiefly through the instrumentality of the south German apostles, Anabaptist communities and conventicles were sown broadcast over the whole of the north-west as far as the Baltic and the North Sea. And even as early as the beginning of A.D. 1530 there issued from the Netherlands an independent movement of a peculiarly violent, fanatical, and revolutionary character, which spread far and wide...
eBook - ePubRadical Reformation Studies
Essays Presented to James M. Stayer
- Werner O. Packull, Geoffrey L. Dipple(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Popular religion ‘under the stimulus of the Reformation’ was marked by ‘an enormous number of small groups of earnest Christians, living apart from “the world”, claiming complete civil and religious freedom... Their outward symbol was Adult Baptism, which implied the voluntary principle.’ 26 Reformation sectarianism’s first manifestation was in Zurich, 1521, among those to whom ‘Zwingli’s application of the Scriptures seemed inadequate’. 27 First-generation leaders were former Lutherans, Zwinglians, humanists and biblically-informed laity who had been attracted by the Protestant Reformers’ emphasis on the authority of the Bible and the ethics embodied in the Sermon on the Mount; later, they would draw into their ranks people dissatisfied with the compromises made by Calvinism. For these reasons the sixteenth-century sectarian movement, insisted Troeltsch, ‘belonged to the Reformation, was caused by the Reformation, and appealed to its ideals’. 28 Anabaptist communities practised a scriptural form of worship: strict church discipline including the excommunication of deviant members, the literal application of the Sermon on the Mount, the refusal to swear oaths, rejection of the sacramental church and adult baptism, which was ‘the motto of the movement’. The embryonic nature of the Protestant movement as well as its inherent affinity with sectarianism allowed Anabaptism to mushroom and before long the ‘whole of Central Europe [was] covered with a network of Anabaptist communities’, 29 the chief centres being Augsburg, Moravia, Strasbourg, and later Frisia and the Netherlands. By 1526, individual Anabaptist groups ‘began to organize their own religious system.....
eBook - ePub- William R. Estep(Author)
- 1986(Publication Date)
- Eerdmans(Publisher)
...For example, the Anabaptists held with the Reformers to the authority of Scripture, but they found the guidelines for the church and the Christian life in the New Testament alone; the Old Testament could never be used to justify state churches and the persecution of heretics, which they considered sub-Christian. For them the church was made up of committed disciples who bore witness to the new birth in believer’s baptism, which also constituted a pledge of discipleship. Discipleship involved the ethical and moral dimensions of the Christian life. All Anabaptist concepts of church, baptism, and discipleship implied that the Christian’s ultimate loyalty belonged to God rather than Caesar. Although with the Magisterial Reformers the Anabaptists acknowledged the legitimacy of the state as God-given, they denied its jurisdiction in matters of religion. For them the very nature of the gospel demanded an uncoerced response. But once commitment was freely made, the new disciple was expected to demonstrate the change wrought by the new birth by a new life-style. The Lord’s Supper then became a sign of the fellowship of committed disciples as well as a memorial of the one sacrifice of Christ. The concept of the church also had certain implications for the state: the state must recognize both its limitations and its responsibilities. For the Anabaptists the state was not the church and therefore had no ecclesial functions. But it was responsible to God for discharging justice and protecting the innocent. Some Anabaptists believed that the Christian could participate with certain reservations in the proper functioning of government, but all Anabaptists believed that the demand for religious liberty was nothing less than a biblical principle inherent in the gospel itself...
eBook - ePubReformation Theology
A Systematic Summary
- Matthew Barrett(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Crossway(Publisher)
...All three men became leaders of the Swiss Anabaptist movement; all three were incarcerated for their doctrine, and Mantz was executed by city officials in 1527, thus inaugurating widespread and prolonged persecution of Anabaptist Christians in the Swiss Cantons and beyond by Protestant and Roman Catholic civil authorities alike. Multiple factors informed the maltreatment of Anabaptists, but their practice of rebaptism provided the justification for their persecution; ancient Roman law embodied in the Justinian Code prescribed capital punishment for both rebaptizers and rebaptized. As the Anabaptist movement grew and spread, it assumed divergent forms, making it difficult if not impossible to identify consistent convictions regarding the nature and efficacy of baptism among those traditionally given the Anabaptist label. 55 Swiss and South German Anabaptists typically viewed baptism, much like Zwingli in his writings of the mid -1520s, as a human word of testimony and commitment to God or other believers. So, for example, Balthasar Hubmaier, in a catechism completed one year before he was burnt at the stake in Vienna for his Anabaptist views, named “water baptism” an “outward and public testimony of the inner baptism in the Spirit”— a “commitment made to God publically and orally. ....
eBook - ePubBaptist Revival
Reaffirming Baptist Principles in Today's Changing Church Scene
- Dan Nelson(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Faithful Life Publishers(Publisher)
...We must remember that Baptists never chose that name; we were called Baptist in derision for immersing believers in water, instead of sprinkling them. Catholics and Protestants labeled the Anabaptists with this name because of their rejection of the incorrect mode and meaning of infant baptism in Reformation times. 24 My suspicion is more people attending church are bothered by the name Baptist than non-Christians. I have found showing guests they are welcome and being hospitable, regardless of what a church calls itself, is a more important factor in determining whether people are drawn to a church. Ultimately, our confession of Jesus as Saviour and Lord stands paramount over all other labels. First, we are Bible-believing Christians as Baptists. As Bible-believing Christians, we should have a desire to know what classifies us as Baptist and how the truths we hold help us to serve our Lord in a more devoted way. There was a stigma of the name Baptist, or Anabaptist, as they were called during the Reformation period. This rejection of the traditional mode of baptism led to major sacrifices. Some Anabaptist leaders paid for this distinction by enduring torture, discrimination, harassment, and eventual martyrdom. It was very meaningful to be called a Baptist in past centuries and it meant something that was not positive in some of the colonies. The colony of Virginia (where Baptists were not permitted to preach in public) required a license for every minister from an unfavorable government. The Church of England was the colony’s official religion and their ministers were considered the only legitimate ministers. 25 In past history, what one was called determined their association with a cause. In their beginnings, we find Baptists struggling to restore the practice of believer’s baptism by immersion and the local church assembly of baptized believers. Their beliefs separated them from government sponsorship of religion and its regulation...
