Lecture 7: The Radical Reformers: Munster, Menno Simons, and the Anabaptist Spectrum

The lecture, section by section

1. An umbrella, not a group

   Anabaptist was a derogatory label meaning rebaptizer, applied from outside to at least a dozen distinct movements. Dr. Busenitz compares it to the modern term charismatic, which covers thousands of doctrinally different groups under one word. Historians also say radical reformers, radical both in extremity and in the sense of fundamental convictions, especially about baptism, that these people were willing to die for.

2. The spectrum

   Under the radical banner sit very different people: anti-trinitarian rationalists like Michael Servetus, spiritual mystics like Caspar Schwenckfeld who claimed revelations beyond Scripture, political revolutionaries who threatened the whole social order, and the Swiss Brethren, whom the lecture views far more favorably. Because they all got lumped together, the biblical groups were persecuted alongside the dangerous ones.

3. Karlstadt at Wittenberg

   Andreas Karlstadt, a fellow Wittenberg professor, pushed fast, sweeping reforms while Luther was hidden at the Wartburg, stripping out everything not commanded in the New Testament. Luther returned, preached the Invocavit sermons against the pace of change, and never got over what he saw as a betrayal of trust. Karlstadt, though he renounced violence, ended his days teaching at Basel.

4. Knights and peasants in revolt

   Ulrich von Hutten, a knight who had studied theology, led the failed Knights Revolt, the first sign that reformation of the church might be seized as a catalyst for social revolution. Thomas Muntzer stirred the Peasants Revolt of 1524 and 1525 with a battle cry that all things ought to be held in common. He was defeated, tortured, and killed, and communist East Germany later honored him with a statue as an ancestor of its ideals.

5. Zwickau prophets and Melchior Hoffman

   Nicholas Storch and Marcus Stubner, the Zwickau prophets, claimed direct guidance from the Holy Spirit, announced the end of the world, and sought spiritual change through political power. Melchior Hoffman predicted Christ would return in 1533 and set up the New Jerusalem in Strasbourg. He died in prison, but his disciple Jan Matthys carried the idea forward with a new address for the New Jerusalem: Munster.

6. The Munster Rebellion, 1534 to 1535

   Jan Matthys and Jan van Leiden seized the city of Munster in Germany. Van Leiden called himself the son of David and set up what was reported to be a communistic and polygamous theocracy, though the lecture notes the surviving reports come from the victors and may overstate. Things grew so grave that Protestants and Catholics raised a joint army, defeated the city in June 1535, and displayed the executed leaders in cages as a warning.

7. The stain spreads

   Because some rebaptizing groups turned violent, believers baptism itself came to be read as the mark of sedition. The persecution that followed had less to do with the doctrine of baptism than with the perceived threat to society. After Munster, hostility toward Protestants rose across Europe, especially in France.

8. Why Calvin wrote the Institutes

   John Calvin wrote to the king of France to prove that French Protestants were nothing like the Munster radicals. That letter grew into a full defense of Protestant belief, the Institutes, first published in 1536, the year after Munster fell. Its sharp words against Anabaptists make sense once you know it was answering the reputation Munster had created.

9. Menno Simons

   Menno Simons was a Catholic priest whose study of communion and baptism convinced him the New Testament commanded neither infant baptism nor the Roman view of the ordinances. A man executed for rebaptism in 1531 pressed the question on him, and the death of his brother Peter, killed fighting on the radical side near Munster in 1535, left him with a lasting horror of revolutionary religion. His first tract attacked Jan van Leiden, saying no greater antichrist could rise than a man posing as the promised David.

10. From revolution to pacifism

    As leader of the groups now called Mennonites, Menno Simons swung the movement to the opposite extreme, championing pacifism over armed revolt. The lecture calls the rescue of the Anabaptists from revolutionary ruin and their return to biblical moorings his crowning achievement. The pacifism of Anabaptists today traces largely to his reaction against Munster.

11. The Swiss Brethren, honored

    Zwingli trained the Swiss Brethren to place Scripture above every authority and to do nothing in church the New Testament did not command. They applied his own principles to baptism and paid with their lives. George Blaurock, the first to be baptized, was burned by Catholic forces in Italy. Felix Manz was drowned in 1527, the first leader executed that way, though Eberli Bolt had been drowned in 1526. Conrad Grebel, who performed that first baptism, is often called the father of the Anabaptists. Balthasar Hubmaier, arrested and tortured in Zurich, was finally burned at the stake in Vienna. The Martyrs Mirror preserves their stories.

12. The Reformed response, weighed

    The magisterial reformers opposed armed revolt, opposed rebaptism of those baptized as infants, and opposed separating church from state, and they affirmed the right of the state to punish radicals with death. Roughly eighty-five percent of Anabaptist executions came from Roman Catholic authorities, who burned, and about fifteen percent from Protestants, who drowned. Dr. Busenitz offers all this as explanation, not excuse: Zwingli's treatment of the Swiss Brethren remains, in his words, inexcusable. The closing lesson turns on us: every generation tolerates unbiblical things native to its own culture, so the remedy is to keep applying Scripture to our own hearts rather than assuming our age has nothing to repent of.

1. The lecture separates explanation from excuse when weighing how the reformers treated the Anabaptists. Where else in church history, or in your own life, is that distinction worth keeping?

2. The Swiss Brethren died for a conviction most would call a secondary issue, yet one they believed the New Testament clearly taught. How should a church decide which convictions are worth costly obedience?

3. Dr. Busenitz warns that every generation tolerates unbiblical things native to its own culture. What might a believer five hundred years from now find glaring in ours, and how would we begin to see it?