Summary

Summary

The beginnings of Anabaptist can, like all Protestant groups, be traced back to Martin Luther when he nailed his manuscript of ninety-five theses to the door at the Wittenberg church in 1517. In that same year, Ulrich Zwingli was studying a Greek text of the New Testament produced by Erasmus and had made the decision to preach the gospel and nothing else. In five short years, the Reformation was gaining momentum with Zwingli in control in the Swiss town of Zurich.

Zwingli had attracted a group of young scholars whom he introduced to the Erasmus' Greek New Testament. Reform soon gripped these young men to the point that they eventually broke with Zwingli in January, 1525 after a disputation.  Not long after, about a dozen young men met near Grossmunster where they prayed for God's will. According to The Large Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren, George Blaurock asked Conrad Grebel to “baptize him with the true Christian baptism upon his faith and knowledge.” Grebel did so after which Blaurock baptized all others present who then pledged themselves to live separated from the world, “to teach the gospel and hold the faith.”  The Anabaptists were born.

Baptism is probably what springs to mind when Anabaptists are mentioned. Therefore, we will start with Baptism. Prior to the Anabaptists, Infant baptism was the accepted norm across Europe. Baptism brought you into the community of church and society. In many places, you needed a letter showing your baptism in order to work. Zwingli, although a reformer, saw infant baptism as a union of church and state your entrance into society, any challenge to infant baptism was viewed as a threat to the very threads of society, of the stability of church and state.

By contrast, Anabaptists viewed baptism as a voluntary, carefully thought out statement that the believer rejected the flesh and had entered a new life following Christ. Since baptism was the “rite” of entering the church, and church meant Christians, those baptized became members of a communal body where they were subject to the “rule of Christ” and any process of discipline if needed. This would rule out infant baptism as they are unable to carefully consider anything, much less rejecting the flesh and following Christ. In a short disputation, Balthasar Hubmaier said, “Whoever wishes to do so, let him show, in German, with plain, clear, simple Scriptures, that small children should be baptized.” He also said that he would prove “that the baptism of infants is an act without any ground in God's word.”

Some questioned the Anabaptists refusal to baptize infants using the doctrine of original sin. If there is original sin, then every infant born has original sin and should be baptized because of original sin. Anabaptists had various arguments on this issue. Some in Germany may have discounted the idea of original sin saying instead that man was created good and pure. If that is so, infants needed no baptism. According to the Hutterites, man inherited an evil tendancy from ...