ANABAPTIST

also called Rebaptizer member of radical, or left-wing, movement of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. Its most distinctive tenet was adult Baptism. In the first generation of the movement, converts submitted to a second Baptism, which was a crime punishable by death under the legal codes of the time. The Anabaptists, of course, denied that they were rebaptizers, for they repudiated their own infant Baptism as a blasphemous formality. They considered the public confession of sin and faith, sealed by adult Baptism, as the only proper Baptism. Following the Swiss Reformer Huldrych Zwingli, they held that infants were not punishable for sin until an awareness of good and evil emerged within them, and that then they could exercise their own free will, repent, and accept Baptism. The Anabaptists also believed that the church, which to them was the community of the redeemed, should be separated from the state, which for them existed only for the punishment of sinners. Most Anabaptists opposed the use of the sword by Christians in the maintenance of social order and in the conduct of a just war. They also refused to swear civil oaths. For their beliefs thousands of Anabaptists were put to death. The Anabaptists did not aim to reform the medieval church. They were determined instead to restore the institutions and the spirit of the primitive church and were quite confident that they were living at the end of all ages. They readily recognized in their leaders divinely summoned prophets and apostles, and all converts stood ready to give a full account of their faith before the magistrates. They often identified their suffering with that of the martyrs of the first three Christian centuries. The Anabaptist movement originated in Zrich among a group of young intellectuals who rebelled against Zwingli's apparent subservience to the magistrates and his reluctance to proceed swiftly with a complete reform of the church. One of their leaders was Konrad Grebel, a highly educated Humanist from a patrician family. The first adult baptisms took place at Zollikon, outside Zrich, at the beginning of 1525, and soon a mass movement was in progress. Some of the more distinctive convictions of the Swiss movement were set forth in the seven articles of the Schleitheim Confession (1527), prepared under the leadership of Michael Sattler. The vehemence and intransigence of the Anabaptist leaders and the revolutionary implications of their teaching led to their expulsion from one city after another. This simply increased the momentum of an essentially missionary movement. Soon civil magistrates took sterner measures, and most of the early Anabaptist leaders died in prison or were executed. Thomas Mntzer was among those (sometimes called spirituals) who emphasized that the Anabaptists were living at the end of all ages. He was executed after leading Thuringian peasants in the revolt of 1525. His disciple Hans Hut (died in prison in Augsburg in 1527) was the principal radical Reformer in southern Germany. Balthasar Hubmaier (executed in Vienna in 1528) was a leader in Nicholsburg, Moravia. Also in Moravia, where the ruling lords desired colonists and where many Anabaptists settled, a type of Anabaptism developed that stressed the community of goods modelled on the primitive church in Jerusalem. Under the leadership of Jakob Hutter the growing communistic colonies assumed his name. Hutterite groups survived and are now primarily located in the western United States and Canada. Melchior Hofmann was the Anabaptist apostle in the Netherlands, where he developed a very large following. He taught that the world would soon end and that the new age would begin in Strasbourg, where he was imprisoned in 1533 and died c. 1543. Some of Hofmann's followers came under the influence of the Dutchman Jan Mathijs (died 1534) and of John of Leiden (Jan Beuckelson; died 1535). The two leaders and many refugees settled in 1534 in Mnster, Westphalia, where they gained control of the city, established a communistic theocracy, and practiced polygamy. The city was captured in 1535 by an army raised by German princes, and the Anabaptist leaders were tortured and killed. Modern historians have come to see the episode at Mnster as an aberration of the Anabaptist movement. In the years following the episode, however, classical Protestants and Catholics increased the persecution of Anabaptists throughout Europe without discrimination between the belligerent minority and the pacifist majority. The pacifist Anabaptists in the Netherlands and north Germany rallied under the leadership of the former priest Menno Simons and his lieutenant, Dirk Philips. Their followers survived and were eventually accepted as the Mennonite (q.v.) religious group. See also Hutterite.