The Spread of Anabaptism (Part 1)

Church History — Steve Gregg

Next in this series

The Spread of Anabaptism (Part 2)

00:00

The Spread of Anabaptism (Part 1)

Church HistorySteve Gregg

Steve Gregg delves into the spread of Anabaptism, a movement which began during the Radical Reformation period. This group believed in the re-baptism of members who had received infant baptism while also rejecting the church-state relationship that existed throughout Europe at the time. The Anabaptist movement was composed of pioneers who shared distinct views on baptism and church government, which led to the persecution and even martyrdom of some members. Today, Anabaptists are known as Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites.

Transcript

The period of time called the Radical Reformation, it began only shortly after the normal Reformation began. It was, I think, 1517 that we marked the beginning officially of the Reformation in Germany with Luther, and it was only a very few years after that that the Radical Reformation began. And it was called the Radical Reformation, or at least it's called that now, in retrospect, because the participants in this movement believed that the Reformation had not really gone far enough in observing its own stated ideals.

Luther believed, or said that he believed, in a principle called Sola Scriptura, which means the Scripture alone as the basis for Christian practice and belief. And yet Luther, coming out of the Roman Catholic Church, being an Augustinian monk until his conversion, and having many Catholic ideas, can be, I hope, forgiven for not seeing his way around all of them. What's amazing is that he saw his way around as many as he did.

And he had some blind spots, at least so thought the Anabaptists, and so think I. Luther's counterpart in Switzerland was named Ulrich Zwingli. And he and Luther almost joined ranks because one was leading the Reformation in Wittenburg, Germany, and the other was in Zurich, in Switzerland. And they were, of course, near each other.

They spoke the same language. They were both German-speaking. And their Reformations had many things in common.

In fact, Luther and Zwingli got together on one occasion, and Luther had drawn up 15 distinctives of his Reformation, and he hoped that Zwingli and he might be able to both sign to these and sort of merge the two movements. And they did agree on 14 out of the 15 points. And the point where they did not agree, Zwingli was actually much more radical than Luther.

Luther was still quite Catholic in his view of the Eucharist or the Lord's Supper, thinking that in the bread and in the wine, there was actually the real presence of the actual literal body and blood of Jesus. This only differed slightly from the Catholic view, which is the Catholic view is transubstantiation, where the wafer and the wine actually become, they change substance into the body of Christ and the blood of Christ. Luther couldn't quite, I feel, pull himself away from that superstition entirely.

And he taught what was called consubstantiation, not that the elements turn into the body and blood of Christ, but that the body of blood, the literal body and blood of Christ, are present with the elements when taken. And Zwingli, on the other hand, believed that the bread and the wine were just a symbol, just a memorial, just something to remember Christ by. Most of us here probably would agree with Zwingli on that.

And we would say that Zwingli actually was able to divorce himself more thoroughly than Luther from some of the Catholic traditions under which both of them had been raised. However, Zwingli had a group of young men in Zurich where he was preaching. In 1520, he gathered some young men around him and began teaching them Greek and Hebrew, and ostensibly to make them educated men.

And they began to study the classics in Greek and Latin, and they learned Hebrew also. And, of course, he had them study the New Testament in Greek, and most of these young men got saved. Among them were some of the men we're going to talk about today in this session.

It was when Zwingli began to waffle on some of his convictions that some of these young men broke with him and became known as the founders of the Radical Reformation. The break came over the issue actually of the Eucharist of all things, the Mass, as the Catholics called it. Zurich had been largely reformed under Zwingli's direction, but there were still Catholic trappings, one of which was that the church in Zurich was still practicing the Mass in the superstitious Roman Catholic manner.

And Zwingli felt that that was not scriptural and that it should be ended. So did his students. In fact, so did the city rulers who were working together with Zwingli in instituting reforms.

Zwingli, in a disputation that he had with a Catholic leader, actually, this was in 1523, Zwingli promised that he was going to abolish the Mass in Zurich by Christmas of that year. I'm sure, I'm sorry, it was 25. It was, no, it was October, I believe, of 1524, that's when it was.

And so his followers, his young men who studied on him, agreed that that was a good idea and they were glad to see the Mass go. But after the disputation was over, Zwingli found out that the city rulers, whose support he needed to carry on his reformation, didn't really want to see the Mass go that quickly. They agreed that it was not a good thing to have it, but they felt like the populace would not follow with such a radical and quick and sudden change.

And so they wanted to prolong the practice of the Mass somewhat longer and phase it out more gradually. And Zwingli gave in to their suggestion and reneged on his promise to end the Mass by Christmas. Well, some of his young students were very upset with him about that, and they became a little disillusioned with him.

They felt like he was caving in on his convictions. And some of them began to meet separately from him, and among them was a Greek scholar, one of the young men that had studied under Zwingli was a very good Greek scholar named Conrad Grebel, and one was a Hebrew scholar of considerable expertise. His name was Felix Manz, or Manz, as we would probably say, M-A-N-Z.

And these were two of the young men who had studied under Zwingli, had actually been converted under Zwingli. And now they were disillusioned with him because of his compromise, and they felt they'd been betrayed by him because he was not being, was not standing with his convictions as they thought he should. So these young men got together with some others who wanted to meet with them, and they began to study the Scriptures on different issues.

And one of the things they studied for about a year was the subject of baptism. Now, at that time, all Europeans baptized their babies because the Roman Catholic Church had done so for centuries, over 1,200 years. Europe had been Roman Catholic, and they baptized their babies.

Luther and Zwingli, both, you know, who spearheaded Reformations in Germany and Switzerland, respectively, they also practiced infant baptism. But some of Zwingli's followers felt like the Scripture didn't support infant baptism. Actually, Zwingli himself, at one point, began to attack infant baptism.

But when he found out that the city fathers, that didn't go over well with them, he backed off of it, and eventually he began to persecute those who attacked infant baptism. Well, among those that attacked it were his former students, Grebel and Muntz and some others, a man named George Blaurock, or so-called as a nickname. We're going to talk about them tonight.

But they broke from Zwingli entirely at that point, and they were meeting for Bible study in the home of Felix Muntz, and they had a baptism in January of 1525 in the home of Felix Muntz, and that was sort of a declaration of independence for the church in Zurich. It was the first time in over 1,200 years that a group of Christians met together and declared themselves free from the state church, and that they were baptized after becoming believers, although they had been baptized as infants. They were therefore called Anabaptists, a word that means re-baptizers, though they didn't believe that they had been re-baptized because they felt like their infant baptism wasn't baptism at all, and they didn't recognize their first baptism.

So they would never have said that they were re-baptizers, although the name stuck anyway, and in history we call them that, and even the Anabaptists themselves call themselves that now. They're not ashamed of the title anymore. It's funny how many times a title that's given to a group, a label that's given to a group by people hostile to them, ends up being their official name, like the word Christian, for example, which apparently was a term of derision, a pejorative given to the disciples in Antioch at one time, but now we call ourselves Christians.

Anyway, the Anabaptists were the re-baptizers, and that was a pretty dangerous thing to do in the 1520s in Switzerland or anywhere in Europe. Eventually, it became illegal everywhere in Europe to baptize a person after they'd already been baptized as an infant. Actually, there were laws passed by the Emperor that required all infants to continue to be baptized, and that forbade adults who had been baptized as infants from being baptized again.

And Conrad Grebel's child that was born, I think in 1523, a couple years before he was re-baptized, he refused to baptize the child. But that was before there were any laws about it. They didn't need laws before then, because everyone baptized their children.

When it began to be a custom among the Anabaptists, they wouldn't baptize their babies, and they all, although having been baptized as babies themselves, they all got re-baptized. Eventually, there was a... this was made a capital offense throughout Europe. Now, you might think that's ridiculous.

I mean, we have people today, we have Presbyterians and Lutherans and Episcopalians and Catholics and Methodists who baptize their babies, and we, you know, we don't, you know, we would never think of killing them, and they probably wouldn't think about killing us if we're not, if we don't baptize their babies. I mean, it's just not that big an issue. And it might be shocking to us that the state church would find it so threatening that these people would re-baptize and wouldn't baptize their babies.

But the reason for this is that the church and the state in every country in Europe were linked inseparably. And to be baptized into the church was part of being a citizen of the state. And if somebody didn't baptize their baby into the church, it's sort of like not getting a Social Security card or something today, you know.

I mean, well, how are they going to be tied into the system, you know? How's the state going to control these people? They're not officially members of society, you know. And that was very controversial, and of course became very illegal, and many people died, over four or five thousand Anabaptists were actually martyred by Protestants and by Catholics and by the state for their stand that they took. Now, I gave you that information last time, and we talked, we kind of had an overview of the movement.

I want to talk about some specific men, some specific cases, and give more details about their stories tonight. Those men are going to be Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, George Blaurock, and Michael Sattler. These men were the pioneers in Switzerland and in Germany of the movement, and were very, you know, all but one were martyred.

And the one that wasn't martyred, the only reason he wasn't martyred is he died prematurely before they could catch him, and they would have killed him if they'd caught him. So, these were men who sealed their testimony with their blood. There, of course, were others before them during the Dark Ages, the Waldensies and some others, you know, were willing to die for their faith.

But the Anabaptists are much more in the mainstream of what we would consider to be evangelicalism today. A lot of times, the movements that the Catholic Church had persecuted as heretical actually were kind of heretical in some respects. But the Anabaptists, they didn't really held any views that were heretical.

Now, they might have held some views that you or I might not fully agree with, but that's not the same thing as heretical. They held to all the basic doctrines of Christianity. But I want to go over again what the distinctives of the movement are and were.

I did this briefly at the end of our last class, but it wasn't even in the notes. It was sort of an afterthought to share it. Now I've got it before me, I want to share it again.

Three things in particular characterized the Anabaptist movement. One was an emphasis on discipleship. And discipleship, actually there were four things.

One was discipleship, which means they believed in personal conversion followed by baptism, and they believed in following Jesus, meaning following what he taught. Now you might say, what's so radical about that? I mean, of course. But believe it or not, throughout the Dark Ages, and these people just lived at the tail end of what we call the Dark Ages.

In fact, their period certainly overlapped with the Dark Ages, as we will see from their stories. But during the Dark Ages, it was not assumed at all that to be a member of the church, one had to have any personal commitment to God or to Jesus. You're just born that way.

You were just, you're baptized at infancy. Everyone was a member of the church. Everyone who lived within Christendom, which was all of Christian Europe, they were members of the church.

Even the clergy weren't converted. Even the popes often weren't converted. In fact, I'm not sure if any of the popes were converted.

I think some of them probably were, but many of them clearly were not. They were adulterers. They were usurers.

They were thieves. They were liars. They were warmongers.

They were all kinds of things that Christians aren't. And it's an amazing thing. I mean, we have such a different view now that it's hard to realize that there was a time, about 1,200 years, more than half of the whole 2,000 years of Christian history, where almost everyone in the church was unconverted.

And to find a converted person was the exception to the rule. Now, you might think that the church you go to, maybe the majority of people aren't really saved. I don't know what you think about the church you go to, whatever it is.

But I doubt if any of you go to a church where you doubt that anyone is saved. And yet it would have been very common to go to church in Europe, medieval Europe, and there wasn't a single person there who knew Jesus or knew he was supposed to know Jesus. It didn't occur to them that being a Christian had anything to do with being converted or following Jesus.

It's just you're baptized in the church, you keep up the ritual, and you die, and the priest will say, last rites over, and you hope to go to heaven instead of hell. But the Anabaptists introduced the idea. They weren't the first to do so, but they did so afresh in their own generation, that being a Christian requires discipleship.

It means you have to have a personal conversion, and you should be baptized after you're converted, not before. And once you've been converted and baptized, you need to follow Jesus. You need to walk with him and obey what he said.

And especially there was emphasis laid on the Sermon on the Mount. One of the distinctives of the Anabaptists has always been that they refuse to take oaths. They won't even swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in a court of law.

And this is because of their way they understand Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, which is don't swear at all. I mentioned, I think, last week that although I'm largely sympathetic to the Anabaptist distinctives, that's one area where I feel like I see the Sermon on the Mount's teaching a little differently than they do. But they were people of conviction, and they felt like we're going to do what Jesus said, and if they understood that they can't swear to anything, then they wouldn't.

And some of them got killed because they wouldn't. The state saw that as seditious, that they wouldn't swear to tell the truth in court. Now, they did tell the truth, but they just wouldn't swear to it because they thought that was forbidden by Jesus.

That was part of discipleship. You'd follow Jesus, do what he said, at least what they perceived that he said, and do that even if your life was on the line. A second distinctive of the Anabaptist movement was their emphasis on love.

And of course, that's part of being a disciple too. Jesus said, by this you'll all men know that you're my disciples, that you have love for one another. Their love was expressed toward one another in the sharing of goods.

Now, in some Anabaptist communities, like the Hutterite communities, they actually had a common purse, a common ownership of all goods. Most Anabaptists did not have quite that extreme of an organized common purse community, but they did emphasize the need for those who had extra to share with those who had little. So, there's kind of a, maybe not a common purse, but a common heart.

The idea that if you have something and your brother has need, you better give it to him. That certainly is taught in the scripture. And that was their application of the command to love your neighbor as yourself among the brethren.

But even they knew that Jesus had said, you have to love your enemy. And they could not reconcile love for your enemies with fighting or killing or resisting the evil man. You might recall in the Sermon on the Mount, it also says, Jesus said, I said, you do not resist the evil man.

But he that would strike you on one cheek, turned to him the other also. And they took that to mean that all resistance of evil is not to be practiced. Once again, I think that they had a view of the Sermon on the Mount that's a little different than I would understand some of the passages.

But one thing they had that many modern Christians don't have is the courage of their conviction, because they would rather be killed than defend themselves, than resist someone who would kill them. And so that was what discipleship and love meant to them. A third distinctive of the Anabaptist movement was their idea of church government.

They believed in a congregational form of church government, which is essentially democratic. Everyone in the church has a vote. Men and women have votes and all the major decisions of the church are made congregationally.

This is a practice still found in many evangelical churches, but was never heard of before the Anabaptists introduced it. Whether this is the right or wrong method of church government, we will not examine right now. That can be disputed.

But the point is, they were the first to do it, and many churches now do it. It's amazing to the degree to which we are pensioners on the innovations of the Anabaptist movement. Today, we just take them for granted in many cases.

But these people died for introducing them. There was also the fourth distinctive was their concept of separation of church and state. Now, unfortunately, most of the people who scream about separation of church and state today are the non-Christians who are trying to keep Christianity out of the public sphere.

And they always scream separation of church and state. Well, of course, that is a matter for the courts to interpret the Constitution and so forth, and the whole idea of separation of church and state in this country. But the fact that anyone can even speak of such a thing and not sound like they're crazy stems back from the time that the Anabaptists introduced the idea that there is no state church or should be no state church.

In Europe, every state had a state church. They were the first to say, no, the church is not a part of the state. The state is not part of the church.

These are different spheres, and there are different duties. Felix Mance actually said when he was on trial, quote, no Christian should be a magistrate, meaning a politician or a judge, nor could he use the sword to punish or kill anyone, for he has no scripture for such a thing, unquote. So they believe that the duties of the state were too much in conflict with the duties of the Christian and the demands of personal discipleship, that it is the duty of the state, according to scripture, to punish criminals, even to use the sword.

But they believe that was for someone else, not for them. That was not for Christians. That's for magistrates.

And obviously, that presupposed a very sharp dichotomy between involvement in the church, on the one hand, which all Christians were perceived to have their identity in the church, and involvement with the state on the other. And Anabaptists have typically stayed away from government involvement. I don't know whether modern Anabaptists usually vote or not.

I've never asked them. But I wouldn't be surprised if they did not. And you would probably never find an Anabaptist running for political office if he's consistent to the original goals.

That was an important distinction of theirs. And of course, before their time, no one ever dreamed of a separation of church and state. And everyone who is a state official was a member of the church.

Most of them weren't converted, but they were still members of the church, whatever the state church was. And of course, one of the things that the separation of church and state had as a result of it is their pacifism. Anabaptists have always been noted for their pacifistic stance, that they don't believe in fighting in war.

Again, this is because war, any war, is fought between two states. And the issues of the war are political state issues. The support of a political nation in defense against another political nation.

The Anabaptists believe that we are members of another kingdom. We're not really to find our identity in the state, or in a political system, or in a geographical area. We're members of a kingdom of which all Christians the world over are citizens.

And as such, we don't share the interests of the state in preserving a particular form of government or particular national structure. Because the Christian church has flourished under all forms of government in all parts of the world. And the issues that the kings of this world are so concerned about, the Anabaptists felt, the church doesn't have to be all that concerned about.

They're not the same. Our issues are to see the world saved, and turned to Christ, and discipled. Not to see this or that political expression of this government sustained in an international conflict.

So they were pacifists. And those are some of the major distinctives. Modern Anabaptists still share, as far as I know, most of these distinctions, if not all.

Now I want to talk to you about some of the leaders in the mainstream groups. Last time we talked about some of the groups that were not mainstream. There were the Zwickau Prophets, who were kind of strange in their doctrines.

And Luther had to come out of hiding to stem their activity in Wittenberg. There was the Munster event. The Munster event was a group of people who were nominally Anabaptists, in that they didn't believe in infant baptism.

But in other respects, they weren't Anabaptistic. But they gave Anabaptists a bad name, because everyone called them Anabaptists, because their views about baptism. And there was this movement.

Jan Matthys collected all these Anabaptists, this one city in Germany called Munster, and staged a revolt and took over the city, and tried to set up the kingdom of God there. And the Catholic and Lutheran authorities around them attacked and killed them and tortured them and put down that rebellion. But that whole thing was an ugly mess, and it gave Anabaptists a bad name.

But they weren't really mainstream Anabaptists. There were other groups that shared Anabaptist views about baptism, but didn't have much else in common with them. The group I want to talk about, and largely refer to as Anabaptists, are what we'd have to the mainstream Anabaptists.

And even these were not one organized group. There were groups of them in Switzerland. There were groups in Germany.

There were groups in the Netherlands. There were groups in Moravia, which I think is essentially what we used to think of as Yugoslavia. And these groups were not really interconnected by any organization.

It's just that the way I would view it, God raised it up. God raised up the movement. And while we might suggest, maybe we wouldn't, I mean, some of you might not suggest this, but we could suggest possibly that on some issues, they could have been more balanced, maybe.

They could have understood some scriptures perhaps more purely. I'm not saying that critical of them. I'm sure I could too.

But I mean, even if it is so, that they failed to recognize the nuances of certain passages and they just took it all black and white, they are to be commended for their faithfulness to their convictions, which is not the case with Zwingli, or for that matter, Luther in his later years, or ever for the Roman Catholics. I mean, for the most part, the Anabaptists were the most consistent Christians of their day, consistent to their convictions. I want to talk about the Swiss Brethren, because that's where it began.

And I've already mentioned the names of these men. I just want to give you sort of a portrait or a sketch of the lives of some of these men and how they met their ends. Conrad Grebel is recognized by all as the leader of the first group of Anabaptists to meet.

He's one of the ones who was a young man studying under Zwingli and was disenchanted by Zwingli's betrayal. Conrad Grebel's lifespan from 1498 to 1526, if you do the math, you can see he died when he was 28 years old. That was true of most of these guys that we're talking about.

They died in their 20s. And yet they were the fathers of this movement. To me, now when I was in my teens, I would have thought, well, yeah, okay, 20s, that's pretty old.

And I was sort of an Anabaptist type when I was in my teens. But now that I'm in my 40s, I think, man, these guys were just kids. But many of them were well-trained scholars in Greek and Hebrew and so forth.

I mean, they were young, but they were no slackers. They were definitely men. They were young men.

But Grebel really didn't have a Christian background before he met Zwingli. He was the son of a city magistrate, and his father was actually kind of a crook. Using his position as a ruler of the city, Grebel's father was able to get sort of like scholarships for his son from various government agencies.

And he kind of hung on to most money himself. He sent his son to university, to college, and he'd get these pensions for him. But the father would hold on to like two-thirds of it for himself and just use it on his own things.

And this father actually later was convicted officially of this crime and was beheaded. But that's not really part of Conrad's story. Conrad Grebel, as a young man, was sent off to study in various places.

Actually, he studied in three or four different colleges and universities. He was a humanist scholar. Initially, he studied humanism and was very attracted to a teacher of humanism who taught high moral values and so forth.

But then he went to Vienna to study, and he had another teacher, and he became totally secularized. And he was not a Christian at this time. And he got involved in a lot of sin, as he later would tell.

For one thing, he got involved in a lot of brawls. Apparently, one of the things that the college students did for fun on weekends was get into brawls, international brawls, where the students from one nation at the university were fighting the students from another nation, sort of like mini wars on the campus or something like that. And on one occasion, a couple of Frenchmen got killed in one of these brawls, and Conrad Grebel was actually implicated in it and brought tremendous shame on his father, practically disowned him for this, and was kicked out of school and all.

In one of the brawls he was involved in, he got a serious injury to his hand, which I think troubled him for the rest of his life. He had swelling in his hand forever afterwards. He also drank a lot, and he also was a womanizer.

And later in life, he experienced tremendous health problems from which he eventually died. There's no specificity as to what of the particular problems he had, but he attributed it to his immoral life as a youth in his college years. He said that he rightfully deserved these sicknesses and this weakness of his body, and he died at age 28.

Most scholars believe just from the weaknesses and the illness that he was chronic in his life after this period in his time, and he attributed it to his sexual dalliances and so forth when he was a younger man. Anyway, in 1521, when he was 23 years old, he joined a group of students who were studying Greek classics under Zwingli in Zurich, and he became proficient in the New Testament Greek. He became a scholar in Greek, actually.

Sometime the next year, in 1522, he converted to Christianity through Zwingli's influence. We don't know the exact circumstances of his conversion. We know he was studying the New Testament in Greek, and there just came a time studying his letters, because a lot of his letters have survived, letters to his friends and family and so forth.

And the letters that he wrote after a certain point in 1522 reflect total, you know, he was on fire for God and for Jesus. All his letters before that were totally secular, totally intellectual, you know, just like a scholar in the classics, you know, quoting things from the Greek gods and things like that. And then after a certain point, he was just talking about, you know, Jesus and the Bible and living for God and evangelism and things like that.

So somewhere in there that year, he got converted. He received the gospel. We know that he broke with Zwingli because of differences initially over the mass and its abolition or its non-abolition on Christmas of 1524.

And he was also the first leader of the Anabaptists in that town when he broke fully from Zwingli. He was, I mentioned last week, the first baptism, the first believer's baptism to occur in over 1,300 years occurred in January of 1525 in the home of Felix Manz. There were several people there, seven or eight.

This is the first Anabaptist congregation. And none of them had been baptized up to this point. But on a particular night in January, they had been given an ultimatum from Zwingli and from the town rulers that if anyone would be baptized as a believer, they would be banished from Zurich.

They'd have eight days to leave town. And, you know, when you own a home in town and stuff, your family lives there and all your friends, your jobs there. I mean, it's kind of an inconvenience to be banished from the town.

But they met together as they were considering this and their options, and they decided to go ahead and baptize one another. But there was no one among them who had ever been baptized to do the other baptizing. So George Blaurock was one of them, and he'd been a priest.

So Conrad Grebel baptized Blaurock, and Blaurock then baptized Grebel and the rest of them. And that was the first formation of the first Anabaptist meeting. And Grebel was from beginning to end the spark plug and the leader of that whole thing.

He was soon recognized as the leader of the Anabaptist movement. In February, the next month, he and Felix Manz went door-to-door witnessing, baptizing, and administering the Lord's Supper to converts that they made. They made a lot of converts, very successful in evangelism.

He was a good Greek scholar, but he was also a good evangelist. Once he got baptized and got turned on to the faith, he won a lot of converts. The height of his success was his ministry in St. Gall, where he baptized about 500 converts in April of 1525.

From the time that he was baptized himself in the house of Felix Manz until he died, was only about one year and eight months. So he had a very short career as an Anabaptist preacher, but a very successful one, a very impressive one. A lot of people were converted and baptized under his preaching.

And of that 20 months that he lived after his baptism, many of them were spent in prison. So when you figure the things he accomplished in that 20 months, and you realize that a good portion of those months, probably at least a quarter of that time, if not more, he spent in prison. Then you know that he really was busy when he was not in prison, got a lot done.

During one imprisonment, which lasted five months, he wrote a treatise on baptism. And he actually hoped that he would get a chance to have a disputation with Zwingli about baptism. Zwingli had earlier criticized infant baptism, but when that was seen to be politically correct, his pendulum swung and he was now persecuted as an Anabaptist.

And Conrad Grebel hoped that he might get a chance to publicly debate his old mentor, Zwingli, on this. And he actually said, he said, if Zwingli will debate me, if he can beat me in debate, I don't mind being burned at the stake. But if I beat him, I won't require him to be burned at the stake.

And he said this and did this. He wrote this manuscript as a prisoner because of his Anabaptist views. He writes this book on baptism.

And he actually had the audacity to ask the authorities while he was in prison if he could have his book published. And they didn't like that. They reacted very nastily to that.

In fact, they gave him a life sentence in prison for that. He and actually at that particular time, Felix Mance and George Blavlock were all in prison together and they were all given a life sentence. However, that life sentence didn't last very long because 14 days later, they broke out and fled.

They got out of the prison. It was either a weak prison in some way, or historians believe that they might've had some sympathizers in the system somewhere that helped them out. But their life imprisonment lasted 14 days and they escaped.

And he spent most of the rest of his life, short as it was after that, in hiding. He would write. He would sometimes visit Anabaptist groups and preach there secretly.

He was banished from Zurich and from other places. So he was kind of on the run most of the remainder of his life. And eventually, the plague was going through that part of Europe, as it frequently did.

And it caught up with him. And scholars aren't sure whether he died of the plague or whether he died of the perpetual weakness and illness of his body that he mentioned so frequently in his writings. It was probably a little of both.

He was probably greatly weakened by the sin of his early youth, and the plague may have found him an easy victim. In any case, he's the only man we're talking about tonight who didn't end up a martyr. But that's, like I said, he didn't live long enough to be one.

They were seeking him. Had they caught him, he would have been a martyr. But he died rather suddenly and very prematurely in August of 1526.

And the leadership of the movement of the Swiss Brethren, the Swiss Anabaptists, was taken over then by Felix Manz, or Manz more properly. Felix Manz was second to Grable in importance in the founding of the Anabaptist movement. But he actually surpassed him in eloquence and in popularity.

He actually was better known, more influential eventually, than Grable had been. He also was the first Anabaptist martyr to die at the hands of Protestants. In fact, he was the first martyr of any kind to die at the hands of Protestants.

The Catholic Church had been martyring dissidents and heretics for centuries. So burning heretics to the stake and doing things like that was not all that unheard of. But up until the time that Felix Manz was drowned, there had never been a martyr made by Protestants.

There were more to come. But he was sort of the beginning of that trend. He was born, as was Erasmus and Henry Bollinger.

Henry Bollinger is the man who replaces Wingly as the leader of the Reform in Switzerland after Wingly died in battle. But Bollinger and Erasmus and Felix Manz had one thing in common. They were all illegitimate sons of Catholic priests.

And they were all raised apparently with a good education. I guess having a Catholic priest as your father, legitimately or not, had its benefits. And they all got good university education and became scholars.

Manz studied Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and he became an expert in Hebrew. He was a Hebraist. So as Conrad Grable had been an expert in New Testament Greek, Felix Manz was an expert in the Old Testament Hebrew.

So these guys, when they linked up together, were a pretty good scholarly team when it comes to the original languages. He joined the young men studying under Zwingli in 1522. And later, like Grable, he was converted to Christ through Zwingli's influence.

He became disillusioned with Zwingli and his Reform movement in 1523 and began holding meetings in his home where he taught the scriptures from the Hebrew Bible. Later, in January 1525, the first believers' baptism occurred in his home, as we've mentioned earlier. Along with Grable and Blaurock, he was active in Dordodore evangelism in Zurich and in Zolkow in Switzerland, through which many converts were made.

His labors expanded to surrounding regions. And these three men, Grable, Manz, and Blaurock, were frequently arrested together. They were found together a lot, and they worked in separate fields, too, although Blaurock and Manz worked together more often than either of them worked with Grable.

But these three men were arrested together in October 1525, though Manz escaped. The other two were held in prison. Manz somehow escaped when they were captured, but he was captured again three weeks later, and so he ended up in prison with them in that year.

He endured a number of brief imprisonments. It is said of him that hardly a prison in the vicinity of Manz's labors escaped being honored by his presence. He was arrested with George Blaurock in December 1526 again, in the Groningen forest.

And at that time, Manz was sentenced to death in January 5th, 1527. The death sentence read, quote, Manz shall be delivered to the executioner, who shall tie his hands, put him into a boat, take him to the lower hut, there strip his bound hands down over his knees, place a stick between his knees and arms, and thus push him into the water, and let him perish in the water. This became the conventional way of martyring Anabaptists when it was done by Protestants.

When the state was doing it, they burned Anabaptists. Anabaptists were burned at the stake by government officials. But when the Catholics, I'm sorry, I take it back, no, the state beheaded them.

It was the Roman Catholics who burned them, and the Protestants drowned them. The Protestants thought that was real funny, real clever. They called it the third baptism.

The Anabaptists wanted to be baptized a second time, and Ferdinand, who was one of the kings who insisted on drowning Anabaptists, he called that their third baptism, the sentence that they had. Well, so this gentleman, this brother, Felix Manz, was bound. His arms were put around his knees, a stick was put through there so he couldn't straighten out his legs.

He was weighted with stones, and then he was pushed off into the water. And of course he drowned. One thing that's really inspiring about his story is that as he was being carried bound to the Limat River, which is where he was drowned, he was preaching and witnessing to all the bystanders.

There were people lining the streets to see him go off to his death, and he is witnessing to them about the gospel. And he was praising God, as he put it, that though he was a sinner, he had the privilege of dying for the truth. And his mother followed with him in the crowd, shouting out to him, encouraging him to remain faithful to Christ through this test, and don't deny the Lord.

And he didn't deny the Lord. He drowned, and he became the first Anabaptist martyr. His last words before he was thrown in the water were, he said it in Latin, but even though his native language is German, he said, into thy hands, O Lord, I commit my spirit.

And then he was thrown overboard. Now I've already mentioned Blaurock, who was a companion both of Grebel and Mons, and his name was actually George of the House of Jacob. Blaurock wasn't really his name, though that's what he's always called.

Blaurock means blue coat in German. And he got that name because he was also one of the young men with Zwingli in the early days, and at one of the disputations, whereas Zwingli was disputing with a Roman Catholic, Blaurock, I guess there was some kind of conversation or some kind of interaction afterwards, and Blaurock made some kind of comment, and someone in the back of the room who couldn't see who spoke it said, who said that? And someone else said, the guy in the blue coat said that, because he was wearing a blue coat. And for some reason, he always was called blue coat after that.

And so he's always called George Blaurock, which means blue coat. It was not really his name, but it became his name. He lived from 1491 to 1529, so he's a little older than both Conrad Grebel and Felix Mons.

Both of them were born in 1498, and Grebel and Mons, at the time of their baptism, were 27 years old, both of them. Blaurock was baptized the same night, but he was seven years older than they were, so he was in his 30s. But he had been a priest, actually a monk, and after Mons died, Blaurock actually exceeded both Conrad Grebel and Felix Mons in the extent and effectiveness of his preaching in the Anabaptist message.

He was formerly a Catholic priest. He joined the young men in Zurich. Actually, when he came to Zurich, he was already a convert to Luther's views.

Blaurock, as I said, was a Catholic priest, but he had read Luther before he came to Zurich and had been convinced of Lutheran views. So he was already Reformed, but still an ordained priest. He had married, and that was one of the things that Lutheran priests did.

The Catholic priests were not allowed to be married, but one thing, Luther was a monk, and when he got converted, eventually he married a woman who had been a nun. That became fairly common. Once these Catholic priests got saved, they decided to get married sometimes, and they frequently married women who were nuns or had been nuns.

Blaurock got married before he came to Zurich, which shows that he already had kind of split with the Catholic Church, but he attached himself to the study group Anders Vingli. Unlike both Grebel and Mons, Blaurock was not a scholar. Conrad Grebel and Felix Mons were both scholars, as I've mentioned.

Blaurock wasn't a scholar, but he was a zealot. In fact, he had more zeal than common sense sometimes, or tact, we should say. He was a big man, very intimidating in stature, and he would actually go into the churches, the Reformed churches in Switzerland, and he would disturb the worship services.

He'd wait till the preacher got up to preach, and he'd stand up in the back of the church and say, excuse me, sir, what are you going to, what are you here to do? And the preacher said, I'm here to preach the Word of God. Blaurock would say, God hasn't called you to preach this morning. He's called me to preach this morning, and he'd go up and physically remove the priest and preach instead of him, throw him out of the church.

He got in trouble for doing that sometimes, but he was kind of impulsive. He wasn't quite as non-resistant, I guess, as some of the Anabaptists. I think he actually held to non-resistant views, but he must have felt like at times there's a place for muscle in the Christian life or something.

I hope there's not need for too much, or else I'm going to be deficient in the Christian life. But anyway, he had a lot of it, and he's sometimes called the Hercules of the Anabaptist movement. He ministered closely with Mance, as I mentioned earlier.

They worked together with Grable also, but there were times when Grable worked in one field and Mance and Blaurock would work together in another. And they were all in prison together sometimes, as I've also mentioned. The day that Mance was drowned, well, Mance had been arrested and Blaurock also.

They were held in prison together, and when Mance was drowned, Blaurock was not. But he was stripped to the waist and beaten severely with rods, and he was banished from Zurich. And he left Zurich and never came back there.

From there, he went to Bern, and he got kicked out of there. After facing Zwingli in a public debate, Zwingli won, but he always won just because the people who were the judges of it were Zwingli in their theology. And he was banished from Bern, and he went to Biel.

That's the only city in Switzerland I've ever been to is Biel. I can't tell you where it is because I went there by train after dark and didn't ever look at it on a map. I was out there for a week.

But Biel was a town that Blaurock preached in for a while. Then he got kicked out of there too, so he left Switzerland altogether for good. He went to Zwingli.

His husband burned at the stake, and so they were looking for a pastor. There was a job opening for him, and he took it. And he got burned at the stake too.

He and one of the laymen in his church were arrested together. Hans Langegger was the layman who was arrested with him August of 1529, so he outlasted some of his compatriots by a couple years. But he was also tortured, and he and the layman who was with him were burned at the stake on September 6, 1529.

But like Felix Manz, he preached to the bystanders as he was led to the place of his execution. And that brings us tonight to the last person I intend to talk about this evening, and that's Michael Sattler. Michael Sattler lived from 1490, so he was even a little older than Blaurock, but he died sooner.

He died in 1527, so he got to be 37 years old before he died. He got to be an old man for an Anabaptist later. But he was born in Staufen, Austria, and when he was a youth, he joined a Benedictine monastery in Freiberg, Germany.

Eventually, because of his diligence in study and in piety, he rose in rank in the monastery to become the prior of the monastery. However, he began to take in some lectures at the local university, and he learned Greek and Hebrew. Actually, he became proficient in both those languages while he was there.

And he began to read the letters of Paul in Greek. I don't know why you'd have to read it in Greek. I could have reached the same conclusions reading it in English, but he read Paul's letters in Greek, and he also read the writings of Luther while he was there at the monastery.

Because Luther was a controversial guy, you know, everyone was talking about him, and so he read him. Well, he became convinced of Lutheran ideas. He also became very disillusioned with the corruption of his fellow monks.

And so he left the monastery, and he left Catholicism at the same time, having been convinced of Lutheran ideas, not yet an Anabaptist. He married a woman who had been a nun, as monks and priests often did when they left the Catholic Church. And in 1525, he was back in Austria, but Ferdinand the King announced an intention to execute and exterminate all heretics.

And since Anabaptists were considered heretics, Michael Sattler and his wife left Austria and went to Switzerland. And they went to Zurich, and there they met the Anabaptists. Now, he had been converted to Lutheranism by reading Luther, but he had not yet considered Anabaptism.

And he met the Anabaptists in Zurich, and he became convinced that they were saying what the Scripture said. And so he converted to Anabaptism himself. He became a preacher, of course, of the Anabaptist faith, holding secret meetings in various forests.

They had to have very secret meetings because there was a death sentence on them if they were caught. He was caught in November 1525, but instead of being killed, probably because he was not Swiss himself, he was expelled from Switzerland. And he returned to his hometown in Austria briefly.

Then he settled in Germany. Now, in Germany, he found an audience that appreciated his preaching, enough so that he was invited to come and speak at a conference of Anabaptists. It was secret.

It was a clandestine meeting, but it was a conference of Anabaptists in Schleitheim, Germany, in February 1527. Schleitheim is a name that is now known to Anabaptists because of the Schleitheim Confession, which Michael Sattler actually wrote. And he brought it to the Schleitheim Conference and presented it.

And the Anabaptists from Switzerland and Germany who were there agreed that this would establish norms for the Anabaptist movement. There had never yet been any kind of organization of the Anabaptist movement. And what Michael Sattler had written was sort of like a manual of church order and discipline, a lot like what the Didache was in the first or second century.

There was sort of a manual of how church procedures. One of the things that he wrote about was how to replace a pastor when your pastor is martyred. I wonder how many of the bylaws of modern churches in America have a section on how to replace your pastor when he's martyred.

I doubt if there are any in this country. But the martyrdom became a hallmark of the Anabaptists. I mean, it was just a given.

You become an Anabaptist and you start counting the days and you'll become a martyr. Thousands of them were killed. Well, he became one of them.

At the Schleitheim Conference, the Catholic rulers of the area became aware of it. It was a secret meeting, but they became aware of it. And they arrested Michael Sattler and his wife and quite a few of the other Anabaptists and their wives.

A lot of men and women were arrested and put in jail and brought to trial. The Catholic officials who arrested them recognized immediately that Michael Sattler was like a leader among them because, first of all, he had the Schleitheim Confession that he'd written. And he also had some other documents that told about various Anabaptist groups in Germany and Switzerland about their activities and their number and so forth.

So he'd been collecting information and that was stuff that the enemies of Anabaptism wanted, that kind of information. So they seized it and they saw him as the guy who had the information, so he was the leader. And they decided to make an example out of him.

He was certainly not the first Anabaptist to be martyred, but the Catholic officials and, for that matter, the Reformed officials were getting kind of tired of not being able to stamp out this movement. So they decided they'd make an example of Michael Sattler that would terrify anybody else from ever considering becoming an Anabaptist. And he had a trial, and it was sort of a joke of a trial.

I mean, he was assigned a defense attorney who was actually against him, one of the people who wanted to see him killed. And then everyone else was against him too. But he was accused of a number of things, mostly of sedition.

That was sometimes what Anabaptists were accused of, because they wouldn't fight in war and they wouldn't swear an oath of allegiance and those kind of things. So he was accused of sedition. There were nine articles of the accusations that came against him.

Some of them were just things that any Protestant might be accused of, because this was in a Catholic region of Germany. He was accused of preaching against prayer to Mary and the saints. Well, Luther would have been accused of that too, or Zwingli.

But he didn't believe in the Eucharist and so forth. So some of the things he was accused of were simply Protestant things, but there were some Anabaptist distinctives that he was in trouble for. One was he taught that it was wrong to take an oath in a court of law, and it was wrong to Here's another thing.

Not only was he a pacifist, but he specifically said it was wrong for Christians to fight the Turks. Now, this was at a time where Christians were terrified of the Turks, because the Turks were coming against that portion of Europe in waves and just swallowing up territory like crazy. And Europeans all lived with a secret fear that the Turks might come and invade and take over Europe.

And so there were crusades and there were all kinds of people being encouraged to fight the Turks. Well, Michael Sattler was accused of saying that he would rather fight Christians than fight the Turks. And that definitely sounded like a very politically incorrect thing to say in those days.

And when he was confronted with that at his trial, he explained, well, the reason I would rather fight a Christian than a Turk is because I wouldn't take the sword against any man. But he said, if I had to fight one or the other, I'd rather fight the Christians because they ought to know better than to take the sword, whereas the Turks are pagans and they don't know any better. And furthermore, he said, the Christians, of course, if they die, they go to heaven, where the Turks, if they die, they go to hell.

So he said, I'd rather kill a Christian than a Turk. Well, that explanation didn't satisfy his inquisitors, and so he was sentenced to die. Now, not only to die, but to die gruesomely.

I hope you won't mind my telling you how he was treated. It's not very pleasant. I could imagine some audiences getting angry at me for describing it.

It shows how wimpy we've become. He had to endure it. If we can't even keep the contents of our stomach hearing about it, how much harder it would have been to live in those days where that's what they did to people.

But in particular, in his case, the first thing that was done with him is they tore his tongue out, part of his tongue, with red-hot pinchers. And then they dragged him through the streets behind an ox cart so that he was on the cobblestone, the rough streets, his skin was all torn up. And at five different places along the way to the place where he was going to be burned at the stake, they had fires with red-hot pinchers in them for people to grab and to pull chunks of his flesh out.

Actually, they did it before they began dragging him. Twice, they pulled chunks of flesh off him with these red-hot pinchers. And then at five different places along the way, they had pinchers waiting for people to do the same.

As he was dragged through the streets, of course, the people lining the streets were cursing him and jeering and cheering that he was going to go to his death. And of course, at the end of that parade, he got to be burned at a stake, but not in the normal way. People typically died too quickly burned at the stake because usually when a person is burned at the stake, they're not killed by the heat.

They're killed by suffocation because the fire burns up all the oxygen. Usually, even people who die in a house that's on fire, they usually die of asphyxiation before their body gets any burns on it because the fire uses up all the oxygen, people just suffocate. So most of the martyrs who were burned at the stake would suffocate and die before they really had any flames on their bodies.

So they wanted to make sure that didn't happen to Michael Sattler. They fixed up sort of a ladder arrangement with something like a hinge on the ground and they tied him to the ladder and they had the flames and the coals over here on one side and they lowered the ladder with a rope down so they'd kind of bake him over the coals. And when he would start to pass out, his skin would be burning, but when he would start to pass out, they'd pull him up again so he could catch his breath and live a little longer.

And they kept lowering him down and, you know, torturing him this way with flames. And anyway, there's something very powerful about his death is that when he was arrested, he knew that they would probably tear his tongue out because they had done that to some other anti-baptists. You remember Felix Mance and George Blavarock had preached to the crowds as they were taking to execution.

They didn't want him doing that. And with others, they had torn out their tongue before, too, before they executed him to prevent them from doing that. And he told his friends, they will probably take my tongue out so I won't be able to preach, but I want to be able to communicate something to you.

He says, I will give you a signal if God has given me the grace to make the torture and the martyrdom tolerable. And he said, I probably won't be able to speak, but I will put my two index fingers together as a signal to you if the grace of God is sufficient in that time. So after they tore out his tongue, pulled flesh out of his body with red-hot pincers, dragged him through the streets and were baking him over this fire, finally the fires burned the ropes that were binding his hands.

And just before he died, his friends saw that he put his two fingers together and then he died. And his testimony, of course, was that the grace of God is sufficient to endure anything that his followers will endure for him. But the story of Michael Sattler became widespread, known.

One of the Anabaptist leaders who had actually first converted him to the Anabaptist cause in Zurich was a witness of his death and wrote the story up and circulated around Europe. And it became an outrage. The Anabaptists were inspired by the story and many people were converted to Anabaptism from it.

And the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church. But even many of the Catholics and Reformed persecutors of Anabaptists were greatly ashamed of how he had been treated and so forth. And even to this day, there are Lutheran historians who express their shame at the way that he was treated, even though he wasn't killed by Lutherans, he was killed by Catholics.

But Michael Sattler became a famous martyr, although there were many, many others who suffered like things and never became quite so famous. His own wife, who was arrested when he was, they tried to get her to recant her Anabaptist views for eight days and she wouldn't do it. So they drowned her eight days after her husband was burned.

So this is the stories of some of the very earliest founders of this movement. Today, there are, of course, Anabaptists, there are Mennonites, there are Amish, there are Hutterites. A lot of these groups, especially the, I would say, especially the Amish, no longer have the Anabaptist distinctives of being evangelistic and so forth.

They've become more of a cultural movement than a spiritual movement. But when you see these people, realize what they've come out of it. Not only they, but we.

Because if you belong to a church that doesn't baptize infants, if you belong to a church that isn't governed by the state and it has its own independence from the state, then you are a pensioner on the benefits of the early Anabaptist martyrs and preachers because they are the ones who introduced these ideas and they died for them. Most of us not only don't die for them, but we think it was silly for people to have to die for such things. Maybe not the church state issue, but certainly the matter of infant baptism just doesn't seem like that big a deal to us today.

But it was not a small deal then. And so this is some of the early history. I'm going to have to continue this next time because there are more of these men I want to talk about.

I had intended to talk about them all tonight, but when I got to reading their biographies and I studied them from several books and so forth, I realized that I just didn't have time to work them all up for tonight and it's taken this long to just tell these four. I have at least three more men I want to tell you about. Then I want to talk about some other branches of the Radical Reformation.

So that'll be next time. After that, we'll move along and talk about further developments in the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. So we've got a lot of interesting stuff to go and I don't make any apologies for taking three weeks talking about the Anabaptists.

Even though I took only one week on Luther and half a session on Zwingli, I think I'd rather give honor to whom honor is due. And I think the Anabaptists were the move of God, to tell you the truth. And we can thank God for their willingness to be tortured and burned and drowned and so forth, to bring the truth to Europe and eventually to America as well.

Well, we're going to close with that.