Anabaptist

Anabaptist (“re-baptizer”) names the radical wing of the sixteenth-century Reformation that rejected both the Roman Catholic Church and the magisterial Reformers, insisting that baptism belongs only to those who personally profess faith and repentance, not to infants.¹ Anabaptists gathered churches of visibly committed believers, separated from civil office, oath-taking, and warfare.¹ Mennonites, Hutterites, and the Amish descend from the movement.²³

Historical Origin

Anabaptism began in Zurich in January 1525, when a circle of Ulrich Zwingli’s own more radical followers broke with him over infant baptism. Zwingli had deferred the question to the city council, which ruled that month that all infants must be baptized or their parents banished; on January 21, 1525, Conrad Grebel baptized George Blaurock, who in turn baptized the others present, an act the Hutterian Chronicle records with the plain explanation that “there was no ordained minister to perform such work.”¹ The council responded with banishment, fines, and drowning: Felix Manz became the movement’s first martyr in 1527, and Michael Sattler, a former Benedictine monk, was executed that May.¹⁴ Sattler presided over the Swiss Brethren gathering that adopted the Schleitheim Confession earlier that same year, the “Brotherly Union” of seven articles on baptism, the ban, the Lord’s Supper, separation from the world, pastors, the sword, and the oath that became Swiss Anabaptism’s founding statement.³⁴

The two magisterial wings of the Reformation treated the new movement as a capital threat rather than a fellow protest against Rome. Martin Luther and the Wittenberg theologians approved death sentences against Anabaptists in Germany as “dangerous heretics,” reasoning that punishing them was cruel, “but more cruel to allow them to damn the ministry of the Word and destroy the kingdom of the world”; Huldrych Zwingli did not object to a death sentence against six Anabaptists in Switzerland.⁵ The movement’s most notorious episode compounded that judgment: a militant faction seized the German city of Münster in 1534 and attempted, in the words of Herman Bavinck, “in revolutionary fashion to establish a kingdom of heaven on earth,” a debacle crushed by joint Catholic and Lutheran forces the following year.⁶ Out of that wreckage, the former priest Menno Simons reorganized the survivors around nonviolence and voluntary discipline, a “gentler Anabaptism” that gave the Mennonites their name and became the movement’s lasting form.²

Core Tenets

Baptism belongs only to a personal confession of faith. Anabaptists denied that infants can meet Scripture’s own condition for baptism, since “baptism is valid only when candidates freely confess their faith in Christ.”¹ Bavinck records the argument directly: because children lack the exercised acts of faith and repentance, Anabaptists reasoned that baptizing them baptizes nothing at all.⁷

The church is a gathered, visibly separated body. Rather than a parish including every resident of a territory, Anabaptists formed congregations of the voluntarily committed, marked off from surrounding society by renouncing oaths, civil service, and other points of contact with “the world.”² Bavinck places this alongside Rome’s own error as one of two extremes the Reformers’ own ecclesiology avoided: “the hierarchy of Rome and the enthusiasm of the Anabaptists.”² Where Rome located the church in sacramental hierarchy, the Anabaptists located it in the visible holiness of the gathered community; the Reformers located it instead in the pure preaching of the Word and administration of the sacraments, regardless of who administers them.²

Nonresistance and separation from civil power. Reading the Sermon on the Mount literally, Anabaptists held that Christians may not bear the sword, serve as magistrates, or otherwise use force, since in Christ “all killing has ceased.”¹ The same literalism barred Christians from swearing oaths, on the strength of Christ’s own prohibition (Matt. 5:34).¹

Comparison with the Reformed Baptist Confession

On the subject that gave the movement its name, the 1689 London Baptist Confession agrees with the Anabaptists against both Rome and the magisterial Reformers: baptism belongs only to those who make “profession of faith in, and obedience unto, Christ,” not to infants.⁸ Most of the confession’s other commitments, however, run the other way. Chapter 24 holds civil magistracy to be God’s own ordinance, “for defence and encouragement of them that do good, and for the punishment of evil doers,” adding that “it is lawful for Christians to Accept, and Execute the Office of a Magistrate… so for that end they may lawfully now under the New Testament wage war upon just and necessary occasions,” the direct opposite of Anabaptist nonresistance and refusal of civil office.⁹ Chapter 23 likewise defends the lawfulness of oaths as “a part of religious worship,” so long as they are sworn in God’s name and imposed by lawful authority, against Schleitheim’s own prohibition.¹⁰ And where Anabaptist ecclesiology tends to make the church coextensive with the community of the visibly separated and holy, the confession draws an explicit distinction between the invisible church, “the whole number of the Elect,” and the visible churches constituted by all who credibly profess the gospel without holding positions that undermine it.¹¹

Variants

Bavinck’s own account already distinguishes “the excesses of the Münsterites” from “the gentler Anabaptism of Menno Simons,” two branches of a single movement whose fortunes and reputations diverged sharply.² The Münsterite kingdom was a short-lived, violent departure from the movement’s own founding Schleitheim principles of nonresistance and separation, not their fulfillment. The Mennonite line that survived it, together with the Hutterite communities, carried Anabaptism’s nonresistant and separatist convictions into the denominations that still bear its name.³

Related Doctrines

• Believer’s baptism
• Radical Reformation
• Mennonites
• Menno Simons
• Baptism
• Church

References

1. “Anabaptism,” Wikipedia, accessed August 29, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabaptism. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. Bavinck, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. “Schleitheim Confession,” Wikipedia, accessed August 29, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleitheim_Confession. ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. “Michael Sattler,” Wikipedia, accessed August 29, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Sattler. ↩ ↩²

5. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 297-98. ↩

6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 4, “Revelation.” ↩

7. Bavinck, chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩

8. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 29, “Of Baptism,” para. 2. ↩

9. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 24, “Of the Civil Magistrate,” paras. 1-2. ↩

10. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 23, “Of Lawful Oaths and Vows,” paras. 1-2. ↩

11. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” paras. 1-2. ↩