The Anabaptists rebaptize

While Luther is reforming the church from within the parish structure and Zwingli is reforming it through the city council, a group of young radicals in Zurich decides that both approaches are too slow, too compromised, and too tied to the authority of the state.

Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, George Blaurock, and others have been meeting with Zwingli for years, pushing him to go further than he is willing to go. They want the church separated from the state entirely. They want voluntary membership, not the automatic inclusion of everyone born in a parish. They want believers' baptism — the baptism of those who can confess their own faith — rather than infant baptism, which they see as meaningless.

Zwingli argues with them. He cannot let the city council be bypassed on questions of church practice. The radicals argue with him. In January 1525, after a final meeting at which the city council rules against them, they decide they cannot wait for institutional permission.

They meet at the house of Felix Manz's mother. They pray. And then George Blaurock asks Conrad Grebel to baptize him — he, an adult, asking for baptism on the basis of his own confession of faith.

Grebel baptizes him.

Then Blaurock baptizes the others.

The Anabaptist movement — from the Greek for rebaptize — begins in a house in Zurich on a January night in 1525. Within months it has spread across Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Within years it is being drowned, burned, and beheaded by Catholics and Protestants alike.

The Anabaptists asked a question that neither Luther nor Zwingli was willing to ask: what if the church should not be coextensive with the state? What if membership should be voluntary rather than automatic? What if the baptism that matters is the one requested by a person who can speak for themselves?

These questions were so threatening to both Catholic and Protestant authorities that both authorities executed the people asking them. The Anabaptists were drowned by the thousands — a grim irony given their emphasis on baptism — by people who claimed to be reforming the church.

Their questions have won, in the long run. Most Protestant Christianity today — especially in North America — operates on broadly Anabaptist assumptions about voluntary church membership and believers' baptism.

The people who were executed for asking the question are the ancestors of most of the people reading this.

Whose questions are you executing today that your grandchildren will regard as obviously right?