Drowned for their beliefs
Anabaptists martyred by Catholics and Protestants
The persecution of the Anabaptists is one of the most brutal episodes in the history of the Reformation, and it is conducted by both sides.
The Catholic authorities execute them for heresy and for their rejection of the entire sacramental and ecclesiastical order. The Protestant authorities — Lutheran and Reformed — execute them for sedition and for threatening the parish structure that the Reformation still depends on.
The preferred method is drowning — a grim pun on their emphasis on baptism, justified by the authorities as a third baptism after their first (as infants) and second (as adult Anabaptists). They are also burned, beheaded, buried alive.
Thousands die. The Martyrs' Mirror — compiled in 1660 but drawing on records kept throughout the century — documents over 2,000 Anabaptist martyrdoms. The actual number is certainly higher.
What is striking in the accounts is the consistency of the dying. The Anabaptists die singing. They die forgiving their executioners. They die with scripture on their lips — often, with characteristic literalism, repeating the precise words of scripture that apply to their situation. They do not recant.
The authorities who execute them cannot understand it. A Reformed theologian who watches an Anabaptist execution writes, troubled: They went to death singing, as if to a wedding feast. I do not know what to make of it.
Neither did most observers. The dying did not look like what guilty people's dying was supposed to look like.
“They have taken our goods, our homes, our children. But they cannot take our faith, our God, our eternal life.”
— Anabaptist saying, c. 16th century
“They overcame him because of the Lamb's blood, and because of the word of their testimony. They didn't love their life, even to death.”
They went to death singing, as if to a wedding feast.
The Reformed theologian's bewilderment is the bewilderment of someone whose framework cannot account for what he is seeing. Guilty people do not die this way. Deluded people do not die with this quality of peace and forgiveness and joy.
The Anabaptist martyrs are the most consistent demonstration in Reformation history of what the early martyrs demonstrated in their era: that the faith that produces this quality of dying is not a mere opinion or a cultural inheritance. It is something staked on a reality.
They loved not their lives even unto death. Not because they had a death wish. Because they had found something worth more than life.
Have you found it? And if you have, does the way you live reflect the value you place on it?