§ 104. The Anabaptists and Mennonites.
Literature.
I. On the Anabaptists.
The writings of Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Calvin, Bullinger, and other Reformers and older divines against the Anabaptists are polemical.
H. W. Erbkam: Geschichte der Protest. Sekten im Zeitalter der Reformation. Hamburg und Gotha, 1848, pp. 479 sqq.
Cornelius: Geschichte des Münsterischen Aufruhrs. Leipz. 1856 and 1860, 2 vols.
Karl Hase: Das Reich der Wiedertäufer. Neue Propheten. 2d edition, Leipz. 1860.
Bouterweck: Zur Liter. und Geschichte der Wiedertäufer. Bonn, 1865.
Gerh. Uhlhorn: Die Wiedertäufer in Münster, in his Vermischte Vorträge. Stuttgart, 1875, pp. 193 sqq.
Comp. also Schreiber's Biography of Hübmaier, in his Taschenbuch f. Geschichte und Alterthum in Süddeutschland, 1839 and 1840.
II. On the Mennonites.
Menno Simons: Fundamentum, 1539, 1558, etc.; Opera, Amst. 1646, 4to; Opera omnia theologica, Amst. 1681, in 1 vol. fol. (Both editions in Dutch.)
Herm. Schyn: Historia Christianorum qui in Belgio foederato Mennonitæ appellantur. Amst. 1723. The same in Dutch, with additions by Gerardus Maatschoen, Amst. 1743-1745, in 3 vols. 12mo. By the same: Histor. Mennonit. plenior Deductio. 1729.
S. Blaupot Ten Cate: Geschiedenis der Doopsgezinden. Amsterdam, 1839-47. 5 vols. 8vo.
Cramer: The Life of Menno Sim. Amst. 1837 (Dutch)
Harder: Leben Menno Simons. Königsberg, 1846.
Roosen: Menno Simons. Leipz. 1848.
Erbkam: Geschichte der Protest. Sekten, pp. 480, 571.
Gieseler: Kirchengeschichte, Vol. III. Part II. pp. 90 sqq.
Henke: Neuere Kirchengeschichte (herausgegeben von Dr. Gass). Halle, 1874, Vol. I. pp. 414 sqq.
The various branches of the Baptist family of Christians [1612] differ very widely, and have little or no connection except that they agree in rejecting infant baptism and in requiring a personal and voluntary profession of faith in Christ as a necessary condition of baptism. Most of them agree also in opposition to sprinkling, or any other mode of baptism but that by total immersion of the body in water. The largest and most respectable denomination of Baptists took its rise in the great religious commotion of England during the seventeenth century, and differed from the Puritans only in the doctrine of baptism and in the steadfast advocacy of religious freedom. But the Baptist movement began a century earlier on the Continent, and this first stage must at least be briefly noticed.
THE ANABAPTISTS.
The early history of the Anabaptists exhibits a strange chaos of peaceful reforms and violent revolutions--separatism, mysticism, millenarianism, spiritualism, contempt of history, ascetic rigor, fanaticism, communism, and some novel speculations concerning the body of Christ as being directly created by God, and different from the flesh and blood of other men. An impartial history, with a careful critical sifting of these incongruous elements, is still a desideratum.
The modern Anabaptists [1613] figure prominently in the history of the Reformation, and meet us in Germany, Switzerland, Holland, and England. They were Protestant radicals, who rejected infant baptism as an invention of the Roman Antichrist, and aimed at a thorough reconstruction of the Church. They spread mostly among the laboring classes. Some of their preachers had no regular education, despised human learning, and relied on direct inspiration; but others were learned and eloquent men, as Grebel, Manz, Hetzer, Hübmaier, Denk, Röublin, and Rothmann. They were regarded as a set of dangerous fanatics, who could not be tolerated under a Christian government. Their supposed or real connection with the Peasant War, against the tyranny of landholders (1524), and with the bloody and disastrous excesses at Münster (1534), increased the opposition. Their doctrines were condemned in the Lutheran and Reformed Confessions. The Reformers, even the mildest among them (Melanchthon, Bucer, Bullinger, and Cranmer, as well as Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin), felt that their extermination was necessary for the salvation of the churchly Reformation and social order. And yet they must have known worthy men among them; Calvin himself married the widow of an Anabaptist pastor. Protestant and Roman Catholic magistrates vied with each other in cruelty against them, and put them to death by drowning, hanging, and burning.
But it is the greatest injustice to make the Anabaptists as such responsible for the extravagances that led to the tragedy at Münster. Their original and final tendencies were orderly and peaceful. They disowned the wild fanaticism of Thomas Münzer, John Bockelsohn, and Knipperdolling. They were opposed to war and violence. They were the crude harbingers and martyrs of some truths which have germinated in other ages. They upheld the necessity of discipline and congregational organization on the basis of personal faith in Christ, instead of carnal descent and parochial boundaries. They attacked the doctrine of the eternal damnation of unbaptized infants, and the equally horrible doctrine of persecution. Balthasar Hübmaier (Hübmör, or, as he was called by a Latin name, Pacimontanus), the ablest and most learned among the Anabaptists, a pupil of Dr. Eck (Luther's opponent), and for some time Professor of Catholic Theology at Ingolstadt, then a zealous and eloquent Protestant preacher, was perhaps the first who taught the principle of universal religious liberty, on the ground that Christ came not to kill and to burn, but to save, and condemned the employment of force in his kingdom. He held that those only are heretics who willfully and wickedly oppose the holy Scriptures; and even these ought to be treated by no other than moral means of persuasion and instruction. [1614] He was burned at the stake in Vienna, March 10,1528, and died with pious joy; his wife, who encouraged him in his martyr spirit, was three days afterwards drowned in the Danube.