The Baptism That Started It

In January 1525, in a house in Zurich, a small group of men who had been working with Zwingli baptised each other as adults. They had concluded that the reform was stopping short of its own principle: if scripture is the standard, and scripture shows baptism following a confession of faith, then baptising infants is not a minor irregularity but a mistake about what the church is. The consequence they drew is what made the movement radical. A church of baptised believers is a voluntary body, entered by decision, and it cannot be identical with the population of a parish or the subjects of a prince. From that followed the other positions associated with the Anabaptists: that the church should be separate from the state and not enforced by it, that discipline should be exercised by the congregation, and, in most streams, that Christians should not swear oaths, hold magistracy or bear arms.

The Schleitheim articles of 1527 set out that programme concisely. Diarmaid MacCulloch stresses that the radicals were not a single organisation and disagreed with each other extensively, and that the label covers spiritualists and anti Trinitarian rationalists as well as Anabaptists. What they shared was the judgement that a reform which left the parish, the magistrate and infant baptism in place had not gone to the root of the question.