July 21, 1526

After arriving in Nikolsburg, Moravia, Balthasar Hubmaier enjoyed the access to a printing press that had been denied him since fleeing Waldshut.  He had a backlog of treatises that he had been working on over the past year; now he could publish them.  

Simprecht Sorg’s press turned out the first of these tracts within just a few weeks of Hubmaier’s welcome into town.  Writing at the home of Oswald Glait, one of the evangelical pastors of the Nikolsburg church keenly interested in his teachings, Hubmaier put the finishing touches on a work that he titled The Ancient and New Teachers’ Opinion that One should not Baptize Young Children until they have been Instructed in the Faith.¹ 

In it, Hubmaier provided the kind of service that humanists of his age were specializing in: laying before the European public translations of the writings of the early church fathers who had typically been known only to the university-trained theologians and lawyers, as well as the monastics who had recopied their texts before the rise of the printing press. Even for university students, the prominent theology textbooks compiled passages from a limited range of early fathers known to the authors in the earlier Middle Ages. For instance, Peter Lombard, the 12th-century author of the Sentences, the most consulted textbook throughout the late medieval era, heavily relied on Latin writers for his citations of theological authorities, especially Augustine.² Now, with humanists publishing the writings of a fuller range of patristic authors, and translating more Greek fathers’ writings into Latin or vernacular languages, Hubmaier mined their works to compile passages indicating that they believed instruction and commitment to discipleship should come before baptism. The early Greek-speaking Christian authors Origen, Basil the Great, Athanasius, and Eusebius, as well as an 11th-century Byzantine theologian, Theophylact of Ohrid, now supplemented testimonies from the Latin-speaking fathers Tertullian and Jerome. Augustine, with his encouragement of infant baptism, now appeared to be an outlier amid Hubmaier’s selection of voices from the early church.³ Hubmaier also added several excerpts from the writings of contemporaries, such as Erasmus, Luther, Oecolampadius, and Zwingli, indicating that their continuance of infant baptism was a failure to follow through on the logic of some of their theological writings.⁴     

In a second edition that came out later in the year, Hubmaier expanded the sources that he cited, likely reflecting his access to books of canon law in the libraries of the Nikolsburg churches or pastors. Hubmaier now included decisions of early regional church councils and synods concerning baptism, as well as decrees and letters of various popes.⁵         

Hubmaier dedicated the text to Martin Göschl, a former assistant bishop in Moravia and the leading evangelical pastor in Nikolsburg at the time when Hubmaier arrived.⁶ “Your Grace,” he wrote, “is still the only bishop I have experienced who has surrendered himself on earth so powerfully and faithfully to God and his holy Word in doctrine and works, and this in a wholly valiant and manly fashion.”⁷ With Göschl, Hubmaier believed he shared the conviction that “the church is built on our own faith and affirmation, not we on the faith of the church. Faith is the foundation and the church is the building.” This concept of the church meant that no faith from members of the church community could be “infused” or ascribed to individuals entering into the church at baptism.⁸ Otherwise, people would be placing their faith in the church, rather than in Christ himself, he reasoned. The “preached Word of God, which is God himself,” the basis for individual faith, was the gift that the church had to offer.  The church was blessed with the resources of instruction to present the words of the Gospel and help individuals understand its consequences for their lives.⁹  Hubmaier hoped he and Göschl would become great partners in getting about that business.  

About This Series

This post is part of a series entitled “The Reformation at 500: Timeline of the Free-Church Movement.” Click here for more information on this series.

Featured image courtesy of the Wick’sche Sammlung, ca. 1575, Zentralbibliothek Zurich, Ms. F 23, fol. 294.

1. Der uralten und neuen Lehrer Urteil, dass man die jungen Kinder nit taufen soll bis sie im Glauben unterrichtet sind. trans. H. Wayne Pipkin & John H. Yoder, eds., Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1989), 249; Johann Loserth & Robert Friedmann, “Glait, Oswald (d. 1546),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1956), at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Glait,_Oswald_(d._1546). ↩︎
2. Marcia L. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 282-88; Alister E. McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 23. ↩︎
3.  See especially, Pipkin & Yoder, Hubmaier, 254-55, 269.
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4.  Ibid., 255-61.
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5.  Ibid., 269-74.
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6.  Johann Loserth & Harold S. Bender, “Göschl, Martin (before 1480-after 1533),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1956), at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=G%C3%B6schl,_Martin_(before_1480-after_1533)&oldid=145277.
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7.  Pipkin & Yoder, Hubmaier, 245, 249.
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8.  Ibid., 247.
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9.  Ibid., 248-49.
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