October 1525

In October 1525, sources begin to indicate that Anabaptism had spread to the Swiss canton of Bern, the largest canton in the Swiss confederation. Bern had not yet politically adopted any ecclesiastical reformation, remaining Catholic at this point. But Ulrich Zwingli and Zurich’s Reformed civic leaders were certainly wooing the councilors who governed the canton to align their religious policy with Zurich’s.¹ And they had an ally in a leading clergyman in Bern, Berchtold Haller.²

Haller corresponded regularly with Zwingli and with Joachim Vadian, the leading councilor and advocate of Zwinglian reform in St. Gall (and the brother-in-law/former friend of Conrad Grebel). In one letter from Oct. 5, 1525, Haller wrote Vadian about his difficulties in prodding the conservatives on the Council toward ecclesiastical reformation, and his worries that new Anabaptist voices would make his reforms even more difficult: “Matters are not yet settled with [the Catholics], and now the Anabaptists are beginning to make trouble. Their new doctrine, until now unknown to the Church of Christ, spreads and leaves no small mark.” Haller saw the Anabaptists’ emergence as a hazard for a Zwinglian-style reform because the conservatives on the Council could now point to Anabaptism and say that this is where any reforms would lead. Haller saw dim chances of success in reform with the rise of Anabaptism “unless men of first-rate learning…resist it with the mighty sword of the Spirit”—prodding Vadian with a reminder that “the whole company of the faithful among the Swiss recognizes you to be” such a man. Haller viewed the sectarian inclination of Anabaptists, who were willing to begin meeting in their own groups rather than stick with the traditional parish churches, as an attempt by Satan to dissolve the clarity of having a uniform church with one doctrinal teaching for the canton. But he urged Vadian to stand firm in countering both Roman and Anabaptist errors, confident in Christ’s ultimate victory even if he becomes unpopular among men: “Satan certainly makes attempts and dangers for us—now through impostures and sects, now through bloodshed. But in the meantime, nothing will be lost to us, even if our bodies perish, as we seem likely to do soon. For the One who is in us is stronger than he who is in the world.”³

Anabaptism continued to gain adherents in Bern, however, and they will grow into the largest of Swiss congregations over the subsequent decades. Even so, they did not prevent Haller from finding success, two and a half years later, in ushering in a state-endorsed reformation of Bern’s churches. Haller would later clarify that he believed Anabaptist beliefs should only be countered with the “sword of the Spirit”—by doctrinal persuasion, rather than the government’s sword.⁴

But on October 22, 1525, both the reform-leaning and conservative councilors coalesced around one religious policy: Anabaptists should not be tolerated. The first such individuals in the Council’s records were two hatmakers living in Aarau, who both received a punishment of banishment.⁵ Aarau lay in the northeastern corner of the canton, close to the cantons of Zurich and Schaffhausen, where Anabaptists had been preaching throughout the countryside since early in the year. So it is not a surprise that Anabaptist activity within the canton would first surface there.

Anabaptist ideas also soon circulated in the city of Bern itself, much further west. Sometime after mid-November, Zwingli testified that “a devout man from Bern had also written him that a certain man named Mr. Martin (who for a time had been among the Anabaptists) spoke in Bern and proudly claimed, in his opinion, that the Anabaptists were right in saying there should be no government. He also greatly admired their steadfastness in piety and in their belief that all things should be held in common.”⁶ We cannot be sure whether Mr. Martin gathered the right impression that the Anabaptists he encountered were teaching that there should be no government. We can also not be sure that Zwingli’s correspondent, or Zwingli himself, reported on Mr. Martin’s opinion correctly. It is possible that Mr. Martin meant that there should be no temporal government involved in the church, which would be the common teaching of early Anabaptists, rather than imagining that there should be no government at all. But from Zwingli’s outlook, he might well have categorized this position as equivalent to advocating for anarchism, since he believed the church and temporal government relied on each other to maintain an orderly Christian society.

Zwingli’s consciousness that Anabaptist ideas were making inroads in Bern, and that people were impressed with Anabaptists’ piety, surely gave him a sense of urgency that he needed to counter them even more effectively than he had thus far. This gave Zwingli impetus to finish a reply to Balthasar Hubmaier’s treatise, On the Christian Baptism of Believers, at the end of October. In a letter to Vadian on October 11, he mentioned that this task was still on his to-do list: “[W]e will gird ourselves against Balthasar of Waldshut, who stupidly treats the baptism of infants and the [anabaptism] of adults with much wresting and violence of the holy Scriptures.”⁷ Zurich printers got Zwingli’s tract into circulation by November 5 under the title Answer to Hubmaier’s Baptism Book—just in time to be useful for a public disputation that the Reformed leadership had planned with their new prisoners, Grebel, Blaurock, and Mantz. It opened the following day.

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. On the conciliar structure of Bern’s cantonal government, see Appendix A in Ernst Müller, The History of the Bernese Anabaptists, ed. Joseph Stoll, trans. John Gingerich (Aylmer, ON: Pathway, 2010; original German publication, 1895), 451. ↩︎
2. See Bruce Gordon, Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 138-39. ↩︎
3. Letter of Berchtold Haller to Joachim Vadian, (Bern, Oct. 5, 1525), in Emil Arbenz, ed., Vadianische Briefsammlung der Stadtbibliothek St. Gallen, vol. 3 (St. Gall: Fehr, 1897), 123. ↩︎
4. Christian Neff, “Haller, Berchthold (1492-1536),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1956), at: https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Haller,_Berchthold_(1492-1536). ↩︎
5. Verbannung zweier Hutmacher aus Aarau, in Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer in der Schweiz, vol. 3: Kantone Aargau—Bern—Solothurn bis 1560, ed. Martin Haas (Zurich: Theologisher Verlag Zürich, 2008), 6. Though not named in the source, Haas explains that the men were most likely named Heini Seiler and Heini Steffan. ↩︎
6. Nachgang über Konrad Grebel, Felix Manz und Jörg Blaurock, in Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer in der Schweiz, vol. 1, eds. Leonhard von Muralt & Walter Schmid (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1952), 122. The letter to Zwingli has not been found among his papers. ↩︎
7. Letter of Zwingli to Vadian (Zurich, Oct. 11, 1525), in The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents, ed. Leland Harder (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 431. ↩︎