July 1526

In July 1526, Balthasar Hubmaier’s search for a place of refuge finally ended in the Moravian town of Nikolsburg. Leonhard of Liechtenstein, the local lord who ruled over Nikolsburg, did not merely tolerate Hubmaier’s presence as an Anabaptist in his dominion; he embraced it.¹ He and his local pastors in Nikolsburg encouraged Hubmaier to teach, and they gave him the opportunity to take a leading role in reforming the local church. By migrating to Nikolsburg and gaining the trust of the Liechtensteins, Hubmaier became the pioneer for thousands of Anabaptists from the Swiss Confederation, Germany, and Austria who would follow an eastward path into exile over the course of the next decade, placing their hopes in rumors of toleration on the Moravian plains.²

A few months after his arrival, Balthasar Hubmaier would publish a tract on the Last Supper, making use of the first printing press established in Southern Moravia—the press of Simprecht Sorg, a relative of the evangelical Zurich printer Christoph Froschauer, who had recently moved from Zurich to Nikolsburg. Sorg would become a great collaborator with Hubmaier to get his theological writings into print and disseminated more widely.³  

Hubmaier dedicated the tract to Lord Leonhard of Liechtenstein to express his gratefulness that Leonhard had welcomed him into Nikolsburg’s church leadership. Hubmaier surely calculated that by exalting Leonhard’s character in the dedication, he could elevate the lord’s stature before his subjects and his peers and in the process enhance their appreciation for the reforms he was sponsoring. Hubmaier lauded Leonhard’s Christian spirit by allegorically explicating the lord’s first and last name, a form of humanist flattery not uncommon in such dedications. The “light” in Liechtenstein, Hubmaier wrote, pointed to the “bright light of that gospel” that Leonhard had allowed to shine in Nikolsburg through the preaching that took place there. Hans Spittalmaier and Oswald Glaidt, the two local ministers, first brought evangelical reform to the town, but then both embraced Anabaptism upon Hubmaier’s arrival.⁴  Through their preaching, Hubmaier exclaimed, they “show the light of Evangelical clarity so valiantly and comfortingly and place it up on the candlestick, the likes of which I have not yet known nor seen in any place on earth.”⁵  Thanks to the protection that Leonhard provided, “lovers of light” could live in the open, and the illumination of their faith would no longer be hidden “under a bushel.” 

The “stone” of Liechtenstein referred to Christ, the sure foundation that Leonhard had used for his “house” – his domain and the town of Nikolsburg. Hubmaier compared Leonhard to the wise man in Jesus’ parable who built his house upon a rock so that it would stand firm against the rains and the floods that beat against it. With Christ as the rock on which Leonhard built his rule, the church in his domain would stand as a beacon of truth even when the storms of current events buffeted it.⁶     

Regarding Nikolsburg, Hubmaier was confident that it had a special role to play in the revelation of the Word that was unfolding through the Reformation movement. Making further word play, he pointed out that Nikolsburg would have been called “Nicopolis” in the Greek and Roman world, and Nicopolis happened to be the name later borne by Emmaus, the city where two of Christ’s followers were heading when he appeared to them on the day of his resurrection. Since cartographers were calling Emmaus by the name of Nicopolis, Hubmaier thought it was well worth reflecting on how Christ’s appearance to the travelers to Emmaus related to Nikolsburg: 

In present times, Hubmaier claimed, the Word of God had experienced a resurrection of its own. This “joyful resurrection,” he explained, first manifested itself through Luther and Duke Friedrich in Saxony. But just as Christ, after his resurrection from the tomb, “continued his pilgrimage on to Emmaus,” so the renewed revelation of God’s Word had moved on to Leonhard’s latter-day Emmaus, Nikolsburg. At Emmaus, Christ was “beseeched by his servants to remain,” and at Emmaus he was “recognized graciously” by his servants “in the breaking of bread.” So too in Nikolsburg, Hubmaier prayed, the Word of Christ would tarry and be recognized by the residents as the saving truth. Here it could be “peaceably” proclaimed through Leonhard’s preachers and be shared in the local church’s own breaking of bread.⁷ 

When Hubmaier appropriated the account of the road to Emmaus, he hardly concealed his own identification with the pilgrimage of God’s Word to Nikolsburg: “Whatever I, as an unworthy pilgrim of Christ, decried as a seducer, rebel, and archheretic . . . whatever I can do to help so that the honor of God and his holy Word are witnessed to, I am ready, willing, and able to do with great diligence.”⁸ Decades later, a chronicle book kept by the Hutterites would incorporate the same theme into historical writing. When Hubmaier arrived in Nikolsburg in July 1526, the chroniclers remarked, the town became for him “what Emmaus was to the Lord when He was asked to stay there.”⁹ 

Both Hubmaier and the Hutterite chroniclers were building on Emmaus’ prominent place in the pilgrimage literature of medieval and early modern Europe. The road to Emmaus became a popular theme in late medieval “pilgrim plays” (Peregrinusspiele) in Germany because it extended to laypeople the idea that even a short journey could be the site of a special encounter with the divine. Late medieval Christians were inspired by the story to reflect on Christ’s passion and death, just as the travelers were doing when the resurrected Christ appeared to them. As they followed pilgrim paths, the play taught medieval Christians that they could have hope that the power of the saints – dead, yet still living in the power of the resurrection – might visit them in the midst of their journey, just as Christ joined the travelers on the road to Emmaus.¹⁰  

Now Hubmaier intended to reform this common approach to saints and pilgrimage. With the stability that Nikolsburg afforded him, Hubmaier soon set to work on a catechism, which he published the following year. He presented the catechism as a dialogue between Leonhard of Liechtenstein and his nephew Hans, who also seemed to be friendly toward Hubmaier’s reforms. In the course of their dialogue, Leonhard asks, “Would you call on [Mary] or the other saints to pray to God for you that he would be gracious to you and save you from all troubles?”  Hans replies with Hubmaier’s reason for declining: 

At the marriage feast at Cana in Galilee, Mary said, “Do whatever my Son tells you,” John 2:5. Her Son commanded us that when we are oppressed or in need of something we should all come to him and he will give us rest; he is the door, the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through him…Therefore, if you want to obey and honor Mary, do not call upon her or the other saints, but alone upon her Son, Christ Jesus.¹¹ 

Moreover, the saints cannot perform “wondrous signs and miracles,” he taught. “God alone performs miracles through them.”¹² Addressing the pilgrimage culture of the day, Leonhard also asks: “Where do you worship Christ?” And Hans replies, “Not at any one particular place…I worship him seated at the right hand of his heavenly Father; there he is my only intercessor, mediator, and reconciler to God.”¹³ Hubmaier would explain this position more in the Apologia that he wrote another year later:  “Because our Head, Christ Jesus, intercedes for us with the Father, I hold that also the dear saints who are in heaven and are of one will with their Head, Christ, and with members of his body, intercede along with him, for their will is subject to the will of Christ. But I know of no Scripture at all that says we are to call upon them for help and salvation in our needs, for all the Scriptures point us to Christ as our advocate and mediator.”¹⁴ These were part of the teachings that Hubmaier would elaborate on in his church leadership role in Nikolsburg, establishing one of many points of agreement with evangelical reformers taking up posts around the Holy Roman Empire under the patronage of other lords like the Liechtensteins.

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. According to the Hutterite chronicles, Leonhard submitted himself to rebaptism and was called “brother” in the congregation. Josef Beck, ed., Die Geschichts-Bücher der Wiedertäufer in Oesterreich-Ungarn (Fontes Rerum Austriacarum 43) (Vienna: Carl Gerold’s Sohn, 1883), 52, 73. Oecolampadius also relayed news to Zwingli that Hubmaier had rebaptized a nobleman in 1526, though he did not give the nobleman’s name. Letter from Oecolampadius to Zwingli (Dec. 1, 1526), in Emil Egli & George Finsler, eds., Corpus Reformatorum: Huldreich Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke (Leipzig: M. Heinsius, 1914), 8:789-790; Torsten Bergsten, Balthasar Hubmaier: Anabaptist Theologian and Martyr, ed. W. R. Estep Jr. (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1978), 321. ↩︎
2. Bergsten posits that Hubmaier must have been one of the first Anabaptists to arrive in Moravia, since records of Anabaptists in the region begin with his arrival. Bergsten, Hubmaier, 323. ↩︎
3. The tract was titled “Ein ainfeltige vnderricht auff die wort: Das ist der Leib mein, in dem Nachtmal CHRJSTJ” (Nikolsburg, 1526); critical edition in Balthasar Hubmaier, Schriften, eds. Gunner Westin & Torsten Bergsten (Heidelberg: Gütersloher Verlaghaus, 1962), 284-304; trans. H. Wayne Pipkin & John H. Yoder, eds., Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1989), 314-338. ↩︎
4. On Spittelmaier and Glaidt’s reforms before Hubmaier’s arrival in Nikolsburg, see Bergsten, Hubmaier, 314-320. Robert Friedmann, “Spittelmaier, Hans (16th century),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Spittelmaier,_Hans_(16th_century); Johann Loserth & Robert Friedmann, “Glait, Oswald (d. 1546),” ibid., at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Glait,_Oswald_(d._1546). ↩︎
5. Westin & Bergsten, Schriften, 288. ↩︎
6. Ibid.; trans. Pipkin & Yoder, Hubmaier, 316-317, citing Matt. 7 (vs. 24-27). ↩︎
7. Ibid., 289; trans. Pipkin & Yoder, Hubmaier, 318, citing Luke 34 [v. 29]. ↩︎
8. Ibid., 289; trans. Pipkin & Yoder, Hubmaier, 318-319. ↩︎
9. Johann Loserth, “Hubmaier, Balthasar,” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Hubmaier,_Balthasar_(1480%3F-1528). ↩︎
10. See register of medieval German plays with Emmaus scenes in Rolf Bergmann, Katalog der deutschsprachigen geistlichen Spiele und Marienklagen des Mittelalters (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1986), 531. On medieval pilgrimage dramas generally, see Heather Hill-Vasquez, “Pilgrimage in Medieval Drama,” in Larisa Taylor, ed., Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 541-543, though Emmaus plays are absent from the analysis.
    
    Westin & Bergsten suggest that Hubmaier might have also been alluding to the Nikolsburg peasants’ tradition of going out to their fields on Easter Monday to inspect the sown seed. By tradition, they called this “Emmausgehen.” Westin & Bergsten, Schriften, 289, citing T. R. Seifert, Nikolsburg. Geschichte der Stadt in Wort und Bild (Nikolsburg, 1937), 293. In this case, the allusion would have been to the seeds of the gospel that Hubmaier had been able to sow in Nikolsburg. But because Hubmaier deals with the biblical Emmaus account in the body of his treatise, and he had not yet been in Moravia over Easter at the time of his writing, his thoughts were most likely directed toward pilgrimage culture rather than agriculture. ↩︎
11. Hubmaier, “A Christian Catechism,” trans. Pipkin & Yoder, Hubmaier, 357. ↩︎
12. Ibid., 358. ↩︎
13. Ibid., 355. ↩︎
14. Hubmaier, “Apologia,” trans. Pipkin & Yoder, Hubmaier, 556. ↩︎