Easter Week, April 15-22, 1525

On the Saturday before Easter, Balthasar Hubmaier, the leading pastor of the churches of Waldshut, underwent rebaptism, “publicly in the pulpit,” alongside sixty other adults in his parish church. The next day, on Easter Sunday, Hubmaier celebrated the Lord’s Supper according to a new form, presenting it as a memorial meal, rather than the Mass. In local services over the course of Easter Week, he then offered believers’ baptism to all who desired it, and, as he recalled, close to 300 individuals came forward to receive it.¹ Like St. Gall, Waldshut quickly became a city where it seemed believers’ baptism might become a normative element of local evangelical reform. 

These acts were the culmination of months of gradual reforms that Hubmaier had been initiating for the city of about one thousand inhabitants south of the Black Forest. Hubmaier had been circulating in the company of both Zwinglian and Anabaptist reformers since at least 1523, two years after he had taken up pastoral leadership in Waldshut. Roughly parallel with Zwingli, he wrote a defense of congregational interpretation of the Scriptures against the objections of Johann Eck, the German theologian who was leading the Catholic charge against evangelical reforms.² Several months before Zwingli was able to convince his city council to abolish the Mass, Hubmaier worked with Waldshut’s clergy to make partial changes to the service,³ conducting it in the vernacular language of the people. But both Zwingli and Hubmaier enjoyed the opportunity to initiate their fuller vision for a reformed Lord’s Supper on the same Easter weekend. In January, Hubmaier had personally rejected Catholic standards of clerical celibacy by marrying.⁴ In February he began discouraging infant baptisms.⁵ In early April, he encouraged the removal of the altars from the churches.⁶ And now at Easter, he was ready to make a public stand for adult baptism by personal example, as well.

The agent of his rebaptism was Wilhelm Reublin. After Reublin had been banished from Zurich in late January, he travelled with Hans Brötli to Hallau, located between Schaffhausen and Waldshut. When Brötli wrote back to the congregation of Anabaptists in Zollikon sometime in late February, Brötli mentioned that “Wilhelm has since left me and come back to me again and now finally left me again, and I do not know where he is. He is distressed in Christ on your account, as I am.”⁷ It turned out that Reublin was making his way to Waldshut, aware that Hubmaier held sympathies toward the reformers who wanted to see Zurich go further than the city council was ready to permit. Reublin knew the region well, since he had been a priest in a rural parish between Hallau and Waldshut more than fifteen years earlier.⁸ Reublin and Hubmaier apparently had sufficiently productive conversations that Hubmaier asked him to be the conduit of his rebaptism—thus forging a link from the first adult baptism service in Zurich, which took place on the day that Zurich ordered Reublin’s banishment, to his own baptism on Easter day. 

Hubmaier and Reublin were able to work publicly in Waldshut because the town council had been steady supporters of Hubmaier’s ministry. Indeed, an Anabaptist from Waldshut later reported that most of the eight-member town council were among the hundreds who underwent rebaptism during Easter week.⁹ But significantly, the reforms that Hubmaier initiated did not get instituted by government resolutions and mandates, as in Zwingli’s Zurich. Waldshut was not a free city, but under the rule of the Austrian Habsburg family, which was hostile to the reform. The Waldshut councillors did what they could to insulate Hubmaier from Habsburg agents and let Hubmaier work out the pace and nature of reforms with the other clergy in the town.

Although sources do not reveal how Hubmaier conducted the first adult baptisms in Waldshut, a Catholic chronicler recorded one symbolic detail: at the Easter Saturday service where Reublin baptized Hubmaier, the water was merely drawn from a local well and carried into the church in a milk bucket, which someone then placed on top of the baptismal font. It seemed to be a purposeful gesture to indicate that the water had not been consecrated and the baptism was not a sacrament. Two chroniclers from St. Gall and Bern also heard that the Waldshut residents soon threw the baptismal fonts out of the churches altogether, hurling at least one into the River Rhine.¹⁰

Among all early Anabaptists, it would be Hubmaier who wrote out in richest detail a program for a believers’ baptism service, as well as a liturgy for congregations’ commemoration of the Lord’s Supper.¹¹ Hubmaier would also go on to supply the fullest theological explanations of believers’ baptism later in 1525 and 1526.

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. H. Wayne Pipkin & John H. Yoder, eds., Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1989), 81-82; Torsten Bergsten. Balthasar Hubmaier, Anabaptist Theologian and Martyr, ed. W. R. Estep Jr. (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1978), 230-32. ↩︎
2. Balthasar Hubmaier, “Theses Against Eck” (Sept. 1524), in Pipkin & Yoder, Hubmaier, 49-57. ↩︎
3. Hubmaier, “Theses Concerning the Mass” (Jan. 1525), in Pipkin & Yoder, Hubmaier, 73-77. ↩︎
4. Christian Neff, “Hügeline, Elsbeth (d. 1528),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1956,  https://gameo.org/index.php?title=H%C3%BCgeline,_Elsbeth_(d._1528)&oldid=106228. ↩︎
5. Hubmaier, “A Public Challenge to All Believers,” in Pipkin & Yoder, Hubmaier, 78-80. ↩︎
6. Bergsten, Hubmaier, 229-30. ↩︎
7. Hans Brötli, Letter to Fridli Schumacher and other Brethren (Hallau, After Feb. 19), in The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents, ed. Leland Harder (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 351. ↩︎
8. Gustav Bossert, Jr. and James M. Stayer. “Reublin, Wilhelm (1480/84-after 1559),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1989), at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Reublin,_Wilhelm_(1480/84-after_1559)&oldid=172017. Hubmaier’s biographers believe that Reublin visited Hubmaier in Waldshut during his first absence from Brötli, as well, dating the visit on January 29-31. Grebel also likely traveled from Schaffhausen to Waldshut to visit with Hubmaier sometime in February or March. See Bergsten, Hubmaier, 229; Pipkin & Yoder, Hubmaier, 78, 79 fn. 6. ↩︎
9. Bergsten, Hubmaier, 232. ↩︎
10. Ibid., 234. ↩︎
11. See “A Form for Water Baptism” (1527) and “A Form for Christ’s Supper” (1527), in Pipkin & Yoder, Hubmaier, 386-408. ↩︎