July 11, 1525

In response to reading Ulrich Zwingli’s “Baptism Booklet,” published in May, Balthasar Hubmaier spent five days in intense writing at Waldshut. The outcome was a treatise that is the longest and most widely admired articulation of the theological grounds for adult baptism produced by the first generation of reformers. Hubmaier titled it On the Christian Baptism of Believers, and the common shorthand term of “believers’ baptism” is inspired by that title. Hubmaier dated his completion of it as July 11, 1525.¹ Johannes Stumpf, a Reformed clergyman and chronicler living near the east side of Lake Zurich, recorded that Hubmaier’s book gained a wide readership in the canton of Zurich quickly after its publication.²

In the treatise, Hubmaier stressed that “the word or teaching should precede the outward baptism, along with the determination to change one’s life by the help of God,” finding that repentance consistently preceded baptism in his analysis of John the Baptist’s and the apostles’ practice of baptism.³ But he also argued that believers’ baptism is more compatible with reformers’ evangelical understanding of the moral depravity of human nature and Christ’s sole agency in salvation than infant baptism. Using Martin Luther’s core concept of Christ’s “alien righteousness,” he wrote that “water baptism” is

but a public testimony which the person received and gives because he confesses and recognizes that he is a miserable sinner, who cannot help himself nor give himself counsel, who does nothing good but that all his righteousness is corrupt and reproachable. For that reason he despairs of himself. He must also be damned eternally, were not a foreign righteousness to come to his help. His awareness and conscience learned from the law, which is knowledge of sin, show this to him.⁴

Hubmaier argued that just as John the Baptist preached to convict people of sin and baptized them upon their repentance to direct them to Christ as the “foreign” source of their forgiveness and righteousness who was yet to come, the church must convict individuals of their sin under the law and present Christ as their sole source of righteousness before offering baptism to those who wish to accept Christ’s gift. Individuals could not formulate a sense of sin, despair of their own righteousness, and hope in Christ as their only salvation while still in childhood. 

Although he did not name other reformers in the treatise, Hubmaier also appealed to Zwingli’s and his followers’ concern that the church’s ritual symbolism led too many people to believe that material objects or actions had spiritual power. He agreed with them that water baptism had no efficacy in itself “for the forgiveness of sins,” but suggested that their continued practice of infant baptism, regardless of the spiritual development of the baptized person, perpetuated an impression that water baptism itself effects or initiates some kind of spiritual process.⁵ Instead, he argued, baptism should be presented as a public witness to an internal repentance that has already taken place within the soul of the believer. When Peter spoke of baptism “in remissionem peccatorum” in Acts 2, Hubmaier explained, 

It is not that only through it or in it sin is forgiven, but by the power of the internal “Yes” in the heart, which the person proclaims publicly in the reception of water baptism, that he believes and is already sure in his heart of the remission of sins through Jesus Christ.⁶

Hubmaier also contended that performing baptism in recognition of the faith of parents would lead to the eternal regret of many sons and daughters who did not appreciate the individual nature of repentance and faith and decide to pursue Christ for themselves.⁷ Here, the difference becomes apparent between the civic ideal of a Christian community that Zwingli clung to and the individualist implications of the free-church movement: while Zwingli appreciated the ritual of infant baptism because it conveyed to the people gathered around the infant their involvement in bequeathing a communal culture of Christianity to future generations—like the Israelites who reinforced their call to distinctiveness from other tribes when they commemorated their sons’ circumcision—Hubmaier found that collective symbolism to be dangerous to the salvation of individuals. Christ beckoned his followers as individuals, stepping out from their families and village contexts in faith to be sent out “into all the world,”⁸ and he beckoned them to baptism after recognizing that His work on the cross is their sole source of salvation. Only personal belief in Christ as Savior made a person part of the “household” when it came to conceiving of oneself within the family of God.⁹

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. Balthasar Hubmaier, “On the Christian Baptism of Believers,” in H. Wayne Pipkin and John H. Yoder, eds., Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1989), 99, 148. ↩︎
2. Pipkin and Yoder, Hubmaier, 95-96. ↩︎
3. Hubmaier, “On the Christian Baptism of Believers,” 101. For extended Scriptural exposition for this argument, see 129-136. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 106.  For Hubmaier’s rejection, in agreement with Luther, of Thomistic theologians who taught an “infused faith which God imparted to them and by which they are saved,” see also 141. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 118-120. ↩︎
6. Ibid., 118. ↩︎
7. Ibid., 141. ↩︎
8. Ibid., 114, quoting Mark 16:15. ↩︎
9. Ibid., 132, discussing Crispus and his household in Acts 18. ↩︎