September, 1524

At the Second Doctrinal Disputation convened by the Zurich Council in October 1523, a visiting pastor from the south German city of Waldshut spoke up on three occasions and received positive notes in the Council’s records for his eloquent support of Ulrich Zwingli’s proposed reforms. This was Balthasar Hubmaier, a middle-aged man with more than a decade’s worth of varied church leadership experiences by this point: in 1512, he was appointed professor of theology at the University of Ingolstadt and priest for the largest parish in the city, and within four years was chosen as the university’s administrative head; he abruptly left the university in 1516, however, to become cathedral preacher in Regensburg, drawing crowds of pilgrims to a new shrine promoted by the city; and in 1520, he left Regensburg for the lead pastorate in Waldshut.  At some point during the next three years, Hubmaier became convinced of the need for evangelical reforms and soon viewed Zwingli and Zurich as nearby allies for reforms he began to advocate for Waldshut.¹

However, Waldshut was not politically autonomous like the canton of Zurich, and when its Habsburg overlords learned that Waldshut was not only reforming, but had also hosted early instigators of peasant unrest in the summer of 1524, Hubmaier became a target for arrest. In August 1524, he fled to Schaffhausen, another northern Swiss canton whose council was embracing Zwinglian reform. The Council of Schaffhausen came under strong pressure from the Swiss Catholic cantons to deny Hubmaier asylum and hand him over to the Habsburgs.² By this point, a few clergymen who had embraced evangelical teachings in Habsburg territories had been burnt at the stake, most notably Hendrik Vos and Johan van den Esschen in Brussels (depicted below in a 1523 pamphlet), whom Martin Luther memorialized in song.³ Contemplating religious persecution on both personal and political levels, then, Hubmaier penned a tract from his refuge in Schaffhausen: “On Heretics and Those Who Burn Them.” 

Throughout the thirty-six articles of the tract, Hubmaier argued that heretics should be counteracted with instruction rather than force. He began by defining heretics as those who “wantonly resist the Holy Scriptures” and “who exposit it otherwise than the Holy Spirit demands.”⁴ He then articulated what should be done with these heretics. First, he used the metaphor of fire to argue that heretics should be gently instructed using the “spiritual flame” of the Holy Scripture rather than the fire of the executioner. If heretics refused to change, Hubmaier contented that the Scriptures had a sufficient solution: Christians should simply “avoid them and let them go” (Titus 3:10 and Rev. 22:11).⁵ Second, he used the parable of the wheat and tares from Matthew 13 to establish that it was against Scripture to persecute unrepentant heretics. From the parable, he thought, we learn that heretics “are not to be destroyed” but left for Christ to judge at the end of time. Hubmaier summarized how the church should interact with heresy by arguing that “we combat … not against human beings, but against their godless teachings.”⁶

To make such an argument, Hubmaier had to be confident that proper doctrine would prevail over heretics’ teachings on its own accord within the church. Yet in his culture, political leaders and theorists consistently envisioned their entire societies as the “body of Christ” and supposed it was their Christian responsibility to cut off the lives of persistent heretics so that their corrupt teachings would not infect other members of the body.  To overcome this conviction, Hubmaier argued that God actually used heretics for his Church’s good. He stated that the “faith which flows from the wellspring of the gospel lives only in the presence of testing; the rougher the test, the greater the faith.” When heresy creeps into the church, it causes the community to wrestle with the truth in the Scripture and learn the articles of faith better. To resort to executing heretics, then, was actually to show a lack of faith in Christ to vindicate the truth within his Church, rather than showing one’s piety in defending the honor of his name in the public sphere.⁷

By placing such great value on opening up theological discussion within church forums, Hubmaier broadened the responsibility to recognize and articulate true doctrine to regular members of a church community—rather than relegate that responsibility to a small number of clergy and legal professionals alone.  In fact, Hubmaier accused those clergy who claimed elite power to prosecute and punish heresy of being the most dangerous members of the church; he claimed that “inquisitors are the greatest heretics of all, because counter to the teaching and example of Jesus they condemn heretics to fire” and, even worse, sometimes burn real Christians alongside heretics.⁸ He used the account in Jeremiah of King Jehoiakim burning the Word of God to show how abominable it is to burn “genuine proclaimers of the Word of God.”⁹ Finally, Hubmaier challenged the heretic-burners by saying “that the law [which provides] for the burning of heretics is an invention of the devil.” But in contrast, “the Truth is Unkillable.”¹⁰ The last phrase claimed confidence that Christ did not need killing to in his name for his truth to prevail. But it also prophetically proclaimed the futility of burning those who might preach the truth against erring clergy and political authorities. It became Hubmaier’s favorite sign-off for his published texts as he became a man pursued by the Habsburg government.

With this tract, Hubmaier argued for a delinking of the church’s concern for doctrinal correctness from the state’s criminal law and administration. The church would have to be vigilant against false teachings to maintain proper doctrine, but it was the church’s job alone.  Implicit in his argument, the church’s tools of excommunication were enough to keep the church uncorrupted; it did not need to rely on the state to use force.

November, 1524

Hubmaier was able to have his theses published in September 1524, and sometime in the next two months he visited Zurich, likely to lobby Zwingli and the canton council for diplomatic and military support on behalf of his city’s reforming party. Zurich sent volunteer soldiers to be stationed in Waldshut for the city’s defense, giving the reformers a greater boldness to proceed with their agenda despite knowledge of Austria’s disapproval.  By the end of November, Hubmaier felt it was safe to move back to Waldshut and take up his role at the pulpit again. Over the next months, he would lead Waldshut on a path to far-reaching reform that would even re-envision baptism.¹¹

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.

Image of Hendrik Vos and Johan van den Esschen courtesy of Martin Reckenhofer, Dye histori / so zwen Augustiner Ordens gemartert seyn tzu Bruzel in Probant / von wegen des Evangelj, 1523, Erfurt, i/r.

1. H. Wayne Pipkin and John H. Yoder, eds., Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 16-17, 21-29. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 58. ↩︎
3. Martin Luther, “Ein neu lied von den zwei Märtyrern Christi, Zu Brussel von den sophisten von löven verbrannt,” in Eyn Enchiridion …geistlicher gesenge vnd Psalmen (Erfurt: Johannes Loersfeld, 1524), no. 25. ↩︎
4. Balthasar Hubmaier, “On Heretics and Those Who Burn Them,” art. 1-2, in Pipkin & Yoder, Hubmaier, 58-66. ↩︎
5. Ibid., art. 4-6. ↩︎
6. Ibid., art. 8-11. ↩︎
7. Ibid., art. 24-25, 27-28. ↩︎
8. Ibid., art. 13 and 29. ↩︎
9. Ibid., art. 28 and 33. ↩︎
10. Ibid., art. 36. ↩︎
11. Pipkin & Yoder, Hubmaier, 37. ↩︎