Palm Sunday, April 9, 1525

On this weekend five hundred years ago, the church calendar also commemorated Palm Sunday. And on that Palm Sunday, a large group of people from St. Gall—a city of about five thousand people to the east of Zurich—walked out of town for two miles to a nearby river. And there, many of them entered into the waters of the stream to have Conrad Grebel baptize them. Although the precise number of people involved is not recorded, a local Catholic chronicler had the impression that a significant portion of the townspeople participated. He wrote at the time that “the sect of the Anabaptists had completely taken over, on Sunday rushing into the water called Sitter, just as if it were a procession.”¹

Conrad Grebel had been in St. Gall for two weeks by this Sunday, arriving in late March from the Schaffhausen area where he had been spending time after fleeing the canton of Zurich in late January. The baptism procession to the Sitter River was the culmination of meetings that he had been openly holding in the town during those two weeks, encouraging listeners to undertake believer’s baptism. St. Gall was a familiar city to Grebel, since his brother-in-law and close friend Joachim von Watt (Vadian) was a member of the city council. Vadian had been a humanist scholar influenced by Erasmus, like Zwingli, and had become the leading proponent of church reform along Zwinglian lines on the council. Vadian kept up a regular correspondence with both Grebel and Zwingli throughout the years of the Zurich reformers’ initial collaboration and subsequent alienation. Although Vadian had been generally supportive of Grebel’s earnestness to restore worship practices to those used by the early church, he was not prepared to support Grebel in his defiance of Zurich’s doctrines on infant baptism and he maintained a vision of church and council working together on the policies and pace of reforms. 

Evangelical reform had been gaining significant popular support over the prior two years, mainly taking expression in townspeople’s eagerness to hear the Scriptures read aloud to them by literate laypeople throughout the workweek in informal places like taverns and guildhalls. Some of these meetings might have very well taken on more of the character of preaching-based worship services, but were still called “readings” in order to avoid authorities’ alarm about services in secular buildings without local clergy.²

Anabaptism in St. Gall emerged within the context of these meetings. A St. Gall resident who kept a chronicle of religious events during the mid-1520s, Johann Kessler, wrote extensively of the spread of Anabaptism in his home region. According to Kessler, Anabaptist ideas first surfaced in St. Gall through a “zealous disciple” of Conrad Grebel named Lorenz Hochrütiner. A native of St. Gall, Hochrütiner had come back to the city after being banished from Zurich in late 1523 for attempting to remove a crucifix before the Zurich Council had permitted iconoclasm. Working as a weaver in Zurich, Hochrütiner had been an early attender of Grebel and Andreas Castelberger’s Bible study group, and both Grebel and Zwingli wrote to Vadian to put a good word in for Hochrütiner upon his arrival home. Despite his banishment by the Zurich Council, Zwingli called him “innocent before God,” displaying his own iconoclastic sympathies.³ He started to give Scripture readings for interested laypeople in St. Gall in 1524, and soon began making known his views about the impropriety of infant baptism. 

The chronicler Johann Kessler was himself an important agent of the evangelical movement in St. Gall. After studying under Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon in Wittenberg, he came back to St. Gall and began using his literacy skills to support other townspeople in hearing and studying the Scriptures through public readings, beginning in 1523 at the Weavers’ Guild.⁴ And Kessler had an unpleasant run-in with Hochrütiner in late 1524, when he was leading a Bible study. “I read Paul’s epistle to the Romans to some Christian brethren who asked and called me to do this,” Kessler wrote. But as he was reading from the sixth chapter of Romans and “speaking about the power of the Word, baptism, and its significance.” Hochrütiner “lifted up his voice and ordered me to stop, saying, “I note from your words that you think infants should be baptized.” “I replied,” continued Kessler, “[that] I knew nothing to the contrary at present. It seemed very odd and strange that there would be anyone who doubted it.” Hochrütiner then based his advocacy of adult baptism on Matthew 28—presumably the words of the “Great Commission,” which names the task of making disciples before naming the task of baptizing—and on Mark 16: “He who believes and is baptized will be saved.” Hochrütiner claimed that a “child is an unreasoning being” and baptizing one would be like “dipping any other unreasoning animal, like a cat or a stick, in to the water.” Grebel apparently stayed in close contact with Hochrütiner, because shortly after this intervention, Grebel sent the brethren who had been gathering with Kessler an eight-page letter, which, Kessler wrote, “I was to read to them, saying all that I said about baptism was from the devil….And thus a division occurred among the brethren.”⁵ Thus, already in 1524, a faction of Kessler’s Bible study group had become dissatisfied with his adherence to infant baptism and had grown inclined to follow Hochrütiner’s and Grebel’s advocacy for believer’s baptism.

The ground for Grebel’s preaching was also prepared by Wolfgang Uliman. Uliman came from a prominent St. Gall family, where his father headed the weavers’ guild, but he had become a apprenticing monk at the same monastery in Graubünden where George Blaurock had been a monk at the same time. Perhaps through Blaurock’s connection, Uliman met up with Grebel in Schaffhausen after Grebel had fled there in late January. Already attracted to evangelical reforms and declining to pursue monastic life, he now embraced Anabaptism. In March, he had Grebel baptize him by immersion in the Rhine River. When Uliman came home to St. Gall shortly thereafter, he began holding meetings about the scriptures in a guildhalls too.⁶

By this point, Town Council members were growing concerned about the doctrinal content of the readings. They temporarily banned them, but then permitted residents to gather, so long as they met in a parish church where designated clergy or city officials could monitor what speakers were saying and decide who would be permitted to lead the meetings. When the residents asked Uliman to move his readings to the church so that he could continue to lead readings, Uliman caused consternation when he said that “The heavenly Father has revealed to me that I should not proclaim his Word in the church from the pulpit…for the truth is never spoken there and none can be spoken.”⁷ Kessler suggested that Uliman’s position might have been due to the continued presence of images in the churches of St. Gall at the time. But he also faulted Uliman for instigating a separatist position with his strict stance on the space where he read; some residents told Uliman that if Christ’s disciples could drive out devils and idols with Christ’s name and preach in temples and synagogues, Uliman should have been confident that proclaiming Christ’s name would not be hindered by images in a church. But Uliman’s more likely reason for avoiding the pulpit is that he anticipated the monitors would quickly object to his teachings for departing from the Zwinglian-style reform that the Town Council favored. Because Uliman would not compromise, “those who adhered to him abandoned our Bethel or house of God,” Kessler wrote, “ganged together in homes, hills, meadows, and considered us as heathen, but themselves as the Christian church.”⁸

These adherents of Uliman and Hochrütiner likely met with Grebel during the two weeks before Palm Sunday and then decided the day would be a moment to make their strength in numbers public for the town at large through a procession to the Sitter River and open baptism through immersion. Kessler wrote that “those who rejected infant baptism had great joy in the confidence that they would now bring forth to the light of day the project with which they had been pregnant now for a whole year.”⁹ And that confidence came in part from the freedom that the St. Gall government had provided; the Town Councillors had not issued any mandates against rebaptism at this point, and residents undertaking it might well have hoped that the founding of an adult-baptizing church could become St. Gall’s unique contribution to reformation. 

According to Kessler, Grebel spoke at the weavers’ guildhall during Passion Week about infant and adult baptism, but then left that same week. So he did not baptize with the intention of discipling the newly baptized or leading them in the formation of a separate congregation. But Kessler wrote that “several of the imprisoned men of Zollikon” came to St. Gall to serve “in his stead in order that the game that had begun should not fall apart.”¹⁰ Another young convert, named Eberli Bolt, came too. Upon accepting rebaptism, Bolt preached in the St. Gall butchers’ hall throughout the Easter weekend and gained an admiring audience.¹¹ Kessler even considered him a “devout, good-hearted man” who was “practiced in the Holy Scriptures,”¹² and he noted that when Bolt preached on a hill outside of town “almost the entire town gathered there to hear the peasant.”¹³ A grassroots movement had begun that would attract many more people than in Zurich and Zollikon. Apart from the numbers who would accept rebaptism, however, the St. Gall residents more broadly showed an eagerness to gather for preaching and scriptural exposition outside of clergy-led church services. 

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. Fridolin Sicher, Chronik (1531), in Quellen zur Geschichte der Täifer in der Schweiz, vol. 2: Ostschweiz, ed. Heinold Fast (Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1973), 588; Leland Harder, ed., The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents, (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 359. ↩︎
2. Arnold Snyder, “Communication and the People: The Case of Reformation St. Gall,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 67 (1993): 158; John Horsch, “The Swiss Brethren in St. Gall and the Appenzell,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 7 (1933): 205-06. ↩︎
3. Horsch, 206. ↩︎
4. Snyder, 159. ↩︎
5. Johannes Kessler, Sabbata, in Harder, 297-98. No letter by Grebel mentioning Kessler has survived for the content to be reviewed. Harder, 687 fn. 8. ↩︎
6. Horsch, 207; Harder, 568. ↩︎
7. Kessler, Sabbata, in Harder, 360. ↩︎
8. Ibid., 360-361. ↩︎
9. Ibid., 361. ↩︎
10. Ibid., 361. ↩︎
11. Snyder, 169. ↩︎
12. Kessler, Sabbata, in Quellen 2: 606; Horsch, 208. ↩︎
13. Ibid.; Kessler, Sabbata (1525), in Harder, 377. ↩︎