December 6, 1524

The free-church movement became closely associated with a movement to baptize only adults in 1524. Earlier, the prime energy among those questioning the alignment of church with state officials came from individuals wanting to see icons eliminated from church worship spaces more speedily than Zwingli or Luther were willing to act. But once the Zurich Council and Zwingli fulfilled their wishes and instituted the removal of images in June 1524,¹ some Zurichers who held a regulative principle of worship remained dissatisfied; they now focused on another issue that seemed to them to have no precedent in the New Testament: infant baptism.

In the spring of 1524, two pastors in villages on the banks of Lake Zurich, Wilhelm Reublin and Hans Brötli, began to preach against the practice of infant baptism, convincing many in the congregations to withhold their children from the baptismal font. In August 1524, these congregations came to the attention of the Zurich Council, which issued a mandate that parents refusing to baptize their infants would be fined one silver mark.  The Council also had Reublin imprisoned briefly and interviewed by the three “people’s priests” of Zurich—the leading clergymen for the church in the canton—who warned him to cease preaching against infant baptism.² In the canton of St. Gallen, a weaver who had been banished from Zurich for illegal iconoclasm also began attending a Bible study group in his new town and challenging its leader on the propriety of infant baptism. His correspondence showed he was a part of Conrad Grebel’s network.³ 

By late fall 1524, Grebel’s circle brought their discontentment with the practice of infant baptism to Zwingli and asked for a judgment that would lift the Council’s fines on parents who did not have their children baptized. Zwingli arranged two discussions with them and the two other people’s priests. The first discussion took place on December 6.⁴ 

Among Grebel’s colleagues at the meeting was Ludwig Haetzer, a strong scholar of Hebrew who had returned to Zurich in the fall after going to Augsburg with Zwingli’s recommendation to assist evangelical reformers active there. Already in 1523, after he had served for three years as a chaplain in a Lake Zurich village, Haetzer had published a tract calling for the removal of devotional images from churches,⁵ and he spoke up twice to advocate that position at the Second Doctrinal Disputation in Zurich. In 1524, Haetzer began to question the practice of infant baptism, as well.⁶  

December 7-28, 1524

At the first meeting, as Zwingli recalled several years later, “the battle was keen but without affront to us as we especially considered their accusations with calmness.”⁷ But he started work after the discussion on a treatise against “those who give cause for rebellion” in evangelical territories, and Grebel came away anticipating that Zwingli’s writings “may well hit us.”⁸ 

Indeed, when Zwingli published his text, he wrote of four types of agitators who created upheaval in the church. Some were so motivated by “envy and hate for the papacy” that they were ready to reject even good practices and teachings that continued under the Roman church; the gospel was lost on people with spiteful motives, “like seed falling on a rock.”  Some used reformers’ teachings of Christian liberty as if they had license to sin or to refuse legal obligations. And finally, a fourth party were “more inflated with knowledge of the gospel than ignited with love,” constantly quarreling “about external things,” and condemning others who did not conduct church affairs precisely as they saw fit. He suggested that the critics of infant baptism were of this sort.⁹    

Zwingli also perceived that behind their objection to infant baptism, this party held concerns of ecclesiological purity that challenged the state’s legitimate role—as he saw it—in binding Christian society together by setting church policies and deterring people from undermining proper doctrine with the threat of criminal punishment:  “First they reject the state; then they want to keep the state, and yet no one in government is a Christian. Now they want to have their own church, later the government shall not use force to protect the preaching of the gospel.” For Zwingli, the critics of infant baptism were not showing the charity and forbearance to attend church with neighbors who did not live up to Christian ideals for behavior as well as they did, and such a posture was based on pride in their own lifestyle. “Why do you continually rage about purely external matters?” he addressed the objectors. “Indeed, if your diligence is only that one live in a Christian manner, you must not infuse those who are not living in a Christian manner with disparagement and accusation, but with gentleness and unceasing love. In short, this is my request to you, that you work as hard on yourselves to kill the greatest monster and poison to Christian living—namely, spiritual pride.”¹⁰ He thought a benefit of a territorial church, rather than a separatist one, was that members would know their body was imperfect and thus be reminded that they were imperfect individuals in need of grace, as well.

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. Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 82. ↩︎
2. Leland Harder, ed., The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 690: fn. 6 and 7. ↩︎
3. Johann Kessler, “Sabbata” (1525). in ibid., 297-298. ↩︎
4. Conrad Grebel to Joachim Vadian (Dec. 15, 1524), in ibid., 300-301. ↩︎
5. Eire, War Against the Idols, 79-80. ↩︎
6. Gerhard Goeters, “Haetzer, Ludwig (1500-1529).” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1956, available at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Haetzer,_Ludwig_(1500-1529). ↩︎
7. Ulrich Zwingli, “Elenchus,” in Harder, Sources of Swiss Anabaptism, 300. ↩︎
8. Conrad Grebel to Joachim Vadian (Dec. 15, 1524), in ibid., 302. ↩︎
9. Ulrich Zwingli, “Those Who Give Cause for Rebellion” (Dec. 7-28, 1524) in Harder, Sources of Swiss Anabaptism, 316 ↩︎
10. Ibid., 318. ↩︎