Late 1523

In late 1523, a group of people in Zurich began to meet together to study the Bible in their homes. Integral members of this group were Conrad Grebel, Felix Mantz, and Andreas Castelberger, a book seller. Castelberger was a conduit for books that advanced Zurichers’ closer study of the New Testament and the classical languages. For instance, if Grebel’s memory in a letter to Castelberger was correct, Grebel and he both owned editions of Erasmus’ annotations on the New Testament and two Greek grammars to assist reading the New Testament books in the original.¹

August 1, 1524

By August 1524, however, townspeople who were not trained in the classical languages had easier access to the Scriptures in their vernacular language, as well: Zwingli’s translation of the New Testament into Swiss German began coming off the press of local printer Christoph Froschauer on the first of the month. Around the same time, the members of the Bible study group obtained the writings of a reformer who had even created German-language liturgies to replace the Latin mass.²

That reformer was Thomas Müntzer, a fiery evangelical preacher in central Germany who would soon side with peasants in an uprising against their lords. In late August, more than a thousand peasants in the Black Forest region marched into the town of Waldshut, near the Swiss border, and formed what they called an “Evangelical Brotherhood” devoted to freeing peasants from oppressive exactions of their manorial lords. Once the movement was fueled by itinerant preachers’ prophetic-style denunciations of the ruling class, like Müntzer’s, insurrectionary fervor spread throughout the German and Austrian lands. 

September 5, 1524

Less than two weeks after the Waldshut convention, Grebel wrote a lengthy letter to Müntzer on behalf of the Bible study group. In it, he indicated that members of the group had also written to Andreas Karlstadt and Martin Luther, but those letters have not been found. Grebel’s letter likely never reached Müntzer, but the surviving copy remains the most substantial elaboration of Grebel’s convictions.³

Grebel began his letter by addressing Müntzer purposely without a pastoral title, and instead as “a true and fellow brother in Christ.” He surely believed that Müntzer would approve of the implied egalitarian concept of the church that abolished privileges and ranks reserved to elites. Indicating that he and his colleagues had read Müntzer’s tracts condemning “contrived faith,” Grebel sketched an interpretation of Church history that they shared in common: Christianity had fallen away from “true faith” in God, trusting instead in a “showy faith” consisting of contrived rituals. In particular, he condemned the “unchristian” ceremonies that surrounded baptism and the Lord’s Supper. He leveled this charge against both the “papists” and the “evangelical preachers,” presumably referring to Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and their supporters. Grebel admitted that he and his circle previously fell prey to the same errors before they began to study the scriptures directly for themselves. At that stage, they had been merely “listeners and readers of the evangelical preachers.” They also had not taken on a sufficient sense of their own lay agency to pray for the church: “We discovered,” he wrote, “that we do not ask God every day, seriously and with constant sighs, to lead us … out of human abominations, and to the true faith and practices of God.”⁴ The thrust of Grebel’s personal narrative suggests that the solution to the damage the Church had suffered began with common Christians taking up their own responsibility to study the scriptures intently and support the church in fervent prayer, rather than merely ask the clergy of the church to support them in prayer. 

Accordingly, Grebel was not shy to support an ordained clergyman like Müntzer with prayer as well as corrections, admonishing him on numerous points of ecclesiastical practice. Consistent with the regulative principle of worship that he had pushed at the Second Doctrinal Disputation in Zurich, Grebel objected to Müntzer’s German Mass, which led the laity into audible singing that Grebel believed had no New Testament precedent; he believed the New Testament scriptures affirmed only singing “in one’s heart.” In Grebel’s mind, since the liturgy and songs of the Mass were Latin inventions not found in the Bible, they should have been discontinued rather than translated.⁵

Grebel also articulated his circle’s view that the Lord’s Supper should be shared in homes, rather than “temples,” and practiced frequently. Despite the frequency, participants were still to take care to maintain Matthew 18-based discipline to avoid sharing the Supper with “false brothers” and to ensure that all “eat it in a brotherly way,” having extended forgiveness and reconciliation after conflicts. Grebel believed the bread should be broken and administered by multiple people, not a clergyman alone—again advancing an egalitarian view of congregational ministry that, he believed, would be a safeguard against clergymen inventing rituals to distinguish themselves ceremonially from the laity.⁶

Grebel also expressed in this letter a conviction that Christians do not engage in violence, even to defend themselves: “One should not protect the gospel and those who accept it with the sword, nor should they protect themselves….[T]rue Christians use neither the worldly sword nor war, for among them killing has been totally abolished.”⁷ Hearing that Müntzer had “preached against the princes, that one should attack them with the fist,” Grebel implored Müntzer to teach only what is found in God’s word, abandoning all human opinions, even his own, in the pursuit of pure teaching and faith. “[I]f you want to defend war, feasting, and singing, or other things which you do not find in the clear word…then I admonish you.”⁸     

Evident from both his view of the church’s decline and his exhortations to Müntzer, Grebel was highly concerned about man-made practices corrupting Christian worship. He viewed additions to apostolic church practices as perversions—often motivated by man’s desires for social distinctions—that led people away from an internal faith in Christ and reliance on the apostles’ models for living as Christian disciples.  If ritual rather than righteousness provided laypeople assurance of salvation. Grebel believed, their faith would be an external one that missed the essential purpose of the few, simple rituals that Christ had actually commanded: to remind ourselves that we “should be dead to sin,” as Christ died for us, and raised to “newness of life” in the righteousness of the Christ.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. The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents, ed. Leland Harder (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 358. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 676-78, fn. 7, 18, and 20. ↩︎
3. Conrad Grebel, Letter to Thomas Müntzer (Zurich, 5 September 1524), in The Radical Reformation, ed. Michael G. Baylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 45-46. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 36-37. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 38-40. ↩︎
6. Ibid., 39-40, 42. ↩︎
7. Ibid., 42-43. ↩︎
8. Ibid., 46. ↩︎
9. Ibid., 42-43. ↩︎