March-April, 1526

While other Anabaptist men escaped from prison in March, Balthasar Hubmaier remained in his cell, wondering when Zurich authorities would release him. He had been kept separate from the others, not subject to the restricted diet of bread and water due to his stated willingness to defer to Zurich’s pastors on the matters of baptism. Unlike the other prisoners, he had also been given pen and paper. During this time he penned a unique pair of prayers, which he published later once he had access to a printing press: a prayer expanding upon the Lord’s Prayer and a prayer based on the Apostle’s Creed.¹ 

For the Lord’s Prayer, he strongly emphasized the individual’s – and his own – need for grace.  Right from the start, expanding on the phrase “Our Father,” he wrote: “I am not worthy that I should be called thy child, or that I should call thee my Father. I have not fulfilled thy fatherly will but rather the will of the father of liars. Pardon me, O merciful Father, and make me thy child in faith.”² Each subsequent petition prompted him to reflect on the corruption that man’s will worked upon God’s good world. “We publicly confess that thy fatherly will is not being done in us earthly humans, for our will is fully and completely in contradiction to thy divine will.” The solution was to pray that the Holy Spirit “might work in us genuine faith, constant hope and fervent love, that we might make our will in all things to be subject to thy fatherly will.”³ He understood Christ’s model prayer for “daily bread” to be prompting his disciples to cry out for the nourishment of the Word, asking God to “bring it to life in our soul.”⁴

In his prayer based on the Apostles’ Creed, Hubmaier struck a similar point of emphasis.⁵ When stating his belief in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, he recognized that God’s own act of creating him as His child was an act of grace. “Yet, I confess,” he continued, “we humans have lost this gracious sonship, dignity, and heritage, through the disobedience of Adam. Nonetheless I place in thee, in my most gracious Father, all my consolation, hope, and confidence, and know surely and certainly that this Fall will be harmless and no source of condemnation for me.”⁶

Hubmaier also included one of the foremost themes of both Reformed and Anabaptist leaders: the access that humans have to Christ, through prayer, at all places on earth. For Hubmaier, a former preacher at an immensely popular pilgrimage shrine, this theme showed his personal conversion from the Catholic “cult of the saints” that he now believed had been misguiding many lay people. “Thou dost command all those who are burdened to come to thee, for thou willst give them rest. It is therefore needless, my meek Christ, to worship thee either here or there, yea neither in bread nor in wine, for thou art to be found sitting at the right of thy heavenly Father, just as also the holy Stephen saw thee and worshipped thee. It is also vain to seek another intercessor.” Christ desired to be our one and only intercessor, Hubmaier declared, reminding those who prayed with him that they should not seek nearness to God through the mediation of saints or material things, even the consecrated host in the Eucharist or sites said to be holy because of miracles that had once occurred there.⁷ By invoking Stephen’s vision of Christ sitting at the right hand of the Father, Hubmaier hit upon a phrase that was important to Reformed theologians in their objections to Lutheran and Catholic teachings about the presence of Christ in the elements of Eucharist: Christ had now transcended the terrestrial realm, they contended, so the Eucharist should just be considered a memorial symbolically remembering Christ’s body and blood, sacrificed on the cross.⁸ 

Covering the “holy universal Christian church,” Hubmaier also prayed that members would “root out everything contrary that thou hast not planted,” a phrase from Matthew 15 where Christ responds to Pharisees’ concerns about dietary restrictions and ritual cleanliness. This phrase became a rally call for Reformed and Anabaptist theologians desiring to reform worship practices more than Luther had. The potential for using the phrase to justify abandoning many centuries-old ecclesiastical traditions and teachings can be seen in the rest of Hubmaier’s meditation on the character of the Church, where he prayed that “we might not be led into error by any kind of respect of persons, human dogmas, or doctrine of the ancient fathers, popes, councils, universities, or old customs.”⁹ By indicating that even councils or doctrines of ancient fathers could lead Christians into error, Hubmaier showed great confidence in the universal clarity of the Scriptures alone (sola scriptura). Hubmaier might also have been trying to show greater commonality with Zurich’s Reformed theologians than they had credited to him. The Apostoles’ Creed, after all, was one product of ancient fathers’ doctrines that they both held to be without error. But as both Hubmaier and the Zurich reformers surely appreciated, the idea that sola scriptura could provide a stable basis for evangelical ecclesiastical bodies was itself under strain by the disagreements that had emerged between them over the purpose and meaning of baptism.

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. Both prayers are translated into English by H. Wayne Pipkin & John H. Yoder in Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1989). ↩︎
2. Balthasar Hubmaier, “A Brief ‘Our Father’,” in ibid., 241. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 242. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 242-43. ↩︎
5.  Balthasar Hubmaier, “Twelve Articles in Prayer Form,” in ibid., 235.   ↩︎
6. Ibid., 235.  ↩︎
7. Ibid., 237. ↩︎
8. See, for instance, the transcript of the “Marburg Colloquy” in 1529, in Great Debates of the Reformation, ed. Katherine Hill (New York: Random House, 1969), 77-107. ↩︎
9. Ibid., 238-39. ↩︎