March 20-22, 1525

After George Blaurock’s rearrest, he rejoined Felix Mantz in a prison tower in Zurich. Once the leaders of the Zollikon Anabaptists had also been rounded up, they asked for another chance for their position to be heard by Zurich’s clerical leaders, apparently still holding out hopes that Ulrich Zwingli held beliefs about baptism that were close enough to their own that he still might be persuaded to align with, or at least tolerate, them. The Zurich Council agreed to a second disputation, to be held over three days. They brought Blaurock and Mantz, and perhaps a few of the Zollikon leaders, out of prison to defend their position and presented them at the City Hall. But Zwingli and the two other “people’s priests” of the canton—Heinrich Bullinger and Leo Jud—had grown only less sympathetic toward them. Joined by Oswald Myconius, a Zurich schoolmaster and former friend of Conrad Grebel, they used the opportunity to try to demonstrate the Anabaptists’ errors in front of civil magistrates from around the canton.

Zwingli wrote about the disputation at length in his Baptism Booklet (Taufbüchlein), published two months later, and briefly in his Refutation of the Twistings of the Catabaptists (Elenchus) of 1527. Bullinger also recalled a few paragraphs about it when he wrote his chronicle of Zurich’s Reformation fifty years later.¹ These sources show Zwingli’s and Bullinger’s perception that the Anabaptists posed a threat to traditional ecclesiology as well as to their new evangelical teachings on soteriology. Their concern about Anabaptists’ adult baptisms was not about liturgical propriety or the pastoral authority of lay people to baptize. Rather it was about the ecclesiological implications that lay behind the Anabaptists’ presentation of what baptism entailed: because the Anabaptists were teaching that baptism was the inflection point between a life in sin and life freed from sin, Zwingli, Bullinger and Myconius sensed a “perfectionist” attitude among them that they thought no individual nor church should assume.

Zwingli noted some Anabaptists’ claims that sounded as if they had taken up the ancient heresy of Pelagianism. One of the Anabaptists, he noted, said that he approached his rebaptism with apprehension because of the Anabaptists’ “claim that no one should be baptized unless he knows that he can live without sin.” Zwingli contested that these Anabaptists were placing an unmeetable burden upon the consciences of people. Some Anabaptists testified that they felt a “great release at the moment of baptism,” suggesting to Zwingli that they viewed the outward act as having a regenerative effect that simultaneously confirmed the forgiveness of their sins and gave them power to live without sin. But Zwingli claimed “it is clear and indisputable that no external element of action can purify the soul.”² Here Zwingli believed he was confronting a revivification of common misunderstandings of Catholic sacramental theology that he had worked hard to counter in his teachings against placing store in the material aspects of the Mass or in devotional imagery.

Zwingli also took umbrage that one Anabaptist at the disputation suggested he might not bother to “justify” his “position from the Word of God” to Zwingli because “none will understand except those who are without sin.” Zwingli attacked the man as saying, in effect, that he himself was without sin. It is not possible to know, based on Zwingli account, whether the Anabaptist believed himself “without sin” because of a confidence that Christ’s prior act on the Cross already forgave his past and future sin, or if the Anabaptist believed that he was actually able to live without sinning any longer. But Zwingli interpreted the comment as implying the latter position, and he declared such “boasting” no less “arrogant” than the perfectionist claims “hitherto made by the monks and nuns.” Mocking the Anabaptists’ pride in their lifestyle, he wrote: “ʽOh,’ but they say, ‘formerly we were sinners, but now we are sinners no longer’…The monks used to talk like that, and we answered, rightly, that in making a statement of that kind they were committing the greatest possible sin. And now the devil is leading us back to the same evil ways.”

In aligning Anabaptists with monastic perfectionism, Zwingli was equating Anabaptists’ beliefs about baptism—as a transition point into “new life”—with Catholic practices of taking monastic vows. And he saw the implications of viewing the Church as akin to a monastic community that would hold members accountable to live lives of sanctity in accordance with those vows. Zwingli recorded the Anabaptists as saying: “We allowed ourselves to be rebaptized in order that our Anabaptist brethren might have power and authority to restrain us when we have the impulse to sin.”³ Here the Anabaptists would have likely been communicating that they understood baptism to be a public ceremony by which a person committed himself to the “discipline” of his congregation, treating all the members as a “priesthood” that could provide admonishment and even the threat of excommunication against him if he were to stray from the path of “discipleship.” Because he was ardent in wanting to pursue righteousness, he was signaling by baptism that he wanted the congregation to play this disciplining role in his life, helping him to suppress his baser desires in order to fulfill his highest desire of life with Christ. Zwingli responded that “this is nothing other than monkery.”⁴ He sensed that this vision of the church was akin to monasticism because monks and nuns only entered full membership into monastic communities after submitting themselves to the rule of their abbot or abbess and the admonishment of their brothers or sisters. Just as monasteries had been voluntary societies for the pursuit of Christian discipleship for centuries, the Anabaptists were now making the monastic model their standard for the true church.

Zwingli reacted against this concept of the church by calling it “a new legalism”: it would cause members to pursue righteousness under a threat of punishment from their congregation rather than a out of uncompelled love and gratitude for Christ. “[W]e as Christians do not act rightly under the compulsion of the law, but by faith.”⁵ The freshness of Zwingli’s battles against the “works-righteousness” that he saw in Catholic piety and monasticism over the past five years caused him to view the Anabaptists as reviving a non-evangelical “bondage” to the “law.”

Zwingli also argued that perfectionism led to a schismatic spirit. He accused the Anabaptists of saying: “We are the church, and those who do not belong to our church are not Christians. The church was founded by us: before us there was no church.” And his response was: “Exactly! It is just as I have said from the very first: The root of the trouble is that the Anabaptists will not recognize any Christians except themselves or any Christians except their own. And that is always the way with sectarians who separate themselves on their own authority….You should accept as Christian even those who do not rebaptize, and you should rejoice that they too accept you as Christians.”⁶ Judging from his writings in the aftermath of this disputation with the Anabaptist prisoners, Zwingli left it feeling confirmed that the matter of infant vs. adult baptism was not just a fine point in liturgical planning. Baptism upon confession of faith by adults entailed that the church would be viewed as one sanctified, voluntary society within an unregenerate “secular” society at large. But he wanted to reform society at large through his reforms of the church. The only way to do so, he thought, was for everyone to have a sense of membership and identity in the church from the time they were children. Anabaptists’ notion of a “free church” was a significant threat to his strategy. 

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. English translations of these three sources are printed in The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents, ed. Leland Harder (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 352-56. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 354. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 355. ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎
6. Ibid., 355-56. ↩︎