After accidentally stumbling across a few “drowned at baptism ceremony” stories like the one I shared on April 24, I signed up with Google to get an email alert whenever the words “drown” and “baptism” pop up in a story.

That simple act turned out to be far more educational than I expected….

—– Why Our Cities Need A Dose Of Reformation (Harry Reid/The Herald; April 30)

To paraphrase the Bible, of making lists there is no end. The latest league table to be unleashed, no doubt to excite controversy, approval, scorn and elucidation in roughly equal measure, seeks to assess the “best” cities in the world – those offering the best quality of life….

The top three cities are all European, and relatively near to each other: Vienna, Geneva and Zurich. I’ve recently visited both Geneva and Zurich, in connection with a book I was researching on the Reformation. I preferred Zurich to Geneva….

I was there to investigate the city’s religious past, about which it is rather diffident. While in Geneva there is pride in the connection with John Calvin, whose imprint is everywhere in the old town up the hill from the lake, in Zurich there is less celebration of the great indigenous reformer Huldrych Zwingli. By a curious quirk, the street named after him is distinctly seedy, located in the only squalid part of town, near the Langstrasse, the city’s “street of sin”, of which it seems curiously proud. The street named after Luther is also located in this unlikely area.

Zurich was the city that spawned the Anabaptist movement. The Anabaptists were the most radical of the various sects that sprang from the Reformation. They believed in adult baptism, and the city fathers, wishing to exterminate these dangerous revolutionaries, took to executing their leaders with grisly appropriateness: they were drowned in the River Limmat. For many years the city seemed too ashamed to own up publicly to this cruel episode in its history. Eventually a tiny, almost insulting, plaque, obscure and difficult to find, was erected by the river.…

Wikipedia provides these additional details:

Believer’s baptism is one of the defining characteristics of Anabaptist beliefs, but was considered heresy by the other major religious groups of the reformation period. As a result, Anabaptists were heavily persecuted during the 16th century and into the 17th….

Much of the historic Roman Catholic and Protestant literature has represented the Anabaptists as groups who preached false doctrine and led people into apostasy. That negative historiography remained popular for about four centuries. The Roman Catholics and Protestants alike persecuted the Anabaptists, resorted to torture and other types of physical abuse, in attempts both to curb the growth of the movement and bring about the salvation of the heretics (through recantation). The Protestants under Zwingli were the first to persecute the Anabaptists. Felix Manz became the first martyr in 1527.

On May 20, 1527, Roman Catholic authorities executed Michael Sattler. King Ferdinand declared drowning (called the third baptism) “the best antidote to Anabaptism”. It has been said that a “16th century man who did not drink to excess, curse, or abuse his workmen or family could be suspected of being an Anabaptist and thus persecuted.” Thousands died in Europe in the sixteenth century. The Tudor regime, even those that were Protestant (Edward VI of England and Elizabeth I of England) persecuted Anabaptists as they were deemed too radical and therefore a danger to religious stability. The persecution of Anabaptists was condoned by ancient laws of Theodosius I and Justinian I that were passed against the Donatists which decreed the death penalty for any who practiced rebaptism.

Thieleman J. van Braght’s Martyrs Mirror [published in 1660] describes the persecution and execution of thousands of Anabaptists, such as Dirk Willems, in Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and other parts of Europe between 1525 and 1660. Continuing persecution in Europe was largely responsible for the mass immigrations to North America by Amish, Hutterites, and Mennonites.

The Encyclopedia Britannica adds these additional details:

The movement’s most distinctive tenet was adult baptism. In its first generation, converts submitted to a second baptism, which was a crime punishable by death under the legal codes of the time. Members rejected the label Anabaptist, or Rebaptizer, for they repudiated their own baptism as infants as a blasphemous formality. They considered the public confession of sin and faith, sealed by adult baptism, to be the only proper baptism. Following the Swiss Reformer Huldrych Zwingli, they held that infants are not punishable for sin until they become aware of good and evil and can exercise their own free will, repent, and accept baptism.

The Anabaptists also believed that the church, the community of those who have made a public commitment of faith, should be separated from the state, which they believed existed only for the punishment of sinners. Most Anabaptists were pacifists who opposed war and the use of coercive measures to maintain the social order; they also refused to swear oaths, including those to civil authorities. For their teachings regarding baptism and for the apparent danger they posed to the political order, they were ubiquitously persecuted.

The Anabaptists, like most Protestant Reformers, were determined to restore the institutions and spirit of the primitive church and often identified their suffering with that of the martyrs of the first three Christian centuries. Quite confident that they were living at the end of time, they expected the imminent return of Jesus Christ.

Although questions were raised about the biblical validity of infant baptism in the early years of the Reformation, the first adult baptism, which took place at Zollikon, outside Zürich, probably on January 21, 1525, was the result of the dissatisfaction of a group of Zwingli’s followers, led by the patrician humanist Konrad Grebel, over Zwingli’s unwillingness to undertake what they considered necessary reforms. Soon thereafter an extensive movement was in progress….

The vehemence and intransigence of the Anabaptist leaders and the revolutionary implications of their teaching led to their expulsion from one city after another. This simply increased the momentum of an essentially missionary movement. Soon civil magistrates took sterner measures, and most of the early Anabaptist leaders died in prison or were executed.

Despite increasing persecution, new Anabaptist communities and teachings emerged under new leaders….

A unique type of Anabaptism, developed later in Moravia under the leadership of Jakob Hutter, stressed the common ownership of goods modeled on the primitive church in Jerusalem. The Hutterite colonies first established in Moravia survived the Reformation and are now located primarily in the western United States and Canada. Another important leader, Melchior Hofmann, established a large following in the Netherlands and inspired a number of disciples. He taught that the world would soon end and that the new age would begin in Strasbourg. He was imprisoned in that city in 1533 and died about 10 years later.

Some of Hofmann’s followers, such as the Dutchman Jan Mathijs (died 1534) and John of Leiden (Jan Beuckelson; died 1536), and many persecuted Anabaptists settled in Münster, Westphalia. Hofmann’s disciples were attracted to the city by dramatic changes that occurred there in the early 1530s. Under the influence of the Reformer Bernhard Rothman, Anabaptist sentiment was strong enough there to elect an Anabaptist majority to the city council in 1533. This was followed, under the direction of Mathijs and John of Leiden, by the expulsion and persecution of all non-Anabaptists and the creation of a messianic kingdom under John of Leiden. The city was surrounded in 1534 by an army of Catholics and Protestants, which perhaps encouraged further reforms, including the common ownership of goods and polygamy, both with the declaration of biblical precedent. The city was captured in 1535, and the Anabaptist leaders were tortured and killed and their bodies hung in steel cages from the steeple of St. Lambert’s church.

Historians regard the episode at Münster as an aberration of the Anabaptist movement. In the years following it, however, Protestants and Catholics increased their persecution of Anabaptists throughout Europe without discriminating between the belligerent minority and the pacifist majority. The pacifist Anabaptists in the Netherlands and northern Germany rallied under the leadership of the former priest Menno Simons and his associate Dirk Philips. Their followers survived and were eventually accepted as the Mennonite church.

QUESTION #1: Approximately how much of this did you already know?

QUESTION #2: What lessons might we reasonably draw from the harsh persecution of the Anabaptists by both Catholics and Protestants?

BONUS QUESTION: I’ve often been told by Christians that the willingness of early Christians to die for their beliefs proves those beliefs are true because “nobody is willing to die for a lie.” If you believe this is correct does the willingness of thousands of Anabaptists to die for their beliefs prove those beliefs are true as well? Explain.