Celebrating 500 Years of Anabaptism

“The Martyrdom of Felix Manz” was the title of a blog post I made in January 2013. In that post, I noted that on January 21, 1525, “a group of people met in the house where Felix lived with his mother, and they formed a new faith fellowship” based on baptism after an open confession of faith in Jesus.

Today and in the weeks/months ahead, the 500^th anniversary of that January 21^st gathering is being widely celebrated by Anabaptists around the world. 

Anabaptist World Inc. is a “journalistic ministry serving the global Anabaptist movement.” Danielle Klotz, the Executive Director of that ministry, calls this month’s edition of that magazine a “special issue for a big milestone.” And indeed, a 500^th anniversary is a big milestone.*¹  

The combined membership of all Anabaptist churches comprises a very small percentage of Christians worldwide. According to the centerfold of the publication just mentioned, the “approximate number of baptized Anabaptist church members around the world is 2.13 million.”

Only 22 countries have more than 10,000 Anabaptist church members, and surprisingly, Ethiopia is the country with the most, nearly 515,000. The U.S. is next, with 456,000. It can be argued, though, that Anabaptists have had influence through the centuries that outstrip their relatively small membership.

Anabaptists are “the most radical reformers” in Protestant Christianity. The quoted words are the title of a major article in the above-mentioned magazine. The author, Anabaptist scholar Valerie G. Rempel, avers, “Appealing to scripture alone, Anabaptists broke with tradition to follow Jesus literally.”

The Protestant Reformation began in 1517 with the ideas and activities of Martin Luther in Germany. In 1518, soon after becoming the priest of Grossmünster, the prestigious church in Zürich (Switzerland), Ulrich Zwingli began a similar reformation of the Roman Catholic Church there.

Both of those reformation movements, however, preserved the basic rituals of the Catholic Church. The sacrament of infant baptism was deemed especially important. But the Jesus-followers who met in sight of Grossmünster Church on 1/21/1525 could find no biblical support for such baptism.

Felix Manz and Conrad Grebel were young men who agreed with Zwingli’s reformation activities, but they thought his work was too slow. So, rejecting infant baptism (which they denied as being true baptism), the small group gathered in Manz’s home performed and accepted “believer’s baptism.”

Their “radical” reformation put them at odds with both the religious and civic leaders in Zürich —and they were soon considered heretics by both the church and the state. Manz was executed by drowning on January 5, 1527, and in the following years, thousands of Anabaptists were imprisoned or killed.^*2

From the beginning the Anabaptists emphasized discipleship. They believed that following Jesus meant living according to his teachings as found in the Gospels.*³ Jesus’ command, “Love your enemies” (Matthew 5:43) was taken literally. To kill in the name of Jesus was unthinkable.

There are many differences among Anabaptists today. Progressive Mennonite churches, such as the one I am a member of, are far different from the various conservative Mennonite groups and the Amish. But from the beginning until the present, pacifism has been a core belief of all types of Anabaptists.

As I wrote in a blog post in 2012 (see here), “I decided while still in high school that pacifism is the position I should espouse because of being a follower of Christ.” So, I was long a “closet Anabaptist” until joining Rainbow Mennonite Church in July 2012.

The Southern Baptist Convention (that I was closely related to for nearly 50 years) as well as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (that I was later a part of for over 10 years) agree with the Anabaptists on believer’s baptism, and until SBC’s swing toward fundamentalism, on the separation of church and state.

But neither of those Baptist groups endorses pacifism, and the former especially has traditionally emphasized the New Testament writings of the Apostle Paul (and the “Roman road”) even more than the four Gospels. They tended to proclaim the Gospel about Jesus more than the message of Jesus.

Currently, 500 years after its beginning, the Anabaptist understanding of the Christian faith is still badly needed—and maybe more so in the U.S. now than ever because of the growing emphasis on Christian nationalism in this country.  

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*¹ Dawn Araujo-Hawkins is one of the nine members of Anabaptist World’s Board of Directors. She is a member of Rainbow Mennonite Church, where June and I are also members.

*² The name “Anabaptist,” meaning “re-baptizer,” was initially used in derision of the first participants in the “radical reformation” which began in 1525. For more detailed information (and a couple of pictures) about the beginning of Anabaptism, I highly recommend “Five Centuries of the Radical Reformation” (see here), the Jan. 16 Substack post by Thinking Friend Brian Kaylor.

Also, John Longhurst, an Anabaptist journalist who since 2003 has been the faith page columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press (the oldest newspaper in Western Canada), is the author of the informative Jan. 18 column, “2025 marks the 500th anniversary of Anabaptism.”

*³ Although Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran, his best-known book, known in English translation as The Cost of Discipleship, was first published in German (1n 1937) under the title Nachfolge, which literally means “following.” Since its publication in English translation in 1948, it has been highly appraised by Anabaptists as well as by many in other Christian denominations.

 

 

The Martyrdom of Felix Manz

Felix Manz is not exactly a household name for most people, although he is widely known in Anabaptist circles. (The family name is sometimes spelled Mantz, as in the name of the library named in his honor at Bethel College in Newton, Kansas).

A man of strong faith and conviction, Manz was martyred 486 years ago today, on January 5, 1527. On that fateful day, Felix was bound, taken to the middle of the Limmat River in the heart of Zurich (Switzerland), and executed by drowning.

Felix Manz was born around the year 1498, the son of one of the priests at the magnificent Grossmünster Church in Zurich and the priest’s concubine, who lived (at least later) in her own house on Neustadt Lane very near the church.

By Oliver Wendell Schenk, 1972

Ulrich (Huldrych) Zwingli became the head priest at Grossmünster at the end of 1518 and soon began to preach about reforming the Catholic Church. The young man Felix Manx became one of Zwingli’s ardent students. But by 1524 Felix, and a few others such as his good friend Conrad Grebel, became increasingly dissatisfied with Zwingli, whose reforms did not go far enough, they thought.

Finally, a group of people met in the house where Felix lived with his mother, and they formed a new faith fellowship on the basis of baptism following an open confession of faith in Jesus Christ. Grebel baptized an older man, George Blaurock (c. 1491~1529) and then he baptized Grebel and the others gathered there that day, January 21, 1525.

The group called themselves the Swiss Brethren—but their opponents, mainly Zwingli and the leaders of the Grossmünster Church as well as the Zurich city council, derisively called then Anabaptists (re-baptizers). In March 1526 the city council passed an edict making re-baptism punishable by drowning.

On January 5, 1527, Manz was sentenced to death, “because contrary to Christian order and custom he had become involved in Anabaptism.” About 3 p.m. that afternoon he was taken by boat onto the Limmat River, which runs not far from the front of Grossmünster Church. His hands were bound and pulled below his knees and a pole was placed between them—and then he was shoved into the river to die by drowning.

Manz was the first person to be martyred by Protestants. Some referred to his watery death as his “third baptism.”

In 2004 the Evangelical-Reformed Church of Zurich had a six-month commemoration of the 500^th anniversary of the birth of Heinrich Bullinger (1504~75), Zwingli’s successor as the head priest of Grossmünster. On June 26, that Church confessed their sins of the sixteenth century and asked for forgiveness by the descendants of those first Anabaptists.

That evening, a historical marker was unveiled on the bank of the river when Manz was matryred 477½ years earlier. June and I were quite moved when we visited that spot and saw the marker in May 2005. (In the picture, the marker is on the lower left, and the “twin towers” of Grossmünster Church can be seen in the background.)

The issue for Manz the other early Anabaptists was not just the rejection of infant baptism. The larger issue was the question about the nature of the church and the meaning of Christian discipleship. Those are topics that still merit serious consideration today.
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Jan. 8 -- Bob Carlson, a fellow member of Rainbow Mennonite Church and good friend, shared the following picture of the historical marker pictured, but unreadable, above: