| 25. The Baptismal Controversy. | ||||
The opposition to the mixed state-church or popular church, which embraced all the baptized, legitimately led to the rejection of infant baptism. A new church required a new baptism. | ||||
This became now the burning question. The Radicals could find no trace of infant baptism in the Bible, and denounced it as an invention of the pope and the devil. Baptism, they reasoned, presupposes instruction, faith, and conversion, which is impossible in the case of infants. Voluntary baptism of adult and responsible converts is, therefore, the only valid baptism. They denied that baptism is necessary for salvation, and maintained that infants are or may be saved by the blood of Christ without water-baptism. But baptism is necessary for church membership as a sign and seal of conversion. | ||||
From this conception of baptism followed as a further consequence the rebaptism of those converts who wished to unite with the new church. Hence the name Anabaptists or Rebaptizers (Wiedertaeufer), which originated with the Pedobaptists, but which they themselves rejected, because they knew no other kind of baptism except that of converts. | ||||
The demand of rebaptism virtually unbaptized and unchristianized the entire Christian world, and completed the rupture with the historic Church. It cut the last cord of union of the present with the past. | ||||
The first case was the rebaptism of Blaurock by Grebel in February, 1525, soon after the disputation with Zwingli. At a private religious meeting, Blaurock asked Grebel to give him the true Christian baptism on confession of his faith, fell on his knees and was baptized. Then he baptized all others who were present, and partook with them of the Lord's Supper, or, as they called it, the breaking of bread. Reubli introduced rebaptism in Waldshut at Easter, 1525, convinced Huebmaier of its necessity, and rebaptized him with about sixty persons. Huebmaier himself rebaptized about three hundred. | ||||
Baptism was not bound to any particular form or time or place or person; any one could administer the ordinance upon penitent believers who desired it. It was first done mostly in houses, by sprinkling or pouring, occasionally by partial or total immersion in rivers. | ||||
The mode of baptism was no point of dispute between Anabaptists and Pedobaptists in the sixteenth century. The Roman Church provides for immersion and pouring as equally valid. Luther preferred immersion, and prescribed it in his baptismal service. In England immersion was the normal mode down to the middle of the seventeenth century. It was adopted by the English and American Baptists as the only mode; while the early Anabaptists, on the other hand, baptized by sprinkling and pouring as well. We learn this from the reports in the suits against them at Z rich. Blaurock baptized by sprinkling, Manz by pouring. The first clear case of immersion among the Swiss Anabaptists is that of Wolfgang Uliman (an ex-monk of Coire, and for a while assistant of Kessler in St. Gall). He was converted by Grebel on a journey to Schaffhausen, and, not satisfied with being sprinkled merely out of a dish, was drawn under and covered over in the Rhine. On Palm Sunday, April 9, 1525, Grebel baptized a large number in the Sitter, a river a few miles from St. Gall, which descends from the Saentis and flows into the Thur, and is deep enough for immersion. The Lord's Supper was administered by the Baptists in the simplest manner, after a plain supper (in imitation of the original institution and the Agape), by the recital of the words of institution, and the distribution of bread and wine. They reduced it to a mere commemoration. | ||||
The two ideas of a pure church of believers and of the baptism of believers were the fundamental articles of the Anabaptist creed. On other points there was a great variety and confusion of opinions. Some believed in the sleep of the soul between death and resurrection, a millennial reign of Christ, and final restoration; some entertained communistic and socialistic opinions which led to the catastrophe of Muenster (1534). Wild excesses of immorality occurred here and there. | ||||
But it is unjust to charge the extravagant dreams and practices of individuals upon the whole body. The Swiss Anabaptists had no connection with the Peasants' War, which barely touched the border of Switzerland, and were upon the whole, like the Moravian Anabaptists, distinguished for simple piety and strict morality. Bullinger, who was opposed to them, gives the Z rich Radicals the credit that they denounced luxury, intemperance in eating and drinking, and all vices, and led a serious, spiritual life. Kessler of St. Gall, likewise an opponent, reports their cheerful martyrdom, and exclaims, Alas! what shall I say of the people? They move my sincere pity; for many of them are zealous for God, but without knowledge. And Salat, a Roman Catholic contemporary, writes that with cheerful, smiling faces, they desired and asked death, and went into it singing German psalms and other prayers. | ||||
The Anabaptists produced some of the earliest Protestant hymns in the German language, which deserve the attention of the historian. Some of them passed into orthodox collections in ignorance of the real authors. Blaurock, Manz, Hut, Haetzer, Koch, Wagner, Langmantel, Sattler, Schiemer, Glait, Steinmetz, Buechel, and many others contributed to this interesting branch of the great body of Christian song. The Anabaptist psalms and hymns resemble those of Schwenkfeld and his followers. They dwell on the inner life of the Christian, the mysteries of regeneration, sanctification, and personal union with Christ. They brea the throughout a spirit of piety, devotion, and cheerful resignation under suffering, and readiness for martyrdom. They are hymns of the cross, to comfort and encourage the scattered sheep of Christ ready for the slaughter, in imitation of their divine Shepherd. | ||||
NOTES. | ||||
The Anabaptist hymns appeared in a collection under the title Aussbund Etlicher schoener Christlicher Geseng wie die in der Gefengniss zu Passau im Schloss von den Schweitzern und auch von and eren rechtglaeubigen Christen hin und her gedicht worden, 1583, and often. Also in other collections of the sixteenth century. They are reprinted in Wackernagel, Das Deutsche Kirchenlied, vol. III. (1870), pp. 440-491, and vol. V. (1877), pp. 677-887. He embodies them in this monumental corpus hymnologicum, as he does the Schwenkfeldian and the Roman Catholic hymns of the fifteenth century, but under express reservation of his high-Lutheran orthodoxy. He refuses to acknowledge the Anabaptists as martyrs any longer (as he had done in his former work on German hymnology), because they stand, he says (III. 439), ausserhalb der Wahrheit, ausserhalb der heiligen lutherischen Kirche! Hymnology is the last place for sectarian exclusiveness. It furnishes one of the strongest evidences of Christian union in the sanctuary of worship, where theological quarrels are forgotten in the adoration of a common Lord and Saviour. Luther himself, as Wackernagel informs us, received unwittingly in his hymn book of 1545 a hymn of the Anabaptist Gruenwald, and another of the Schwenkfeldian Reusner. Wackernagel is happily inconsistent when he admits (p. 440) that much may be learned from the Anabaptist hymns, and that a noble heart will not easily condemn those victims of Rome and of the house of Habsburg. He gives first the hymns of Thomas Muenzer, who can hardly be called an Anabaptist and was disowned by the better portion. | ||||
Burrage, in Baptist Hymn Writers, Portland, 1888, p. 1 sqq., gives some extracts of Anabaptist hymns. The following stanza, from a hymn of Schiemer or Schoener, characterizes the condition and spirit of this persecuted people: - | ||||
We are, alas, like scattered sheep, | ||||
The shepherd not in sight, | ||||
Each far away from home and hearth, | ||||
And, like the birds of night | ||||
That hide away in rocky clefts, | ||||
We have our rocky hold, | ||||
Yet near at hand, as for the birds, | ||||
There waits the hunter bold. | ||||