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They were the first generation of Anabaptists—Conrad Grebel (a patrician’s son and Zwingli’s former protege), Felix Manz (a clergyman’s illegitimate son), George Blaurock (middle-aged ex-priest of peasant origins), Simon Stumf (parish priest in rural Hongg), Wilhelm Reublin (middle-aged priest in Witikon who was the first Zurich pastor to marry and to persuade parents to refuse baptism of their child), and Johannes Brötli (priest in rural Zollikon)—to name a few. Stumf, Reublin, and Brötli had achieved reform in their rural parishes through their refusal to send tithes to support Zurich’s clergy while Zwingli was still trying cautiously to institute reforms in the mass in that city. Zwingli’s insistence on the full support of city council frustrated Grebel and Manz, who concluded that the magistrate’s way and Christ’s way were not necessarily the same. Relinquishing their first hope of packing city council with likeminded reformers, they met on 21 January 1525 to discuss and pray about their response to city council’s newest law: that all infants be baptized within eight days of birth. When Blaurock asked Grebel to rebaptize him and then proceeded himself to rebaptize Grebel and others, these brothers in Christ signaled their intention to go a different way and suffer the political consequences of following Christ. Grebel left home and family, sold his books, and became a traveling evangelist working with Manz—first winning followers at Zollikon in what became the first Anabaptist congregation and then later quelling extremism among the rebaptized.

On 5 January 1527, Manz became the first martyr of the Swiss Brethren. Grebel had died of natural causes six months earlier, and Blaurock by 1528 was banished from the Swiss cantons. A popular preacher, Blaurock established many congregations in the Austrian Tyrol until he was caught and burned at the stake near Innsbruck on 6 September 1529. Brötli had met the same fate sometime in the preceding year. Seeking to keep the cause of the common man and the gospel joined, Reublin sought converts in Waldshut and surrounding areas of Austria, baptized Hubmaier and traveled to Strassburg. From there he seems to have led Michael Sattler to the Neckar Valley and been among those gathered at Schleitheim to solidify what by now was a separatist underground movement. Escaping Sattler’s fate of martrydom in May 1527, Reublin made his way to Moravia. He preached a rigorous communalism but was not faithful to it himself, was banned after Jacob Hutter conducted a sober investigation, and lived the last three decades of his life no longer associated with Anabaptists. Like Stumpf, Brötli and Hubmaier, Reublin seems to have held more to a Zwinglian view of the possibility of Christian magistrates and a Christian political system than to the more radical idea of separatist discipleship as held by Grebel, Manz, and Blaurock.

(1490?–1525) Historians have not found it easy to classify him: Was he an Anabaptist? A wayward disciple of Luther? Forerunner of modern socialism as Marxist scholars and others have claimed? He was the revolutionary spiritual leader of the Peasants’ War of 1525 and a torchbearer in the great wave of religious and social revolution of this time. A student of medieval realism— well read in church history, the German mystics, and the humanistic and Reformation tracts—Müntzer in 1520 received a pastorale in the Saxon city of Zwickau, where he quickly allied himself both with the disenfranchised artisans wanting a role in government and with those council members urging that the city become free of outside ecclesiastical powers. Müntzer combined the anticlerical spirit of the times with his own mysticism. Not in the Scriptures, not in the sacraments, not in the institutional church but rather in the tormented struggle of his soul did a person, according to Müntzer arrive at faith. And one still would not have faith unless God himself gave and taught it. This “experienced faith” placed the believer in a new order, an elect, to whom sooner or later the kingdom of this world would be given in the form of democratic theocracy. Müntzer’s conviction to bring faith to the common man resulted in his 1523 innovations in worship services, including German liturgies, psalms and hymns. When the court of Weimar retaliated by declaring that his pastorale was not official, Müntzer was summoned to give a “trial sermon” to Duke John and his son John Frederick, the latter already convinced of Luther’s version of the Reformation. In this “Sermon to the Princes” Müntzer invited his hearers to flee the inevitable bad combination of ecclesiastical and worldly powers for the “unconquerable Reformation”—the kingdom of Christ on earth. Unsuccessful, Müntzer had to flee Allstedt in August 1524 for Muhlhausen. There he joined the Peasant’s Revolt in the Black Forest. He had become convinced that their cause, especially the confrontation forthcoming at Frankenhausen was the last judgment and that the ensuing conflict would put the common man in direct contact with God. The results of the Frankenhausen battle on 15 May 1525, in which six thousand peasants and six princes met their death, proved Müntzer’s cause wrong. Shortly thereafter he was captured, tortured, and then executed on 27 May. Although the Swiss Brethren took issue with Müntzer’s use of force, they did identify with his insistence that the inner experience of faith affected totally the actions of both the individual and the fabric of society.

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