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Imagine yourself in the imposing Grossmünster church in Zurich. This is a sanctuary in transition: the votive candles have been snuffed out, the frescoes painted over, and the wooden statues depicting saints and biblical figures removed. The expansive space echoes with the high-pitched voice of Huldrych Zwingli. In the language of the marketplace, he preaches directly from the text of the New Testament, moving verse by verse through each book, ignoring the centuries-old liturgical order of readings. He insists on the need for a biblical Christianity to complete the Reformation Luther has begun.

Several young men listen with particular intensity. These are George Blaurock, a striking, black-haired man of peasant stock, with no great education but great zeal for reform; the scholarly Felix Mantz, illegitimate son of a clergyman at the Grossmünster; and Conrad Grebel, a well-educated young aristocrat whose mangled hand—relic of a student brawl at Vienna —testifies to an impetuous nature. They share a hunger for reform and a respect for Zwingli, with whom they are studying the Bible in the original languages.

The three friends' blood rises with excitement at Zwingli's radical words—some preached from this pulpit and others confided in private: The tithes paid to the church to sustain layabout monks and nuns can not be supported from the Bible. Those who eat meat during the weekly fast break not a divine commandment but a human custom. Even the Mass—the regular recapitulation of Christ's sacrifice, supposed to bring his real body and blood to the people—is an abomination that should no longer be celebrated.

These men have learned much from Zwingli's teaching. But like others among the townspeople who support Zwingli's proposed reforms, they are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with his approach and his progress. Why, they ask, does he dither with the Council, seeking a moderate road to reform, when the Bible so clearly and directly contradicts so many of the church's inherited practices and teachings? Why, bowing to conservative pressure, has he failed to fulfill a promise to abolish the Mass on Christmas Day, 1523?

Zwingli's protégés have concluded that baptism as ordained and practiced in the New Testament is not an automatic conferral of grace, but a sign attached to faith, to be administered upon confession of sin and profession of faith. Surely the sprinkling of some water and the muttering of a few words do not a Christian make! And look at the results: in a state and a church where every person born is baptized in infancy, thus assumed to be Christian, the church (it seems to the radicals) has become nothing more than a social club filled with slackers and sinners.

On January 21, 1525, these young men come to a new understanding of faith and grace in baptism while worshiping in a home near Zurich. Convinced of the need to profess faith and to repent of sin, the impetuous Blaurock asks Grebel to baptize him. Grebel obliges, pouring water over his friend's head in the names of the Trinity.

Blaurock and Grebel understood that by their act, they were making themselves outlaws in church and society. For over a millennium, since the reign of Emperor Constantine, all Christendom had believed that civic and religious community were indissolubly linked by God. When the Swiss brethren instituted adult baptism, daring to separate church and civil government by declaring that the only true church was a church of gathered believers, they would of course raise the ire of the established order.

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