Early Spread of Anabaptism & The Schleitheim Confession - History of the Anabaptists - Part Three

Lesson Transcript

Okay, very good. Well, this evening we're going to be looking at lesson three of the history of the believer of the believer baptizers in Europe, 1615 hundred to 1650. And, you know, I scope out a course and give titles to the various lessons. And then as I go on, I have to do some revising. I originally was planning on covering the period from 1527 to 1545 tonight with the Swiss Brethren, but I'm going to limit myself to two years today. And there are two dates I want you to keep in mind: January 21st, 1525.

Why is that date important? January 21st, 1525. Somebody from the audience can answer it if they know. What's the first baptism? That's the first baptist, believers' baptism in Zurich, January 21st, 1525. It's seen to be the beginning of what we later on refer to as the Anabaptist movement. All right. Then the other date I want you to keep in mind is February 24th, 1527. February 24th, 1527. And that is the date in which the group of leaders got together and drew up the Schleidheim Confession.

And we're going to spend a fair amount of time tonight talking about the Schleidheim. It's I don't know exactly how it got to be called a confession because it's not really a confession. It's almost more like a church discipline or a church order and so on, because it has to do with a lot with practices, but of course giving the foundation for the particular practices and so on. And we're going to be looking at that tonight. All right. So let me see here. All right.

We're going to look at the spread of believers' baptism from 1525 to 1526. All right. Okay. Let's try that again. There. Doesn't like that. Just redo it. All right. There. Okay. Very good. Okay. This is a map showing the northern part of Switzerland. There's no boundaries, just some towns named and also a bit of Germany there. And of course, the first baptisms are the first baptism is in January 21st, 1525, and it happens in Zurich. And almost immediately, the Zurich officials crack down.

And what that does, it actually sends those first believers out of Zurich and they scatter. And as they scatter, they're preaching, they're teaching, they're baptizing, and they're forming congregations. And then no surprise, if they were caught, they were arrested. Now, Grebel headed up toward let me see. Does this thing work? To Schaffhausen right up here, which was part of the Swiss Confederation. And he worked there for a while. Later on, he got himself down here to St.

Gallen, all right, and was evangelizing there, baptizing, and organizing congregations. Felix Mons, you know, people talk an awful lot about Grebel. And part of that is because he's very important. Don't get me wrong. But part of it is that he wrote a lot of letters, actually more before he became an Anabaptist than what he did after he became an Anabaptist. But from what I can tell, actually, Felix Mons is really the evangelist par excellence. He is traveling all around, baptizing, and organizing congregations.

And he also writes some things that are very important. All right. Remember I mentioned that on September 7th, January 17th, 1525, they had this disputation between Zwingli and the circle that was going to become the first believers. And it was decided the city council decided that Zwingli won the argument and that these people need to have their infants baptized. And then on the 21st, they responded by performing the first believers' baptisms there in Zurich. All right.

Well, the thing was beginning they were successful. Okay. They got people who responded to their message, who were baptized. They organized small congregations and so on. And Zwingli and company thought it was time to have another disputation. And they call these things disputations. And again, I'm not sure if that's entirely an accurate way of referring to it. But, you know, historians latch on to names about things and then they get stuck with them there.

They are almost more like interrogations, like public interrogations, where the purpose of it was to browbeat these guys into giving in and going along with the official pace of reformation. The interesting thing is, okay, it's not until after the first baptisms, the first baptism in January 1525, that Zwingli finally gets and the city council finally agree to get rid of the mass and implement the Lord's Supper according to after reformed manner.

And so in some sense, the rise of Anabaptism probably pushed his accelerator a little bit to implement some reforms. But again, they were always playing a balancing game there because they were very concerned that the very strongly Catholic cantons in the western part of Switzerland would react negatively, which they did. All right. So they had this second baptism disputation on March 20th, 22nd of 1525. And Mons and Blauruck were the spokesmen. Grebel was away. So these two are arguing with Zwingli and company.

And the only accounts we have about that thing is from Zwingli's side of the thing. So of course, guess who won the argument? Okay. They won the argument. But that doesn't keep Anabaptism from spreading. St. Gallen, which is right here. It's one of the let's see here. Where are you? Here's St. Gallen. All right. Remember I mentioned this man by the name of Lorenz Hockrutner, who had been part of the really radical group. And he had been involved in eating the sausage.

He had been involved in tearing down a cross in the center of a village and so on. And he was kicked out of Zurich. Okay. He was kicked out of Zurich. And he went to St. Gallen. And there he had a reading circle. And those reading circles are Bible studies. Okay. And they include people like Wolfgang Ullemann and Hans Krusti, both of whom you can read about in the Martyr's Mirror. They both suffered martyrdom. Grebel was in St. Gallen in March and April 1525.

And he baptized Ullemann and Hans Krusti, who became leaders of an organized congregation. And another person who was active in St. Gallen was a man named Eberly Bolt. And he was from the canton of Schweiz. And he went back home to his home canton after he was baptized and so on. He went back home to his home canton to evangelize. He was captured. That was a Catholic canton. And he was burnt at the stake.

Typically speaking, when it came to dealing with heretics, Roman Catholics' territories used burning at the stake as the most common form of execution, whereas the Protestants like Zurich would use drowning and beheading. All right. And then Hans Krusti was captured and taken to Lucerne and burned at the stake on July 27th, 1525. So these are the first two martyrs, the first two people to die for believers' baptism. Now, also down here at Bern, which is going to become let me see here. Where's this thing? Yeah.

Bern's down there in the corner there. It's going to become a real stronghold of believers' baptizers into the 18th century. All right. And probably many of you who have roots in Switzerland and the Platten and so on, your ancestors came from Bern. They may have also originally come from Zurich. But Bern was later on a real stronghold of Anabaptism. Hans Pfistermeyer had a reading circle in 1524. This is again a Bible study group. And then in 1525, when Nicholas Guldedin from St.

Gallen and Jacob Gross from Walshout came into the area preaching and teaching and baptizing, they connected with Pfitzmeyer's reading circle. And that became the nucleus of an Anabaptist or believers' church then. Then on November 6th, 1525, there was a third disputation with Zwingli and company. And just before this, in October, they had done a major sweep and gathered up as many of these leaders they could. They caught Grebel. They caught Blauruck. They caught Mens and so on. Some other leaders were there.

Balthasar Hubmeyer was there and so on. They were all arrested on October 1525. And again, it's one of these things where it's more like an interrogation, where they're trying to get them they're playing the pressure and they're trying to get them to give in. And they don't. Okay. Blauruck and Grebel and Mons don't. And they were sentenced to imprison on bread and water in the tower. And this is a picture of it. But that's in November of 1525. But in March 1526, they escape.

And one of the things I was reading recently was really interesting is that these prisons were kind of ad hoc things. This was just a tower and part of a building and so on. And they were kind of converted to prisons and to jail cells and so on. And the security wasn't the greatest. And I've been reading many accounts of Anabaptist prisoners who somehow managed to escape simply because the security was not all of them did, but some of them were able to do that. And this is what happened on March 21st, 1526.

And Grebel fled to Gladenfelden, where he died of the plague in August of 1526. And Felix and Blauruck continued to go around preaching, baptizing, and gathering congregations. And like I said, I think really Felix Mons is a pretty important person here in these first two years. But they're captured again. And Mons, by this time, the Zurich government has passed a law declaring the death penalty for baptizers, persons who perform baptisms, not all believers, but just for the ones who are performing baptisms.

All right. And so Felix Mons is a major baptizer. So he is. And he is tried and he's executed by drowning on January 5th, 1527. Now, Blauruck is not a citizen of Zurich. Mons is. And so they execute him. But they whip Blauruck out of the city and make him swear an oath that he will never come back, okay, which he does. And we'll talk about that a little later when we look at Schleidheim and the oath. All right.

And right here down the corner it's a little hard to see, but in my slide, you'll see this is a commemorative monument along the Limmat River. There's the Limmat River runs through Zurich commemorating at least Felix Mons's martyrdom there. All right. Now, let's look at another map. It doesn't just stay around Switzerland there. Within these two years, we have Anabaptists up in Strasburg. We have Anabaptists here at Augsburg, at Strasburg, at Wolfshood, here in Württemberg and Hoorbe and so on.

So in a couple of years, they're really spreading. And they're doing it simply by people kind of moving out and evangelizing and so on. And the other thing, though, to keep in mind is that this is not a tightly organized movement. It's really a grassroots movement. And it connects with people who already, in many cases, people who already have been stirred by Luther and by Zwingli and by prosonism who are looking and reassessing things. And they're carrying with them some of their own ideas.

And so some of the ideas that the Swiss have, these Swiss Anabaptists have, don't quite jive with some of the other ones that some other persons who become believers, who are baptized, form congregations. But the way they do church or the way they understand things are a little different. Some false brethren among us. Remember I mentioned that February 24th, 1527, is the date of the Schleidheim Brotherly Union. And the reason for this gathering was really to correct some problems that they saw.

And this is in the opening cover letter of the Brotherly Agreement. It says, "A very great offense has been introduced by some false brethren among us, whereby several have turned away from the faith, thinking to practice and observe the freedom of the Spirit and of Christ. But such have fallen short of the truth and to their own condemnation are given over to lasciviousness and license of the flesh.

They have esteemed that faith and love may do and permit everything, and nothing can harm nor condemn them since they are believers." Okay. So very quickly, we have this problem. And there's accounts of and there's also accounts of people who have joined the believers and so on who are doing really odd, crazy things. And I think any religious movement always attracts a certain number of crazies, okay, or people who go off in the deep end.

There are stories about people taking the teaching that Jesus said you're supposed to become as little children. And then so they would act like little children in Babel and do silly little things like that. Maybe they were speaking in tongues. I don't know. That was extra. All right. And one of the persons that Schleidheim was probably directed toward was Balthasar Hubmeyer.

Now, in the next lecture, I'm going to talk about Balthasar Hubmeyer more and also about two other persons, Hans Dink and Hans Huth, who I'm just going to pick up on this evening very, very quickly. But Hubmeyer was a reformer. He had joined Zwingli's reform movement. He started out as a Catholic priest in the city of Walshout. He's actually been other places too. But by this time, he was at Walshout, which is just let me just go back here and show you where Walshout is. Let me see. I have to go to the first map.

Walshout is right up here. It is not in Switzerland. It's on the other side of the Rhine River. And it was actually part of the Duchy of Württemberg, which at this particular point in time was controlled by the Habsburgs because they had kicked the Duke out. All right. All right. Let's go on back here. All right. So he was a reformer there. And he really did sort of buy into Zwingli's reform. But then as he studied, he also encountered these radicals.

And he was impressed by what they were saying as far as believers' baptism. And so in February of 1525, okay, this is just like a month or less than a month after the first baptism in Zurich, William Rubelin, one of the young men who is there at the January 21st meeting and was baptized, comes to Walshout. And he meets Hubmeyer. And Hubmeyer had already been talking about not baptizing babies. In fact, he said that he had stopped baptizing babies unless the parents really were insisted upon it.

So he was contemplating the whole idea of believers' baptism. He was convinced. He was baptized. And then he baptized about 300 people in Walshout. And they formed an Anabaptist congregation there. The difference, however, is that Hubmeyer believed that the reform could be promoted and protected by the magistrates and that a believer could be a magistrate and that it was acceptable for a believer to take up arms. Okay.

But he's very important because he wrote a writing in 1525 and then another one in 1526 on baptism, on the meaning of baptism. And this writing pretty well spelled out what these early pretty well gelled with what all the other early Anabaptists were talking about, their rationale for baptism and so on like that. In fact, it's interesting that parts of this were literally lifted out verbatim and inserted in other later Anabaptist writings. Okay. Then we have a few other souls.

And I titled this slide, "Spiritualism, Unitarianism, and Apocalypse." And these three men, Ludwig Heitzler, and then in the middle is a title page from Hans Dink's first writing on the Law of God and then Hans Huth. Now, I should just mention these pictures of these men are something this comes from a book that was published in 1655. So it was just some artist's conception of what these people looked like. All right. This is no actual picture of them. Okay.

A number of years ago, somebody thought that we ought to have a picture of Conrad Grebel and Felix Mons and George Blauruck. But there weren't any. There weren't any. And so they came up with this bright idea of getting three prominent Mennite men to pose as one. I'm trying to think. John Ruth was they had him pose for Conrad Grebel. So if you ever see that picture of Conrad Grebel, know that that's really John Ruth. Okay. I'm not sure if he's proud of that or not. I'll have to ask him.

He might be embarrassed about it. I don't know. Maybe not. I would be embarrassed. But I don't always parse things the way he does. All right. So Ludwig Heitzler was there in Zurich in 1524. But he leaves 1520 before the baptisms happen. He goes to Augsburg, gets in trouble there, comes back to Zurich, and so on. But at some particular point, it seems as though he does actually join the believers' movement. We don't know who baptized them. But we do know that for a period of time, he was baptizing himself.

All right. Hans Dink, scholars used to say that he was baptized by Hubmeyer. But there's really no documentation for that. It's just kind of a coincidence of location. Hubmeyer, after he left Walshout because the Austrians were going to take the city over because of what was happening there, he fled Walshout and went to Augsburg. And Dink was also in Augsburg at that particular point. And Heitzler was also in Augsburg. And historians have conjectured, though it's just a conjecture, that Hubmeyer baptized Dink.

And then in 1526, we have this crackpot by the name of John Hutt or Hans Huth. Okay. He was originally a follower of Thomas Münster. And he had been involved in the Peasant War. In fact, Thomas Münster had he was a bookseller. He was an itinerant bookseller. And Thomas Münster had given him a couple of his manuscripts to take and get printed. And he was responsible for that. He meets Dink in Augsburg in 1526. And he submits to believers' baptism. And then he becomes a very zealous evangelizer.

But it's really interesting because he has he picked up from Hutt all this apocalyptic stuff about the end of the world and about God's going to overthrow all the nobility and establish justice on the earth and so on. And he still held on to that. Okay. He still held on to that. And he saw his task as evangelizing baptizers as getting the 144,000 together. All right.

And I mean, he swept through southern Germany and Moravia and Bohemia and was quite active until he was arrested in Augsburg in 1528 or '29 and died in prison from smoke inhalation. I think personally, he's a bit of a crackpot. But that's okay. All groups have crackpots. Okay. All groups have crackpots. One of the things I find so interesting is that the Protestants, they really made hay out of people like Hans Hutt and so on and so did the Catholics and so on.

But they had their full share of crackpots too and of people who did very regrettable things. All right. Now, in 1526, let's go on back to my map here. 1526, oops, here in Strasburg, right here in Strasburg. It's up the Rhine River. Okay. It's now part of France. It was a German-speaking city at this particular point. Okay. And the leaders, the religious leaders of Strasburg were two men by the name of Wolfgang Capito and Martin Bucer.

And these men were working with the city council to move the city away from Roman Catholicism in a Protestant direction. Okay. And they were moving very carefully. But they also were somewhat, how should I say, more ironic in their approach than, let's say, Zwingli was. And so there's this period of time between about, oh, 1525 to 1531 when things are just not settled there. And so it becomes a place of refuge for all kinds of people, all kinds of Anabaptists, other radicals, Lutherans, Zwinglians.

And there's still Catholics there too. Okay. Because they have not really instituted their Reformation. And again, they're interesting because they're willing to talk with these other people and actually have conversations, not just, "We're going to interrogate you until you give in, or we do away with you," kind of thing. All right. Okay. And Dink is there. And there's another person who's there, Michael Sattler. Now, Michael Sattler is an interesting person. He was prior to the Benedictine Abbey of St.

Peter's in the Black Forest, which meant that he had an administrative position. He was not just a lowly monk. But by May 1525, he had left the abbey. And that area was heavily overrun by the Peasant Revolt. And it's thought that he probably left the abbey as a result of that. He settled in Walshaut, Schaffenhausen area. And there he encountered the first believers. And by June 1526, he had joined them. He was baptized and joined them.

And by the end of the year, he's in toward the end of the year, he's in Strasburg. And he's not only in Strasburg, but he's living in Wolfgang Capito's house. He's a guest in his house. Hans Dink had been a guest in Capito's house too. And Capito had a very high opinion of Michael Sattler. He did not have a high opinion of Hans Dink. But he had a very high opinion of Michael Sattler.

He said he's a very devout, pious man who is mistaken about some things, essentially believers' baptism, all right, and some other things. But in this conversation with Wolfgang Capito, these are the things they talked about. This is what Sattler is advancing. And I'm just going to read down through them. "Christ has come to save all who believe in him. He who believes and is baptized will be saved, but he who does not believe will be condemned. Faith in Christ reconciles us with the Father and gives access to him.

Baptism seals all the believers into the body of Christ who is now their head. Christ is the head of his body, that is, of the believing church. As the head, so shall the body be. The predestined and called believers shall be conformed to the image of Christ. Christ despises the world. His children shall do the same. He has no kingdom in this world. The world is against his kingdom. The believers have been chosen out of the world. Therefore, the world hates them." Let's go to the next slide. And there's a picture.

There's a portrait of Capito. And that is what he looked like. That's a contemporary portrait. These famous Protestant reformers all get their pictures painted or engraved and so on. All right. But Sattler's points continue. "The devil is the prince of all the world. Through him, all the children of darkness reign. Christ is the prince of all spirits. Through him live all that walk in the light. The devil seeks destroy, Christ to save. The flesh is an enmity with the spirit, the spirit with the flesh.

The spiritual are Christ. The carnal belong to death and the raft of God. Christians are quite at rest and confident in their Father in heaven without any external worldly armor. Christ citizenship is in heaven, not on the earth. Christians are the family of God and the citizens of the saints, not of the world. But they are true Christians who do the teachings of Christ with works. Flesh and blood display, worldly honor, and also the world cannot comprehend the teachings of Christ.

In short, Christ and below have nothing in common." So here we see, through a whole series of statements and so on, a very strong emphasis on the kingdom of God versus the kingdom of this world or the kingdom of darkness. Okay. And that is, of course, ideas and themes that are also then expressed in the Schleidheim Confession. Now, let's look then at the confession, the brotherly union of a number of children of God concerning several articles adopted at Schleidheim on February 24th, 1527.

It is addressed to this document is addressed to all children of light who are scattered everywhere, wherever they might have been placed. Okay. And the purpose of this brotherly union is to make known and points and articles unto all that love God that as far as we are concerned, we have been united. Okay. And then their resolve was to stand fast in the Lord as obedient children of God who have been and shall be separated from the world in all that we do.

Right there from the very beginning is the idea of separation. And of course, it's not new. It's present. Going back to 1524 with Grebel and Company's letter to Thomas Münster. But in 1527, it is very clearly stated. Okay. It's very clearly stated. All right. And then the seven points. Okay. The seven topics they're going to cover. I have divided these into three Bs and four Cs. I mean, four Ss. Okay. Baptism, ban, breaking of bread, separation, shepherds, swords, and swearing of oaths. All right.

Let's look at the first one. Okay. First, concerning baptism, note this. "Baptism should be given to all who have learned repentance, amendment of life, and faith through the truth that their sin has been removed by Christ to all who want to walk in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and to be buried with him in death so that they can be resurrected with him and to all who desire baptism in this sense from us and who themselves request it." Now, I want to ask you a question.

This phrase here, all who want to walk in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and to be buried with him in death, where does that come from? What text in the Bible does that come from? Romans 6. It's Romans 6. Romans 6 runs through. It's there in Münster. It's there in Grebel's protestation. It's there in Hubmeyer. This reference to Romans 6 as part of their understanding of baptism is very important. It's right here. And it continues on. All right.

Now, again, following the instructions in Matthew 28:19 and Mark 16:6, the instructions is, "Go, make disciples, baptize." Mark 16:6, "Go, preach the gospel. Those who believe in my name baptize." And so the early believers baptized upon confession of faith, not as infants who could not understand. All right. And in baptism, it's actually kind of wrapped up there. They kind of explain their whole understanding of the new birth, of what happens.

And they talk about the fact that one, first of all, believes in the heart. And it's a will. It's a decision of the will. And the Holy Spirit is involved in it. And then one is born anew through the power of the Holy Spirit. All right. And then one is baptized. And when you are baptized with water, it is a symbol. And they were very clear about that. It is symbolic. They did not believe that the water washed away your sins. All right.

But they did believe it was more than just a symbol because some things happened at baptism. First of all, you are incorporated into the body of Christ. It was a covenant that you made with God, an outward covenant you made with God and with his church. All right. It was a pledge, I think, almost like a pledge that one makes when one gets married, a promise that one makes. Okay. And so something did happen at baptism, but it had nothing to do with the efficaciness of the water. The water was symbolic. Okay.

The water was symbolic. All right. But something did happen there. You were taken into the covenant. You were making this pledge. And so there's a whole bunch of things going on there. All right. Now, this takes us to an Anabaptist understanding of salvation. Luther talked a lot about justification. Okay. Rec fer terragong. Okay. And that was his rallying call and so on. The Anabaptists talked very little about justification. They really did. It wasn't a big topic in their writings and so on. All right.

And Luther stressed the idea, and the other Protestant reformers stressed the idea that God declares you to be righteous without any change. You just simply are declared to be righteous. And that's their basis for being accepted by God, correct declaron. The Anabaptist, on the other hand, said that salvation is being made righteous, correct der machtun, okay, to make righteous. And they also talked more about from machtun, which is the idea of making somebody pious or devout or God-fearing. Okay.

They were actually interested in a change in a person. And in fact, they're the only ones really in the Reformation who talked much about the new birth. The new birth is very important to Anabaptist, to these early believers. It wasn't that important to Luther. It wasn't that important to Calvin. It wasn't that important to Zwingli because they all were predestinarians, and they all believed that grace was forensic and so on.

And talking about the new birth is getting a little bit into this idea that it gets too subjective for them. And they feel they need something less subjective. I don't know that they got it, but that's who we are. Okay. So the first article is believers' baptism. All right. The second article is breaking of the bread. All those who desire to break the one bread in remembrance of the broken body of Christ and all those who wish to drink of one drink in remembrance of the shed blood of Christ.

Now, I'm going to stop right there. What's the key word here? In remembrance. Okay. All the Anabaptists understood the Lord's Supper to be a meal of remembrance where we remember what Jesus did for us. Okay. It's a meal of remembrance. Of course, point there straight from Paul's letter to the Corinthians. "They must beforehand be united in one body of Christ. That is the congregation of God whose head is Christ and that by baptism.

For as Paul indicates, we cannot be takers of the same time of the table of the Lord and the table of devils, nor can we at the same time partake and drink of the cup of the Lord and the cup of the devils. That is, all those who have fellowship with dead works of darkness have no part in the light. Thus, all who follow the devil in the world have no part with those who have been called out of the world into God.

All those who lie in evil have no part in the good." And of course, as they looked at and as Sattler and these folks, and Sattler is thought to be the main writer of these articles, particularly when you compare what he said back in his discussions with Capito, they're looking around both among the magisterial Protestant reformers and Roman Catholics, and they're saying, "Baptism makes you a Christian in Roman Catholicism." By this time, Zwingli had been working on his baptismal theology and said it's what brings

the children into a covenant relationship and so on with God.

But the Anabaptists looked and said, "Well, there's no change. All these people are baptized. And baptism truly made somebody if baptism truly made a baby a Christian, don't you think that baby would act better than what it does? There was no change. All right. And so it's just dead works. All right. Now, so it's a meal of remembrance. It's a meal of remembrance. All right. But it's also a representation of the body of Christ.

So it shall and must be that whoever does not share the calling of one God to one faith, to one baptism, to one spirit, to one body together with all the children of God may not be made one loaf together with them as must be true if one wishes truly to break bread according to the command of Christ." And so baptism also speaks I mean, excuse me, the Lord's Supper, the breaking of the bread, the passing of the cup also reflects the fact that we are Christ's body. Okay. And it's interesting.

They did believe that Christ was present in his body, that Christ's body was present, and that one could partake of Christ's body, but it was the body of Christ made up of many members. And so when we celebrate the Lord's Supper, Christ is present. He's also present when we meet together to sing and pray and to hear a sermon. Okay. So it's not that God is absent. It's not that we don't receive grace when we do these things, but it's all predicated on faith. There's nothing magical about it.

There's nothing mechanical about it. It's not because the right words were said. It's because the right people are here. Okay. And are present. Okay. That then takes us to the ban. All right. "The ban shall be employed with all those who have given themselves over the Lord to walk after him and his commandments, those who have been baptized into the one body of Christ and let themselves be called brothers or sisters and still somehow slip and fall into error and sin being inadvertently overtaken." All right.

And then we have Matthew 18, "The same shall be worn twice privately and the third time be publicly ammonished before the entire congregation according to the command of Christ.

But this shall be done according to the order of the Spirit of God before the breaking of the bread so that we may all in one spirit and one love break and eat from one bread and drink from one cup." Now, if you remember back when Grebel and Company wrote to Thomas Münster, they mentioned the importance of the ban of putting people outside the congregation who were walking disobediently and disorderly. Okay. And it's there from the very beginning. All right. It's there from the very beginning.

In fact, Balthazar Hubmeyer agreed that the ban was important. He said, "You can have baptism. You can have believers' baptism. You can have the Lord's Supper and so on. But if you do not have the evangelical ban, you do not have church. You don't have church unless, in a sense, the boundaries of the church are defined and people who are disobedient are corrected, hopefully bringing them to repentance." All right. So it's there from the very beginning. Now, the next thing we want to look at is shepherds.

One of the arguments that goes way back to the time of Augustine was with the Donatist is that the Donatist had said that the baptisms and so on of the traitors, the bishops who had, when persecution came along, handed in the scriptures, had renounced Christ, or had weakened under that pressure and so on, their baptisms were not valid. And Augustine had a big argument with them about that. And it was finally won when the emperor threw in his side on Augustine's side and the Donatists were crushed.

But the Catholic Church established this principle or this idea that the validity of the sacrament and of course, they think the sacrament is something that does something to somebody. The validity of the sacrament is not impinged upon. It does not depend on the character of the person officiating at the sacrament. So even a wicked man can, if he's a properly ordained priest, can perform the sacraments. And so there's this divide between their understanding of shepherds and so on, what qualifies as shepherds.

The Catholic Church is based on this whole line of apostolic succession, people being ordained in their understanding and so on. The interesting about the Protestants is that almost all the early Protestant leaders were Catholic priests, not quite all of them, but almost all of them were Catholic priests who were won over to the Reformed. And they were never ordained again.

Their leadership as reformers was really rooted in the fact that they had been Catholic priests, even though they may have renounced that and thought it was all bad. And the other interesting thing that happened is that when they start talking about qualifications, one of the things Luther said is that the church is present where the word is rightly preached and the sacraments are rightly administered. Well, how can the word be rightly preached? Well, it helps if you just follow what Luther is saying.

And he wrote an awful lot. He was one of the most prolific writers. I think that his writings cover about 70-some volumes, and they're about two inches thick. Can you imagine? Nobody would have the time to read all that stuff. And you wonder how he had the time to write it all, but he did. But their emphasis focused then on having properly qualified and learned leaders who could read the Greek, who could read the Hebrew, and certainly had to read Latin.

And they were the ones who were the official kind of spokesmen for the Reform. They were the ones who were theologically trained and so on. All right. The Anabaptists, I mean, they had some learned men amongst them, not that many, okay, a few here and there. All right. And they had a smattering of priests, ex-priests here and there. Okay. But we have been united as follows concerning shepherds in the church of God. The shepherd in the church shall be a person according to the rule of Paul.

What's he talking about there? Well, those are the qualifications that Paul gives in Titus and Timothy about a bishop. Okay. All right. And they focus very much on character, don't they? All right.

Fully and completely, who has a good report of those that are outside the faith, the office of such a person shall be to read and exhort and teach, warn, ammonish, or abandon the congregation, and to properly preside among the sisters and brothers in prayer and the breaking of bread and all things to take care of the body of Christ, that it may be built up and developed so that the name of God might be praised and honored through us and the mouth of the mocker be stopped." Well, okay.

So you see this thing about their past. The first thing he says, they have to read. They're talking about reading scripture because only a minority of persons, okay, only a minority of persons could read. All right. And even persons who could read their own language, in this case, German, only a minority of persons could read. So it was important that a shepherd be able to read so he could read the scriptures. And books were expensive. Now, more books are being printed and more Bibles are being printed.

They become more available, but they are becoming available. Can you imagine buying a book if you can't read it? Okay. It probably didn't happen that often. All right. So it's very important that when they looked for somebody who was going to be a shepherd, that that person could read the scriptures to them. So there was kind of a basic educational requirement there, but it's not a very high bar. It's not like having to know Latin and Greek and Hebrew. All right. And notice that they preside over the congregation.

They make sure things happen. They're responsible for moving forth that the ban has to be. Exercised and so on like that. And they're to take care of it. So it's a very pastoral kind of approach here with leaders. "He shall be supported wherever he has need by the congregation which has chosen him so that he who serves fully and completely, who has let me see here, who has served the gospel can also live therefrom as the Lord has ordered.

But should a shepherd do something worthy of reprimand, nothing shall be done with him without the voice of two or three witnesses. And if they sin, they shall be publicly reprimanded so that others might fear." And so they're saying that not only must you look for a leader who has a good character, but he has to continue to have a good character. And if he does something that's wrong, he falls into sin, then he needs to be removed. And that did happen. Okay. That did happen.

And then the last thing looking at shepherds, "If the shepherd should be driven away or led to the Lord by the cross," that means if he's going to be if he's executed, "at the same hour another shall be ordered and dead in his place so that the little flock and the little folk and the little flock of God may not be destroyed, but be preserved by warning and be consoled." And from the very beginning, there's this idea that leaders are chosen from the congregation, from the body of Christ. Okay.

Separation, okay, is the next point. You like that picture? That is the dragon. And let me see here. Right here is the pope with his three-tier crown. All right. And this is the beast and the dragon. And they're bowing down to the beast and to the dragon. All right. I think this is the actually, this is the beast over here. All right. And this is from Luke this is from a copy, an early 1500 copy of Luther's Bible. It was illustrated, quite the dramatic illustrations. Okay.

"We have been united concerning the separation that shall take place from the evil and the wickedness which the devil has planted in the world, simply in that we have no fellowship with them and do not run with them in the confusion of their abomination. So it is, since all who have not entered into the obedience of faith and have not united themselves with God so that they will do as will are a great abomination before the Lord." One of the things I notice about Schleidheim is the starkness of its comparisons.

Did you notice that? These folks are an abomination to the Lord. We hardly talk that way anymore. In fact, I would say that we are almost uncomfortable talking that way. It sounds somewhat judgmental, doesn't it? All right. Sounds somewhat judgmental. But for these folks, there are two kingdoms. One is an abomination and one, the evil is an abomination to the Lord.

And as it goes on to say, "Now there is nothing else in the world and all creation than good or evil, believing and unbelieving, darkness and light, the world and those who come out of the world, God's temple and idols, Christ and Belial, and none will have part with the other." So there's a separation between the kingdom of Belial, between the kingdom of Satan, the kingdom of this world, and Christ's kingdom. It's a very stark contrast. All right.

And then he goes on to say that, "First of all, this we should learn, that everything which has not been united with our God in Christ is nothing but an abomination which we should shun. By this are meant all popish and repopish works and idolatry, gatherings, and church attendance." Now, what do they mean by that? Well, popish, we know. That's Catholic. Repopish is their way of referring to the Protestant reformers.

And so in their minds, the Protestant reformers are just sort of a yeah, they're sort of a they're like Rome in many ways. They may have cleaned up a few things, but their foundation is very similar. Okay. It's repopish. All right. And it talks then, of course, about idolatry. There, they're probably thinking about the mass, which they consider to be idolatry, going into other Protestant and Catholic churches where there are images and so on, gatherings and church attendance. What's it mean by church attendance?

Well, certainly, you want to go to church, don't you? Okay. Well, actually, they're talking about going into a Protestant or a Catholic church that they would not have in fact, there was a later Swiss brethren tract or writing that said that gave the explanation why we don't attend the churches. And when they used the term churches, they were talking about the Protestants and the Catholics. They weren't talking about themselves.

So they weren't saying you shouldn't go to church, okay, but you shouldn't go to the Catholic church and you shouldn't go to the Protestant church. And one of the things that is important to keep in mind here is that one way you could tell maybe if a person was an Anabaptist, if he didn't show up for church, if he didn't show up for the local parish church and so on. And people would notice that, and they would be questioned about it.

And if you wanted to kind of escape that, if you wanted to kind of go under the radar, well, you show up at church once in a while, and then they wouldn't worry about you so much. But Schleidheim says you can't do that. Okay. Starkness and its light. And the contrast is very stark. Okay. Separation from carnality and the unequal yoke, separation from winehouses, guarantees.

Those are probably contracts of some sort, commitments of unbelief with unbelievers, other things of that kind which the world regards highly and yet which are carnal or flatly counter to the command of God after the pattern of iniquity which is in the world. Okay.

"For they are nothing but abomination which caused us to be hated before our Christ Jesus who has freed us from the servitude of the flesh and fitted us for the service of God and the spirit whom he has given us." And then it says, "Therefore also fall away from us the diabolical weapons of violence such as the sword, armor, and the like, and all of their use to protect friends or against enemies by virtue of the word of Christ.

You shall not resist evil." And this is, of course, a counter to Huppmeyer, an encounter to the Protestants and a counter to the Roman Catholics who thought it was perfectly okay for Christians to take up the sword and the diabolical weapons of violence. And notice it says, "What is the source of violence? It's the devil. Okay. It's the devil." Now, that takes us then to the sword. All right. That's Charles V with his lantern jaw. Okay. Covered somewhat better this time with a rather grisly beard. Okay.

"We have been united as follows concerning the sword. The sword is an ordering of God outside the perfection of Christ. It punishes and kills the wicked and guards and protects the good. In the law, the sword is established over the wicked for punishment and for death, and the secular rulers are established to well the same.

But within the perfection of Christ, only the ban is used for the admonition and exclusion of the one who sinned without the death of the flesh, simply the warning and the command to sin no more." Okay. So in the kingdom of God and God's congregation, the ban is used if somebody is being disobedient. Okay. And it's a warning, and it's a command to sin no more. You're not going to be put in jail. You're not going to be whipped. You're not going to be killed outside. That's within the perfection of Christ.

That's how Christ followers walk and work. Okay. But outside the perfection of Christ, God is and he's pulling here from Romans 13. God set up the government to maintain order. All right. And then it goes on to ask, "Can a Christian use the sword for protection?" Okay. And we're running out of time here. So rather than read this, I'll simply say, "No, they're not. They're not to." In fact, his arguments here are very, very good.

Now, one of the things that's interesting is that in February 1527, all right, we have the Schleidheim Confession. Michael Sattler goes back to his congregation at Horeb, and he's captured along with 20-some other believers. And he is taken to Schleidheim, and there he is tried. And his interrogation was recorded. And one of the things that his accusers accused him of in his trial was he has said, "If the Turk were to come into the land, one should not resist him.

He would rather go to war against the Christians than against the Turks, which is, after all, a great offense to take the side of the greatest enemy of our holy faith against us." Now, in 1526, the Ottoman Turks who were moving up the Balkans had defeated the kingdom of Hungary in a major battle, the battle of Mohács in 1526. And they were rolling along. And in fact, they were even threatening Vienna, the capital of the Archduchy of Austria. Okay. And they were considered to be a major threat to Christendom.

Both Protestants and Catholics agreed with that. Though interesting enough, at one particular point, Francis II, the king of France, actually made an alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent against Charles V because Francis wanted some of Charles's territories. So sometimes religion matters, and sometimes it doesn't. All right. Now, Sattler and you can read this in the martyr's mirror. Sattler answers this, "If the Turk comes, he should not be resisted.

For we should not defend ourselves against the Turks or our other persecutors, but with fervent prayer should implore God that he might be our defense and our resistance. As to me saying that if waging war were proper, I would rather take the field against the so-called Christians who persecute, take captive, and kill true Christians than against the Turks. This is for the following reason.

The Turk is a genuine Turk according to the flesh, but you claim to be Christians, boast of Christ, and still persecute the faithful witnesses of Christ. Thus, you are Turks according to the spirit." All right. So the Turks just doing what a Turk does. You guys claim to be Christians, but you act like Turks. Okay. I think that's a pretty good answer. And you have to remember he's saying this while he's being interrogated and facing his death. All right.

I'm going to scoot ahead here because there but we'll talk here. Just mentioned third is concerning the sword, whether a Christian should be a magistrate. Okay. And he says, "Christ refused to be a ruler over us, I mean, over a man." And he said, "The princes of this world lorded over them." Further, Paul says, "For whom God has foreknown, the same he is also predestined to be conformed to the image of his sons." So Christ refused to take up worldly power.

As Christians, we need to refuse to take up worldly power also. All right. I'm going to skip ahead here. "The worldly are armed with steel and iron, but Christians are armed with the armor of God, with truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and with the word of God. In some, as Christ our head is minded, so also must be minded the members of the body of Christ." Sweary knows. Okay. The last of the articles. Okay. He said, "We've been united as fallen concerning the oath.

The oath is a confirmation among those who are quarreling or making promises." And he talks about in the Old Testament, it was commanded. Christ, who teaches the perfection of law, forbids it. And one of the things you have to keep in mind is that oath swearing was very important to the social, political, and religious fabric of Europe. One of the things that's very interesting to me is that priests, when they were ordained, had to swear an oath, a special oath to abide by their ordination vows and stuff like that.

In Switzerland, in the cantons, yearly, the citizens of the canton met together in the square, and they took an oath of loyalty to the canton. And I think they still do that. I'm not sure. But until recently, this is a rather recent picture showing this happening in one of the cantons. All right. But he says, "Jesus." And then he talks about the others say that swearing cannot be forbidden by God in the New Testament when it was commanded in the old.

And here he does some of his hermeneutical work, his understanding of the relationship of the old and the New Testament. And he quotes, of course, Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus said, "Don't swear at all." And he's basically saying whatever Jesus said takes precedent over anything that was said before then. All right. And then I want so again, let's skip to the last slide. Schleidheim does not define Anabaptism as a whole. Okay.

There were other Anabaptists who were not necessarily Schleidheim in their understanding. There are many of them who have continuities with it, connections with it, and so on. But as we see in the next lecture, there was variety. But Schleidheim is foundational for our stream of Anabaptism, the Swiss brethren stream.

Those Anabaptists who originated in Switzerland, some who moved to Moravia, to other parts of Europe, and so on, up into the Palatinate at various points in a couple hundred years, and so on, and then whose descendants eventually made their way over here to North America. Okay. So Schleidheim is very important for our tradition of Anabaptism. And I think as we went through it, you heard resonances of things that you were taught and you know is how it also explains how we look at things.

It goes back here to Schleidheim. One thing I forgot to mention about the oath is that in January 1527, when George Blaurock was whipped out of Zurich, they made him swear an oath that he would not come back. And he did swear an oath. The oath was not really an issue that was settled. Okay. Believers' baptism, the ban, non-resistance, all right, some sense of separation from the world, and so on. Those were all there even before the first baptisms. Okay. But the oath really wasn't.

And one of the things you have to keep in mind is these people are just starting to read their Bibles. Within two years, though, they somehow figured out. Okay. It's an amazing two years that they somehow figure out that and they're reading their Bibles. And it's very clear that Sattler and company are reading their Bibles, and they're taking very seriously what Jesus is saying about not swearing oaths. And so it becomes one of the seven points. All right. And it's also a point in which there is some variety.

Pilgrim Marpec does not hold as strictly to the idea of an oath, and so on, as the Swiss brethren did. He thought the Swiss brethren were legalistic. You know what a legalist is. That's somebody who's stricter than I am. That's all it is. It's somebody you feel they don't need to be that strict. And that was, I think, kind of Pilgrim Marpec's attitude toward the Swiss brethren. But I want to close with this quotation from Johannes Kessler, a Zwinglian reformer in St. Gallen, who describes these early Anabaptists.

And he's no friend. Okay. He's no friend. All right. But this is how he describes them. "Their conversation and bearing shines forth as entirely pious, holy, and unpunishable. They avoid ostentatious clothes, despise delicate food and drink, clothe themselves with coarse cloth, and deck their heads with broad-felled hats. Their way and conversation are quite humble.

They carry no weapon, neither sword nor dagger, except for a broken-off bread knife, saying that those were wolf's clothing which sheep should not wear. They swear not, not even to the authorities, the civic oath. And if anyone transgresses among them, he was banned, for there was the practice of daily excommunication among them." In their talk now, here he makes a stab at them. "In their talk and disputations, they were grim and hardbitten. That was meant that they wouldn't give up.

And so unyielding that they would rather have died than have yielded a point." That's a pretty amazing testimony, somebody who's not a friend. All right. Thank you very much for your attention.