Students of Scripture in Zurich
In January 1519 Ulrich Zwingli became the people's preacher at the Great Minster in Zurich and began preaching straight through the Gospel of Matthew. Young men eager to read the Bible in its original languages gathered around him. Among them were Conrad Grebel, the gifted son of a member of the city council, and Felix Manz, son of a canon of the Great Minster and an able Hebrew scholar. They studied Greek and Hebrew with Zwingli and shared his conviction that Scripture alone must govern the church.
The break came over who would decide what Scripture required. At a public disputation in October 1523 Zwingli argued that the mass and the use of images were contrary to God's Word. But when the question arose of when to abolish them, he left the timing to the city council. Some of his younger followers protested that the council had no authority to delay what the Word of God had already decided. Zwingli chose the council. To Grebel and his friends that choice revealed a church that would always be governed by the magistrate.
Their study led further. If the church is the company of those who hear and obey Christ, it cannot be the whole population of a city, and baptism, the sign of entering it, cannot be given to infants who neither hear nor obey. By 1524 some in Grebel's circle were refusing to bring their newborns to the font. In September of that year Grebel and his friends wrote to Thomas Müntzer, the radical preacher in Saxony, urging that baptism be given only to believers and that the sword be renounced in the cause of the Gospel.
The dispute in Zurich was not, at first, about the mode of baptism. It was about the church. Zwingli wanted a reformed state church that included everyone in the territory. The Brethren wanted a church of believers, gathered by the Word, disciplined by its members, and free of the magistrate's control. Infant baptism stood or fell with the territorial church.
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For Deeper Study
- The Anabaptist StoryAmazon William R. EstepA Baptist historian's introduction; sympathetic, and stresses kinship with Baptists.
- Conrad Grebel, c. 1498–1526Amazon Harold S. BenderThe standard Mennonite scholarly biography of the founder of the Swiss Brethren (1950).
- Anabaptist History and Theology: An IntroductionAmazon C. Arnold SnyderA modern survey that stresses the movement's diversity.
- The Legacy of Michael SattlerAmazon John H. Yoder, ed.Schleitheim, Sattler's other writings, and the account of his trial, in translation.
- Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian of AnabaptismAmazon H. Wayne Pipkin and John H. Yoder, eds.Hubmaier's writings in translation.
- The Complete Writings of Menno SimonsAmazon J. C. Wenger, ed.; trans. Leonard VerduinMenno in his own words.
- The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist WitnessAmazon H. Leon McBethA standard Baptist history that traces the first English Baptists mainly to English Separatism, a useful counterweight to Estep.
- Foxe's Book of MartyrsAmazon John FoxeThe classic Protestant record of those who died for the faith, from the early church to the English Reformation.
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