Luther’s writings were being spread rapidly throughout
literate Europe and gaining followers among academics and German nobles. At the
same time, his views were being spread orally among the illiterate. They
reached rural areas where communities already had loose catechesis and heretical
ideas had nominally been practiced for years (see the result of the Plague). In
1521, three men later called the “Zwickau Prophets” arrived in Wittenberg. They
preached that their authority came from the Holy Spirit, not Scripture or the
Church. They rejected infant baptism and warned of a coming apocalypse.
Although their views differed wildly from Luther’s, they
gained favor with some of Luther’s peers, including Andreas Karlstadt. On
Christmas Day 1521, Karlstadt celebrated his first “communion service” in which
he wore secular clothes, used German instead of Latin, rejected confession as a
prerequisite for communion, and purged all references of sacrifice from the
Mass. Luther eventually returned to Wittenberg in order to preach against the “fanatics.”
Karlstadt continued to grow more radical; he got rid of
images and music in churches, got married, and rejected infant baptism. He
denied the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
Politically, the Zwickau Prophets preached an ideal Christian
commonwealth, with commodities shared and all men held equal. These ideas were
gaining traction among German peasants, who revolted against the aristocracy in
the German Peasants’ War of 1524-1525. While all the complex causes and
influences in the war are still subject to debate, I think it is clear that the
individualism and anti-institutionalism expressed in the growing new religious
movements inspired people to seek political change, and vice versa. If the
Church is oppressive, then isn’t the king oppressive too? If each man is equal
in political power, then isn’t his Biblical interpretations equal too? In both
cases, the rural populace wants to be left alone and not told what to do.
Variations of this sort of religious movement popped up
across Germany, Switzerland, Moravia, and the Low Countries. There are various
pastors from the late 1520s and early 1530s who developed somewhat similar
iconoclastic, credo-baptist, pacifist doctrines. The Swiss Brethren were one of
the larger of these groups. In 1527 the Swiss Brethren published a confession
of faith outline among other things adult-only baptism, symbolic Lord’s Supper,
separation from worldly matters, and nonviolence. The belief that baptism of
infants was invalid was a large competent of this group, and thus they begin
“re-baptizing” adults, earning the name “Anabaptist” (“to baptize again”). Of
course, other Christian groups did not recognize these second baptisms as
valid. One of these leaders, Felix Manz, was executed by Protestants by way of
drowning—a signal of their disapproval of “re-baptisms.”
I think the Anabaptist beginnings share a lot in common with
the Awakenings that would spring up over the centuries and with the Pentecostal
movement in the early twentieth century. The people outside of the academic
circles and noble elites did not care much about complicated doctrines or
edicts. They felt religion, and the
zeitgeist valued appeals of individual emotion and rejection of foreign
institutions.
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