500: The Peasants Protest Too


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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