The Radical Reformation the Radical Reformation

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LESSON Santa Barbara University of California, Abraham Friesen, PhD Abraham Friesen, Experience: Professor Emeritus of History, of History, Experience: Professor Emeritus Christian humanism after 1515, and who undoubtedly knew of knew undoubtedly who and 1515, after humanism Christian to according passages, baptismal the on annotations Erasmus’s should not be baptized before “children agreed that Hubmaier, they are instructed in the faith.” Hubmaier attended the second Zurich disputation in October Mass and the images were the Catholic where 1523, 26–28, Zwingli had turned of that disputation, the close At discussed. city the implementation of the reforms over to my lords of the saying that the Holy objected, however, Simon Stumpf, council. it had now to be issue and that decided the Spirit had already his religious convictions were undergoing changes, and so he undergoing changes, his religious convictions were Now he came increasingly under Zwingli’s returned to Waldshut. particular in him, with correspondence into entered He influence. It is passages dealing with baptism. discussing New Testament on centered passages these that later, see shall we as likely, quite on the Great they centered In other words, Matthew 28:19 and 20. this passage in connection with for he later cites Commission, Erasmus and in virtually every other writing on baptism. Zwingli, who had himself been heavily influenced by Erasmian theology at the University of Ingolstadt. An effective administrator theology at the University of Ingolstadt. of the University of Ingolstadt he became pro-rector and preacher, Cathedral. Regensburg the at chaplain and pastor then and 1515, in though which, town of Waldshut, In 1521 he became priest in the was in Austrian-Habsburg territory. close to the Swiss border, later on. This factor will become very important He sought writings. study Luther’s By 1522 Hubmaier began to Pauline the of study a began and Reformation the of friends out Regensburg the to return to call a received he Then Epistles. however; because staying only one year, He did so, Cathedral. This is lecture 8. The topic is Waldshut and Hubmaier. Balthasar Hubmaier. and Waldshut is topic The 8. is lecture This Ingolstadt, John Eck at the University of a student of Dr. Hubmaier, of received a doctorate famous Catholic opponent, most Luther’s

The Radical Reformation Radical The Lesson 08 of 24 Waldshut: Hubmaier and Politics

acted upon.

Upon his return to Waldshut from Zurich in the fall of 1523, Hubmaier began to implement his reforms. The populace was already on his side, if not, in fact, all the clergy. He delivered his “18 Articles Concerning the Christian Faith,” abolished the laws on fasting and celibacy, and married—all with the tacit approval of the town council. But Waldshut was not autonomous, like the free imperial cities of the empire, which owed allegiance only to the emperor Charles V, who was absent from Germany in Spain between 1521 and 1530. Waldshut’s political overlord was Charles’s brother Ferdinand, the archduke of Austria and a very staunch Catholic indeed.

Sometime between Hubmaier’s return from Zurich in early November of 1523 and December 11, 1523, the government—that is, the Catholic government at Innsbruck—must have written to the Waldshut authorities demanding that Hubmaier reverse his reforms and that he should do so on the basis of the Nuremberg Imperial Edict of March 6, 1523. This edict—and we shall have to enter into a fairly substantial discussion of it here—has been ignored in its impact on the Reformation. I have completed all of the research on it and have commenced writing a book about it. It is an edict that depends largely on the political context for its interpretation, and it is the result of Frederick the Wise’s own attempt to find a solution for the problem of Luther in his territory.

We cannot go into the background of the edict here, but it was formulated by a counselor to Frederick the Wise. It was formulated in the imperial governing council, the executive branch of the imperial government of Germany, in the summer of 1523 Frederick’s representative on the council was aided by one of Germany’s best legal minds at the time, a man by the name of Hans von Schwarzenberg, who was all but Lutheran by this time.

Reflecting Frederick’s desire to allow Luther to continue preaching the gospel but worried about imperial intervention if changes were to be made in the church services, his representatives drew up the law, which reads in part as follows. And this is the critical passage that we want to keep in mind: “That every elector, prince, prelate, count, and other estate in the realm shall, with all due diligence, so order and decree that all preachers in his territory are justly and equitably advised to avoid everything that might lead to disobedience, dissension, and revolt in the Holy Empire, or that might cause Christians to be led astray in their faith. Instead,

they are to preach and teach only the Holy Gospel and that in accordance with the interpretation of the Scriptures as approved by the Holy Christian Church.”

There are clearly two separate aspects to this edict. On the one hand, there are to be no innovations made in the church’s liturgy, in the church’s services, or any other changes in it. Clearly, this was what Frederick had feared most when Karlstadt had held his evangelical Mass on Christmas Day, 1521, because it would have given the imperial government an excuse to intervene in what he considered his internal political affairs. The second aspect had to do with preaching only the gospel. One would nearly call this a Lutheran tenet and the aspect that Frederick wanted protected the most, but the edict added the clause “according to the interpretation approved by the Holy Christian Church.”

In the original draft had been written in specific names of such teachers approved by the Christian church. The names listed were those of Augustine, of Saint Jerome, Saint Ambrose, Saint Cyprian, and other of the great church fathers. But Catholics on the council had objected. The best teachers of the Christian church, they insisted, were the latest ones—teachers like Thomas Aquinas, William of Auken, Duns Scotus, Gabriel Biel, et cetera— in other words, the scholastic theologians of the High Middle Ages. Clearly, the argument reflected differences of opinion between Reformers and Catholics as to who the best teachers of the Christian church were. In this case, Luther and Melanchthon had adopted the Christian humanist position that one should go back to the Bible, the purest source of Christianity, and to those interpreters who stood in closest in time to the Bible. But in the council the two sides reached a stalemate, and so it was decided to delete the specific names and simply to say “as approved by the Christian church.”

This compromise did not resolve the issue. It merely allowed both sides to interpret this part of the edict in diametrically opposing ways, and it transferred the quarrel from the smaller confines of the imperial governing council to the broader confines of the empire at large. Had we the time, one could show in detail how Catholics interpreted the edict in one way and Protestants interpreted it in quite another. The political context in which this confrontation took place was absolutely critical to the outcome. So sometime between November 1, 1523, and December 11 of the same year, the Catholic Austrian government wrote to the Waldshut mayor and council arguing that Hubmaier was preaching a heretical

version of the gospel and was introducing innovations clearly condemned by this particular edict.

On December 11, 1523, the mayor and town council of Waldshut wrote to the Austrian authorities at Innsbruck defending Hubmaier against these accusations. The specific accusations were the following. First, that Hubmaier had “interpreted the holy gospel differently than it actually was.” And this, the Austrians said, had angered the people of Waldshut and their neighbors. The second accusation was that he had introduced unheard-of innovations into the church services. To these charges, the mayor and town council answered as follows. First, they said that they had always published all imperial mandates, and this last one (the one of March 6, 1523) had been read from the pulpits of their churches by two secular priests from Constance. Second, they said, Hubmaier had not preached anything contrary to the gospel, nor would they have tolerated him preaching against the imperial edict. Rather, they were seeking to enforce it. Third, as far as they could tell, Hubmaier was interpreting the gospel from the pulpit as it actually was. His intention was, as he stated openly from the pulpit, to preach “the pure and clear gospel from here on out, which he has done according to our understanding. We even invited the dean and priests to see if he preached anything but the clear and pure Word of God.”

If the Austrian authorities wished, the mayor and town council continued, they could act in compliance with the edict and send several theologians from the Bishop of Constance to check Hubmaier out themselves. If these authorities could prove Hubmaier’s interpretation of the Gospels to be wrong, the latter would surely back down; but this was difficult to do, as Catholics had learned by this time, and so nothing was done. For in virtually every debate in the Reformation between the contending parties, if that debate was based on the Bible, it was invariably lost by the Catholics. Clearly, two opposing interpretations of the Edict of Nuremberg of 1523 were confronting one another in this instance.

To make a long story short, the party with the greater power would in the end prove to be the best interpreter of the gospel; and, in this case, it was to be the Austrian armies. On September 1, 1524, Hubmaier fled to Schaffhausen. There he wrote his pamphlet entitled On the Burning of Heretics. It is a ringing defense of religious freedom. Indeed, it has been called one of the best defenses of religious liberty of all time.

His presence in Schaffhausen caused problems, however, and so he returned to Waldshut. Officially, Hubmaier still belonged to Zwingli’s party, but on January 17, 1525, Hubmaier and his radical followers met in that last-ditch attempt to resolve the baptismal issue. Although Zwingli was officially declared to have won the debate, the radicals refused to acknowledge that fact or to acknowledge the persuasiveness of his arguments. On January 21, the radicals then proceeded to baptize one another on their confession of faith, and the breach between Zwingli and his erstwhile followers became irreparable.

Hubmaier now also dropped infant baptism, baptizing only the children of such parents who were still weak in their faith and wanted their children baptized. So he made some concessions to the weakness of the faith of members of his own congregation. On February 2, 1525, he published his public declaration, offering to prove in public disputation that infant baptism had no foundation in the Scriptures. He now also began, with broad popular support, to abolish the Mass in Waldshut, and on Easter 1525, was himself baptized on his confession of faith by Wilhelm Reublin.

Zwingli responded to these events in two ways. First, he enlisted the town council of Zurich in his fight against the radicals. Second, he began to write against the radicals publicly. His first tract was entitled Concerning Baptism, Rebaptism, and Infant Baptism, Hubmaier replied to this tract with his Concerning the Christian Baptism of Believers, one of the best defenses of believer’s baptism in the sixteenth century—some indeed say the best defense ever written.

In Waldshut, Hubmaier then baptized large numbers—so large that some have spoken of Anabaptism in Waldshut as a mass movement. But with the defeat of the peasants in the Great Peasants’ War of 1524 to 1525, in the summer of 1525—and we shall have to return to Hubmaier’s role in that revolt later on—the Austrian government could now enforce its Catholic interpretation of the Nuremberg Edict on the city of Waldshut. On December 5, 1525, Hubmaier fled Waldshut and sought sanctuary in Zurich, but Zwingli was now his enemy. Though Zurich refused to turn Hubmaier over to the Austrian authorities, Hubmaier was imprisoned after a debate with Zwingli, and he was forced to recant his views. On April 15, he did, in fact, recant; but under great qualms of conscience. Yet even that did not help his situation in Zurich with the town council or with Zwingli, and so he managed to escape Zurich.

He wandered about for a time in southern Germany, spent some time in Augsburg, where he baptized Hans Denck, and in the summer of 1526 arrived in Nikolsburg, Moravia. Here, under Leonhard von Liechtenstein, Hubmaier and the Anabaptists found sanctuary for a time. The Anabaptist church in Nikolsburg grew rapidly under Liechtenstein’s protection, and with the coming of the printer Christoph Froschauer—the man who had been in Zurich and who had been the party organizer of the breaking of the first Lenten fast in Zurich—to Nikolsburg, Hubmaier could publish his increasingly prolific writings.

But in late 1526, after the Battle of Mohács, Moravia came into the hands of Ferdinand of Austria, who had sought to capture Hubmaier when he was still in Waldshut. The fact that Nikolsburg was becoming such an Anabaptist sanctuary, and Hubmaier becoming such a powerfully attractive personality, made it only a matter of time before the Austrian Catholic government would seek to destroy the whole movement in Moravia. By 1527, in mid- August, Ferdinand called the counts of Liechtenstein to appear before him and demanded of them the capture of Balthasar Hubmaier. Four weeks later Hubmaier was in custody and being taken to Vienna.

At the center of the accusation against Hubmaier was his activity in Waldshut, so that the Nuremberg Edict formed the legal basis for Ferdinand’s execution of Hubmaier. Before the execution happened, however, Hubmaier was allowed to meet and discuss his plight with an old classmate, now a high official of the Bishop of Constance, a man by the name of Dr. Johann Fabri. The meeting took place in late 1527 and lasted for three days. The Bible and infant baptism were discussed the first day; the sacraments in general, the Mass, intercession of the saints, and purgatory were discussed on the second day; faith, good works, Christian liberty, the freedom of the will, the worship of Mary, and other things were discussed on the last day. At the close, Hubmaier presented a confession of faith. It was called “An Account of My Faith,” which contained twenty-seven articles; but it was so worded that any Christian could subscribe to it. In matters of baptism and the Mass, the two most important articles, he was willing to await the decision of a future church council. In other words, he wrote them in such a way that anyone could find their position in it, and he suggested that he was willing to await the decisions of a future church council on these two matters. But the Austrian authorities wanted more from Hubmaier, and they demanded an absolutely unconditional recantation. This Hubmaier could not and would

not give them; and so, on March 10, 1528, he was burned at the stake.

Aside from Menno Simons, Balthasar Hubmaier was the most important literary spokesperson for Anabaptism. His pamphlets on believers’ baptism, issued essentially against Zwingli’s attacks, have never been surpassed. He also saw the Reformation issue in a much larger context than most of his Anabaptist fellows. He read widely, quoted—as we shall see—a significant passage on believers’ baptism from Erasmus, discussed the issue of baptism with him, and knew the arguments on all sides of the issue. He was the one who also originated the argument that Anabaptists should not be persecuted by the Catholic Church, because the latter itself regarded initiation into the monastic life as a second baptism; that is, that the Catholic Church was the true re-baptizer. At the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, Luther and Melanchthon were to fulminate against this Catholic assertion—the assertion that entry into a monastery was a second baptism. And on one occasion, at least, Luther even wrote that the Catholics were the real Anabaptists of the sixteenth century.

In 1527, Hubmaier addressed the issue of the church ban, arguing that nothing would ever be right in the church until proper church discipline would be exercised. The tract indeed was a frontal attack on the up-and-coming Protestant state churches because, he said, without discipline in the church nothing would really improve within Christendom.

In the same year, he wrote a tract defending the freedom of the will. Borrowing arguments from Erasmus, he insisted that man’s spirit had remained good in spite of the fall, but it was under the control of the flesh. Since the fall of Adam, he argued, the flesh was useless, though the spirit was willing to do good. The human soul, he argued further, was caught in between these warring factions. Once the soul was healed by Christ, however, it could be freed and could once again obey the Holy Spirit.

He also wrote on Communion, stressing that the bread and the cup were a memorial of Christ’s broken body and shed blood. Unlike many of the early Swiss Brethren, he was not totally opposed to the use of the sword. Indeed, he saw a legitimate role for the use of the sword by the government, and he argued that the government had the right to demand obedience from its subjects in this respect. This more positive approach to government and to the use of the sword has won him the approval of Baptist historians

who nearly universally regard him as the ideal Anabaptist of the sixteenth century.

He also strongly opposed some of the influences coming from Saxony and Thuringia, especially Hans Hut’s eschatology. Though powerful, Hubmaier is not entirely typical of early Swiss Anabaptism, and his attempts at theological compromise in Zurich and Vienna while he was captive in those two cities have detracted somewhat from his stature. The case of Hubmaier and the city of Waldshut raise some interesting issues for early South German-Swiss Anabaptism. For Waldshut, and later Nikolsburg, present us with centers in which Anabaptism cooperated with the local political authorities. Is this a case of magisterial Anabaptism? Indeed, for a brief time, Hubmaier’s movement constituted the official church in both of these regions.

Could Anabaptism, even while practicing believer’s baptism, have become a territorial church? The argument has been made that even the Swiss Brethren, before their final break with Ulrich Zwingli, sought to convince the latter that their form of Christianity would find the greatest support in the city of Zurich. To what extent, then, did the fact that Zwingli and the authorities refused to go along with the radicals and forced them into an oppositional minority group determine their view of the church? It is clear that Luther, as well as Zwingli, before they gained the support of their respective political authorities, defined the true church as “the congregation of the believers.” Yet when they gained political favor, they began to accommodate themselves to the territorial state. Could Anabaptism have done the same, as the case of Hubmaier seems to indicate? Perhaps we shall never know for certain, but Hubmaier’s Anabaptist experiment in both Waldshut and Lichtenstein raises some very intriguing questions for the early history of Anabaptism.

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