Zwingli's Persecution of the Anabaptists
Huldrych Zwingli (l. 1484-1531) broke with the Church in 1522 and defended his beliefs at the First Disputation in 1523, encouraging many people in Zürich to embrace his teachings. Among his followers was a group, soon known as Anabaptists, who felt he had compromised himself at the Second Disputation, and they were then persecuted for their convictions.
Zwingli advocated for rejection of Catholic doctrine and practice and strict adherence to the authority of the scriptures. Zwingli's 67 Articles, presented at the First Disputation at which he denounced the Church as unbiblical, inspired a number of his adherents to take his claims to their natural conclusion that the Bible should be understood literally as God's word and its precepts followed faithfully without picking and choosing only what suited one's interests. When the Bible stated, "Thou Shalt Not Kill", they claimed, it meant a Christian should not take the life of another no matter the circumstances and, further, since there was no mention of infant baptism in the Bible, this practice should be rejected in favor of adult baptism. Zwingli rejected both of these challenges.
At the Second Disputation of 1523, Zwingli compromised on a number of points including infant baptism, alienating some of his more ardent supporters including Conrad Grebel (l. c. 1498-1526) and Felix Manz (l. c. 1498-1527) who formed their own Christian community, the Swiss Brethren, notable for their practice of adult baptism. Their opponents, who included Zwingli, called them Anabaptists (rebaptizers), and considered them dangerous radicals as they refused military service, denounced tithes, and challenged both civil and ecclesiastical authority.
When the city council of Zürich condemned them through a mandate, and when four of them were executed as heretics in 1527, including Manz, Zwingli made no objection. He had already spoken out against them as extremists who threatened the success of his movement, and he seems to have been relieved when the Anabaptist community left Zürich after the executions. Their exodus was only the beginning of the Anabaptist reform movement, however, which continued to spread throughout Europe despite severe persecution from religious and secular authorities. The Anabaptist sect went on to influence the development of others still practicing today, including the Amish and Mennonites.
Zwingli began his reform movement in 1519, as soon as he was appointed the people's priest of the Grossmünster (Great Church) in Zürich, by rejecting the Church's liturgy in Latin and reading from the Gospel of Matthew in the vernacular while interpreting and commenting on it. This encouraged members of his congregation to form their own Bible-study groups, which met in members' homes and applied Zwingli's teachings to interpret scripture.
In 1522, Zwingli broke with the Church over an event known as the Affair of the Sausage, when some members of his congregation (with Zwingli in attendance) broke the Lenten fast and the prohibition on eating meat by serving sausage at dinner. Zwingli defended this practice, denouncing Lenten fasting – and Lent itself – as unbiblical. He defined his stand in two sermons, Regarding the Choice and Freedom of Foods and On Rejecting Lent and Protecting Christian Liberty from Man-Made Obligations, and then further clarified his views through his 67 Articles delivered at the First Disputation with Catholic delegates in January 1523.
Zwingli's stand at the First Disputation inspired his more zealous supporters to fully embrace his call for the supremacy of biblical authority over any other, ecclesiastical or civil, and the Bible study led by Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz began advocating for a radical revision of Christian practice completely in accordance with scripture. Scholar Randolph C. Head comments:
Zwingli's sermons unleashed powerful responses from his audiences, which included Zurich's population, rich and poor, and clergy and laity from the surrounding areas…the broad (though by no means unanimous) support Zwingli's movement enjoyed by 1525 suggests many listeners found his sermons persuasive. Zwingli's impact was amplified by a number of Bible-study circles that formed in Zurich, whose participants often became proselytizers for increasingly bold reform projects. (Rublack, 170-171)
Although Zwingli had inspired this movement, he rejected their proposals as too extreme. At the Second Disputation in 1523, Zwingli completely rejected the views of Grebel and Manz and compromised on various issues with the Zürich city council. Head notes, "among the most pressing issues were clerical celibacy, the use of images in ceremonies, and the economic obligations of the laity to the church, especially tithes" (Rublack, 171). Zwingli agreed with Grebel and the others on the first two points but not on tithes, and he also rejected their claim that infant baptism was unbiblical and condemned them as dangerous rebels.
Grebel, Manz, and others in their circle, including George Blaurock (l. c. 1491-1529), felt betrayed by Zwingli and formed the Swiss Brethren, a counter- – and more extreme – reform movement to his own. Zwingli met with them in 1524 to reconcile, but no compromise could be reached. In response, Zwingli published his sermon Whoever Causes Unrest, denouncing the new movement as divisive – the same charge the Catholics had brought against Zwingli at the First Disputation – and this led to another disputation in early January 1525 to resolve the issue. Zwingli won this debate as he had the others, especially on the point of infant baptism. The city council then issued a mandate that anyone refusing to have their babies baptized must leave the city.
