THE ANBAPTIST LEGACY: IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTIONS
OF THE ANABATIST TO THE CHURCH

The Anabaptists were perhaps the most controversial group involved in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Their beliefs pitted them against Roman Catholic Church as well as Reformers such as Ulrich Zwingli. How did they manage to chafe against members on both sides? The Anabaptists were taking Sola scriptura, one of the key developments of the Reformation, further to its inevitable conclusions in ways other Reformers like Zwingli and John Calvin were not yet prepared for. “What became typical of the mainstream of Anabaptist life . . . was a strong commitment to being biblical people. In particular, Anabaptists focused on the New Testament, especially the teaching of Jesus, and on the kind of church found in the New Testament.”  They were applying that biblical commitment not just to soteriology, but to ecclesiology as well. This challenged many of the deeply entrenched paradigms of the sixteenth century church concerning issues such as baptism and church-state relations. “[Medieval Catholic theology] had so warped the Western Christian understanding of the church and its relationship to the state that even spiritual giants like Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli couldn’t comprehend church and state not being in tandem together.”  This was the climate that the Anabaptists found themselves in. They were Reformers, but they met opposition from both sides of the debate.
Even though they faced such tough opposition, the Anabaptists were able to have a positive influence on the church for years to come. They were not without their own flaws. To be certain, Anabaptists made some serious errors along the way. However, those errors were not necessarily characteristic of the Anabaptist movement as a whole. Despite these errors, they were able to make lasting contributions to the church. Having said that, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the Anabaptists made vital contributions to the life and theology of the church even as they erred in certain respects. In order to support this thesis, this paper will provide several examples of Anabaptist contributions to the church: (1) living faith displayed through faithful living, (2) believer’s baptism, (3) separation of church and state, and (4) church discipline.

Living Faith Displayed Through Faithful Living
The Anabaptists placed a strong emphasis on genuine faith and the fruit of genuine faith being evidenced by holy and faithful living. “One of the gifts of the Anabaptists to the wider Christian church is the insight that God calls every human being to a personal recognition of the truth, and to a personal commitment to a new life in Christ, recognizing Jesus Christ as both Savior and Lord. Jesus called us not simply to be believers, but to be disciples.”  Their concept of living faith was quite characteristic of their commitment to being biblical people. They took seriously the admonition of James: “faith apart from works is dead” (Jas 2:26).
[The Anabaptists] saw the test of Christian faith in a discipleship of Christ that, they maintained, must be experienced in a spiritual rebirth or awakening and exhibited in a life of saintliness. The true church of God, accordingly is made up not of all professed Christians, who have entered upon church membership through baptism in infancy, but only of all convinced believers, who have received baptism as adults in full consciousness of faith and who now display in their lives the palpable fruits of faith.
This commitment to biblical fidelity and living faith became the foundation for the other doctrines they emphasized. It was the foundation of their convictions concerning the three other aforementioned emphases: baptism, church-state relations, and church discipline.

Believer’s Baptism
“Believer’s baptism was introduced by the Anabaptists.”  Balthasar Hubmaier, the first major Anabaptist theologian came to doubt the practice of infant baptism as early as May 1523. His conviction was based on lack of biblical support for the practice. According to his testimony, he discussed his convictions with Zwingli who also had similar doubts at the time. Eventually, these convictions were put into practice when “on the evening of January 21, 1525, a small band gathered at a house belonging to Felix Manz’s mother. After prayer, George Blaurock . . . stood up and asked Conrad Grebel to baptize him. This Grebel did, and Blaurock then baptized fifteen others.”  These events became the catalyst for the Anabaptist movement.
The Anabaptists, under the leadership of Michael Sattler drafted a confession of faith, the Schleitheim Confession. The very first of the seven articles addressed baptism. It stated:
Observe concerning baptism: Baptism shall be given to all those who have learned repentance and amendment of life, and who believe truly that their sins are taken away by Christ, and to all those who walk in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and wish to be buried with him in death, so that they may be resurrected with him, and to all those who with this significance request it [baptism] of us and demand it for themselves. This excludes all infant baptism, the highest and chief abominations of the pope. In this you have the foundation and testimony of the apostles. Matthew 28, Mark 16, Acts 2, 8, 16, 19. This we wish to hold simply, yet firmly and with assurance.
The Confession shows that the Anabaptist convictions concerning baptism we based firmly on several scriptural arguments, both negative and positive.  “First, no explicit biblical warrant could be found for infant baptism. . . . Second, the Anabaptists noted that none of the New Testament accounts of baptism make any mention of infants participating in the ceremony. . . . As a positive case for the baptism of believers, the Anabaptists pointed to all the New Testament passages about baptism and underscored that, in every case, faith preceded water baptism.”  It was absolutely necessary for the Anabaptists that people come to the waters of Baptism as someone who has experienced the new birth and made a genuine confession of faith. They saw this as a clear pattern from scripture, especially from the book of Acts. For example, in Acts 8, one of the passages cited by the Confession, the Ethiopian eunuch says to Philip, "See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?" Philip’s responds, "If you believe with all your heart, you may." Finally, the Ethiopian replies, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God" (Acts 8:36-37).
In fact, in light of the confessional nature of the Anabaptist view of baptism, the label “believer’s baptism” actually does not make enough distinction from the Catholic or Lutheran view. “The term “believer baptism” does not really suffice, for . . . both Catholics and Lutherans maintained that baptized infants are believers. It is the requirement that the baptismal candidate himself or herself be able to say “I believe” that makes the Anabaptist position unique. In short, what Hubmaier was calling for was confessor baptism.”  “Confessor baptism” may sound like splitting hairs, but it is in fact a more accurate description of not only Anabaptist belief, but historical Baptist belief as influenced by the Anabaptists.
To say that the Anabaptists had a significant influence on the church in terms of baptism would be a gross understatement. There may have been small ripples of discontent with infant baptism before the Anabaptists came onto the scene, but these ripples did not become waves before Hubmaier, Blaurock, and Grebel actually began to put their beliefs into practice. “There is evidence that throughout the medieval period . . . voices of protest arose against the practice of infant baptism . . . but the antipaedobaptist movement for which Hubmaier spoke was by far the biggest thing of its kind since the days of the apostles, and it had something that the medieval antipaedobaptists had not: the printing press.”  Quite similar to events surrounding Martin Luther, the collective atmosphere of discontent that had been brewing under the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, combined with the proliferation of information via the printing press created the perfect storm that allowed the influence of Anabaptist theology to spread rapidly over Europe. The same was true when they came under persecution. They would scatter, taking their message across the continent. “Hubmaier fled to Nickolsburg, Moravia after being persecuted in Austria. He experienced instant success, within a year baptizing between six and twelve thousand people. He was also able to publish several excellent works in defense of the Anabaptist position.”  Their theology would continue to exert its influence until it eventually impacted the theology of the very first Baptist church. “Members of a separatist assembly – led by John Smyth and Thomas Helwys – from Gainsborough, England fled to Holland in 1607. While in England, the church had practiced infant baptism, but influenced by some Anabaptists, this church changed its view of baptism and began administering this ordinance to believers only.”  It should be clear by now that the Anabaptists were responsible for the reclamation of  the doctrine of “confessor baptism” which continues to be a foundational doctrine for Baptists even to this day.

Separation of Church and State
The separation of church and state for the Anabaptists was a natural outworking of their theology. Their beliefs led them to establish separate communities of believers, distinct from the state church of Roman Catholicism. Under medieval Roman Catholic theology, there was no freedom of conscience. As a member of the Holy Roman Empire, you were born into the Roman Catholic Church, and baptized as an infant. You had no freedom from coercion, for you were taught from birth that the Roman Catholic Church held the keys to your salvation. If you did not conform to the theology of the Church, you could easily be labeled as a heretic and face serious consequences, including death. For the Anabaptists to worship according to their convictions, it was necessary for them to sever the tie between church and state. “The Anabaptists refused to have any part in inclusive state-churches of the kind that Zwingli established in Zurich and that were developed in other centers of the Reformation. Their beliefs impelled them, rather, to set themselves apart in free communities and conventicles of their own. Thus, they were the first to practice the complete separation of church and state.”  The only way they could worship without being coerced into doing anything that violated their consciences  was to establish these communities in which they could freely worship according to their religious convictions.
This is another area in which the Anabaptists were distinct from other Reformers, specifically the Magisterial Reformers like Calvin.
Calvin was like the Anabaptists in wanting serious discipline of the Christian community . . . The distance that remained between [them], however, was that Calvin, while emphasizing the distinction between ecclesiastical and civil authorities, did not want to separate the community of believers from society and government the way the Anabaptists did.
The Magisterial Reformers still wished to maintain a relationship between the church and state, using the power of the state to accomplish their goals. In other words, they sought to legislate biblical morality. The problem with that model, however, is that it works both ways. If you have a magistrate that has legislative power over the church, and the church is using the magistrate to accomplish its goals, what happens when you have a corrupt magistrate, or corrupt clergy? One needs to look no further than the corrupt medieval Roman Catholic Church to see what happens in that situation. It was for these reasons that the Anabaptists saw the union of church and state as evil. In fact, on this issue, the Schleitheim Confession states “everything which is not united with our God and Christ cannot be other than an abomination which we should shun and flee from.”
As pioneers of church-state separation, the Anabaptists made one of the most important contributions to the church and religious freedom in history. Church-state separation and its product, religious freedom may have taken many more years to become a reality for other nations, but it is undeniable that the Anabaptists planted and watered the tree of church-state separation so that it would grow and mature for future generations. Their movement also paved the way for congregationalism. “Spearheaded by the Anabaptists, this movement rejected the church-state reality of the Catholic Church and the new Protestant churches. In one sense, it can be seen as an early form of congregationalism, encouraging the establishment of individual congregations.”  This was a paradigm shift away from the pre-Reformation system where your congregation and your bishop were determined by your place of birth. New congregations were being established and suddenly people had a choice. That in itself is a lasting contribution. Without a choice, there is no way to avoid violating your conscience other than abstaining from church participation.

Church Discipline
The Anabaptists took church discipline seriously. Again, their commitment to this practice is inextricably linked to their desire to be biblical and to their emphasis on holy living. Their doctrine of church discipline is articulated in the second article of the Schleitheim Confession:
We agree as follows on the ban: The ban shall be employed with all those who have given themselves to the Lord, to walk in His commandments, and with all those who have been baptized into the one body of Christ and who are called brethren and sisters, and yet who slip sometimes and fall into error and sin, being inadvertently overtaken. The same shall be admonished twice in secret and the third time openly disciplined or banned according to the command of Christ. Matthew 18. But this shall be done according to the regulation of the Spirit (Matthew 5) before the breaking of bread, so that we may break and eat one bread, with one mind and in one love, and may drink of one cup.
Notice how different church doctrines meet in the Anabaptist doctrine of church discipline. You have regenerate church membership, baptism, and the Lord’s supper all in one. The practice of church discipline guards the purity of the church by guarding the membership and the ordinances. It served as a means by which their theology was “grounded in praxis”.  The real possibility of being banned from fellowship or from the Lord’s table added a solemn weight not only to one’s profession of faith, but also to owning up to that profession through godly living. “The Anabaptists, like their New Testament counterparts, baptized with confidence those who wished to profess their faith in Christ. But they also made certain that the new believer understood that he or she was acting out the death of the old man and the resurrection of a new man. If serious problems developed thereafter and repeated admonitions were disregarded, then the ban was exercised and the offender was not allowed to come to the Lord’s Table.”  Again, this was a major shift from the Roman Catholic Church where you were born into the church and were required to perform penance for sins. There was no requirement to show evidence of true faith and live a life consistent with that faith to take part in the Eucharist.
From very early on, Hubmaier saw church discipline as essential to maintaining the purity of the church. “As early as 1526, Hubmaier was asserting that without the restoration of the proper use of the ban, there was no real church even if baptism and the Lord’s Supper are observed, and he considered this lack to be a major reason for the degenerate condition of the medieval Roman [Catholic] Church and for the failure of the Magisterial Reformation to achieve practical, moral reform in the church.”  To put it simply, Hubmaier believed that where there was no church discipline, there was no church. The Anabaptist influence on the church in this regard can be seen by the fact that “Historically, Baptists have viewed church discipline as an essential mark of the church along with the Word rightly preached and the ordinances properly administered.”   In fact, it is remarkable when one considers that the major emphases of the Anabaptist movement: living faith, confessor’s baptism, church-state relations, and church discipline are still emphasized by many contemporary Baptist churches today.

Conclusion: Spitting Out the Bones
Earlier in this paper, it was mentioned that Anabaptists did make some serious errors along the way. One example of this would be the Münster Rebellion, in which a group of Anabaptists overthrew the government in Münster, Germany which led to the city being besieged by Catholic forces, resulting in many deaths.  Another example would unorthodox Anabaptist teachings such as those of Adam Pastor, who adopted and taught anti-trinitarian views.  
Does this mean that Baptists today have to distance themselves from Anabaptist doctrines and cease any attempts to learn anything from them? Does it mean that all of their contributions become null and void because of a few bad apples in the bunch? Certainly not. We have to remember to put the Reformers in their proper contexts. Like us, they were sinners daily in need of God’s grace. They all had their flaws. Luther was an anti-Semite. Calvin sought the death penalty for Michael Servetus. However, this does not mean that we cannot still glean much wisdom from these spiritual giants. Realizing that we are heirs to their legacies, that we stand upon their shoulders, we must use discernment while chewing the meat and spitting out the bones, so to speak. If we allow them to, the Anabaptists still have important contributions to make to our spiritual lives today. Their example of dedication to the Word of God and to holy living remind us that living faith cannot be divorced from faithful living. Therefore, let us glean from the important lessons the Anabaptists have to offer us, and apply them in our own walk with the Lord, and in the lives of our churches.

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