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Anabaptist: Anabaptist Movement
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Not all early Anabaptists were committed to non-violence or "non-resistance" as they called it. Some Anabaptist sects were positively militant. In 1535, a group of revolutionary Anabaptists seized the city of Münster and proclaimed the advent of God’s kingdom on earth, forcing baptism on its inhabitants and putting some resisters and opponents to death. By the 1560s... a principled rejection of violence had become the dominant ethos of the movement. It was considered one of the primary ways believers could imitate Christ. A corollary of this was a refusal by many Anabaptists to swear oaths, since this not only violated Jesus’ command against oath-taking and devalued truth (Matt 5:33-37) but also entailed acceptance of the principle of state coercion.
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The Anabaptist movement had its genesis as the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation. It began in Zurich in 1525 when a small group of men and women gathered to baptise one another. This group and those that followed them became known as Anabaptists because they believed that Christians must choose baptism as consenting adults rather than as infants.
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After the first stage of the Reformation, Anabaptist groups underwent a transformation from dynamic early reforming movements to more established communities. The concentration of Anabaptist and Radical Reformation studies on the period until about 1550 has meant that the character of institutionalized Anabaptism of the early modern period remains largely unexplored.
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The term Anabaptist has come to be applied to a broad religious movement at the beginning of the Radical Reformation (1520-1580). Anabaptism was not a centralized or homogeneous sect. The early origins of the Anabaptist are still being debated. There have been estimates of up to forty independent sects within the general category of what has been termed Anabaptism.
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Along with the fanatic element, there was always in the Anabaptist party a more pacific current represented especially by its Swiss adherents. The effect of the fall of Münster and of the determined repression of Anabaptists by Catholics, Lutherans, and Zwinglians alike, was the very pronounced and ultimately complete elimination of the violent features of the movement. Menno Simonis, formerly a Catholic priest, who joined the party in 1536, exercised a beneficient influence in that direction. The very name Anabaptists was superseded by others, particularly that of Mennonites. It is under the latter designation that the Anabaptists exist today, principally in Holland, Germany, and the United States. Another result of the capture of Münster seems to have been the appearance of the Anabaptists in England, where they come into frequent notice shortly after this time and continue to be mentioned during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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Those of the polygenesis viewpoint use Anabaptist to define the larger movement, and include the inspirationists and rationalists as true Anabaptists. James M. Stayer used the term Anabaptist for those who rebaptized persons already baptized in infancy. Walter Klaassen was perhaps the first Mennonite scholar to define Anabaptists that way in his 1960 Oxford dissertation. This represents a rejection of the previous standard held by Mennonite scholars such as Bender and Friedmann.
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Anabaptist Movement