Conrad Grebel, founder of the Anabaptists

Conrad Grebel was born into a fairly wealthy, leading Zurich family. The first photo is of his house in Zurich. It is a large and beautiful home. It is currently a small theater called Theater am Neumarkt. There is a plaque on it that says: "1508 - 1514 and 1520 - 1525 in this house lived Conrad Grebel, who together with Felix Manz founded Anabaptism."

Conrad was well-educated. His father used his political connections to gain what we would call scholarships today. Conrad first went to Vienna to study, through a scholarship through the Holy Roman Emperor, who ruled what would roughly be Germany today. There he was a student of Joachim von Watt, or Vadian. Through the years Conrad wrote many letters to Vadian, who eventually married Conrad's sister, and many of these letters were preserved.

After Vienna Conrad transferred to Paris, now under the auspices of the King of France. He was a studen of Glarean, another Swiss in a foreign setting. But there Conrad had much conflict with Glarean and eventually abandoned his studies. Glarean apparently thought Conrad was spoiled, and in my mind not without reason. He moved out of his lodgings with Glarean because they were too cold. But Glarean also played favorites and was hard to get along with.

In Paris Conrad got into other kinds of trouble as well. He was part of a group of Swiss students that became involved in a brawl that killed two Frenchmen. Apparently the French were attempting to rob the Swiss, so it was considered self defense. Conrad also admitted that he frequented prostitutes. He also suffered from an illness already at this time, something we hear about again and again, but not with enough details to know what it was.

So Conrad came home. But then his father got another scholarship for him, this time from the Pope to study in Rome. Now at this time the Pope was not just spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, but also political leader of the Papal states, much of northern Italy. So in other words Conrad's father managed to get money from each of the major countries that surrounded Switzerland at that time. This is part of the reason that Conrad's father was eventually executed, not for religious reasons but for treason.

But Conrad didn't have the heart to go to Rome and so stayed in Switzerland. He was a bright student, knew Latin as well as Greek. He wrote poetry that was published in Vadian's books.

It was only as he joined a study group with pastor Ulrich Zwingli, Felix Manz, and others that he began to have a spiritual awakening. He became more serious about life and about God. With Zwingli he believed that the church should be reformed according to the Bible. But as he read the Bible he didn't agree with all of Zwingli's ideas.

His greatest problem with Zwingli became infant baptism. He believed that baptism should follow a declaration of faith. That was the Biblical pattern.

The second photo is an illustration of the baptism disputation in Zurich. This comes from a handwritten copy of Heinrich Bullinger's Reformation History. The book was handwritten for political reasons, to not upset the Catholic cantons of Switzerland. The Swiss after all had battled each other over religion. The copyist painted these beautiful pictures. While the artist did not necessarily actually attend the events, he was drawing the rooms and places as they appeared at the time. In this picture the lords of the council are on the left, the clergy on the right, and the Anabaptist party are the ones standing at the front of the picture.

This is the disputation that the Anabaptists lost, where the council decided to maintain infant baptism, and to force parents to have their children baptized. As I already mentioned, the group soon thereafter decided to baptize each other as adult believers.

Basler Taufer, David Joris, and living with persecution

Before I came to Switzerland I thought that most Swiss Anabaptists were found in Zurich, where it all began, and Bern. These are the two primary sources of Swiss Amish and Mennonites in America today. But as I found out last week Anabaptists were also plentiful in Schaffhausen, which is where the Schleitheim Confession was written. I have also learned that they were active early in Neuchatel, which is where the 1/3 less fat cream cheese originated, I suppose. And finally I've learned that there was a lot of Anabaptist activity in Basel as well.

Today I mention one of the most colorful of Anabaptists, David Joris. He is the only early Anabaptist that I know of where we have a portrait of him, and his portrait hangs in the presitigious Basel Art Museum. The house below the portrait belonged to him when he lived in Basel.

Joris was a companion of Menno Simons in Holland, though often in conflict with him. Menno stuck closely to the Bible whereas Joris was more of a spiritualist. That emphasis on inner spirituality more than the outward appearances eventually led him to flee to Basel where he pretended to be a Reformed refugee. He lived under an assumed name and became extremely wealthy. This house is one of several that he owned, along with farms and even a castle, which I may eventually visit. All this time he remained in secret correspondence with his followers the Davidjorists.

After he died his real identity was discovered. So he was dug up from his grave at the church and his bones were burned as a heretic. People would pejoratively say that Basel only burned its heretics after they were dead. The current Basel folklore is that Joris' ghost haunts his home because of the way his remains were treated.

Joris is an extreme example, but the same day that I saw his home I read an article in the Mennonite Quarterly Review (Mark Furner, "Lay Casuistry and Anabaptist Survival in Bern" October 2001) about how Anabaptists managed to survive in spite of government opposition. We talk about Mennonites becoming die Stille im Lande, or the Quiet in the Land. But this article painfully exposes the machinery that helped create this situation.

Anabaptists were killed by Swiss governments from 1525 to around 1614, though the majority of those deaths were in those early years. But even after they had abandoned execution, persecution continued. Some of the methods included imprisonment, sometimes on starvation diets. The Zurich government eventually succeeded in expelling all its Anabaptists, and so Bern tried to do the same, but never succeeded.

What Bern tried to do was confiscate Anabaptist land and then force them into exile. But Anabaptists would then start giving their land away to their children, or they would make complicated arrangements with neighbors and friends. And while the government would tell them they are exiled, they would simply return again.

So what do you do if being an Anabaptist means that your property and your children will be taken from you, and you will be forced to leave your home country? Anabaptist had four strategies. The first was to simply avoid the authorities. And so there are the Anabaptist caves. They would also avoid going to the Reformed Church.

Secondly they would compromise on non-essentials, and defining non-essentials became difficult as the authorities put more pressure on them. Surprisingly many Anabaptists allowed their children to be baptized, and then they would just call it a meaningless ceremony. To not have your children baptized made you a suspected Anabaptist and created all kinds of trouble.

Thirdly, avoid being identified as an Anabaptist. And so if you were called before the church courts, because the Swiss Reformed Church had a kind of morals court that would make sure that everyone in the parish was behaving in a properly Christian way. And so if an Anabaptist would be forced to appear, they would avoid answering questions and even perhaps outright lie, to avoid being identified officially as an Anabaptist.

Finally some Anabaptists went so far as to say oaths or recantations of their faith. One way to do this was to show up for the oath ceremony and mumble. But as authorities became suspicious they would individually be forced to speak. And so they might say it while inside they tell themselves that they don't really mean it.

For obvious reason in our telling of history we focus more on the heroes who were willing to die for their faith. They are of course to be admired. But other people tried to find a way to be faithful in an impossible situation. David Joris became a facade in order to be both Anabaptist and successful. Others after him, though not as extreme, found ways to hide their identity.

I'm not sure what to do with this story. I won't say go thou and do likewise. But at the same time I sympathize with their predicament. What would I do if I was going to lose my family and my home and my country? What compromises would I make? Or rather, what compromises do I make? When the pledge of allegiance is said, I don't say it, but I do stand up and face the flag like everyone else. Am I just pretending to participate in the national oath while only myself and perhaps one other person in the place knows that I am not?

Tauferhohle, or the Anabaptist Cave

Hopefully you can indulge the many photos in this particular entry. On Sunday I visited the Tauferhoehle, or Anabaptist Cave, near Baeritswil. It was a deeply emotional, spiritual, and enjoyable experience.


In Schaffhausen I met some Mormons. They overheard me talking to a local woman and then because the one was American, he started talking to me. The other one was Swiss German, and when I told him that I was a Taufer, he recognized the name because he knew about the Tauferhohle. But just because that was the name of the cave, he did not know much about Anabaptists. I needed to give him the regular explanations.


And so while Mennonites think of Tauferhohle as a worship space for our spiritual ancestors, the Swiss think of it as a beautiful and fun place to hike. Since I was there on Sunday afternoon the place was full of people. There are several fire circles with grills and wood, so people would hike up to the cave and then picnic. It was nice to know that it was a place that was giving so many people such joy, especially children who loved the cave. But of course many of them did not know where the name came from or what its significance might be. However some signs were put up recently that do an excellent job in both German and English of explaining the place.


For my part I spent a lot of time in quiet, when I could. I also sang 606, which is the thing to do in such places. I felt a little awkward doing it by myself, especially since a family was within listening distance.


I have visited a number of beautiful cathedrals, or muensters they are called in German, during my stay here. Some of them have been not so beautiful, such as the Grossmuenster of Zurich which is still very plain after the manner of Zwingli. It even has places made for statues but no statues there. Zwingli preached against all such decorations and they were taken out of the church.


But the Fraumuenster, or women's cathedral of Zurich is just the opposite. It is gorgeous. It has a whole series of stained glass windows designed by Marc Chagall. They go from the life of Jesus, to the prophets, Jacob's ladder, King David and New Jerusalem, and the giving of the law. Each one is in its own color. I sat there for a long time meditating on the meaning and beauty of the pictures.

But I have to say that the beauty of this Tauferhohle is beyond anything else that I experienced. I thought about the irony of the Anabaptists needing to meet here because it was so isolated and so safe for gatherings. But at the same time finding such a beautiful and peaceful place to meet. There is a water fall that goes over the front, so there is the soft noise of water the whole time you are there. And if the preacher is standing at the front, you would have the beauty of God's creation to meditate on as you look past him or her. It is a holy and beautiful place.

A note on finding the place. Sam Wenger gives excellent directions in his second volume of A Tour of Ten Important Anabaptist and Reformed Sites in Rural Switzerland. They are very detailed. But you could also use Markus Rediger and Erwin Roethlisberger's Walk in the Footsteps of the Anabaptists. The main thing is to go to Baretswil and then follow the yellow "wanderweg" signs to Tauferhohle.

I took the train from Zurich to Wetzikon, and then the bus from Wetzikon to the Oberdorf stop in Baretswil. It was under 40 minutes to be at the Overdort stop. From there the Wanderweg sign says it is 1 1/2 hours by foot. I took my bike up the roads about 2 km and then went by foot another 1 km, I would estimate. It is a climb. And then I returned all the way to Wetzikon by bike. There is a nice bike path part of the way, though it was all down hill for me coming from Baretswil. So you could easily take public transportation and walk the rest of the way for about at total of 4-5 hours.

I met some hikers when I got off the bus. I biked up and then saw them on my return. They had given me some guidance. When I spoke to them I told them I was a Taufer, and they said they thought I might be. They could tell I was a foreigner, and thought I might be there to visit an origination point. They were well informed, asking about the Amish as another kind of Taufer.

This was a worthwhile and satisfying visit. My last photo is of the beautiful scenery you see when you come out of the woods.

The first Anabaptist baptisms

These two photos are the locations of the first baptisms among Anabaptists. The nondescript street is Neustadtgasse, where Felix Mantz lived. We don't know where he lived exactly, but it was on this street near the Grossmuenster, or cathedral. Mantz was the illegitimate son of the canon of the cathedral.

Mantz gathered at his home with Conrad Grebel, George Blaurock and others to decide what to do after the Zurich council had declared that everyone must have their children baptized. They decided to start baptizing each other based on their confession of faith. So this happened on January 21, 1525.

The Hutterite Chronicle tells the story: "After prayer, George Blaurock stood up and asked Conrad Grebel in the name of God to baptize him with true Christian baptism on his faith and recognition of the truth. With this request he knelt down and Conrad baptized him. Then the others turned to George in their turn, asking him to baptize them, which he did."

The second picture is of a house in Zollikon, once a farming village outside of Zurich, now a suburb. I travelled there by boat, though it is also accessible by train.

The Anabaptists were evangelistic from the start. The very next day Johannes Broetli baptized someone in Zollikon at this Rudi Thomann home. A wave of baptisms swept the area. There is a plaque on the house, though it can no longer be read because the owner has allowed that bush to grow over it. Perhaps there is some frustration with tourists snapping photos? I don't know.

Anyway, from Sam Wenger's Swiss Anabaptist tour book I know that it says, in English translation: "The concept of the believers' church was first realized in Zollikon by Anabaptists. In this house on January 25, 1525, one of their earliest meetings was held.

I want to mention that my source for the beginnings of Anabaptism in Zurich, Zollikon, Hallau, Waldshut, etc., is the recent essay by C. Arnold Snyder called "Swiss Anabaptism: The beginnings, 1523-1525" found in A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521-1700, edited by John D. Roth and James M. Stayer, 2007. The book itself is a great resource for getting up to date on the state of Anabaptist studies.

First there was Zwingli

Here in Zurich I was where I could witness for myself the places where Anabaptism had its origins. Anabaptism is the common background of both Amish and Mennonites, as well as the Hutterites, a communitarian group. In my introductory blog I wrote about a "Where in the world is Carmen San Diego" show that incorrectly identified the Amish as the origins of the Mennonites, when in fact it is the reverse, the Amish come from Mennonites. But I wondered exactly who the Mennonites come from. Increasingly I am convinced as I read and ponder, that Mennonites come under the Zwinglian Reformed. I mention Zwingli because eventually John Calvin became the leading voice of the Reformed church. But first there was Zwingli.

Zwingli was the main pastor of the Grossmuenster, or cathedral, of Zurich. Based on the humanism of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who for many of these years was a teacher in nearby Basel Switzerland, Zwingli was with Luther preaching for the reform of the church. Humanism was a rediscovery of classic literature, especially Greek. This meant educated people were able to read the New Testament in its original language.

Zwingli formed a sodality, or study group of ancient literature. The group included the promising young student Conrad Grebel and Felix Mantz. This was to inform his teaching of the Scriptures. But Bible study groups were also set up for studying the Bible in the new German versions of the Bible.

Eventually Zwingli broke with the Roman Catholic Church, believing that following the Bible was more important than following church hierarchy. He believed in faith alone and Scripture alone. But if the pope and the bishops were no longer the final authorities on matters of faith, than who was? Zwingli turned to the city council of Zurich.

This is what eventually led to the break between Zwingli and Grebel and Mantz, considered the founders of Anabaptism. It was another member of the group, Simon Stumpf, who told Zwingli, "You have no authority to place the decision in Milords' hands, for the decision is already made: the Spirit of God decides."

Of course other differences that flowed with this one was the idea of believers' baptism, that someone expresses faith before they are baptized, something a baby cannot do, and the idea of Christians not participating in war and other forms of governmental authority. That is all outside the perfection of Christ.

I have here a picture of Zwingli found in a prominent place in Zurich, he is after all a major figure in Zurich history, perhaps the most famous. The statue has him with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, symbolizing his bringing together of church and state. And actually Zwingli died at a relatively young age in battle.

I show all the paraphernalia around his statue from the night of partying before. It was an odd scene to see drunken revelry. The beer manufacturer at that spot had obviously paid several young women to dance provocatively at that spot, I assume to keep men buying beer there. I wondered what Zwingli would think about the goings-on around him and whether anyone there knew who he was or what he stood for.

The second photo is an illustration of the Zurich disputation on baptism, which the Anabaptists lost. It was after this disputation that refusing to have your child baptized, or being re-baptized, were considered offenses for banishment. The illustration comes from the Zurich Chronicle of the time.

Of Snails and other wonders of God's creation

This photo of a snail is when I was biking on the trail between Neunkirch and Schaffhausen. It's a beautiful path and I saw something on the trail but went speeding by. But I thought it warranted further investigation and so turned around and saw the largest snail I have ever seen. I have also seen some big slugs. I took the photo with my sunglasses to give you some sense of the size of the thing. And it was trucking along pretty quickly. I suppose this is mostly for my boys.

I also visited the Rheinfalls, the largest falls in Europe. This gave me the opportunity to eat lunch in a castle as well, the Schloss Laufen. And then I was off to Zurich.

But in Schaffhausen I was again helped by the legendary Swiss hospitality. A couple asked me about my bike and then helped me get my bike and luggage in the train. They then helped me get oriented in Zurich.

Zurich was a very different place from Schaffhausen. I went from a very country area to the most urban. Zurich is the largest and richest city in Switzerland. Because of the European soccer championships, the place was full of people, and especially young people. It was a wild, decadent, and loud place to spend the night. At one point I thought, oh to be 20 years old and single again. But then I remembered that when I was 20 and single, I wouldn't have liked the drunken and sexually charged festivities either. So what did it matter?

Hallau

After a wonderful night's sleep in the barn pictured above, I was fed a fabulous filling breakfast. This is the barn of farmer Werner Gysel. They are connected with the Geissels in America, and in fact an American Mennonite had given his wife a Geissel family cookbook. In turns out that along with Bern, Basel, and Zurich, Anabaptists were also active here in Schaffhausen. The Gysels are not Mennonite, but perhaps some ancestors were.

Frau Gysel was extremely generous, feeding two filling meals. The scenery from here is fantastic. You are on top of the mountain. You can learn about them at www.farmer.ch. I had planned to sleep in the straw, and they have a small building for that. But as I smelled the straw I thought my nose might not be functioning properly by morning so I slept in the barn, which at this end is filled with bathrooms, meeting rooms and 2 dormitory style rooms. Since I was the only person there it wasn't a problem.

I then made my way across the mountain for awhile on my bicycle, and it was of course a wonderful trip down. I wanted to stop in the nearby town of Hallau because of a little-known incident there related to Anabaptist history. From April to November of 1525, the church and community there became Anabaptist. So I took the photo of the Hallau church interior, partly because its plainness seemed so Mennonite to me. But of course a plain style is also part of the Swiss Reformed emphasis of Ulrich Zwingli, the man from whom early Anabaptist parted ways. However there were two stained glass windows at the Hallau church, and one was of a knight! So that wasn't particularly Mennonite.

The people in the countryside are extremely accomodating and trusting and friendly. I arrived at the Hallau church only to find it locked. But some people were around and so he opened it for me. He drove away and told me to be sure to shut the door when I left.

The story of Hallau goes like this. After the first baptisms in Zurich in January 1525, the leaders spread out quickly. A few days later they went to Zollikon and then a few more days and Conrad Grebel was in Schaffhausen and Johannes Broetli and Wilhelm Reublin were in Hallau. At this point things were in flux and there were different ideas about what this movement might be. They did not assume that the state would be against them, though that was their experience in Zurich. So Broetli and Reublin preached in Hallau and many people were baptized.

Connected with this was the idea of the tithe no longer going to support the faraway administrators but for the support of the local community. They also wanted to decide who their pastors would be. There was a lot of peasant agitation against their lords and eventually the Peasants' War broke out.

What role did Anabaptists play in that? Certainly they shared in the frustrations of peasants. It is also clear that some of the early Anabaptists were pacifists, and others were not. When the capital city of Schaffhausen sent troops against Broetli and Reublin in Hallau, the villagers protected them with weapons.

A similar thing happened just across the border in Waldshut, Germany. Essentially the whole city became Anabaptist under the influence of the preaching of their pastor, Balthasar Hubmaier. Hubmaier was avowedly not a pacifist and the most educated of the early Anabaptists. He is one of the best Anabaptist theologians, especially in his writings about believers baptism and the separation of church and state. However for him that separation did not mean not participating in government functions, only that the state should not compel people to believe.

But in any case these experiments in whole cities being "Anabaptist" did not last long. Anabaptists never did garner state support. And two years later an ex-Benedictine monk, Michael Sattler, marked Anabaptism with some of his monastic ways. He was the writer of the Schleitheim confession, which I mentioned as the place I visited on Friday, and was also an area very sympathetic to Anabaptism. Schleitheim called for a strict separation between the state and the church. There was to be no mixing and Christians could not serve in state functions because that would require the use of the sword, something outside the perfection of Christ. You can read the Schleitheim Confession, which isn't very long, here http://www.mcusa-archives.org/library/resolutions/schleithiem/index.html

Not that Schleitheim is the first pacifist statement among Anabaptists. Conrad Grebel and his associates had also criticized the revolutionary Thomas Munzter for his advocacy of violence. But it is also clear that there was not originally consensus on this issue, and that at least for the Swiss, Schleitheim was inluential in eventually building that consensus.

After visiting Hallau I started biking towards Schaffhausen to catch a train to Zurich for the night. However I got a flat tire. And again I was aided by a complete stranger. I explained to someone that all I needed was air pressure, but he insisted on driving me and my tire to the nearest bike shop. Then he brought me to his home for a short visit and some chocolate with warm milk. His name was Iso and he was born in Greece, raised in Macedonia, and now lived in Hallau. He was a very busy man who worked hard, and being rewarded by gaining property in Switzerland, no small feat. As Andy had told me my first day in Switzerland, owning real estate is only for the rich. Everyone else must rent from them.