Felix Manz (1490-1527) was in the inner circle of the Swiss “Anabaptist” revival at the time of the reformation. The son of an unwed mother, his father was the canon of Grossmuenster in Zuerich. There were many illegitimate children as a by-product of the rule of celibacy in the priesthood. These included some of the main players in the Reformation: Erasmus, the great Greek scholar and Henri Bullinger, who succeeded Zwingli. No doubt their firsthand knowledge of the iniquities flowing from the celibacy rule moved them to agitate for reform in the state church.
Having a Roman Catholic priest as a father did give the child a better chance for an education in those days, and young Felix became an avid student of Greek and especially of Hebrew. The priests’ violation of the celibacy rule was notorious.
In 1524, with several others Manz arrived at the conviction that infant sprinkling had no biblical support. Ulrich Zwingli appeared to have a large area of agreement with these young brothers. Zwingli was a gifted clergyman who had begun preaching the gospel in about 1516. Thereafter he spoke out against venerating statues, fasting during Lent, the celibacy rule, the sacrifice of the mass, and baptismal regeneration. He also became a mentor to Felix Manz, Conrad Grebel, and other promising young scholars in Zuerich, Switzerland. But on the issue of baptism Zwingli drew back to the state church position on christening. Manz and Grebel criticized Zwingli for his waffling on this point. A debate followed and schism resulted.
To understand the issue that divided these men, we have to see beyond particular rituals and arguments over the timing or the method used in baptism. The issue was really about whether the Bible taught that the church should be composed of believers only. Should the church allow the unconverted to be members? If you baptize a baby, it would thereafter mean that that child had some foothold in the church, whether he or she grew up to believe in Christ or not. The Reformers saw the church as an earthly institution, somehow connected to the civil magistrate, therefore your baptismal certificate was almost synonymous with your citizenship papers. This view made a purified church an impossibility.
When Manz and Grebel pled with Zwingli that the only ones to be baptized were those who were Christians, and that the church should maintain discipline and excommunicate unrepentant sinners, Zwingli made his appeal to Christ’s words, “He that is not against Me, is for Me,” and to the parable of the tares and the wheat. Zwingli reasoned that if all the tares were to be rooted up now, there would be nothing left for the angels to do on the day of final separation! He was not ignorant of the Lord’s plain statement that “the field is the world” when he gave that interpretation. To Zwingli and the rest of the Reformers, the world and the church were not two mutually exclusive entities.
In working for a purified church of believing members, Grebel, Manz, and Blaurock and thousands more endured torture, drowning, and the stake. Today from the parapets of heaven this cloud of witnesses looks down on us to see if we will take seriously the New Testament record of a believing church. The modern religious world, with its mega talk and mega methods, only gives lip service to the idea of the local church being comprised only of believers, and where there is divine authority vested in the church to discipline and even excommunicate the unrepentant. To many contemporary evangelicals, the church is very much an institution in and of this world, whose social, political, economic, and cultural clout is not to be jeopardized by a gang of idealists. So the particulars may have varied some, but the jargon is not that different, and at heart the issues are the same.
In the beginning of 1525, the Zuerich Council arranged for a conclusive disputation with all the prominent parties, Zwingli, Grebel and manz all being present. Zwingli was a dynamo behind the debater’s lectern, as well as an able student in the original languages (some suggested that he was second only to Erasmus in his knowledge of the Greek). Each side defended their position. But as expected, the Council disregarded the weight of Manz’ arguments and decided in favor of Zwingli. The council ordered all infants in the area to be baptized within eight days, and those who refused to baptize their young faced expulsion from the city. The edict also demanded that Manz and his colleagues hold their tongues.
The losers in the debate did not cower; instead they took their own offensive. When they heard the council’s decision, about a dozen sympathizers passed through the snowy lanes to the home of “Mother Manz” in nearby Zollikon. There followed an all-night meeting where they prayed, read Scripture and deliberated on what their response should be. In that meeting, George Blaurock stood up and asked to be baptized. Grebel obliged and thereafter George baptized all the others present. This step created a sensation throughout all the region. These brothers, Manz, Grebel, and Blaurock, spent the next months traveling, preaching repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. They baptized converts and organized congregations. They were repeatedly incarcerated. Conrad Grebel’s father rescued them after their first arrest, engineering their release. Thereafter they were driven about as fugitive evangelists.
The Zuerich Council ordered these brethren to be drowned in March of 1526. George Blaurock and Felix Manz were arrested in 1527. Blaurock was not a citizen of the area, so they only exiled him after a severe beating. But Manz was condemned to drown. This was an innovation since the heretics had previously been burned (basing that mode of execution on John 15:6, they both tortured the man and the verse).
Two years before this, when Blaurock, Manz, and Conrad Grebel had argued with Zwingli about the unscripturalness of infant sprinkling, they had told Zwingli that believer’s baptism signified “the submerging of the man of sin.” They said this to argue that the true believer has been now raised into a new life, and that evidence of new life is a condition of church membership. Of course, the state churches, which Zwingli was tied to, were populated by a mixed multitude. Zwingli was in a corner, and lashed back, “Let those who talk of going under go under indeed!” Sadly, Zwingli had the backing of the civil authorities, so that when Manz was convicted in court, he was sentenced to death by drowning (“going under”).
The court records give the basis for Manz’ execution: “Because he has, contrary to Christian order and custom, become involved in re-baptism…has confessed to having said that he wanted to gather such as want to accept Christ and follow Him, to unite himself with them through baptism…so that he and his followers have separated themselves from the Christian Church, to raise up a sect of their own…such doctrine being harmful to the united usage of all Christendom and tending to offense-giving, to insurrection and sedition against the government.” Manz had earlier composed a poem including these lines:
They call out the magistrate
to put us to death,
For Christ has abandoned them.
To shed innocent blood
Is the most false love of all.
Felix’s mother, who had served as a hostess to that courageous band on that chilly January evening, stood on shore within sight of the courthouse where her son had debated Zwingli. She shouted to her son to remain firm. Manz’ last recorded words were, “Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.”
“He was placed in a rowboat with his wrists firmly tied together and passed over his cocked knees, and a heavy piece of wood thrust between his bent knees and his elbows. Trussed up in this manner–making swimming impossible–he was rowed to the other side of the Limmat River, thrown overboard, and thus made to perish.” Thus the tortured man received his “third baptism.”
As far as we know, Zwingli never repented of his bitter animosity toward his opponents. He angrily and sarcastically rejected the teaching that baptism was an emblem of a changed life. On one occasion when some believers had spoken of how they had experienced a moral turnaround at the time of their being baptized, Zwingli scoffed, “Jolly tidings! Let’s all go for a dip in the Limmat!”
Did this blow halt the missionary work Manz had begun? Was that work commenced in 1525-1527 the work of Felix Manz or the work of God? It is generally conceded that the state churches of Europe were not making serious efforts at world evangelization. The great commission did not appear to have a great place in their theology or their practical agenda. But outside of institutional religion, a different agenda held sway.
Franklin Littell writes: “The original circle at Zuerich scattered widely and apparently on a spontaneous basis: Blaurock, after working with Manz in the Grisons, went on to the Tyrol; Reublin and Sattler went to Alsace and Swabia, Hetzer to Nuernberg and Augsburg, Gross to Strassburg and Augsburg. Waldshut, center of a great reformation under Hubmaier, was the center of concentric circles of influence: Ulrich Teck and Jakob Gross were especially active in trips from this base of operations.
“Recorded planning began with the famous Martyr Synod of Augsburg, August 20, 1527, which could as well be termed a Missionary Synod. This synod not only affected co-operation between the parties led by Hans Hut and Hans Denck, but divided the land on a grand map of evangelical enterprise. Brethren were sent out from it to centers in South Germany, Switzerland, and Moravia. Those attending included outstanding leaders–Denck, Hut, Joerg von Passau, Hetzer, Jakob Gross, Jakob Dachser, Sigmund Salminger, Eitelhans Langenmantel, Leonhard Dorfbrunner, Gall Fischer–most of whom died as martyrs within a few years. The fate of an Anabaptist missioner (“agitator” in Christendom) usually was sealed without adequate trial.
“Only two or three of the Martyr Synod lived to see the fifth year of the movement. (A long list of those martyred, 1527-1531, is still extant.)”
This revival that occurred right under the nose of the Reformers could not be dismissed as a tempest in a teapot. Already by 1528, only three years after the baptisms of Blaurock, Grebel, and Manz, there were congregations appearing throughout the region. In Swabia, the officials commissioned four hundred special police to apprehend these believers who functioned outside the control of the state church. When it became obvious that they were failing they increased the number of police to one thousand. Thus the ripples from Felix Manz’ baptism continued spreading to the very shores of eternity.
Materials for this article have been taken from:
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Martyr’s Mirror, Herald Press
The Anabaptist View of the Church, by F. H. Littell
Renaissance & Reformation, Eerdman, Wm. R. Estep
Revolution Within the Revolution, Eerdman, by Wm. R. Estep
The Reformers and Their Stepchildren, Eerdman, by Leonard Verduin
The History of the Christian Church, Volume VIII, Eerdman, by Philip Schaff
Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers, The Westminster Press, Edited by George H. Williams & Angel M. Mergal