THE 'RADICAL REFORMATION' AS A MOVEMENT

Let's start with the first of the three statements in my last post. Was the 16th century Radical Reformation (or Anabaptism) a co-ordinated movement or a largely individual protest?

Take almost any reform movement in history and it probably began with isolated rumblings of discontent, which grew more general and more vocal but awaited a defining moment: an action or the emergence of a leadership that would give the protest a voice and a cause. 'Protestantism' was already simmering under the surface of German life, but it took Marin Luther's act of nailing to the church door his 95 Theses (objections to the Catholicism of his day), to turn discontent into a movement.

A similar act could be seen as the defining moment for the Radical Reformation. Many people, particularly among the poorer classes, felt that Luther and his colleagues had not gone fare enough in their separation from the old Roman church system. They said he had "tried to mend an old kettle but had only made the hole bigger." One key area was infant baptism. At Zurich in Switzerland, one of the nerve centres of Luther's reforms, a group of leading Protestants headed by Ulrich Zwingli debated the issue. Finally, the town council sided with Zwingli and the mainstream party, declaring that infant baptism was acceptable and that nobody should oppose it.

Three leaders, Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz and George Blaurock, could not accept this. On 21 January 1525 they went to Manz's house to talk and pray the matter over. Blaurock then asked Grebel (who had been a minister) to baptise him with water as a believer, then Blaurock baptised the others. It was illegal but they made no secret of it afterwards, but instead went round baptising others.

The decisive moment had happened; a leadership had emerged; the 'Anabaptist' movement (coming from the Greek for 're-baptised'), or Radical Reformation, was born. This fits fairly conclusively the first criterion for "radicality".