Five centuries ago, the Radical Reformation began.
On January 21, 1525, the city council of Zurich, Switzerland, forbade advocacy and organization around believer’s baptism. That night, a group gathered anyway, secretly assembling in defiance of the government and baptizing one another as they understood the Scriptures to require. They would come to be called Anabaptists, distinguished not only by their practices of baptism but by their commitments to nonviolence, to church disentangled from the state, and to robust community life centered on obedience to God’s Word.
Against popular misconceptions, modern Christian pacifists sometimes have to clarify that our calls to peace are not passive or cowardly. It is difficult to imagine those early Anabaptists feeling any need to mount a similar defense. Fervid and brave, they were so staunch in their convictions – as editor John D. Roth notes in his introduction to the Anabaptist Community Bible – that for many, fidelity would “lead to imprisonment, torture, and even death.”
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