Title: “Radical Reformation”

Author: George Huntston Williams

From: Hans Hillerbrand, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, Vol. 3, (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 375–384.

RADICAL REFORMATION. Outwardly this movement was formed by congeries of reforming and actively or passively separatist churches, communes, sects, itinerant evangelists, prophets, and brooders that left or did not join the territorial churches of the three major confessions—Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican. Also called the Left Wing of the Reformation, the radical Reformation clashed with Protestant reformers, who in one way or another were allied with the established order or state—that is, the magisterial Reformation ordained by kings, princes, and city-states and their often university and theologically trained advisers, masters (magistri), and holders of theological doctorates (doctores).

This sociologically radical and theologically primitivist movement shared with the magisterial Reformation the yearning for divine immediacy, the recovery of the scriptures, and the ardent impulse to renovate society at large. The radical Reformation followed Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and then Martin Luther in eliminating the intercessory role of the saints, including Maria Mediatrix, and in accepting as "the sole Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (I Tim 2:5). Like the magisterial Reformation, the radical Reformation accepted a clergy committed to family life.

In sharp contrast with classical Protestantism, even the many clerically and humanistically trained teachers among the radicals disparaged humanist learning and trilingual classical education. They espoused the simpler life of the peasants and artisans, dressed plainly, and

preferred vernacular Bibles. Radical reformers spurned tradition when they refuted or ignored the doctrine of original sin, the belief that the first trespass of Adam and Eve universally caused sin and death, which was vanquished only by the death and resurrection of the Second Adam, Jesus Christ. Most radicals also quietly abandoned or marginalized the dogmatic medieval view of a three-tiered afterlife of

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heaven, purgatory, and hell. Not until the Fifth Lateran Council (1517) had the church authoritatively defined the human soul as naturally immortal, and most of the radicals embraced a primitive and scriptural eschatology, believing in the sleep of the soul until the general resurrection of the dead. Like the young Luther, most radicals (and even a Lutheran like William Tyndale) were Christian mortalists, awaiting the imminent resurrection of all reanimated flesh before the second advent of Christ and the Last Judgment. The radicals, accepting natural death, eschewed divinely predetermined election of only a few from all the mass of humanity assigned to purgatory or doomed to hell. By various strategies the radicals, mostly inconspicuously, abandoned exceptionalism by grace. Almost all believed that upon the resurrection of the body God would reward the righteous with eternal life and punish the unrighteous or, more mercifully, consign them to eternal oblivion. The radical Reformation in all its three subgroupings was eschatologically intense.

When one distinguishes reform from reformation, the radicals can be called the "separatist reform" or the "radical restitution" (Franklin Littell) for aiming to restore primitive Christianity. But "radical Reformation" properly links these disparate movements in the Reformation era, sharing with the classical reformers the basic intent to return to the scriptures without the intermediation of sacerdotal authority.

Radical Reformation suggests a return to the roots of Christianity—a motif also shared with magisterial Protestants—but linked to a final break with the established church, the repudiation of baptism in infancy, and usually the insistence on believers’ baptism. Radicals often reordained their ministers, engaged in extensive missionary campaigns, and even faced martyrdom in confrontation with established authorities. As part of a Christian renaissance, radicals tried to liberate Christianity from Constantinian and medieval incrustations. Persecution by state-church authorities or even the populace was to the radicals often interpreted as the seal of the authenticity of their mission to restore the pure church and recover the assignments of the apostolic age.

Since they usually practiced rebaptism, the radicals were pilloried by outsiders as Anabaptists. Rebaptism was a capital offense in the ancient Christian world in the codes of Theodosius II and Justinian I, and Emperor Charles V resurrected these codes against Anabaptism with the consent of Lutherans and Catholics alike at the Diet of Speyer (1529).

With the removal of external authority—such as the papacy, hierarchy, and regulated cultus—and the repudiation of religious coercion on the part of the Inquisition and of the new magistracy, the original diversity of scriptures (the radicals’ solely acknowledged authority) reasserted itself and could no longer be contained, not even by the new authorities like Luther and Calvin. Thus, the variegated radical Reformation reflects a similarly variegated biblical legacy. Still, historians in identifying individuals or movements must stress the unique or peculiar, while traditional polemics stressed distinctions, concealing common premises. Typology is used here to rectify some distortions and to identify basic historical commonalities.

The radical Reformation includes three major intertwined subgroupings—the Anabaptists, the

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spiritualists, and the evangelical rationalists—all with regional and ecclesio-theological variants, reflecting their uneven distribution from Spain to Ukraine and from Sicily and the kingdom of Naples to southern England and the Low Countries. As the third force of the Reformation era, the other being the CounterReformation, the radical Reformation was an interrelated religio-social entity and dynamic, not a merely conceptual aggregate of opponents of the three main Protestant churches.

The historiography that separates the radical Reformation as a conceptual unity distinct from magisterial Protestantism was, ironically, inaugurated in the comprehensive but polemical treatment of "Anabaptism" by the Reformed divine Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575) of Zurich. To him the radical Reformation was a many-headed monster reared up against the true Reformation, and the unitive principle was demonic. Though an anti-Remonstrant in Holland disparaged the heirs there of the radical Reformation as "the garbage wagon of the Reformation," Polish Brother and chronicler, Stanislas Lubeniecki (d. 1675) regarded Socinianism as "the climax of the Reformation" begun by Luther. Modern historians have, in the meantime, joined to help differentiate and define the three sixteenth-century radical thrusts.

Alfred Hegler, in his Geschichte des Spiritualismus in der Reformationszeit (1892), identified a distinctive spirituality that he called spiritualism, eventually susceptible to expanded meanings. Sebastian Franck (1499–1542)—sometime Lutheran pastor, geographer, and chronicler—was to Hegler the archetypical spiritualist, a term going back to the Spiritual Franciscans and unrelated to occultism. Franck, a quasi-mystical seeker and proponent of religious toleration, sympathetically described many forms of Anabaptism and spiritualism.

Franck relied heavily on Deutero-Taulerian mysticism, popularized in Luther’s editions of Theologia Deutsch (1516 f.) and Bodenstein’s treatises on renunciation (Gelassenheit) of 1520 and 1523. Thus, in the typology of Ernst Troeltsch in Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (1912, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, 1931), Franck, on the basis of Hegler’s monograph, became the paradigm of the mystic-type in his socio-religious scheme, which also included the church-type and the sect-type of religious community. Troeltsch (1865–1923), with the input of Max Weber (1864–1920), recognized that almost any modern state church in Europe and almost all disestablished state churches in the United States and elsewhere, along with many denominations of "sectarian" antecedents, converge in morphology as "churches" (and eventually as "denominations"), distinct from the programmatically separatist and otherworldly "sects." Troeltsch freed the term church for broader typological usage over against both the gathered sect and the self-disciplining and spiritualizing or mystical fellowship (the spiritual ecclesiola in or outside the public church).

Troeltsch’s work lies behind the conceptualization of this article. Besides several Anabaptist subgroups, historiographers, in still shifting nomenclature, now increasingly distinguish from them the spiritualists (spiritualizers) and the evangelical rationalists. The latter were latently present in the early Reformation but did not surface as the third distinct subgrouping until the Catholic Counter-Reformation provoked the flight of many reform-minded Italians or failed to halt their "inner migration" while they conformed as quietistic Nicodemites.

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During the early Reformation the figure who singularly embodied radicalitv in several potential directions was Bodenstein (1486–1541). All along Bodenstein deviated from Luther in softening the doctrine of predestination, leaving all human beings free to choose their destiny on the basis of universal prevenient grace.

Having taught at the University of Wittenberg longer than Luther, Bodenstein—indirectly challenging the Saxon elector Frederick—celebrated the first publicly "Protestant" Communion on Christmas 1521, doing so without vestments and omitting the fixed prayer of eucharistic consecration and the elevation of the elements. His service was conducted in German with the lay communicants taking the bread in their hands and sharing the wine. In Orlamunde Bodenstein encouraged lay participation in common worship, renounced his degrees as "Brother Andrew," and introduced the congregational singing of psalms in the vernacular. He also restored foot washing after Communion.

Bodenstein did not resort to rebaptism but did abolish infant baptism in Orlamunde in 1524; in his treatises on the Lord’s Supper, printed in Basel with the support of Felix Mantz and other radicals from Zurich, Bodenstein encouraged a total break with sacramentalism. Bodenstein’s brother-in-law, Gerhard Westerburg, became the first Bodensteinian to entertain rebaptism, but the first to put it in practice in the Reformation-era context were Mantz and Conrad Grebel (c 1498–1526) on 21 January 1525, followed by a Communion service among themselves. Mantz became the first Anabaptist martyr when he was drowned in Zurich on 5 January 1527. In 1525, sympathetic with the social outrage of the peasants, Bodenstein preached among them during their uprising.

Chafing under Luther’s restrictions, Bodenstein left Saxony for the last time in 1528. Although Bodenstein ultimately conformed in the emerging Swiss Reformed—rather than Lutheran—context, he provided biblical and theological grounding for separatist spiritualism, as well as Anabaptism, if not so much for the still inchoate evangelical rationalism, though Bodenstein, like many among the evangelical rationalists, was an alienated and egalitarian intellectual who cast aside his doctoral degrees, wore plain clothing, and tried to become a peasant. From 1521 to 1528 in Saxony and during his final Reformed phase, 1528–1542, in Switzerland, Bodenstein had embodied or anticipated many features of sixteenth-century radicality in his convictions, thought, strategy, and even temperament and passion. Complex Bodenstein had freely used moral and rationalistic arguments to uphold personal responsibility. to define the human nature of Christ, and to attack convention and tradition concerning baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

Spiritualists and Spiritualizers. Some separatist spiritualists abstained from Communion in the local parish and broke with the organized church or sect, maintaining personal piety in new fellowships of seekers. Spiritualizers of suspended sacraments and spiritualists driven by the Spirit ranged from the eschatological and learnedly contemplative like Kaspar von Schwenckfeld (d. 1561), to the eschatological and angrily prophetic like Bodenstein and Thomas Muntzer (d 1525). Often they criticized the rigidities that develop in any religion and the often oppressive social consequences.

Socioreligious typology recognizes among the contemplative spiritualists and spiritualizers a distinct

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piety of the disciplined, devout, charismatic, and prophetic and sees their modality of spiritualism at the core of many a new sect or church (as an ecclesiola in ecclesia) or even as escaping all the structures of church or sect in favor of eclectic spiritual freedom (not unlike some scholarly liberal Christians who first identified this type of spirituality). This modality of spiritualism was embodied in prayer and preaching circles in Spain, Italy, and France, as well as in Germany and eastward.

Spiritualists—of varying temperaments and divergent in theology, especially on the sacraments (ordinances) and eschatology—were often intellectuals with or without higher education. In different eras and locales they acquired distinctive and circumstantial labels that often keep them from being recognized generically as spiritualists or spiritualizers. They all had been nurtured by a church or sect, but became dissatisfied with ecclesial organizations and cultus. Eclectic and often headstrong, they often tactically or devoutly favored religious toleration.

In the lands that, amid socioreligious upheaval, settled down as territorially Catholic or Protestant, spiritualists were dissatisfied with any form of magisterial Protestantism and particularly with Catholicism in Romance lands, often feigning nominal conformity to the gradually more exacting standards of public adhesion and practice. During their inward migration of loyalties, they were sustained by a network of friends and correspondents and by prayer-group pieties. In contrast, prophetic spiritualism was often angry, fiercely evangelical, and iconoclastic toward perceived idolatry. As with many scorned Sacramentarians and other spiritualizers in Germany, the Netherlands, England, Silesia, Moravia, Poland, and Palatinate Lithuania. Spiritualists, like many Anabaptists, often adhered to variants of the originally Valentinian Gnostic doctrine of the celestial flesh of Christ that protected his human nature from original sin and was thought to sanction their perfectionism.

Spiritualism sometimes became manifest as a final phase of disciplined Anabaptism, as with Hans Denck (c. 1500–1527), who abandoned its originating asperities on becoming a spiritualizer. A tolerant unitarianizing spirituality was, indeed, often the final stage of several former Anabaptists. A sometimes outwardly conforming spiritualism was evident among unitarianizing Anabaptists such as the Adam Pastorians, the Gabrielites (Gabriel Ascherham), the Obbenites (Obbe Philips), and some David Jorists.

Almost paradigmatic for Troeltsch and Weber’s definition of contemplative spiritualism was the community led by Kaspar von Schwenckfeld (1489–1561). Schwenckfeld, early a reformer in Silesia, sadly, imposed here and elsewhere in Germany the suspension (Stillstand) of the Lord’s Supper (1529) pending ecumenical clarification of the meaning of this "feast of love and reconciliation" because it had provoked such bitter strife. In his views on spiritualizing baptism and the Eucharist, Schwenckfeld resembled the Dutch Sacramentarian Wessel Gansfort (d 1489) and anticipated the seventeenth-century nonsacramental Quakers.

Another spiritual trajectory led to a comparable spirituality among the (Sebastian) Franckists, the Loists (Loy Pruystinck (d. 1549), the Familists (Family of Love, followers of Hendnik Niclaes (1502–1582), and speculative brooders of often creative intellect. They, too, were a disparate company, often reviled as notorious heresiarchs. Their distinctive personalities easily escape the net of typology. For example,

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Michael Servetus (1509–1553), a practitioner of baptism by immersion at age thirty—the presumed moment of Jesus’ own immersion by John the Baptist—is seldom classed among the Anabaptists or the other subgroupings, partly because he was born in Navarre, distant from their homelands, and partly because of his idiosyncratic theological system, which included an economic (dispensational) doctrine of the Trinity. Servetus also believed in the celestial flesh of Christ without human insemination. A physician, he discovered the pulmonary circulation of the blood while trying to identify the specific work of the Holy Spirit. Condemned to death in Geneva as an antitrinitarian at the instigation of Calvin, but then burned at the stake despite Calvin’s objections to this form of execution, Servetus was sui generis an eschatological spiritualist who sought a pansophist understanding of body, mind, and soul.

A learned scriptural spiritualist, the Christian Hebraist Matthias Vehe-Glirius (d 1590) was widely influential from the Rhineland to Poland and Transylvania. He became a Judaizer as a consequence of his trilingual scholarship and held, as did many early Christians, that believers should live communally disciplined lives while awaiting the final return of Jesus. There were enough Christian Hebraists who became in effect ethnically gentile Jews in a primitive Christian modality to constitute almost a fourth subtype of sixteenth-century radicalism. Vestigially they were Christian in awaiting the return of the human Jesus as messiah and celebrating in his memory a simple supper. Francis (Ferencz) David (1520–1579) the Unitarian Reformed superintendent in Transvlvania and sponsor of Vehe-Glirius—before his own imprisonment and death approached this extreme reductionism in the final stage of his Unitarianism, refusing to regard Jesus as other than a great prophet but fervently foreseeing as imminent his return for the Last Judgment.

Anabaptists. In the pre-Constantinian era rebaptizing "rigorists" contended with the "laxists." The division persisted between Donatists and Catholics in North Africa. They had their medieval analogue in the monks and friars with the monastic vow and rigorous communal life apart from the world. Rebaptism was practiced by the Czech Brethren (Bohemian Brethren, heirs of the Hussites) for all recruits from beyond their own birthright community. Their baptismally immersed counterparts in Poland and Lithuania, resolved to avoid the notoriety of the bellicose Anabaptists of Munster (1535), always called themselves simply brethren and sisters. Rebaptism constituted a common bond among most radicals, including the Polish Brethren (except Fausto Sozzini). Anabaptists, baptized on profession of faith, saw themselves as recruits in the company of Christ and his apostles, and spoke of baptism of believers and hence eventually of "believers baptism" and thought of themsches as the "baptist-minded" reformers.

German, Dutch, and English Anabaptists. Centuries of controversy having abated, and with the ecumenical benevolence of others, the descendants of the first Germanic rebaptizers vindicated themselves in the public domain, calling themselves in German simply Taufer ("baptists") or in Dutch Doopsgezinden ("people of the baptizing persuasion"), terms, however, largely limited to these languages. In English Anabaptists continues to be used for those who practiced adult baptism in the Reformation era, whether or not they used the term themselves. The term is best used primarily for the Reformation era.

The most important variants of Anabaptism were found in the German and Netherlandish realms. This

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includes the Anabaptism of southeastern England, introduced by Dutch and Flemish refugees, although some new traits developed as the movement became Anglicized. About two-thirds of the Germanic Anabaptists (not the Swiss Brethren) appropriated the doctrine of Christ’s celestial flesh, which sets Jesus apart even in his human nature. This doctrine was introduced into Anabaptism by Melchior Hoffman (1495?–1543) and slightly modified by Menno Simons (c 1496–1561) among Mennonites.

Three subgroupings, located in three main regions, are emphasized in studies of Germanic Anabaptism. The first— separatism in Zurich—overflowed into German territory from the border of the Swiss and Rhaetian confederations northward. This movement, including Michael Sattler, embodied recoil in chagrin at the bloody failure of the peasant uprisings for social justice (1524–1525). The second hearth was Nuremberg in 1526 when the humanist Denck rebaptized Hans Hut, a fiery preacher of apocalyptic fervor. Because of the final shift of trilingual Denck toward spiritualization and also his premature death (1527), his more analogous than derivative movement has not until recently been clearly distinguished. Not so commonly included here are the university humanist Balthasar Hubmaier and his stalwart wife, who preceded him in their execution as Anabaptists (1528). Hubmaier accepted the role of magistracy and the temporal sword. The third subgrouping centered in Emden, East Frisia, where Hoffman, a furrier and roving preacher of Schwabisch-Hall, baptized Jan Matthijs in 1530 and initiated the Lower German-Dutch phase of what became increasingly bellicose Anabaptism. This led to the mass conversion of Munster and dependent towns and insurrection in 1534–1535 in a popular movement that would be called Hoffmanite or in its violent phase, Melchiorite or Munsterite.

Recoiling from the unexpected violence, the survivors of Munster and allied communities such as Amsterdam took the name of Mennonites in reference to Menno Simons (1496–1561), a former priest, who in 1536 shepherded the stricken followers of a social revolution into separatist, pacifist communities, highly disciplined by the frequent imposition of the ban, even between spouses. His own missionizing extended from the Netherlands to the mouth of the Vistula. His main ideas were embodied in his Foundation Book (in Low German, i539), successively revised and translated. In another, less widespread version, Germanic Anabaptism took the name of another mentor, Jacob Hutter (1500?–1536), who was in effect the posthumous founder of all the related communes Hutterites from the Rhineland to Moravia. With the Mennonites they survive to the present.

Since the German, Dutch, and English subgroupings are set forth in the article on Anabaptism, the less-known Anabaptists in Italy and Slavic lands will be covered further. None of the Italian and Slavic Anabaptists went through an insurrectionary phase. The various Slavic Brethren, as they called themselves, were, in fact, reacting against accommodations to "worldly" means on the part of the first philo-Protestant leadership in their lands, while the Italians did the same in a Catholic context.

Italian Anabaptists. Numerous conventicles of Italian Anabaptists extended from Sicily and Calabria to the French, German, and Slavic frontiers Many members fled to Moravia for refuge among the Hutterites. They were of two strands—those Italian sectaries who were converted by contagion or Germanic Anabaptists during their missions abroad and those who were former Marranos, often long-Christianized Jews who may have known of Jewish proselyte baptismal cleansing. They were drawn to Anabaptism out of their yearning for a purified Christianity. The two Italianate strands were not

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everywhere entirely distinct. Because of their common desire to return to scriptural sources, pious and often learned Marranos who became Anabaptists were highly esteemed by converts of non-Jewish stock because of their knowledge of the biblical languages and because of their courageous espousal of evangelical Christianity. Both types of Italian Anabaptists were drawn to the spirituality of the Castilian humanist Juan de Valdés (1500 or 1510–1541) and his twin brother, Alfonso (c 1500–1533).

It was Pietro Manelfi who first distinguished the "old" strand of the Tirolese-Venetian type from the "new" strand of the Neapolitan-Sicilian type, which had evangelical Marranist antecedents. Distinctive features of all Italian Anabaptists were their sustained pacifism, discipline, devotion to scripture study, devotional prayer, preaching, prophecy, and evangelization through sustained missions in Itoy and abroad. To both types the Lord’s Supper was a solemn commemoration of Christ’s suffering and a joyful anticipation of Christ’s final return and vindication.

The first references to Italian Anabaptists, beginning in 1526, include people of all classes and motivations. As Anabaptists they were not explicitly credal, merely traditional and scriptural, never expressly challenging the Nicene or the Chalcedonian formularies, but content with the Apostles’ Creed.

The first recorded Italian Anabaptist was the Tirolean master Antonio Marangone, a Venetian carpenter, who was tried in 1533 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1535. His testimony documents the transition in Italy from "Lutheranism" to Anabaptism. Antonio’s Lutheran legacy included predestination, salvation by faith alone, and the priesthood of all believers. Antonio also regarded Saint Peter as the only pope. He avoided infant baptism and then espoused adult rebaptism as a disavowal of Roman jurisdiction. He believed in spiritual Communion—without reception—at the parish Mass, which he otherwise found idolatrous He denied purgatory and eschewed the doctrine of the Trinity.

Giacometto (the Stringer) Stingaro, a haberdasher of Vicenza, rebaptized many and became the first Italian Anabaptist to produce his own writings as "bishop of his church." In 1547 he addressed his "brethren in Christ" in a semiliterate but profoundly biblical tract entitled La rivelatione, wherein he clarified his doctrine on the basis of scripture, notably the New Testament. He distinguished Christ’s common humanity from Christ’s Spirit and held that the flesh of Christ was not generated by God at conception or even during gestation but that Jesus was infused with the Spirit at baptismal regeneration and was then "generated" definitively at the Resurrection (Acts 13:33, Rom 8). Giacometto suggested that in the church, as resurrection community, Christ and the Spirit might well be one, but in the age to come this Christ would be subject to God, and God, in turn, would place all earthly things under Christ (I Cor 15:27).

A former Franciscan from southern Italy, Camillo Renato (l500?–1575?) espoused believers’ baptism in the lost Latin tract Adversus baptismum... sub regno papae atque

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Antichristi (1548). There Renato also defended his "rite of Caspano" (Rhaetia). which included an ample agapetic meal for the poor. Some at the time regarded Renato as the "father of Italian Anabaptism.

II Tiziano (not the Anabaptist Lorenzo Tizzano), a cleric in the court of a cardinal in Rome, fled to Geneva "and some other Lutheran places, returning to Italy as a messengcr sent by God. After he established himself as an "Anabaptist minister" in Rhaetia. the federal government expelled him from its Reformed synod in 1549 Il Tiziano organized several conventicles in northern between 1549 and 1553. In his most fateful action, II Tiziano converted Pietro Manelfi in Florence and rebaptized him in Ferrara around 1549. Manelfi, as a priest in Ancona, a Marranist center, had been drawn to Protestantism by Bernardino Ochino around 1540. Having read works of Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, Manelfi gave up his priestly duties Lutherans instituted him as a minister in Padua. and he traveled extensively. In Florence Manelfi espoused both rebaptism and pacifism and held that it was Il Tiziano who first introduced Anabaptism into Italy.

Some Neapolitan-Sicilian Anabaptists became antitrinitarians. They were Josephites, regarding Jesus as the son of Joseph and Mary, and were inspired especially by the Hebrew prophets, interpreting them in the light of the Reformation During the pan-Italian Anabaptist Synod of Venice in 1550 in which both evangelical Marranos and old-stock sectaries participated—the Ten Articles were adopted, consolidating the Josephite strand of Italian Anabaptism. Josephites became even more programmatically antitrinitarian, humanizing Jesus sometimes as the adoptive Son of God, or as the hidden and prospective Messiah, or as the greatest of the prophets, and always as the son of Mary and Joseph.

On his defection in 1551 Manelfi revealed numerous Anabaptist names at Inquisitorial hearings in Bologna and Rome. This delation almost killed the movement in Italy, though a distinctly evangelical Anabaptism continued for three more decades in ebbing strength. Survivors of the first wave of persecution of 1551 were the Venetians Giulio Gherlandi, Francesco della Sega, and Antonio Rizzetto They had moved toward antitrinitarlanism but remained moderates. The three and their followers found asylum with the Hutterites in Moravia.

In 1550 the university educated Gherlandi (b 1520) left the Roman church to join the Anabaptists and was baptized with della Sega in Padua. In 1559 Gherlandi, having renounced the more extreme of the Ten Articles, arrived in Venice with two Hutterites bearing a letter from della Sega, which described Hutterites as communitarian, and welcorned Italian Anabaptists only if uncontaminated with Josephitism or with the tenet that the Resurrection applied only to the persevering saints. Gherlandi’s comprehensive confession of faith recounted why he joined the Hutterites, who for him exemplified the peculiar people (1 Pt. 2:9), reborn in the Spirit and in Christ overcoming the sin of Adam.

Della Sega (b. 1528) studied civil law in Padua. Stricken with illness, he turned to the new Testament determined to model his life after Christ. He gave up law, became a tailor, and joined the Anabaptist movement, another of many instances of highly educated people seeking the simple disciplined

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Anabaptist life. Della Sega recognized the mystery of Communion, but feared participating to one’s detriment, like a Judas. Della Sega and Gherlandi wrote on religious toleration, recognizing the God-ordained role of magistracy but contending that the Roman church was now a rival worldly kingdom. Theological Inquisitors should be servants, not masters. Christians should never condone capital punishment for heresy. In Venice, Jews and Muslims rightly enjoyed religious toleration, he said; but those who follow Christ’s commands deserve equal treatment. Della Sega visited the Hutterites, and in 1562 he and two friends led twenty-one members of the Cittadella conventicle to Moravia. Della Sega was arrested, tried by the Inquisition at Venice, and sentenced to be drowned.

Antonio Rizzetto, having been rebaptized (1551) in Vicenza by the apostle Marc Antonio of Asolo, a companion of Manelfi, visited the Hutterites and was with della Sega’s group when they were imprisoned. Both della Sega and Rizzetto appealed to scripture and the rights of conscience. They reserved baptism for believers who had received the Holy Spirit, noting that Christ bade children come to him but without baptizing them. Christ’s sacrifice wiped out the guilt of Adam (Original Sin) for all, thus, Christ cleansed all infants universally. Confession of sin and acceptance of group discipline qualified one for believers’ baptism.

Silesian and Slavic Anabaptists. In the vastness of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth—a royal republic of the lesser and middle nobles and the princes (szlachta) and three city-states – the synodal church of the Reformed spawned a three-way schism of the Polish and Lithuanian Brethren. One grouping became implicitly Unitarian and, in effect, Anabaptist while steadfastly upholding the Apostle’s Creed and scorning the Munsterites. In a rigoristic fellowship of peasants, burghers, and especially the szlachta, many of whom were inclined to pacifism and the liberation of their serfs, these nobiliary brethren and articulate sisters would endure as the synodal Minor Reformed church until the banishment of the Polish Brethren in 166o.

The origins of this Anabaptist movement in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth are obscure. Slavic Anabaptism developed in Poland and the Polish-speaking part of Lithuania partly through the influence of refugees and partly through the inner dynamics of their delayed Reformation movement. In Silesia as early as 1528 mass adult baptisms by immersion occurred at the confluence of the Neisse and Weistritt among Germanic evangelicals, the earliest such usage documented in the Reformation era. The immersed were "initiated" (eingeweiht) as "covenanters" (Bundesgenossen). In 1535 two hundred Germanic Anabaptists mosed from Silesia to Torun (Thorn), Grudziadz, and Chelmno (Culm). In the same year six hundred Anabaptist refugees from Hungary (Slovakia) settled near Lublin. and a year later (1536) others settled near Poznan, while Dutch and Flemish Mennonites settled around Gdansk (Danzig), from which the peaceful Mennonite diaspora would much later overflow into Russia. These Polish Anabaptists were fortified by a large contingent of Moravian Brethren (Unitas Fratrum), who settled in Great Poland (1548).

The diets in the commonwealth (1552–1553) urged the king to call a national synod to reform the traditional church, including its prelates In 1555, after the Peace of Augsburg, the nobility demanded that King Sigismund Augustus establish a national church on the English (Edwardian) model.

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In 1550 the first evangelical synod in Minor Poland convened in Pinczów, attended by, among others, Francis Stancarus (Stancaro) and Hieronym (Jerome) Filipowski, soon spokesmen of two of the three main Reformed schisms in the commonwealth alongside the Lutherans and the eventually Polonized Czech Brethren The Reformed attempted to set forth a creed and organization for their church in nor Poland in their first synod held at Slomniki (1554).

At their synod of Krzciecice in 1555 Felix Cruciger was appointed as the first superintendent of the Reformed churches in Poland-Lithuania. The Czech Unity of Brethren, with their Slavic liturgy and exemplary discipline, federated with the Polish Reformed at Kozminek in 1556. Jan Laski was invited to return from Germany to lead the native pan-Protestant Reformation. The synod of Ksiaz (1560) cemented the union between the Minor Poland Calvinists with their Lithuanian counterparts. From them would arise the (Unitarian) Polish Brethren (1565), radical reformers in Poland and Lithuania who regularly rebaptized and immersed their offspring only after a disciplined catechumenate.

Reformed radicalism moved from rejecting the Athanasian Creed to the sole use of the Apostles’ Creed, considered binding, ancient, and free from philosophical constructs. Scruples about infant baptism preceded the widespread practice of believers’ baptism by immersion, and an increasingly radical social agenda led the nobiliary brethren to question or disavow their ancestral right to the sword (ius gladii).

Unintentionally decisive in the transformation of socially radical Calvinism into Anabaptist Unitarianism was Stancarus, formerly lecturer of Hebrew at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, who taught that Christ was the mediator only in his human nature, which is, in fact, the orthodox postulate. But for many among the Polish Reformed, Stancarus’s formulation derogated from the plenary dignity of the Savior, and this anxiety precipitated the first schism in Polish Calvinism—that of the Stancarists (1561–1570). Stancarus had been the scholarly founder of the Polish Reformed church (1550), but because of his prickly personality and preeminent biblical, perhaps Marranist, scholarship, he drove the also well-educated native leadership into compromising formularies In the end they would recite in their churches only the Apostles’ Creed, which the Polish Brethren continued to uphold until their banishment from the Polish commonwealth on pain of death in 166o.

Among the Polish and Lithuanian Brethren, believers’ (re)baptism and explicit Christocentric Unitarianism had evolved by several stages: (1) doubts about infant baptism. notably by Peter Gonesius (Piotr z Goniaza) and Marcin Czechowic (1558–1562/63); (2) theoretical rejection of infant baptism (antipedobaptism) by the groups around Gonesius and Szymon Budny in Lithuania and by Jerzy (George) Schomann in Minor Poland (1558–1563/64); (3) theoretical advocacy of believers’ baptism (mainly by Gonesius and Czechowic in 1558); (4) widespread refusal to have infants baptized, beginning with the general postponing of baptism in Lithuania until 1563, when the Reformed pastors Czechowic, Mikolaj (Nicholas) "Wedrogowski, and Albrecht Koscienski refused to baptize infants, and with Schomann’s withholding of his daughter from pedobaptism in 1564; (5) the theoretical justification of rebaptism by Czechowic after 1563/64 and by Stanislaw Paklepka; (6) the institution of believers’ baptism for the progeny of the communities and rebaptism of converts and most ministers and lay patrons (as with the Czech Brethren) after 1566, and (7) the sole use of the Apostles’ Creed for

Radical Reformation

catechized baptizands at their nocturnal immersion in pond or stream, followed by first Communion.

Before these final stages, however, there had been a balancing act between lay patrons and ministers in the local and regional presbyteries of the Reformed churches of Poland-Lithuania, during which the adroit royal physician and lay archpresbyter Giorgio Biandrata, active in both Poland and Transylvania, had only temporarily preserved the presbyterial-synodal polity by compromising on doctrine. As a distinguished lay leader in both lands, Biandrata took most of the Reformed church over into New Testament Unitarianism, although he himself in the Transylvanian context declined believers’ baptism.

The separate Unitarian baptist (neither term used by the sixteenth-century brethren) Minor Reformed church in the commonwealth had emerged amid controversy over the Trinity, baptism, and the social gospel. In January 1556 the Reformed church of Minor Poland, at the synod of Secemin, rebuffed the learned Gonesius, who, in an unscheduled speech, spoke against the doctrine of the Trinity. Gonesius had early on proclaimed his Anabaptist and antitrinitarian theme and again in 1558 before the Lithuanian Synod of Brest Litovsk.

Biandrata was a wily but earnest compromiser and spokesman for the Polish Reformed in rapid transition. As a theological "liberal" but a social conservative, Biandrata was indifferent to, or conventional on, the issue of baptism. After the Swiss Reformed attacked him, Biandrata had to present at the synod of Pinczow (1561) a written confession of faith, which was still nominally Catholic (orthodox) but omitted "one God in three persons." The synod’s acceptance of Biandrata’s compromise confession encouraged other theological radicals at the synod of Pinczow’ (1562) to resolve "to teach about the Lord God in simple terms and solely according to the scriptures and the Apostles’ Creed".

In the same year, Gregory Pauli (Grzegorz Pawel) of Brzeziny published his Tabula de Trinitate (lost), the first antitrinitarian baptist book in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Soon afterward, the synod discussed it, with inconclusive results that reflected the mounting schism Francis (Francesco) Lismanino, formerly superior of the Franciscans, a moderate, mediating follower of Catholicism, identified three theological groupings among the Reformed as of 1563—a few followers in Poland of Giovanni Valentino Gentile (tritheists), a grouping following Gregory Pauli (the proto-Unitarians), and a small party of Calvinists under his own equivocal leadership. Calvin angrily responded with Brevis admonztio ad fratres Polonos and Epistola (1563), which attacked Pauli as a heretic worse than Stancarus, but the Reformed synods everywhere became dominated by the ecclesio-theological radicals (1562–1565).

The general Synod of Pinczów (1563), under the influence of Pauli, elected as the now schismatic superintendent Stanislaw Lutomirski, who opposed the already schismatic and theologically and socially more conservative Stancarus. This unitarianizing synod ended with Communion and the signing of the confession of faith, "in one God the Father, and in the Son of God, a true God from God, who died, was raised, and ascended to heaven, and in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father." It acknowledged only the Apostles’ Creed.

Radical Reformation

In 1550 the first evangelical synod in Minor Poland convened in Pinczów, attended by, among others, Francis Stancarus (Stancaro) and Hieronym (Jerome) Filipowski, soon spokesmen of two of the three main Reformed schisms in the commonwealth alongside the Lutherans and the eventually Polonized Czech Brethren The Reformed attempted to set forth a creed and organization for their church in nor Poland in their first synod held at Slomniki (1554).

At their synod of Krzciecice in 1555 Felix Cruciger was appointed as the first superintendent of the Reformed churches in Poland-Lithuania. The Czech Unity of Brethren, with their Slavic liturgy and exemplary discipline, federated with the Polish Reformed at Kozminek in 1556. Jan Laski was invited to return from Germany to lead the native pan-Protestant Reformation. The synod of Ksiaz (1560) cemented the union between the Minor Poland Calvinists with their Lithuanian counterparts. From them would arise the (Unitarian) Polish Brethren (1565), radical reformers in Poland and Lithuania who regularly rebaptized and immersed their offspring only after a disciplined catechumenate.

Reformed radicalism moved from rejecting the Athanasian Creed to the sole use of the Apostles’ Creed, considered binding, ancient, and free from philosophical constructs. Scruples about infant baptism preceded the widespread practice of believers’ baptism by immersion, and an increasingly radical social agenda led the nobiliary brethren to question or disavow their ancestral right to the sword (ius gladii).

Unintentionally decisive in the transformation of socially radical Calvinism into Anabaptist Unitarianism was Stancarus, formerly lecturer of Hebrew at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, who taught that Christ was the mediator only in his human nature, which is, in fact, the orthodox postulate. But for many among the Polish Reformed, Stancarus’s formulation derogated from the plenary dignity of the Savior, and this anxiety precipitated the first schism in Polish Calvinism—that of the Stancarists (1561–1570). Stancarus had been the scholarly founder of the Polish Reformed church (1550), but because of his prickly personality and preeminent biblical, perhaps Marranist, scholarship, he drove the also well-educated native leadership into compromising formularies In the end they would recite in their churches only the Apostles’ Creed, which the Polish Brethren continued to uphold until their banishment from the Polish commonwealth on pain of death in 166o.

Among the Polish and Lithuanian Brethren, believers’ (re)baptism and explicit Christocentric Unitarianism had evolved by several stages: (1) doubts about infant baptism. notably by Peter Gonesius (Piotr z Goniaza) and Marcin Czechowic (1558–1562/63); (2) theoretical rejection of infant baptism (antipedobaptism) by the groups around Gonesius and Szymon Budny in Lithuania and by Jerzy (George) Schomann in Minor Poland (1558–1563/64); (3) theoretical advocacy of believers’ baptism (mainly by Gonesius and Czechowic in 1558); (4) widespread refusal to have infants baptized, beginning with the general postponing of baptism in Lithuania until 1563, when the Reformed pastors Czechowic, Mikolaj (Nicholas) "Wedrogowski, and Albrecht Koscienski refused to baptize infants, and with Schomann’s withholding of his daughter from pedobaptism in 1564; (5) the theoretical justification of rebaptism by Czechowic after 1563/64 and by Stanislaw Paklepka; (6) the institution of believers’ baptism for the progeny of the communities and rebaptism of converts and most ministers and lay patrons (as with the Czech Brethren) after 1566, and (7) the sole use of the Apostles’ Creed for

Radical Reformation

trilingual prowess who criticized ecclesiasticism no less in Protestant than in Catholic guise. Often individualistic in their Christianity, they were, like the evangelical spiritualists, distressed by the division and strife that accompanied organized religion. These humanist reformers and their lay patrons sought a rational, nonmystical, sober church of the informed and the pious. Some may have preferred the half-enunciated ideal of Desiderius Erasmus—a "Third Church," neither Protestant nor Catholic, devout but not doctrinaire. In Poland, Lithuania, and Transylvania the evangelical rationalist ferment in the local Reformed churches created three well-integrated ecclesiastical bodies, one of them still surviving as the Unitarian church in Romania (Transylvania) and Hungary. But its ecclesial survival in those regions should not obscure the earlier geographical and societal scope of this mostly tolerant, yet disciplined, modality of reform. It was, in fact, international in terms of epistolary correspondence, visitation, and irenic ecumenism.

To these evangelical rationalists the Holy Spirit was not so much mystically experienced as aglow in reason itself, perhaps reflective of the Logos as the mind of God, a view fundamental to their piety and their stalwart courage in national debate. They were evangelical in exalting Jesus’ moral teachings, especially the Sermon on the Mount. Those in Transylvania were stronger than the late Socinians in valorizing the Old Testament. Evangelical rationalists were morally perfectionist, like the later Pietists, but without the intense mystical resonance. Divine immediacy was experienced in understanding the scriptural text with philological expertise and even in religious wonder before the original or carefully translated text. Had not Erasmus remained nominally Catholic, he could have been counted "an evangelical rationalist" in emphasizing evangelical precepts and counsels of tolerance. The Castilian Marrano Juan de Valdés (1500/10–1541), as much a Catholic evangelical as a moderate spiritualist, was a forerunner of evangelical rationalism.

Evangelical rationalism was, in a sense, the aborted humanist Italian spirit of reform reconstituted abroad. Yet the evangelical rationalists shared with the other radicals an intense eschatological expectation. The most notable exponents of this were Lelio and Fausto Sozzini, who were content with a doctrine of the Resurrection and the reanimation of the scripturally righteous only, opting for sheer oblivion as the benign punishment of the wicked and unbelievers in Christ as the Virgin-born Son of God.

The radical Reformation produced three lasting denominational forms of evangelical rationalism. The antitrinitarlanism and immersionist Anabaptism of the Polish Brethren evolved under Fausto Sozzini into the evangelical rationalism, eventually called Socinianism, of the Racovian Catechism (Raków, 1605) Realistically dealing with the state, the antipedobaptist scriptural Unitarianism of multi-confessional establishmentarian Transylvania had Erastian features. Lithuanian biblical Unitarianism, nonadorant of Christ and immersionist as to baptism, similarly linked philological with supernatural rationalism under pluralistically tolerant princely patronage. Transylvanian Unitarians even set aside the Apostles’ Creed. The Socinians, the Hebraist Budny and his Lithuanian followers, and Transylvanian Unitarians all adhered to scripture as the sole source of revelation and salvific truth. Only in the seventeenth century did Andrzy Wiszowaty (grandson of Fausto Sozzini) endorse natural theology in his Religio rationalis (Amsterdam, 1685).

Radical Reformation

Unlike later proponents of Reformed and Lutheran rational orthodoxy—and inspired by Socinian methodology— the three evangelical rationalist synods of east-central Europe embraced mutual toleration and irenicism and intrepidly defended public and ecumenical exchanges, which in Transylvania occasionally included Jewish, Karaite, and Muslim spokesmen. In contrast to variegated evangelical rationalism, much of Anabaptism and spiritualism all along had mystical components and left some room for a natural theology prior to biblical revelation, except for Socinianism. The mystical is evident in their understanding of Christ’s suffering descent into hell to save the worthy of all traditions prior to his first advent, in the quasi-mystical teaching about the gospel of all creatures, and in the conviction that Christ had died to save all infants, absolving Original Sin.

"Radical Reformation," a handy conceptual aggregate term for most of the regional opponents of, or secessionists from, any of the three main classical (magisterial) Protestant churches, was something of a loosely coherent entity and dynamic in the Reformation century, with processes and persons often closely interconnected, partly by derivation or appropriation, partly by recurrent analogy or imitation, joining and separating—all with reformatory or restorationist agendas and often sharply held eschatological convictions.

A variegated movement during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the radical Reformation appears to have extended from 1516—the year of Erasmus’s edition of the Greek New Testament—to a cluster of events around 1578 and 1579. These include the death of Peter Walpot, who led the Hutterites in their golden age; the death of Francis (Ferencz) David, who led the Transylvanian Unitarians, the arrival of Fausto Sozzini in Poland and his only partially successful conversion of Racovian, antitrinitarian Anabaptism in the direction of what became known later as Socinianism, the official toleration of Mennonites in the Netherlands by William of Orange, and the Emden Disputation between the Mennonites and the Reformed.

By then the radical Reformation had eliminated its most obvious excesses and had softened its asperities. Its own disparate impulses were crystallized in diverse and geographically isolated synodal churches, sects, and fellowships. The way had been opened for a deepened appreciation of the individual conscience and the value of religious toleration, with many radical groups reappropriating elements inherent in the theologies of classical Protestantism as they evolved into strong, mission-minded, peace-loving denominations. Slowly gathering strength, bearers of radical ideas and strategies, as well as analogous groupings, became once again involved in general history, notably in the restructuring of English Christendom during the civil wars and the Cromwellian commonwealth and in the consolidation of several new, eventually denominational forms of independency— the Baptists and the Quakers. The socio-religious dynamic of the sixteenth century would replicate itself in ever new configurations.

[See also Anabaptists, Antitrinitarianism; Bohemian Brethren; Hutterites; Melchiorites; Mennonites; Polish Brethren; Socinianism, and Unitarianism]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Radical Reformation

● Baylor, Michael G. The Radical Reformation. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge, 1991.

● Dan, Robert. Matthia Vehe-Glirius: Life and Work of a Radical Antitrinitarian. Leiden, 1982.

● Friedmann, Robert. "Spiritualism." In Mennonite Encyclopedia, vol. 4, pp. 596–599. Scottdale, Penn. 1959.

● Hillerbrand, Hans J. ed., Anabaptist Bibliography 1520-1630. Saint Louis, 1991.

● Horst, Irvin B. The Radical Brethren: Anabaptism and the English Reformation to 1559. Nieuwkoop, 1972.

● Kot, Stanislas. Socinianism in Poland. Boston, 1957.

● Lubieniecki, Stanislas. History of the Polish Reformation and Nine Related Documents. Translated, annotated, and illustrated by George Huntston Williams. Harvard Theological Studies, 34. Minneapolis, 1995.

● McLaughlin, R. Emmet. Caspar Schwenckfeld, Reluctant Radical: His Life to 1540. New Haven, 1986.

● Menno Simons. The Complete Writings. Scottdale, Penn., 1956.

● Miller, James. "The Origins of Polish Arianism." Sixteenth Century Journal 16.2 (1985), 221–256.

● Pater, Calvin A. Karlstadt as the Father of the Anabaptist Movements: The Emergence of Lay Protestantism. Reprint, Lewiston, N.Y., 1993.

● Szczucki, Lech. "The Beginnings of Antitrinitarian Anabaptism in Lithuania and Poland in the Light of an Unknown Source." In Anabaptists et dissidents au XVIe siecle, edited by Jean-Georges Rott and Simon L. Verheus, Baden-Baden, 1987.

● Toth, William. "Unitarianism versus Antitrinitarianism in the Hungarian Reformation." Church History 13 (1944), 255–268.

● Troeltsch, Ernst. The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches. London, 1931.

● Wilbur, Earl Morse. A History of Unitarianism: Socinianism and its Antecedents. 2 vols. Reprint, Boston, 1977.

● Williams, George Huntston. "Camillo Renato, c. 1500–1575." In Italian Reformation Studies in Honor of Laelius Socinus, edited by John Tedeschi. Florence, 1965.

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● ___. "The Two Social Strands in Italian Anabaptism." In The Social History of the Reformation, eduted by Lawrence P. Buck and Jonathon W Zophy. Columbus, Ohio, 1972.

● ___. "Francis Stancaro’s Schismatic Reformed Church in Ruthenia, 1559/61–1570." Harvard Ukranian Studies (1979-1980), 267–277.

● ___. The Radical Reformation. 3d. ed. Kirksville, Mo., 1992.

● ___. "The Polish Brethren [of Stanislaw Lubieniecki]." In The Earl Morse Wilbur History Colloquium, edited by Warren R. Ross, pp. 34–41. Berkeley, 1994.

● Williams, George Huntston, ed. and trans. The Polish Brethren, 1601–1685. 2 vols. Harvard Theological Studies, 30. Missoula, Mont., 1980.

● Williams, George Huntston and Angel M Mergal, eds. Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers: Documents Illustrative of the Radical Reformation. Library of Christian Classics, 25. Philadelphia, 1957.