What was going on down in Nicolsburg?

As a beginning student of Anabaptism (an maybe I still really am and don’t realize how far I’ve yet to go) I always got confused over one of many things. What was going on down in Nicolsburg? As a student at a Baptist institution I was of course exposed to Balthasar Hübmaier with abnormal weight. What I remember thinking then of that important time in Hübmaier’s career was that he went down there, there was a controversy, Hübmaier is martyred, something else happened, add salt, shake well and out popped Hutterites. I knew it started with Hübmaier and ended with Hutterites but the road between the two was unclear. Something drastic must have happened in the innards of the Moravian mechanism that took a magisterial, sword-bearing input yet produced a separatist, pacifist, communitarian output.

So, with bravado unbecoming of my inexperience, I have decided to make a chart illustrating the path from Nicolsburg to Jacob Hutter. At about Hutter’s arrival, things get fissiparous and the Austerlitz group is splintered, with one group following Hutter and adopting his name as their own. Your screen, dear reader, is probably not big enough to contain such a chart; so, I will take you up to the arrival of Hutter and at least one piece of the puzzle should be clearer (or so I hope).

Here’s a narrative to accompany the chart. After Hübmaier’s recantation in Zürich, he left for Moravia via Augsburg, arriving in Nicolsburg in July 1526. Hübmaier began a magisterial Anabaptist reformation along the lines of that of Waldshut, befriending the local lords, the Liechtensteins. He had great success, performing a great number of baptisms subject to possible exaggeration. The advancement of his reformation among the indigenous population was augmented by the arrival of refugees.

There were tension between the locals and the refugees. The refugees, led by Jacob Wiedemann, were not supported by a magisterial reformation and preferred to exist as a separatist congregation. Accordingly, they began to hold their own meetings and as a matter of survival began to advocate mutual aid. This mutual aid was not yet developed into the more communalistic communitarianism for which the later Hutterites would be known.

Hübmaier was reforming a city. Wiedemann was with the refugees dissenting. And then there’s Hut. What had been an internal difference erupted into tract warfare. Hans Hut sided with Wiedemann and the refugees and began a campaign against Hübmaier. Hübmaier matched volleys by his writings against Hut. What began as a debate over separatism and the corollary of participation in the magistracy was turned to the issue of pacifism.[1] Although Hut left town for Vienna in June 1527 and soon thereafter martyred and in July Hübmaier was given up to the Hapsburg authorities, in whose hands he was martyred, the two parties were now irreconcilable. The positions they held on the question of pacifism became their identifying mark; Hübmaier’s congregation became known as the Schwertler (sword-bearers) and the dissenting group that remained under Wiedemann’s leadership became known as the Stäblers (staff-bearers).

The Schwertler were dissipated by persecutions in 1535 and have not been of much interest to scholars. The Stäbler were forced from Nicolsburg during the Spring of 1528 by the Lords who favored the magisterial reformation that had been Hübmaier’s legacy. They ended up in Austerlitz where their practice of mutual aid was radicalized into communalism. This group was enlarged by even more refugees, among whom differences of ideas were imported—differences that would lead to later fractionalization. One of the immigrants was Hutter, who would go on to lead one of these groups that would become known as the Hutterites.

If four paragraphs isn’t concise enough a narrative, let me try again. Hübmaier founded an Anabaptist church in Nicolsburg. Some of the church members wanted to be pacifists. The pacifists were kicked out of town and went to Austerlitz and formed a communitarian church. Many groups came out of that group, including the Hutterites.

So, I hope that clears up some of that little knot in Anabaptist history. I hope that it helps at least one person understand more clearly what was going on down there in Nicolsburg. At least the way my mind works, having things in chart format helps me understand it.

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[1]Hut was known for his apocalypticism, which was ardent enough to earn him the rebuke of Denck at the Martyrs’ synod of August 1527. Hut there agreed to place his apocalypticism at the periphery of his preaching. Such apocalypticism is often associated among the radicals with violence, for it was taught by some that the end of days was to be accompanied by the wrathful execution of God’s judgment of the unbelievers by the faithful church of God.  On the contrary, Hut’s end times fervency was pacifistic. He predicted that that judgment would come at the hands of the godless Turks on behalf of the faithful remnant.

Anabaptist New Testament Biblicism and the Shift of Expectations toward Radicalization

One of my current reads is Werner Packull’s Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian Experiments during the Reformation.[1] I had read the publication of his dissertation, Mysticism and the Early South German-Austrian Anabaptist Movement, 1525-1531[2] and I am refreshed to once again read his writing, which to me is solid history that is very readable–a narrative that is fastened to historical details and is sympathetic from an outside perspective without feeling the need to be apologetic in Anabaptism’s defense. In a section titled, “The Forgotten Factor: The Availability of the Vernacular Scriptures,”[3] Packull composed a mini essay on the historical circumstances that contributed to the New Testament orientation of Swiss Anabaptist Biblicism.

In that section Packull reviewed the dates of printings of the Scriptures in the vernacular that would have been available to the book distributor Andreas Castelberger and the network of friends involved in the Bible study from which Anabaptism would spring. Luther’s New Testament was completed in 1522 and was widely available. Versions tailored to the Swiss dialects became available in the following years. The Old Testament began to be available in the vernacular shortly thereafter, with a first installment coming out of Basel at the end of 1523. While the Old Testament existed in the vernacular, it was several years before it was completely translated and the translations that were available were not as widely available.

In light of the certain New Testament preference of the New Testament over the Old,[4] Packull concluded that it was possible “that the New Testament orientation of Early Swiss Anabaptism was influenced by particular historical circumstances that included the limited availability of the vernacular Scriptures.”[5] Since the Anabaptists could be loosely characterized as a bottom-up hermeneutic community reflecting the practical concerns of the congregation rather than a top-down hermeneutic authority structure under the leadership of the learned for whom the availability of the vernacular Scriptures would have less consequence, despite that there were several learned leaders among the first Anabaptists, “Swiss Anabaptist vernacular biblicism, it can be argued [as Packull had just done], took shape before a wholistic reading of both testaments was an option for a hermeneutic community that had rejected the tutelage of the learned.”[6]

The Anabaptists had a different reform polity in mind than Zwingli and the incipient cause of limited availability of vernacular Scriptures lent the Anabaptists to appeal primarily to the New Testament. This dialogically led to further differences of reform polity as the paradigm of New Testament oriented Biblicism hardened in continued Anabaptist polemics. The turning point was the issue of baptism, which reflected both the difference over reform polity and hermeneutics. The Anabaptists appealed to the New Testament on the issue while Zwingli read the Old Testament rite of circumcision at an equal level with the New Testament, justifying this move by claiming that the New Testament church instituted baptism before writing the books and letters collected in the New Testament. Packull recognized that it was not insignificant that the correlation of the breaking point of baptism and Zwingli beginning to preach the Old Testament in the Münster.[7]

Packull’s awareness of the influence of this factor on the hermeneutics of the Anabaptists prevents interpreting their New Testament orientation as a “deliberately held principled position”[8] developed in the crucible of insular theological reflection. There is one further question that comes to my mind from Packull’s research. Is the New Testament orientation of the Anabaptists in accordance to the above-mentioned factors developed in distinction to an inherent Reformation hermeneutic that held both Testaments as equal or was that orientation developed as the logical conclusion of an early Reformation preference for the New Testament that set about those factors?

It was no accident that the New Testament was the first to be translated and printed. Luther’s translation was an effort to proliferate the gospel that Luther had grounded in the New Testament, especially in passages like Mark 1:15 and explicated in his lectures on Romans. Zwingli’s demonstrated the same preference for the New Testament by preaching from the New Testament long before systematically approaching the Old. Packull contended that Zwingli’s regard for the Old Testament was always present but was obscured by the New Testaments bases for his preaching. Packull wrote, “Zwingli’s own initial preoccupation masked potential differences.”[9] The exact status of the importance of the Old Testament in Zwingli’s hermeneutics has not been given (to my knowledge) treatment but would be a worthwhile avenue of future research. However, if his change from his initial doubts of infant baptism is any indication,[10] then it seems that Zwingli possibly held to a Anabaptistic New Testament orientation and only later did he elevate the Old Testament for the purposes of combating the Anabaptists.

If a preference for the New Testament was the initial Reformation standard, then it would not be the case that the availability of the vernacular Scriptures caused Anabaptists to prefer the New Testament, although the strength of Packull’s research would confirm that that factor certainly reinforced the preference. It would then have been Zwingli, needing a polemical advantage, who turned to the Old Testament, which would have been available to him without translation. What then may be the case, as is fitting with my broader interpretation of the Reformation, is that it was not the Anabaptists radicalized their Biblicism beyond that of the reformers but rather that the reformers moderated on their previous positions, on which the Anabaptists remained consistent. Though a complete paradigm shift from the reformers/radical reformers paradigm to one of reformers (Anabaptists)/moderating reformers (Luther, Zwingli, et al.) may be more seismic than warranted, a push in that direction will move interpreters of the Reformation away from the default assumption that differences between the two parties were always a result of radicalization.

A more complex dynamic is at play. At times the radicals indeed took the reforms of the moderates beyond the positions the moderates consistently maintained. At other times the radicals were the ones who consistently maintained the initial positions on reform on which the moderates had drawn back. The continuity of ideas did not necessarily rest on the continuity of persons. What may more often be revealed to be the case was that the later split came on issues on which there was no firm position. For example, neither party retained Zwingli’s initial hesitance on infant baptism. The radicals went beyond it by practicing believer’s baptism while the reformers withdrew. Luther’s early consideration of an ecclesiola was radicalized into the separated church of Anabaptism while Luther set the idea aside for later institution (which never occurred). Historians of the Radical Reformation should be served well in gaining a new interpretive tool by being free of assuming all differences between the two camps resulted from the radicals going beyond positions that the moderates consistently maintained.

The same operating principle may be at play in the topic at hand, namely that the differing hermeneutics after the split over baptism were not necessarily indicative of one side standing firm and the other either radicalizing or moderating. The New Testament preference was observed by all but as the debates over reforms continued, Zwingli and his learned coterie lessened the distinction between the Testaments by elevating the Old to support their moderate reforms while the Anabaptists expanded on that preference almost to the exclusion of the Old Testament since they did not have it readily available to them. Their preference of the New Testament was so great that they were subject to the taunts of the moderates, who charged that they were reviving the error of Marcion.[11]

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[1](Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

[2](Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald, 1977).

[3]Hutterite Beginnings, 27-29.

[4]In an endnote, Packull quoted John Howard Yoder’s claim that the preeminence of the New Testament among the Anabaptists is so certain that it is taken for granted. Packull called this an understatement (Packull, Hutterite Beginnings, 329). Importantly, Jonathan R. Seilig concluded that the Anabaptists treated the Apocrypha as equal to the rest of the canon (“Solae [Quae?] Scripturae: Anabaptists and the Apocrypha,” MQR 80, no. 1 [Jan. 2006]: 5-34). While these claims are not cotenable, Packull is only speaking of the emerging movement of the mid- to late 1520s while Seilig wrote of Anabaptism up until the mid-1600s. Before the first century of Anabaptism was completed the historical circumstance of extremely limited availability of the vernacular Old Testament had passed.

[5]Packull, Hutterite Beginnings, 28.

[6]Ibid., 32.

[7]Soon after arriving in Zürich in 1519, Zwingli had begun preaching from the Gospel of Matthew with the mandate to preach the complete text, genealogies and all—a project that would consume the first half of the 1520s (Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation (New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 51).

[8]Packull, Hutterite Beginnings, 28.

[9]Ibid., 29.

[10]Many sources attest to this change, but the most in depth that I have come across is that of Brian Brewer, “Zwingli’s Early Anabaptist Convictions: History or Mythology?” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Ft. Worth, Texas, October 2011.

[11]Packull, Hutterite Beginnings, 28.