Quotes About Anabaptists

From Switzerland in the south, throughout central Europe and Germany, and as far north and west as England, where Henry VIII burned a dozen Anabaptists at the stake, thousands of men and women were subjected to the most terrible persecution. Many of the more moderate leaders who abjured violence were martyred, leaving a gap in the leadership that was often filled by men of little education but much passion.

From the very beginning of the movement in the sixteenth century, Anabaptists shared a deep suspicion of the so-called Schriftgelehrten - the university-trained scholars who, they claimed artfully dodged the clear and simple teachings of Jesus by appealing to complex arguments and carefully crafted statements of doctrine. In other words, they confused theological discussions with lived faith.

My mother's families were Mennonites or Anabaptists that came to Minnesota from Russia. They were actually moving around Europe doing diking and lowland reclamation work, and they moved into Minnesota.

Serious theological strife and strategic political reversals had confined Lutheranism to the German and Scandinavian lands. Anabaptists such as the Mennonites remained a marginalized, often fugitive, people. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Reformed varieties of Protestantism continued to expand in Holland, Switzerland, the British Isles, and for a time in France. But

The most radical views of church–state relations in sixteenth-century Europe were held by the Anabaptists, who rejected almost all of the links between the sacred and the secular that had been built up in Europe since the age of Constantine.

The Anabaptists' rejection of infant baptism and their insistence upon adult baptism after an individual profession of faith grew out of a desire to distinguish Christianity from state citizenship, as well as from a fresh interpretation of teaching about baptism in the New Testament.

The host of Protestant differences only rarely erupted into full-scale doctrinal battle, though Protestant violence against Anabaptists was a sad reality throughout the sixteenth century, and intra-Protestant disagreement leading to violence was known in several places throughout Europe.