Present at the Inception: Menno Simons and the
Beginnings of Dutch Anabaptism

by Abraham Friesen

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Dutch Anabaptism, like that in Zurich, Switzerland, was born at a revolutionary point in time: the first believers baptism took place in Zurich on January 21, 1525, at the very height of the great Peasant War; Menno's conversion took place on the eve of the collapse of the revolutionary Muenster movement in the spring of 1535. These "coincidences" led to repeated charges of sedition and outright revolution against the Anabaptists. Menno Simons especially had to defend himself against the charge of being a Muensterite at nearly every turn. He repeatedly denied the charge, at times with some vehemence. But not everyone believed him at the time or since; even some Mennonites have had their doubts and wondered if they could really trust Menno's word.

Scholars were, for many years, even more skeptical, with Christoph Bornhaeuser, a German Reformed scholar arguing, not that many years ago, that Menno had been a Muensterite before the collapse of the movement in the summer of 1535. And Christian Sepp, a Dutch Mennonite historian, informed his readers in 1872 that he could recall that his father's generation had still been fearful that someone, somewhere would discover the "smoking gun" that would link Menno to the Muensterites. The answer we give this issue matters, therefore, for if Menno lied in this instance, can he be trusted in any other?

Anabaptism was first brought to northern Germany and the Netherlands by Melchior Hoffmann (1495-1543) in 1529. Earlier a lay Lutheran missionary, he had gotten into trouble with the governing authorities in the Hansa cities of northern Germany because of certain radical tendencies and chiliastic speculations. Recalled to Wittenberg to be counseled by Luther in 1525, he eventually broke with him over the interpretation of the Eucharist. As a consequence, he decided -- in 1529 -- to travel south to Strasbourg where some of Luther's eucharistic opponents lived. But even these -- Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito, the Reformers of the city -- soon rejected him.

As a consequence, Hoffmann joined himself to the city's mystical Anabaptists, was rebaptized by them, came to see himself as a second Elijah. He had already written a commentary on the book of Daniel in 1526, and adopted Casper von Schwenckfeld's doctrine of the incarnation which held that Christ had not taken on sinful, human flesh when he became man. Schwenkfeld therefore spoke of the "heavenly flesh of Christ."

In May of 1530 Hoffmann returned to the north where, in Emden, he baptized some three hundred persons and established the first continuous Anabaptist churches in the region. Nowhere did the movement spread more rapidly than here. Hoffmann, however, soon went back to Strasbourg because of his belief that Christ would return there in 1533. In between, he made one more trip to the north; he may have baptized Dirk and Obbe Philips at this time.

Though Hoffman and his followers were not initially revolutionaries, Hoffmann did predict that the return of Christ had to be preceded by a great cleansing of the godless. This argument certainly sounded revolutionary to the governing authorities, and it got him imprisoned in Strasbourg in 1533 where he languished until his death in 1543.

In the meantime, 1533 came and went without Christ's return. This caused two of Hoffmann's Dutch followers, Jan Mattthys and Jan Leiden, to declare that Hoffmann had erred both as to the time and place of Christ's return. In their turn they proclaimed Muenster to be the "New Jerusalem" where the reign of Christ would begin. Bernard Rothmann, a former Lutheran who had also been influenced by people he had met in Strasbourg during the year of 1531, as well as by the so-called "Wassenburg Predicanten" later on in Muenster, began to reform the city in 1532.

By 1533 Rothmann was defending believers baptism and the symbolic interpretation of the Eucharist against both Lutheran and Catholic opponents at the Muenster Colloquy. He was later to assert that he and his followers had, at the time, been fully prepared to suffer for Christ like the early church, but the arrival of Jan of Leiden in Muenster in January 1534, and Jan Matthys in February 1534, changed everything. Introducing adult baptism into the city, they also argued that since they were living in the last days, in which the tares would be removed from the wheat, it was right and proper to defend the gospel with the sword. But that gospel was increasingly based on the Old Testament, with the millennial kingdom of God on earth gradually replacing the renewal of the apostolic church. And so they took over the city.

No sooner had they done so, than the bishop of Muenster laid siege to the city. A little later he was assisted by the troops of Duke Philip of Hesse, a Protestant. In order to dispel the gloom that settled over the city as a consequence of the siege, Jan Matthys predicted that God would judge the wicked on Easter 1534 and free the city. When Easter -- 5 April 1534 -- arrived all the inhabitants stood on the city walls expecting their salvation and the destruction of the godless.

Once again, however, nothing happened. To rehabilitate his tarnished prophetic honor, Matthys decided, with a number of followers, to emulate Gideon of old and sally forth from the city to slay the enemy. Instead, he and his followers were mercilessly slaughtered by the Landsknechte, his head was severed from his body, stuck on a pike and paraded around the city walls for all within to see. In the wake of these events, Jan of Leiden, a former actor and drifter, staged his own election as king of the New Jerusalem. From Muenster their revolutionary movement spread to Amsterdam and Bolsward. It was in the latter place that Menno's younger brother, Pieter, became involved and was executed.

Not all the Melchiorites were involved in this revolutionary activity. Dirk and Obbe Philips could never quite accept these tendencies and eventually rejected them. But Obbe, in 1540, felt so compromised by the origins of the movement that he renounced it, explaining his reasons in a Confession written in 1560. Nevertheless, it is important to establish that, at its inception, the movement was peaceful. This fact is confirmed by a number of contemporaries as well as by modern scholarship.

What was Menno's relationship to these movements? To answer the question properly, we must begin with an important observation: Menno's conversion is not to be confused with his theological development -- believing a creed or a set of theological propositions does not a Christian make! Because scholars have not distinguished between the two, there has been a great deal of confusion in regard to the question of Menno's relationship to the Muensterite movement.

Menno's theological transformation began in 1525, at least six years before he ever heard about "rebaptism," and nearly nine years before he came into contact with the Muensterites. In 1524 he was ordained and appointed priest in Pingjum, the village next to his father's farm. Only one year later, he began to have doubts about the Catholic teaching of the mass known as transubstantiation. Somewhere he had read, perhaps in a Lutheran tract, perhaps in one of Erasmus' writings, about the preeminent importance of the Bible in matters Christian. He began to read it, looking for passages dealing with the Lord's Supper. Not long into his quest he concluded that the church had deceived him in the matter. For further clarification he turned to the writings of the emerging Reformers, but found only disagreement. This forced him back to the Bible. Once begun, he did not stop studying the book of books.

In 1531 he heard of the execution of Sicke Freerks in Leeuwarden for rebaptism. Had Menno been educated in a monastery or a monastic school, the term would not have been so unfamiliar to him, for monks referred to the initiation into a monastic order as a "second baptism." But Freerks had been baptized upon his confession of faith as an adult, and that was unheard of. Again Menno consulted the Reformers, but again they differed in their justification for infant baptism. So Menno, once again, turned to the Bible, but could find none of the Reformers' views substantiated there. Again he felt betrayed by his church.

In 1532 Menno was transferred to the parish church in Witmarsum. He informs us that by this time he had "acquired considerable knowledge of the Scriptures" and was considered an "evangelical preacher." One year later, believers baptism was introduced in his region; and in 1534 he encountered the first emissaries from Muenster.

By this time Menno had studied the Bible and the writings of Erasmus and the Reformers for nine years. He had been forced to find his own theological way through the confusing maze of Catholic, Reformation, Muensterite, and biblical teachings, a path he had embarked upon long before he encountered the Muensterites. If he had not fallen prey to any of the much more theologically sophisticated arguments of the Reformers, why should he now have fallen prey to the much cruder arguments of the Muensterites? To assume that he did so without any proof at all is absurd, yet many have done so.

Menno now began to encounter the Muensterite emissaries in Witmarsum. He opposed them, debated them privately and publicly, and easily refuted their views. Though they erred in doctrine, he recognized their zeal. In January 1535 the disciples of Jan Matthys and Jan of Leiden sought to capture Amsterdam as well; in March they took over the monastery in nearby Bolsward. in the latter place the authorities captured and massacred the rebels, Menno's brother Pieter among them.

Probably immediately after his brother's execution, Menno took up his pen for the first time and attacked Jan of Leiden in a tract entitled Against the Blasphemy of Jan of Leiden. Written in anger, it was a frontal attack on the king of the New Jerusalem. Menno never wrote another piece like it, not did he ever publish it. It was later discovered among his daughter's papers after her death and first published in 1627. Since it speaks of Jan of Leiden as still alive, it must have been written between Easter of 1535 and the collapse of Muenster in June of the same year. In the tract, Menno attacks Leiden as a "false prophet" who had subverted the movement from within; he addressed it to all "true brethren of the covenant scattered abroad." It was the nature of such false prophets, Menno asserted, to "desert the pure doctrine of Christ and begin to traffic in strange doctrine." His purpose, apparently, was to call the movement back to its more orthodox beginnings.

Before Menno could publish the tract, Muenster must have fallen. Should he still publish it and appear to be celebrating on the graves of his enemies? Perhaps there was another reason for not publishing the tract. In his brief autobiography, Menno describes himself during this period in which he debated the Muensterites -- as a hypocrite. The reason for this, he informs us, was that he knew what was right -- he had his biblical theology in order -- and he knew how the "erring sheep" could be helped; but for his ease and convenience he chose to remain in the Catholic Church and let the "misguided sheep" go to their doom.

When his poor brother was killed, he picked up his pen and-both out of guilt and anger -- attacked Jan of Leiden who was responsible for the disaster. But as he did so -- or shortly after he had done so -- the words of Christ as recorded in Matthew 7 about the splinter in the "brother's" eye and "mote" or beam in his eye came back to haunt him. Here he was, Menno Simons, denouncing his "brother" who certainly had a splinter in his eye, while his own conscience was punishing him for his own hypocrisy. Was he not, therefore, at least as damned in the eyes of God as any Jan of Leiden, who may have acted in ignorance?

Confronted by the realization of who he really was, Menno broke down before God, repented his sins, and received a new heart from God through the power of the Holy Spirit. Now he knew that theological knowledge of itself provided no power; it led only to arrogance and strife with those who disagree with you. It had not made him a Christian, for he had continued his old lifestyle unabated. Will as well as mind had to be transformed and brought into subjection to God; conversion had to be added to correct theological knowledge; life had to be brought into conformity with faith. And so Menno placed his Blasphemy in a "drawer," even though the tract could have exonerated him forever had he published it at the time. Rather than do so, however, a reformed Menno chose to divest himself on his honorable position in society and associate himself with the most despised of all 16th-century persons -- the hated Muensterites. If Menno was never a Muensterite, could he have belonged to the peaceful Melchiorites? Most recent scholars, both Mennonite and non-Mennonite, have answered in the affirmative, primarily because of Menno's doctrine of the incarnation. Now it is interesting that virtually every time Menno seeks to refute the charge of being a Muensterite he mentions very specific aspects of their teachings that the had opposed from the time he first encountered them. Never once, however, does he mention their views on the incarnation. Was this because he agreed with them on the issue, or because he had not heard of them before the collapse of the movement? Most historians, myself included, assumed the former. But I no longer believe this to be the case. For there exists, in Menno's A True Confession and Scriptural Demonstration of the Most Holy Incarnation, the following passage:

...when the matter of the incarnation of our beloved Lord Jesus Christ was first mentioned by the brethren, on hearing it I was terrified at heart, lest I should err in the matter and be found, before God, in pernicious unbelief. On account of this article I was often so troubled at heart, after receiving baptism, that for many days I abstained from food and drink, by the overanxiety of my soul, beseeching and praying God in extreme necessity that the kind Father by his mercy and grace would disclose unto me, poor sinner, who, although in extreme weakness, desired to do his blessed will and pleasure, the mystery of the incarnation of his blessed Son, to the extent necessary to the glorification of his holy name to be consolation of my afflicted conscience.

This passage makes clear that Menno first heard of the doctrine directly from "the brethren" -- the reference must be to Dirk and Obbe Philips and their followers. Such a first meeting took place only well after the collapse of Muenster. More importantly, however, Menno speaks of hearing of the doctrine in connection with his baptism -- probably in January 1536. Perhaps, it was only after his baptism! For, would he have allowed himself to be baptized by them had they informed him about these views beforehand? Hardly. But if he only heard of it afterwards Menno would have placed into a nearly impossible position. Once performed, he could not go back on his baptism; and yet he could not accept the doctrine of the "heavenly flesh" of Christ either.

If the above is correct, it says something extremely important about Menno's relationship to the peaceful Melchiorites -- and that is: had he been theologically influenced by them prior to his baptism he must surely have heard about this doctrine, for it was widely known, even that the Muensterites shared it. I therefore believe it safe to concluded that both in his theological development as well as in his conversion, Menno owed essentially nothing to the Muensterites or the Melchiorites save the occasion or reason for his theological inquiries.

If this is so, however, it poses a problem of character for Menno. Should Menno have allowed himself to be persuaded in the matter of the incarnation by his new brethren, apparently against his better judgment? Should he have allowed the "brotherhood" -- to put it into a contemporary context -- to have determined his interpretation? Or should he not rather have played the prophet and "corrected" his brothers, in the process vindicating his conscience?

Menno did the same thing later with respect to the implementation of the ban, succumbing to the "harsh banners" against his better judgment. No wonder that every time he addresses the topic of the incarnation in his writings one gets the distinct impression that Menno is defensive. This was noted already by the great church historian, Johann Lorenz Mosheim, in the first half of the eighteenth-century. He argued further that Menno, on occasion, even described the incarnation in orthodox terms! And Mosheim was no friend of the Anabaptists.

Within a few years of the collapse of the revolutionary movement in 1535, a powerful transformation began to manifest itself in Dutch Anabaptism. Mosheim may have been the first "outsider" to acknowledge it. He credited it primarily to Menno's eloquence and moral integrity. But would that have been enough to account for a transformation that even Johan Huizinga, the great twentieth-century Dutch cultural historian and descendant of Anabaptist forebears, pointed to in the following question:

"How is it that a religion whose zealots were responsible for fanatical excesses in Amsterdam and Muenster should have subsided so gently into decorous piety, and that the many disciples of Menno in the northern provinces, in Haarlem and in Amsterdam, become the most peaceful citizens of all?

How indeed! The question has never been satisfactorily answered. Certainly, the discredited Muensterite movement could not have provided the power for it. Could Melchioritism? Or had it, too, been compromised by its association with the revolutionary forces?

We have observed that Obbe and Dirk Philips, who formed the center of the peaceful Melchiorite movement, sought out Menno after his conversion and both baptized and ordained him after January 1536. But within a few short years -- in 1540 -- Obbe had left the movement because, as he wrote in his Confession of 1560, he felt compromised by the revolutionary involvement of the Muensterite leaders from whom he had received baptism and ordination. How could such a movement -- filled with inner doubt and external turmoil -- have provided both the theology and inner strength to transform a movement which had been derailed by its own internal problems? Was the failure of the revolutionary wing enough to bring about such a change? The answer would appear to be negative. It was Menno who provided both the requisite theology and the source of strength; and neither the one nor the other derived from Melchioritism.

The power came from Menno's own conversion and his theology of conversion that resulted from it. His conversion has been described above; as early as 1536 he wrote his "The Spiritual Resurrection." There, in the opening lines, he wrote:

The Scriptures teach two resurrections, namely a bodily resurrection from the dead at the last day, and a spiritual resurrection from sin and death to a new life and a change of heart. That a man should mortify and bury the body of sin and rise again to a new life of righteousness in God is plainly taught in all the Scriptures.

In 1537 Menno revisited the topic in his The New Birth. From the very outset of the piece it was clear that Menno was talking not only of a moral reformation, but of a moral revolution, for he wrote:

Tell me, dearly beloved, where and when did you read in the Scriptures, the true witness of the Holy Ghost and criterion of your consciences, that the unbelieving, disobedient, carnal man, the adulterous, immoral, drunken, avaricious, idolatrous, and pompous man has one single promise of the kingdom of Christ and His church, yes, part or communion in His merits, death and blood? I tell you the truth, nowhere and never do we read it in the Scriptures.

From the start, Menno's message was; you must be born again. Neither Hoffmann's teachings nor the "revolution of the saints" had changed the essential nature of man. Instead, their teachings had brought only disaster. But this doctrine of the new birth, of regeneration through the power of the Holy Spirit, had a larger theological context. And that theological context came to Menno from the same source the Swiss and South German Anabaptists had received it -- from Erasmus' interpretation of Matthew 28:18-20 -- Christ's great commission. This becomes apparent in Menno's writings as early as 1539 in his immensely influential "Fundamentboek." There Menno wrote:

Christ commanded his disciples after his resurrection, saying: "Therefore go and teach all nations, and baptize them in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the Holy Ghost; and teach them to observe everything that I have commanded you. For, behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the earth."

Here we have the Lord's command regarding baptism, who shall receive God's ordinance, and when and what it is to serve; that is that the Gospel must be preached and then baptize those who [accept and] believe it, as he [Christ] says: "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned."

Somewhat later Menno continued:

Christ's holy apostles taught and practiced [baptism] in accordance with Christ's commandments, as one can readily understand and note from many passages of the New Testament. Thus Peter says: Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." and Phillip said to the eunuch; "If you believe with all your heart, you may be [baptized]." Acts chapter 8. For faith does not follow upon baptism, but baptism follows from faith (Matt. 28, Mark 16).

What is striking about the passage is that Menno interprets the great commission through the baptismal passages in the Acts the Apostles, in particular through Peter's Pentecost sermon. In and earlier essay, we pointed out that such an interpretation, to be found throughout Swiss, South German, and Hutterite Anabaptism, could only have come from Erasmus' Paraphrases of the Gospel of Matthew and the Acts of the Apostles. It was this Erasmian context that gave theological meaning to Menno's own conversion.

Thus, as we have seen, Peter's Pentecost sermon became the grid through which the great commission was interpreted by the Anabaptists. In that sermon Peter began by proclaiming Jesus as the risen Christ and confronting the Jews -- and others -- with the Son of God whom they had crucified. He went on to demonstrate that his coming had been foretold in the Old Testament, and that he was now seated at the right hand of God the Father and would come again to judge the quick and the dead.

With the Holy Spirit visibly present -- without his presence there can be neither true repentance nor conversion -- the listeners were stricken in their consciences; they recognized whom they had crucified and that, at their death, he would sit in judgement of them. Seeing no escape from sure condemnation by the living God, they cried out to Peter and the other apostles: "Brothers, what shall we do?" And Peter told them "Repent and be baptized, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." Those who accepted Peter's message, we are informed, "were baptized, and about 3,000 were added to their number that day."

After the first "teaching," repentance, and baptism, the Matthean account of the great commission had then added: "teach them [who have been baptized] to obey everything I have commanded you." And in Acts 2 we read that those who had been baptized and added to the church "devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer." Only two weeks ago I heard an Evangelical preacher proclaim that these apostolic teachings must have dealt with Christ. Anabaptists -- and Menno -- would have rejected that assertion.

The "apostolic teachings" the newly baptized converts devoted themselves to were all those things Christ had commanded his disciples to obey! This was the place where discipleship was taught. And the context makes it clear that such discipleship was possible only if persons involved had heard and accepted the crucified and risen Christ as Savior, had repented their sins, and had had their heart changed -- that is, had been raised to newness of life -- and had taken an oath of obedience to Christ in baptism. For that baptism symbolized the fact that they had already died to self, sin, and the world, and had been raised to newness of life. Only then could Christ's second command to "teach" be meaningful.

Now, if with the above firmly in one's mind one begins to read the Martyrs Mirror, one cannot help but be struck by how widespread -- from ministers to the commonest brother and sister -- this interpretation had penetrated to the very core of Dutch Anabaptism. And what transformed this theological interpretation into vibrant life was Menno's all-pervasive emphasis on conversion. It was this message, so graphically portrayed in Menno's earliest writings, and the conversions that followed from it, that transformed the revolutionary Muensterites, as well as the more peaceful Melchiorites, into peaceful Mennonites, just as his own conversion transformed Menno's life. And the Martyrs Mirror is filled with the evidence.

Both Menno, therefore, as well as Dutch Anabaptism after Muenster, were neither Muensterite nor Melchiorite. The theological core came from the outside -- from Erasmus' interpretation of Christ's great commission -- but it was given life by Menno's own conversion experience. To be sure, the Melchiorite doctrine of the incarnation hung around for some time to come, but the framework of Dutch Anabaptist theology came from Erasmus, as it had for Swiss and South German Anabaptism. Hence the overwhelming similarities between the two movements despite the fact that there were virtually no initial contacts between the two, and Menno never once mentioned, in his writings, the names of any of the early Swiss Brethren.

--Abraham Friesen is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and chair of the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission

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Mennonite Historical Bulletin, April, 1996