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The Reformation and the Anabaptists
Steps to Reconciliation
26 June, 2004,
Zurich, Switzerland
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The story now has a new ending
John E. Sharp, Mennonite Historical Bulletin, October 2004
When Mennonites and Amish from rural Pennsylvania or Ohio encounter the rolling hills of the Swiss Emmental, they often exclaim with wonder, "I feel so at home here!"
"And now," I told the Zurich conference, "after experiencing the hospitality and generosity of the Reformed Church, we will also feel at home in Zurich."
And that changes how I will tell the story. As usual, I will tell the story of the Zurich reformation fueled by Zwingli’s preaching in the Grossmünster; the vigorous debates between the impatient radicals and their former mentor in the council hall a few blocks down river; the first believers’ baptism on Neustadt Gasse in the shadow of the cathedral; the missionary passion of the new evangelicals; the unwavering martyrdom of Felix Manz in the icy waters of the Limmat River; and the stubborn resistance of Hans Landis, who told the Zurich authorities they had no right to seize his property or expel him from the canton, because, after all, “The earth is the Lord’s”(Psalm 24:1), not theirs.
Now as I stand on the west bank of the Limmat under the Lindenhof, I will read the Swiss German text of the new stone tablet: Here from a fisherman’s platform in the middle of the Limmat, Felix Manz and five other Anabaptists were drowned during the Reformation between 1527 and 1532. The last Anabaptist executed in Zurich was Hans Landis in 1614.
This, I will say is the new ending to the story. The Zurich persecutors, who for centuries had wished to forget this story, but are now choosing to remember it, placed this marker here. They have acknowledged their “historic sin,” and consider the persecution “a betrayal of the gospel.” They have asked for our forgiveness.
And, we have acknowledged the threat our Anabaptist forebears posed to Zurich’s ordered society during an era of turbulent changes. We understand the Zurich reformers believed they were rediscovering the “liberating Gospel of Jesus Christ,” for which they were also willing “to give up their lives.”
They and we are “branches of the one and the same bough of the great Christian tree.” We are called to work together as God’s reconciling ministers, “in small things and great ones.”
Given this common charge, which Swiss Mennonite and Reformed leaders will explore further, we can now feel at home in Zurich, too!
--John E. Sharp, editor