Who is conrad grebel

He had a humanistic education, but he was anything but composed and moderate. He was relentless, when it came to carrying through perceived truth.

He was restless, intemperate, torn this way and that way, and he kept at a distance everyone who came close to him. He does not arouse feelings of timeless devotion and is not an easy person to celebrate. Nothing had turned out well for Grebel. He had broken off studies in Basel, Vienna, and Paris, and had fallen out with his parents; he could find no way to a secure professional existence.

He was dissatisfied with the course of the Reformation in Zurich, though at first he had supported it. Then he turned against Ulrich Zwingli, the reformer of the city. He left his young family and went underground. While fleeing the henchmen of the authorities he hid away in the vineyards of Maienfeld and died of the plague. It was the brief life of a nonconforming, self-willed, radical. It is inconceivable how such a life could produce something worth remembering.

In the s Harold S. Bender wrote the first academic biography about Grebel. It was the subject of his doctorate in Heidelberg in , but it was not published until The origins of Anabaptism are cloudy, unclear, and contradictory.

Was it the boldness of thought, the religious virtuosity of a humanistically-educated layperson, or everyday experiences that steered him onto a new path? As far as organization is concerned, others were more successful. He neither set the tone for good or evil nor conceived the slogans with which the Anabaptists defied ecclesiastic and secular authority or on which they built their theological structure. Often the ideas were supplied by others. He took them up, transposed them, and pursued them with rigor and single-mindedness, not sparing himself when it was necessary to commit himself to the Anabaptist rejuvenation of Christianity.

He was not an original theological mind, even though he used his education in the service of Anabaptism. The Anabaptist theologian of substance was Balthasar Hubmaier, one-time professor of theology at the University of Ingolstadt. Grebel was not a comforter of souls like Menno Simons, who accompanied the brothers and sisters with encouragement and comfort on their path into martyrdom.

Perhaps Grebel would have been able to offer support in the extreme trial of life when called upon, drawing from the well of his ideas on the following of the suffering Christ. However, he died before the wave of severe persecutions came upon the Anabaptists. He was surely a critical agitator. Zwingli experienced how his educated disciple from a good family suddenly turned against him in , showing solidarity with preachers in the countryside and redirecting toward Zwingli and the city council the effective agitation of emotions against the traditional clergy.

That obviously affected the reformer very deeply. He interpreted hate against his own person as betrayal against the Gospel which, he believed, was on the right course in Zurich. His proclivity for polemical criticism fit well into the existing anticlerical milieu of controversy. With merciless perspicacity he criticized the mistakes and deficiencies of priests, monks, and nuns, showing disdain for everything that they represented, including the appearance of piety they spread around themselves and their cult.

Zwingli was as much disturbed by the hypocrisy among the clergy as he was by the feigning humility of the radicals. In contrast to the image of the deceitful clergy he upheld the image of the pious lay person. He did not limit his criticism to insults and denunciation but also outlined fundamental principles for a renewal of Christianity, as represented and embodied practically by devout lay people. The personalization of the criticism resulted in the personalization of the key ideas of the reform movement.

Grebel had consciously absorbed the anticlerical environment of conflict, and thus his thinking received a very definite orientation. He experienced the crucial turning point in his own life as the conversion and rebirth described in the New Testament and as a transition from the old to the new creation.

The single morality of the humanists changed to a rigid form of Christian sanctity. The reading and discussion of Holy Scripture within the circle of brethren became the germ cell for a new understanding of the church.

Not only what the layperson believed, but also, and above all, what he did, determined the possibility of a fundamental renewal of Christianity. Otherwise they would not have been biblically advised. The reformers wanted to wait before renewing the ordinances in order not to burden the conscience of traditional believers and not to anger them unnecessarily towards the newly discovered Gospel. The radicals saw it differently.

They could not countenance overburdening those who had just come to the faith and were dependent on supportive regulations in order to maintain their allegiance to Christ.

It has no say in the church and may not be cooperated with. At first glance this anticlerically-conceived framework gives an impression of soundness.

One thing fits the next. On closer observation, contradictions are apparent. At one point Grebel refers to Zwingli as having opened his eyes and those of his brethren to the Gospel; at another he maintains that the truth of the Gospel was first revealed to them when they went from being listeners to reformatory preaching to becoming readers of Holy Scripture.

Grebel would dispute any claim that he experienced conversion through his encounter with Zwingli. At times he followed Scripture to the letter, at other times he followed the spirit of Scripture or outlined far-reaching connections in order to determine the meaning of a biblical word. The City Council judged in favor of Zwingli and ordered Grebel and his group to cease and desist. They also ordered that any unbaptized infants had to be presented for baptism within 8 days.

Disobedience was to be met with exile. This was no academic question for Grebel. He had married and his wife had born him a daughter only two weeks before and he had refused to present his infant daughter for baptism. The judgment of the council did not have the desired effect on Grebel. On January 21, the group held an illegal meeting in the home of Manz. It was at this meeting that a monumental decision was made. Blaurock asked for Grebel to re-baptize him on the basis of his profession of faith and Grebel consented.

In turn, Blaurock baptized the others present. At this point, the schism was complete and this innovation would soon spread all over Central Europe. The group meeting in the home of Felix Manz would band together with a pledge to live the faith according to the New Testament alone and without any other accountability or formal structure.

The fact that neither Grebel or Blaurock had ever been ordained never seemed to bruise their consciences. The Anabaptist movement had begun. Gall and quickly gathered another convert, Wolfgang Ulimann, who he baptized by immersion in the Rhine River.

For several months, these two went about preaching with much success. But it did not take long for Grebel to run afoul of the magistrate and the response of the magistrate was swift and extreme.

In October of the same year he was arrested and imprisoned. While in prison, Grebel was able to prepare an apology of the Anabaptist position on baptism although he could not find a printer to publish it.

Five months later, through the help of some friends, he escaped his imprisonment. He immediately set about to seek converts to his position. At some point between March and July he was also able to find a printer willing to print his apology.

There are no copies of his pamphlets extant, but Zwingli quotes from it in a refutation. Even though the members of this new movement were arrested, fined, and imprisoned, the movement grew. Soon, huge numbers were rebaptized. In Waldshut, three hundred adults were rebaptized.

And in St. Gall, about five hundred were rebaptized at one time. But this was not to be the fate of Grebel. Eventually, Grebel arrived in the Maienfeld area of the Canton of Grisons where his oldest sister lived.

Not long after arriving in Grison in he died not having reached his 30 th year. He likely died in July or August due to contracting the plague there. It is not a stretch to call him the father of not only what became the Swiss Brethren, but also a theological forefather of the Amish, Baptist, Schwarzenau Brethren German Baptists , and the Mennonite churches.

Many subsequent pietistic and free church movements can also be traced to the fateful decision of January 21, in the home of Felix Manz. One can appreciate the zeal of the young Conrad Grebel, but also wish that he had learned a little more patience and humility from Ulrich Zwingli. It was Zwingli and not Grebel who forced the issue in a bitter determination to root out the opposition to his program.

The first refusals to baptize infants occurred in the spring of in the parish of Wilhelm Reublin , and were not due to Grebel's influence. However, Grebel certainly sympathized with the objectors and without doubt supported them.

Zwingli and the council sought to win the objectors to infant baptism by private discussion, but the objectors asked for Scripture proof that infant baptism was commanded, which of course could not be given, and all the devious and specious arguments which Zwingli and his fellow pastors used could not move these simple-minded Biblicists from their fundamental position.

It was clear that only vigorous action, including the use of the force by the state if necessary, would suffice to quell what Zwingli called rebellion Aufruhr. So the decision was made to hold a public debate on 17 January , to be followed by a decree of the council on the matter. The story of the debate and its outcome is familiar history. As leader of the dissenting group, Grebel played a major part, assisted by Felix Manz and George Blaurock.

The outcome was two severe council mandates of 18 and 21 January , ordering a complete cessation of activity by Grebel and Manz and their associates, forbidding the Bible study meetings of the group, and ordering immediate baptism of all unbaptized infants on pain of exile from the canton.

The final break was at hand. Grebel himself had an unbaptized daughter two weeks old who, as he said, "had not yet been baptized and bathed in the Romish water bath," and whom he did not intend to baptize. No sooner was the issue raised than the answer was given. The Grebel group would not compromise under any circumstance, for their consciences were bound by the Word of God as much as Luther's was at Worms. They felt that they had taken a Scriptural position which had not been refuted from the Word of God by Zwingli and the city council.

The Word of God was to be trampled underfoot by the brutal power of the state. Already on the next day after the first mandate Zwingli knew the outcome, for he wrote to Vadian on 19 January, "Grebel persists in his stand. When the little group of Brethren met for counsel to determine their course of action, probably on the evening of 21 January, they had no program of introducing rebaptism. In fact, such a thing had never been mentioned in the entire course of the struggle.

But in a moment of inspiration by what they confidently believed was divine guidance, adult baptism was introduced in this little meeting, with Grebel performing the first baptism, as related earlier in this article.

This was the birthday of Anabaptism. The story of the Anabaptist movement from this point on is familiar. The little group that had met on the evening of 21 January went out from their meeting with a sense of divine mission and endowment upon them. Fearing neither Zwingli nor the council, they went from house to house and into the towns and villages of the countryside teaching and preaching and urging men and women everywhere to join them in their new fellowship.

The response was remarkable. In spite of repeated arrests and fines and imprisonments, the movement grew. Apparently it was not to be stopped. By Easter time Balthasar Hubmaier and practically his whole parish in Waldshut had been baptized with three hundred adult participants, and in St.

Gall Grebel had great success, so that about five hundred were baptized at one time. This example was followed widely within and without Switzerland. Several weeks in February were spent in Schaffhausen where it appeared for a time as though he might win Sebastian Hofmeister , the city pastor.

Then followed a call to St. Gall about Easter time, where one of his associates, Wolfgang Ulimann , whom he had baptized in the Rhine near Schaffhausen in February, was having remarkable success, and where he also perhaps hoped to find at least toleration at the hands of Vadian. During the winter in prison, Grebel evidently succeeded in preparing a brief defense of the position of the group on baptism in reply to the arguments advanced by Zwingli.

He had tried during the summer before to accomplish this and to find a printer, but was frustrated in his intentions. It seems that after his escape from prison he succeeded in finding a printer and circulating a small number of the booklets.

No copy is extant, but Zwingli attempted to refute the booklet in detail in his Elenchus which was published in July Worn and weary, in ill health from the long imprisonment and the hardships he had been compelled to undergo, Grebel sought to find a safer field of labor and possibly the rest and quiet which he so sorely needed by going to the region of Maienfeld in the canton of Grisons , where his oldest sister had been living for some time.

There is no record of his movements or activities in this region, except for the brief statement in Kessler's Sabbata that shortly after his arrival in Maienfeld he died of the plague. Nothing is known of his burial place, nor of the exact time of his death, although it must have taken place about July He did not die in prison as Neff and others have claimed.

As early as May he wrote his friend Vadian that all previous conflicts referring to the Catholic opposition were as child's play compared with this one Zwingli Werke VIII, The seriousness of the conflict was due not so much to the number of the Anabaptists as to the power of their ideas and the conviction with which they were held. What were these ideas of Conrad Grebel and his associates which Zwingli feared and with which he differed so radically? In the first place, they were not ideas referring to the major classic Christian doctrines.

It can be said without contradiction that on the cardinal points of Christian theology Zwingli and Grebel agreed, for the former declared that the Grebelites differed from him only on unimportant minor points. In his Commentario de vera et falsa religione Commentary on True and False Religion written in March he says, "But that no one may suppose that the dissension is in regard to doctrines which concern the inner man, let it be said that the Anabaptists make us difficulty only because of unimportant outward things, such as these: whether infants or adults should be baptized and whether a Christian may be a magistrate" Zwingli Werke III, Zwingli was, of course, mistaken in his judgment that the issues involved concerned only unimportant things, but he was right in denying that the issues concerned the inner aspect of Christian faith or experience.

Grebel and his brethren were consistent evangelicals. If we take at face value Zwingli's statement that baptism and magistracy were the chief points at issue, we see that the deeper issues involved were those of the nature of the church and the relation of the Christian to the world.

These are of course major theological points. Grebel's doctrine of the church was substantially that held by the modern nonconformist churches, particularly the Baptists and the Mennonites, and he was the first to hold this position. According to Grebel, the church as a local body comes into existence through the preaching of the Word and its voluntary acceptance, and through the consequent conversion and renewal of life of individual believers.

By faith the individual members are united together and incorporated into the body of Christ. This church is in truth a fellowship of brethren in life and suffering, a communio sanctorum, which is maintained by the inward bond of faith and the outward bond of love. When a member of the body fails to maintain love toward the brethren or does not order his life according to the Gospel, he breaks the bond of fellowship, and if he will not hear the church and repent and change his life he must be excluded from the fellowship of the believers.

New members may be received into the church only upon a confession of faith and separation from sin, upon evidence of a renewal of life and a walk in holiness.

In the second major point, that of the relation of the Christian to the world order, Grebel and his followers occupy a unique position in the history of Protestant doctrine, a position which has not been followed by the nonconformist groups to any extent, and which probably only the modern Mennonites hold.

Luther , Calvin , and Grebel alike condemned the world order as sinful and in need of regeneration, but the three assumed radically different attitudes toward the condemned world order.

Luther held that it was futile to do much to change it, and that since it was a necessary evil which one could not well escape, the Christian must compromise with it, participating as necessary in its life and institutions, and finding solace from the conflict by a retreat to the inner life with its experience of the grace of God and the forgiveness of sins. Calvin took the opposite position, namely, that the Christian must not compromise with the world, but must seek to regenerate the world order and make it Christian and thus make the will of God sovereign in all human life and institutions, even though that might mean the forcible suppression of ungodliness.

Unfortunately, Calvin relied too much on the Old Testament in addition to the New for the content of the will of God, from which the pattern for human society was to be drawn, and in so doing compromised with the world unconsciously as Luther did deliberately.

Grebel agreed with Calvin that the existing world order needed to be regenerated according to the will of God, but he differed in the method by which it was to be accomplished. He would separate the true Christian from the ungodly world order and its institutions, and resolutely abandon the use of the civil state even in its theocratic form to promote the Christianization of society, rather making the church a light to the world and a salt to the earth.

The church should overcome the world by winning members from the ungodly society of the world to the godly society of the church.

According to Grebel, the church has no right to seek to rule society from without or to attempt to control the civil authorities for the benefit of its interests.

Rather it should probably expect to continue to be a "suffering church" in the world, as Christ promised His disciples, and never expect the mass of men to enter its portals or to adopt its way of life. However, within the boundaries of the church the will of God as found in the Gospel not as found in the Old Testament ethic which for Grebel was of inferior value and certainly no longer valid for the Christian was to have absolute sway.

No Calvinist ever taught more rigidly the absolute sovereignty of God over the life of the members of the Christian community than Conrad Grebel and his brethren did. He resolutely refused to make the deliberate compromise with the world which Luther and possibly Zwingli made, or the unconscious compromise with the world which Calvin made. Grebel's absolutism did not make him a social revolutionary, although his program for the Christian was certainly radical for his time, and in fact is still radical for our day.

He demanded absolute Christian nonresistance , the complete abandonment of the use of force and of the taking of human life. In taking this position, he found it necessary to deny the Christian the right to participate in the functions of the state, for the magistrates were compelled to use force and to take life since the state is ultimately based upon the sanction of force. Again, Grebel repudiated for the Christian the oppressive and unjust economic practices of his day, rejected tithes, and insisted upon the exercise of Christian brotherhood in economic relationships.

It is not true, however, that his program included a communistic social order, although the emphasis upon genuine Christian brotherhood did lead to the establishment of pure Christian communism after a few years in one branch of the Anabaptist movement in Austria and Moravia , that known as " Hutterian Brethren.

Conrad Grebel sought after reality in the spiritual life, a reality that was far removed from any mere externalism or legalism. He sought to generate and maintain a deep inner spiritual life through a living faith in Christ and a personal union with Him. He earnestly sought to make this inner spiritual life effective in the daily experience of the Christian believer, in trust in God for daily needs, in love toward the brethren, in separation from sin and the world, and in the life of holiness.

He held that alone through incorporation with Christ and the brethren can the individual receive the strength necessary to live the Word of God, to conquer sin, and to maintain love. The most characteristic feature of Anabaptism, following inevitably from its concept of discipleship , was its insistence upon a new church of truly committed and practicing believers in contradistinction to the prevailing concept of the Volkskirche or inclusive church of the Reformation and subsequent periods held by Catholics and Protestants Lutheran and Zwinglian alike and maintained by the powerful patronage of the state, and to which, by birth and infant baptism , the entire population belonged.

It was in the months between October and January that the battle between the two diametrically opposing views was fought out in the very heart of the Swiss Reformation. Zwingli, as Professor von Muralt has said, deliberately rejected the Swiss Brethren call for a church of true believers only and established "a church in which all professing Christians, the nominal, lukewarm, and indifferent ones as well as the really live and active Christians are kept together, a church to which the entire population belongs and which is not the church of genuine believers but only an imperfect human institution" L.

Luther and Calvin made the same basic decision, as did the leaders of the English Reformation, thereby establishing the "Volkskirche" as the official and general pattern for the whole of Protestantism. Only the Swiss Brethren on and Dutch Mennonites on at this crossroads of Christian history took the road of the free church of committed Christians, thus becoming the fourth major Reformation type.

What personal significance has Conrad Grebel for the historic movement which he founded? The answer is chiefly that he made possible the initial and basic breakthrough. Historically the case is clear. To this commitment he held unflinchingly in the crucial moment when, in bitter determination to annihilate their ideas forever, all the power of church and state thundered down upon him and his small band of followers. Once the great and irrevocable step was taken, other faithful and noble spirits, including ultimately thousands of martyrs, followed in Grebel's train; but Conrad Grebel was the first Anabaptist.

He was the first to clearly mark the road away from Luther's and Zwingli's mass church into the free church of voluntary commitment, brotherhood, and full evangelical discipleship, of separation of church and state, and of freedom of conscience.

Where others shrank from adoption of the full New Testament ideal because of fear that it could not be carried through in practice, as for instance Luther , Grebel acted. He chose to follow the vision without calculation of possibilities or practicalities, believing that the truth commands, it does not merely advise. For him the kingdom of God is to be built here and now in the fellowship of believers, in the beloved community of the disciples of Christ.

This conviction was the sole ground for the existence of the Swiss Brethren brotherhood and later related groups. Unlike the other reformers, Grebel's is not a sharply delineated figure because of the brevity of his career, but his basic view of the essence of Christianity and the nature of the church is clear, and his place in church history is secure.

That Grebel and his Swiss Brethren derived their faith solely and directly from the New Testament without any apparent literary or personal antecedents is one of the most striking things about the new movement.

Every attempt to trace connections to earlier sources has failed, whether to the Waldensians or the Hussites as Ludwig Keller believed, or to the Franciscan Tertiaries as Albrecht Ritschl suggested. The Anabaptists were Biblicists and it was from the Biblical fountains that they drank. Having taken altogether seriously the sola scriptura of the Reformation, they were able to break more completely with the ecclesiastical and sociological forms of the Middle Ages and thus to return to the original ideas of the New Testament.

For more than two decades after its writing, Harold Bender's biography of Grebel was read as the indisputable account. The following effort to update the Grebel historiography in the light of more recent revisionist writings will be restricted to a cursory review of seven of Bender's interpretations.

By portraying Grebel as the chief founder of Swiss and South German Anabaptism, Bender presented a heroic progenitor of what has become the traditional, normative, theological vision of Anabaptist origins. Through the work of later historians, e. A movement is an aggregate of people with a common cause in a variegated sociopolitical context, and the younger students of the Anabaptist movement are giving more attention to its contextual developments than to its so-called normative vision.

Grebel surely had an early role in certain aspects of mentorship, but the development of the movement resulted from interdependent roles.

What Bender failed to understand sociologically was the contextual functions of radicalism which the Grebel group performed in the Zwinglian movement and the complexity of the sociopolitical factors involved in the subsequent schism.

From a behavioral perspective, Zwingli's attitude at this stage of his reformation was essentially radical in the sociological meaning of that term, i. This need not imply that he was responsible for all of the actions of his most eager advocates, some of which caused problems for him as he steered the precarious course between tradition and change. On one hand he moved cautiously and no faster than he felt the system could move with him.

But on the other hand, he, together with his advocates, prepared the way for change and then allowed events to come to a crisis. Heinold Fast portrays the Grebel group as Reformation storm-troopers, whose precipitous actions could advance Zwingli's cause at the same time that they could endanger it Fast, , The nature of this precarious partnership can be observed in a sequence of demonstrations involving Grebel and other persons who were later participants in the Anabaptist separation.

One was a preaching disturbance in the Dominican monastery by Grebel and three of his friends. In his attempt to play down Grebel's precipitous behavior, Bender wrote that "it is hardly possible that the four accused had been speaking against the monks [i. Following the review of these events by Goeters , Fast , and others, it now appears less unlikely that Grebel and his friends were doing exactly what the chronicler said they were doing, what Fast calls "reformation through provocation"—acts of pulpit-storming in which the ambiguous partnership with Zwingli is surely evident.

Bender's claim above that Grebel's humanist education "made no evident contribution to his religious life or thinking" needs the corrective analyses found in articles by Robert Kreider , Kenneth Davis , and especially in Dale Schrag's dissertation