Sixteenth-century Lutherans, Roman Catholics and Swiss reformers were quick to condemn Anabap- tist teaching, but political leaders also took action. Some 350 Anabaptist Christians (right) were executed in Alzey, Germany, in 1529.
Christ was death. Is that toleration? The historical record is also
mixed among Lutherans. When Martin Luther defended his views before the imperial Diet at Worms in 1521, he said it is “neither safe nor right to go against conscience.” There was no tolerance for Luther, who was both excommunicated and outlawed. But as Lutheran- ism spread, Luther and his fellow reformers weren’t always tolerant of other viewpoints, even though they continued to assert the right to fol- low their own beliefs. The Evangelical Church in Ger-
many, a federation of Lutheran, Reformed and United churches in Germany, designated 2013 as the year of “Reformation and Toler- ance.” This is part of its Luther Decade, 10 years of special empha- ses leading up to the 500th anniver- sary of the Reformation in 2017. The theme “Reformation and Tolerance” provides Lutherans today—in Ger- many and in the U.S.—the oppor-
22 The Lutheran •
www.thelutheran.org
tunity to wrestle with our complex history of religious tolerance and intolerance.
Our failures
Anabaptists and Jews were two groups that suffered greatly from Reformation-era intolerance. Anabaptists were Christians
who rejected infant baptism. They thought baptism was something believing Christians needed to request for themselves once they had come to a mature faith. The Anabaptist movement began in 1525, less than a decade after Luther launched the Protestant Ref- ormation by posting his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. Anabaptists considered their new understand- ing of believers’ baptism to be a natural outgrowth of the Protestant belief in justification by faith alone, but this view was rejected by other Christians.
One thing that 16th-century
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Lutherans, Roman Catholics and Swiss reformers could agree on, despite all their differences, was that the Anabaptists were wrong. Church leaders were quick to condemn Ana- baptist teaching, but political leaders also took action. Because Anabap- tists chose to separate themselves from society (like the Amish and [Old Order] Mennonites today), they were considered a threat to the social order as well as to traditional church teaching and practice. In some ter- ritories, the punishment for being an Anabaptist was death. The Augsburg Confession, the statement of faith that the Lutheran reformers presented to the emperor in 1530, explicitly condemns the Anabaptists in five of its 28 articles. The Formula of Concord, a later Lutheran confessional writing, states that the Anabaptists “profess doc- trines of a kind that cannot be toler- ated either in the church, or in the body politic and secular administra- tion, or in domestic society.”
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