Sword & Trowel 2018: Issue 1
idea of an entire citizen body being Christian from any authentic New Testament standpoint, and affirmed both doctrinally and in practice that the church is essentially and by na- ture distinct from the wider citizen body. One may be born into citizen- ship, but one cannot be born into church membership, only reborn into it through faith in Christ, which is not and never has been the collec- tive privilege of any territorial body of citizens. However, I am not here concerned with what Anabaptists believed on this point. The Ana- baptist movement was very much the tiny minority report in the 16th century.
And this issue aside, the theology
of Reformed Baptists is far more closely aligned with the theology of the Magisterial Reformers. Most Anabaptists cannot be described as Protestants in a historic sense. Their theology was too far adrift on too many points from the convictions expressed in historically Protestant confessions of faith, especially on matters of soteriology – whether sal- vation is by grace alone. One might almost say that Reformed Baptists (as contrasted with Anabaptists) were and are simply those children of the Magisterial Reformation who stopped believing that church and state were two sides of the same coin.
So my concern is to consider aspects of thought in the Magiste- rial Reformation which were not embodied in that Reformation, but which bore fruit among Protestants later, notably although not exclu- sively among Reformed Baptists.
WHO SHOULD BE BAPTISED?
Let us first of all consider bap- tism itself. Were there any currents of thought among the Magisterial Reformers that questioned infant bap- tism and pointed towards believers’ baptism? Yes, there were. In a previ- ous article, I highlighted the influence of Erasmus on Reformation thinking – in some ways Erasmus, with his va- riety of Christian humanism, was the grandfather of Protestantism. Well, Erasmus departed from the medieval consensus on the purpose of baptism and its recipients. While he did not actually reject infant baptism, Eras- mus did suggest that baptism could be given again, once a person had reached the age of discretion and ma- turity, and could now understand the significance of the sacrament. This emphasis on understand- ing the significance of a religious ordinance, and how only someone of relatively mature years was ca- pable of this, made Erasmus into a quasi-Baptist or semi-Baptist. It is not surprising that among the first gen- eration of Swiss Anabaptists, many of its leaders were devout disciples of Erasmus. Yet Zwingli himself was also a
devout Erasmian. Did this aspect of his master’s religious thought affect Zwingli too? It seems to have done. In his early reforming days, we know that Zwingli had not been convinced that infant baptism was truly biblical. We know this because in 1523, he admitted to Balthasar Hubmaier, the greatest theologian among the Swiss Anabaptists, that it would be better if
page 16 Great Advances Sown by the Reformation
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