CHURCH AND STATE IN CONFLICT: 
Hubmaier Confronts Catholics and Reformers

Balthasar Hubmaier was famous in Catholic Europe. He was appointed vice-rector of Ingolstadt University in 1515 and then a priest at Regensburg Cathedral the following year. Yet Catholicism was in crisis. The Protestant Reformation was sweeping across Europe and in 1522 Hubmaier publicly identified with the cause of Reform. Expelled from Regensburg he became pastor of a church near Zurich where the Reformation was led by Huldrich Zwingli.

By 1525 Hubmaier was identifying himself with a new cause — the Anabaptist movement. Up to this point the Catholic authorities had mostly left him alone, but as an Anabaptist he could no longer be tolerated. Hubmaier was a wanted man. He fled to Zurich, but Zwingli, the Protestant Reformer, was no more sympathetic to Hubmaier than the Catholics. He handed Hubmaier over to the city authorities to extract a recantation. They did this by torturing him.

A spell in the city prison was followed by a move to the city of Nikolsburg where there was some limited freedom. But, having got away from the Protestants, the Catholics now caught up with him. He was arrested by the Catholic Emperor's police agents, tried for heresy and burned at the stake in Vienna. Three days later his wife had stones tied round her neck and was drowned.

What was it about this man and so many like him in the Anabaptist movement that provoked such violence and hatred from Catholic and Protestant alike, church and State alike? At the heart of the conflict between Anabaptists on the one hand and Catholics and Protestants on the other was the question of the relationship between the church and the secular authorities. Catholics and the Protestant reformers both believed in the idea of a Christian society ruled and ordered according to Christian teaching. It was the duty of the secular authorities to pass and enforce laws in keeping with the church’s vision of society, to enforce formal allegiance to the church and to punish heresy.

The Anabaptists challenged this. While supportive of the Protestant reformation as far as it went, they argued that in its reform of the church it had not gone anywhere near far enough. The church, they argued, was a voluntary community. While secular authorities had a duty to govern well, it was no part of their duty to coerce the conscience of men and women, to enforce Christian belief or to punish heresy. Reformers, Catholics and secular rulers alike were horrified at this idea. To them it was a recipe for religious and social anarchy. This voice for toleration and freedom of conscience could not be tolerated by church or state. So Anabaptists were hunted down, imprisoned, tortured and executed. Hubmaier was not the first or last Anabaptist to die in the flames of religious persecution. Nor was his wife the first or last to die in the waters of a river. Yet the Anabaptist vision and the Anabaptist witness survived.

Alwyn Thomson - Research Officer with ECONI.