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.Muntzer saw himself as a prophet come to deliver thegodly from the godless, and he began to speak openly of the need for violence in defenseof this idea.99 The high note was sounded in his Sermon to the Princes (1524), preachedin the presence of both Duke Johann and the crown prince Johann Friedrich of Saxony.¬Evoking dreams from the second chapter of Daniel, Muntzer conjured an image of theGerman church that confirmed his apocalyptical forewarnings and emphasized thedistance between the religion of his own day and the religion of Christ.Once it becameclear that he would find no support among the ruling elite of Saxony, however, heturned to the parishioners and called on his fellow elect in Christ the poor, oppressed,persecuted, powerless, and marginalized to help him realize his vision.This was anidea of Christian Communion so far removed from traditional assumptions that Lutherlikened him to Satan.100But the devil did not just reside in Saxony.Zwingli faced the same kind of oppositionas he worked to see through the Reformation in Zurich.And like the situation inSaxony, the dissenting voices first emerged from within the ranks of his closestsupporters, the main protagonist in the first instance being the recent convert ConradGrebel (c.1498 1526), who began to preach reform in 1522.Even the initial groundsfor separation were similar: Grebel came to disagree with Zwingli over his readiness tocompromise the gospel in order to secure the cooperation of the magistracy, and hewent so far as to suggest that Zwingli was willing to sacrifice the promises of the gospelon the altar of the law. Zwingli, he wrote, the herald of the Word, has cast down theWord, has trodden it underfoot, and has brought it into captivity. 101In contrast to Zwingli, Grebel and the other radicals held that Scripture could beunderstood by all men and women with faith.Bible exegesis was a collective endeavor communal, dialogic, vernacular and it was the responsibility of all Christians toseek constantly in the belief that the church could be restored with the help ofChrist s rule. As Zwingli charged them with literalist reading of Scripture and a starklegalism that lay behind the delusion in supposing they would gather a church thatwas without sin, Grebel and his followers, speaking in similar terms, condemned theZurich reformer for his betrayal of Christ.102 Like Luther and Karlstadt before them,Zwingli and Grebel parted ways over the implications of their respective readings ofScripture for the actual process of reform.For Grebel, there could be no tarrying forweaker conscience; reform must be faithful to the Word, uncompromised anduntarnished, and it must begin immediately.And he was not alone in his thoughts.In short order a number of like-minded reformers made their voices heard, amongthem Simon Stumpf, Balthasar Hubmaier, Wilhelm Reublin, and Ludwig H¬atzer,who also began to challenge Zwingli s model of reform and call for a more thoroughcleansing of the church.Wherever dissenting or marginalized figures emerged, exclusion was as much¬imposed as it was voluntary.This was certainly true of Karlstadt and Muntzer, whowere pushed out of the fold by Luther and the Wittenberg reformers.And it was true ofGrebel and the later Swiss Anabaptists as well.But we should not let subsequent eventsobscure points of origin or deeper reasons for divergence.All of the evangelicals beganwith a common agenda; all were filled with the same desire to go beyond established Foundations 43practice and recover authentic apostolic religion.103 What was different was the scale ofrenewal they had in mind.The first Protestant dissenters, later termed radicals by historians, pursued an idea ofChristianity that threatened to sweep away traditional order.It was not revolution forrevolution s sake; the central issue was the working of the Holy Spirit, and to be precise,how the faithful might come under its affective influence.But unlike the magisterialreformers, the radicals did not hold that the Spirit necessarily had to be mediated byexternal forms or that it was bound to institutions or media.With the full revelation ofthe Spirit, as the Nuremberg prophet Augustin Bader put it, all outer sacraments[would] be rooted out, and there would be no baptism but affliction, no altar but Christ,no church but the community of believing men. 104 This indifference to forms was notthe same thing as an indifference to Christian history.No less than the mainstreamreformers, the radicals understood their movement as part of the historic revelation.Butwhen the radicals spoke about returning to the pure church and rediscovering theSpirit of apostolic Christianity they spoke in different terms to those used by Luther orZwingli.What was required was a fundamental overturning of the old order.The churchwas to be resurrected in the image of the Spirit-filled gatherings of the first Christians,free of the proof texts and ceremonies that had since been heaped on the faith.For theradicals, there could be no checks on the Spirit, neither traditional convictions nordogmatic restraints, nor indeed Scripture itself.What this means in historical terms is thatany attempt to categorize the radicals has to remain an approximate science.The onlyconstant was the desire to overturn the social and ecclesial status quo and put in its place avision of godly order that did not cater (as they saw it) to the weaknesses of fallen man.Fundamental to the dissident or nonconformist impulse was thus a readiness to seek areligious order that paid no heed to traditional forms.Even in their search for apostolicorigins, there was no a priori paradigm of a church that guided the radicals on theirreforming mission.105 Nor was there a hierarchy of church leaders (even if certaincharismatic preachers did amass followers over time), or confessions of the faith alongthe lines of the Lutheran or Reformed variants a few gathered thoughts, but nothingas comprehensive as the later magisterial syntheses.It was this lack of fixed order, thisseeming Babel of opinion, that first prompted Luther to refer to the radicalism of the¬Saxons as Schwarmerei, a word that evoked medical theories relating to flutteringthoughts that swarmed and stung the mind as well as divination, or more specificallythe ancient opinion that the activity of bees, as Calvin put it, had some portion of thedivine spirit and have drawn some virtue from the sky. 106 Luther believed thatthe radical rejection of the externals of the faith, along with their presumed relianceon the Spirit, had led them away from the teachings of Christ.Similarly, he added, theiraversion to traditional religious forms, whether sacraments, rituals, images, or cere-monies, had just pushed them in the direction of servility to a new set of external laws,though these were purely of their own making.The consequence, Luther believed, wasa religion based on blatant subjectivity and willful invention, the only possible outcomebeing a denial of all earthly and spiritual realities
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