The Four Cs of Doctrinal History: Part 11 – Anabaptists and the Dordrecht Confession

Since the beginning of the Reformation period, certain men rose to prominence, along with their teachings. Three such men were Martin Luther of Germany, John Calvin of France, and Ulrich Zwingli of Switzerland. They held much in common, though they also had their differences.

One commonality was that they all still held to the Catholic practice of paedobaptism. Luther believed it to be part of tradition and something that was done since the beginning of Christianity. Calvin and Zwingli both likened it to the Old Testament practice of circumcision and therefore believed it to be something the church should practice.

Another commonality between them was their political philosophy. The three men are referred to as “Magisterial Reformers” because of their support from and close ties with some kind of secular, political entity. Neither Luther, nor Calvin, nor Zwingli were completely independent from the state.

Two men who followed Zwingli, Conrad Grebel and Felix Mantz, after studying the Scriptures, came to disagree with the practice of infant baptism. While thankful Zwingli’s separation from the Catholic Church, they believed he and the Reformation movement should go further. They were against the practice of the Mass; they were against the civil oversight of the church; and they were against the baptism of infants.

Grebel and Mantz sought to persuade Zwingli to their beliefs but he did not accept them. These two men, along with a third named George Blaurock, believed in the gospel, but they held that the state should not interfere with the church; they believed that since infants could not repent of their sin they should not be baptized; and they believed that Christ should not continue to be sacrificed in the Mass.

This all came to a head in 1525. After being pressured by the city authorities to baptize all their unbaptized infants and to essentially conform to the Zwinglian ways, the men met at the home of Felix Mantz in Zurich in somewhat of a secret fashion on January 21, 1525.

A letter describes the events of that day, “And it happened that they were together. After fear lay greatly upon them, they called upon God in heaven, that he should show mercy to them. Then George (Blaurock) arose and asked Conrad (Grebel) for God’s sake to baptize him; and this he did. After that, he baptized the others also.”¹ These views clashed with Zwingli’s head on, and within five years of this meeting, George Blaurock, Conrad Grebel, and Felix Mantz would all be dead.

Their movement is sometimes called the “Radical wing” of the Reformation, and they are called “the Radical Reformers,” because their views were held to be so radical from the others. Their decisions formed part of the beginnings of the Anabaptist Movement. The term “anabaptist” simply means rebaptized because of they were first baptized as infants but then were baptized again after their conversion.

By some accounts, the Anabaptists could be a bit wild in their manner. George describes it as “not merely a ‘wing,’ a side effect that revealed a more extreme form of the Reformation; it was instead a movement that gave birth to a new form of Christian faith and life. As one scholar put it, it was a ‘reformation of the Reformation’ or ‘a correction of the correction of Catholicism.’”²

While these three young men were the first sparks of Anabaptism, it was Menno Simons who really helped to grow and shape the Anabaptist Movement.

Menno Simons became a prime leader within this somewhat secondary protestant movement. The Anabaptists were looked upon as the outsiders, the radicals, the weirdos. Admittedly, some of them were very strange. This gave them somewhat of a bad name, but Simons wanted to make Anabaptism something more respectable.³

After renouncing his Catholic priesthood in 1536 Simons was baptized post-conversion, and became an articulate advocate for Anabaptist teaching. His most influential work is The Foundation of Christian Doctrine, in 1540, which was something like Calvin’s Institutes, seeking to instruct believers in the truths of the Christian faith. Simons died in 1562 of natural causes.

In February 1527 an early Confession of faith was written by Michael Sattler, another early convert to the Anabaptist persuasion. His “Schleitheim Confession” could be called the first Protestant confession written. It taught things like credobaptism, communion only received by baptized believers, a Memorialist view of communion, non-violence, and no oath-taking.

Though this document was held by the Anabaptists for many years, a little over 100 years later another document was written by the Dutch Mennonites (named after Menno Simons). “The Dordrecht Confession of Faith” which essentially elaborated upon the seven articles from Shleitheim and added more to them. This was done in the city of Dordrecht, Netherlands in April 1632. It has been the adopted and established confession of many of the Anabaptist sects ever since, containing eighteen articles of faith.

There are things in this confession that most Baptists would agree with and some things that we would not, which is the case with most confessions of faith. However, it was an attempt to further clarify a non-magisterial approach to church ministry, a credobaptist belief and practice, along with basic gospel teaching. We can be thankful for such work of the Anabaptists, while not holding to some of their perhaps extremist views, even as seen today in their descendants — the Amish and Mennonite peoples.

Resources:

Schleithem Confession

Dordrecht Confession of Faith | Resous Anabatis

Menno Simons: Complete Works of Menno Simon Volume 1 – Christian Classics Ethereal Library

---

Previously in this series:

• Introducing the Four “C’s” of Doctrinal History
• The Origins, Division, and Authority of the Four C’s of Doctrinal History
• The Four C’s Part 3 – The Apostles’ Creed
• The Four C’s of Doctrinal History: Part 4 – The Nicene Creed
• The Four C’s of Doctrinal History: Part 5 – The Chalcedonian Definition
• The Four C’s of Doctrinal History Part 6 – The Athanasian Creed
• The Four C’s of Doctrinal History – Part 7: Luther and His Catechism
• The Four C’s of Doctrinal History – Part 8: The Lutheran Augsburg Confession
• The Four C’s of Doctrinal History – Part 9: Early Protestant National Confessions
• The Four C’s of Doctrinal History – Part 10: Anglicanism and the 39 Articles of Religion

---

Taigen Joos is the pastor of Heritage Baptist Church in Dover, NH. He blogs here, where this article first appeared. It is republished here by permission.

---

This photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

1. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2013), 270. [↩]
2. George, 269. [↩]
3. For examples of some of the extreme types of Anabaptist activities, read Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, chapter 6, “No Other Foundation: Menno Simons.” Also, read John Longhurst, “500 years ago, Anabaptists showed the meaning of true evangelical faith,” www.anabaptistworld.org, December 27, 2024, www.anabaptistworld.org/500-years-ago-anabaptists-showed-the-meaning-of-true-evangelical-faith (accessed August 26, 2025). [↩]