Chris I agree that there is good and bad in all movements – including Universalism. And the main part of Lutheranism today is very positive and draws on the positive legacy of Luther – his sacramental theology and his theology of sanctification, his great love of music as one of the good things fo life which eventually inspired Bach (Some of Bach’s glorious Chorale’s are arrangements of Luther’s hymns). I had a friend at school – Immo – whose father was the Lutheran Pastor at Bonheoffer’s old Church in Forest Hill – where he presided for a short time before returning to Germany to be martyred – and he was lovely and I went to an advent fair there and it was wonderful. I think we have to face the good with the bad when assessing the past and that helps us to have a more nuanced picture of the present
A question for you all. Who said ‘Food is shut up full seemly as if within a purse and in good time the purse opens full marvellously. And God does this and meets us in our humblest needs?’. Well I need my Yentil here 
but she’s busy with her coursework so I shall not disturb her. So let’s see it as a rhetorical question. And the answer is… wait for it … Julian of Norwich thanking God for a healthy bowel movement unabashedly but with a kindly and gentle image. Compare and contrast with Luther Both Julian and Martin Luther also spoke of Jesus in chivalric and courtly language – as was natural in those times. But for Mother Julian Jesus is ‘our full courteous Lord’ while for Luther Christ is the jouster who enters the lists and ‘fights for me’ (with ‘me’ being the operative word).
Why did Luther persecute the Anabaptists? Well first perhaps we should ask who were the Anabaptists? – they were not identical the Baptists today believing in adult baptism (the Baptists – defenders of religious liberty with the distinctive doctrine of believer baptism) are descended from largely from John Smyth the Elizabethan Anglican Separatist– although there are some tenuous links with the earlier Mennonite Anabaptist movement. The Anabaptist were the radical wing of the Reformation comprising a number of disparate groups.
They believed in adult baptism – but during the time of the Reformation this was a very dangerous thing sot believe in. Most Catholics, Lutherans, Zwinglians, and Calvinist all shared one thing in common; they believed that Church attendance should be enforced by magistrates to protect social order. Child baptism was s sign that the child was to be brought into conformity with the magisteruim of the Church State. To make religion a matter of personal choice for an adult was lunacy and an invitation to anarchy. There were also obviously concerns that not having infants baptised would lead to their damnation – as Augustine taught.
They believed in holding goods in common and later Anabaptists were mainly pacifists – which again was seen as being against the sate and a threat to civil order.
Although their leaders were often highly educated – and some were even Christian humanists scholars – the majority of the Anabaptists were drawn from the lower classes. So they were seen as potential revolutionaries by the magisterium. In the early stages of the Reformation this fear was sometimes well grounded– but not so in the latter pacifist movements of Anabaptists that were ruthlessly persecuted without cause. Because they were harassed and killed their scholars were always on the move and sometimes thought through their ideas without consultation of adequate thought - so they sometimes came up with ideas that were seen as heresy. For example an influential Anabaptist teacher Melchior Hoffman taught that Christ did not have a human body but only a spiritual body – which is technically the Docetic heresy - and many Anabaptist were arraigned and killed for this belief (often falsely – because not all Anabaptists believed this and not all Anabaptist were Unitarians – another charge on which they were often arraigned).
The origins of the disparate Anabaptist groups are obscure and probably linked to peasant movements in the Middle Ages. And Luther came preaching freedom from the tyranny of the Church of Rome. At first he would have agreed with Erasmus – let the wheat and the tares grow up together – laugh at error challenge error but do not kill the man you call heretic. Then Thomas Muntzer – a former colleague of Luther’s and a charismatic firebrand– fired up the peasants and they rose in violent revolt against the German Princes thinking they were supporting Luther (they’d suffered hard under the Church with its tithing of them when they were starving, and with its selling of Indulgences and Pardoners and it Summoners to ecclesiastical courts that needed to be paid off with a bribe – and there had been many lynchings of these shady ecclesiastical dignitaries by German peasants). But Luther was horrified at the tumult and called upon the Princes to kill the peasants and show no mercy – which they did with terrible savagery. Muntzer was once lionised by Communist as a martyr for justice – but the consensus today is that he had no clear programme to help the peasants at all and he was in fact a reckless nihilist in love with the intensity of the moment. At least some of the peasant insurrections were early Anabaptists and all of them became identified with the amorphous Anabaptist movement in popular imagination.
As for Luther? Well his behaviour was appalling too – but we can see some mitigation in the historical context. Luther was always convinced the time was very short indeed and he last Judgement was imminent (whereas Erasmus took the longer view). This lead him to fits of rage filled disappointment when his programme of freedom which was meant to gather in the Lord’s elect was frustrated. The peasant rising had to be put down with maximum barbarity because by unleashing anarchy they were threatening the civil stability necessary for the spread of the Gospel. Likewise the Jews – who he had hoped would convert in large numbers to the new faith and thereby speed up Christ’s return – by their stiff necked refusal were also frustrating the progress of the Gospel. We can note that he honestly thought these things were true without condoning anything he said or did. And of course it was not only his speeches against the Jews that later reverberated centuries later with the Nazis – the rhythms of Luther are there in Hitler’s speeches even if Luther’s quarrel with the Jews was not strictly on racial grounds – but also in his view of the power and authority of the State. Even Bonheoffer was conflicted about challenging the Nazis at first because of traditional Lutheran doctrine about State authority. But I do note that the liberal Lutheran tradition in Denmark fared very well during these dark times – the Church there organised the total public support of the Jews which made Nazi persecution almost impossible even under occupations
It was also around this time that the Anabaptist began to be identified with Origenist Universalists – although there is no evidence that any but a few of them were Universalists at this time. The stereotype was of the Universalist as violent anarchist inviting Satan to sit and sup at the Kingdom’s feast by believing in Satan’s redemption – and many of the stereotype that informed the witch hunts grew out of the stereotyping of Anabaptist -and most of the so called witches that were killed were actually Christian ‘heretics’ or falsely accused Christian heretics). There was also the stereotype propagated in many prints and chapbooks by the magisterial Christians – Catholic and Protestant – of the Anabaptist adult baptism rite as a time of lewd nakedness and debauchery.
Well mnay fo the Anabaptist movements were entirely peaceful and innocent – but In the 1530’s a group of millenarian Anabaptist ruled over Munster on the continent. For two years, from (1533-1535) it was governed by their ‘Messianic King’ John of Leydon (a sort of David Koresh - of Waco fame - figure). He imposed both communism and polygamy on the people and ruled with great cruelty, especially towards women who would not comply with polygamy, or who were found guilty of adultery. There are rum ours that as the end came he disported with his concubines as messianic King in his banqueting hall while his comrades starved but these are only rumours. The Messianic Kingdom of Munster was ended with enormous and revolting cruelty by a Catholic army that had found common cause with the Lutherans. The aftershock of Munster created fear in a generation of Magisterial Protestants, and persuaded them to sully all Anabaptists with the memory of the Messianic Kingdom. Again these Anabaptists were accused of being Universalists’ – although there is absolutely no evidence for this.
After the Munster debacle Anabaptism dissociated itself from charismatic and messianic leaders and we begin to see the two distinct traditions of Anabaptism proper emerging clearly.
There were the Scriptural Anabaptists – the Mennonites, the Hutterites (and latterly the Amish) – who emphasised the authority of the Word as scripture (interpreted with their own distinctive theology). The first Universalist sect of Scriptural Anabaptist that we know of was/are the Tunkers/Dunkers who originated in Germany in 1708 and later became the Church of the Brethren of Christ (one of the historic Peace Churches in the USA today). The Dunkers were also influenced by the writings of Lutheran Pietists.
Alongside the Scriptural tradition developed the Spiritual tradition. The Spiritual tradition traces its lineage to Hans Denck – the Christian Humanist scholar who was in Basle at the same time as Erasmus. The Spiritual Anabaptists emphasised both the Authority of the Word as Scripture, and the Authority of the Word as the Logos/Light that is within every human being (a theme that Origen with his emphasis on Christ as Wisdom would have agreed with). One reason for Denck’s Spiritual emphasis was compassion for the poor and the illiterate who had recently been deprived of the comfort of Catholic sacramentalism but did not have the level of education required to comprehend the subtleties of Protestant doctrine. Denck’s emphasis was not on correct doctrine; rather he emphasised putting on the life of Christ in a spirit of Love and living this life gently with all one’s heart. This emphasis is certainly consonant with Erasmus’ Christian Humanism and many think Denck was directly influenced by Erasmus.
Here are some links to defamatory images of Anabaptists
refo500.nl/content/files/Ima … en/113.jpg
artoflegendindia.com/images/ … usalem.jpg
britishmuseum.org/collection … _001_l.jpg
Here is an image of the cruel martyrdom of two Anabaptists they suffered a greater death toll than all other sects and parties put together – these two have not been burnt on a pyre they’ve been slowly roasted by embers at their feet and are still alive at this point (the terrible idea in all of this was to give them a foretaste of their sufferings in hell so as to dispirit them).
realcourage.org/wp-content/u … /f0101.jpg
And here is an image of the handsome and charismatic messianic King of Munster - John van Leyden
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c … grever.jpg
; and there is another famous one of three Lutheran soldiers relieving their earthy needs in a large and upturned Papal crown. I mean it all seems a bit of a giggle in a very boyish way today - I can’t help but titter at the joke that the revered Father of the Reformation and his upstanding first followers sometimes spoke, wrote and created visual images most unseemly way - and actually the images in context are alarmingly obscene because they are violent and meant to provoke violence too. I seem to remember the according to Josephus, during Jesus’s day when a troop of Roman soldiers were dispatched into the temple for a stand off with young Jewfish hot bloods - everything became tranquil but then one of the Roman soldiers decided to drop his pants and fart in the general direction of the Holy of Holies - and there was terrible bloodshed and loss of life as a result 
Which is a good thing.
