Anabaptist Tradition
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- Published on Saturday, 10 September 2011 14:30
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Anabaptist, (from Greek ana, “again”) member of a radical movement of the Protestant Reformation and spiritual ancestor of modern Baptists, Mennonites, and Quakers. The movement’s most distinctive tenet was adult baptism. In its first generation, converts submitted to a second baptism, which was a crime punishable by death under the legal codes of the time. Members rejected the label Anabaptist, or Rebaptizer, for they repudiated their own baptism as infants as a blasphemous formality. They considered the public confession of sin and faith, sealed by adult baptism, to be the only proper baptism. Following the Swiss Reformer Huldrych Zwingli, they held that infants are not punishable for sin until they become aware of good and evil and can exercise their own free will, repent, and accept baptism.