Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief in Reformation Germany: Anabaptism and Lutheranism 1525–1585 by Kat Hill (review)

This insightful, provocative book explores interactions between Lutheran and Anabaptists in central Germany during the early Reformation. With careful research in the primary sources it challenges the popular myth that once Reformation-era Christians chose a theological camp, they persisted in that camp until the point of martyrdom. Hill demonstrates the ways that Christians tried to make sense of their own personal and familial worlds and ties and theological concerns, and often moved between the Lutheran and Anabaptist camps.

While the concept of “popular religion” has been problematized in recent historiography Hill notes that Anabaptism became popular in central Germany “out of individual reactions to Lutheran theology and to ideas heard from preachers . . . in conversation with Catholic tradition” (15). She shows that Anabaptists were geographically dispersed in Saxony, making their influence larger than their numbers. In addition, Hill notes that the lack of a central authority in Saxony made it easier for Anabaptist groups to move in order to avoid persecution. The book notes that before the Peasants’ War Luther detested those who preached without a proper call, believing that they stirred up trouble and rebellion against the princes, who were Luther’s protectors and allies. Lutheranism was organized around appointed preachers and teachers in Wittenberg and elsewhere in Saxony, but Anabaptism spread through a more diffuse and scattered group of mobile teachers.

Hill also complicates the simplistic picture of Anabaptism as a class movement. Not only memories of the Peasants’ War animated the Anabaptist movement, the memory of encounters, preachers, and other religious experiences also shaped Anabaptist commitment. Hill notes that as Anabaptists continued to practice adult baptism they developed a distinctive theological anthropology and ethics. If infants were not condemned by original sin, other notions of responsibility, conversion, and sanctification needed to be developed. For Anabaptists, reason was an important part of Christian commitment. One needed to understand the faith before one could be believe in it. Hill’s chapter on baptism could have done more to elucidate the Anabaptist theology of the Holy Spirit in relation to Luther’s conception, or at least speculate why such a theology was not present in the records she examined. Anabaptists found Luther’s theology of the Lord’s Supper to be untenable to common sense. They rejected the notion that one could or should “eat Jesus” as well as the notion that finite bread could contain the real presence of Jesus. Hill shows that this did not arise from ignorance, but from a set of scriptural teachings, especially John 6.

Hill also explores gender and kinship in Anabaptism, carefully noting that Anabaptists were not free of cultural patriarchy, but their reliance on friendship and social networks to form community and transmit teachings did lead them to different patterns of relationship. She notes some radical Anabaptists saw sex as sacramental; since Christ’s body in the Lord’s Supper linked their bodies to Christ, sex could become a means and part of spiritual practice as sex linked bodies of Christians to one another. Lutherans and others believed that spiritual kinship notions were disruptive of the notion of the home as a well ordered domestic “church.”

The final chapter explores the Lutheran interrogation of Hans Thon, an Anabaptist in Saxony. This case study illustrates one of Hill’s main arguments, namely, that Anabaptists were engaged with the same issues as Lutheran theologians were, and responded to the same anxieties that motivated the Lutheran Reformation but did so in different ways. It shows, too, that Lutheranism and Anabaptism continued to influence one another, if only by giving reasons why one rejected another.

Hill’s work is an exemplary case study of confessional dynamics, and a look at the emotional concerns and anxieties that animated theological affiliations of individual Christians in the era before confessionalization. How, some believers asked, could one “eat Christ” or “bake Christ” in the oven? Some Lutheran beliefs defied what seemed to...