Conrad Grebel

Conrad Grebel came from a wealthy Zürich patrician family — his father was Jakob Grebel, a city councillor with imperial connections. He studied at Basel, Vienna, and Paris in the humanist mode, running up debts and conducting himself, as he later admitted, in ways he had reason to regret. He returned to Zürich around 1521 and came immediately under the influence of Ulrich Zwingli, who was reforming the city church with careful scriptural arguments. For two years Grebel was a member of the inner circle — attending the famous Monday Bible study where Zwingli read through the New Testament in Greek with his colleagues, corresponding with the great humanist Erasmus, working closely with Felix Manz and others in the reform circle.

The break came over pace and principle, and it was both at once. Zwingli argued that the city council had to sanction each reform: images would be removed when the council decided; infant baptism would be addressed when the council was ready. This was not cynical for Zwingli — he believed that reforming the whole city together, not creating a gathered sect inside it, was the New Testament pattern. Grebel, Manz, and their colleagues read the New Testament and saw something different: a community gathered voluntarily by repentance and faith, independent of the civil magistrate's timetable, baptized as believers into a covenant of discipleship. Infant baptism was not a New Testament rite; the church was not coextensive with the city.

Their September 1524 letter to Thomas Müntzer in Saxony — the surviving evidence of a wider network trying to connect — shows the Grebel circle working out the implications. They told Müntzer that Scripture authorizes no coercion in the gospel's service: no revolutionary force, no state church, no compulsion of conscience. Their program was radical in principle and nonviolent in method; Müntzer's was revolutionary. They were already different kinds of reformers.

After months of disputation, the Zürich council issued a January 1525 mandate ordering all unbaptized infants to be baptized within eight days on pain of exile. On January 21, 1525, in a house on Neustadt Lane belonging to Felix Manz's mother, a small group gathered. A former priest named George Blaurock asked Conrad Grebel to baptize him. Grebel did. Blaurock then baptized each of the others present in turn. This was the first adult baptism of the Reformation — a deliberate, illegal act of ecclesial founding. The Swiss Brethren movement had begun.

The Zürich council moved quickly. Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat in January 1527 — the bitter irony of a third baptism inflicted on a man who believed in one baptism for believers. Grebel escaped a harsher fate only because plague killed him at Maienfeld in the summer of 1526, roughly twenty-eight years old, less than two years after the founding baptism. He had been a serious Christian for perhaps four years of his life.

What Conrad Grebel contributed was a question that the magisterial Reformation had not quite asked: what is the relationship between the gathered community of believers and the governing authorities? Zwingli said: coordinate them. Grebel said: distinguish them, as the New Testament church was distinct from the Roman state. The Free Church traditions — Baptist, Mennonite, Brethren, and ultimately the religious liberty settlement in America — follow the logic of Neustadt Lane more than the logic of the Zürich Council. Grebel did not live to see any of it. He was a convert who read the New Testament with the eyes of a man who had just stopped living the way he used to live, and who could not reconcile what he read with what he saw. That question outlasted the plague that killed him.