Anabaptist Portraits by John Allen Moore and published by Classics.
The moderate, peaceful New Testament based Anabaptists were of various types and emphases. The differences, as well as the much more important similarities are evident in this collection of biographical sketches.
The first three – Grebel, Mantz and Blaurock – represent the very first chapter in the history of Anabaptism. Sattler fits nobly within the Swiss brethren fellowship, although his origins and much of his work were in South Germany. Denck, a co-operating Anabaptist leader for a period of time, was essentially undogmatically spiritual in approach – uncomfortable in any rigid mould of precept or practice. Hubmaier differed from the others in holding that a good Christian might participate in government – magistracy, the judiciary, law enforcement even to the extent of capital punishment for heinous crime, when officially and rightly call on to do so.
The six biographies have been written as separate stories, each complete in itself. Some repetition, especially in the first three accounts, is therefore by design. All six of the men here presented were pioneers in the Anabaptist movement which ranks as a worthy part of the sixteenth-century Reformation in Europe.
