Menno Simons
- Lived
- 1496–1561
- Era
- Reformation
- Where
- Friesland and north Germany
- Tradition
- Mennonite
Giving the Anabaptists a non-violent shape
A Frisian parish priest who came to doubt infant baptism and transubstantiation, and who left the priesthood in 1536 — the year after the Anabaptist seizure of Munster had ended in slaughter and left the name a byword for sedition.
Why it matters
He spent twenty-five years as a hunted man, with a price on his head, gathering the scattered survivors around believers' baptism, discipline and an explicit refusal of the sword. That he succeeded is why Anabaptism survived at all, and why it survived as a pacifist movement rather than an apocalyptic one. The Mennonites carry his name, which he did not choose.
In the record
-
1525 AD Reform
The Radical Reformation
Gave the scattered movement its settled, non-violent shape
All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.