Understand the Christians the Reformation Left Behind

If you have spent any time studying the Protestant Reformation, you have probably encountered a familiar cast of characters: Luther at Worms, Zwingli in Zurich, Calvin in Geneva. These are important figures, and their work genuinely reshaped Western Christianity. But if you have ever read far enough into the sources to notice the people being drowned in the rivers of Zurich, burned in the squares of the Netherlands, or expelled from city after city across the Holy Roman Empire — and found yourself asking who were they, and what exactly did they believe? — then you are asking exactly the right question. That question is what this course is built to answer.

I came to the Radical Reformation the way many serious students do: through a footnote, a passing reference, a name in a margin. Conrad Grebel. Felix Manz. Menno Simons. Figures who appeared briefly in standard Reformation narratives and then vanished, usually around the moment they became inconvenient to the story being told. The deeper I went into the primary sources — the confessions, the letters, the trial records, the martyr accounts — the clearer it became that these were not fringe curiosities. They were people working out a coherent, demanding, and often brilliant theology under conditions of extreme pressure, and the questions they raised about the church, the state, scripture, and the cost of discipleship have never stopped being relevant.

What I want to offer you in this course is not a hagiography of the Radical Reformers, and not a prosecution of their opponents. Both would be intellectually dishonest. The Catholic and Protestant authorities who persecuted these communities had arguments, some of which were serious. The Radical Reformers themselves were not a unified movement — they disagreed sharply with one another on baptism, on the nature of Christ, on violence, on how to read scripture — and those disagreements matter for understanding them accurately. The Münster episode is not swept under the rug; it is examined carefully, in context, so you can understand both what actually happened and why it has been used, often unfairly, to discredit movements that had nothing to do with it.

What you will find here is a course that trusts you. It trusts you to read primary sources and form judgments. It trusts you to hold competing arguments in tension without needing one of them declared the winner before you have thought it through. It trusts you to care about the difference between Balthasar Hubmaier's theology and Caspar Schwenckfeld's — because that difference is real, and it matters.

Whether you are a seminary student encountering this material in a formal program, a pastor trying to understand the roots of the free church tradition you serve, or a historically serious independent learner who simply will not accept a shallow account of things that deserve better — I am glad you are here. The people we are studying paid a very high price for their convictions. The least we can do is understand them carefully.