Lecture 14-3: The Schleitheim Confession — A Church Fully Separated

Schleitheim's fourth article, on separation from the world, cites language very close to the Corinthians passage directly, reading Paul's warning against being "unequally yoked" as a governing principle for the whole of a believer's social existence, not only for marriage (its narrower original context) — a broadening move worth naming honestly as an extension of the text rather than a simple restatement of it. The Matthew passage anchors the confession's sixth article, on the sword: Sattler and his colleagues read Christ's command to love enemies as flatly incompatible with a Christian wielding lethal force against them, even in a magistrate's official capacity, a reading this lecture's closing section sets directly against the magisterial reformers' own use of the same Sermon on the Mount.

Michael Sattler and the need for a common statement

Michael Sattler had been prior of a Benedictine house near Freiburg before leaving it, convinced that the monastery's wealth and discipline had drifted from the gospel he found in Scripture. He joined the Anabaptist movement sometime in 1525 or 1526 and quickly became one of its most capable leaders precisely because his monastic formation had given him practice in the kind of communal discipline and structured common life the scattered, persecuted movement badly needed. By early 1527 the Swiss Brethren had spread from Zurich into South Germany, Austria, and Moravia, gathering under different local leaders who did not always share the same emphases — some more inclined toward the spiritualism this course met in Chapter 9's Zwickau Prophets, some more apocalyptically minded in ways that would later surface catastrophically at Münster (this chapter's next lecture). The February 1527 gathering at Schleitheim, and the seven articles it produced, gave the wider movement a common reference point precisely at the moment its founding generation was being killed off and its geographic spread risked pulling it apart into incompatible local variants.

The seven articles, read as one argument

Schleitheim's articles are worth listing in the order the confession itself gives them, because that order builds an argument rather than presenting a checklist.

First, baptism is reserved for those who have repented, amended their lives, and requested it themselves in genuine faith — restating, in confessional form, the practice this chapter's first lecture already narrated, and grounding church membership in a personal, adult act rather than an inherited status. Second, the ban (church discipline, drawn from Matthew 18's procedure) provides for the correction and, if necessary, exclusion of a baptized member who falls into open sin and will not repent when confronted — a discipline the confession insists must precede the Supper, so that unrepentant sin is dealt with before communion rather than tolerated alongside it. Third, the breaking of bread (the Lord's Supper) is closed to those outside this baptized, disciplined community — not, the confession is careful to say, because outsiders are worthless, but because the Supper signifies a unity of life and body among those who have already been united by baptism and discipline, a unity that including the unbaptized would falsify. Fourth, separation from "the world" — named concretely as "all popish and repopish works and idolatry," worldly assemblies, taverns, civic oaths of loyalty, military service, and any other entanglement that would compromise the gathered church's distinctness from surrounding society — generalizes Paul's "unequally yoked" language (above) into a comprehensive social rule. Fifth, the pastoral office describes shepherds chosen from within the congregation, supported by it, and subject to the same discipline as any other member, an intentionally flat, congregational model against both Catholic clerical hierarchy and the magisterially appointed pastorates of Lutheran and Reformed territories alike. Sixth, the sword — civil government's coercive power, including capital punishment and warfare — is acknowledged as ordained by God "outside the perfection of Christ" for restraining evil in the fallen world generally, but is declared entirely off-limits for a follower of Christ, who is called instead to the "perfection" of nonresistance the confession finds modeled in Christ's own conduct and commanded in passages like the one above from Matthew 5. Seventh, the oath is rejected outright on the authority of Matthew 5:34-37 ("swear not at all"), removing from the Christian's hands the entire apparatus of sworn testimony, civic loyalty oaths, and guild membership oaths that structured nearly every formal relationship in sixteenth-century society.

Taken as a set, the seven articles are not seven independent preferences. They are seven consequences of one ecclesiology: the church is a visible, voluntary, disciplined body of the openly regenerate, gathered out of and clearly marked off from a surrounding society that remains, on this view, largely unregenerate regardless of its outward Christian profession. Baptism marks entry into that body; the ban maintains its purity; closed communion protects its unity; separation, the rejection of the sword, and the rejection of oaths together refuse every mechanism by which the surrounding "world" — its governments, its wars, its guilds, its civic loyalties — could otherwise pull the gathered church back into the undifferentiated Christian society every other tradition in this course still assumed was possible and desirable.

The strongest case for Schleitheim's logic — and the strongest objection to it

Read sympathetically, Schleitheim's ecclesiology has real coherence and a real scriptural basis its authors were not inventing from nothing: it takes with full seriousness Jesus's own teaching on nonresistance and oaths, refuses the assumption (shared by every magisterial reformer and by Rome) that a Christian society and the visible church can simply be the same population under two descriptions, and it offers a concrete, workable model of the disciplined, gathered congregation that later Baptist, Mennonite, and free-church traditions would develop at length. Sattler and his colleagues were not being willfully divisive; they were following what they read in the Sermon on the Mount to what they judged its necessary institutional conclusion.

The magisterial reformers' objection, stated in its strongest form and not as a caricature, ran roughly as follows. Romans 13, which this confession's sixth article addresses only briefly, describes civil government bearing the sword as "God's servant for good" and calls Christians to be subject to it — a text Luther and Zwingli both read as establishing that a Christian may, and in the right office should, exercise the sword on the state's behalf, rather than that Christians must abstain from civil office altogether. On the magisterial view, refusing all participation in government and all military service does not keep the Christian conscience clean; it simply leaves civil order, which Scripture itself calls a good and necessary restraint on evil, entirely in the hands of the unregenerate, a result these reformers thought Scripture nowhere requires and Christian charity toward one's neighbors' safety argues against. Neither side's reading of Romans 13 and the Sermon on the Mount together is presented here as simply correct; both engage the same texts with genuine seriousness, and the disagreement between them outlived every figure in this lecture.

Every article follows the same premise; none stands alone.

5. Going to the Sources

• Read the Schleitheim Confession itself in full — it is brief, seven short articles plus a preface and conclusion — in English translation via John H. Yoder's edition and translation, The Legacy of Michael Sattler (Herald Press), or through the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (GAMEO), which hosts the full text under "Schleitheim Confession."
• For the fuller story of Michael Sattler's own trial and execution later in 1527 (beyond this lecture's scope but directly relevant to it), look up the Martyrs Mirror account of Sattler, also referenced in Lecture 14-2's sources, for the community's own memory of the confession's chief author.