The Case of Münster: Melchior Hoffman’s The Ordinance of God (1530) 

Melchior Hoffman is credited with bringing Anabaptism to North Germany and the Netherlands. 

According to the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (G.A.M.E.O.), he was born around 1495 and grew up in the Stuttgart area of southern Germany and was well-educated especially in religious and Biblical studies. He was very inspired by Martin Luther and went on to preach all over Europe based on Luther’s teachings of justification through faith alone and iconoclasm. 

Andreas Karlstadt was another theologian he was influenced by but scholars believe aside from Luther and Karlstadt his views largely came from the “Spiritual Franciscan tradition” which his education growing up was grounded in. 

He eventually started challenging the Lutheran church on the "faith-alone doctrine" and on its view of communion. Hoffman was then exposed to the Anabaptist movement and resonated with a lot of their beliefs and principles and officially joined the Anabaptist church in 1530 in Strasbourg.

Hoffman’s The Ordinance of God was addressed to the people of East Friesland, a region in northwestern Germany, for the purpose of spreading the Anabaptist belief that Christ commanded that to enter the church and therefore be reborn into the Kingdom of God, one must be baptized voluntarily. 

His theology was very apocalyptic, using the imagery of the church’s marriage with Christ as the end of this world and the start of the new creation.  These views ultimately provided the framework for the Anabaptist “Münster Kingdom” whose inhabitants came to believe that they had been chosen to establish the kingdom of God and prepare for Christ’s return.

Hoffman’s description of Jesus Christ in The Ordinance of God was very magisterial in nature. 

His rhetoric doesn’t paint the picture of Jesus being a lowly servant leader who washes his disciples' feet, rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, and eats meals with prostitutes and tax collectors but emphasizes that Jesus “received from his Heavenly Father all power, might, strength, spirit, mind, and will and promises that he [will] be a king, prince, captain both in heaven and on earth, and that his rule extends over all...” 

I believe this way of portraying Christ is similar to what most Jews of the Old Testament were expecting their messiah to be like. He’s advocating for an authoritarian society led by Christ, or at least by those who supposedly know God’s will best until Christ returns. So it makes sense to me that Hoffman’s writings played a large role in inspiring Münster to become a “militant Old Testament messianism” as editor Lowell Zuck describes it. 

Forming the basis of Hoffman’s proclamation, the marriage analogy for the new covenant was "fleshed out" (if you will) quite a bit in The Ordinance of God. The “water bath and baptism” is a public covenant that unites a person to Christ just like a wedding is a public covenant that unites two people together. Marriages are illegal if both parties don’t consent to them, and in the same way Hoffman argues that the baptism covenant must be voluntary, rational, and the covenant must be understood by the one who is taking part in it. This is why Hoffman passionately states: 

“...infant baptism is absolutely not from God but rather is practiced, out of willfulness, by anti-Christians and the satanic crown, in opposition to God and all his commandment, will, and desire. Verily, it is an eternal abomination to him...”

The idea of marriage, being two people surrendering to each other’s will, was also used to demonstrate that baptism should be about a person surrendering to the will of God and accepting God’s surrender, his grace. Hoffman believed the purpose of Jesus’ baptism was to be a model for this kind of surrender. It was a covenant between the Son and the Father with the contents of the covenant being the promise that humanity can receive the Kingdom of God in exchange for surrendering to God’s will symbolized by the act of baptism. 

According to Hoffman this allows all people who are baptized to enter the Kingdom of God in the here and now: these people can have “true rest completely naked and resig[n] to enter the bed of the Bridegroom where the righteous [re-]birth takes place and where one is instructed by God and the Word”. 

So again I believe the implication for the society of the people reading this is that people will feel they must surrender to whoever has the power to claim that they know God’s will the best which leads to an authoritarian state.

Not only do “the Bride”, the baptized people of the church, and “the Bridegroom”, Christ, become one flesh as those in a human marriage partnership do (as stated in Genesis 2 and restated in Matthew 19, Mark 10, and Ephesians 5), Hoffman claimed that this Bride and Bridegroom become “one body, one flesh, one spirit, and one passion.” He believes communion symbolizes this and he uses an analogy of a wedding ring to explain his beliefs about communion (so many symbols and analogies, and analogies within analogies!).  

In the same way that a wedding ring is not in itself the marriage but rather is an important universal symbol that reminds those in the marriage of the covenant and communicates to others that they are in a covenant relationship, Hoffman says that the consuming of bread and wine together is a symbol of people’s covenant relationship with Christ. 

Consuming the bread is a symbol of receiving Christ’s body allowing the church to become “one body” or “one flesh” with Christ. Consuming the wine is a symbol of receiving Christ’s blood, the blood that was poured out of Christ Jesus when he was crucified, and as Hoffman puts it, referring again to the church as the Bride: “his blood is [one] with hers.” I guess this is how he symbolizes the church becoming “one spirit” and “one passion” with Christ.

With his idea of the church being a single body, a single bride though, I don’t believe Hoffman is in line with the analogy in 1 Corinthians 12 of the church being one body with many members. He treats the Bride that gets married to Christ as simply one person implying that Hoffman believes everyone needs to assimilate, everyone needs to believe the same thing, and therefore once again everyone needs to follow authority without questioning it. 

When Hoffman adds that if people are baptized but are following Satan their blood won’t be able to mix with Christ’s and they will be “poisoned by the blood and die”, he is saying that not assimilating leads to death. 

So although Hoffman doesn’t explicitly mention whether he believes the physical sword should ever be used or not he believes it is best to ban people from the church who are like this after three chances as outlined in Matthew 15. 

• Do Hoffman’s analogies resonate with you? Even if not, could they be helpful for understanding or articulating what the rituals of baptism, communion, marriage, etc, meant to early Anabaptists and also what they mean to ourselves?

• Is Hoffman’s portrayal of Christ in line with other Anabaptists of his time? What about in Anabaptism and Christianity in general today? Do you also believe this kind of thinking about Christ leads to “militant Old Testament messianism”?