A History of the Mennonite Brethren Church, Ja Toews

ramentarians offered growing opposition to the Roman Catholic view of the Eucharist by rejecting the doctrine of the physical presence of Christ in the bread and the wine of the Communion. Here, as in Switzerland, there was general dissatisfaction with the state of the Medieval Church. The yearnings and frustrations of these people found new hope of fulfillment in 1530 with the arrival in the Netherlands of Melchior Hoffman. Earlier in his spiritual pilgrimage this gifted but uneducated man had moved from Catholicism to Lutheranism. For several years he was the stormy apostle of this new faith in the Scandinavian countries and Northern Germany. Later he moved closer to the views of Zwingli and Carlstadt, both of whom differed from Luther in their understanding of the Lord's Supper. In Strassburg he first met the Anabaptists and accepted many of their views, but he also added ideas of his own. He was especially attracted to the prophecies of the Bible as they appeared in the books of Daniel and Revelation, "those most dangerous of all books in the hands of unlettered enthusiasts." 12 Hoffman returned to Emden, East Friesland, shortly after he had become an Anabaptist. Here his message found a ready response and about three hundred were baptized. Two Hoffmannite apostles visited Leeuwarden in West Friesland later that year (1530) and succeeded in winning and baptizing Obbe and Dirk Philips, two brothers who became important leaders in the movement. Under the severe persecution which set in almost immediately, the chiliastic seeds of Hoffman's gospel produced an evil harvest. According to Hoffman's prediction, the new age would be ushered in in 1533 (the Great Tribulation having begun in 1526) with Strassburg as the New Jerusalem. After Hoffman's imprisonment in Strassburg, Jan Matthijs, a follower of Hoffman, used a new prophecy to change the location to Muenster in northwest Germany. The resort to violence and the practice of polygamy in the "Muenster Kingdom" must be viewed as a tragic aberration and a complete denial of the basic views of mainstream evangelical Anabaptists. Unfortunately, most church historians of the established churches have magnified this incident and put the Muenster stigma on the whole Anabaptist movement until recent times. Under the sane leadership of Obbe and Dirk Philips a large segment of the Dutch Anabaptists repudiated the revolutionary Muensterites. In 8 HISTORY OF THE MENNON1TE BRETHREN CHURCH this crucial period of reorientation Menno Simons joined the movement. He was destined, under God, to become the most important leader of the persecuted and scattered flock. Menno Simons(1496— 1561) Menno Simons was born in Witmarsum, a small village in the northern Dutch province of Friesland. He studied for the priesthood and was ordained in 1524, receiving his first assignment in Pingjum. His emancipation from Roman Catholicism and his conversion to an evangelica