1525 was the year of conflict in Zurich featuring the attempts of the anabaptists to persuade Zwingli and the other Clerics to speed up the pace of reform.
Zwingli was too smart to rush headlong into changes too fast but his opponents (oddly the very people who were formerly his friends) were hell bent on proceeding.
Towards the end of that busy year Zwingli’s friend Berchtold Haller wrote him a letter in which he used the interesting term ‘pseudobaptists’ to describe the anabaptists.
Opportunissime misisti, frater et praeceptor candidissime, libellum tuum contra pseudobaptistas, nimirum non minus pro nostra quam tua sollicitus ecclesia. Nam ad diem dominicum proximum Actorum caput 18. et 19. [Act. 18. 8, 19. 1 ff.] cum prae manibus habeam, quid mihi tua interpretatione, quae plane tua non est, sed eius, qui per te omnia agit [1. Cor. 12. 6], clarius accidere potuit? Utcunque et Thomas et ego delati simus aput te, eo tamen insanię nunquam devenimus, ut puerorum baptismum negaremus.
Those more eager than Zwingli managed to nearly derail Reform and had to be evicted from the city under the order of the Great Council to spare it civil war.
Wanting to do things scripturally means also wanting to do things ‘decently and in order’. It was this which the Anabaptists, or in Haller’s term, the Pseudobaptists, refused to do.
Zwinglius Redivivus 
If I could, I’d like to put in a word of defense for the Anabaptists:
* Early on Zwingli had said that everything would be up for review in their reform process and he even questioned whether infant baptism was Biblical. So, it would be understandable then that they would see him as the one who was being irresponsible and backtracking on the friendship.
* They never called themselves ‘Anabaptists.’ They believed their first infant baptism was illegitimate and therefore their pseudo-baptism (to borrow Holler’s phrase) and their second baptism was their real one.
* While we may agree that a slower reform was necessary to win council support, to appease the neighbouring cantons and to give it a greater sense of legitimacy, but the scriptures that were supposed to be at the center of Zurich’s reform program never advocate a slow and careful reform.
* Also, a few years later he learned to be more aggressive and was hell bent on rushing headlong into battle in 1531. 🙂
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and see how far we’ve come? i don’t even want to drown you! 😉
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‘Holler’? nice! even better than Haller!
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Good, that third baptism Zwingli and his crew were so happy to hand out was even less necessary than the first one.
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zwingli and his crew… sounds like an awesome rap band
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