Below is an account of an agreement between State churches and their decision to make legal the persecution and murder of our Baptist forefathers. Complicit in this agreement and a wholehearted participant was none other than the famous Martin Luther.
You will have to pardon me if I don’t care for “A Mighty Fortress is Our God”!
-Pastor Dave
There were many Anabaptists, who suffered for the truth’s sake at the hands of Papists and Protestants in the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. In the Martyrs’ Mirror, and the Baptist Martyrology, there are hundreds of cases recorded.
In all of these places the persecutions were legalized both by civil enactment, and by ecclesiastical sanction. In Germany, by the edict of King Ferdinand in 1527, death was the penalty for Anabaptism. The Emperor Charles V. caused them to be hunted down and put to death. In 1529, at the Diet of Spires, it was ordained that death should be visited upon every Anabaptist. There also met at Homburg in 1536, a Diet composed of the Reformers of Germany and their followers in church and state. Luther and Melancthon were among the number. That body sanctioned the punishment of Anabaptists, even by death, by the civil authorities.
At the beginning of the Reformation, the first to suffer martyrdom in Germany were Hans Koch, and Leonard Meyster, who were put to death at Augsburg in 1524. They were said to have been descendants of the Bohemian and Moravian Waldenses, and were placed at the head of the list of Anabaptist martyrs.
-From
The Story of the Baptists in All Ages and Countries By Rev. Richard B. Cook, D.D. (1838-1916)
