A radical among radicals, Conrad Grebel’s vision for the church is a familiar one to most evangelicals today. But at the time it made him an exile, not just from Roman Catholicism, but even among the Reformers.

Grebel was born in 1498 to a prominent family in Zurich. In 1524, Grebel’s university career began in Basel with what seemed like a promising start. But things unraveled as Grebel’s differences of opinion with his teacher, his brawling, and his loose living caused his father to cut him off. Chastened, he returned home to Zurich, where he fell in with a small band of humanists studying Greek, Hebrew, and the Latin Bible under the instruction of Ulrich Zwingli.

Sometime in the year following his stint with Zwingli, Grebel’s life changed. He married a woman below his class, which caused a further break with his family, and he was converted, as evidenced by a dramatic change in his lifestyle. It didn’t take long for Grebel to become one of Zwingli’s most enthusiastic supporters and earn a reputation as a gifted gospel witness.

Dispute and Disrepute

But just a little more than a year later, in October 1523, a wedge began working its way between the two men. The culprit? Mass. In a public disputation, both men favored abolishing the Mass, but when Zwingli saw that the city councilmen were not ready to go that far, he relented. This was unthinkable to Grebel, who felt that the clear word of God must be obeyed without delay. Both sides felt betrayed: Grebel felt Zwingli agreed to do what he had condemned as abominable (that is, continue performing the Mass), and Zwingli felt Grebel was ungrateful and demanding.

This dispute got to the heart of one of Grebel’s deepest differences with the mainstream Reformers: To whom does the church answer? Grebel was convinced that the city councilmen should have no authority over the church and its practice — more so, they should have no authority over the word of God itself. On the flip side, he didn’t think the church should have authority over the state either, and he opposed compulsory tithing and the like. The seeds of a separation between church and state were germinating. To us, this separation is as familiar as the air we breathe; to them, it was revolutionary.

A Romish Water Bath

The last nail in the coffin on Grebel’s association with the mainstream Reformers was over infant baptism. Grebel had hoped that Zwingli might be amenable to his conviction that only believing adults should be baptized, but it was not to be so.

On January 17, 1525, Zwingli called for a public debate to force the issue. Grebel was joined by Felix Manz and George Blaurock for the side of believers’ baptism. In the end, the city council agreed with Zwingli and ordered Grebel’s group to cease meeting for Bible study. They also ordered all unbaptized infants to be brought for baptism or else be exiled. Grebel’s daughter was two weeks old at the time and, in Grebel’s words, “had not yet been baptized and bathed in the Romish water bath.” Nor would she be while Grebel drew breath, which wasn’t for long.

A few days after the debate, Grebel gathered at Felix Manz’s home with the exiled radicals, and he performed the first adult baptism on Blaurock, a married former priest. In the months following, Grebel preached the gospel of “repent and be baptized” in St. Gall, and around five hundred people responded by doing just that.

Grebel was arrested and imprisoned in October 1525. After escaping from prison the following year, he continued preaching the gospel until he died of the plague just a few months later.

Preach and Obey

The driving force behind Grebel’s actions and doctrinal reforms could be summed up this way: preach and obey the word without compromise. In his own words,

Seek earnestly to preach only God’s word unflinchingly, to establish and defend only divine practices, to esteem as good and right only what can be found in definite clear Scripture, and to reject, hate, and curse all the schemes, words, practices, and opinions of all men, even your own.

Even if it means exile or worse.

The drama of the Protestant Reformation casts big personalities and major characters, the types of men now etched into myths, legends, and giant stone figures. But the Reformation is also the story of everyday, ordinary followers of Christ, mostly forgotten, who lived out Reformation theology on the ground — and who paid the price for it with their lives. Martyrs like Hellen Stirke.

Mary’s Equal

Hellen was a fairly average Scottish Christian in the city of Perth, dedicated to daily domestic work as a wife and mother. Her life remained unnoticed to history until the birth of her last child in 1544.

When the time arrived for Hellen’s labor and delivery, Catholic tradition called for earnest prayers to the Virgin Mary. Having a good sense of Scripture, Hellen repudiated these petitions. It was a tradition she would not follow. Her baffled midwives pressed her to make such a prayer, but she refused the ritual. The physical risk was real, but the prayers were nothing more than superstitious insurance.

“If I had lived in the days of the Virgin,” Hellen said with poise, “God might have looked likewise to my humility and base estate, as he did the Virgin’s, and might have made me the mother of Christ.” Her childbed sermonette must have triggered gasps. But Hellen was settled and comforted by her theology, knowing her prayers were going directly to God through her Savior Jesus Christ.

“I Will Not Bid You Good Night”

News of Hellen’s refusal to pray to Mary, and her bold claim that she was on equal standing before God, very soon found its way to the ears of the local Catholic clergy and quickly up the chain to the presiding cardinal. His response was swift to snuff out this spark of Protestant theology. Before long, Hellen was arrested and imprisoned, along with her husband and four other outspoken Protestants in the city. The small group was soon found guilty of “heresy” and sentenced to death. The following day, soldiers brought Hellen, her husband, and the condemned Protestants to the gallows.

Hellen asked to die side by side with her husband, James Finlason, but her request was denied. Men were to be hanged, women drowned, and James would go first. Holding her young child in her arms, Hellen approached her husband, kissed him, and gave him these parting words:

“Husband, be glad, for we have lived together many joyful days, and this day, in which we must die, we ought to esteem the most joyful of all, because we shall have joy forever. Therefore I will not bid you good night, for we shall shortly meet in the kingdom of heaven.”

James was hanged before her eyes. His life on earth done, eyes fell to Hellen, who was forced to hand her newborn to a nurse entrusted with the child’s care from this point. The authorities led Hellen to a nearby pond, bound her hands and feet, put her into a large gunnysack along with stones or weights, and threw her into the water like a bag of garbage. All for the crime of “blaspheming the Virgin Mary.”

A Cloud of Ordinary Witnesses

Heaven has all the details, but this is all we know of Hellen’s life. She was a bold woman made strong by Scripture. Her birthbed claim, that she was equally qualified to mother Jesus, was a radical ceremonial insubordination — but at the heart it was an act of faith, rendering the strata of all human superiority irrelevant in the presence of Christ’s supremacy.

Look deeper into the Reformation, and you will see that it’s more than printing presses and theses nailed to doors and theological debates. It’s the story of ordinary believers, husbands and wives and fathers and mothers, poised in the words of Scripture, reclaiming the primacy of Jesus Christ for their lives, their marriages, their families, and their eternal hopes, who stand as a cloud of witnesses calling us to do likewise. They call us to hold our biblical convictions without wavering, to enjoy God’s earthly blessings, and to endure all momentary afflictions now for the great eternal joy set before us.

For those familiar with the English Reformation, the name Latimer sounds incomplete on its own. It demands a Ridley.

Bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley are fastened together in history primarily because they were fastened to the same stake on October 16, 1555, on the north side of Oxford. But Latimer and Ridley share more than a martyrdom. The bishops also join each other on the list of England’s most influential Reformers — men and women whose allegiance to Scripture and the glory of Christ transformed England from a Catholic kingdom to a lighthouse of Reformation.

Both Latimer and Ridley lived during the reigns of four English monarchs: Henry VII, Henry VIII (the one with all the wives), Edward VI, and Mary I (aka “Blood Mary”). Both witnessed the Reformation’s tug and pull under Henry VIII’s tentative acceptance, Edward VI’s warm embrace, and Mary I’s violent resistance to Reformed doctrine. But they were anything but casual observers.

Latimer the Preacher

Latimer, born around 1485, spent the first thirty years of his life a zealous Catholic — or, in his words, an “obstinate Papist.” “I was as obstinate a Papist as any was in England,” he wrote, “insomuch that when I should be made bachelor of divinity, my whole oration was against Philip Melanchthon [i.e., Luther’s right-hand man].”

But soon after Latimer’s anti-Reformation oration, a young Cambridge divine named Thomas Bilney approached him with a request. Would Latimer allow Bilney to privately explain his own Reformed faith? Latimer agreed, and from then on he “began to smell the Word of God, and forsook the school doctors and such fooleries.” Latimer gathered up the arrows he had been shooting at the Reformation, and he started pointing the bow in the other direction. Throughout the next couple decades, he distinguished himself as a fervent Reformed preacher, at times enjoying Henry VIII’s favor for it, and at other times fearing his persecution (depending on the king’s mood).

Perhaps the most fruitful years of Latimer’s ministry came under Edward VI’s short reign, from 1547 to 1553. Despite his age, Latimer assisted Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer in reforming the English church, and he also preached like a man who just couldn’t stop. According to J.C. Ryle, “No one of the Reformers probably sowed the seeds of Protestant doctrine so widely and effectually among the middle and lower classes as Latimer.”

Then, in 1553, Queen Mary came to power, and Latimer was sent to a cell in the Tower of London.

Ridley the Scholar

Ridley, nearly twenty years Latimer’s junior, was born around 1502 near the border of Scotland. Throughout the next five decades, he would become one of England’s sharpest intellects, even going so far as to memorize all the New Testament letters — in Greek.

After attending Cambridge’s Pembroke College in his teenage years, Ridley continued his studies in France, where he likely encountered Reformation teachings. Unlike Latimer, Ridley left no clear account of his passage from Catholic priest to Protestant preacher. But we do know that he signed the 1534 decree against the pope’s supremacy, that he accepted the post of chaplain to Archbishop Cranmer three years later, and that he renounced the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation by 1545. When he became the bishop of London in 1550, he replaced the stone altars in London’s churches with plain wooden tables. According to Ridley and the Reformers, communion was a spiritual feast, not a sacrifice.

Ridley’s scholarly abilities launched him from one prestigious post to the next, even under Henry VIII’s capricious reign. From Canterbury to Westminster to Soham to Rochester to London, Ridley studied, preached, and, once Edward VI took the throne, threw himself into Cranmer’s reforms.

But then Queen Mary came to power, and Ridley joined Latimer in the Tower.

England’s Candle

On October 16, 1555, after spending eighteen months in a tower cell, Latimer and Ridley met at an Oxford stake. With Latimer in a frock and cap, and Ridley in his bishop’s gown, the two men talked and prayed together before a smith lashed them to the wood.

Ridley was the first to strengthen his friend. “Be of good heart, brother, for God will either assuage the fury of the flame, or else strengthen us to abide it.” As the bundle of sticks caught fire beneath them, Latimer had his turn. Raising his voice so Ridley could hear, he cried, “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”

Three years later, Mary I died and passed the kingdom to her half-sister Elizabeth, a Protestant queen. And Latimer and Ridley’s candle burst into a torch.

In a 1791 sermon, Lemuel Haynes remarked, “Nothing is more evident than that men are prejudiced against the gospel. It is from this source that those who are for the defense of it meet with so much contempt” (The Faithful Preacher, 25). The French Reformer Guillaume Farel knew his fair share of contempt.

A fervent gospel minister, Farel spent his days championing the Protestant cause, often in the face of opposition. At times, this opposition arose from true gospel prejudice. At other times, though, Farel’s own foolhardiness was to blame. John Calvin noted that Farel could sometimes get “carried away by the vehemence of his zeal” (Calvin, 152). Blending a headstrong temperament with a deep concern for biblical piety, Farel contended unflinchingly for the faith and was instrumental in the cause of early French reform.

“The Papacy Fell from My Heart”

Born in Gap, France in 1489, Farel grew up in a devout Catholic household. As a twenty-year-old, he enrolled at the University of Paris to study theology. While there, Farel encountered the humanist scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, a man whose devotion to Christ inspired Farel.

After graduating in 1517, Farel began teaching at the Collège du Cardinal Lemoine. Reports of Luther’s reforming efforts in Germany reached him there, bolstering his own growing conviction that Catholic worship and teaching had strayed from their biblical roots. As he studied Scripture over several years, Farel found that “little by little the papacy fell from my heart” (William Farel, 26).

Farel resigned from his teaching position, and in 1521 he began to promote the message of reform wherever he could. He preached in France and in the French-speaking Swiss regions, crossing paths with Johannes Oecolampadius in Basel and Wolfgang Capito and Martin Bucer in Strasbourg. Farel was known for his confrontational style, which prompted the following warning from Oecolampadius: “the more you are prone to violence, the more you must work on being gentle and tone down your lion-like outbursts by the spirit of a dove” (William Farel, 38).

Calvin’s Co-Laborer

In 1533, after an unsuccessful visit the previous year, Farel took up residence in Geneva, intent on leading the city to adopt the Reformation. His hopes were realized in 1536 when the General Council of Geneva officially allied itself with Protestantism.

It was in that same year that Farel famously persuaded Calvin to join him in his work. Calvin was passing through Geneva on his way to Strasbourg, intent on a quiet life of scholarship. Farel learned of Calvin’s presence in the city and tried to convince him to stay. When gentler appeals proved unsuccessful, Farel threatened Calvin with God’s judgment. Farel’s words found their mark. Calvin later wrote, “By this imprecation I was so stricken with terror, that I desisted from the journey which I had undertaken” (William Farel, 69).

The decision to stay in Geneva was pivotal for Calvin, for although he and Farel were driven out of the city in 1538 — the two had clashed with the magistrates over church discipline matters — Calvin returned to Geneva in 1541 and ministered there for the rest of his life. Farel relocated to Neuchâtel, a city where he and Antoine Froment had introduced Reformation teaching in 1530. Like Calvin in Geneva, Farel established himself in Neuchâtel until his own death in 1565.

Calvin and Farel maintained a close relationship after their time together in Geneva, corresponding at least once a month for twenty years. The two men, together with Pierre Viret in Lausanne, formed a crucial partnership that helped advance the cause of French reform. Sadly, Calvin and Farel’s relationship ruptured when, in 1558, Farel announced his betrothal to Marie Thorel, a teenaged woman over fifty years his junior. Though it seems there was no sexual impropriety involved, the marriage created a scandal because of the vast age difference between the two spouses. Calvin’s friendship with Farel never recovered its former luster.

A Lover and a Fighter

As lion-like and controversial as Farel could be, he was committed to the spiritual vitality of the French-speaking people. He produced some of the first Reformation works available in French, writing a commentary on the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer in 1524 and a summary of Reformed teaching in 1529.

In his writings, Farel displayed a particular interest in the topic of prayer. In an article titled “Guillaume Farel’s Spirituality,” Theodore Van Raalte argues that Farel’s emphasis on prayer shows us a side of him that is too often overlooked, a side marked by “profound piety and pastoral love.” Farel was both a lover and a fighter, a pastor and a pugilist. Whatever his faults, this French firebrand loved the gospel and devoted his life to sharing its riches.

As King Henry VIII lay dying in his bed, he wanted one man to come and hold his hand. Amazingly, that man was a major proponent of the Protestant Reformation.

Thomas Cranmer helped lead the English Reformation, but he is an unlikely hero alongside Luther, Calvin, and the other Reformers. He did not write any major theological books or pastor any important churches. Indeed, Cranmer did not adopt the central truths of the Reformation until relatively late in his life. But during the years of the Protestant Reformation, he shaped English theology perhaps more than any other person who has ever lived.

The Seed of Separation

Born in 1489, in the small village of Aslockton, Thomas Cranmer grew up near the same Sherwood Forrest where Robin Hood hid out three centuries earlier. He was a slow reader, taking eight years to finish Cambridge’s four-year undergraduate degree. He persevered in his studies, completed a masters degree, was ordained into ministry, and was elected by Cambridge to teach. He built a reputation for pushing his students to study the Bible for themselves.

While Cranmer spent his days peacefully serving on academic committees, England was in turmoil. King Henry VIII wanted to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Through a strange set of circumstances, Cranmer suggested to some of Henry’s advisors that the King of England was not ultimately subject to the pope’s rule (much to the king’s delight). Cranmer’s advice, then, inadvertently planted a seed that separated the English church from Roman Catholicism.

The Reformed Politician

Cranmer traded away Roman Catholicism for Reformed doctrine by the end of his life, a transformation that mirrored the turmoil and split of the English Reformation. While a student at Cambridge, he had read Martin Luther skeptically, but he warmed to Reformed thought after befriending Simon Grynaeus and Andreas Osiander. He eventually rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation after conversations with his friend Nicholas Ridley. Cranmer then clarified his liturgical reforms through conversations with the Italian Reformer Peter Martyr and the German Reformer Martin Bucer.

Cranmer’s theology changed too dramatically for English Roman Catholics and too slowly for Reform-minded evangelicals. To some (even today), Cranmer’s reforms seemed too personally and politically motivated. But he did not have the luxury of working out abstract beliefs among a company of disinterested academia. His theology was formed in a volatile pastoral and political cauldron of crises.

Father of the Anglican Church

Cranmer’s greatest ministry accomplishments came during the rule of Edward VI, when he rewrote the public liturgies, pastoral sermons (or homilies), private prayers, and articles of faith. These writings defined the doctrinal framework and personal piety which later developed into the Anglican Church, for which he is most remembered.

Cranmer wanted everyone in English churches to embrace justification by faith alone. He wrote,

This proposition — that we be justified by faith only, freely, and without works — is spoken in order to take away clearly all merit of our works, as being insufficient to deserve our justification at God’s hands; and thereby most plainly to express the weakness of man and the goodness of God, the imperfectness of our own works and the most abundant grace of our Savior Christ; and thereby wholly to ascribe the merit and deserving of our justification unto Christ only and his most precious blood-shedding. (The Works of Thomas Cranmer, 131)

Double Recantation

When the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I took power, Cranmer’s Reformed convictions cost him his life. During an agonizing three-year period, he was imprisoned, isolated, humiliated, interrogated, and tortured. He was forced to watch his friends, Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, burned alive.

Later, at his own execution, Cranmer nearly succumbed and recanted his beliefs, but this usually hesitant and quiet statesman powerfully demonstrated his faith in Christ while being burned at the stake.

The Thief on the Throne

But the moment that best illustrates Cranmer’s enduring legacy was not the day of his own death, but a day nine years earlier, as he stood at the deathbed of King Henry VIII. On January 27, 1547, King Henry was dying. An attendant asked him whom he wished to have at his bedside. The king asked for Thomas.

By the time Cranmer arrived, King Henry was unable to speak. Foxe tells the story.

Then the archbishop, exhorting him to put his trust in Christ, and to call upon his mercy, desired him though he could not speak, yet to give some token with his eyes or with his hand, that he trusted in the Lord. Then the king, holding him with his hand, did wring his hand in his as hard as he could. (Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 748)

The scene sweetly punctuates the most important friendship in the English Reformation. Whatever King Henry believed when he squeezed Cranmer’s hand that day, God used the bond between them to break England free from Roman Catholicism and to recover the one true gospel.

The first thing we should do is get the issue of the name out of the way. Let us not stumble over the name. If he lived among us today in North America, we would call him John Houselamp. His German surname was Hussgen, which John himself worked into the Greek form (as was customary at the time).

In this brief overview of this talented man’s contribution to the great Reformation, perhaps we should just call him John.

“I Have Lost the Monk”

John was born in Germany in 1482, ten years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. As Calvin is associated with Geneva, Bucer with Strasbourg, and Luther with Wittenberg, John Oecolampadius is associated with Basel. He was one of the rising tribe of humanist scholars, thoroughly trained in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. By 1515, John had attained the post of cathedral preacher in Basel.

While in Basel, he worked as an assistant to Erasmus — the project being Erasmus’s first edition of the Greek New Testament, for which John wrote the epilogue. John was a humanist scholar who went over to the Reformation, while Erasmus was a humanist scholar who remained in the Roman communion. This was a time of spiritual turmoil for John, resulting in him becoming a monk. But he soon decided that was not right, saying, “I have lost the monk; I have found the Christian.”

A German Choir

He left Basel for a time, but returned in 1522 when he assumed a post at the University of Basel. He was a scholarly and effective participant in various disputations — which was one of the ways that cities made their decisions — and as a result, the leaders of Basel decided to join forces with the Reformation. The Mass was abandoned in Basel by 1529.

This was a time of genuine spiritual quickening, as was demonstrated by the following incident:

At about this time, God honored Oecolampadius and his church with something spectacular. Normally a choir gave short responses in Latin at various prescribed liturgical moments in the worship service. However, on Easter Sunday, the congregation in St. Martin’s spontaneously broke out in German singing during the service. Nothing like this had happened anywhere. The Council immediately forbade such singing. The congregation responded by continuing to do it. (Reformer of Basel, 19–20)

Marriage and Controversy

One interesting detail relates to John’s decision to marry in 1528. His wife was a widow named Wibrandis, who, after John passed away, married another Reformation leader, Wolfgang Capito. After he passed away, she married another Reformer, Martin Bucer. These things happen of course. But not that often.

On the matter of the Lord’s Supper, the reformational world was divided between the respective views of the Lutherans, the Calvinists, and the Zwinglians. The Lutherans held to a physical presence of Christ in the Supper, the Calvinists held to a spiritual presence, and the Zwinglians held to a memorialist position.

Basel is only 54 miles from Zurich, where Zwingli was ministering. John grew close to Ulrich Zwingli, working together with him, and came to hold Zwingli’s position on the Lord’s Supper. In 1529, John participated in the Marburg Colloquy, together with Zwingli, Luther, Bucer, Melanchthon, and others, in an unsuccessful bid for Protestant unity on the Supper.

When Zwingli was killed in battle, in 1531, John took the shocking news very hard, and died himself shortly after.