Swiss Mennonite Family Names: An Annotated Checklist

Authors

Leo Schelbert
Sandra Luebking

Keywords

Family names, Swiss Mennonite

Abstract

In the decades after 1520 the people of Western Europe experienced a thorough religious transformation. Instead of one Western Christendom centered in Rome a variety of competing interpretations of true Christianity emerged that were able to translate their assumptions into viable and enduring institutions. Among the emerging persuasions one group was unique, however: its members, scornfully called "catabaptists" or " anabaptists" - re-baptizers - by their opponents, rejected the millennia-old idea of the corpus christianum which postulates the unity between the ecclesiastical and political domain. For the Brethren, as they called themselves, the secular world was not an aspect of the divinely sanctioned order, but the sphere of anti-Christ. This belief was institutionally expressed not only in a rejection of infant baptism as invalid and blasphemous, but also in an abhorrence of the oath and the bearing of arms as forbidden entanglements with the powers of evil. The true church, they held, was exclusively the gathering of the sanctified who in the acceptance of baptism had submitted irrevocably to divine lordship.

Recommended Citation

Schelbert, Leo and Luebking, Sandra (1978) "Swiss Mennonite Family Names: An Annotated Checklist," Swiss American Historical Society Newsletter: Vol. 14: Iss. 2, Article 3.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/sahs_newsletter/vol14/iss2/3