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The third Reformation-era Protestant tradition involves the more radical and “Anabaptist” Reformers. Because they rejected infant baptism and believed that only confessing believers’ baptism was biblical, they were labeled “rebaptizers”—for requiring that believers once baptized as infants be baptized again to become church members.

Radical Reformers were less wedded to justification by faith alone than magisterial Protestants; in some cases they opposed it. Like Lutheran Pietists soon after the Reformation, Puritans later, and others since, they placed justification in a larger context with different emphases. They emphasized pursuit of personal discipleship in small Christian communities. These communities would be alternative societies, typically modeling the nonviolent practice of Jesus while waiting eagerly for God’s kingdom to come in fullness. Radical soteriologies were more biblicist, less formal, and correspondingly less consistent. Yet, separatistic tendencies and periodic aberrations aside, their core commitments have become widely influential in recent decades.^[7]