Radical Reformation - Characteristics

Characteristics

Unlike the Catholics and the more Magisterial Lutheran and Reformed (Zwinglian and Calvinist) Protestant movements, the Radical Reformation generally abandoned the idea of the "Church visible" as distinct from the "Church invisible." Thus, the Church only consisted of the tiny community of believers, who accepted Jesus Christ and demonstrated this by adult baptism, called "believer's baptism".

While the magisterial reformers wanted to substitute their own learned elite for the learned elite of the Catholic Church, the radical Protestant groups rejected the authority of the institutional "church" organization, almost entirely, as being unbiblical. It was unavoidable that as the search for original Christianity was carried further, some would claim that the tension between the church and the Roman Empire in the first centuries of Christianity was somehow normative, that the church is not to be allied with government, that a true church is always subject to be persecuted, and that the conversion of Constantine I was therefore the Great apostasy that marked a deviation from pure Christianity.