The Schleitheim Confession was a declaration of SwissAnabaptist belief, endorsed unanimously by a meeting of Swiss Anabaptists in 1527 in Schleitheim (Switzerland). The meeting was chaired by Michael Sattler.
The Seven Articles were written during a time of severe persecution. They were not meant to be a full statement of Christian doctrine, but rather a statement against what the Anabaptists felt were unsound doctrines during that period.
External links
The Schleitheim Confession (http://www.anabaptistnetwork.com/schleitheimconfession) - full text of all seven articles and the opening and closing letters
The Mennonite Church, organized in North America in 1898 by several regional conferences of Swiss-South German background, has recognized a number of confessions: the Schleitheim Articles (Switzerland, 1527), the Dordrecht Confession (Holland, 1632), the Christian Fundamentals (1921), and the Mennonite Confession of Faith (1963).
The Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective was adopted at the delegate sessions of the General Conference Mennonite Church and the Mennonite Church, meeting at Wichita, Kansas, July 25-30, 1995.
Further, the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective is commended to all Christian churches and to those of other faiths or no faith, that they may seriously consider the claims of the gospel of Jesus Christ from this perspective.
The Schleitheimconfession does not give a complete summary of Christian faith, but treats only of the unique emphases of the evangelical Anabaptists of that era or perhaps of the points which were particularly challenged, either by the opponents or by erring brethren within.
McGlothlin in Baptist Confessions of Faith (Philadelphia, 1911) 3-9 is a translation of the inadequate Latin form of the articles as given by Zwingli in the Elenchus of 1527, which is a translation from a German manuscript copy.
Schleitheim's teaching on the sword and the oath (articles 6 and 7) became increasingly normative in the Mennonite and Hutterite traditions, but the articles themselves seem not to have been preserved in a confessional sense: there is no obvious direct line of descent from Schleitheim to the later Mennonite confessions such as Dordrecht.
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