Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town Into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe--And Started the Protestant Reformation (38 page)

Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes
was reprinted over twenty times during the course of 1525. Significantly it was also published in Catholic cities where Luther’s works seldom found a printer, in Cologne and Ingolstadt, on the Emser press in Dresden.
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Luther’s Catholic opponents could no doubt sense that this was a work that damned Luther and the peasants equally: the Cologne edition was published with a scathing commentary from his old foe and future biographer, Johannes Cochlaeus.
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For once, Luther’s command of the press had let him down. As happens when events turn against you, during 1525 Luther was consistently unlucky with his timing. Earlier in the year the
Admonition to Peace
was already out of date as the movement turned to violence.
Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes
was written before, but published after, the awful butchery of Frankenhausen, where the princes’ armies finally caught up with the main peasant host and wreaked a terrible vengeance. Thousands of the peasants were murdered on the field of battle; Thomas Müntzer, who had fled the field, was discovered in hiding nearby, tortured into a humiliating recantation, and executed at Mühlhausen on May 27.

Read alongside reports of the bloodshed at Frankenhausen,
Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes
caused widespread revulsion. Even Luther’s closest associates expressed disquiet; others wrote to tell him that their congregations found it difficult to reconcile the savage tone of this tract with Christian love and mercy. Luther was characteristically defiant. It was only with the greatest difficulty that he was persuaded to return to the subject again, with
An Open Letter on the Harsh Book Against the
Peasants,
which gave little ground to his critics.
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Luther seems to have had no conception of the damage done to his movement. In September the new Erfurt Council asked Luther and Melanchthon to advise them about articles that been presented to them in April, drafted by a committee drawn from members of the urban opposition and members of the local peasantry. A copy exists with Luther’s annotations, flippant and contemptuous. “If one does not trust the town council, why set one up? Why have one at all?” “Indeed, that the council should not be a council, but that the mob should rule everything.” Best of all is the sarcastic peroration:

But one article has been left out, that the council may do nothing, have no power entrusted to it, but must sit there like a ninny and kowtow to the commune like a child, govern with hands and feet tied, and pull the wagon like a horse while the driver reins in and pulls the horses back. Thus it would be according to the illustrious model of these articles.
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One senses a man driven to the limits of his endurance and understanding, exasperated and petulant, utterly unwilling to acknowledge
any link between his evangelical teaching and the hopes that fueled the tragic mobilization of the revolt of 1525. As he put it in a belligerent letter to his friend Wenzeslaus Linck, “[H]e that will not understand, let him not understand; he that will not know, let him be ignorant; it is enough that my conscience pleases Christ.”
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The impact of the events of this year on Luther’s movement would be profound. Luther had been forced to choose sides, and he had done so decisively. He had reassured the princes that the Reformation posed no threat to the social order. In the short term the movement would reap the benefit; the next ten years would witness a sequence of princely states and territories adhering to the movement and proclaiming a new evangelical church order on the Saxon model. In the longer term, the reformed evangelical clergy would become in effect servants of the state, drawing their salaries from state funds and cooperating with state-appointed supervisors and visitors in the management of the church and the lives of their congregations. This was a long way from the evangelical freedom envisaged in the first buoyant years of protest and discovery, but it was an essential step in the process of church building.
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For the poor and the dispossessed, Luther’s writings of 1525 represented a cruel awakening. This was the year when the movement finally lost its innocence; the soaring hopes inspired by Luther’s leadership of a national movement of regeneration and renewal were dashed. The awful denouement at Frankenhausen provided the most graphic demonstration that the hope that Luther articulated was for salvation in the hereafter: the promise of a social gospel was for Luther an irrelevant and ultimately cruel delusion.

ZURICH

The Peasants’ War was the first occasion wherein Luther was truly mastered by events. He finally found the words to steady the ship and
the Reformation survived, though at a terrible cost to the wider appeal of the evangelical movement and his own reputation.

The breach with Zwingli, on the other hand, was an entirely self-inflicted wound. It is hard not to admire the courage and fortitude with which Luther had faced the conflict with his church in the years after 1518. It required a rare combination of skills and personal qualities: this was what made Luther such an attractive figure to the German people in these years. Perhaps it was inevitable that this resolution and extraordinary clarity of purpose would harden into something less attractive: a stubborn refusal to listen to the opinions of others who, examining Scripture anew, drew different conclusions.

In the tussles with Karlstadt and Müntzer, Luther refined his understanding of the existential struggle between good and evil. In the first days Antichrist had been identified with the corrupted papal hierarchy, the pope and his agents. But having been vanquished in this first assault, Satan adopted a more subtle approach, attempting to undermine the citadel of evangelical truth from within. His new instruments were the “false brethren,” men who espoused evangelical principles but distorted and corrupted them.
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By 1526 Luther had seen off the first generation of those he clumped together as “fanatics,” the Zwickau prophets, Karlstadt, and Müntzer, whose horrendous tortured death after Frankenhausen Luther viewed with dry-eyed detachment. But in his continuing literary exchanges with Karlstadt, for the first time in 1524 Luther began to associate new names with these local challenges to his authorities, specifically the leaders of the Swiss Reformation, Zwingli and Oecolampadius.

In the years after 1520 the Swiss city of Zurich had emerged very rapidly as the Reformation’s southern pole. This, in itself, might have been somewhat unexpected. The city was much smaller than many of the southern cities of the Empire. In its immediate vicinity it stood in the intellectual shadow of Basel, the great university city and center of humanist scholarship (a neat mirror of the relationship between Leipzig
and Wittenberg in the northeast). Here, in the south, Basel was a major printing emporium, strategically placed on the trade routes of the Rhine, simultaneously facing north to the Netherlands and France, and south across the Alps to Italy. Zurich had no university and very little printing; indeed, there was no printing press active in the city between 1514 and 1519. Nevertheless Zurich was an important regional power, geographically the largest of the German-speaking cantons. And in 1519 it had a religious leader of remarkable charisma and drive.

Ulrich Zwingli was the son of a farmer, a father sufficiently wealthy to sponsor his son through studies in the universities of Vienna and Basel.
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In 1518, after service in Glarus and Einsiedeln, he was chosen for the important position of
Leutpriester
at the Zurich Grossmünster, essentially the city’s preacher. Zwingli used his pulpit to criticize the failings of the clergy and to question traditional teachings of popular devotions such as the veneration of saints. In January 1519 he denounced the local preaching of the St. Peter’s indulgence. Although there was clearly a strong convergence of themes here, Zwingli was always touchy on the issue of how far his thinking was shaped by Luther. In later times it suited him to claim that his intellectual development was entirely independent of the Wittenberg reformer, though Luther’s works would certainly have been freely available in Zurich through their numerous Basel reprints. In 1520 the newly established Zurich print shop of Christopher Froschauer also began printing Luther locally.
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Froschauer was a close friend of Zwingli, and it was in the printer’s workshop that the next major step in the Zurich Reformation was plotted. During Lent 1522, with Zwingli in attendance, Froschauer and a few other close associates consumed two smoked sausages. Zwingli did not partake in the sausage, but he did defend (and publicize) this deliberate transgression of church discipline in a sermon shortly after, then duly published by Froschauer.
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The pace of events now quickened. Zwingli preached against clerical celibacy and took a wife. When the bishop of Constance attempted to restore discipline, reformers on the city council ensured that Zwingli was protected, a decision ratified by the first of
two public disputations over which the local authorities would preside. In the second disputation the question of images came to the fore, identifying what would be a critical issue of division between Wittenberg and Zurich; in 1524 the council prescribed the orderly removal of images from Zurich’s churches. In 1525 Zwingli (like Müntzer the year before) celebrated his new vernacular Communion liturgy.

Thus far the process of reform had been remarkably smooth and clinical. Zwingli’s success in transforming the church in Zurich lit a beacon for others in the Swiss Confederation; it also established another dynamic pole for the Reformation movement substantially independent from the intellectual influence of Wittenberg. In a debate between the contending parties within the Confederation at Baden in 1526, the lead was taken by Johann Oecolampadius of Basel; Basel and Bern were increasingly drawn into the orbit of Zurich, and Zwingli’s clinically austere view of the worship service would also prove attractive to many in Germany.
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The public disputations that had sealed the evangelical victory in Zurich offered a prototype of orderly transition that would later be adopted by many German cities.

Zwingli’s confident pursuit of his own reforming agenda was not altogether welcome in Wittenberg. Though his radical purging of images was disapproved, raising uncomfortable memories of Karlstadt’s assault on the Wittenberg churches in 1521, it was Zwingli’s developing teaching on the Lord’s Supper that caused most alarm. By 1523 it was clear that Zwingli was increasingly drawn to a symbolic understanding of the words of institution in the Communion service; over the following years Luther received worrying reports that these views were gaining traction among supporters of the Reformation elsewhere.
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In 1525 Johannes Bugenhagen wrote a trenchant
Open Letter Against the New Error Concerning the Sacrament
.
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Luther made clear his views mostly in sermons; it did not help the attempts at mediation now initiated by various parties that some of these sermons were printed in October 1526 under the provocative title
The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ Against the Fanatics
.
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Zwingli was obliged to respond. His
Friendly Exposition
was
expounded in a tone of patient civility, though not necessarily calculated to conciliate. He excused Luther his solecisms and theological missteps: “Sometimes even Homer sleeps.” This touched a nerve. Luther could shrug off the insults of his Romanist opponents, but he would not tolerate being patronized. Zwingli’s work was “full of pride, accusations, stubbornness, hate, and almost every wickedness, even though couched in the best words.” Luther fired back. The title,
That These Words of Christ “This Is My Body,” etc., Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics,
offers a clear view of the contents.
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This exchange, and subsequent volleys through 1527 and 1528, was immensely destabilizing to the evangelical movement. Some form of reconciliation was urgently required. By 1528 the towns and princely states that had adhered to the Reformation had begun to consider an active policy of collective defense to protect their churches and territories. They could hardly do this if two increasingly alienated wings of the movement were constantly at each other’s throats. In 1529, following the renewed condemnation of the evangelicals at the Imperial Diet, Philip of Hesse sought to bring the quarreling parties together to settle their differences. Since Duke John had given his blessing, Luther could hardly refuse to attend, though he made clear enough he expected nothing good to come of it.

The colloquy was set for October in Marburg. Luther and Melanchthon led for Wittenberg, and Zwingli and Oecolampadius for the Swiss. An impressive supporting cast included Bucer from Strasbourg and Brenz from Württemberg. Luther made clear from the start that there would be no change in his views; he hoped, without expectation, that his opponents would allow themselves to be instructed.
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Luther told his wife that progress was impeded by the fact that Zwingli and Oecolampadius were “simple-minded and inexperienced debaters.” Zwingli, for his part, believed that he had had the better of the exchanges. Both parties present were able to put their names to an agreement, reflecting considerable areas of common ground.
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But the central issue of the Lord’s Supper remained unresolved.