59 - Zwickau Prophets and Luther's Sacralism

Well, we are continuing in the study we've been doing for quite some time now.

We are still in the German Reformation and have some important things yet to cover there, though I was looking at my notes here, and my notes reflect sort of how we deal with Martin Luther.

Luther, pretty much after 1530, the last 16 years of his life, he dies in 1546, just sort of are passed over.

And it has been well said that Luther's primary contributions were done prior to 1530.

And we'll discuss a little bit more of that as we go along.

When we last visited with Brother Luther, he was in the Wartburg Castle after the

Diet of Worms. The Diet of Worms has given its condemnation of him. He is now an outlaw, but he's being protected by Elector Frederick and is hiding out at the

Wartburg Castle. He is translating the New Testament into German.

We discussed a little bit about how much of a challenge that would be, how he was dealing with a language that had numerous dialects and was not, you know, we think of languages as fairly standardized things in this day and age, but they were not at that particular point in time.

And then we mentioned what was going on back in Wittenberg. Andreas Karlstadt had taken over and there was iconoclasm going on, the destruction of images, and Frederick didn't like what he was hearing coming out of Wittenberg.

And so Luther made a flying trip home, December 3rd and 4th, and at that time things were fairly calm.

So he didn't really see that there was too much to be concerned about. But then, as I mentioned,

Karlstadt announced that he was going to give the bread and the wine to the people in mass for New Year's, and Frederick said, oh, no, you're not.

So Karlstadt said, yes, sir. So he did on Christmas Eve instead. And I mentioned briefly the fact that I included that particular incident in the opportunity

I had to preach in the castle church, because that's where it took place. So it was rather interesting to stand in the high pulpit there over on the side, of course.

You wouldn't put anything in the center at that time period. But you're very much elevated.

I mean, you can, everybody can hear you rather easily from up there, and you can see everybody as well.

And I could not help but imagine a number of times what it looked like that day when

Karlstadt made the wine available. There were, the place was completely packed out, and there were just so many people that wanted to partake of the elements, all of them.

The wine had been, the cup had been withdrawn from the laity hundreds of years before. And the priest had communed in their place, representatively.

And there were obviously many people that were excited about this new development. There were other people who were very disturbed by it, because it was not done, evidently, in a super orderly fashion.

As you can imagine, people pushing and shoving to get to the front, and it was quite the experience.

But at the same time, two days later, the day after Christmas, the

Zwickau prophets came to Wittenberg, the Zwickau prophets.

Now, these were interesting individuals who basically presented the idea that they were the recipients of divine revelation of the same nature and character as Scripture itself.

And they taught a very individualistic spiritualism, the soul's direct communion with God and communication with God over against the old ways of man and the strictures of church and religion and things like that.

And interestingly enough, when they are first mentioned to Luther via letter, his response is, well, need to hear them out and see what it is they're saying and find out what they're really talking about.

We don't want to be quick in judging them. I mean, he's hiding from the authorities himself, not really in a position to be able to very strongly condemn someone else at this point in time, anyways.

So we're talking 1521 here. We're only talking less than, well, just a little over four years since the posting of the 95

Theses. This is a relatively early period. And assuredly, what one must do if one's going to be fair with Luther in history is to keep in mind this

Luther versus the Luther of the 1540s, who is not going to be anywhere near as generous in withholding judgment on someone like the

Zwickau prophets. They even had influence upon Karlstadt, especially upon Karlstadt.

And even Philip Melanchthon was like, well, these guys, they seem to live quite a holy life and maybe there's something to what they're saying.

Well, Luther returns to Wittenberg. He writes to the elector and he says, look,

I really appreciate your protecting me. I know you can't protect me if I go to Wittenberg.

I don't expect you to. I expect to die. But I cannot stay in hiding here any longer.

Wittenberg needs me. The Reformation needs me. And so I'm going to return, even though the duke through his, the elector through his representatives strongly attempted to discourage

Luther from doing this. He returns in March of 1522 and very immediately he is very negatively impacted by the effect and the presence of the

Zwickau prophets and very quickly has them driven out of town. And what we need to understand, and this is just part of human nature and it's part of dealing with history and you've simply got to factor this in when dealing with anybody, but Luther was never really either able or willing.

Sometimes able and willing are terms that are way too close to one another, especially historically.

Able or willing to distinguish between the Zwickau prophets and all

Anabaptists, whoever they were and whatever their views were. This was a problem amongst pretty much all the

Reformed, even when we use the term Reformed it's more strict sense of maybe

Zwingli, Calvin, the Genevan tradition that then becomes the primary tradition in the

United Kingdom and hence primary in defining the very term Reformed for us even today.

There was not a lot of meaningful interaction,

I mean as we're going to see Zwingli has the most interaction with the early Anabaptists because many of them were his students.

But once the break takes place, the reaction to them and the utilization of governmental force against Anabaptists by non -followers of the papacy, the term

Protestant won't be developed for a few more years, but by Protestants, takes place astonishingly quickly but it shouldn't astonish us because the fact that the big term, the big word that I hope you keep in mind as we consider these things, that one's probably already dead, is a term we have used before but let's remind ourselves of it, sacralism, sacralism, the state church and Luther for a brief period of time somewhere between 1521 and 1524 maybe, maybe for a few years, right at this time period where we are right now, made some comments where he recognized that if you really wanted to have a pure and holy church, it would have to be a free church, it would have to be a church that people associate with freely, that they're not just simply baptized into it.

He recognized that without that you would always have a mixed church of people in whose lives the spirit is truly active and in others whose lives the spirit is not in regeneration and so you had for a while the possibility of a critical examination of sacralism even though, remember at this point in time, the state church has existed for over a thousand years, for over a thousand years.

It's all that anyone remembers, it's all that anyone knows. Certainly intellectually they knew that in the early church, you know the early church was persecuted and things like that and but from their perspective,

Christendom had defeated the pagan Romans, had taken over and that's how it was supposed to be and so you had this concept of sacralism and the

Anabaptists as a rule, well you can't say anything about Anabaptists as a rule, that's the problem.

Many of the Anabaptists were not sacralistic, they believed in a free church and they believed that it needed to be a free church, that you needed to make a decision to be a part, to be a follower of Christ and to be a part of the church and it wasn't just that, that was part of the whole issue of baptism itself, was what is true believer's baptism, it sort of came together.

Now there were some who ended up being called Anabaptists who weren't overly consistent on that point but we'll get to them at a later point in time.

Anyway, so Zwingli, I'm sorry, so Luther sees the

Zwickau prophets as a grave danger ecclesiastically and theologically at first and then within a few years sees them as a grave danger to social order itself and there is no question that for Luther he is eventually going to make the decision that anarchy is the worst possible sin and it must be resisted at all costs and that is going to impact the reason why

I say that we have Luther I and Luther II, we have the

Luther prior to 1525 and the Luther after 1525 and that is rather an important issue that we'll get to here in just a moment.

Let's talk a little bit about his personal life at this time. Once he returns to Wittenberg, he shaves his beard off, he returns to the tonsure cut of the monk, he puts on his monastic robes,

Karlstadt had done away with clerical clothing, Luther comes back and he preaches a series of sermons,

I think it was eight sermons if I correctly, basically saying the

Reformation is here, we are going to continue it but we are going to do it in an orderly and decent manner and all of you hotheads need to be patient with the

Lord's work, we're working through these issues but again the idea of anarchy and rebellion, these are all things that Luther says we simply cannot allow this to mark our movement or it'll be the end of our movement, we must do this in a decent and orderly fashion and so he takes up his preaching ministry once again but one of the things that he had already agreed to was to look at this issue of lawful oaths while he was at the

Wartburg, he had come to the conclusion that the oath he had taken of celibacy was an invalid oath before God and therefore priests could marry, which of course has always been the tradition in Lutheranism since that day, the married ministry ended up having a huge impact on German culture as a whole in fact and as a result the monasteries are being closed and Karlstadt marries pretty quickly but Luther not so much is interested in that but in about 1522 -ish, well he had written a book called

On Monastic Vows and a group of nuns read the book while still in the nunnery and escaped from the nunnery on Easter Sunday hiding themselves in salt pork barrels which must have smelled wonderful and been tremendously comfortable but the people who came for the barrels thought they were picking up salted pork and instead they were picking up five nuns and escaped,

I think it was five, may have been more than that but it's the number that pops into my head, escaped from the nunnery, came to Wittenberg and Luther then becomes a matchmaker, they approach

Luther, they tell them their story and Luther is like, okay, let me see what

I can do for you and over the next number of months manages to marry them all off except for one by the name of Katharine von

Bora, Katharine von Bora and it seems like Katharine had already made up her mind that she wasn't going to marry anyone but Luther and so she's the last one not to be married and Luther's like,

I don't know what to do and she's like, I think you do and he's like, well, okay, and as he said in his writings later on, he married for three reasons, three reasons.

Now, gentlemen who are not married yet, I would not suggest necessarily that you contextualize these reasons in your own life but one, to please my father, number two, to rile the pope and number three, to make angels laugh and devils cry, those were his three reasons that he gave later on for his marriage to his beloved

Katie but while it may have been somewhat of a, well, okay,

I can't find anybody else for you, let's get married type situation in 1525, by 1530,

Luther is very much head over heels in love with his dear Katie, even he described the book of Galatians as his dear

Katherine of all the books of scripture, so you sort of get the idea, that type of thing. She was a great help to Luther, she was a great administrator, she ran the home quite well, she was witness to much of what's called the table talk, the discussions that Luther would have with his students and others there at the home that had been given to him by the elector and I think

I already told you the story about Luther's many depressions, he would probably be described as bipolar today or something like that but there were great dark times in his life and during one of those times he was sitting by himself in the darkness of the basement of the home and the door opens and Katherine comes in and she's all dressed in black and she sits down next to him and she's weeping and he's like, what is wrong with you, woman?

And she says, well, haven't you heard? What? God has died. God has died?

Woman, what are you talking about? That's impossible. And she's like, well, what else could make you behave in this fashion?

And, you know, sort of like, oh, quit ruining my sour mood, you know, that type of a thing.

And so she was a tremendous help to Luther.

They had five children together that, I think five that lived,

I think there were some infantile deaths in that situation that were very difficult on Luther, but that was the common experience of that day.

In many places you had to have 10 live births to get one child through to maturity, especially during periods of plague, that was the case.

And so it was a very, very, very difficult time. And so Luther finally marries.

This is going to become one of the major, you know, obviously what Rome then starts saying is, ah, the whole reason these people are doing what they're doing is because they couldn't be celibate, and they just want to engage in sex, and that's all it's all about, and so on and so forth.

But the reality is the restoration of the New Testament model of the elder in the church and the role of the pastor that had been so completely taken over by this foreign concept of a priesthood and a celibate priesthood and all the non -Christian accretions that had been added to it, major, major strength for the

Reformation and all the other traditions would take this to heart as well in their own ways as they left the

Roman Communion. And so what happens that changes everything in Luther's perspective, or that solidifies,

I guess, Luther's perspective, and it marks the dividing line between the early

Luther and the later Luther. Luther I and Luther II is portrayed for you somewhat in the movie

The Radicals. It's not really, it is portrayed in the 2004

Luther movie. It doesn't really, the BBC Luther movie ends before this.

So it is brought in briefly in the Luther movie toward the end where they sort of conflate a bunch of stuff together.

But what you have in 1525 is the peasants' revolt. And from Luther's return to Wittenberg in 1522 up to 1525, the peasants are looking to Luther as a great leader, as an ally, as a friend.

They're obviously heavily taxed and mistreated and sort of still in serfdom in many situations.

And Luther addresses the nobles and he strongly encourages them to a

Christian ethic of how to treat their subjects. And so the peasants view

Luther as their leader. But starting in 1525, scattered acts of rebellion become a full -scale rebellion with bloodshed.

And large groups of peasants storm certain castles and resulting in the death not only of soldiers but also of princes and nobles.

And at some point in 1525, Luther has to make a decision.

And he does. And he comes down the side of law and order and against anarchy.

And in a poorly phrased tractate, encourages the

German nobility and government, if there wasn't a German government, but you know what

I mean, the powers that be, to crush the rebellion.

Which they did to the tune of about 100 ,000 peasants who certainly were not prepared either in armament, leadership, or training to take on professional soldiers, cavalry, and so on and so forth.

And so the rebellion is put down but Luther loses southern

Germany, basically. And there's a fairly clear line of demarcation, you can sort of follow it by just looking at what the churches were maybe 100 years later.

And what happens in Luther's thinking is a solidification of this concept of sacralism.

There's no more rumination about a free church or anything like that at all.

Now you have the necessary survival of Christendom. And of course, at the same time, the

Muslims are invading from the east. And in Luther's eschatology, the

Pope is the spiritual antichrist, but the Muslim is the physical antichrist.

So there's a spiritual antichrist, that's the papacy, but the physical antichrist is being used to punish sinful

Europe are the Muslims. And so there has to be a unified

Christendom in the defense against the

Muslims. And so you begin to see in later years, a few years after this, joint

Lutheran -Catholic military maneuvers, you might say. For example, when the

Anabaptists take over a city, we'll look at this later on, it was a joint Catholic -Lutheran army that broke through the city walls and eventually put down this insanity from their perspective.

And it was a joint group that did this. And so the

Peasants' Revolt of 1525 is, in my mind, the dividing line in looking at Luther.

Prior to that, you have the

Luther we like the most, and after that, you have the Luther we don't like as much. And this can be seen,

I think, especially in Luther's view of the

Jews. Now, you probably heard last year with the 500th anniversary, a fair amount of discussion of Luther's anti -Jewish polemic and that Luther led to the

Nazis and all the rest of that stuff. Luther didn't lead the Nazis. The Nazis used

Luther in quotes, but then again, they quoted from the Gospel of John a lot, too. You can't quite hold

John accountable for the twisting and horrific misuse of his own words 2 ,000 years after he wrote them.

Well, 1 ,900 years after he wrote them. Anyway, so in 1523, so prior to the

Peasants' Revolt, Luther wrote a book called Jesus Was Born a Jew.

Now, you need to understand that there was a tremendous amount of anti -Judaism in Europe long before Luther was born.

Remember when we talked about the Crusades? The one crusade that basically hung a left, went over and sacked

Constantinople, along the way did pogroms against Jews. And so when the

Crusaders would come through, any Jews in the area would flee. And remember, I told you what happened during the plague.

One Swiss city had taken all the Jews in their city and put them out on an island and locked them in a house on an island and burned the place down.

So there was a tremendous amount of anti -Judaism under Roman Catholicism. The popes had encouraged it.

Inquisition encouraged it. That was the norm at this period of time.

So in 1523, when Luther writes this book, it's rather radical.

Here's what he says, Therefore, I will cite from Scripture the reasons that move me to believe that Christ was a Jew born of a virgin, that I might perhaps also win some

Jews to the Christian faith. Our fools, the popes, bishops, sophists, and monks, the crude asses' heads, have hitherto so treated the

Jews that anyone who wished to be a good Christian would almost have had to become a Jew. If I had been a

Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a

Christian. They have dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings.

They have done little else than deride them and seize their property. When they baptize them, they show them nothing of Christian doctrine or life but only subject them to popishness and monkery.

When the Jews then see that Judaism has such strong support in Scripture and that Christianity has become a mere babble without reliance on Scripture, how can they possibly compose themselves to become right good

Christians? I have myself heard from pious baptized Jews that if they had not in our day heard the gospel, they would have remained

Jews under the cloak of Christianity for the rest of their days. For they acknowledge that they have never yet heard anything about Christ from those who baptized and taught them.

I hope that if one deals in a kindly way with the Jews and instructs them carefully from Holy Scripture, many of them will become genuine

Christians and turn again to the faith of their fathers, the prophets and patriarchs. They will only be frightened further away from it if their

Judaism is so utterly rejected that nothing is allowed to remain and they are treated only with arrogance and scorn.

If the apostles, who also were Jews, had dealt with us Gentiles as we Gentiles deal with the

Jews, there would never have been a Christian among the Gentiles. Since they dealt with us

Gentiles in such brotherly fashion, we in our turn ought to treat the Jews in a brotherly manner in order that we might convert some of them.

For even we ourselves are not yet all very far along not to speak of having arrived."

So this is 1523 and this is a rather what we would call liberal or friendly perspective, very unusual in this time.

Luther is open to evangelistic ministry amongst the

Jews and you hear the words. That's prior to 1525.

Luther dies in 1546 in Eisleben and Eisleben is where he was born.

He almost never lived there. He just happened to be in Eisleben when he had a series of heart attacks.

He had gone there to he had gone there to mediate a dispute and that's when he had the heart attacks and he was never strong enough to leave and so he died there in Eisleben.

He's preached the last four sermons that he preached. He preached there in the cathedral church in Eisleben and the pulpit from which he preached is still there.

You can't go up into it. It's too old and rickety but it's still there and the second and third of those sermons in particular had a fair amount of very strong language about the

Jews. Why? Well, in 20 years after Jesus was born, a

Jew came out. Luther published a book called The Jews and Their Lies.

The Jews and Their Lies. Let me read about the same amount of material from The Jews and Their Lies for you.

What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? Since they live among us we dare not tolerate their conduct now that we are aware of their lying and reviling and blaspheming.

If we do we become sharers in their lies, cursing and blasphemy. Thus we cannot extinguish the unquenchable fire of divine wrath of which the prophets speak, nor can we convert the

Jews. With prayer and the fear of God we must practice a sharp mercy to see whether we might save at least a few from the glowing flames.

We dare not avenge ourselves. Vengeance a thousand times worse than we could wish them already has them by the throat.

I shall give you my sincere advice. First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them.

This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom. Please notice the term Christendom.

So that God might see that we are Christians and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his son and of his

Christians. For whatever we tolerate in the past unknowingly, and I myself was unaware of it, will be pardoned by God.

But if we, now that we are informed, were to protect and shield such a house for the

Jews existing right before our very nose in which they lie about, blaspheme, curse, vilify, and defame

Christ and us as was heard above, it would be the same as if we were doing all this and even worse ourselves as we very well know.

Now what is he referring to? Well, he's talking about the blood libel. There were all sorts of stories told, continue to be told today, of what the

Jews did in secret in their synagogues and how, well, there are in the

Talmud, for example, some pretty clearly anti -Christian statements about Jesus and his parentage and so on and so forth.

But the popular stories that were spread about in medieval culture and in the culture at this time concerning the activities of the

Jews and their secret blasphemies and ceremonies and so on and were just wild.

And between 1523 and 1543, Luther came to believe the blood libel stories and the stories about children being sacrificed and all the rest of the stuff.

He came to believe that these were true. And then note, in honor of our

Lord and of Christendom, Christendom. So it seems very clear that now what's really, really, really ironic at this point, even

Martin Bucer, we're not going to spend a whole lot of time on Martin Bucer. Martin Bucer is the reformer of Strasbourg and he was known as a very irenic, calm, almost ecumenical, trying to get everybody together type guy.

Even Bucer in the late 1530s wrote a book against, I'm sorry, was it 1541?

I think 1539, 54, I wasn't sure, wrote a book against the Jews. Even Martin Bucer did.

And what is really fascinating is that Luther's lifelong enemy,

Johann Eck, from back at the Heidelberg disputation and his opponent, the debate in Leipzig and the one that was trying to get the

Pope to get him condemned. He's just lifelong enemy of Martin Luther.

Eck puts out a book around this same time called

Refutation of a Jew Book, 1541. And to quote

Stephen Rowan in 1985, it would be odious to review the whole of Eck's book, suffice it to say that it represents the absolute nadir of anti -Jewish polemic in the early modern period.

It was long, it was vile, it believed every lie that has ever been told about the

Jews and codified it. And two years later Luther comes out with his own book,

The Jews and Their Lies. So here you have two mortal enemies and yet they are ironically, at the end of their lives, united.

And what holds them together? Sacralism, a belief in the state church.

And so they see the Jews as a fundamental threat to a unified state church.

If you believe in sacralism then the idea is we can't allow places like a synagogue to exist on Christian land, because this is a

Christian country. And therefore we will receive the punishment due to any

Christian land that would allow that to happen. Would it be fair to say that this is very, very different though than, in space, not, there wasn't like concept of race like in that period, that this is an attack on people about Judaism?

It's religious and national, yeah. Luther, pretty clear, and even his most hostile, like out there book, that a person of Jewish heritage can convert to Christianity and they're totally cool in his book, which

I mean would be quite different. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean he even said in The Jews and Their Lies, you know, try to snatch some of them from the fires.

He hadn't given up on the idea of the salvation of a Jewish person. But there was a marked shift and hardening in his attitude, and much, much, much more so.

It's just horrific. Now, there were people, Andreas Osiander, Andreas Osiander, who will be, we'll see next week, was at the

Marburg Colloquy. We'll talk about that from 1529. But Andreas Osiander was one of the early reformers at this time period who was thoroughly opposed to this attitude and taught that as Christians we should be seeking to love and evangelize the

Jews, reason with them from the scriptures, that their person should be protected, that the

Bible says that we are to be doing these things. Evidently he read Romans chapter 9 and 10 -11 and went, boasting against the branches.

Okay. And so there were some who were saying, no, no, no, no, no, stop.

Time out. This is totally inconsistent with what we're saying. But they were unfortunately in the minority, even when you have someone like Martin Bucer writing against the

Jews at this time. And so, like I said, last year there were numerous articles, especially in October, why we can celebrate the

Reformation but not necessarily celebrate Martin Luther. And almost all of this went back to Luther and the

Jews. Luther was in the vast mainstream of thought, both

Roman Catholic and Lutheran, and reformed at this point in time. We would be in a small minority in our view at that particular time in history.

That's the reality. That's simply what must be recognized.

That's what history does. It slaps us upside the face and makes us realize that things have not always been as they are now.

Very similar situation to what's come up recently in various contexts, the reality that George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards owned slaves.

A lot of people are like, well, they need to be judged on the basis of what? Well, you got to find out what did they know, what was believed, were they in rebellion against the church of their day, etc.,

etc., etc. And man, it's tough to get people to hold their emotions in check long enough to actually even ask those questions.

Could we consider this? People don't think about applying the same standards to others that they would want to have applied themselves by later generations.

But there you go. There's the issue with Luther and the peasants' revolt.

So we will pick up with the Marburg colloquy and pretty much finish off Luther next week,

Lord willing. Finish off Luther. That didn't sound quite right, but you know what I mean. We'll finish our looking at Luther.

And so if you haven't watched the videos yet, you sort of missed that part, but you can still watch the radicals before we get to the

Anabaptists, and that will help you with that a good deal. Okay? All right, let's close the

Word of Prayer. Once again, Father, we do thank you for the opportunity of looking back and learning.

And Lord, we do pray that as we see blind spots and errors in others, that you would give us the perspective to see the same in our own lives.

Lord, may we not be judgmental, but may we judge righteously, even as we look at history.