All these movements toward intellectual, spiritual, and social freedom seemed at first to find their champion in the dynamic hero, whose ninety-five theses on the door at Wittenberg shook the world awake in 1517. He was by birth and spirit a child of the people—"ein Kind des Volkes"—and he seemed to be a prophet, divinely called to voice their dumb aspirations. He possessed, {5} like all great prophets, a straightforward moral honesty and sincerity, an absolute fearlessness, a magnetic and commanding personality, an unusual mastery of the vernacular speech, and an abundant power of pathos, humour, and satire. All the world loves a hero who can say in the face of real danger, "I would go forward to Worms if there were as many devils there as there are tiles on the roof!" or again, "I would go to Leipzig if it rained Duke Georges for nine days running!"[6]

He had, too, unusual religious depth and power which sprang, as in the case of the great mystics, from a profound inward experience. Luther, like St. Paul and St. Augustine, and many another spiritual guide of the race, came upon his supreme insights in sudden epoch-making revelations or illuminations by which he found himself on a new level, with the line of march shifted and all values altered. His conversion and dedication to religion was an instance of this type. So, too, was his discovery of the way of Faith. Legend has very likely coloured our accounts of this experience, but for purposes of valuation it is of little moment to us whether the dynamic flash came to him in his cell at Wittenberg as he was studying the Epistle to the Romans, or whether it came while he was climbing the penitential stairway in Rome.[7] When all legendary coverings are stripped away we have left an inner event of the first importance, a live idea bursting into consciousness like a new star on the field of vision. By processes much deeper and richer than those of logical argument, his mind leaped to the certainty of infinite grace and forgiving love in God as revealed in Christ. In a word, this baffled and despairing monk, striving in vain to heap up merits enough to win {6} divine favour, suddenly discovered a new God who filled his whole world with a new light and freedom and joy. His name for this discovery was Faith ["Glaube"], but Faith in its first intention for Luther meant a personal experience or discovery of God, brought into full view and clear apprehension in Christ. "No one can understand God or God's Word," Luther once wrote, "unless he has it revealed immediately ["on Mittel"] by the Holy Ghost, but nobody can receive anything from the Holy Ghost unless he experiences it. In experience the Holy Ghost teaches as in His own school, outside of which nothing of value can be learned."[8]

Not only was Faith for Luther thus possessed of a mystical character as an inward discovery and as a personal experience which laid hold on God immediately, but it also owed its illuminating birth in his consciousness largely to the influence of the writings and the lives of the mystics. However suddenly the "revelation" seemed to burst into his mind, there had nevertheless been a long period of psychological gestation and preparation for it before the epoch-making moment finally came. He had already in his early convent days come under the spell of St. Augustine, St. Bernard, Gerson, and many another guide into the deep regions of inward personal religion, and his intimate friend, the Vicar-general Staupitz, had been to him in some sense a personal embodiment of this type of religion. But the German mystics of the fourteenth century, with their mighty experience and their extraordinary depth, carried him still farther in this direction. He was so enthusiastic over that beautiful anonymous classic of mystical religion, the Theologia Germanica, that he twice edited and published it, declaring in his Preface that he had learned from it "more of what God and Christ and man and all things are" than from any other book except the Bible and St. Augustine. John Tauler, the great Dominican preacher of Strasbourg, impressed him no less profoundly. "Neither in the Latin nor the German language," he {7} wrote to Spalatin in 1516, "have I ever found purer or more wholesome teaching, nor any that so agrees with the Gospel." Both these great teachers of spiritual religion helped him to see that complete confidence in and surrender to the will of God is salvation—"Put off thy own will and there will be no hell."

In Luther's earlier writings we come frequently upon passages which reveal the way in which experience still saturates Faith for him, and which exhibit the mystical depth of his Christianity at this period. Commenting on the phrase, "Christ liveth in me" (Gal. ii. 20), in his Commentary on Galatians[9] he says, "He [Christ] is my form, my furniture, and perfection, adorning and beautifying my faith as the colour, the clear light, the whiteness, do garnish and beautify the wall. Thus are we constrained grossly to set forth this matter. For we cannot conceive that Christ is so nearly joined and united unto us as the colour or whiteness is unto the wall. But Christ thus joined and united unto me and abiding in me, liveth this life in me which now I live; yea, Christ Himself is this life which now I live. Wherefore Christ and I in this behalf are both one."[10] And in a famous passage in the tract "On Christian Liberty," he declares that "Faith has the incomparable grace of uniting the soul to Christ as bride to husband, so that the soul possesses whatever Christ Himself possesses."

Not only was this Luther of the early period the hero of the people and the prophet of a deep and inward religion, he seemed also to have found, even more emphatically than had the Humanists, a far-reaching principle of individualism which took the key from the Church and put it into the hands of the Christian man himself. Salvation in its essence, he sees, is conferred upon no one from without. The soul is dependent for it upon no organization, no traditions, no dogma, no sacred performances. It is a transaction between the {8} individual soul and God, and the person who lays hold on God in living faith thereby has salvation, assurance, and joy. With this principle of individualism there came naturally to Luther a new conception of the Church altogether.[11] It was for him, in ideal at least, a community or congregation ["Gemeinde"] of believers, each member a spiritual priest, ministering to the spiritual and social life of all: "I believe that there is on earth, wide as the world is, not more than one holy universal Christian Church, which is nothing else than the community or assembly of the saints. . . . I believe that in this community or Christendom, all things are common, and each one shares the goods of the others and none calls anything his own. Therefore all the prayers and good works of the entire community help me and every believer, and support and strengthen us at every time in life and in death."[12]

This ideal of a priesthood of believers, ministering to each other in mutual service and practising neighbourly love in daily life, would, if it had been actually carried into effect, have marked a great step in the direction in which the Humanists were going, namely, the transfer of the emphasis from dogma to life, from doctrine to ethics, from ecclesiasticism to personality. Luther's great discovery that personal faith is the only thing which counts toward God, and that love and service are the only things in the human sphere which have religious significance would have introduced, if it had been put full into play, a new era of personal freedom and a new stage in the progress of the Kingdom of God as a world-wide brotherhood of men engaged in mutual service.

{9}

II

But the young Luther of these glowing ideals is not the actual Luther of the Protestant Reformation, any more than the Augustine of the mighty spiritual experiences portrayed in the Confessions is the St. Augustine of history. The historical Luther had the hero-spirit in him in high degree; he had mystical depth and inward experience as we have seen, and he possessed the prophetic power of vision and forereach which makes him often seem far in advance of his time; but these dynamic traits were more than overbalanced by his fundamentally conservative disposition and by his determination not to go faster or farther than he could carry Germany, especially the nobility, with him. He was, in a very real sense, a child of his time, a product of medieval Europe, and he never succeeded in liberating himself from the tight swaddling-bands in which his youth was wrapped. He could not comprehend, as we shall see, the bold spirits who were dedicated to the task of reinterpreting Christianity in terms of the new age; he loved the old, in so far as it seemed to him unspoiled by apostacy and corruption, and he naturally kept reverting to the ancient dogma and the accepted theology of the old Church instead of leading the way into a fresh, vital, spiritual form of Christianity adapted to the social aspiration of the time.

In spite of the fact that Luther knew and loved the German mystics and had himself received a powerful inward experience of Christ as the bridegroom of his soul—an experience which quickened all the forces of his will and raised him to the rank of a world-hero—nevertheless his normal tendency was toward a non-mystical type of Christianity, toward a Christianity thoroughly based on Scripture, logically constructed out of concepts of the nature of God and Man, so ancient, sacred, and orthodox, that they seemed to him axioms of theology and capable of being formulated into a saving {10} system of truth, as universal and as unalterable as the multiplication table.

However unconscious Luther himself may have been of the shift of emphasis that was taking place in him as the movement progressed, the historical observer has no difficulty in noting the change from the Luther who is endeavouring to sound the deeps of life itself, and whose religion is the creation of the inward stream of life within him; and the Luther who wanders far afield from experience, draws curious conclusions from unverified concepts, piles text on text as though heaven could be scaled by another Pelion on Ossa, and once more turns religion back to the cooled lava-beds of theology. He never could succeed in getting the God of his heart's glowing faith into the theologies which he laboriously builded. As soon as he started constructing he invariably fell back upon the building-material which had already been quarried, and which lay at hand. His experimental Faith discovered a God of all Grace, but his inherited concept of God, the God of the Old Testament and of theology, was vastly different, and remained to the end unrevolutionized by his heart's insight. This background conception of God comes to extreme expression in his De servo arbitrio ["The Unfree Will"] of 1525: "This is the acme of faith, to believe that God who saves so few and condemns so many is merciful; that He is just who at His own pleasure has made us necessarily doomed to damnation, so that . . . He seems to delight in the tortures of the wretched and to be more deserving of hatred than of love. If by any effort of reason I could conceive how God, who shows so much anger and harshness, could be merciful and just, there would be no need of faith." There could, in his thought, be no salvation for man, no hope, and no joy, until some way of escape was found from the stern judgments of this angry and wrathful God. This way of escape is found in what Luther calls "the Word of God," by which he means "the Gospel of God concerning His Son, incarnate, suffering, risen, and glorified."[13] {11} This Word of God is for him the sum total of "the promises that God is for us": "the pure Gospel" of a pardoning, forgiving God; the revelation in the Cross of Christ that no self-merit counts or is needed, but that on Christ's account God forgives the sinner and bestows His Grace upon him.

Speaking theologically, Faith consists in believing in the God whom Christ has historically revealed—believing without any doubt that He will be and will do to us according to the things which are said of Him in "the Word of God." It must be said that for Luther himself, Faith was an "active, powerful thing," "a deliberate confidence in the grace of God," which made him "joyous and intrepid" and "for which he could die a thousand deaths";[14] but there was always an irresistible tendency in the Lutheran teaching for faith to drop to the lower level of doctrine, and to consist in the acceptance of a scheme of justification.

This tendency was, I say, easy and irresistible just because Luther did not normally and naturally think of God as being inherently and essentially loving, gracious, tender, and forgiving, that is to say, fundamentally a Father and in his deepest nature like the self-giving Christ. For him, as for so many other theologians, God becomes forgiving and gracious on account of Christ's merit and righteousness and thus no longer imputes sin to us. Because of what Christ did, God now beholds us with an attitude of mercy, grace, and forgiveness, and, on condition of our faith, imputes to us the righteousness of Christ. Salvation is, thus, a plan by which we escape from the God of justice and wrath and have our dealings with a God who has become merciful because our sin has been balanced off by somebody else's merit and righteousness.

Not only did Luther continue this medieval fiction of God's nature and character, he had also always in mind a fictitious and constructed "man." Man for him is a being devoid of "merit," a creature whose personal {12} goodness in and of itself is of no value. Even Faith itself, by which salvation is received, is not an attitude or function of man's own will or reason. It is, like everything else connected with salvation, something divinely given, supernaturally initiated, a work of God, an opus operatum—"Mit unserer Macht ist nichts gethan"—and therefore "faith" and "reason" belong in totally different compartments of the human being. Nor, furthermore, when he is absorbed with his system, is salvation ever synonymous for him with an inwardly-transformed and spiritually-renewed self. Salvation means for him certainty of divine favour. It does not inherently carry with it and involve in its intrinsic meaning a new life, a joyous adjustment of will to the Will of God. If man is to attain to a moral transformation of life, he must receive an added gift of supernatural grace, that is, the power of sanctification through the Holy Spirit. This conception made it impossible for him to look for the coming of a divine kingdom by slow processes now at work in the world.

Luther did not intend to make the "Word of God" synonymous with the Scriptures, and in his great Prefaces to St. Paul's Epistles he does not identify the two. The Word of God is, as we have seen, the revelation, the message, the gospel, of Grace through Christ Jesus, wherever expressed, enunciated, or preached. But the pledged Word of God found in the Scriptures seemed to him the main miracle of the ages, and as, in his contests with Zwickau "Prophets," "Anabaptists," and "Spiritualists," he found himself forced to produce a fixed touchstone of faith and a solid authority to take the place left vacant by the Old Church, he swung naturally toward the dogma of the absolute authority of Scripture, and he laid, without wishing to do so, the foundation for the view of the second generation of Protestantism, that the infallible Scripture is God's final communication to helpless man, and is the ultimate and only basis of authority in religion.

His conception of the sacraments in like manner, {13} because of his crude supernaturalism and his inadequate intellectual and spiritual penetration, drifted to a semi-medieval view. He intended to transform these ceremonies and to have them fit "the pure Word of God." In his primary intention they were to be no longer objective works of grace, but were to have a subjective value only, a faith-significance. They were to be conceived as pictorial, symbolic ways of learning the one important truth of salvation—God's grace and forgiveness; for God deigns, he said, to speak to his immature creatures by signs and pictures. But the imperial sway of the past powerfully moved him; his own conservative disposition carried him along paths which an enlightened reason would not have taken, and the heat of the controversy often blinded him to some of the precious truths that had seemed clear to him in the creative period of Faith. In the bitter controversy with the "spiritual prophets" on the question of sacraments, he wrote words which seem strangely out of harmony with his earlier views and with his own experience: "External things in religion must precede internal experiences which come through [i.e. are mediated by] external things, for God has resolved to give nobody the internal gifts except through the external things. He will give nobody the Spirit and Faith without the use of external word and sign."[15] Without meaning to surrender the precious jewel of a religion spiritually grounded, he once more introduced "the awful mystery" of the sacraments, and opened the door for the conception of the rite as an opus operatum—a grace of God objectively real. He retained infant baptism as an efficacious act, and, obsessed as he was by the literal words, Hoc est corpus—"this is my body"—he went back into the abandoned path of scholasticism,[16] and restored the mysterious and miraculous real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.[17] It is true, as Loofs has said, that {14} "Luther re-discovered Christianity as religion," but it is also unfortunately true as well that he lacked the insight, faith, and boldness of spirit to trust the people of his age and of the future with "Christianity as religion," and instead gave them a Christianity theologically constructed, deeply marred with residual superstitions and mysteries, and heavily laden with the inheritances of dark and medieval ages.



III

There are two types of religious genius, both of which play great roles in history. There is first the genius who, inspired by the ideal of some earlier prophet, or made wise because he has himself discovered the trend of celestial currents, sees through the complex and tangle of his time, and forecasts a truth which all men in a happier coming age will recognize. When he has once seen it, this vision transforms all his ideas and aims, and spoils forever for him all meaner gains, all half truths, all goods which must be won through surrender of a possible better. He will be obedient to that vision regardless of all cost. He will bear witness to the full light which he has seen even though he can compel nobody else in the heedless world of his generation to see it. He may only cry in the wilderness, but at all events he will cry, and he will cry of that highest thing his heart knows.

There is, on the other hand, the genius who understands his own age like an open book. He is almost hypersensitive to the movings of his time. He feels the silent yearnings and strivings of the dumb multitudes about him; he anticipates in his thought what the rest are incipiently thinking—he is the clear voice and oracle of the spirit of his age. He knows to a nicety how far his contemporaries will allow themselves to be carried. {15} He will not over-hurry, he will not outrun their possible speed, and he will sacrifice everything to carry his epoch with him toward the goal which he sees. He is contented to keep his roots deep in the past, and he tempers all his creative insights with a judicious mixture of the experience of the past and the ideas which time has made sacred. He will not satisfy the idealist who wants leaps, and he will not please the radical in any period; but if he is brave, wise, and sincere, and, withal, possessed of rare gifts of interpretation and unusual powers of leadership, he may be able to shape the course of history no less effectively, perhaps more surely, than the genius who insists upon an immediate march straight across country to Canaan the moment he glimpses it from his Pisgah.

Luther was a reformer of this second type. He was beset by very real limitations. Dr. McGiffert does not overstate the facts when he says: "He cared little for clearness and consistency of thought. A satisfactory and adequate world-view was not of his concern. Of intellectual curiosity he had scarcely any; of interest in truth for truth's sake none at all. . . . He remained entirely without intellectual difficulties, finding no trouble with the most extreme supernaturalism."[18] In many respects, as Harnack has insisted, his Christianity was a "medieval phenomenon."[19] Only in one thing was he supremely the master of his age and the hero of a new time—in his discovery of a way of Faith which makes a man "intrepid" even in the wreck of worlds and "in a thousand deaths." On the lower levels of life, where most of his work was done, he was strangely under the sway of the past, a distruster of reason, a restorer of ancient doctrine, a conservative in thought and action, a friend of rulers, a guardian, as far as he could be, of the status quo—a leader who anathematized radicals and enthusiasts and who staved off and postponed for nearly four hundred years the truly liberating and thoroughly {16} adequate reformation. He was determined to be the repairer of the "Old Church," not the builder of a "New Church," and he was resolved not to travel farther nor faster than the substantial men of his time considered safe and wise.

But less was perhaps more. There will at least always be those who think that the sinuous way of progress is the most certain way of advance. The slow incline, the gradual spiral, each wind of the curve "ever not quite" the old level—that is the most approved method of leaving an outworn past and of moving forward into a new stage of history. It may be so. It certainly is true that through Luther's insight new reliance upon God came to men, new energy of faith was won, and by his work of repair, conservative and cautious though it was, in the long sweep of time a liberated Christianity has come, a vital social gospel has become effective, and great vistas of progress are opening out before the Church of Christ. But it is impossible to forget that other group—those men of the other type—who even in Luther's day saw the way straight across into Canaan, the men who saw their vision fade away unrealized, and who failed to behold the fruit of their spiritual travail largely because Luther misunderstood them, refused to give them aid and comfort, and finally helped to marshal the forces which submerged them and postponed their victory. We may not blame him, but it is not fair to these heroic souls that they should longer lie submerged in the oblivion of their defeat. I shall try in these pages to bring up into the light the principles and ideas which they proclaimed to Europe, perhaps ahead of their time.



[1] In the South the movement showed a tendency to drift back into a refined paganism. In the North, however, it was deeply Christian in interest, in feeling, and in its moral aspirations. Erasmus was by far the greatest figure and the most influential person in the group of Humanists of this latter type.

[2] Epistle CCVII.

[3] Epistle DLXXXVII.

[4] 1401-1464.

[5] Nicholas belonged to one of these circles. "The Brethren of the Common Life" are treated in my Studies in Mystical Religion, chap. xiv.

[6] Letter to the Elector Frederick, March 5, 1522.

[7] The story that Luther, climbing the Scala Santa in 1510, suddenly was impressed by the words, "The just shall live by faith," is based on a reminiscence of Luther's son Paul. Luther's own reference to the ascent of the Scala Santa makes no allusion to any such experience. He merely says that when he reached the top of the stairs, which he climbed in the hope of getting the soul of an ancestor out of Purgatory, he thought to himself, "Who knows whether this prayer will avail?" Luther began his lectures on Romans in 1515, and his dynamic experience probably belongs near this date.

[8] Preface to the Magnificat written in 1521.

[9] First given as Lectures in 1516-17, and published in 1519.

[10] A Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians.

[11] Dilthey says in Archiv fuer Geschichte der Philosophie, Bd. v. Heft 3, p. 358: "The Justification of which the medieval man had inward experience was the descending stream of objective forces upon the believer from the transcendental world, through the Incarnation, in the channels of the ecclesiastical institutions, priestly consecration, sacraments, confession, and works. It was something which took place in connection with a super-sensible regime. The Justification by faith of which Luther was inwardly aware was the personal experience of the believer standing in the continuous line of Christian fellowship, by whom assurance of the Grace of God is experienced in response to personal faith, an experience derived from the appropriation of the work of Christ."

[12] Saemmtliche Werke (Erlangen edition), xxii. p. 20.

[13] On Christian Liberty, Primary Works, p. 106.

[14] See his Preface to The Epistle to the Romans.

[15] Wider die himlichen Propheten vom Sacrament, ii. Anno 1525.

[16] See P. Loofs, Dogmengeschichte (Vierte Auflage, 1906), pp. 752-755.

[17] In his instructions to Melanchthon for the Cassel Conference with Butzer in 1534, Luther said, "In and with the bread, the body of Christ is truly partaken of, accordingly all that takes place actively and passively in the bread takes place actively and passively in the body of Christ and the latter is distributed, eaten and masticated with the teeth."

[18] McGiffert, Protestant Thought before Kant (1911), p. 20. See also the same view in Troeltsch, Protestantisches Christentum und Kirche in der Neuzeit (2nd Auflage), p. 481.

[19] History of Dogma, vii. p. 169.



{17}

CHAPTER II

HANS DENCK AND THE INWARD WORD[1]

Hans Denck has generally been enrolled among the Anabaptists, and it is possible to use that name of scorn with such a latitude and looseness that it includes not only Denck but all the sixteenth-century exponents of a free, inward religion. Anabaptism has often been treated as a sort of broad banyan-tree which flourished exuberantly and shot out far-reaching branches of very varied characters, but which held in one organic unity all the branches that found soil and took root. A name of such looseness and covering capacity is, however, of little worth, and it would promote historical accuracy if we should confine the term to those who opposed infant baptism and who insisted instead upon adult baptism, not as a means of Grace, but as a visible sign of the covenant of man with God. The further characteristic marks which may be selected to differentiate Anabaptism from other movements of the period are:

1. The treatment of the Gospel as a new law to be literally followed and obeyed by all who are to have the right to be called "saints."

2. The true Church is a visible Church, the community of the saints, founded by covenant, with adult baptism as its sign, formed exactly on the pattern of the apostolic {18} Church and preserved in strict purity by rigorous church discipline; and

3. The denial to magistrates of all power to persecute men for their faith and doctrine on the ground that the Gospel gives them no such authority—its great commandment being love.[2]

Hans Denck, though in his early period of activity closely identified with this movement and regarded as one of its chief leaders in Germany, does not properly belong, however, to the banyan-tree of Anabaptism. His writings reveal ideas and tendencies of such enlarged scope that it appears clear that he had discovered and was teaching another type of Christianity altogether.[3] He is the earliest exponent in the sixteenth century of a fresh and unique type of religion, deeply influenced by the mystics of a former time, but even more profoundly moulded by the new humanistic conceptions of man's real nature.

There are few biographical details of Denck's life available. He was, most probably, a native of Bavaria,[4] and he was born about the year 1495. He studied in the University of Ingolstadt, where he was admitted among the baccalaureates in 1517.[5] In the year 1520 we catch a glimpse of him in close association with the Humanists of Augsburg.[6] In 1522 he was at work in Basle as proof-reader for the famous publisher, Valentin Curio, and was living in intimate fellowship with the great scholar OEcolampadius, whose lectures on the Prophet Isaiah he heard.[7] In the autumn of the same year, on the recommendation of OEcolampadius, he was appointed Director of St. Sebald's School in Nuremberg, which was then the foremost seat of learning in that city, {19} a great centre of classical humanistic studies. During the first period of his life in Nuremberg he was closely identified with the Lutheran movement, but he soon shifted his sympathies, and aligned himself with the radical tendencies which at this period were championed in Nuremberg by Thomas Muenzer, who, in spite of his misguided leadership and fanatical traits, had discovered a genuine religious principle that was destined to become significant in safer hands.[8] Muenzer read Tauler's sermons from his youth up; in his own copy of these sermons, preserved in the library at Gera, a marginal note says that he read them almost continually, and that here he learned of a divine interior Teaching. It was Muenzer's teaching of the living Voice of God in the soul, his testimony to the reality of the inner heavenly Word, which God Himself speaks in the deeps of man's heart, that won the Humanist and teacher of St. Sebald's School to the new and perilous cause. He also formed a close friendship with Ludwig Hetzer, who, like Muenzer, taught that the saving Word of God must be inward, and that the Scriptures can be understood only by those who belong to the School of Christ. Having once caught the idea from these impassioned leaders, Denck proceeded directly to work it out and to develop its implications in his own fashion. He was himself sane, clear-minded, modest, sincere, far-removed from fanaticism, and eager only to find a form of religion which would fit the eternal nature of things on the one hand, and the true nature of man on the other—man, I mean, as the Humanist conceived him.[9]

Already in this Nuremberg period, Denck became fully convinced that Luther's doctrine of sin and justification was an artificial construction—Einbildung—and that his conception of Scripture and the Sacraments was destined to clamp the new-found faith in iron bonds, tie it to outworn tradition, and make it incapable of a progressive {20} and vital unfolding. He declared in his testimony or "confession" to the city council of Nuremberg in 1524, that although he had not yet a full experience of the inward, powerful Word of God, he distinctly felt its life as an inner witness which God had planted within him, a spark of the Divine Light breaking into his own soul, and in the strength of this direct experience he denied the value of external ceremonies, and declared that even the Bible itself cannot bring men to God without the assistance of this inner Light and Spirit.[10]

As a result of this change of attitude, the schoolmaster of St. Sebald's was banished from the city of Nuremberg, January 21, 1525, and from this time until his early death he was homeless and a wanderer. He spent some months—between September 1525 and October 1526—in Augsburg endeavouring to organize and direct the rapidly expanding forces of the liberal movement. He was during these months, and especially during the period of the great Anabaptist synod which was held at this time in Augsburg, endeavouring to give the chaotic movement of Anabaptism a definite direction, with the main emphasis on the mystical aspect of religion. He hoped to call a halt to the vague socialistic dreams and the fanatical tendencies that put the movement in constant jeopardy and peril, and he was striving to call his brotherhood to an inner religion, grounded on the inherent nature of the soul, and guided by the inner Word rather than on "a new law" set forth in the written word. There were, however, too many eddies and currents to be mastered by one mind, too many varieties of faith to be unified under one principle, and Denck's own view was too intangible, inward, and spiritual, to satisfy the enthusiasm either of the seething masses or of {21} the leaders who saw a new Jerusalem just ready to come down out of heaven from God.[11]

After the Augsburg period, Denck spent some time in Strasbourg, where he gained many followers. Capito bears testimony at this time to the purity of Denck's life, to his moderation and goodwill, and to the impressive effect of his preaching and teaching upon the people of the city.[12] Vadian, the Humanist and reformer of St. Gall, too, in spite of his disapproval of some of Denck's ideas, speaking of him in retrospect after his death, called him "a most gifted youth, possessed of all excellencies." But his teaching was too strange and unusual to be allowed currency even in free Strasbourg. After being granted a public discussion he was ordered to leave the city forthwith. During a short stay in Worms, following the Strasbourg period, in collaboration with Ludwig Hetzer, they brought to a successful conclusion a German translation of the Prophets from the Hebrew, a work which Hetzer had begun. This important piece of scholarly work was published under the title, Alle Propheten nach hebraeischer Sprache verteutscht, in Worms, April 3, 1527, and had a wide circulation and use, its main demerit being that it had been done by "Anabaptists."

Pursued on every hand, hunted from place to place, he finally sought peace and shelter with his old friend, the teacher who had first inspired him in his youth, OEcolampadius, and here in Basle in a quiet retreat, he died of the plague in November 1527, hardly more than thirty-two years of age.[13]

We must now turn to the little books of this persecuted and homeless Humanist to see what his religious teaching really was, and to discover the foundation principle which lay at the root of all the endeavours of this period to launch a Christianity grounded primarily on the {22} fundamental nature of man.[14] Denck writes like a man with a message—straight to the mark, lucid, vivid, and intense. He believes what he says and he wants others to see it and believe it. His writings are entirely free from the controversial temper, and they breathe throughout the spirit of tolerance and charity. He knows when to stop, and brings his books to an end as soon as he has made his points clear. The fundamental fact of man's nature for Denck is personal freedom. Starting with no theological presuppositions he is under no obligation to make the primary assumption common to all Augustinian systems that man is devoid of any native capacities which have to do with spiritual salvation. He begins instead with man as he knows him—a sadly marred and hampered being, but still possessed of a potentially Divine nature, and capable of co-operating, by inward choices and decisions, with the ceaseless effort of God to win him completely to Himself. His little book, What does it mean when the Scripture says God does and works Good and Evil, is throughout a protest against the idea of "election," which, he says, involves "a limitation of the Love of God," and it is a penetrating account of the way in which man by his free choices makes his eternal destiny.[15] "God compels nobody, for He will have no one saved by compulsion."[16] "God has given freewill to men that they may choose for themselves, either the good or the bad. Christ said to His disciples, 'Will ye {23} go away?' as though He would say, 'You are under no compulsion.'"[17] "God," he says again in the Widerruf, "forces no one, for love cannot compel, and God's service is, therefore, a thing of complete freedom."[18]

It is freedom, too, which explains the fact of sin. God is in no way the author of sin; He is wholly good; He can do nothing but what is good; He ordains no one to sin; He is the instigator of no evil at all. All the sin and moral evil of the world have come from our own evil choices and purposes. "The thing which hinders and has always hindered is that our wills are different from God's will. God never seeks Himself in His willing—we do. There is no other way to blessedness than to lose one's self-will."[19] "He who surrenders his selfishness," he says in another treatise, "and uses the freedom which God has given him, and fights the spiritual battle as God wills that such battles are to be fought and as Christ fought His, can in his measure be like Christ."[20] The whole problem of salvation for him is, as we shall see, to bring about such a transformation in man that sin ceases, and the least thing thought, said, or done out of harmony with the will of God becomes bitter and painful to the soul.[21] "To be a Christian," he once wrote, "is to be in measure like Christ, and to be ready to be offered as He gave Himself to be offered. I do not say that we are perfect as Christ was, but I say rather that we are to seek the perfection which Christ never lost. Christ calls Himself the Light of the world, but He also tells His disciples that they too are the light of the world. All Christians in whom the Holy Ghost lives—that is all real Christians—are one with Christ in God and are like Christ. They will therefore have similar experiences, and what Christ did they will also do."[22]

Not only is there a power of free choice in the soul; there is as well an elemental hunger in man which pushes him Godward. "God," he often says, "can give only {24} to those who hunger." In a very great passage which reminds one of Pascal he says: "The kingdom of God is in you and he who searches for it outside himself will never find it, for apart from God no one can either seek or find God, for he who seeks God, already in truth has Him."[23] He says nearly the same thing again in the little book, Vom Gesetz Gottes: "He who does not know God from God Himself does not ever know Him." This central insight of Denck's religious faith that God and man are not completely sundered, but meet, as he says,[24] in the deeps of ourselves, is grounded upon the fact of experience that there is within us a supra-individual Reality which becomes revealed to us sometimes as a Light, sometimes as a Word, sometimes as a Presence or environing Spirit. This testimony is Denck's main contribution, and we must next see how he sets it forth. There is, he says, a witness in every man. He who does not listen to it blinds himself, although God has given him originally a good inward eyesight. If a man will keep still and listen he will hear what the Spirit witnesses within him. Not only in us but in the heathen and in Jews this witness is given, and men might be preached to outwardly forever without perceiving, if they did not have this witness in their own hearts.[25] The Light shines, the invisible Word of God is uttered in the hearts of all men who come into the world, and this Light gives all men freedom and power to become children of God.[26] There is both an inward principle of revelation which he calls das innere Wort, and a principle of active power which he calls die Kraft des Allerhoechsten (the power of the Highest), not two things, but one reality under two aspects and two names, and he insists that he who turns to this Divine, spiritual reality, which is one with God, and obeys it and loves its leading has already found God and has come to himself. "Oh, who will give me a voice," he writes, "that I may cry aloud to the whole world that God, the all highest, is in the deepest abyss {25} within us and is waiting for us to return to Him. Oh, my God, how does it happen in this poor old world, that Thou art so great and yet nobody finds Thee, that Thou callest so loudly and nobody hears Thee, that Thou art so near and nobody feels Thee, that Thou givest Thyself to everybody and nobody knows Thy name! Men flee from Thee and say they cannot find Thee; they turn their backs and say they cannot see Thee; they stop their ears and say they cannot hear Thee!"[27]

This self-giving nature of God is everywhere taken for granted—it is just that which he feels that Christ has once for all made sun-clear, and it is because He is essentially self-giving that God pours out His life and love upon us as He does His sunshine upon the grass and flowers. "The Word of God is with thee before thou seekest; He gives before thou hast asked; He opens to thee before thou hast knocked." God like a Father deals with His wayward children. "Oh, blessed is the man," he writes, "who in his need finds the love of God and comes to Him for forgiveness!"[28] No one of us who has been washed from his sins, he beautifully says, ought to eat a piece of bread without considering how God loves him and how he ought to love God, who in Jesus Christ His Son laid aside His right to Divinity that His love might appear complete.[29] "It has pleased the eternal Love," he writes, "that that Person in whom Love was shown in the highest degree should be called the Saviour of His people. Not that it would be possible for human nature to make anybody saved, but God was so completely identified in Love with Him that all the Will of God was the will of this Person, and the sufferings of this Person were and counted as the sufferings of God Himself."[30]

Christ is for him the complete manifestation of life and the perfect exhibition or unveiling of God's love, and he who appreciates this love, feels its attraction, and lives a life which corresponds to his soul's insight, becomes {26} himself Christlike, forsakes sin and self, and enters upon a life of salvation. "All who are saved," he says, "are of one spirit with God, and he who is the foremost in love is the foremost of those who are saved."[31] "He who gets weary of God has never found Him," while the person who has found Him in this love-way will be ready and willing to give up even his own salvation and accept damnation for the love of God, since he knows in his heart that "God is so wholly good that He can give to such a man only what is highest and best, and that is Himself!"[32] That is to say, he who is willing to be damned for the love of God never will be damned!

But salvation must never be conceived as something which is the result of a transaction. It is from beginning to end a life-process and can in no way be separated from character and personal attitude of will. "He who depends on the merit of Christ," he says, "and yet continues in a fleshly, wicked life, regards Christ precisely as in former times the heathen held their gods. He who really believes that Christ has saved him can no longer be a servant of sin, for no one believes rightly until he leaves his old life."[33] "It is not enough," he elsewhere writes, "that God is in thee; thou must also be in God, that is, partake of the life of God. It does not help to have God if thou dost not honour Him. It is no avail to call thyself His child if thou dost not behave thyself like a child!"[34] He insists that no one can be "called righteous" or be "counted righteous" until he actually is righteous. Nothing can be "imputed" to a man which is not ethically and morally present as a living feature of his character and conduct. No one, he truly says, can know Christ as a means of salvation unless he follows Him in his life. He who does not witness to Christ in his daily walk grows into a different person from the one he is called to be.[35] The person who lives on in sin does not really know God, and, {27} to use his fine figure; is like a man who has lost his home and gone astray, and does not even know that he is at home, when his Father has found him and has welcomed him back, but still goes on hunting for home and for Father, since he does not recognize his home or his Father when he has found them![36]

Salvation, then, for Hans Denck is wholly an inward process, initiated from above through the Divine Word, the Christ, whom we know outwardly as the historical Person of the Gospel, and whom we know inwardly as the Revealer of Light and Love, the Witness in us against sin, the Voice of the Father to our hearts, calling us home, the Goal of our spiritual quest, the Alpha and the Omega of all religious truth and all spiritual experience. The Way to God, he says, is Christ inwardly and spiritually known.[37] But however audible the inner Word may be; however vivid the illumination; however drawing the Love, there is never compulsion. The soul itself must hear and see and feel; must say yes to the appeal of Love, and must co-operate by a continuous adjustment of the personal will to the Will of God and "learn to behave as a child of God."

Having reached the insight that salvation is entirely an affair of the spirit, an inward matter, Denck loosened his hold upon the external things which had through long centuries of history come to be considered essential to Christianity. Sacraments and ceremonies dropped to a lower level for him as things of no importance. With his characteristic breadth and sweetness, he does not smite them as an iconoclast would have done; he does not cry out against those who continue to use them. He merely considered them of no spiritual significance. "Ceremonies," he writes in his dying confession, "in themselves are not sin, but whoever supposes that he can attain to life either by baptism or by partaking of bread, is still in superstition."[38] "If all ceremonies," he adds, "were lost, little harm would come of it."[39] {28} He appeals to Christians to stop quarrelling over these outward and secondary matters, and to make religion consist in love to neighbour rather than in zeal for outward ceremonies. He laid down this great principle: "All externals must yield to love, for they are for the sake of love, and not love for their sake."[40]

He was, consistently with his fundamental ideas, profoundly opposed to every tendency to make Christianity a legal religion. His friends, the Anabaptists, were inclined to turn the Gospel of Christ into "a new law," and to make religion consist largely in scrupulous obedience to this perfect law of life. To all this he was radically alien, for it was, he thought, only another road back to a religion of the letter, while Christ came to call us to a religion of the spirit. "He who has not the Spirit," he wrote, "and who fails to find Him in the Scriptures, seeks life and finds death; seeks light and finds darkness, whether it be in the Old or in the New Testament."[41] "He who thinks that he can be made truly righteous by means of a Book is ascribing to the dead letter what belongs to the Spirit."[42] He does not belittle or undervalue the Scriptures—he knew them almost by heart and took the precious time out of his brief life to help to translate the Prophets into German—but he wants to make the fact forever plain that men are saved or lost as they say yes or no to a Light and Word within themselves. "The Holy Scriptures," he writes in his dying testimony, "I consider above every human treasure, but not so high as the Word of God which is living, powerful, and eternal, for it is God Himself, Spirit and no letter, written without pen or paper so that it can never be destroyed. For that reason, salvation is not bound up with the Scriptures, however necessary and good they may be for their purpose, because it is impossible for the Scriptures to make good a bad heart, even though it may be a learned one. A good heart, however, with a Divine Spark in it is improved by everything, and to such the Scriptures will bring blessedness {29} and goodness."[43] The Scriptures—the external Word—as he many times, in fact somewhat tediously, declares, are witnesses and pointers to the real and momentous thing, the Word which is very near to all souls and is written in the heart, and which increases in clearness and power as the will swings into parallelism with the will of God, and as the life grows in likeness to the Divine image revealed in Christ. This inward life and spiritual appreciation do not give any ground for relaxing the moral obligations of life. No fulfilling of the law by Christ, no vanishing of the outward and temporal, furnish any excuse to us for slacking a jot or tittle of anything which belongs to the inherent nature of moral goodness. "Christ," he says, "fulfilled the law, not to relieve us of it, but to show us how to keep it in truth. The member must partake of what the Head partakes."[44] To love God alone and to hate everything that hinders love is a principle which, Denck believes, will fulfil all law, ancient or modern.[45]

Such were the ideas which this young radical reformer, dreamer perhaps, tried to teach his age. The time was not ripe for him, and there was no environment ready for his message. He spoke to minds busy with theological systems, and to men whose battles were over the meaning of inherited medieval dogma. He thought and spoke as a child of another world, and he talked in a language which he had learned from his heart and not from books or from the schools. It is "the key of David," he says, that is, an inward experience, which unlocks all the solid doors of truth, but there were so few about him who really had this "key"! His task, which was destined to be hard and painful, which was in his lifetime doomed to failure, was not self-chosen. "I opened my mouth," he says, "against my will and I am speaking to the world because God impels me so that I cannot keep silent. God has called me out and stationed me at my post, and He knows whether good will come of it or not."[46]

{30}

It is not often that a man living in the atmosphere of seething enthusiasm, pitilessly pricked and goaded by brutal and unfeeling persecutors, compelled to hear his precious truth persistently called error and pestilent heresy, keeps so calm and sane and sure that all will be well with him and with his truth as does Denck. "I am heartily well content," is his dying testimony, "that all shame and disgrace should fall on my face, if it is for the truth. It was when I began to love God that I got the disfavour of men."[47] He confesses that he has found it difficult to "keep a gentle and a humble heart" through all his work among men, to "temper his zeal with understanding," and to "make his lips say always what his heart meant,"[48] but he did, at least, succeed in loving God and in hating everything that hindered love. In an epoch in which the doctrine was new and revolutionary, he succeeded in presenting the principle of the Inward Word as the basis of religion without giving any encouragement to libertinism or moral laxity, for he found the way of freedom to be a life of growing likeness to Christ, he held the fulfilling of the law to be possible only for those who accept the burdens and sacrifices of love, and he insisted that the privileges of blessedness belong only to those who behave like sons.



[1] The best studies on Denck are Heberle's articles in Theol. Studien und Kritiken (1851), Erstes Heft, and (1855) Viertes Heft. Gustave Roehrich's Essai sur la vie, les ecrits et la doctrine de Jean Denk (Strasbourg, 1853). Ludwig Keller's Ein Apostel der Wiedertaeufer (Leipzig, 1882). The last two books must, however, be followed with much caution.

[2] One branch of the Anabaptists held that the "saints" may, however, rightly use the sword to execute the purposes of God upon the godless, and to hasten the coming of the Thousand Years' Reign of the Kingdom.

[3] I have included him, in my Studies in Mystical Religion (1908), among the Anabaptists, but he can be called one only by such a loose use of the word that it ceases to have any definite significance.

[4] See J. Kessler's Sabbata (1902), p. 150.

[5] L. Keller, Johann von Staupitz, p. 207.

[6] Ibid. p. 208.

[7] OEcolampadius' Letter to Pirkheimer, April 25, 1525.

[8] Georg Theodor Strobel, Leben, Schriften und Lehren Muenzers (Nuernberg, 1795); J. R. Seidemann, Thomas Muenzer (Dresden, 1842).

[9] A contemporary chronicle calls Denck a scholar, eloquent, modest and, withal, learned in Hebrew.—Kessler's Sabbata, p. 150.

[10] This "Confession" is in the archives of Nuremberg, and has been extensively used in Keller's Ein Apostel der Wiedertaeufer, see especially pp. 49-62. See also Th. Kolde, Kirchengeschichtliche Studien (1888), p. 231 f. In this connection much interest attaches to a passage in a letter which Luther wrote to Johann Brismann, February 4, 1525. He says: "Satan has carried it so far that in Nuremberg some persons are denying that Christ is anything, that the Word of God is anything, that the Eucharist is anything, that Magistracy is anything. They say that only God is."

[11] See Nicoladoni's Johannes Buenderlin von Linz (Berlin, 1893), p. 114.

[12] Letter of Capita to Zwingli, December 26, 1526.

[13] Kessler says that OEcolampadius in a Christian spirit was with him at his death. Op. cit. p. 151.

[14] The little books of Denck from which I shall extract his teaching are: (1) Vom Gesetz Gottes ("On the Law of God"), printed without place or date, but probably published in 1526. I have used the copy in the Koenigliche Bibliothek in Berlin, sig. Co. 2152. (2) Was geredet sey doss die Schrift sagt Gott thue und mache guts und boeses ("What does it mean when the Scripture says God does and works Good and Evil"), 1526. Copies of this are to be found in the University Library of Marburg, also in the Koenigliche Bibliothek of Dresden. (3) Widerruf ("Confession "), 1527. I have used the copy in the Koenigliche Bibliothek in Dresden sig. Theol. Cathol. 817 (4) Ordnung Gottes und der Creaturen Werck ("The Divine Plan and the Work of the Creature"), 1527, in the above library in Dresden. (5) Wer die Warheif warlich lieb hat, etc., no date ("Whoever really loves the Truth," etc.), and (6) Von der wahren Liebe ("On the True Love"), 1527. This last tract has been republished in America by the Mennonitische Verlagshandlung, Elkhart, Indiana, 1888.

[15] "To hear the Word of God," he elsewhere says, "means life; to hear it not means death."—Ordnung Gottes, p. 17.

[16] Was geredet sey, p. C. (The paging is by letters.)

[17] Was geredet sey, B. 3.

[18] Widerruf, sec. iv.

[19] Was geredet sey, B.

[20] Ibid. B. 5.

[21] Venn Gesetz Gottes, p. 15.

[22] Was geredet sey, B. 6.

[23] Was geredet sey, B. 2.

[24] Ibid. B. 5.

[25] Ibid. B. 1 and 2.

[26] Ordnung Gottes, p. 7.

[27] Vom Gesetz Gottes, p. 27.

[28] Was geredet sey, D. 1 and 2.

[29] Vom Gesetz Gottes, p. 33.

[30] Van der wahren Liebe (Elkhart reprint), p. 7.

[31] Van der wahren Liebe (Elkhart reprint), p. 8.

[32] Vom Gesetz Gottes, p. 19.

[33] Widerruf, ii.

[34] Was geredet sey, B. 1.

[35] Ibid. D.

[36] Was geredet sey, A. 4 and 5.

[37] Ibid. B. 3.

[38] Widerruf, vii.

[39] Ibid. vii.

[40] Vom Gesetz Gottes, p. 33.

[41] Ibid. p. 22.

[42] Ibid. p. 21.

[43] Widerruf, i.

[44] Vom Gesetz Gottes, p. 9.

[45] Ibid. p. 12.

[46] Was geredet sey, Preface.

[47] Widerruf, Preface.

[48] Ibid., Preface.



{31}

CHAPTER III

TWO PROPHETS OF THE INWARD WORD: BUNDERLIN AND ENTFELDER

I

The study of Denck in the previous chapter has furnished the main outlines of the type of Christianity which a little group of men, sometimes called "Enthusiasts," and sometimes called "Spirituals," but in reality sixteenth-century Quakers, proclaimed and faithfully practised in the opening period of the Reformation. They differed fundamentally from Luther in their conception of salvation and in their basis of authority, although they owed their first awakening to him; and they were not truly Anabaptists, though they allied themselves at first with this movement, and earnestly laboured to check the ominous signs of Ranterism and Fanaticism, and the misguided "return" to millennial hopes and expectations, to which many of the Anabaptist leaders were prone.

The inner circle of "Spirituals" which we are now engaged in investigating was never numerically large or impressive, nor was it in the public mind well differentiated within the larger circle of seething ideas and revolutionary propaganda. The men themselves, however, who composed it had a very sure grasp of a few definite, central truths to which they were dedicated, and they never lost sight, in the hurly-burly of contention and in the storm of persecution, of the goal toward which they were bending their steps. They did not endeavour {32} to found a Church, to organize a sect, or to gain a personal following, because it was a deeply settled idea with them all that the true Church is invisible. It is a communion of saints, including those of all centuries, past and present, who have heard and obeyed the divine inner Word, and through co-operation with God's inward revelation and transforming Presence have risen to a mystical union of heart and life with Him. Their apostolic mission—for they fully believed that they were "called" and "sent"—was to bear witness to this eternal Word within the soul, to extend the fellowship of this invisible Zion, and to gather out of all lands and peoples and visible folds of the Church those who were ready for membership in the one family and brotherhood of the Spirit of God. They made the mistake, which has been very often made before and since, of undervaluing external helps and of failing to appreciate how important is the visible fellowship, the social group, working at common tasks and problems, the temporal Church witnessing to its tested faith and proclaiming its message to the ears of the world; but they did nevertheless perform a very great service in their generation, and they are the unrecognized forerunners of much which we highly prize in the spiritual heritage of the modern world.

The two men whose spiritual views we are about to study are, I am afraid, hardly even "names" to the world of to-day. They were not on the popular and winning side and they have fallen into oblivion, and the busy world has gone on and left them and their little books to lie buried in a forgotten past. They are surely worthy of a resurrection, and those who take the pains will discover that the ideas which they promulgated never really died, but were quick and powerful in the formation of the inner life of the religious societies of the English Commonwealth, and so of many things which have touched our inner world to-day.

Johann Buenderlin, like his inspirer Denck, was a scholar of no mean rank. He understood Hebrew; he knew the Church Fathers both in Greek and Latin; he {33} makes frequent reference to Greek literature for illustration, and he was well versed in the dialectic of the schools, though he disapproved of it as a religious method.[1] He was enrolled as a student in the University of Vienna in 1515, under the name of Johann Wunderl aus Linz, Linz being a town of Upper Austria. After four years of study he left the University in 1519, being compelled to forgo his Bachelor's degree because he was too poor to pay the required fee.[2] The next five years of his life are submerged beyond recovery, but we hear of him in 1526 as a preacher in the service of Bartholomaeus von Starhemberg, a prominent nobleman of Upper Austria, and he was at this time a devout adherent of the Lutheran faith. He was in Augsburg this same year, 1526, at the time of the great gathering of Anabaptists, and here he probably met Hans Denck, at any rate he testified in 1529 before the investigating Judge in Strasbourg that he received adult baptism in Augsburg three years before. He seems to have gone from Augsburg to Nikolsburg, where he was present at a public Discussion in which a definite differentiation appeared between the moderate and the radical, the right and left, wings of the Anabaptists. Buenderlin took part in this Discussion on the "moderate" side. He remained for some time—perhaps two years—in Nikolsburg and faced the persecution which prevailed in that city during the winter of 1527-1528. The next year he comes to notice in Strasbourg where, for a long time, a much larger freedom of thought was allowed than in any other German city of the period. The great tragedy which he had to experience was the frustration of the work of his life by the growth and spread of the Ranter influence in the Anabaptist circles, through the leadership of Melchior Hoffman and others of a similar spirit. He loved freedom, and here he saw it degenerating into license. He was devoted to a religion of experience and of inner authority, and now {34} he saw the wild extremes to which such a religion was exposed. He was dedicated to a spiritual Christianity, and now he was compelled to learn the bitter lesson that there are many types and varieties of "spiritual religion," and that the masses are inclined to go with those who supply them with a variety which is spectacular and which produces emotional thrills. Our last definite information concerning Buenderlin shows him to have been in Constance in 1530, from which city he was expelled as a result of information against the "soundness" of his doctrine, furnished in a letter from OEcolampadius. From this time he drops completely out of notice, and we are left only with conjectures. One possible reference to him occurs in a letter from Julius Pflug, the Humanist, to Erasmus in 1533. Pflug says that a person has newly arrived in Litium (probably Luetzen) who teaches that there are no words of Christ as a warrant for the celebration of the Sacrament of the Supper, and that it is to be partaken of only in a spiritual way. He adds that God had intervened to protect the people from such heresy and that the heretic had been imprisoned. The usual penalty for such heresy was probably imposed. This description would well fit Johann Buenderlin, but we can only guess that he was the opponent of the visible Sacrament mentioned in the letter which Erasmus received in 1533.[3]

Buenderlin's religious contribution is preserved in three little books which are now extremely rare, the central ideas of which I shall give in condensed form and largely in my own words, though I have faithfully endeavoured to render him fairly.[4] His style is difficult, {35} mainly because he abounds in repetition and has not learned to write in an orderly way. I am inclined to believe that he sometimes wrote, as he would no doubt preach, in a prophetic, rapturous, spontaneous fashion, hardly steering his train of thought by his intellect, but letting it go along lines of least resistance and in a rhythmic flood of words; his central ideas of course all the time holding the predominant place in his utterance. He is essentially a mystic both in experience and in the ground and basis of his conception of God and man. This mystical feature is especially prominent in his second book on why God became incarnate in Christ, and I shall begin my exposition with that aspect of his thought.

God, he says, who is the eternal and only goodness, has always been going out of Himself into forms of self-expression. His highest expression is made in a heavenly and purely spiritual order of angelic beings. Through these spiritual beings He objectifies Himself, mirrors Himself, knows Himself, and becomes revealed.[5] He has also poured Himself out in a lower order of manifestation in the visible creation where spirit often finds itself in opposition and contrast to that which is not spirit. The highest being in this second order is man, who in inward essence is made in the image and likeness of God, but binds together in one personal life both sensuous elements and divine and spiritual elements which are always in collision and warfare with each other. Man has full freedom of choice and can swing his will over to either side—he can live upward toward the divine goodness, or he can live downward toward the poor, thin, limiting isolation of individual selfhood. But {36} through the shifting drama of our human destiny God never leaves us. He is always within us, as near to the heart of our being as the Light is to the eye. Conscience is the witness of His continued Presence; the drawing which we feel toward higher things is born in the unlost image of God which is planted in our nature "like the tree of Life in Eden." He pleads in our hearts by His inner Word; He reveals the goodness of Himself in His vocal opposition to all that would harm and spoil us, and He labours unceasingly to be born in us and to bring forth His love and His spiritual kingdom in the domain of our own spirits. The way of life is to die to the flesh and to the narrow will of the self, and to become alive to the Spirit and Word of God in the soul, to enter into and participate in that eternal love with which God loves us. This central idea of the double nature of man—an upper self indissolubly linked with God and a lower self rooted in fleshly and selfish desires—runs through all his writings, and in his view all the processes of revelation are to further the liberation and development of the higher and to weaken the gravitation of the lower self.

His first book deals with God's twofold revelation of Himself—primarily as a living Word in the soul of man, and secondarily through external signs and events, in an historical word, and in a temporal incarnation. With a wealth and variety of expression and illustration he insists and reiterates that only through the citadel—or better the sanctuary—of his inner self can man be spiritually reached, and won, and saved. Nobody can be saved until he knows himself at one with God; until he finds his will at peace and in harmony with God's will; until his inward spirit is conscious of unity with the eternal Spirit; in short, until love sets him free with the freedom and joy of sons of God. Priests may absolve men if they will, and ministers may pronounce them saved, but all that counts for nothing until the inward transformation is a fact and the will has found its goal in the will of God: "Love must bloom and the spirit {37} of the man must follow the will of God written in his heart."[6]

All external means in religion have one purpose and one function; they are to awaken the mind and to direct it to the inward Word. The most startling miracle, the most momentous event in the sphere of temporal sequences, the most appealing account of historical occurrences can do nothing more than give in parable-fashion hints and suggestions of the real nature of that God who is eternally present within human spirits, and who is working endlessly to conform all lives to His perfect type and pattern. In the infant period of the race, both among the Hebrews and the Gentile peoples, God has used, like a wise Teacher, the symbol and picture-book method. He has disciplined them with external laws and with ceremonies which would move their child-minded imaginations; but all this method was used only because they were not ripe and ready for the true and higher form of goodness. "They used the face of Moses until they could come to the full Light of the truth and righteousness of God, for which all the time their spirits really hungered and thirsted."[7] The supreme instance of the divine pictorial method was the sending of Christ to reveal God visibly. Before seeing God in Christ men falsely thought of Him as hostile, stern, and wrathful; now they may see Him in this unveiling of Himself as He actually is, eternally loving, patiently forgiving, and seeking only to draw the world into His love and peace: "When the Abba-crying spirit of Christ awakens in our hearts we commune with God in peace and love."[8] But no one must content himself with Christ after the flesh, Christ historically known. That is to make an idol of Him. We can be saved through Him only when by His help we discover the essential nature of God and when He moves us to go to living in the spirit and power as Christ Himself lived. His death as an outward, historical fact does not save us; it is the supreme expression of His limitless love and the complete dedication {38} of His spirit in self-giving, and it is effective for our salvation only when it draws us into a similar way of living, unites us in spirit with Him and makes us in reality partakers of His blood spiritually apprehended. Christ is our Mediator in that He reveals the love of God towards us and moves our will to appreciate it.[9]

Every step of human progress and of spiritual advance is marked by a passage from the dominion of the external to the sway and power of inward experience. God is training us for a time when images, figures, and picture-book methods will be no longer needed, but all men will live by the inward Word and have the witness—"the Abba-crying voice"—in their own hearts. But this process from outward to inward, from virtue impelled by fear and mediated by law to goodness generated by love, gives no place for license. Buenderlin has no fellowship with antinomianism, and is opposed to any tendency which gives rein to the flesh. The outward law, the external restraint, the discipline of fear and punishment are to be used so long as they are needed, and the written word and the pictorial image will always serve as a norm and standard, but the true spiritual goal of life is the formation of a rightly fashioned will, the creation of a controlling personal love, the experience of a guiding inward Spirit, which keep the awakened soul steadily approximating the perfect Life which Christ has revealed.

The true Church is for Buenderlin as for Denck, the communion and fellowship of spiritual persons—an invisible congregation; ever-enlarging with the process of the ages and with the expanding light of the Spirit. He blames Luther for having stopped short of a real reformation, of having "mixed with the Midianites instead of going on into the promised Canaan," and of having failed to dig down to the fundamental basis of spiritual religion.[10]

In his final treatise[11] he goes to the full length of the implication of his principle. He recounts with luminous {39} simplicity the mystical unity of the spiritual Universe and tells of the divine purpose to draw all our finite and divided wills into moral harmony with the Central Will. Once more religion is presented as wholly a matter of the inward spirit, a thing of insight, of obedience to a living Word, of love for an infinite Lover, the bubbling of living streams of water in the heart of man. He declares that the period of signs and symbols and of "the scholastic way of truth" is passing away, and the religion of the New Testament, the religion of life and spirit, is coming in place of the old. As fast as the new comes ceremonies and sacraments vanish and fall away. They do not belong to a religion of the Spirit; they are for the infant race and for those who have not outgrown the picture-book. Christ's baptism is with power from above, and He cleanses from sin not with water but with the Holy Ghost and the burning fire of love. As soon as the spiritual man possesses "the key of David," and has entered upon "the true Sabbath of his soul," he holds lightly all forms and ceremonies which are outward and which can be gone through with in a mechanical fashion without creating the essential attitude of worship and of inner harmony of will with God: "When the Kingdom of God with its joy and love has come in us we do not much care for those things which can only happen outside us."[12]



II

Christian Entfelder held almost precisely the same views as those which we have found in the teaching of Buenderlin. He has become even more submerged than has Buenderlin, and one hunts almost in vain for the events of his life. Hagen does not mention him. Gruetzmacher in his Wort und Geist never refers to him. The great Realencyklopaedie fur protestantische Theologie und Kirche has no article on him. Gottfried Arnold in his {40} Kirchenund Ketzer-Historien merely mentions him in his list of "Witnesses to the Truth." The only article I have ever found on him is one by Professor Veesenmeyer in Gabler's N. theol. Journal (1800), iv. 4, pp. 309-334.

He first appears in the group of Balthasar Huebmaier's followers and at this period he had evidently allied himself with the Anabaptist movement, which gathered into itself many young men of the time who were eager for a new and more spiritual type of Christianity. Huebmaier mentions Entfelder in 1527 as pastor at Ewanzig, a small town in Moravia, where, as he himself later says, he diligently taught his little flock the things which concerned their inner life. In the eventful years of 1520-1530 he was in Strasbourg in company with Buenderlin,[13] and in this latter year he published his first book, with the title: Von den manigfaltigen in Glauben Zerspaltungen dise jar erstanden. ("On the many Separations which have this year arisen in Belief.") A second book, which is also dated 1530, bears the title: Von waren Gotseligkayt, etc. ("On true Salvation.") He wrote also a third book, which appeared in 1533 under the title: Von Gottes und Christi Jesu unseres Herren Erkandtnuss, etc. ("On the Knowledge of God and Jesus Christ our Lord.")

His style is simpler than that of Buenderlin. He appears more as a man of the people; he is fond of vigorous, graphic figures of speech taken from the life of the common people, much in the manner of Luther, and he breathes forth in all three books a spirit of deep and saintly life. His fundamental idea of the Universe is like that of Buenderlin. The visible and invisible creation, in all its degrees and stages, is the outgoing and unfolding of God, who in His Essence and Godhead is one, indivisible and incomprehensible. But as He is essentially and eternally Good, He expresses Himself in revelation, and goes out of Unity into differentiation and multiplicity; but the entire spiritual movement of the universe is back again toward the fundamental Unity, for Divine Unity is both the Alpha and the Omega of the {41} deeper inner world. His main interest is, however, not philosophical and speculative; his mind focuses always on the practical matters of a true and saintly life. Like his teacher, Buenderlin, his whole view of life and salvation is mystical; everything which concerns religion occurs in the realm of the soul and is the outcome of direct relations between the human spirit and the Divine Spirit. In every age, and in every land, the inner Word of God, the Voice of the Spirit speaking within, clarifying the mind and training the spiritual perceptions by a progressive experience, has made for itself a chosen people and has gathered out of the world a little inner circle of those who know the Truth because it was formed within themselves. This "inner circle of those who know" is the true Church: "The Church is a chosen, saved, purified, sanctified group in whom God dwells, upon whom the Holy Ghost was poured out His gifts and with whom Christ the Lord shares His offices and His mission."[14]

There is however, through the ages a steady ripening of the Divine Harvest, a gradual and progressive onward movement of the spiritual process, ever within the lives of men: "Time brings roses. He who thinks that he has all the fruit when strawberries are ripe forgets that grapes are still to come. We should always be eagerly looking for something better."[15] There are, he says, three well-marked stages of revelation: (1) The stage of the law, when God, the Father, was making Himself known through His external creation and by outward forms of training and discipline; (2) the stage of self-revelation through the Son, that men might see in Him and His personal activity the actual character and heart of God; and (3) the stage of the Holy Spirit which fills all deeps and heights, flows into all lives, and is the One God revealed in His essential nature of active Goodness—Goodness at work in the world. Externals of every type—law, ceremonies, rewards and punishments, {42} historical happenings, written Scriptures, even the historical doings and sufferings of Christ—are only pointers and suggestion-material to bring the soul to the living Word within, "to the Lord Himself who is never absent," and who will be spiritually born within man. "God," he says, "has once become flesh in Christ and has revealed thus the hidden God and, as happened in a fleshly way in Mary, even so Christ must be spiritually born in us." So, too, everything which Christ experienced and endured in His earthly mission must be re-lived and reproduced in the life of His true disciples. There is no salvation possible without the new birth of Christ in us, without self-surrender and the losing of oneself, without being buried with Christ in a death to self-will and without rising with Him in joy and peace and victory.[16] He who rightly loves his Christ will speak no word, will eat no bit of bread, nor taste of water, nor put a stitch of clothes upon his body without thinking of the Beloved of his soul. . . . In this state he can rid himself of all pictures and symbols, renounce everything which he possesses, take up his cross with Christ, join Him in an inward, dying life, allow himself, like grain, to be threshed, winnowed, ground, bolted, and baked that he may become spiritual food as Christ has done for us. Then there comes a state in which poverty and riches, pain and joy, life and death are alike, when the soul has found its sabbath-peace in the Origin and Fount of all Love.[17] His first book closes with a beautiful account of the return of the prodigal to His Father and to His Father's love, and then he breaks into a joyous cry, as if it all came out of his own experience: "Who then can separate us from the Love of God?"

Those who rightly understand religion and have had this birth and this Sabbath-peace within themselves will stop contending over outward, external things, which make separations but do not minister to the spirit; they will give up the Babel-habit of constructing theological {43} systems,[18] they will pass upward from elements to the essence, they will stop building the city-walls of the Church out of baptism and the supper, which furnish "only clay-plastered walls" at best, and they will found the Church instead upon the true sacramental power of the inward Spirit of God.[19] The true goal of the spiritual life is such a oneness with God that He is in us and we in Him, so that the inner joy and power take our outer life captive and draw us away from the world and its "pictures," and make it a heartfelt delight to do all His commandments and to suffer anything for Him.[20]

Here, then, in the third decade of the sixteenth century, when the leaders of the Reformation were using all their powers of dialectic to formulate in new scholastic phrase the sound creed for Protestant Christendom, and while the fierce and decisive battle was being waged over the new form in which the Eucharist must be celebrated, there appeared a little group of men who proposed that Christianity should be conceived and practised as a way of living—nothing more nor less. They rejected theological language and terminology root and branch. They are as innocent of scholastic subtlety and forensic conceptions as though they had been born in this generation. They seem to have wiped their slate clean of the long line of Augustinian contributions, and to have begun afresh with the life and message of Jesus Christ, coloured, if at all, by local and temporal backgrounds, by the experience of the earlier German mystics who helped them to interpret their own simple and sincere experiences. They are as naive and artless as little children, and they expect, as all enthusiasts do in their youth, that they have only to announce their wonderful truths and to proclaim their "openings" in order to bring the world to the light! They go to the full length of the implications of their {44} fresh insight without ever dreaming that all the theological world will unite, across the yawning chasms of difference, to stamp out their "pestilent heresy," and to rid the earth of persons who dare to question the traditions and the practices of the centuries.

Instead of beginning with the presupposition of original sin, they quietly assert that the soul of man is inherently bound up in the Life and Nature of God, and that goodness is at least as "original" as badness. They fly in the face of the age-long view that the doctrine of Grace makes freewill impossible and reduces salvation wholly to a work of God, and they assert as the ineradicable testimony of their own consciousness that human choices between Light and Darkness, the personal response to the character of God as He reveals Himself, the co-operation of the will of man with the processes of a living and spiritual God are the things which save a man—and this salvation is possible in a pagan, in a Jew, in a Turk even, as well as in a man who ranges himself under Christian rubrics and who says paternosters. They reject all the scholastic accounts of Christ's metaphysical nature, they will not use the term Trinity, nor will they admit that it is right to employ any words which imply that God is divided into multiform personalities; but nevertheless they hold, with all the fervour of their earnest spirits, that Christ is God historically and humanly revealed, and that to see Christ is to see the true and only God, and to love Christ is to love the Eternal Love.

In an age which settled back upon the Scriptures as the only basis of authority in religious faith and practice, they boldly challenged that course as a dangerous return to a lower form of religion than that to which Christ had called men and as only legalism and scribism in a new dress. They insisted that the Eternal Spirit, who had been educating the race from its birth, bringing all things up to better, and who had used now one symbol and now another to fit the growing spiritual perception of men, is a real Presence in the deeps of men's {45} consciousness, and is ceaselessly voicing Himself there as a living Word whom it is life to obey and death to disregard and slight. Having found this present, immanent Spirit and being deeply convinced that all that really matters happens in the dread region of the human heart, they turned away from all ceremonies and sacraments and tried to form a Church which should be purely and simply a Communion of saints—a brotherhood of believers living in the joy of an inward experience of God, and bound together in common love to Christ and in common service to all who are potential sons of God.



[1] See Veesenmeyer's article on Buenderlin in N. lit. Anzeiger for August 1807, P. 535.

[2] The details of his life here given have been gathered mainly from the excellent monograph on Johannes Buenderlin by Dr. Alexander Nicoladoni. (Berlin, 1893.)

[3] This incident is given in Dr. Carl Hagen's Deutschlands literarischt und religioese Verhaeltnisse im Reformalionszeitalter, 1868, iii. p. 310.

[4] The books are:—

(1) Ein gemayne Berechnung ueber der Heiligen Schrift Inhalt, etc. ("A General Consideration of the Contents of Holy Scripture.") Printed in Strasbourg in 1529.

(2) Aus was Ursach sich Gott in die nyder gelassen und in Christo vermenschet ist, etc., 1529. ("For what cause God has descended here below and has become incarnate in Christ.")

(3) Erklaerung durch Vergleichung der biblischen Geschrift, doss der Wassertauf sammt andern aeusserlichen Gebraeuchen in der apostolischen Kirchen geubet, on Gottes Befelch und Zeugniss der Geschrift, von etlichen dieser Zeit wider efert wird, etc., 1530. ("Declaration by comparison of the Biblical Writings that Baptism with Water, together with other External Customs practised in the Apostolic Church, have been reinstated by some at this time without the Command of God or the Witness of the Scriptures.")

These three books can be found bound in one volume, with writings of Denck and others, in the Koenigliche Bibliothek in Dresden. There is also a copy of his third book in Utrecht. Besides using the books themselves I have also used the monograph by Nicoladoni and the study of Buenderlin in Hagen, op. cit. iii. pp. 295-310.

[5] This idea is reproduced and greatly expanded in the writings of the famous Silesian Mystic, Jacob Boehme.

[6] Ein gemayne Berechnung, p. 57.

[7] Ibid. p. 14.

[8] Ibid. p. 221.

[9] Ein gemayne Berechnung, pp. 218-221, freely rendered.

[10] Ibid. pp. 30-34.

[11] Erklaerung durch Vergleichung.

[12] Aus was Ursach, p. 33. These phrases, "Key of David" and "Sabbath Rest for the Soul," occur in the writings of all the spiritual reformers.

[13] See N. lit. Anzeiger (1807), p. 515.

[14] Entfelder to his brethren at the end of his first book: Von Zerspaltungen.

[15] Vorrede to Von Zerspaltungen.

[16] Von waren Gotseligkayt, pp. 18-21.

[17] See especially Von Zerspaltungen, pp. 6-8.

[18] This "Babel-habit of constructing theological systems" is constantly referred to by Jacob Boehme, as we shall see. I believe that Boehme had read both Buenderlin and Entfelder.

[19] See Von Zerspaltungen, passim, especially p. 17.

[20] Von waren Gotseligkayt, p. 13.



{46}

CHAPTER IV

SEBASTIAN FRANCK: AN APOSTLE OF INWARD RELIGION

Sebastian Franck is one of the most interesting figures in the group of German Reformers, a man of heroic spirit and a path-breaking genius, though for many reasons his influence upon his epoch was in no degree comparable with that of many of his great contemporaries. No person, however great a genius he may be, can get wholly free from the intellectual climate and the social ideals of his period, but occasionally a man appears who has the skill and vision to hit upon nascent aspirations and tendencies which are big with futurity, and who thereby seems to be far ahead of his age and not explicable by any lineage or pedigree. Sebastian Franck was a man of this sort. He was extraordinarily unfettered by medieval inheritance, and he would be able to adjust himself with perfect ease to the spirit and ideas of the modern world if he could be dropped forward into it.

He is especially interesting and important as an exponent and interpreter of a religion based on inward authority because he unites, in an unusual manner, the intellectual ideals of the Humanist with the experience and attitude of the Mystic. In him we have a Christian thinker who is able to detach himself from the theological formulations of his own and of earlier times, and who could draw, with breadth of mind and depth of insight, from the wells of the great original thinkers of all ages, and who, besides, in his own deep and serious soul could feel the inner flow of central realities. He was no doubt {47} too much detached to be a successful Reformer of the historical Church, and he was too little interested in external organisations to be the leader of a new sect; but he was, what he aspired to be, a sincere and unselfish contributor to the spread of the Kingdom of God, and a significant apostle of the invisible Church.[1]

Sebastian Franck was born in 1499 at Donauwuerth in Schwabia. He began his higher education in the University of Ingolstadt, which he entered March 26, 1515. He went from Ingolstadt to Heidelberg, where he continued his studies in the Dominican College which was incorporated with the University. Here he was associated in the friendly fellowship of student life with two of his later opponents, Martin Frecht and Martin Bucer, and here he came under the influence of Humanism which in the scholarly circles in Heidelberg was beginning to take a place along with the current Scholasticism of the period. While a student in Heidelberg he first heard Martin Luther speak on the insufficiency of works and on faith as the way of salvation, and though he must have felt the power of this great personality and the freshness of the message, he was not yet ripe for a radical change of front.[2] He seems to have felt through these student years that a new age was in process of birth, but though he was following the great events he remained to the end of his University period an adherent of the ancient Church and was ordained a priest about the year 1524; but very soon after he went over to the party of Reform, and was settled as a reforming preacher in the little church at Gustenfelden near Nuremberg. During this period he came into close and intimate relation with the powerful humanistic spirit of that important city. Hans Sachs was already a person of fame and influence in Nuremberg, and here he became acquainted with the writings of the most famous humanists of the day—Erasmus, Hutten, Reuchlin, Pirkheimer, {48} Althamer and others. In 1528 he married Ottilie Behaim, a woman of rare gifts, whose brothers were pupils of Albrecht Duerer, and who were themselves in sympathy with the freer tendencies of the time as expressed by the Anabaptists. Franck, however, though sympathizing with the aspirations of the Anabaptists for a new age, did not feel confidence in their views or their methods. His first literary work was a translation into German of Althamer's Diallage, which contained an attack from the Lutheran point of view upon the various Enthusiasts of the period, especially the Anabaptists. In his original preface to this work Franck, though still in most respects a Lutheran, already reveals unmistakable signs of variation from the Wittenberg type, and he is plainly moving in the direction of a religion of the spiritual and mystical type freed from the limitations of sect and party. Even in this formative stage he insists that the Spirit, and not commentaries, is the true guide for the interpretation of Scripture; he already contrasts Spirit and letter, outer man and inner man, and he here lays down the radical principle, which he himself soon put into practice, that a minister of the Gospel should resign his charge as soon as he discovers that his preaching is not bearing spiritual fruit in the transformation of the lives of his congregation.[3]