CHAPTER XX
ATTEMPTS AT UNION IN VIEW OF THE PROPOSED COUNCIL
1. Zürich, Münster, the Wittenberg Concord, 1536
The tension between Luther and the Swiss theologians grew ever greater after Zwingli’s death. Zwingli’s successors complained bitterly of the unkind treatment and the reprobation meted out at Wittenberg to themselves, as well as to Zwingli’s memory, and their doctrines.
Leo Judæ, one of the leaders of the Swiss party, writing in 1534 to Bucer, a kindred spirit, concerning the latter’s rough treatment of Schwenckfeld, takes the opportunity to voice his bitter grudge against Luther: “If it is right to oppose Schwenckfeld, why do we not write in the same way against Luther? Why do we not issue a proclamation warning people against him, seeing that he advocates theories, not only on the Sacrament but on other matters too, which are utterly at variance with Holy Scripture? Yet he hands us over to Satan and decrees our exclusion.”[1408]
Martin Bucer himself complained in 1534 to his Zwinglian friend Bullinger: “The fury is intolerable with which Luther storms and rages against everyone who he imagines differs from him, even though not actually an opponent. Thus he curses the most pious men and those who have been of the greatest service to the Church. It is this alone which has brought me into the arena and induced me to join my voice to yours in this controversy on the Sacrament.”[1409]
Heinrich Bullinger, on whom, after Zwingli’s death, devolved the leadership of the Swiss innovators, wrote later to Bucer: “Luther’s rude hostility might be allowed to pass would he but leave intact respect for Holy Scripture.... To such lengths has this man’s proud spirit carried him, while all the preachers and ministers worship his writings as so many oracles, and extol his spirit as apostolic, of whose fulness all have received. What has already taken place leads us to apprehend that this man will eventually bring great misfortune upon the Church.”[1410]
Just as Luther’s work differed from the religious innovations in Switzerland, so it differed equally, or even more, from that of the Anabaptists, despite the fact that the latter traced their origin to Luther’s doctrine of the Bible as the one source of faith, and were largely indebted to him for the stress he had laid on the inward Word.[1411] “The Anabaptist movement was a product of the religious innovations of the sixteenth century,” “the fanatical sect an outcome of the so-called Reformation.”[1412] Notwithstanding the severe persecution they encountered, particularly in Switzerland and in the German uplands, they soon spread throughout other parts of Germany, thanks chiefly to the attractions of their conventicle system. An Imperial mandate of January 4, 1528, imposed the death penalty on Anabaptist heretics, their sacrilegious repetition of baptism being taken as equivalent to a denial of this sacrament and therefore as a capital offence against religion.