Though Schwenckfeld was all his life equally averse to the demagogue Anabaptist movement and to Zwinglianism with its rationalistic tendency, yet his fate led him into ways very much like theirs. Together with his associate Valentine Krautwald, a former precentor, he attacked the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament, giving, however, a new interpretation of the words of Institution., different from that of Zwingli and Œcolampadius. To the fanaticism of the Anabaptists he approximated by his opposition to any organised Church, to the sacraments as means of grace, and to all that appeared to him to deviate from the spirit of the Apostolic Church.
He besought Luther in a personal interview at Wittenberg, on Dec. 1, 1525, to agree to his doctrine of the Sacrament, explaining to him at the same time its affinity with his supposedly profounder conception of the atonement, the sacraments and the life of Christ as followed in his communities; he also invited him in fiery words to throw over the popular churches in which all the people received the Supper and rather to establish congregations of awakened Christians. Luther, though in no unfriendly manner, put him off; throughout the interview he addressed him as “Dear Caspar,” but he flatly refused to give any opinion. According to Schwenckfeld’s own account he even allowed that his doctrine of the Sacrament was “plausible” ... if only it could be proved, and, on parting, whispered in his ear: “Keep quiet for a while.”[280]
When, however, the Sacramentarian movement began to assume alarming dimensions, and the Swiss started quoting Schwenckfeld in favour of their view of the Sacrament, Luther was exasperated and began to assail his Silesian fellow-worker. His indignation was increased by certain charges against the nobleman which reached him from outside sources. He replied on April 14, 1526, to certain writings sent him by Schwenckfeld and Krautwald by an unconditional refusal to agree, though he did so briefly and with reserve.[281] On Jan. 4, of the same year, referring to Zwingli, Œcolampadius and Schwenckfeld in a writing to the “Christians of Reutlingen” directed against the Sacramentarians he said: “Just behold and comprehend the devil and his coarseness”; in it he had included Schwenckfeld, though without naming him, as a “spirit and head” among the three who were attacking the Sacrament.[282]
From that time onward the Silesian appeared to him one of the most dangerous of heretics. He no longer admitted in his case the rights of conscience and private judgment which Luther claimed so loudly for himself and defended in the case of his friends, and to which Schwenckfeld now appealed. It was nothing to him that on many occasions, and even till his death, Schwenckfeld expressed the highest esteem for Luther and gratitude for his services in opening up a better way of theology.
“Dr. Martin,” Schwenckfeld wrote in 1528, “I would most gladly have spared, if only my conscience had allowed it, for I know, praise be to God, what I owe to him.”[283]
It was his purpose to pursue the paths along which Luther had at first striven to reach a new world. “A new world is being born and the old is dying,” so he wrote in 1528.[284] This new world he sought within man, but with the same mistaken enthusiasm with which he taught the new resurrection to life. The Divine powers there at work he fancied were the Holy Ghost, the Word of God and the Blood of the all-powerful Jesus. The latter he wished to reinstate in person as the sole ruler of the Church; in raising up to life and in supporting it, Jesus was ministering personally. According to him Christ’s manhood was not the same as a creature’s; he deified it to such an extent as to dissolve it, thus laying himself open to the charge of Eutychianism. Regeneration in baptism to him seemed nothing, compared with Christ’s raising up of the adult to life.
He would have it that he himself had passed, in 1527, through an overwhelming spiritual experience, the chief crisis of his life, when God, as he says, made him “partaker of the heavenly calling, received him into His favour, and bestowed upon him a good and joyful conscience and knowledge.”[285] On his “conscience and knowledge” he insisted from that time with blinded prejudice, and taught his followers, likewise with a joyful conscience to embrace the illumination from on high. He adhered with greater consistency than Luther to the thesis that everyone who has been enlightened has the right to judge of doctrine; no “outward office or preaching” might stand in the way of such a one. To each there comes some upheaval of his earthly destiny; it is then that we receive the infusion of the knowledge of salvation given by the Spirit, and of faith in the presence of Christ the God-man; it is a spiritual revelation which fortifies the conscience by the absolute certainty of salvation and guides a man in the freedom of the Spirit through all the scruples of conscience he meets in his moral life. His system also comprises a theory of practically complete immunity from sin.[286]
No other mind has given such bold expression as Schwenckfeld to the individualism or subjectivism which Luther originally taught; no one has ever attempted to calm consciences and fortify them against the arbitrariness of religious feeling in words more sympathetic and moving.
Carl Ecke,[287] his most recent biographer, who is full of admiration for him, says quite truly of the close connection between Schwenckfeld and the earlier Luther, that the chief leaders of the incipient Protestant Church, estimable men though some of them were, nevertheless misunderstood and repulsed one of the most promising Christians of the Reformation age. When he charged them with want of logic in their reforming efforts they regarded it as the fanaticism of an ignoramus.... In Schwenckfeld 16th-century Protestantism nipped in the bud the Christian individualism of the early ages rediscovered by Luther, in which lay the hope of a higher unity.[288]