Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 5

Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 5

[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 G.o.d"), printed without place or date, but probably published in 1526. I have used the copy in the Konigliche Bibliothek in Berlin, sig. Co. 2152. (2) _Was geredet sey doss die Schrift sagt Gott thue und mache guts und boses_ ("What does it mean when the Scripture says G.o.d does and works Good and Evil"), 1526. Copies of this are to be found in the University Library of Marburg, also in the Konigliche Bibliothek of Dresden. (3) _Widerruf_ ("Confession "), 1527. I have used the copy in the Konigliche 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 G.o.d," 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.

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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 p.r.o.ne.

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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d. 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 Bunderlin, 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 ill.u.s.tration, 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 Bartholomaus von Starhemberg, a prominent n.o.bleman 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.

Bunderlin 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 ma.s.ses 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 Bunderlin 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 Lutzen) 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 G.o.d 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 Bunderlin, but we can only guess that he was the opponent of the visible Sacrament mentioned in the letter which Erasmus received in 1533.[3]

Bunderlin'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 repet.i.tion 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 G.o.d and man. This mystical feature is especially prominent in his second book on why G.o.d became incarnate in Christ, and I shall begin my exposition with that aspect of his thought.

G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d in the soul, to enter into and partic.i.p.ate in that eternal love with which G.o.d loves us. This central idea of the double nature of man--an upper self indissolubly linked with G.o.d 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 G.o.d'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 ill.u.s.tration 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. n.o.body can be saved until he knows himself at one with G.o.d; until he finds his will at peace and in harmony with G.o.d'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 G.o.d. Priests may absolve men if they will, and ministers may p.r.o.nounce 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 G.o.d: "Love must bloom and the spirit {37} of the man must follow the will of G.o.d written in his heart."[6]