Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 8

Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 8

[19] _Moriae Encomion_, p. 149.

[20] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 13.

[21] _Moriae Enc._ p. 97b.

[22] _Paradoxa_, sec. 29.

[23] _Moriae Enc._ p. 93a.

[24] _Paradoxa_, sec. 63.

[25] _Moriae Enc._ p. 110. For the testing of the Word, see Hegler, _op.

cit._ pp. 117-119.

[26] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 8.

[27] _Paradoxa_, sec. 9.

[28] _Ibid._ sec. 45.

[29] _Das verbutschierte Buch_, Apology, p. 11.

[30] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 8.

[31] This Letter is preserved in J. G. Sch.e.l.lhorn's _Amoenitates literariae_ (1729), xi. pp. 59-61.

[32] _Paradoxa_, Vorrede, sec. 4.

[33] _Ibid._ sec. 6.

[34] _Ibid._ sec. 2.

[35] See _Das verbutschierte Buch_, pa.s.sim.

[36] Quoted from Hegler, _op. cit._ p. 104.

[37] _Das verbutschierte Buch_, p. 3.

[38] _Paradoxa_, sec. 101.

[39] _Ibid._ sec. 101.

[40] _Paradoxa_, sec. 8.

[41] _Das verbutschierte Buch_, pp. 6-9, and _Paradoxa_, sec. 41.

[42] _Paradoxa_, sec. 41 and 42.

[43] _Moriae Enc._ p. 111. _Paradoxa_, pa.s.sim, especially sec. 28-32.

See also Hegler _op. cit._ pp. 127-136.

{64}

CHAPTER V

CASPAR SCHWENCKFELD AND THE REFORMATION OF THE "MIDDLE WAY"[1]

Among all the Reformers of the sixteenth century who worked at the immense task of recovering, purifying, and restating the Christian Faith, no one was n.o.bler in life and personality, and no one was more uncompromisingly dedicated to the mission of bringing into the life of the people a type of Christianity winnowed clean from the husks of superst.i.tion and tradition and grounded in ethical and spiritual reality, than was Caspar Schwenckfeld, the Silesian n.o.ble. No one, to a greater degree than he, succeeded in going behind, not only Scholastic formulations but even behind Pauline interpretations of Christ, to Christ Himself. The aspects of the Christ-life which powerfully moved him were very different from {65} those which moved Francis of a.s.sisi three centuries earlier, but the two men had this much in common--they both went to Jesus Christ for the source and inspiration of their religion, they both lived under the spell of that dominating Personality of the Gospels, they both felt the power of the Cross and saw with their inner spirits that the real healing of the human soul and the eternal destiny of man were indissolubly bound up with the Person of Christ.[2] Here again, as in the early years of the thirteenth century, there came a gentle Reformer of religion, who would use no compulsion but love, who knew how to suffer patiently with his Lord, and whose entire programme was the restoration of primitive Christianity, though of necessity it would be restored, if at all, in terms of the spiritual ideals of the sixteenth century, as the Christianity of St. Francis had been in terms of thirteenth-century ideals.

Caspar Schwenckfeld was born of a n.o.ble family in the duchy of Liegnitz, in Lower Silesia, in 1489. He studied in Cologne, in Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, and probably also in the University of Erfurt, though he attained no University degree. His period of systematic study being over, about 1511 he threw himself into the life of a courtier, with the prospect of a successful worldly career before him.

Luther's heroic contest against the evils and corruptions of the Church and his proclamation of a Reforming faith shook the prosperous courtier wide awake and turned the currents of his life powerfully toward religion. He deeply felt at this time, what he expressed a few years later, that a new world was coming to birth and the old one dying away.

To the end of his days, and in spite of the harsh treatment which he later received from the Wittenberg Reformer, Schwenckfeld always remembered that it was the prophetic trumpet-call of Luther which had summoned him to a new life, and he always carried about with him in his long exile--an exile for which Luther was largely responsible--a beautiful respect and {66} appreciation for the man who had first turned him to a knowledge of the truth.[3]

From the very beginning of his awakening he shows the moral earnestness of a prophet, and even in his earliest writings he emphasizes the inwardness of true religion and the importance of a personal experience of the living, creative Divine Word.[4] As a result of this pa.s.sion of his for the formation of moral and spiritual character in the lives of the people, he was very acute and sensitive to note the condition which actually existed around him, and he was not long in detecting, much to his sorrow, aspects of weakness in the new type of Christianity which was spreading over Germany. Even as early as 1524, in _An Admonition to all the Brethren of Silesia_[5] he called attention to the superficiality of the change which was taking place in men's lives as a result of the Reformation--"the lack of inward grasp" as he calls it--and to the externality of the new Reform, the tendency to stop at "alphabetical promises of salvation." He gives a searching examination to the central principles of Luther's teachings and approves of them all, but at the same time he points out that little will be gained if they be adopted only as intellectual statements and formulated views.

He pleads for a faith in Christ and an appreciation of Him that shall "reach the deep regions of the spirit," renew the heart, and produce a new man in the believer--"the atoning work of Christ must be vital"--and for a type of religion that will involve suffering with Christ, real conformity of will to His will, dying to self and rising again with Him, which means that we cannot "take the {67} cross at its softest spot."[6] He calls with glowing pa.s.sion for a radical transformation of personal and social life, and for a serious attempt to revive primitive Christianity with its conquering power.

Luther himself was always impressed with the lack of real, intense, personal religion which resulted from the Reformation movement, and he often bewailed this lack. He said once to Schwenckfeld in this early period, "Dear Caspar, genuine Christians are none too common. I wish I could see two together in a place!" But with all his t.i.tanic power to shake the old Church, Luther was not able to sift away the acc.u.mulated chaff of the ages and to seize upon the inward, living kernel of Christ's Gospel in such a real and vivid presentation that men were once again able to find the entire Christ, and were once again lifted into apostolic power through the discovery of Him. This was the task to which Schwenckfeld now felt himself summoned. It seemed to him that the entire basis of salvation should be grasped in a way quite different from Luther's way of formulation, and this called for a restatement of the whole revelation of G.o.d in Christ and of the work of Christ in the soul of man.[7]

Luther's final break with the spiritual Reformer of Silesia, which occurred in 1527, was primarily occasioned by Schwenckfeld's teaching on the meaning and value of the Lord's Supper, though their difference was by no means confined to that point. Schwenckfeld's position had culminated in 1526 in a suspension of the celebration of the Lord's Supper--the so-called _Stillstand_--until a right understanding and true practice of it according to the will of the Lord should be revealed.[8] "We know at present of no apostolic commission," he wrote, "nor {68} again do we make any claim to be regarded as apostles, for we have neither received the fulness of the Holy Spirit nor the apostolic seal for such an office. We dwell in humility and ascribe nothing to ourselves, except that we bear witness to Christ, invite men to Christ, preach Christ and His infinite work of salvation, and labour as much as we can that Christ may be truly known."[9]

Into the bitter controversy over the Sacrament--a controversy between n.o.ble and sincere Reformers, which forms the supreme internal tragedy of the Reformation--we need not now enter. We shall in the proper place give Schwenckfeld's position upon it, though only in so far as it belongs in an exposition of his type of spiritual Christianity; but the immediate effect of his position and practices was such a collision with Luther, and the arousal of such hostility on the part of the Lutherans of Silesia, that the continued pursuit of Schwenckfeld's mission in that country became impossible. He was, however, not expelled by edict, but under compulsion of the existing situation; and in order not to be a trouble to his friend, the Duke of Liegnitz, he went in 1529 into voluntary exile, never to return. For thirty years he was a wanderer without a permanent home on the earth, but he could thank his Lord Christ, as he did, for granting him through all these years an inward freedom, and for bringing him into "His castle of Peace." He once wrote: "If I had wanted a good place on earth, if I had cared more for temporal than for eternal things, and if I would have deserted my Christ, then I might have stayed in my fatherland and in my own house, and I might have had the powerful of this world for my friends."[10]

He sojourned for longer or shorter periods in Strasbourg, Augsburg, Ulm, and other cities, but nowhere was he safe from his enemies, and he always faced the prospect of banishment even from his place of temporary sojourn. {69} Furious declarations were pa.s.sed against him by the Schmalkald League in 1540, for to his anti-Lutheran views on the sacraments he had now added teachings on the nature of Christ which the theologians p.r.o.nounced unorthodox. Three years later he sent a messenger to Luther in hope of a friendly understanding. Luther's answer was brief and final: "The stupid fool, possessed by the devil, understands nothing. He does not know what he is babbling. But if he won't stop his drivel, let him at least not bother me with the booklets which the devil spues out of him."[11] At the ministerial Council of Protestant States in 1556 Schwenckfeld was denounced in the most vituperous language of the period, and the civil authorities were urged to proceed against him as a dangerous heretic. He always had, notwithstanding this pursuit of theological hate, many powerful friends, and a large number of brave and devoted followers who were glad to risk goods, home, and life for the sake of what was to them the living Word of G.o.d. He died--or as his friends preferred to say, he had a quiet and peaceful "home pa.s.sage"--at Ulm in 1561. Of the purity, the brave sincerity, the n.o.bility, the outward and inward consistency of his life there is no question. His enemies had no word to say which reflected upon the motives of his heart or upon the genuine piety of his life. His religion cost him all that he held dear in the outer world--he had not taken "the cross at the softest spot"--and he practised his faith as the most precious thing a man could possess in this world or in any other.

We must now turn to a study of his type of Christianity, which will be presented here not in the order of its historical development, but as it appears in perspective in his life and writings. He does not ground his conception of salvation, his idea of religion _uberhaupt_, as the humanistic Reformers, Denck, Bunderlin, Entfelder, and Franck, do, on the essentially divine nature of the {70} soul in its deepest reality,[12] nor again as the medieval mystics do, on the substantial presence within the soul of a divine soul-centre, an unlost and inalienable Spark or Image of G.o.d which can turn back home and unite itself with its Source, the G.o.dhead. He begins, as Luther does, with man "fallen," "dead in sin," by nature "blind and deaf" to divine realities. For him, as for Luther, there exists no _natural_ freedom of the will, by which a person can spontaneously and of his own initiative rise up, shake off the shackles of sin, and go to living as a son of G.o.d. This stupendous event, this absolute shift of the life-level, comes, and can come, he thinks, only through an act of G.o.d, directly, immediately wrought upon the soul. Salvation must be a supernatural event. Through this act of G.o.d from above there results within the soul an experience which in every respect is a new creation.

It is a cataclysmic event of the same order as the _fiat lux_ of cosmic creation, a rebirth through which the man who has it once again comes into the condition Adam was in before he fell.

Everything which has to do with salvation in Schwenckfeld's Christianity goes back to the historical Christ.[13] Christ is the first-born of this new creation. He is the first "new Adam," who by His triumphant life and victorious resurrection has become for ever "a life-giving Spirit," the creative Principle of a new humanity. In Christ the Word of G.o.d, the actual Divine Seed of G.o.d, became flesh, entered into our human nature and penetrated it with Spirit and with Life, conquered its stubborn bent toward sin, and transfigured and transformed this human flesh into a divine and heavenly substance. By obedience to the complete will of G.o.d, even to the extreme depths of suffering, sacrifice, and death on the Cross for {71} the love of men, Christ glorified human flesh, exalted it from flesh to spirit, and in His resurrected heavenly life He is able to unite Himself inwardly with the souls of believers, so that His spiritual resurrected flesh and blood can be their food and drink, and He can become the life-giving source of a new order of humanity, the spiritual Head of a new race.

"If the soul of man," he wrote, "is to be truly nourished, vitally fed and watered, so that it comes into possession of Eternal Life, it must die to its fleshly life and _receive into itself a divine and spiritual Life, having its source in the Being of G.o.d and mediated to the soul by the living, inward-working Flesh and Blood of Jesus Christ_," through which mediation we come into spiritual union and vital fellowship with G.o.d who is Spirit.[14]

Salvation for Schwenckfeld, therefore, is partic.i.p.ation in the life of this new creation, this new world-order. To become a Christian, in his sense of the word, is to pa.s.s over one of the most decisive watersheds in the universe, to go from one kingdom to another kingdom of a higher rank. The _process_--for it is a vital process--is from beginning to end in the realm of experience. By the exercise of faith in the crucified, risen, and glorified G.o.d-Man, as the life-giving Spirit, real power from a higher world streams into the soul. Something "pneumatic," something which belongs ontologically to a higher spiritual world-order, comes into the person as a divinely bestowed germ-plasm, with living, renewing, organizing power. As with Irenaeus, so with Schwenckfeld, salvation is "real redemption," the "deification"

of mortal man, the actual formation of an immortal nature, the restoration of humanity to what it originally was, through the in-streaming life-energy of a mystical Adam-Christ, the Founder and Head of a new spiritual race.[15]

By this incoming spiritual power and life-substance the entire personality of the recipient is affected. The {72} recreative energy which pours in transforms both soul and body. The inner eternal Word of G.o.d, who became flesh, acts upon the inner nature of man, so that the believing man is changed into something spiritual, divine and heavenly, and like Jesus Christ, the incarnated Word of G.o.d.[16] There comes, with this epoch-making experience, a sense of freedom not known before, a power of control over the body and its appet.i.tes, an illumination of the intellect, a new sensitiveness of conscience to the meaning of sin, an extraordinary expansion of the vision of the goal of life--which is a full-grown man in Christ,--and an apprehension of the gift of the Spirit sufficient for the achievement of that goal. Not least among the signs of transfiguration and of heightened life is the attainment of a joy which spreads through the inward spirit and shines on the face--a joy which can turn hard exile into a _Ruheschloss_, "a castle of peace."

Those who have experienced this dynamic transfiguration gain thereby gifts, capacities, and powers to hear the Word of G.o.d within their own souls, and thus this Word, which is the same life-giving Spirit that became flesh in Christ and that produces the new creation in man, becomes a perpetual inward Teacher in those who are reborn. "Precious gifts of the Holy Ghost flow from the essential Being of G.o.d into the heart of the believer." There is, Schwenckfeld holds, a double revelation of G.o.d. The primary Word of G.o.d is eternal, spiritual, inward. "The Word, when spiritual messengers preach or teach, is of two kinds with a decided difference in their manner of working. One is of G.o.d, even is G.o.d, and lives and works in the heart of the messenger.

This is the inner Word, and is in reality nothing else than the continued manifestation of Christ. He is inwardly revealed, and heard with the inward ears of the heart."[17] It is, in fact, G.o.d Himself _operating_ as Life and Spirit and Light upon the spiritual substance of the human soul, first as the Life-Seed which forms the new creation in man, and afterwards as the permanent {73} nourishing and tutoring Spirit who leads the obedient soul on into all the Truth, and perfects it into the likeness and stature of Christ. "There is a living, inner Scripture, written in the believer's heart by the finger of G.o.d."

"This inner Scripture has an active creative power of holiness, and makes holy, living, righteous and saved all those in whose hearts it is written."

The _divine word_ in the secondary sense is the outward word--the word of Scripture. "The other word which serves the inner Word with voice, sound, and expression is the external word, and is heard by the external man with his ears of sense, and is written and read in letters. He who has read and heard only that, and not the inner Word, has not heard the Gospel of Christ, the Gospel of Grace, nor has he received or understood it."[18] It is at best only the witness or testimony which a.s.sists the soul to find the real life-giving Word.

Cut apart from the inner spiritual Word, the word of the letter is "dead," as the body would be if sundered from the spirit. "It paints truth powerfully for the eye, but it cannot bring it into the heart."[19] "The Scriptures cannot bring to the soul that of which they speak. This must be sought directly from G.o.d Himself."[20] In his practical use of Scripture and in his estimate of its importance he is hardly behind Luther himself. "There is," he says, "no writing on earth like the Holy Scriptures."[21] His Christianity is penetrated and illuminated at every point by the profound spiritual experiences of the saints of the Bible, and still more by the vivid portraits of Christ in the Gospels, by the words from His lips recorded there, and by the experiences of the apostles and the development of the primitive Church. He never doubts or questions the inspiration of the Scriptures; quite the contrary, he holds that Scripture is "given by G.o.d" and is an inexhaustible well of inspired truth from which the soul can endlessly draw. The actual content of Christian faith is supplied by the historical revelation; {74} but Schwenckfeld always insists that written words, however inspired, are still external to the soul, and merely record historical events which have happened to others in other ages. "If man," he writes, "is to understand spiritual things and is to know and judge rightly, he must bring the divine Light to the Scriptures, the Spirit to the letter, the Truth to the picture, and the Master to His created work. . . . In a word, to understand the Scriptures a man must become a new man, a man of G.o.d; he must be in Christ who gave forth the Scriptures."[2] That which is to change the inner nature of a man must be something personally experienced and not external to him; must be in its own nature as spiritual as the soul itself is and not material, as written words are. "The pen cannot completely bring the heart to the paper, nor can the mouth entirely express the well of living water within itself."[23] The Bible leads to Christ and bears witness of Him as no other book does, but it is not Christ. And even the Bible remains a closed book until Christ opens it.[24] The Scriptures tell, as no other writings do, of the Word of G.o.d and its life-operations in the world, but they are still not the Word of G.o.d. The spiritual realities of life cannot be settled by laboriously piling up texts of Scripture, by subtle theological dialectic, or by learned exegesis of sacred words. If these spiritual realities are to become real and effective to us, it must be through the direct relation of the human spirit with the divine Spirit--the inward spiritual Word of G.o.d.[25] "He who will see the truth must have G.o.d for eyes."[26]

Schwenckfeld's view of the process of salvation and the permanent illumination of the reborn soul by a real incoming divine substance--whether called Word or Seed--is the _dynamic_ feature of his Christianity. He is endeavouring to find a foundation for a religious energism that will avoid the dangers which beset Luther's principle {75} of "justification by faith." From the inception of the Reformation movement there had appeared a tendency to regard the exercise of "faith" as all that was required for human salvation.

Luther did not mean it so, but it was the easy line of least resistance to hold that "faith" had a magic effect in the invisible realm, that is to say: As soon as a person exercised "faith," G.o.d counted the "faith"

for righteousness, and regarded that person as "justified." The important operation was thus in a region outside the soul. The momentous shift was not in the personal character of the individual, but in the way the individual was regarded and valued in the heavenly estimates. It was the discovery of the prevalence of this crude and magical reliance on "faith" which first drove Schwenckfeld to a deeper study of the problems of religion. It was the necessity that he felt to discover some way by which man himself could be actually renewed, transformed, recreated, and _made_ righteous--rather than merely counted or reckoned righteous by some magical transaction--that made him an independent reformer and set him on his solitary way.