Sermon Tone Analysis
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The Radical Reformers
Andreas Bodenstein von Carlstadt and Gabriel Zwilling
Gabriel Zwilling
The Zwickau Prophets (Nicholas Storch, Marcus Stubner, Thomas Dreschel)
Insisted on laity touching the bread of the communion because Jesus said take and eat!
Rejected infant baptism
Rejected the Church-State alliance
The Zwickau Prophets (Nicholas Storch, Marcus Stubner, Thomas Dreschel)
Led by Thomas Munster
They claimed direct revelation from God
Munster made the Bible secondary to the “direct speaking” of the Holy Spirit to the heart.
He believed that, if necessary, the elect would have to take up the sword to conform society to his idea of perfect equality.
Claimed that Luther was a mere academic, an enemy of the Holy Spirit, who worshipped the dead letter of the Bible.
Luther once said about Munster, “Thomas Munster thinks that he has swallowed the Holy Spirit feathers and all.”
The Pea
Concerning Church-State Relations
The nationalist Reformers - transferred powers of the papacy to the state in order to secure protection for the Protestants against the papacy.
[Lutheran and Anglican Churches fit here]
Christianising Reformers - committed to the ideal of a Christian society and culture, believed in the rightness of a Christian state.
[This is exemplified in Martin Bucer, John Calvin, and the Reformed Churches]
Those who abandoned the ideal of Christianising society and cutlure, rejected the notion of a Christian state, saw the church as an alternative society living in an irredeemably wicked and hostile world.
[These are the radical reformers]
The radicals were pacifists.
Anabaptists were extreme egalitarians, contending that women had the same right of functions in the community as men.
At one point the Anabaptists actually took over Strasburg, and due to the impacts of war on the male population, installed polygamy.
Reformation, Chaos, and Violence
Religious life became chaotic in Wittenberg.
Violence erupted
Mobs smashed alters, shrines, images, statues and stain-glassed windows
Evangelicals insulted and intimidated those who stayed loyal to Rome.
Luther was compelled to return and restore order.
He preached a series of sermons over 8 days that produced calm.
Faith must always be accomplished by love.
All true reform must be truly evangelical, growing from the freedom of the gospel, rather than from the compulsion of the law.
The Peasants’ Revolt
1524-1525, widespread throughout Germany, strongly influenced by the radical reformers, especially Thomas Muntzer.
Luther believed that civil disobience was sin, regardless of how tyrannical a government might be, civil war was worse.
Luther rejected the Peasants position.
In 1525, 8,000 peasants had gathered to battle a professional German army.
The Protestant prince, Philip of Hesse offered to allow them to disband and leave.
Spurred on by Thomas Muntzer, they refused.
Muntzer was taken captive, the Peasants were annihilated, and Muntzer was tortured and executed.
Muntzer’s last act was to recant and receieve the mass.
It is estimated that 100,000 peasants lost their lives.
The Reforms of Ulrich Zwingli
Life of Zwingli (1484 - 1531)
Zwingli studied in Basel and Bern, then the University of Vienna.
He was proficient in Greek
Made a copy of Erasmus’ GNT so that he could memorize as much of it as possible.
He was not only a pastor and a scholar, but a patriot as well.
He reached many of the same conclusions as Luther, independent of Luther’s influence.
In October of 1531, five Catholic cantons joined in a suprise attack on Zurich.
A mercenary captain found Zwingli among the wounded after the battle.
He killed Zwingli by a single sword thrust, then had his body quartered and burned.
Theology of Zwingli
Zwingli differed with Luther on the sacrements, claiming that the presence of Christ was only symbolic.
Luther held that the presence as real.
Roman Catholics believed in the actual transformation of the elements into the body and blood of Christ.
On the issue of Predestination, they agreed but came to their conclusions differently:
Luther and Zwingli both affirmed that predestination was scriptural, and that it was necessary to affirm it as the basis for the doctrine of justification by grace alone.
For Luther, predestination was the expression and result of his experience of knowing himself powerless before his own sin.
For Zwingli, presdestination was the logical consequence of the nature of God.
God is both omnipotent and omniscient, and God knows and determines all things beforehand.
While Luther’s theology would lead to the Lutheran tradition in Protestantism, Zwingli’s theology would lead to the Reformed tradition.
It is from Zwingli’s views that many Christians have taken up arms as a matter of righteousness and justice.
The Life and Theology of William Tyndale
Life of Tyndale (1494 - 1536)
Born in the western part of England, graduated from Oxford.
Tyndale’s passion was translating the Bible into English
Tyndale once said to a clergy with whom he was debating:
“If God spare my life, ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”
P.M. Bechtel and P.W. Comfort, “Tyndale, William,” ed.
J.D. Douglas and Philip W. Comfort, Who’s Who in Christian History (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1992), 684.
Tyndale left England and settled in Hamburg, Germany in 1524.
Tyndale used the same Greek Text of Erasmus that Luther used for his German Bible.
15,000 copies of 6 editions were smuggled into England between 1525-1530.
Tyndale was arrested and carried off to Brussels in 1535 where he was imprisoned.
A year later he was strangled, and burnt at the stake.
His last words: “Lord, open the King’s eyes.”
Theology of Tyndale
Faith alone justifies
He denied any human works in salvation
He denied the freedom of the will
He denied purgatory
Life of Melancthon (1497 - 1560)
Become professor of Greek at Wittenberg in 1518.
By 1521 he had given the reformation its first dogmatics.
With Luther’s help, he drafted the Augsberg Confession for the Imperial Diet.
Melancthon was more of a scholar and reflective theologian than he was a man of action.
Theology of Melancthon
The Life and Theology of Heinrich Bullinger
Life of Bullinger (1504 - 1575)
Replaced Zwingli as the leader of the Swiss reformation.
Turned a monastery into a church in Kappel because all the monks had become Protestant through his exposition.
He was a gifted preacher and theologian.
His sermons were published as a textbook of systematic theology, called, Decades.
It became the basic textbook of theology for training Anglican clergy.
Bullinger’s greatest theological contribution was his development of the covenant theme.
He argued that God’s covenant with Abraham was the basis of “salvation history,” and that Christ is the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant.
Bullinger tied the old and new testaments closely together as the unfolding of one story, one single gracious covenant, in which the Mosaic law was only a temporary addition.
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