The Believer's Baptism - History of the Anabaptist - Part One

Lesson Transcript

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the first class of a history of the early believer baptizers in Europe, 1500 to 1650. And I'll just say a little word about the title. Probably most of you are used to the term "Anabaptist," which is one most commonly used, and I'll be using it here and there throughout these lessons and so on. But, you know, the term "Anabaptist" is really quite a curious term because it means rebaptizers. That's what it literally means.

And it was initially a term of derision, but also a criminal charge. It was a criminal charge because, according to the Justinian Code of Imperial Rome, to be rebaptized or to rebaptize somebody was a criminal offense and could be punished. And so it's something that their enemies called the persons who in the 16th century insisted upon believers' baptism. And whenever you read any of their writings, and they say when they're accused of being Anabaptist, they say, "No, we're not Anabaptist.

We baptize only upon confession by faith, with true baptism, not the false baptism," which Schleidheim calls infant baptism. Schleidheim refers to as the first and worst abomination of the Pope. All right?

So this evening we're going to be looking at Reformation beginning, so we're not actually going to get into the early believers' baptism movement this evening, but we're going to look at some of the backgrounds to it, looking at Catholicism, and looking at four persons, Luther, Karlstadt, Münzer, and Zwingli, as kind of as persons who were major leaders but also typified some important movements within the Reformation period. Okay? And so before we go, before we continue, Marvin, would you lead us in a prayer?

Father, we thank you so much for this opportunity again to meet together and worship you, and pray that you would bless Brother Russell as he shares the information that he has for us, Lord. And I pray that you would just guide us in breakfast and by your Spirit and help us to share forth your praises to all men as we have opportunity. And we pray that your Holy Spirit will have free course here tonight in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. All right. Okay, first of all, this is a map of Europe around 1500.

If you look at it, you can see that the outlines are same, and there are some similarities to the current map of Europe, but not entirely. Okay? Because Europe in 1500 looked a little bit differently than it does today as far as the political entities and so on. This is Christendom. Okay? Europe was "Christian." Okay? And we're going to be looking at Western Christendom, the part of primarily Western Christendom, the part of Christendom that was where the Roman Catholic Church held sway.

And so even though Europe was divided into many principalities, kingdoms, states, cantons, and even small imperial cities and stuff like that, it had one religion, generally one religion, with a few underground dissenters. All right? And we'll be talking about that. At the center of Europe was the Holy Roman Empire.

And the Holy Roman Empire basically encompasses what we would know today as Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, but also sort of parts of Poland and also parts of what's Czechoslovakia and so on like that today. And it was called the Holy Roman Empire because it was established in the Middle Ages as kind of a reinstitution of the Old Roman Empire. Rome had such a hold on people's minds as being kind of the glory days of history.

And so to, in a sense, to reestablish this empire in Germany and to call Voltaire used to say wrote that it was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. And that was very much true because it wasn't very holy. It was not Roman. It was basically German. And it really wasn't quite an empire. It was actually a collection of various principalities.

So over, I think, almost 300 little principalities, some of them were just like a village where there was a knight who had control over that village, and he didn't answer to anybody but the emperor. And the emperor was an elected emperor. Okay? And there were several persons, several princes in the Holy Roman Empire who had the authority to vote for the emperor. Whenever an emperor died, they had to have an election, and these electors got together, and they cast their vote for who the new emperor was going to be.

Now, for quite a number of generations, up to 1500 and actually on through to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire around 1800, when Napoleon pretty well dealt a death blow to it, the emperors came from the Austrian House of Habsburg. And that's going to be very important. But I want to just point out a couple of places for you. Up there is Saxony. That's the area where Martin Luther was from. Okay? The Platinate, and that's one of the Saxony was one of the electors. The Platinate was one of the electors.

Let me think. I don't know if I have them all. There was a couple of archbishops who were electors. And that's the other thing that's very interesting is that there were actually leaders in the church, bishops and archbishops, who were leaders in the Roman Catholic Church but also were princes and rulers who controlled a principality, and they were like the temporal lords of that principality. All right?

Now, if we look at how people in 1500 looked at the world, they looked at the universe actually, everybody believed that there was an earthly realm and that there was a heavenly realm. And they saw both realms as being hierarchical, and they saw the hierarchies as being somewhat parallel. So in heaven, you have at the top, of course, God. Okay? And then on the next level, you have Christ. And the BVM is the Blessed Virgin Mary. Okay? Because Mary was very important to Catholics.

They saw her as being one of the prime persons that you would pray to or ask her to pray for you because there developed in the Middle Ages this idea that somehow you couldn't go straight to Jesus or even straight to God and ask him something. You would ask particularly holy people who had died before and were considered to be saints and who were up there in heaven, and they were interceded that you could ask them to, in a sense, intercede or pray for you there.

And that gave rise to whole cults of saints and so on. And the Blessed Virgin Mary was the one who had the greatest access to Jesus in their minds. Then you have archangels, you have angels, and you have saints. And there's a parallel here. The earthly realm is divided into two states. The temporal state, you have at the top the emperor, the kings, and so on. And then you have the dukes, the princes, and the electors in the Holy Roman Empire. Underneath that, you have barons. These are lesser nobles and so on.

Then you have knights who are kind of the lowest level of nobility. And then under that is everyone else: peasants, artisans, anyone who's not nobility. Okay? And then in the Catholic Church, you have the Pope, who is the head of the church. And then there are cardinals, and those are clergy who have the authority to vote for the new pope whenever a new pope is needed. And then you have archbishops and bishops and clergy. Okay? And this view of the world was very static.

It was very important in their minds that everybody kind of keep their place. And it was particularly important for the people at the top of it, of the temporal and the spiritual states, that the people below them keep their place. All right? It was particularly important that way. And then they had justification for this by saying, "You see what's happening here on earth parallels the way it is in heaven too." All right? Now, this is something that began to fall apart. Okay?

It was beginning to crack and sort of crumble by 1500, but it was still pretty much in place, and the Reformation pretty well did a number on it. Now, the other thing as far as understanding Europe, the Western Christendom around 1500, is that the Roman Catholic Church controlled the means or the access to grace, the access to salvation. And they did that by means of the seven sacraments. And a sacrament was a ritual that conferred grace.

And this triptych is a really good illustration of well, it shows all seven sacraments here. This was something that would have been in a large church or cathedral up at the front at an altar. Okay? And of course, remember, a lot of people could not read, and so pictures and illustrations and so on were very important to them. But the first sacrament is baptism. You can see that in the lower corner over here. Okay? The priest is baptizing an infant. Okay?

And the Roman Catholics believed that baptism, water baptism, is what made you a Christian. Okay? It's what made you a Christian. And it also took care of original sin. When the baby was baptized, the original sin of Adam was taken care of. Okay? Through that ritual of baptism. And I mean, all these rituals, they believed when a priest performed them, they were spiritually efficacious. All right?

And then later, if you go on just a little bit further up, you'll see some people kneeling, and there's a guy there in white robes and so on laying his hands on them. That's confirmation. And confirmation is when a person, and it's normally a child, 10, 12 years old, who is confirmed in their faith. And they believed that confirmation always had to be done by a bishop. Okay?

And when the bishop laid his hands on the person's head and confirmed them in their faith, they at that point were supposed to have received the Holy Spirit. Okay? And simply by doing that action, okay, by doing that ritual, it was believed the Holy Spirit came down on that person. Now, if you go further on up, you'll see a man in white, and people are kneeling in front of him. They're saying their confession. Okay? They're confessing their sins to the priest. And he is listening to their sins.

He's absolving them of their sins. The Roman Catholics believed that priests had the authority to absolve people of their sins. And then normally, okay, normally having absolved them of their sins, he then subscribes certain penances sort of to equal their sins. Now, there were purposes for these penances. One was simply to kind of remind them of there were aids considered to be aids to devotion.

They might say the priest might say, "Well, you need to say 12 Our Fathers and 20 Hail Marys every day for the next month." Okay? And that was supposed to have some kind of spiritual benefit to you. Or it could be something even more significant than that. Okay? Depending on the size of the enormity of the sin. Now, one of the things you have to keep in mind here is that they didn't believe that you were doing this to earn your salvation. You had already been absolved of your sin.

But the Roman Catholic Church believed that there were as well as spiritual penalties for sin, there were also temporal penalties for sin, and that one had to do penance. One had to, in a sense, experience some suffering, some purgation. And these various penances were part of that process because Roman Catholics believe in a place called purgatory. And purgatory is this place that you go to after you die to be purged of the spiritual impurities you have still at the point of death.

Again, if you go to purgatory, you're going to heaven eventually. It may take you a few thousand years depending on how nasty and wicked you really had been in this life. But eventually, you would get to heaven. All right? It wasn't a place where you went to, and then it was decided which way you were going to go. If you went to purgatory, you were going to go to heaven eventually, but it might be a while. Okay?

If you're a really holy spiritual person, if you had achieved something called sainthood, you probably went past purgatory and went straight to heaven, and then you became one of these people that people would ask them to help them. Okay? And the other way that you could deal with some of this problem of this residue that you had to take care of was to ask other people to pray for you. Okay? And another way to take care of it was to make donations.

In fact, many of the churches, the monasteries, the hospitals, the universities in Europe were built by donations of people who gave these donations as penances to reduce their time in purgatory. And you could not only do that for yourself, you could do it for your friends, for your relatives. Okay?

And so if you had your father, and I'll talk about that later, if your father was or your grandfather and so on was he was not just the best person in the world, but nonetheless, he got everything taken care of before he died, but he still had this long time in purgatory, you could have his time in purgatory reduced by making donations, by having prayers said for him, having masses paid for his in which he was prayed for in the mass.

And then the centerpiece, and there's no accident that this thing is really right there in the center, is communion. And there you see a priest with his back to the people up at an altar. He's lifting up the bread or the cup. I can't quite no, I think it's actually the cup that he's lifting up there, and he's saying that, "This is my blood." Okay?

And according to Roman Catholic teaching, when a priest lifted that cup up and he said, "This is my blood," or if he said lifted the bread up and said, "This is my body," okay, it became the physical body and blood of Jesus even though it still looked like wine and even though it still looked like bread. And if you ate it, then you were spiritually nurtured by that. Okay? And that's the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Now, one of the things that happened during the Middle Ages is that they stopped giving the cup or the wine to the laity because they were concerned that in passing the cup or something that it would drop, it would spill, and there you would have the blood of Jesus spilled on the floor, which would have been a sacrilege, and you didn't want to do that. So they stopped doing that, and they started to give the laity only the bread.

And then the other thing that they started to do is that they wouldn't give it to them in their hands, but they would place it in their mouths. And the reason they would place it in their mouths is because they found out that people would save it, take it home, and put it above their doorpost because can you imagine? You have Jesus in that piece of bread, and that keeps everything I mean, if you have Jesus in that piece of bread, that keeps everything away, doesn't it?

Any nasty thing that could harm you keeps it away. So the Catholic Church came across the practice of putting the bread in people's mouths. All right? Then we go over here to you'll see in the other side here of the triptych a couple getting married. And the Roman Catholic Church believed that when a priest married a couple, they were mystically united and that that was a marriage bond that could not be broken.

One of the things that's really interesting, though, is that the Roman Catholic Church was quite capable of annulling marriages. And by that, what they were basically saying then is that the marriage was never a legitimate marriage to start with, and so it could be annulled. And that happened quite a number of different times, particularly for rulers. Okay? It didn't happen for ordinary people because they weren't special enough.

But oftentimes, rulers found themselves in situations where they needed to get rid of a wife, and she was still living. Okay? And so they would come up with some reason why to annul the marriage. All right? And then on the far corner above that, you'll see this guy in a mitre, and he is laying hands on a person who is in a white robe. That's ordination. Okay? And ordination, of course, baptism, everybody's going to get baptized. Everybody's going to get confirmed. Everybody's going to go to confession.

Everybody's going to take communion and so on. Not quite everybody's going to get married, but most people are going to get married. There are only a very few people in comparison to that who are going to be ordained as priests. And the Roman Catholic Church taught that when you were ordained a priest, you were given the authority to perform the sacraments, and that meant that you had in your hands the means by which to transfer grace to the people.

And so when you baptize somebody, their original sin was taken care of. They were made a Christian. Now, again, the bishop could only do the confirmation, but as a priest, you could absolve people of their sins. When you raised the elements and said the words, they became the body and blood of Christ and so on. When you married somebody, it was a mystical union.

And simply by that right of ordination, the idea was that you were ordained by a bishop who had been ordained by a bishop, who had ordained by a bishop, who was ordained by a bishop all the way back to the apostles who had been chosen by Christ. And so you have this line of apostolic succession going back to the apostles. All right? And then the last one is extreme unction. You'll see the person there embedded. He looks like he's a bit picketed. He's dying.

And extreme unction is an anointing with oil, getting somebody ready for death. And oftentimes, it was accompanied by confession, by receiving the sacrament of communion and so on, and it was the means by which to prepare people for death. All this was very important. The Roman Catholic Church controlled the means of salvation. All right? But not all was well in the Roman Catholic Church. There was corruption. There was a corrupt clergy.

There was a combination of spiritual and political power in which popes and bishops and archbishops and other clergy would use their spiritual power as a leather when it came to political power. Here are three popes who are popes during this period of time: Alexander VI, 1492 to 1503; Julius II, 1503; 1513; and Leo X, 1513 to 1521. He's pope when Luther comes onto the scene.

All these men were not only popes, but they were also the rulers of the papal states, which was an area in the center of Italy that was a temporal power. So they were temporal rulers also. They also all belonged to very powerful families. All right? Now, Alexander VI was an exception to most popes because he was actually Spanish. He grew up in Spain. He belonged to the Borgia family, and they were a very corrupt, wicked group of people. He was particularly corrupt and wicked.

He had several children, and he spent most of his rule as pope using his power of pope to put his children in places of power and influence. His one son, Caesar, Borgia, almost succeeded in taking control of all of Italy but failed to do so because his father died before he could get it accomplished. Okay? Julius II belonged to a very powerful Italian family. He is sometimes called the warrior pope because he spent most of his time fighting off France, who was trying to take over Italy. All right?

And then we have Leo X. He came from Florence, the very powerful Medici family, a family of bankers and so on. And again, oftentimes, these people would get into power, and one of the things they would do is that they would put their families in power of position. This guy, Leo X, was made a cardinal when he was a boy. In fact, he was not even ordained a he was elected pope, and he wasn't even ordained a priest when he was elected pope.

So he had to be very quickly ordained a deacon and then a priest and then a bishop before he could be ordained pope. Very curious kind of situation. So not all was well. But there are winds of renewal, new winds of renewal. There's a movement called the Renaissance or a rebirth of learning, and it started in Italy. And there was a reacquaintance with the writings of the ancient Romans and Greeks. Ancient Latin and ancient Greek became also languages that people were studying and learning.

In Italy, it was very much focused kind of on a very secular kind of thing. Art, paintings, sculpture was all part of this thing. And then in the north, there was also a rebirth of learning. But in the north, there was focus on the ancient Roman and Greek writings, but there was more focus really on the sources of early Christianity, particularly the Hebrew and Greek scriptures and the early church fathers. The northern Renaissance was a much more devout rebirth of learning.

And one of the key persons is Erasmus of Rotterdam. He was like the movie star, or as they sometimes say here, he was the rock star, if you can imagine, a learned scholar being one of the probably most famous persons in Europe during his time. And one of his main contributions is in 1516, he gathered together what Greek New Testaments he could find in various monasteries and libraries, and he edited it a Greek New Testament.

And Erasmus's Greek New Testament is the New Testament that all Reformation-era translations of the New Testament use. Luther used it in his translation, the various English translations, the French translations, all used Erasmus's Greek New Testament. So he was a very important person.

The other thing that we have happening is there's not only an increase in learning in these learned languages like Greek and Hebrew and Latin, but there's also an increase in lay literacy where people are learning to read and to write their own language. And this is assisted by the fact that reading material becomes more available because in the 1450s, Gutenberg invented the printing press.

And so what had taken hours and weeks and years to make when it came to book could take days now, and you could make multiple copies. And there are also religious movements of renewal, particularly in the north. There is a movement called the Modern Devotion, which how many of you have ever read The Imitation of Christ? If you have ever read that, okay, that is a book that comes straight out of the Modern Devotion, Thomas Acemptus.

And it's very much a focus on inwardness, of self-reflection, of growing in spirituality and so on, and obedience to God. And that was a lay movement that was very important, particularly in the northern part of Europe. Okay, that then takes us to Martin Luther. That fellow I showed you earlier, Leo X, actually Julius, okay, yeah, Julius II, decided that it was time to rebuild the St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome. Now, the idea was that underneath this cathedral was the grave of St. Peter, and they still believe that.

Whether it is or not, I don't know. Okay? I don't think they really know, but they think that's what it is. And so this church building, it sat on top of this. And the church building that you see up in the upper corner there was built by Constantine in the 300s. Well, by 1500, it had begun to get a little shabby, actually a little bit decrepit. So Julius II tore it down in 1505 and decided it was time to build a new cathedral. And he got Michelangelo and some other persons to design this new cathedral.

And here's a picture of the new cathedral. All right? And it took over a century to complete it. It started in 1505, and it was not really finished until 1626. It's a long-term project. And it is still the largest church building in the world, housed 20,000 people. Okay? I was there once back in 1979, and there's these four large wooden pillars that are in the middle of it and so on. I looked at it and thought, "If my grandmother was here, she would say that those pillars need a good dusting." All right.

But they had to build this thing. Well, building a big project like that takes money. And so when Leo X came to the throne as the pope, he needed money to continue the building project. And so what he decided to do was that he decided that he was going to preach an indulgence. All right? And this is a cartoon, a character of Leo issuing this indulgence. And by this indulgence, if people would donate money to help with building this new cathedral, then they would be granted, depending on how much money they gave.

And I think it actually was sort of prorated. If you were wealthy, you had to pay more than a poor person did to get as much benefit and so on. But if you gave donations to it, then it could be used to reduce your time in purgatory, reduce your father's time in purgatory, your grandmother's time in purgatory, whoever it was. Okay? And Johann Tetzel, who was a Dominican priest, was given the task of preaching this indulgence in Germany.

And so he went up to Germany, and he went to town to town preaching this indulgence. And he had assistance. They collected the money. They wrote out these scripts of indulgence and gave people so many years out of purgatory and so on. Well, he probably exaggerated the efficaciousness of this indulgence. At least in the popular imagination, there are people who thought there was a little tag.

I don't know if it actually came from him or not, but the little tag was, "When the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from hell springs." Well, that was not really correct Catholic doctrine, but that was kind of the idea. Well, he shows up in Saxony and in Wittenberg. Well, I know he actually comes to the border of Saxony, and he's not allowed in because Frederick the Wise, the elector of Saxony, doesn't want him there.

And the reason why he doesn't want him there is because Frederick has this big church in the middle of Wittenberg that has all these relics that he has worked very hard to collect. And people come to his church there in Wittenberg because if they come and visit these relics and so on, they get a certain amount of credit for that. Okay? They get a certain amount of it's a form of penitence. And it's good for the economy of Wittenberg to have all these people come.

He doesn't want anybody coming into his territory and saying that selling this indulgence, that's going to cut into his profits. So he doesn't let them in. But the Saxons go across the boundary line into the next territory, and they bring these things back. And Martin Luther, a monk, an Augustinian monk and a professor at the University of Wittenberg, hears this thing, and he is appalled. He's appalled by this claim. Now, talk a little bit about Martin Luther.

1483 to 1546, the picture there on that side shows him as a young man around about 1520. The other picture shows him more as a middle-aged man and so on after the Reformation got started. He was born to a well-to-do peasant family. He had a real spiritual struggle. Martin Luther was one of these people that just always seemed to be worried about his soul. And he began his studies at Erfurt University in 1501, and he was going to study law. Okay? That's what his father wanted him to do.

And in 1505, he was out, and a lightning storm came, hit a tree next to him, and he was frightened out, and he cried out, "Saint Anne save me." And he promised that if his life was spared, that he would give himself over to service to God. And his life was spared, and he entered the Augustinian Order. And he was sent to Wittenberg University in Saxony to teach philosophy. He struggled with a very deep sense of spiritual inadequacy and a fear of an angry God. And he would confess his sin.

He would do penitances and so on. And finally, his confessor, his superior, said, "You know, essentially, you're too worried about this." And he said, "Here, I'm going to give you the task of teaching scripture in the university. We need somebody to do this." And so they gave Luther the task he gave Luther the task of teaching scripture in 1512. And Luther began a very assiduous study of scripture.

And in the course of his study, he came across the phrase in Romans, "The just shall live by faith." And all of a sudden, it was an Eureka moment. And he realized that all this anxiety and so on, what he needed to do was to have faith. All right? So it's in the course of that whole experience that Tetzel comes nearby and is preaching this indulgence, and people are buying it, and he knows this is not the way it is. All right? And so he's horrified. And he does the thing that any university professor would do.

He decides to issue a call to a debate. He wants to have a nice little debate about this. And the typical thing was you wrote down your propositions, the things you wanted to debate about, and so on, and you invited other scholars, other professors, maybe students, to come together and take sides and debate this whole thing. And so he came up with 95 statements or theses. He wrote them in Latin. He sent them to the archbishop. I think it was the archbishop I forget which one it was.

It was an archbishop there in the area. And that was it. But somebody got a hold of that thing, and they translated it into German because it was written in Latin, and they printed it, and it was like the bestseller of 1517. All right? And some of the things that Luther said, "Forgiveness of man's sins comes through God's grace. The pope cannot remit guilt. He can only remit the penalties he imposes. Okay?

Not ones that God imposes." He said, "The true treasure of the church is the gospel and the grace of God, not that treasure of merit," which is what the pope was making his claim is that he controlled the treasury of merit. All the good deeds and everything that all the saints had done was at his disposable to kind of be used to transfer over to other people. All right? And like I said, it was translated and caused a firestorm. That's Frederick the Wise, the elector there. Now, the whole thing was muddied.

The whole situation was muddied because in 1518 and 1519, Maximilian, the emperor, died, and they had to have an election. All right? And his grandson, Charles V, was elected. He was like 19 or 20 years old. He's really a young man. The Habsburgs had this really predominant chin. All right? That's caused by generations of marrying your first cousins. All right? That chin, I guess, just got more and more prominent. Now, this is a painting when he's young. This is when he's older. He has a beard.

He's covering some of that. And maybe the painter in the early one accentuated it and so on. But he did have a really big chin and an underbite. All right? So this whole issue, the pope sees this as a threat, and he tells Luther, "Come to Rome." He basically wants Luther to come to Rome and can him. All right? And Frederick the Wise says no. He protects Luther. All right? And it's very important that he protected Luther.

And since he was one of the electors, the Habsburgs could not really do much about it because they needed Frederick's vote. Charles needed Frederick's vote to get the election. All right? And so eventually, they did have the debate at Leipzig in 1519 in which Luther argued against the idea of the supremacy of the pope.

And at that particular point, his debate partner, Johann Eck, who was a Roman Catholic priest who was kind of the pitbull of the Roman Catholic Church back then, he was also responsible for the trial of Balthasar Hubmeyer later on. He charges Luther with Hussitism, with heresy. And Eck traveled to Rome to ask the pope to excommunicate Luther, and Luther and the pope did. All right? So Luther begins a furious writing campaign in which he fleshes out his theology and the ideas of reform. Some are conservative.

Some are rather radical. His conservative assumptions are that all of Western Europe was Christian. And the Catholic Church was God's church, but it needed reformed, not restored. And he also had the idea that the Reformation would be done with the approval of the rulers with the direction of the clergy or the ordained ministry. And the change was going to be only what was needed. It was going to be a very gradual conservative change. Now, he did have some radical ideas.

He believed in the priesthood of all believers. He destroyed the whole sacramental system because he said, "Salvation is by faith," and he had added the phrase, "alone." And he took this focus away from the Mass, which was really focused on the bread and the wine, and shifted the focus to the preaching of the Word. And he even changed the doctrine of what happened when the priest lifted up the bread and the cup and said those words of institution. He held to the doctrine of consubstantiation. Okay?

Consubstantiation. All right? And consubstantiation is the idea that Christ is present in the bread and the wine spiritually, not physically. And that when one ate it, one ate the body and blood of Jesus. All right? And that is Lutheran doctrine to today. Okay? I'm sorry. My pages have gotten mixed up here. Okay. Okay. Here we are. Yeah. He also, when it came to the church, he said that the visible church is where the Word is rightly preached and the sacraments are rightly administered.

Where that happens, where God's Word is rightly preached and where the sacraments are rightly administered, that's where the church exists. That's the visible church. And so it really does not it really still holds the church kind of in the hands of the clergy. And then he's talked about the invisible church, which is made up of the predestinated elect.

Luther did not believe everybody in the visible church would be saved, which is kind of different than Roman Catholics because Roman Catholics believed it was possible for everyone in the visible church to be saved if they went through the whole if they participated in the whole sacramental system and were prepared through extreme unction at the time of their death to be in a state of grace. Well, the pope issued a Bull of Excommunication in 1520.

And in 1521, by that time, the Holy Roman Empire had split into principalities and persons who supported Luther and those who supported the pope. And so the new emperor, Charles V, this lantern-jawled young man, calls for an imperial diet at the city of Worms. And he promises Luther safe passage if he comes. And so Luther appears before the diet of Worms in April of 1521, and there he is told to in the presence of the emperor, he is told to refute or to repudiate all these writings.

His writings are placed there on the table, and he's told, "You need to renounce them." And he says, "Unless I am convinced by scripture and plain reason, and I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other, my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot, and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen." So he refuses to repudiate his writings.

It's pretty certain that Charles was going to have him arrested just like he had had John Hess arrested as the emperor had John Hess arrested in the 1400s and condemned and burnt at the stake. Luther's supporters were very sure that was going to be Frederick snuck him out of there and sent him off to one of his castles, Workborg, in Saxony for safekeeping. And so Luther is at Workborg. And while he's there in Workborg in hiding, okay, he translates the New Testament.

And the German New Testament is printed in September of 1522. He also, in 1525, did something very radical. He got married. So he did because Roman Catholic priests were not married. Okay? Now, let's look then at Andreas Karlstadt, 1486 to 1541. He is a supporter he is a supporter actually, he's a co-professor with Luther at Wittenberg. And initially, he's a little skeptical about Luther. He's well-educated. He's a professor of theology. He actually had been in Rome and studied in Rome.

But he decided when Luther was coming up with this whole thing about justification by faith that he was going to read Augustine. And after reading Augustine, he decided, "Well, Luther " he thought Luther was right, and so he became a defender of Luther and justification of faith. He participated with Luther at the debate in Leipzig. But while Luther was there at Workborg, Andreas Karlstadt is there in Wittenberg. And so Luther has been talking about all these things and so on, but there's been no changes.

And so on Christmas Day, 1521, Karlstadt, who is the pastor of the castle church, okay, which is the main church there in Wittenberg, decided he's going to make some changes to the service, to the Mass. And so he preaches a sermon without any special robes on as a Roman Catholic priest would normally have worn. He preached a sermon in German, and he took out all the words in the Mass that referred to the Mass as a sacrifice. And he also spoke the words of institution not in Latin but in German. Okay?

And then probably the most radical thing that he did is that he gave both the cup and the bread to the laity. All right? And then that was followed by essentially a riot in which the citizens or the burghers of Wittenberg went and got rid of all the images and so on in the church and threw them out because Karlstadt had also been preaching against the use of images. Well, this was not something Frederick the Wise wanted to happen. This was too much of a disturbance.

And when Luther showed up in March of 1522, came back to Wittenberg in 1522, he didn't really like this. Now, it wasn't necessarily that he disagreed theoretically with what Karlstadt was saying at this particular point, but he just thought things should go really slowly. Changes should be made very slowly, very cautiously. And so he kind of rolled back some of these changes. Karlstadt had to take a backseat. He actually wasn't allowed to preach anymore.

And eventually, he went out to a little village outside of Wittenberg and pastored this little church out there. And finally, in 1523, he moved on. But during this period of time in which he was thinking about these reforms and so on, he began to demonstrate some divergence from Luther. As I said earlier, he had kind of picked up on Luther's idea of justification by faith.

But as he studied the scriptures and looked at things, his emphasis shifted away from the justification of the sinner to the sanctification of the justified. He really was interested in the growth of holiness in an individual's life, which wasn't that much of a concern to Luther at this particular point. And unlike Luther, he really liked the book of James, the Epistle of James. Luther said it was a right strolly work. All right?

Karlstadt said, "Faith which trusts God's promised salvation in Christ opens a path of understanding the law, whose fulfillment is possible because Christ has freed and redeemed the faithful from the curse of the law." And this became operational in a person's life through golossan height, through yieldiness. And he's one of the persons who picks up this term, golossan height, and talks about that's the posture that an individual has to take if they want to grow in grace. All right? He falls afoul of Luther.

And the other thing that happens is that he disagrees with Luther about the meaning of communion. In his study of the scripture, he comes to the conclusion that communion is a meal of remembrance. It's not that the bread and wine become anything, but the bread and wine are symbolic. And so he's the first one not the first one, but one of the first ones to advocate that idea. All right? And after he's kicked out of Saxony, he wanders from city to city looking for support. And finally, in 1529, he settles in Zurich.

Zwingli welcomes him there. Of course, Zwingli also holds to a similar understanding about the Lord's Supper. And Karlstadt, for a number of years, teaches there, teaches at their training school for ministers. And then finally, in 1534, he goes to the Swiss city of Basel, where he becomes professor of Old Testament in the university.

So in some ways, he has this really radical phase in his life, and then he kind of becomes he links up with Zwingli and the Swiss Reformation because they have some very similar ideas. But he's very, very important because in his earlier, more radical phrase he's writing prolifically, and his stuff is being printed and being distributed and so on. He is impacting a lot of persons, particularly young, educated persons like in Zurich, who are reading his writings, who then later on become Anabaptist. All right?

Now, by the way, this portrait of him is a contemporary portrait. This portrait of Thomas Münster is not. This is some artist's conception from about 1600. They needed to have a picture of him for a book, and so somebody came up with this idea. We're going to look at Thomas Münster and the Peasants' Revolt, and we're going to do that in five minutes here. Thomas Münster, again, was university educated. He was, on Luther's recommendation, appointed a priest in a little town called Zwickau there in Saxony.

And while he was there, he turned in a more radical direction. Like Karlstadt, he began to question particularly Luther's idea of justification by faith. His problem with it was that it didn't seem as though it resulted in anybody living a holier life. Okay? And he talked about instead the cross. He said, "The cross, as a mortification of the flesh, has to be experienced by every believer in a surrender to the will of God." So there had to be this surrender.

Every believer experienced the cross in their life by a conscious surrender to God's will. And you know what he called that? Golossan height. Golossan height. But he was also very critical of what he saw as the continual inequities. You remember that whole hierarchical system I showed you at the beginning? He was very critical of that. All right? And as he read the scriptures and so on, he saw much more leveling influence, and he was very much and he was also very anti-clerical.

He was very critical of the clergy, whether it was Roman Catholic clergy or whether it was Lutheran clergy or whatever. He was very critical of them, particularly of the fact that they were supported by forced tithes. Everybody had to pay a tithe. It was like a tax, and the tax went to the support of the church. And he felt that that should not be, that pastors should be chosen by the parishioners, by the people.

They should have the authority to choose their own pastors, and that those persons should be supported by voluntary contributions. And he began to speak in very apocalyptic terms, using language from Daniel and from Revelation and so on, about the current situation in Europe. And he saw things kind of coming to this great chaschlimic event and so on. And he was in a town called Ostett for a while, but he had to flee in 1524. And then he went to the free imperial city of Mulhausen.

Now, a free imperial city, there were a number of them in the Holy Roman Empire. They were self-governing cities that were only responsible or accountable to the emperor. There was no other overlord over them. Okay? And Mulhausen was one of those. And once he got there, he again began to preach and to he tried to turn the city against the clergy in the city. That did not win him their favor, and they had the power to get him banished. And so he was banished from Mulhausen in 1524, late 1524.

The same time this was all happening, there's a lot of ferment. And a lot of Luther's ideas are getting I mean, Luther was writing prolifically. Other people were writing prolifically. The printing presses were running hot. All these pamphlets getting off and so on. And there's preaching and so on by Lutheran leaning. Many of them are still technically in the Roman Catholic Church, but they're kind of leaning that way. Things are really messy and untidy. Okay?

But the ordinary people get this idea that something is going to change, and maybe it's going to change for the better. Okay? Maybe it's going to change for the better. And they get bits and pieces of what the scriptures are saying and so on. They're sometimes reading the New Testament for the first time in their lives, okay, and coming to their own conclusions. And you know the Bible is a very dangerous book. Okay? It's a very dangerous book.

People start reading it, and they come to their own conclusions about what it means. And what happened was there erupted in southern Germany and central Germany and in Austria an uprising of peasants. Now, sometimes this is referred to as the Peasants' War. And these peasants had a long list of grievances. One of the things they were upset about was the noblemen, their landlords, who owned the land that they rented from them were increasing their rents, and all villages had common land.

That was land that belonged to the village, and the people could use the pasture, their livestock, and so on. And the nobles were beginning to take that over. And so that sort of put an economic hurting to the ordinary people. And so at the same time, there's this rising expectation that there's a new dawn coming. There's a new day coming, and they become impatient, and they want to see a more just and equitable society.

And it started in the Black Forest in late 1524 as basically a work strike where they laid down their hose or their hammers, and they went on strike. And they gathered together in mass groups and armies and demanded that the nobility give them their rights is what they thought. They wanted to have their grievances redressed, and they wanted to have some kind of agreement about this.

They wanted to have the clergy removed from positions of temporal authority, and they wanted the authority to appoint their own pastors. They wanted greater autonomy when it came to governing their village affairs, and they wanted the common lands restored and fairer rents. Okay? So that was kind of that was from about January of 1525 to about March of 1525. Okay? It's the first stage of what becomes known as the Peasants' War. It's this uprising. It's not that violent, actually.

But the Roman Catholics look at this and say, "Huh? See, we told you this is what Luther has caused." Luther says, "This is bad news." And he writes a tract. He writes a pamphlet to the nobility and tells them to put down this rebellion like you would put down mad dogs. All right? And they do. Within the next couple of months, mercenary armies led by the nobles put down the revolt. It's estimated that there were 300,000 peasants involved in this revolt, and 100,000 of them were killed. That's a pretty deadly event.

In his wandering in the Rhinelands, Münster had encountered this. The ideas of the peasants resonated with him. He went back to Mulhausen, which by this time was leaning in the direction of the peasants. And he led a group, a contingent out of Mulhausen down into Thuringia and at Frankenhausen, along with other groups of peasants, other contingents of peasants. In May 15, 1525, they encountered the mercenary armies of the rulers, and they were massacred. Münster was captured. He was taken back to Mulhausen.

He was tortured, and he was executed before the gates of Mulhausen. And the Peasants' War was put to an end. And one of the things that that did was it really created a stink in the nostrils of the peasants toward Lutheranism. That was one of its main impacts. Okay? So I'm going to stop there. All right? We'll pick up. Zwingli, actually, what I want to say about him, I can handle when I look at the beginnings of Swiss Anabaptism in Zurich in 1525 and 1526 at the next session.

I should just mention an earlier version of the schedule that I sent out had a wrong date for March's session. I had put down March 29th. It should be March 28th. So if you have a copy of the old schedule, I made a mistake there. All right. Okay. That's the end of the lecture. Are there any questions? Okay. Very good. Thank you for your attention. Lord willing, we'll be back here on March 28th, and we'll be looking at the first baptisms in Zurich in 1525 and 1526. Okay.