OUTSIDE of educational circles with a research interest within the Reformation, relatively few readers will likely be aware of the five hundredth anniversary of the German Peasants’ War (1524-25). The largest popular rebellion in Western Europe before the French Revolution, it grew in successive waves at the peak of the Reformation, terrifying feudal powers and costing as much as 100,000 lives.
Its causes remain contested: a succession of bad harvests, the avarice of landowners, the indolence and corruption of the Church, and the desperation of unusual people to ameliorate the harshness and injustice that diminished their lives and freedoms, all played an element.
Peasant leaders justified riot by appealing to “God’s law” — first, by drawing on their version of Luther’s teaching concerning grace and salvation; and, later, insisting that serfdom was incompatible with the word of God. The Twelve Articles of March 1525, drafted within the southern town of Memmingen, were plagued by scriptural references. Peasants were now not to be thought to be mere chattels, because “Christ has redeemed and purchased us all by the shedding of his precious blood.”
Dismayed and angered by the destruction and killings precipitated by the rebellion, Luther condemned the revolt’s leaders for his or her abuse of the Bible in support of their cause, and was deeply perturbed by their rejection of those set above them, who — on the idea of his reading of Romans 13 — exercised divine authority. Denouncing the Memmingen Articles as “the Devil’s work”, he penned a notorious tract, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants. In it, he called on the German princes to revive secular authority and to “stab, smite, strangle” opponents without mercy.
ONE peasant leader specifically who had come to represent a serious threat to vested interests was a passionate and infrequently penniless itinerant preacher, Thomas Müntzer. Born in 1489, the son of a coin-maker, and educated at the colleges of Leipzig and Frankfurt, Müntzer had a popularity as a militant revolutionary advocating riots and bloodshed. This grew as he preached in towns and cities in Saxony and Bohemia.
Frequently offending local authorities and subsequently being expelled by them, he castigated princes as “a miserable, wretched sack of maggots”. Rejecting Luther as “Doctor Liar”, and resorting to coarse and vituperative language like that employed by Luther himself in his denunciations of the late-medieval papacy, Müntzer wrote: “I shit in your scripture and Bible and Christ unless you will have the knowledge and Spirit of God.”
Müntzer’s life ended violently after he stood with the peasants — 6000 of whom were massacred by superior troops — on the Battle of Frankenhausen on 14 and 15 May 1525. After torture with thumbscrews and a forced confession, he was executed. His head was placed on a pole because the severest warning to others entertaining the hope of a latest social order, and a reminder that this was how God punished disobedience.
The authorities expected that Müntzer would soon be forgotten, afforded only the legacy of a heretical loser. In an obituary notice, Luther described him as “that murderous and bloodthirsty prophet” who, boasting that “God spoke and acted through him”, now lay dead, visibly forsaken by God, together with the 1000’s who had perished within the mud of Frankenhausen.
THE mud, so to talk, stuck. In a matter of years, Müntzer’s name and influence largely waned. The Anabaptist movement initially drew inspiration from his teachings because it spread across Germany and the Netherlands after the peasants’ brutal suppression; but a mendacious myth devised by Müntzer’s opponents ensured that posterity would remember him — if in any respect — as a failed rebel, an apostate concerning true religion, and a threat to a political dispensation ordained by God.
The myth amounted to a personality assassination, however it did contain a vital truth: Müntzer did imagine that he was a prophet of God — a latest Moses or Elijah who, as a part of God’s Elect (his predestined chosen people), was living within the last days, with the intention to summon society to repentance and a greater conformity to God’s will. To this endeavour, Müntzer brought his deep knowledge of the Bible in addition to the numerous theological writings of the Middle Ages. A professed mental, he loathed academics cloistered in privileged surroundings, content, on the one hand, with a venal ruling class and, on the opposite, seemingly indifferent to the poverty of peasants’ tenuous lives.
Anticipating Luther, he was a reformer of German liturgical worship and texts (most notably the Psalms), insisting that only German be spoken, and that whole chapters of the epistles and Gospels be read, in order that congregations were edified spiritually and liberated from the mystifying priestly mumblings and incantations of the Latin mass.
A mystic, who believed that God spoke immediately in dreams and visions, he encouraged his followers within the expectation that God would write directly of their hearts “along with his living finger”. Without such experience, scripture was merely a record of God’s former dealings along with his people slightly than the revelation of his ultimate and unchanging “word”. Individual suffering, mental and physical, was an inevitable and indispensable feature of the habitation of the Elect; “for less than then can someone who has been tested preach God’s name”.
Müntzer’s own afflictions and manner of death served to verify in his own experience the veracity of this central aspect of his radical teachings.
Müntzer’s life and thought merit serious and sympathetic attention. As Professor Bridget Heal identified in a recent review of a latest biography, The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer: The life and times of an early German revolutionary, by Andrew Drummond (Books, 26 July), his story signifies “ the extraordinary dynamism and fervour of the early years of the German Reformation”. No less, nevertheless, it confirms the place of the emotions within the religious life. The reason for God’s truth extends beyond the uncritical acceptance of doctrines or texts, and demands each the assent of the guts and the impulse of justice.
Luther inveighed against a Church that had abandoned the narrow way of Christ for worldly power and wealth, but was unwilling to recognise that the forced resignation of the lowly and meek to God’s will contained inside it the seeds of revenge and revolution.
Müntzer perceived that a truer and more radical reformation of society and manners also required a readiness to challenge secular authority and social injustice, within the name of God and for the sake of the suffering poor.
Canon Rod Garner is an Anglican priest, author, and theologian.
