Christianity Through the Centuries: A History of the Christian Church by Cairns Earle E

Author:Cairns, Earle E. [Cairns, Earle E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2009-09-13T03:00:00+00:00

III. YEARS OF SEPARATION, 1522–30

During the trying year of May 1521 to March 1522, Melanchthon was not idle. His short work on the theology of the Reformers of Wittenberg, Loci Communes,9 came out in 1521. This little work in Latin was the first major theological treatise of the Reformation and went through numerous editions during the lifetime of its author. It established Melanchthon as the theologian of the Lutheran movement.

Melanchthon rejected the authority of the Roman church, the Fathers, the canon law, and the Scholastics. He put the Bible above these as the final authority for Christians. His little book grew out of his study of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. In it, Melanchthon attempted to deal with the “most common topics of theological science” in a methodical fashion in order that he might “incite people to the Scriptures.” He pictured man bound by sin and unable to help himself. The law, he wrote, cannot help because its main function is to reveal sin. God must initiate the work of the salvation that the individual receives by faith in Christ. Luther, who recognized that he was bold and violent where Melanchthon was irenic and gentle, fully approved of this work as the theological expression of his ideas. He characterized it as “immortal.”

Melanchthon also set up the German school system from village schools to universities. He was responsible for the Augsburg Confession. For thirty years this irenic scholar was Luther’s friend and colleague.

But neither had Luther been idle during his enforced residence at Wartburg Castle between May 1521 and March 1522. Making use of Erasmus’s edition of the Greek Testament, he completed his German translation of the New Testament in less than a year. The whole Bible, including the Apocrypha, was translated from the original languages into German by 1534. When it was published, it not only gave the German people the Bible in their own tongue but also set the standard form of the German language. He also wrote On Monastic Vows, in which he urged monks and nuns to repudiate their wrongful vows, to leave the cloister, and to marry.

Luther was indeed a national hero and held in high regard by prince, peasant, humanist, and knight alike; but his policies in the subsequent years alienated some of those who had followed him so readily at first. While he was at Wartburg, Nicholas Storch and Markus Stübner, who were known as the Zwickau prophets, appeared at Wittenberg and began preaching ideas similar to some of the Anabaptists’ ideas. They taught that the kingdom of God would soon appear on earth and that their followers would have special revelations. The usually unstable Carlstadt was influenced by them. At the risk of his life, Luther returned to Wittenberg in 1522. After eight fiery sermons, in which he stressed the authority of the Bible and the need for gradual change in the church, he defeated the Zwickau prophets. The radical wing of the Reformation, however, felt from this time on that it could not count on help from Luther, and in 1535 Luther broke openly with the Anabaptist movement.

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