The Strange and Terrible Visions of Wilhelm Friess by Green Jonathan

Author:Green, Jonathan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780472120079
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Strasbourg and Sacraments: The Religious Home of “Friess II”

Strasbourg, like Nuremberg, enjoyed the status of a free imperial city. It was the leading economic force of its region, and its significance as a printing center extended throughout southwestern Germany. After the Reformation took hold in Strasbourg in the early 1520s, the city became known for its religious tolerance, and several radical leaders and various Anabaptist groups found a home there for a time. Beginning in the 1530s, however, the city became harsher in its treatment of nonconformists, and most Anabaptists eventually left the city or were reconciled with mainstream Protestantism. Under the city’s guiding reformer, Martin Bucer, Strasbourg charted a middle course between Martin Luther and Jean Calvin from the 1520s into the 1540s. From 1538 to 1541, Calvin lived in Strasbourg and attempted to win Anabaptists for the Reformed cause. In later decades, Calvinism in Strasbourg continued to receive strength from Huguenot refugees, as French Calvinists were frequently forced to seek refuge abroad.

In the decades after 1550, however, any Strasbourg resident who chose to follow the tenets of Jean Calvin found himself or herself in an increasingly untenable position. The years following Bucer’s death in 1551 were marked by confessional conflicts between Lutheranism and Calvinism in which orthodox Lutheranism gained firm control over the city’s institutions. Reformed teaching and worship were threatened with official sanction and eventually forbidden. Calvinist worship had been increasingly forced underground after 1563, and in February 1577, the city authorities closed the French Calvinist congregation that had served Huguenot refugees. Johann Sturm, the first rector of Strasbourg’s humanistic school (which he had led since the 1530s) and a proponent of Reformed views, was forced from his office in 1581, after years of conflict with the second generation of the city’s Lutherans leaders.14 By the end of the century, Strasbourg had committed itself to orthodox Lutheranism and prohibited its citizens from participating in Reformed services.15

The confessional conflicts that set Lutherans against Calvinists in Strasbourg included a fierce controversy in the 1570s over the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. In the New Testament accounts of Christ’s last meal with the apostles on the evening before Christ’s arrest and crucifixion, Christ “took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, ‘Take; this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. He said to them, ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many’” (Mark 14:22–24 NRSV). What exactly Christ meant when he said, “This is my body,” has been subject to vigorous discussion up to the current day. All strains of Protestantism rejected the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which held that the Eucharistic wafer and wine were transformed into the substance of the body and blood of Christ, but common ground among Protestants in the matter of sacramental theology nevertheless remained elusive. In 1529, Luther and Zwingli had debated

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