OUTSIDE of academic circles with a research interest in the Reformation, relatively few readers will be aware of the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants’ War (1524-25). The largest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution, it grew in successive waves at the height of the Reformation, terrifying feudal powers and costing up to 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 ordinary people to ameliorate the harshness and injustice that diminished their lives and freedoms, all played a part.
Peasant leaders justified insurrection 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 in the southern town of Memmingen, were littered with scriptural references. Peasants were no longer to be regarded as mere chattels, because “Christ has redeemed and bought us all by the shedding of his precious blood.”
Dismayed and angered by the destruction and killings precipitated by the uprising, Luther condemned the rebellion’s leaders for their abuse of the Bible in support of their cause, and was deeply perturbed by their rejection of those set above them, who — on the basis 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 restore secular authority and to “stab, smite, strangle” opponents without mercy.
ONE peasant leader in particular who had come to represent a serious threat to vested interests was a passionate and often penniless itinerant preacher, Thomas Müntzer. Born in 1489, the son of a coin-maker, and educated at the universities of Leipzig and Frankfurt, Müntzer had a reputation 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 on your scripture and Bible and Christ unless you 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 — at 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 as the severest warning to others entertaining the hope of a new 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, along with the thousands who had perished in the mud of Frankenhausen.
THE mud, so to speak, stuck. In a matter of years, Müntzer’s name and influence largely waned. The Anabaptist movement initially drew inspiration from his teachings as 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 at all — as a failed rebel, an apostate concerning true religion, and a threat to a political dispensation ordained by God.
The myth amounted to a character assassination, but it did contain an important truth: Müntzer did believe that he was a prophet of God — a new Moses or Elijah who, as part of God’s Elect (his predestined chosen people), was living in the last days, in order to summon society to repentance and a greater conformity to God’s will. To this endeavour, Müntzer brought his deep knowledge of the Bible as well as the significant theological writings of the Middle Ages. A professed intellectual, he loathed academics cloistered in privileged surroundings, content, on the one hand, with a venal ruling class and, on the other, 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, so 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 in the expectation that God would write directly in their hearts “with his living finger”. Without such experience, scripture was merely a record of God’s former dealings with his people rather 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 only then can someone who has been tested preach God’s name”.
Müntzer’s own afflictions and manner of death served to confirm 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 pointed out in a recent review of a new 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, however, it confirms the place of the emotions in the religious life. The cause of God’s truth extends beyond the uncritical acceptance of doctrines or texts, and demands both the assent of the heart 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 within 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, in the name of God and for the sake of the suffering poor.
Canon Rod Garner is an Anglican priest, writer, and theologian.
