Continued from part two.
As a result of these convictions, Bucer was generally the most ecumenically-minded of the reformers. His emphasis on love and dialogue made him an ideal “champion for protestant unity,” and motivated him to work tirelessly to unify the evangelical movement as a whole. His ecumenism also led him to work to unify with more Erasmian-minded Catholics in hopes of creating a state-wide German church, much like the Anglican church in terms of its relation to the state, but more evangelical in its doctrine. This ecumenical bent also manifested itself in a more irenic disposition toward those with whom he disagreed. This side of him will be seen as we now examine the nature and handling of his disagreements with the Roman church, with Luther himself, and with the Anabaptists.
As a young man hailing from Selestat and steeped in Erasmian humanism, it should be no surprise that Bucer was critical of the institutional abuses of the church. Yet as he grew, his polemics directed at the church in Rome heightened, becoming far more severe than anything ever used by Erasmus or any of his teachers in Selestat. While “antichrist” was his preferred epithet, he elsewhere called the church a, “mob of priests,” “the religion of the pope,” and “the false church.”[1] What were the grounds for Bucer’s break? Much of it can be traced back to his understanding of the Christian faith as in essence a simple matter of faith in Christ and love for others. While his emphasis on love of others sometimes distanced him from Luther’s unapologetic emphasis on grace alone with no place for works, Bucer was still an evangelical at the end of the day. And he saw many of the late medieval rituals of Catholicism as an undermining of the simplicity of Christian faith granted by the Holy Spirit.
Moreover, the laity was often steamrolled by the church’s emphasis on external ritualistic piety. “The Roman clergy had trampled on the rights of the laity, deceived and patronized and seduced them. It encouraged a false piety based on externals, dressing up stone and wooden images in costly garments while the living members of Christ suffered hunger and poverty.”[2] Thus, not only did late medieval piety undermine the nature of saving faith by encouraging people to trust their salvation to the church, it also caused the church to lose sight of Christianity’s most basic teaching, that “everyone should live not for himself but for others.”[3] In this way, the late medieval church came to undermine Christianity in its most essential form, making unity impossible.
This is where Bucer’s ecumenism must be distinguished from that of Erasmus, who was also a strong voice for reconciliation in the German church at this time. Erasmus’ critique of the church was focused purely on externals and did not have the complexity of Bucer’s, causing Erasmus to see unification as a possibility. But Bucer could not agree with him on this. While it was true that the church’s problems were largely external in Bucer’s eyes, the nature of those external problems cut at the very foundation of the Christian faith. In light of this, “Erasmus’ increasingly desperate calls for moderation and tolerance and unity at the end of the 1520s were based on a total misreading of a crisis.”[4] For Bucer, the larger issue at stake was the Gospel, and tangential to that the question of authority in the church.
Implicit in Bucer’s argument that the Roman church had abandoned the Gospel was the idea that Scripture stood alone as the supreme authority in the church. Of course, Bucer was not alone in advancing this argument. The question of authority in the church was foundational to the Reformation itself. Indeed, one of the most oft-quoted speeches of the Reformation is Martin Luther’s “Here I Stand” speech given at Worms in which Luther explained why he could not recant.
“Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures or by evident reason—for I can believe neither pope nor councils alone, as it is clear that they have erred repeatedly and contradicted themselves—I consider myself convicted by the testimony of Holy Scripture, which is my basis; my conscience is captive to the Word of God. Thus I cannot and will not recant, because acting against one’s conscience is neither safe nor sound. God help me. Amen.”[5]
This speech accurately captures the Protestant understanding of church authority, an understanding just as fundamental to Bucer’s theology (and eventual departure from the Roman church ) as it was to Luther’s. The Bible was the final authority on questions of Christian teaching. While Bucer respected the church fathers, he did not consider them to be equally authoritative. More interesting, this was an issue on which Bucer’s opinion would remain generally unchanged for the duration of his career. In the early 1540s when he began working for reform in Cologne he and the Catholic theologian Johannes Gropper the fundamental point of disagreement was still the question of authority. Though Bucer presented his view in different form – he allowed for the authority of “apostolic” traditions – at the end of the day he still essentially affirmed sola scriptura, “For a tradition to be accepted it must truly stem from the apostles… and in every case the legitimacy of those traditions had to be confirmed by referring them back to Scripture.”[6] While it may be a more sophisticated way of saying it than Luther’s relatively black and white declaration at Worms, at the end of the day, he and Luther are still very much in agreement on this point.
Further complicating matters was Bucer’s slightly different understanding of the relation between love of God and love of others. The understanding espoused by Aquinas, the greatest Dominican theologian, had been that love of others was the only appropriate response to the love God has for man. Bucer agreed. Where they conflicted was that Thomas held that love of others and acceptance of self was a form of loving God. Bucer was not comfortable with this statement because he felt that it neglected the issue of human sinfulness. Bucer instead said that humans must be forgetful of self because their sinfulness meant they would invariably pervert self-love.[7] While this may seem a small point, it was an issue where Bucer disagreed with the greatest Dominican theologian, and at a time when religious conflict was already brewing in Germany, that was no small thing. For all those reasons, Bucer’s theology compelled him to break from the Roman church.
[1] Matheson, p. 5.
[2] Matheson, p. 9.
[3] Bucer, Instructions in Christian Love, p. 19.
[4] Matheson, p. 10.
[5] Deutsche Reichstagsakten, Jungere Reihe, Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter Kaiser Karl V., vols. 1-, ed. Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Gotha, 1893-; 2d ed. [reprint] Gottingen, 1962-) 2.555, 37, note 1.
[6] Amy Burnett, “Martin Bucer and the Church Fathers in the Cologne Reformation,” Reformation and Renaissance Review, 2001: 108-124, p. 120.
[7] Martin Greschat, Martin Bucer, a Reformer and His Times. p. 30-31.
[...] Continued from part 3 here. [...]