Lecture 5: Luther's Last Years and the Rise of Zwingli

The lecture, section by section

1. The recovered pastor's family

   For the first time in centuries of Western church history the Reformation restored married pastors, since mandatory celibacy could not survive contact with Scripture: Paul lists being the husband of one wife among an elder's qualifications, and Peter himself, whom Rome claims as the first pope, had a mother-in-law whom Jesus healed. Clement of Alexandria even records that Peter's wife was martyred just before he was, with Peter encouraging her faithfulness as she went. For Martin it was Katie; the course will meet the wives of Zwingli, Calvin, and Knox in turn.

2. Teaching the plow-boy: hymns and catechisms

   Luther labored to educate common people and children who had known nothing but Latin ceremony. Hymns carried theology to laypeople, which is why old hymns are so doctrinally dense, and he wrote a large catechism and a small one for households and children. Out of some four hundred works and roughly sixty thousand handwritten pages, Luther said all of it could burn so long as the word of God remained, and then allowed one exception: perhaps his catechism for children could stay.

3. Table talk and the German Bible

   At the great scarred table in the old cloister, Luther, his family, students, and guests talked theology, and students' notes of those conversations became the famous Table Talk, the namesake of a well-known modern magazine. By 1534, working with Wittenberg colleagues including Philip Melanchthon, his co-laborer and from a Lutheran perspective the co-founder of Lutheranism, Luther completed the entire German Bible, a translation that helped unify the German language itself.

4. Marburg, 1529: agreed on everything but the table

   Luther and Zwingli, the two pioneering reformers, agreed on all the solas and nearly every doctrine, but at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529 they broke over the Lord's table. Rome taught transubstantiation, the elements becoming Christ's literal body and blood; Luther held consubstantiation, a real presence in, above, and around the elements; Zwingli held a memorial view. Luther could not get past the words this is my body, Zwingli could not get past do this in remembrance of me, and Luther left declaring he would rather drink blood with a papist than mere juice with Zwingli. The first two Protestant streams, Lutheran and Reformed, divided there, and the Anabaptists would soon make a third, divided over baptism: together for the gospel, split on the ordinances.

5. Augsburg, 1530: a confession before the emperor

   Politics opened a window. Charles V, needing Protestant soldiers against the Muslim Turks, allowed a measure of peace, and at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 Melanchthon presented the Augsburg Confession, the earliest charter document of Lutheran belief, read before the emperor himself.

6. The hard case: Luther's late pamphlet against the Jews

   Busenitz addresses the writing critics raise against Luther. Early on Luther showed the Jewish communities kindness, thought Catholics treated them too harshly, and never blamed them for the crucifixion; late in life, provoked by what he took as blasphemies against Christ's deity, he wrote a pamphlet whose harshness Busenitz will not defend and thinks Luther himself would own as sinful excess. The context matters: Luther said far harsher things about the pope and everyone else he opposed, so the charge of anti-Semitism misreads a man who was ferocious toward every perceived threat to the gospel. A student adds that the Nazis later exploited those pages, a misuse the lecture acknowledges alongside Luther's failing health in those years. Context explains; it does not excuse.

7. Magdalena, and the God of the downcast

   In 1542 Luther's thirteen-year-old daughter Magdalena died, and he sank into deep depression, a lifelong vulnerability he shared with Elijah under the broom tree and, centuries later, with Spurgeon, whose battles Lloyd-Jones would write about. Three years on, Luther confessed he still mourned her and could not forget her, yet knew surely she was in heaven, God having taken his own flesh and blood to his fatherly heart as a token of love. It is grief with hope, and Busenitz draws the pastoral lesson: God mightily uses up-and-down personalities, and his strength carries them through what feels like breaking.

8. Eisleben, the rose, and the last word

   Luther preached his last sermon in Eisleben, the town of his birth, where he had returned to settle a family dispute, and died there on February 18, 1546, at sixty-two; his grave lies beneath the pulpit of the Wittenberg castle church. His chosen seal, the Luther rose, he explained himself as his compendium of theology: a black cross within a living red heart, for faith in the Crucified justifies and pains but does not kill; the heart set in a white rose, for faith gives a joy and peace the world cannot give; the rose on a sky-blue field, heavenly joy begun now and held in hope; all ringed in gold, the endless preciousness of blessedness to come. And his own verdict on his life: he only preached and wrote the word, and while he slept or drank Wittenberg beer, the word did everything.

9. Zwingli: the Alps and the cantons

   Ulrich Zwingli was born January 1, 1484, seven weeks after Luther, at Wildhaus high in the Swiss Alps, which he loved so dearly he would devotionally reword the Psalms to fit them. Switzerland, semi-independent within the Holy Roman Empire, was a confederation of thirteen cantons, city-states ruled by councils. His father was a civic leader, and lifelong respect for Zurich's government marked his ministry, as did a patriot's anger that popes hired Swiss mercenaries and sent hundreds of thousands of young Swiss to die in papal wars.

10. The making of an expositor

    Zwingli studied at Bern, Basel, and Vienna, and at Basel came under Thomas Wyttenbach, who pointed him to Erasmus and the study of Scripture in the original Greek. He bought the priest's post at Glarus in 1506, as one could then, served ten years there and two at Einsiedeln, and across those years gradually adopted Scripture alone as his sole standard. Unlike Luther's datable conversion, Zwingli's was a process, aided by Luther's writings as they spread, so that by his arrival in Zurich in 1519 the transformation was worked.

11. Zurich, Matthew 1:1, and the plague

    As people's priest of the Grossmunster, Zurich's principal church, Zwingli abandoned the medieval models and simply preached: beginning at Matthew 1:1, verse by verse through the New Testament, in the language of the people. Citizens said they had never heard anything like it. If Luther is the Reformation's prophet and Calvin its theologian, Zwingli is its expository preacher. When plague struck Zurich he refused to flee, though the wealthy always left first, ministered to the dying, caught the disease himself, and near death wrote his plague poem: nothing can be too severe; I am your vessel, to make whole or break in pieces. That surrender to God's sovereignty is the fountainhead of what became reformed theology, and his staying endeared him to the city and bought credibility for every reform to come.

12. The regulative principle in action

    Zwingli preached against indulgences, Roman fasts like Lent, private confession, the mass, icons, church music, mandatory tithes, prayers to the saints, and purgatory, admitting into worship only what the New Testament commands, the regulative principle, over against Luther's normative principle. The organs came out and the sanctuaries went stark, though one glaring inconsistency remained for a later lecture: infant baptism. Practice followed preaching: in March 1522, days after he preached against Lent, Zwingli and friends held a public sausage supper in mid-Lent Zurich; that July they petitioned the bishop of Constance to void mandatory celibacy, were refused, and Zwingli secretly married Anna Reinhart anyway, a marriage that predated Luther's but caused scandal when it became public. An architectural footnote: the medieval pulpit stood off to the side, and it took the Puritans, building fresh in New England, to set the pulpit front and center where the word belongs.

1. Luther valued his children's catechism above sixty thousand other pages. What are you doing to pass the faith's fundamentals to children and new believers, and does its priority match Luther's?

2. At Marburg, men agreed on the whole gospel split over the table. How do you decide which disagreements between true believers are worth dividing over, and which are not?

3. Zwingli's staying through the plague gave him credibility no sermon could buy. Where does costly presence with suffering people fit in your picture of ministry?