Thomas Müntzer

Thomas Müntzer (born sometime before 1490, Stolberg, Thuringia [Germany]—died May 27, 1525, Mühlhausen) was a leading German radical reformer during the Protestant Reformation, a fiery and apocalyptic preacher, and a participant in the abortive Peasants’ War in Thuringia in 1524–25. A controversial figure in life and in death, Müntzer is regarded as a significant force in the religious and social history of modern Europe. Marxists in the 20th century viewed him as a leader in an early bourgeois revolution against feudalism and the struggle for a classless society.

Early life and career

Very little is known of the childhood and youth of Thomas Müntzer, except that he was the son of a burgher in Stolberg in the Harz Mountains. His name appears in the 1506 register of the University of Leipzig, however, and in 1512 he attended the University of Frankfurt an der Oder, later earning the academic ranks of master of arts and bachelor of theology. Müntzer became a linguistic specialist in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and an accomplished scholar of ancient and humanistic literature—particularly the books of the Bible. He was an assistant teacher in Halle (Saale) in 1513 and a clergyman as well as a teacher in Aschersleben in 1514 and 1515. In these capacities he represented the middle class in its striving for church reforms. He initiated various secret alliances in order to achieve the reforms.

From 1516 to 1517 Müntzer worked as a prior at Frohse monastery at Aschersleben. He then taught at the Braunschweig Martineum (secondary school) until 1518, when he was attracted to Martin Luther and his ideas of reform. The designation Martinian was first applied to Müntzer in 1519 after he spoke out against the Franciscan order, the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the veneration of the saints. He early showed himself to be an independent thinker. After occasional participation in debates between Luther and the Roman Catholic theologian Johann Eck in Leipzig, he pursued intensive literary studies at the monastery of Beuditz at Weissenfels (1519–20). There he developed, especially under the influence of mysticism, his own view of Christianity, which became increasingly apocalyptic and spiritual. From an action-hungry conspirator in local burgher plots, he became a reformer who began to see the work inaugurated by Luther as a fundamental change in both ecclesiastical and secular life and therefore as a revolution. He henceforth judged Luther by this criterion.

Müntzer, probably at Luther’s recommendation, served as a pastor in Zwickau, a town in which great social tension existed between the upper classes and the early miners’ guilds. In this work he sided with the common people, who seemed to him to be the executors of the divine law and will on earth. More and more he found himself opposed to Roman Catholic practices and Lutheran ideas of reform. He increasingly adopted the view that true authority lay in the inner light given by God to his own, rather than in the Bible, a view taught by Nikolaus Storch, a leader of a reform group known as the “Zwickau prophets.” Storch also convinced Müntzer that the end of the world was imminent. Driven away from Zwickau in 1521, Müntzer sought on trips to Saaz (Žatec) and Prague to gain the support of the Taborites, a Bohemian group that followed the teaching of Jan Hus, a 15th-century reformer. In Prague he also published a manifesto proclaiming the start of the final reformation and the emergence of a new church over which the Holy Spirit would reign. Müntzer became fully aware of his opposition to Luther in 1522 at Nordhausen, where, in a struggle against Luther’s supporters, his theological differences of opinion with them became more pronounced. For the first time it was the Lutherans who were to effect his expulsion from a city.

Müntzer’s reform

Although he began his religious revolt by following Luther’s theological doctrines, Müntzer soon went his own way. Believing that teachings came from the Holy Spirit, he placed them in opposition to the Lutheran doctrines of justification (justification by faith alone) and of the authority of Scripture (Scripture as the exclusive source of divine truth). As an exponent of the supremacy of the inner light of the Holy Spirit as against the authority of Scripture, Müntzer was said by Luther to have swallowed the Holy Spirit, “feathers and all.”

The revolutionary aspect of Müntzer’s theology lay in the link he made between his concept of the inevitable conquest of the anti-Christian earthly government and the thesis that the common people themselves, as the instruments of God, would have to execute this change. He believed that the common people, because of their lack of property and their unspoiled ignorance, were God’s elect and would disclose his will. Indeed, he came to believe that, as God’s elect, peasants would lead the struggle against the enemies of the Holy Spirit in the last days.

Müntzer arrived in Halle at the end of 1522. By his preaching in Glaucha, he won numerous disciples. Here he may also have met his later wife, the former nun Ottilie von Gersen, with whom he had two children. Before Easter of 1523, Müntzer found employment as pastor of a Saxon community in Allstedt, near the Mansfeld mining area. His most important religious, liturgical, and theological writings originated here. They included German Church Office, German-Protestant Mass, Protestation or Defense…Regarding the Beginning of the True Christian Faith and Baptism, Of Written Faith, and Precise Exposure of False Belief. Here, too, he drafted a speech, “Motivation for Defense,” and delivered his “Princes’ Sermon,” in which he unsuccessfully tried to urge the Saxon rulers to take their place in reforming Christendom to its biblical splendour.