Martin Bucer

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Martin Bucer died in Cambridge on the 28th of February 1551, far from the city where he had spent the most productive decades of his life. He was 59 years old, a German exile in a foreign country, having been forced out of Strasbourg by the very Emperor he had spent years trying to persuade. At his burial in the church of Great St Mary's, a large crowd of university professors and students came to pay their respects.

  John Cheke, a scholar who had known him in England, wrote to a colleague afterward: "We are deprived of a leader than whom the whole world would scarcely obtain a greater, whether in knowledge of true religion or in integrity and innocence of life."

  Bucer had begun his adult life as a Dominican friar in a small Alsatian city, and he ended it as a professor at Cambridge. Between those two points lies one of the most restless, argumentative, and overlooked careers of the Protestant Reformation. He mediated between Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli. He drafted confessions of faith, organised synods, and lobbied emperors. He tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to build a single Protestant church that could hold all the quarrelling factions together.

  No denomination bears his name today. Yet Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Puritans all claimed him as their own. How did a cooper's son from Alsace become the Reformation's most persistent bridge-builder, and why did his grand project keep falling just short?

• 2. A Cooper's Son in the Orders

  ›

  Bucer was born in Sélestat, a free imperial city in Alsace, on the 11th of November 1491. His father and grandfather, both named Claus Butzer, were coopers by trade. Almost nothing is known about his mother. He likely attended Sélestat's prestigious Latin school, where artisans sent their children, and he completed his studies in the summer of 1507 before joining the Dominican Order as a novice.

  He later claimed his grandfather had pushed him into the order. Whether or not that is true, Bucer moved through the Dominican system at a steady pace. He was consecrated as an acolyte at the Strasbourg church of the Williamites, took his full vows as a Dominican friar, and was ordained a deacon in 1510. By 1515 he was studying theology in the Dominican monastery in Heidelberg, then moved to Mainz for a course in dogmatics, where he was ordained a priest. He returned to Heidelberg in January 1517 to enroll at the university.

  Around this time Bucer began buying books published by Johannes Froben, including works by the humanist Erasmus. A 1518 inventory of his personal library includes the major works of Thomas Aquinas, the central figure of medieval scholasticism in the Dominican tradition. That inventory is also his will, which he drew up because he was about to do something risky.

  In April 1518, Johannes von Staupitz, the vicar-general of the Augustinians, invited Martin Luther to Heidelberg to argue his theology at a formal disputation. Bucer was there. He wrote a long letter afterward to his mentor Beatus Rhenanus, commenting on several of Luther's Ninety-five Theses and noting that Luther and Erasmus seemed to him to be saying much the same thing. Because simply meeting Luther carried risk, he asked Rhenanus to make sure the letter did not fall into the wrong hands. In early 1519, Bucer received his baccalaureus degree and publicly stated his break with Aquinas and scholasticism in a disputation before the Heidelberg faculty.

• 3. Escape and Arrival

  ›

  Jacob van Hoogstraaten, the Grand Inquisitor of Cologne and a fellow Dominican, began looking for targets among reformist sympathisers. Hoogstraaten had recently failed to prosecute the humanist scholar Johann Reuchlin, but his attention now turned toward Bucer. On the 11th of November 1520, Bucer warned the reformer Wolfgang Capito by letter that Hoogstraaten was planning to make an example of him as a follower of Luther.

  To escape Dominican authority, Bucer needed his monastic vows annulled. Capito and others arranged it. On the 29th of April 1521, Bucer was formally released from the order.

  For the next two years, the Imperial Knight Franz von Sickingen and the humanist Ulrich von Hutten provided him protection. Bucer worked for a time as chaplain at the court of Ludwig V, Elector Palatine, living in Nuremberg, where he met the humanist Willibald Pirckheimer and the future Nuremberg reformer Andreas Osiander. In September 1521, he accepted Sickingen's offer of a pastorate at Landstuhl, where Sickingen had a castle, and in summer 1522 he met and married Elisabeth Silbereisen, a former nun.

  Sickingen then offered to fund Bucer's study in Wittenberg. On the way, Bucer stopped at Wissembourg, whose leading reformer Heinrich Motherer asked him to serve as chaplain. Bucer agreed and began preaching daily, attacking the Mass and monastic rules on the grounds of sola scriptura, the principle that the Bible alone is the source of saving knowledge. He summarised his convictions in six theses and called for a public disputation. The local Franciscans and Dominicans ignored him, but the townspeople were roused enough to threaten the monasteries.

  The bishop of Speyer responded by excommunicating Bucer. Then Sickingen was defeated and killed in the Knights' War, and Hutten became a fugitive. Bucer's protectors were gone. The Wissembourg council urged Bucer and Motherer to leave, and on the 13th of May 1523 they fled to Strasbourg.

• 4. Building a Church in Strasbourg

  ›

  Strasbourg was a free imperial city on the western frontier of the Holy Roman Empire, closely allied with Swiss cities that had already broken with Rome. It was ruled by a complex local government dominated by powerful families and wealthy guildsmen. Social unrest was rising as lower-level artisans resented the widening income gap. Bucer arrived excommunicated, without means, and without citizenship.

  On the 9th of June 1523 he wrote urgently to the Zurich reformer Huldrych Zwingli, asking for a safe post in Switzerland. What saved him was the influence of the reformer Matthew Zell on the Strasbourg council. Within months, the Gardeners' guild, the largest in the city, appointed Bucer pastor of St Aurelia's Church on the 24th of August 1523. A month later the council granted him citizenship.

  He joined a team that included Zell as the mass preacher, Wolfgang Capito as the city's leading theologian, and Caspar Hedio as the cathedral preacher. The reformers pressed the council to ban all masses, and on the 20th of February 1529 the practice was officially suspended. Strasbourg openly joined the Reformation. In its place, two preaching services per Sunday were held in all parish churches.

  Bucer's priority was moral discipline. He established special wardens drawn from the laity, assigned to each congregation to supervise both doctrine and practice. His concern was partly driven by a rapidly growing refugee population, drawn by Strasbourg's tolerant asylum policies. Influxes after 1528 brought revolutionary preachers inspired by apocalyptic and mystical doctrines, including followers of Melchior Hoffman, Caspar Schwenckfeld, and Clemens Ziegler. Bucer personally took responsibility for attacking these figures and pressing for their expulsion.

  The turning point came when Hoffman's followers seized power in Munster in 1534, in what became known as the Munster Rebellion. The Strasbourg council, fearing a similar uprising, finally acted. On the 4th of March 1534, it announced that Bucer's Tetrapolitan Confession and his sixteen articles on church doctrine were now official statements of faith. All Anabaptists must subscribe or leave. With that decision, Capito declared, "Bucer is the bishop of our church."

• 5. The Eucharist Wars

  ›

  The single issue that most divided the Protestant Reformation was deceptively simple to state: when Christians celebrate the Lord's Supper, is Christ physically present in the bread and wine? Luther said yes, a corporeal real presence. Zwingli said no, the Holy Spirit makes Christ present but not in physical form. The disagreement had serious consequences for whether a unified Protestant church could ever exist.

  Bucer had abandoned the idea of corporeal real presence by late 1524, accepting Zwingli's interpretation after his own study of the texts. But he did not believe the Reformation depended on either position. Faith in Christ was the foundation; the eucharist was a secondary matter. This put him at odds with both sides.

  In March 1526 he published the Apologia, proposing that different scriptural interpretations were acceptable so long as both sides shared what he called "child-like faith in God". He also published two translations of works by Luther and Johannes Bugenhagen, quietly inserting his own interpretation of the Lord's Supper. This outraged the Wittenberg theologians and damaged his relationship with them.

  The last meeting between Luther and Zwingli came at the Marburg Colloquy in October 1529, organised by Philip of Hesse. The two theologians agreed on 13 of the 14 topics discussed. The one exception was real presence. Luther would not compromise. After the talks broke down, Bucer tried to rescue the situation. Luther's response was blunt: "It is obvious that we do not have one and the same spirit."

  The following year, Bucer wrote of his frustration at doctrinal rigidity: "If you immediately condemn anyone who doesn't quite believe the same as you do as forsaken by Christ's Spirit, and consider anyone to be the enemy of truth who holds something false to be true, who, pray tell, can you still consider a brother? I for one have never met two people who believed exactly the same thing."

  The Wittenberg Concord of 1536, signed on the 28th of May after difficult negotiations, represented Bucer's greatest formal success at bridging the divide. It distinguished between the unworthy who receive the body of Christ and left the harder question of what unbelievers receive unanswered. The south German cities eventually endorsed it. The Swiss cities never did.

• 6. Philip of Hesse and a Costly Secret

  ›

  Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, was one of the most important political backers of the Reformation. His lands lay between Saxony and the Rhine, and he had helped organise the Marburg Colloquy. When his law protecting Jews in Hesse expired in 1538, he commissioned Bucer to draft a new policy. Philip's own draft was relatively tolerant. Bucer rejected it.

  Bucer's counter-proposal, the Judenratschlag, recommended that Jews be barred from all trades except those providing the minimum for subsistence. It was the first time he used negative stereotypes of Jews in writing. Philip's 1539 ordinance was a compromise: Jews could engage in trade and commerce, but faced strict rules on contact with Christians. The arbitrary enforcement potential was severe enough that many Jews chose to leave Hesse rather than remain under it. Historians have noted that Bucer bears part of the responsibility for this outcome.

  Later in November 1539, Philip asked Bucer for a theological defence of bigamy. Philip had decided to take a second wife, a lady-in-waiting of his sister, while remaining married to his first. Bucer reluctantly agreed to help, on condition the marriage stayed secret. He consulted Luther and Melanchthon, and the three produced a joint statement of advice. Bucer later produced additional arguments on his own.

  When rumours spread, Luther told Philip to deny the marriage. Bucer advised Philip to conceal his second wife and hide the truth. Some scholars have suggested the reformers believed they were operating under the seal of pastoral counsel, where a lie to protect a confessional confidence was justified. The marriage became public regardless, Philip lost political influence, and the broader Reformation within the Empire was severely compromised. It was one of the most damaging episodes of Bucer's career.

• 7. Exile and England

  ›

  Strasbourg surrendered to the imperial army on the 21st of March 1547, and the following month the Protestant military defeat at the Battle of Muhlberg ended most armed resistance within the Empire. At the Diet of Augsburg, which sat from September 1547 to May 1548, Charles V produced the Augsburg Interim: an imperial decree restoring Catholic rites and ceremonies throughout the Empire, with only minor concessions to the Reformation.

  Charles wanted a leading Protestant to endorse it. He chose Bucer. Bucer arrived in Augsburg on the 30th of March 1548 voluntarily, hoping to negotiate changes. On the 2nd of April he announced he would sign if modifications were made. Charles refused. Bucer was placed under house arrest on the 13th of April and then in close confinement. On the 20th of April he signed and was freed.

  He returned to Strasbourg and immediately stepped up his attacks on Catholic ceremonies. The guild officials voted on the 30th of August to begin negotiations toward implementing the Interim. Bucer held out even after the city of Konstanz surrendered. In January 1549 he and colleagues produced a memorandum on preserving Protestant faith under the Interim's directives. With no significant support remaining, he and Paul Fagius were relieved of their positions and dismissed on the 1st of March 1549. He left Strasbourg on the 5th of April, a refugee once more, just as he had arrived twenty-five years before.

  He received offers from Melanchthon in Wittenberg and Calvin in Geneva. He accepted Archbishop Thomas Cranmer's invitation to England instead. On the 25th of April 1549, Bucer and Fagius landed in London, where Cranmer received them with full honours. Within days they were introduced to Edward VI and his court. Bucer took the position of Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge.

  His most substantial English contribution was a treatise on the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. Cranmer had asked for his opinion on the book's revision. Bucer submitted his response on the 5th of January 1551, calling for a simpler liturgy and concentrating on how ordinary people would worship and be taught. Scholars agree that although his impact on the Church of England should not be overstated, he exercised his greatest influence on the revision that produced the 1552 second edition of the Prayer Book.

  His larger ambition for England took shape in a treatise he gave to his friend John Cheke in draft form on the 21st of October 1550. He described it as the culmination of his years of experience and his theological legacy. In it, he urged Edward VI to take direct control of the English Reformation and proposed that Parliament enact fourteen specific laws covering both ecclesiastical and civil life. He described marriage as a social contract rather than a sacrament and permitted divorce. He proposed restructuring economic and administrative systems with improvements to industry, agriculture, and education. The work was never printed in England during his lifetime. It was published in Basel in 1557, six years after his death.

• 8. A Legacy Without a Church

  ›

  When Mary I came to the throne, she had Bucer and Fagius tried posthumously for heresy. Their caskets were disinterred and their remains burned along with copies of their books. On the 22nd of July 1560, Elizabeth I formally rehabilitated both men. A brass plaque on the floor of Great St Mary's in Cambridge still marks where Bucer's grave originally stood.

  No Buceran church emerged from his work, probably because he never built a systematic theology the way Melanchthon did for Lutheranism or Calvin did for the Reformed churches. His theology was practical and pastoral rather than theoretical. He took doctrinal positions not to claim territory but to open a conversation, to find the point at which his opponent could be persuaded to move toward him. That made his theology extraordinarily adaptable and gave polemicists easy ammunition: they accused it of being too accommodating.

  Bucer had in common with John Calvin, whom he invited to lead a French refugee congregation in Strasbourg in summer 1538, a vision of what a reformed church could look like in daily practice. Many of the reforms Calvin later introduced in Geneva, including the liturgy and the church organisation, had been developed first in Strasbourg. The extent of Bucer's direct influence on Calvin remains an open question among scholars, but the parallel is hard to miss.

  Wibrandis Rosenblatt, whom Bucer married on the 16th of April 1542, outlived him as she had outlived her three previous husbands. She eventually returned to Basel, where she died on the 1st of November 1564. Bucer had left her a significant inheritance of household goods and his large library. His books, like his ideas, continued to circulate long after the man himself was gone.