Berchtold Haller

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Berchtold Haller

Berchtold Haller (* 1492 in Aldingen , Württemberg ; † February 25, 1536 in Bern ) was the reformer of the city of Bern.

Life

After attending school in Pforzheim , where he became friends with Philipp Melanchthon , he studied theology in Cologne from 1510 , then became a teacher in Rottweil and around 1513 in Bern , where he also became a canon and priest at the Münster in 1520 . In 1521 he visited Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich , who became his friend and advisor and since then has been in lively correspondence with him.

His shy attempts to reform the Bern church, which he undertook from 1522 together with the Bernese Franciscan preacher Sebastian Meyer , met with strong resistance. When Haller was publicly referred to by the priests as an "arch heretic and pot-bellied liar", he was already planning to retire to Basel on the pretext of wanting to study the ancient languages. Zwingli talked him out of this, however: “Just go on bravely to gradually tame your wild bears. But you mustn't treat yours the way I treat mine: Your ears are still too hard to suddenly be scratched sharply. Such animals have to be stroked gently. "

He also received energetic support from other sources: Niklaus Manuel Deutsch's drastic anti-Catholic carnival games met with a strong response from the population, as did his dance of death on the cemetery wall of the Dominican monastery , which the clergy were not exactly flattering.

From 1523 on, Haller went over to the continued interpretation of scriptures in his sermons based on the Zwingli model. In 1525 he stopped reading mass in Bern . In 1526 he took part in the Baden disputation . In 1528 the great religious talk took place in Bern, which resulted in the Bern Reformation Edict of February 7, 1528, with which Bern officially decided in favor of the Reformation.

Zwingli's death in 1531 brought the Reformation in Bern into a crisis, whereupon the council convened the first Bern Synod , in which 200 pastors took part. Haller was very concerned about the Bern Reformation, especially since Zwingli's successor Heinrich Bullinger could not take part. However, he received active support from Wolfgang Capito , who arrived in Bern shortly before the opening of the Synod and worked with Haller on the Bern Synod , which the Synod then accepted.

In 1532 Haller became the highest dean in Bern and thus head of the Bern Reformed Church. He was in close contact with Guillaume Farel in the west and Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich and thus became a mediator between the Calvinist and Zurich Reformation. In the conflicts with the Bernese Oberland and the Catholic towns and the Anabaptists , Haller took a more moderate stance.

Works

Together with Wolfgang Capito he wrote the Synod of Berne, the church order for Berne.

literature

Web links

Commons : Berchtold Haller  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Haller, Berchtold
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Haller, Berthold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Reformer of the city of Bern
DATE OF BIRTH 1492
PLACE OF BIRTH Aldingen
DATE OF DEATH February 25, 1536
Place of death Bern