Zwickau prophets

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The Zwickau Prophets (also called the Zwickau Storchians ) were a radical group in the early days of the Reformation . They had to leave Zwickau in 1521 and Wittenberg in 1522 .

The "72 disciples"

In the center of the circle of religious enthusiasts, referred to by Martin Luther disrespectfully as "Zwickau prophets", stood the two scarf squires Nikolaus Storch and Thomas Drechsel as well as the student and Müntzer friend Markus Thomas Badstübner from Elsterberg called Stübner, who after a failed riot against the magistrate of Zwickau in 1521 settled in Wittenberg. Among their 72 "disciples" was the preacher and later peasant war leader Thomas Müntzer , who, however, had to leave Zwickau on April 17, 1521 under pressure from the magistrate.

The "Zwickau Prophets" in Wittenberg

In Wittenberg, the nucleus of the Protestant movement, the people of Zwickau believed that they would find suitable ground for spreading their thoughts. The conflict with the Wittenberg movement led by Luther was thus mapped out in several respects, if only because the men around the craftsman Storch turned against any kind of scholarship and thus also against the authorities of the University of Wittenberg , which was founded in 1502 . Above all, however, the “prophets” represented a radical biblicism whose ideas of salvation they consistently led away not only from ecclesiastical but also from secular authority. Due to their blunt criticism of the sovereign authorities, from which they demanded strict adherence to Protestant beliefs, they were unacceptable from the point of view of Luther, who was strongly in conformity with the authorities. The Zwickau prophets made a deep impression through the self-confident manner of their appearance and their amazing knowledge of the Bible. Even Philipp Melanchthon and Andreas Bodenstein temporarily came under their influence.

Luther's vote

The challenging behavior of the "Zwickau" challenged the intervention of Luther's patron, the Saxon Elector Friedrich the Wise , who instructed the Wittenberg city council, led by the mayors Anton Niemegk and Christian Beyer, to clarify the matter. The magistrate, overwhelmed by the theological dimension of the dispute, called on Luther for help, who had announced to the elector on February 24, 1522 that he would return from the Wartburg on March 6, 1522. From March 9, 1522 on, the Sunday Invocavit, Luther gave a sermon every day in the Wittenberg town church. In these invocavit sermons he commented on the reforms carried out: abolition of the mass, introduction of the priestly marriage, abolition of the fasting commandments, removal of the pictures, Lord's Supper under both forms (bread and wine), but spoke out against the much more far-reaching social and church political Demands of the "prophets".

Under pressure from the city and state authorities, the “Prophets” quickly left Wittenberg. Like Storch, whose personal fate remained unexplained, they probably joined the peasant war movement.

Historical classification

Radical revival movements like those of the Zwickau prophets were characteristic of the early days of the Reformation. Inspired by religious visions (including ideas about the end of the times ) on the one hand and driven by outrage over the worsening social and legal conditions in many places on the other, they combined religious enthusiasm with a criticism of the authorities that was considered legitimate. On the other hand, most of the princely authorities, but also the governing bodies of the imperial cities , opposed the denominational "enclosure" in the sense of the sovereign church regiment and an uncompromising fight against the groups that Luther called "enthusiasts". With the exception of the Anabaptists (which also include the Hutterites and today's Mennonites ), who were able to hold on to certain points even after the defeat of the Anabaptist Empire in Münster in 1535, the alternative forms of confession of the so-called radical Reformation, in addition to " Lutheranism " and (on " Calvinism ", which was only tolerated at the imperial level in 1648, had no future due to its alleged "anti-state" attitude.

literature

  • Rolf Decot : A Brief History of the Reformation in Germany. Freiburg i. Br. 2005, ISBN 3-451-28613-0 .
  • James M. Stayer : Saxon radicalism and Swiss Anabaptism. The return of the repressed. In: Günter Vogler (Hrsg.): Wegscheiden der Reformation. Alternative thinking from the 16th to the 18th century. Weimar 1994, pp. 151-178.
  • Reiner Groß: Zwickau in the first half of the 16th century , in: Ders. (Ed.), 500 years of the Zwickau Council School Library. 1498-1998, Zwickau 1998, pp. 160-175
  • Susan C. Karant-Nunn: Zwickau in Transition, 1500-1547: The Reformation as an Agent of Change . Columbus 1987, ISBN 978-0-8142-0421-4 .
  • Harold S. Bender: The Zwickauer Prophets, Thomas Müntzer and the Anabaptists . In: Theologische Zeitschrift , 8 (1952), pp. 262-278.
  • Horst Rabe: German History 1500-1600. The century of religious schism , Munich 1991
  • Hans-Jürgen Goertz : Religious Movements in the Early Modern Era (= Encyclopedia of German History, Vol. 20), Munich 1993

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Müntzer - Der Satan von Allstedt , MDR television film, broadcast on October 31, 2010.