CASPAR SCHWENCKFELD AND THE REFORMATION OF THE "MIDDLE WAY"[1]
Among all the Reformers of the sixteenth century who worked at the
immense task of recovering, purifying, and restating the Christian
Faith, no one was nobler in life and personality, and no one was more
uncompromisingly dedicated to the mission of bringing into the life of
the people a type of Christianity winnowed clean from the husks of
superstition and tradition and grounded in ethical and spiritual
reality, than was Caspar Schwenckfeld, the Silesian noble. No one, to
a greater degree than he, succeeded in going behind, not only
Scholastic formulations but even behind Pauline interpretations of
Christ, to Christ Himself. The aspects of the Christ-life which
powerfully moved him were very different from {65} those which moved
Francis of Assisi three centuries earlier, but the two men had this
much in common--they both went to Jesus Christ for the source and
inspiration of their religion, they both lived under the spell of that
dominating Personality of the Gospels, they both felt the power of the
Cross and saw with their inner spirits that the real healing of the
human soul and the eternal destiny of man were indissolubly bound up
with the Person of Christ.[2] Here again, as in the early years of the
thirteenth century, there came a gentle Reformer of religion, who would
use no compulsion but love, who knew how to suffer patiently with his
Lord, and whose entire programme was the restoration of primitive
Christianity, though of necessity it would be restored, if at all, in
terms of the spiritual ideals of the sixteenth century, as the
Christianity of St. Francis had been in terms of thirteenth-century
ideals.
Caspar Schwenckfeld was born of a noble family in the duchy of
Liegnitz, in Lower Silesia, in 1489. He studied in Cologne, in
Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, and probably also in the University of Erfurt,
though he attained no University degree. His period of systematic
study being over, about 1511 he threw himself into the life of a
courtier, with the prospect of a successful worldly career before him.
Luther's heroic contest against the evils and corruptions of the Church
and his proclamation of a Reforming faith shook the prosperous courtier
wide awake and turned the currents of his life powerfully toward
religion. He deeply felt at this time, what he expressed a few years
later, that a new world was coming to birth and the old one dying away.
To the end of his days, and in spite of the harsh treatment which he
later received from the Wittenberg Reformer, Schwenckfeld always
remembered that it was the prophetic trumpet-call of Luther which had
summoned him to a new life, and he always carried about with him in his
long exile--an exile for which Luther was largely responsible--a
beautiful respect and {66} appreciation for the man who had first
turned him to a knowledge of the truth.[3]
From the very beginning of his awakening he shows the moral earnestness
of a prophet, and even in his earliest writings he emphasizes the
inwardness of true religion and the importance of a personal experience
of the living, creative Divine Word.[4] As a result of this passion of
his for the formation of moral and spiritual character in the lives of
the people, he was very acute and sensitive to note the condition which
actually existed around him, and he was not long in detecting, much to
his sorrow, aspects of weakness in the new type of Christianity which
was spreading over Germany. Even as early as 1524, in _An Admonition
to all the Brethren of Silesia_[5] he called attention to the
superficiality of the change which was taking place in men's lives as a
result of the Reformation--"the lack of inward grasp" as he calls
it--and to the externality of the new Reform, the tendency to stop at
"alphabetical promises of salvation." He gives a searching examination
to the central principles of Luther's teachings and approves of them
all, but at the same time he points out that little will be gained if
they be adopted only as intellectual statements and formulated views.
He pleads for a faith in Christ and an appreciation of Him that shall
"reach the deep regions of the spirit," renew the heart, and produce a
new man in the believer--"the atoning work of Christ must be
vital"--and for a type of religion that will involve suffering with
Christ, real conformity of will to His will, dying to self and rising
again with Him, which means that we cannot "take the {67} cross at its
softest spot."[6] He calls with glowing passion for a radical
transformation of personal and social life, and for a serious attempt
to revive primitive Christianity with its conquering power.
Luther himself was always impressed with the lack of real, intense,
personal religion which resulted from the Reformation movement, and he
often bewailed this lack. He said once to Schwenckfeld in this early
period, "Dear Caspar, genuine Christians are none too common. I wish I
could see two together in a place!" But with all his titanic power to
shake the old Church, Luther was not able to sift away the accumulated
chaff of the ages and to seize upon the inward, living kernel of
Christ's Gospel in such a real and vivid presentation that men were
once again able to find the entire Christ, and were once again lifted
into apostolic power through the discovery of Him. This was the task
to which Schwenckfeld now felt himself summoned. It seemed to him that
the entire basis of salvation should be grasped in a way quite
different from Luther's way of formulation, and this called for a
restatement of the whole revelation of God in Christ and of the work of
Christ in the soul of man.[7]
Luther's final break with the spiritual Reformer of Silesia, which
occurred in 1527, was primarily occasioned by Schwenckfeld's teaching
on the meaning and value of the Lord's Supper, though their difference
was by no means confined to that point. Schwenckfeld's position had
culminated in 1526 in a suspension of the celebration of the Lord's
Supper--the so-called _Stillstand_--until a right understanding and
true practice of it according to the will of the Lord should be
revealed.[8] "We know at present of no apostolic commission," he
wrote, "nor {68} again do we make any claim to be regarded as apostles,
for we have neither received the fulness of the Holy Spirit nor the
apostolic seal for such an office. We dwell in humility and ascribe
nothing to ourselves, except that we bear witness to Christ, invite men
to Christ, preach Christ and His infinite work of salvation, and labour
as much as we can that Christ may be truly known."[9]
Into the bitter controversy over the Sacrament--a controversy between
noble and sincere Reformers, which forms the supreme internal tragedy
of the Reformation--we need not now enter. We shall in the proper
place give Schwenckfeld's position upon it, though only in so far as it
belongs in an exposition of his type of spiritual Christianity; but the
immediate effect of his position and practices was such a collision
with Luther, and the arousal of such hostility on the part of the
Lutherans of Silesia, that the continued pursuit of Schwenckfeld's
mission in that country became impossible. He was, however, not
expelled by edict, but under compulsion of the existing situation; and
in order not to be a trouble to his friend, the Duke of Liegnitz, he
went in 1529 into voluntary exile, never to return. For thirty years
he was a wanderer without a permanent home on the earth, but he could
thank his Lord Christ, as he did, for granting him through all these
years an inward freedom, and for bringing him into "His castle of
Peace." He once wrote: "If I had wanted a good place on earth, if I
had cared more for temporal than for eternal things, and if I would
have deserted my Christ, then I might have stayed in my fatherland and
in my own house, and I might have had the powerful of this world for my
friends."[10]
He sojourned for longer or shorter periods in Strasbourg, Augsburg,
Ulm, and other cities, but nowhere was he safe from his enemies, and he
always faced the prospect of banishment even from his place of
temporary sojourn. {69} Furious declarations were passed against him
by the Schmalkald League in 1540, for to his anti-Lutheran views on the
sacraments he had now added teachings on the nature of Christ which the
theologians pronounced unorthodox. Three years later he sent a
messenger to Luther in hope of a friendly understanding. Luther's
answer was brief and final: "The stupid fool, possessed by the devil,
understands nothing. He does not know what he is babbling. But if he
won't stop his drivel, let him at least not bother me with the booklets
which the devil spues out of him."[11] At the ministerial Council of
Protestant States in 1556 Schwenckfeld was denounced in the most
vituperous language of the period, and the civil authorities were urged
to proceed against him as a dangerous heretic. He always had,
notwithstanding this pursuit of theological hate, many powerful
friends, and a large number of brave and devoted followers who were
glad to risk goods, home, and life for the sake of what was to them the
living Word of God. He died--or as his friends preferred to say, he
had a quiet and peaceful "home passage"--at Ulm in 1561. Of the
purity, the brave sincerity, the nobility, the outward and inward
consistency of his life there is no question. His enemies had no word
to say which reflected upon the motives of his heart or upon the
genuine piety of his life. His religion cost him all that he held dear
in the outer world--he had not taken "the cross at the softest
spot"--and he practised his faith as the most precious thing a man
could possess in this world or in any other.
We must now turn to a study of his type of Christianity, which will be
presented here not in the order of its historical development, but as
it appears in perspective in his life and writings. He does not ground
his conception of salvation, his idea of religion _ueberhaupt_, as the
humanistic Reformers, Denck, Buenderlin, Entfelder, and Franck, do, on
the essentially divine nature of the {70} soul in its deepest
reality,[12] nor again as the medieval mystics do, on the substantial
presence within the soul of a divine soul-centre, an unlost and
inalienable Spark or Image of God which can turn back home and unite
itself with its Source, the Godhead. He begins, as Luther does, with
man "fallen," "dead in sin," by nature "blind and deaf" to divine
realities. For him, as for Luther, there exists no _natural_ freedom
of the will, by which a person can spontaneously and of his own
initiative rise up, shake off the shackles of sin, and go to living as
a son of God. This stupendous event, this absolute shift of the
life-level, comes, and can come, he thinks, only through an act of God,
directly, immediately wrought upon the soul. Salvation must be a
supernatural event. Through this act of God from above there results
within the soul an experience which in every respect is a new creation.
It is a cataclysmic event of the same order as the _fiat lux_ of cosmic
creation, a rebirth through which the man who has it once again comes
into the condition Adam was in before he fell.
Everything which has to do with salvation in Schwenckfeld's
Christianity goes back to the historical Christ.[13] Christ is the
first-born of this new creation. He is the first "new Adam," who by
His triumphant life and victorious resurrection has become for ever "a
life-giving Spirit," the creative Principle of a new humanity. In
Christ the Word of God, the actual Divine Seed of God, became flesh,
entered into our human nature and penetrated it with Spirit and with
Life, conquered its stubborn bent toward sin, and transfigured and
transformed this human flesh into a divine and heavenly substance. By
obedience to the complete will of God, even to the extreme depths of
suffering, sacrifice, and death on the Cross for {71} the love of men,
Christ glorified human flesh, exalted it from flesh to spirit, and in
His resurrected heavenly life He is able to unite Himself inwardly with
the souls of believers, so that His spiritual resurrected flesh and
blood can be their food and drink, and He can become the life-giving
source of a new order of humanity, the spiritual Head of a new race.
"If the soul of man," he wrote, "is to be truly nourished, vitally fed
and watered, so that it comes into possession of Eternal Life, it must
die to its fleshly life and _receive into itself a divine and spiritual
Life, having its source in the Being of God and mediated to the soul by
the living, inward-working Flesh and Blood of Jesus Christ_," through
which mediation we come into spiritual union and vital fellowship with
God who is Spirit.[14]
Salvation for Schwenckfeld, therefore, is participation in the life of
this new creation, this new world-order. To become a Christian, in his
sense of the word, is to pass over one of the most decisive watersheds
in the universe, to go from one kingdom to another kingdom of a higher
rank. The _process_--for it is a vital process--is from beginning to
end in the realm of experience. By the exercise of faith in the
crucified, risen, and glorified God-Man, as the life-giving Spirit,
real power from a higher world streams into the soul. Something
"pneumatic," something which belongs ontologically to a higher
spiritual world-order, comes into the person as a divinely bestowed
germ-plasm, with living, renewing, organizing power. As with Irenaeus,
so with Schwenckfeld, salvation is "real redemption," the "deification"
of mortal man, the actual formation of an immortal nature, the
restoration of humanity to what it originally was, through the
in-streaming life-energy of a mystical Adam-Christ, the Founder and
Head of a new spiritual race.[15]
By this incoming spiritual power and life-substance the entire
personality of the recipient is affected. The {72} recreative energy
which pours in transforms both soul and body. The inner eternal Word
of God, who became flesh, acts upon the inner nature of man, so that
the believing man is changed into something spiritual, divine and
heavenly, and like Jesus Christ, the incarnated Word of God.[16] There
comes, with this epoch-making experience, a sense of freedom not known
before, a power of control over the body and its appetites, an
illumination of the intellect, a new sensitiveness of conscience to the
meaning of sin, an extraordinary expansion of the vision of the goal of
life--which is a full-grown man in Christ,--and an apprehension of the
gift of the Spirit sufficient for the achievement of that goal. Not
least among the signs of transfiguration and of heightened life is the
attainment of a joy which spreads through the inward spirit and shines
on the face--a joy which can turn hard exile into a _Ruheschloss_, "a
castle of peace."
Those who have experienced this dynamic transfiguration gain thereby
gifts, capacities, and powers to hear the Word of God within their own
souls, and thus this Word, which is the same life-giving Spirit that
became flesh in Christ and that produces the new creation in man,
becomes a perpetual inward Teacher in those who are reborn. "Precious
gifts of the Holy Ghost flow from the essential Being of God into the
heart of the believer." There is, Schwenckfeld holds, a double
revelation of God. The primary Word of God is eternal, spiritual,
inward. "The Word, when spiritual messengers preach or teach, is of
two kinds with a decided difference in their manner of working. One is
of God, even is God, and lives and works in the heart of the messenger.
This is the inner Word, and is in reality nothing else than the
continued manifestation of Christ. He is inwardly revealed, and heard
with the inward ears of the heart."[17] It is, in fact, God Himself
_operating_ as Life and Spirit and Light upon the spiritual substance
of the human soul, first as the Life-Seed which forms the new creation
in man, and afterwards as the permanent {73} nourishing and tutoring
Spirit who leads the obedient soul on into all the Truth, and perfects
it into the likeness and stature of Christ. "There is a living, inner
Scripture, written in the believer's heart by the finger of God."
"This inner Scripture has an active creative power of holiness, and
makes holy, living, righteous and saved all those in whose hearts it is
written."
The _divine word_ in the secondary sense is the outward word--the word
of Scripture. "The other word which serves the inner Word with voice,
sound, and expression is the external word, and is heard by the
external man with his ears of sense, and is written and read in
letters. He who has read and heard only that, and not the inner Word,
has not heard the Gospel of Christ, the Gospel of Grace, nor has he
received or understood it."[18] It is at best only the witness or
testimony which assists the soul to find the real life-giving Word.
Cut apart from the inner spiritual Word, the word of the letter is
"dead," as the body would be if sundered from the spirit. "It paints
truth powerfully for the eye, but it cannot bring it into the
heart."[19] "The Scriptures cannot bring to the soul that of which
they speak. This must be sought directly from God Himself."[20] In
his practical use of Scripture and in his estimate of its importance he
is hardly behind Luther himself. "There is," he says, "no writing on
earth like the Holy Scriptures."[21] His Christianity is penetrated
and illuminated at every point by the profound spiritual experiences of
the saints of the Bible, and still more by the vivid portraits of
Christ in the Gospels, by the words from His lips recorded there, and
by the experiences of the apostles and the development of the primitive
Church. He never doubts or questions the inspiration of the
Scriptures; quite the contrary, he holds that Scripture is "given by
God" and is an inexhaustible well of inspired truth from which the soul
can endlessly draw. The actual content of Christian faith is supplied
by the historical revelation; {74} but Schwenckfeld always insists that
written words, however inspired, are still external to the soul, and
merely record historical events which have happened to others in other
ages. "If man," he writes, "is to understand spiritual things and is
to know and judge rightly, he must bring the divine Light to the
Scriptures, the Spirit to the letter, the Truth to the picture, and the
Master to His created work. . . . In a word, to understand the
Scriptures a man must become a new man, a man of God; he must be in
Christ who gave forth the Scriptures."[2] That which is to change the
inner nature of a man must be something personally experienced and not
external to him; must be in its own nature as spiritual as the soul
itself is and not material, as written words are. "The pen cannot
completely bring the heart to the paper, nor can the mouth entirely
express the well of living water within itself."[23] The Bible leads
to Christ and bears witness of Him as no other book does, but it is not
Christ. And even the Bible remains a closed book until Christ opens
it.[24] The Scriptures tell, as no other writings do, of the Word of
God and its life-operations in the world, but they are still not the
Word of God. The spiritual realities of life cannot be settled by
laboriously piling up texts of Scripture, by subtle theological
dialectic, or by learned exegesis of sacred words. If these spiritual
realities are to become real and effective to us, it must be through
the direct relation of the human spirit with the divine Spirit--the
inward spiritual Word of God.[25] "He who will see the truth must have
God for eyes."[26]
Schwenckfeld's view of the process of salvation and the permanent
illumination of the reborn soul by a real incoming divine
substance--whether called Word or Seed--is the _dynamic_ feature of his
Christianity. He is endeavouring to find a foundation for a religious
energism that will avoid the dangers which beset Luther's principle
{75} of "justification by faith." From the inception of the
Reformation movement there had appeared a tendency to regard the
exercise of "faith" as all that was required for human salvation.
Luther did not mean it so, but it was the easy line of least resistance
to hold that "faith" had a magic effect in the invisible realm, that is
to say: As soon as a person exercised "faith," God counted the "faith"
for righteousness, and regarded that person as "justified." The
important operation was thus in a region outside the soul. The
momentous shift was not in the personal character of the individual,
but in the way the individual was regarded and valued in the heavenly
estimates. It was the discovery of the prevalence of this crude and
magical reliance on "faith" which first drove Schwenckfeld to a deeper
study of the problems of religion. It was the necessity that he felt
to discover some way by which man himself could be actually renewed,
transformed, recreated, and _made_ righteous--rather than merely
counted or reckoned righteous by some magical transaction--that made
him an independent reformer and set him on his solitary way.
To this deep and central question of religion, How is a human soul
saved? there were in Schwenckfeld's day four well-known answers:
(1) There was the answer of the Church in which he was born. Salvation
is by Grace, mediated through the sacramental channels of the
mysterious and divinely founded Church. Man's part consists in the
performance of the "works" which the Church requires of him and the
proper use of the sacramental means of Grace. Through these
sacramental channels actual Grace, substantial divine help, comes into
man and works the miracle of salvation in him.
(2) There was the answer of the great mystics, not always clear and
simple, but very profound and significant. The Ground and the Abyss of
the soul is one substance with the eternal and absolute Godhead.
Finite strivings, isolated purposes, selfish aims, centrifugal pursuits
are vain and illusory. We lose our lives in so far as we live {76} in
self-will and in self-centred joys. The way home, the way of
salvation, is a return to that Ground-Reality from which we have gone
out--a return to union and oneness of Life with the infinite Godhead.
(3) The third answer is that of Luther: "Salvation is by faith." This
seems at first to be a dynamic answer. It breaks in on the distracted
world like a new moral trumpet-call to the soul. It comes to men like
a fresh Copernican insight which discovers a new religious
world-centre. The soul by its own inward vision, by its moral
attitude, by the swing of the will, can initiate a new relation with
God, and so produce a new inward kingdom. That, however, is not
Luther's message. He could not take that optimistic view of life
because it implied that man has within himself a native capacity for
God, and can rise to the vision and attitude which lead to a moral
renewal of the self. Luther never succeeded in clearing his principle
from scholastic complications. He never put it upon a moral and
dynamic foundation. It remains to the last a mysterious principle, and
was easily open to the antinomian interpretation, that upon the
exercise of faith God for Christ's merits "counts man justified"--an
interpretation dear to those who are slack-minded and prone to forensic
schemes of salvation.
(4) The fourth view was that of the humanist-spiritual Reformers, men
of the type of Denck and Buenderlin, who are the precursors of what we
to-day call the ethical way of salvation. They assume that salvation
is from beginning to end a moral process. God is in essence and nature
a loving, self-revealing, self-giving God, who has in all ages unveiled
Himself in revelations suited to the spiritual stature of man, has in
the fulness of time become incarnate in Christ, and forever pleads with
men through His Spirit to come to Him. Those who see and hear, those
who respond and co-operate, _i.e._ those who exercise faith, are
thereby morally transformed into an inward likeness to Him, and so
enter upon a life which prefers light to darkness, goodness to sin,
love to hate.
{77}
Schwenckfeld was not satisfied with any of these views. He knew and
loved the mystics, but he was too much impressed with the mighty Life
and message of the historical Christ to adopt the mystic's way. He
felt that Lutheran Christianity was too scholastic, too dependent on
externals, too inclined to an antinomian use of "faith." He could not
go along the path of the Humanist-Spirituals, for he believed that man
had been ruined in the Fall, was too deeply scarred with sin to help
himself, was without freewill, was devoid of native capacity for
spiritual vision and saving faith. Salvation, if it is to be effected
at all, must be initiated by Divine Grace and must be accomplished _for
man_ by God. But it could be for Schwenckfeld no forensic adjustment,
no change of reckoning in the heavenly ledgers. "Justification," he
once wrote, "is not only forgiveness of sins, but it is more, it is the
actual healing and renewing of the inward man."[27] It must involve a
real and radical transformation of man's nature--man must cease from
sin and the love of it, he must receive from beyond himself a passion
for goodness and a power to enable him to achieve it. The _passion_
for goodness, in Schwenckfeld's view, is created through the vision of
the God-Man who has suffered and died on the Cross for us, and has been
glorified in absolute newness of life; and the _power_ for moral
holiness is supplied to the soul by the direct inflowing of divine
Life-streams from this new Adam, who is henceforth the Head of the
spiritual order of humanity, the Life-giving Spirit who renews all who
receive Him in faith. "Faith," he says, "is a penetrating stream of
light flowing out from the central divine Light and Fire, which is God
Himself, into our hearts by which we are inflamed with love for God and
for our neighbour, and by which we see both what we lack in ourselves
and what can abundantly supply our lack, so that we may be made ready
for the Kingdom of God and be prepared to become children of God."[28]
"Real faith," he elsewhere says, "that is to say, justifying faith, can
come from nothing {78} external. It is a gracious and gratuitous gift
of God through the Holy Spirit. It is an emanation ["Troepflein"] from
the eternal Life of God, and is of the same essence and substance as
God Himself."[29] It is, in fact, the Eternal Word of God become vocal
and vital within the inner region of our own lives.[30]
The Church, in Schwenckfeld's conception, is this complete spiritual
community of which Christ is the Head. "We maintain," he wrote in the
early period of his mission, and it remained the settled view of his
life, "that the Christian Church according to the usage of the
Scripture is the congregation or assembly of all or of many who with
heart and soul are believers in Christ, whose Head is Christ our Lord,
as St. Paul writes to the Ephesians and elsewhere, and who are born of
God's Word alone, and are nourished and ruled by God's Word."[31] "The
Christian Church," he elsewhere says, "is the entire community of the
children of God. It is the actual Body of Christ, the Seed of Abraham,
the House of the living God, the Temple of the Holy Spirit. It has its
life and power through the obedience of faith, it manifests to the
world the Name of the Lord, the goodness and the glory of Him who
called its members from darkness into His marvellous Light. Wherever
such a Church is gathered, there also is Christ, its Head, who governs
it, teaches it, guards and defends it, works in it and pours His Life
into its members, to each according to the measure of his living faith.
This inward invisible Christ belongs to all ages and all times and
lands."[32] The Church, in its true life and power, is thus for him a
continuation of the apostolic type. He had no interest in the
formation of a sectarian denomination, and he was fundamentally averse
to a State-Church system. The true Church community can be identified
with no temporal, empirical organization--whether established or
separatist. It is a spiritual invisible community as wide as the
world, including all persons in all regions of {79} the earth and in
all religious communions who are joined in life and spirit to the
Divine Head. It expands and is enlarged by a process of organic growth
under the organizing direction of the Holy Spirit. "As often," he
writes, "as a new warrior comes to the heavenly army, as often as a
poor sinner repents, the body of Christ becomes larger, the King more
splendid, His Kingdom stronger, His might more perfect. Not that God
becomes greater or more perfect in His essence, but that flesh becomes
more perfect in God, and God dwells in all His fulness in the flesh
into which in Jesus Christ He ever more pours Himself."[33] Each soul
that enters the _kingdom of experience_ through the work of the
Life-giving Spirit is builded into this invisible expanding Church of
the ages, and is endowed with some "gift" to become an organ of the
Divine Head. All spiritual service arises through the definite call
and commission of God, and the persons so called and commissioned are
rightly prepared for their service, not by election and ordination, but
by inward compulsion and illumination through the Word of God. The
preacher possesses no magical efficacy. His only power lies in his
spiritual experience, his clarified vision, and his organic connection
with Christ the Head of the Church and the source of its energy. If
his life is spiritually poor and weak and thin, if it lacks moral
passion and insight, his ministry will be correspondingly ineffective
and futile, for the dynamic spiritual impact of a life is in proportion
to its personal experience and its moral capacity to transmit divine
power. Here again the emphasis is on the moral aspect of religion as
contrasted with the magical. There can be no severing of the
ecclesiastical office or function from the moral character of the
person himself. Schwenckfeld has cut away completely from
sacerdotalism and has returned, as far as with his limited historical
insight he knew how to do it, to the ideal of the primitive Apostolic
Church. The true mark and sign of membership in the community of
saints--the invisible Church--is, for him as for St. Paul, {80}
possession of the mind of Christ, faith, patience, integrity, peace,
unity of spirit, the power of God, joy in the Holy Ghost, and the
abounding gifts and fruits of the Spirit. "No outward unity or
uniformity, either in doctrine or ceremonies, or rules or sacraments,
can make a Christian Church; but inner unity of spirit, of heart, soul
and conscience in Christ and in the knowledge of Him, a unity in love
and faith, does make a Church of Christ."[34] The Church is in a very
true sense bone of Christ's bone and flesh of His flesh, vitalized by
His blood, empowered by His real presence, and formed into an organism
which reveals and exhibits the divine and heavenly Life--a world-order
as far above the natural human life as that is above the plant.
Quite consistently with this spiritual view of religion--this view that
the true Church is an invisible Church--Schwenckfeld taught that the
true sacrament is an inner and spiritual sacrament, and not legal and
external like those of the Old Testament. "God must Himself, apart
from all external means, through Christ touch the soul, speak in it,
work in it, if we are to experience salvation and eternal life."[35]
The direct incoming of the Divine Spirit, producing a rebirth and a new
creation in the man himself, is the only baptism which avails with God
or which makes any difference in the actual condition of man. Baptism
in its true significance is the reception of cleansing power, it is an
inward process which purifies the heart, illuminates the conscience,
and is not only necessary for salvation but in fact _is_ salvation.
Christian baptism is therefore not with water, but with Christ: it is
the immersion of the soul in the life-giving streams of Christ's
spiritual presence.
Schwenckfeld was always kindly disposed toward the Anabaptists, but he
was not of them. He presented a very different type of Christianity to
their type, which he penetratingly criticized, though in a kindly
spirit. He did not approve of rebaptism, for he insisted that the
all-important matter was not how or when water was applied, {81} but
the reception of _Christ's real baptism_, an inner baptism, a baptism
of spirit and power, by which the believing soul, the inner man, is
clarified, strengthened, and made pure.[36]
His view of the Lord's Supper in the same way fits his entire
conception of Christianity as an inward religion. It was through his
study of the meaning and significance of the Supper that he arrived at
his peculiar and unique type of religion. He began his meditation with
the practical test--the case of Judas. If the bread and wine of the
Last Supper were identical with the body and blood of Christ, then
Judas must have eaten of Christ as the other disciples did, and,
notwithstanding his evil spirit, he must have received the divine
nature into himself--but that is impossible.
In his intellectual difficulty he turned to the great mystical
discourse in the sixth chapter of John, in the final interpretation of
which he received important suggestion and help from Valentine
Crautwald, Lector of the Dom in Liegnitz. In this remarkable discourse
Christ promises to feed His disciples, His followers, with His own
flesh and blood, by which they will partake of the eternal nature and
enter with Him into a resurrection life. The "flesh and blood" here
offered to men cannot refer to an outward sacrament which is eaten in a
physical way, because in the very same discourse Christ says that
outward, physical flesh profits nothing. It is the Spirit that gives
life, and, therefore, the "flesh and blood" of Christ must be
synonymous with the Word if they are actually to recreate and nourish
the soul and to renew and vitalize the spirit of man.
This feeding and renewing of the soul through Christ's "flesh and
blood," Schwenckfeld treats, as we have seen, not as a figure or
symbol, but as a literal fact of Christian experience. Through the
exercise of faith in the person of the crucified, risen, and glorified
Christ--the creative Adam--incorruptible, life-giving substance comes
into the soul and transfigures it. Something from the divine {82} and
heavenly world, something from that spiritualized and glorified nature
of Christ, becomes the actual food of man's spirit, so that through it
he partakes of the same nature as that of the God-Man. Not once or
twice, but as a continuous experience, the soul may share this glorious
meal of spiritual renewal--this eating and drinking of Christ.
The external supper--and for that matter the external baptism too--may
have a place in the Church of Christ as a pictorial symbol of the
actual experience, or as a visible profession of faith, but this
outward sign is, in his view, of little moment, and must not occupy the
foreground of attention, nor be made a subject of polemic or of
insistence. The new Creation, the response of faith to the living
Word, the transfiguration of life into the likeness of Christ, are the
momentous facts of a Christian experience, and none of these things is
_mediated_ by external ceremonies.
It was his ideal purpose to promote the formation of little groups of
spiritual Christians which should live in the land in quietness, and
spread by an inward power and inspiration received from above. He saw
clearly that no true Reformation could be carried through by edicts or
by the proclamations of rulers, or by the decision of councils. A
permanent work, from his point of view, could be accomplished only by
the slow and patient development of the religious life and spiritual
experience of the people, since the goal which he sought was the
formation, not of state-made Churches, but of renewed personal lives,
awakened consciences, burning moral passion, and first-hand conviction
of immediate relation with the World of Divine Reality. To this work
of arousing individual souls to these deeper issues of life, and of
building up little scattered societies under the headship of Christ,
which should be, as it were, oases of the Kingdom of God in the world,
he dedicated his years of exile. All such quiet inward movements
progress, as Christ foresaw, too slowly and gradually "for
observation"; but this method of reforming the Church through rebirth
and the creation of Christ-guided societies {83} accomplished, even
during Schwenckfeld's life, impressive results. There were many, not
only in Silesia but in all regions which the missionary-reformer was
able to reach, who "preferred salt and bread in the school of Christ"
to ease and plenty elsewhere, and they formed their little groups in
the midst of a hostile world. The public records of Augsburg reveal
the existence, during Schwenckfeld's life, of a remarkable group of
these quiet, spiritual worshippers in that city. Their leaders were
men of menial occupations--men who would have attracted no notice from
the officials of city or Church if they had been contented to conform
to any prevailing or recognized type of religion. Under the
inspiration which they received from the writings of Schwenckfeld they
formed "a little meeting"--in every respect like a seventeenth-century
Quaker meeting--in their own homes, meeting about in turn, discarding
all use of sacraments, and waiting on God for edification rather than
on public preaching. They read the books and epistles of Schwenckfeld
in their gatherings, they wrote epistles to other groups of
Schwenckfeldians, and received epistles in turn and read them in their
gatherings. They objected to any form of religious exercise which
seemed to them incomprehensible to their spirits and which did not
spring directly out of the inward ministry of the Word of God. They
were eventually discovered, their leaders banished, their books burned,
and their little meeting of "quiet spirituals" ("stillen Frommen") as
they called themselves was ruthlessly stamped out.[37] Societies
something like this were formed in scores of places, and continued to
cultivate their inward piety in the Fatherland, until harried by
persecution they migrated in 1734 to Pennsylvania, where they have
continued to maintain their community life until the present day.
But the most important effect of Schwenckfeld's life and work must not
be sought in the history of these {84} visible societies which owed
their origin to his apostolic activity. His first concern was always
for the building of the invisible community of God throughout the whole
world--not for the promotion of a sect--and his greatest contribution
will be found in the silent, often unnoticed, propagation of his
spirit, the contagious dissemination of his ideas, the gradual
influence of his truth and insight upon Christian communions and upon
individual believers that hardly knew his name. His correspondence was
extraordinarily extensive; his books and tracts, which were legion,
found eager readers and transmitters, and slowly--too slowly for
observation--the spiritual message of the homeless reformer made its
way into the inner life of faithful souls, who in all lands were
praying for the consolation of God's new Israel. Even so early as
1551, an English writer, Wyllyam Turner, in a book written as "a
preservative and treacle against the poyson of Pelagius," especially as
"renewed" in the "furious secte of the Annabaptistes," mentions the
"Swengfeldianes" as one of the heads of "this monstre in many poyntes
lyke unto the watersnake with seven heads."[38] There is, however,
slight evidence of the spread of Schwenckfeld's views, whether they be
called "poyson" or "treacle," in England during the sixteenth century,
though they are clearly in evidence in the seventeenth century. One of
the most obvious signs of his influence in the seventeenth century,
both in England and in Holland, appears in the spread of principles
which were embodied in the "Collegiants" of Holland and the
corresponding societies of "Seekers" in England.[39] The cardinal
principle of these groups in both countries was the belief that the
visible Church had become apostate and had lost its divine
authoritative power, that it now lacked apostolic ministry and
efficacious sacraments and "the gifts of the Spirit" which demonstrate
the true apostolic succession. Therefore those who held this view,
"like doves without their mates," were _waiting_ and _seeking_ for the
appearing of a {85} new apostolic commission, for the fresh outpouring
of God's Spirit on men, and for the refounding of the Church, as
originally, in actual demonstration and power.
It was a settled view of Schwenckfeld's that the visible Church had
lost its original power and authority, and he cherished, too, a
persistent faith and hope that in God's good time it would again be
restored to its pristine vitality and its original conquering power.
"We ask," he writes, "where in the world to-day there is gathered
together an external Church of the apostolic form and type, and
according to the will of Christ."[40] And yet scattered everywhere
throughout the world--even in Turkey and Calcutta[41]--God has, he
says, His own faithful people, known only to Him, who live Christlike
and holy lives, whom Christ the living Word, that became flesh,
baptizes inwardly with the Holy Spirit and inwardly feeds without
external preaching or sacrament, writes His law in their hearts and
guides into Eternal Life.[42] But the time is coming when once more
there will be in the world an apostolic and completely reformed Church
of Christ, His living body and the organ of the Spirit, with divine
gifts and powers and commission. In the interim let the chosen
children of God, he writes, rejoice and comfort themselves in this,
that their salvation rests neither in an external Church, nor in the
external use of sacraments, nor in any external thing, but that it
rests alone in Jesus Christ our Lord, and is received through true and
living faith.[43]
For Schwenckfeld himself the important matter was the increase of this
inward life, the silent growth of this kingdom of God in the hearts of
men, the spread of this invisible Church, but his writings plainly
suggest that God will eventually restore the former glory to His
visible Church. "You are," he says, in one of his epistles, "to pray
earnestly that God will raise up true apostles and preachers and
evangelists, so that His Church may {86} be reformed in Christ, edified
in the Holy Ghost, and unified into one, and so that our boasting of
the pure preaching of the Gospel and the right understanding and use of
the sacraments may be true before God,"[44] and the time is coming, we
may in good faith believe, when the sacraments will be used according
to the will of Christ, and then there will be a true Christian Church,
taught outwardly by apostolic ministers and taught inwardly by the Lord
Himself.[45] Fortunately, however, salvation does not depend upon
anything outward, and during the _Stillstand_ or interim there is no
danger to be feared from the intermission of outward ceremonies.[46]
Sebastian Franck graphically describes this waiting, seeking attitude
as well known in his time. He wrote in his "Chronicle" (1531): "Some
are ready to allow Baptism and other ceremonies to remain in abeyance
["stilston," evidently Schwenckfeld's _Stillstand_] until God gives a
further command and sends true labourers into His harvest-field. For
this some have great longings and yearnings and wish nothing else."[47]
The intense _expectation_ which the Seekers, both in Holland and
England, exhibit was, of course, a much later development, was due to
many influences, and is connected only indirectly with the reforming
work and the Gospel message of Schwenckfeld. It indicates, in the
exaggerated emphasis of the Seekers, a failure to grasp the deeper
significance of spiritual Christianity as a present reality, and it
misses the truth, which the world has so painfully slowly grasped, that
the only way to form an apostolic and efficacious visible Church is not
through sudden miracles and cataclysmic "restorations" and
"commissions," but by the slow contagion and conquering power of this
inward kingdom, of this invisible Church, as it becomes the spirit and
life of the outward and visible Church. This truth the Silesian
reformer knew full well, and for this reason he was ready at all costs
to be a quiet apostle of the invisible Community of God and let the
outward {87} organism and organ of its ministry come in God's own way.
The nobler men among the English Seekers, as also among the Dutch
Societies, rose gradually to this larger view of spiritual religion,
and came to realize, as Schwenckfeld did, that the real processes of
salvation are inward and dynamic. Samuel Rutherford is not a very safe
witness in matters which involve impartial judgment, or which concern
types of spiritual experience foreign to his own type, but he is
following a real clew when he connects, as he does, the leaders of
spiritual, inward religion in his day, especially those who had shared
the seeker aspirations, with Schwenckfeld.[48] Rutherford's account is
thoroughly unfair and full of inaccuracies, but it suffices at least to
reveal the fact that Schwenckfeld was a living force in the period of
the English Commonwealth, and that, though almost a hundred years had
passed since his "home-passage" from Ulm was accomplished, he was still
making disciples for the ever-enlarging community and household of God.
[1] The most important material for a study of Schwenckfeld is the
following:--
_Corpus Schwenckfeldianorum_, edited by C. D. Hartranft. Published
Leipzig, vol. i. (1907); vol. ii. (1911); vol. iii. (1913). Other
volumes to follow.
_Schriften von Kaspar Schwenckfeld_, in 4 folio volumes. Published
between the years 1564-1570. Indicated in my notes as vol. i., vol.
ii., vol. iii. A, vol. iii. B. There are, too, many uncollected books
and tracts, to some of which I refer in footnotes.
Karl Ecke, _Schwenckfeld, Luther, und der Gedanke einer apostolischen
Reformation_ (Berlin, 1911). Important book, but to be followed with
caution.
R. H. Gruetzmacher, _Wort und Geist_ (Leipzig, 1902).
Gottfried Arnold, _Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historien_, i. pp. 1246-1299.
(Edition of 1740.)
H. W. Erbkam, _Geschichte der prolestantischen Sekten im Zeitaller der
Reformation_ (Hamburg und Gotha, 1848), pp. 357-475.
Doellinger, _Die Reformation_, i. pp. 257-280.
Ernst Troeltsch, _Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und
Gruppen_ (Tuebingen, 1912), pp. 881-886.
[2] Christ, Schwenckfeld insisted, is the sum of the whole Bible, and
to learn to know Christ fundamentally is to grasp the substance of the
entire Scripture.
[3] He wrote in 1543 to Luther: "I owe to you in God and the truth all
honour, love, and goodwill, because from the first I have reaped much
fruit from your service, and I have not ceased to pray for you
according to my poor powers."--_Schriften_, ii. p. 701 d.
[4] In _An Epistle to the Sisters in the Cloister at Naumberg_, written
probably in the autumn of 1523, he says: "A true Christian life in its
essential requirements does not consist in external appearance . . .
but quite the contrary, it does consist in personal trust in God
through an experience of Jesus Christ, which the Holy Ghost brings
forth in the heart by the hearing of the Divine Word."--_Corpus
Schwenckfeldianorum_, i. p. 118.
[5] _Ermahnung dess Missbrauchs etlicher fuernemsten Artikel des
Evangelii_ (1524). _Corpus Schw._ ii. pp. 26-105.
[6] "Wir greyffen das Creutz noch am waichsten Ort an."--_Ermahnung
dess Missbrauchs_. Corpus Schw. ii. p. 89.
[7] "There are now in general two parties that make wrong use of the
Gospel of Christ, one of which turns to the right and the other to the
left of the only true and straight way. The first party is that of the
Papacy . . . the other party consists of those to whom God has now
granted a gracious light--But!"--_Ermahnung dess Missbrauchs_.
[8] The _Stillstand_ was proposed in a _Circular Letter_ written by
Schwenckfeld, Valentine Crautwald, and the Liegnitz Pastors, April 21,
1526.--_Corpus Schwenckfeld_, i. pp. 325-333.
[9] The revival of this idea of a _Stillstand_, that is, of a
suspension of certain time-honoured practices of the Church until a
further revelation and new enduement should be granted, will be
referred to in later chapters, especially in connection with the
_Collegiants_ of Holland and the English _Seekers_.
[10] Ecke, _op. cit._ p. 217.
[11] Arnold, _op. cit._ ii. p. 251. There are many similar references
to Schwenckfeld in Luther's _Table Talk_, and he usually calls him by
the opprobrious name of "Stenkfeld."
[12] "Ein natuerliches Licht kennt Schwenckfeld nicht."--Gruetzmacher,
_Wort und Grist_ (Leipzig, 1902), p. 168.
[13] The important data for Schwenckfeld's doctrine of Christ and the
way of salvation will be found in the following writings by him:--
_Von der goettlichen Kindschaft und Herrlichkeit des ganzen Sones
Gottes_ (1538).
_Ermanunge zum wahren und selig machende Erkaenntnis Christi_ (1539).
_Konfession und Erklaerung von Erkaenntnus Christi und seiner goettlichen
Herrlichkeit_ (1540).
[14] _Schriften_, i. p. 664. See also p. 662.
[15] For the doctrine of deification in Irenaeus see Harnack, _Hist. of
Dogma_, ii. pp. 230-318.
[16] See _Schriften_, i. p. 768.
[17] _Ibid._ i. p. 767 a.
[18] _Schriften_, i. p. 767 a.
[19] _Die heilige Schrift_. x. d.
[20] _Ibid._ cviii. c.
[21] _Ibid._ ii. b.
[22] _Die heilige Schrift._ vi. and vii.
[23] _Vom Worte Gottes_, xxii. c.
[24] _Die heilige Schrift._ iv. b.
[25] _Catechismus vom Wort des Creuetses, vom Wort Gottes, und vom
Underscheide des Worts des Geists und Buchstabens._
[26] _Die heilige Schrift._ iv. c.
[27] _Schriften_, i. p. 725.
[28] _Ibid._ i. p. 634.
[29] _Schriften_, i. p. 380.
[30] See _ibid._ ii. p. 421.
[31] _Corpus Schwenck._ i. p. 295.
[32] _Schriften_, iii. A.
[33] _Schriften_, ii. p. 290.
[34] _Schriften_, ii. p. 785.
[35] _Ibid._ i. p. 768 b.
[36] _Schriften_, i. p. 513. For a criticism of the legalism of the
Anabaptists see _ibid._ i. pp. 801-808.
[37] The details are given in Friederich Roth's _Augsburgs
Reformations-Geschichte_ (Muenchen, 1907), iii. p. 245 ff.
[38] _A Preservative or Treacle against the Poyson of Pelagius, etc._
(1551), A iii.
[39] For a fuller account of the Collegiants see Chap. VII.
[40] _Schriften_, iii. B, p. 572.
[41] _Ibid._ ii. p. 783.
[42] _Ibid._ a. p. 784.
[43] _Ibid._ iii. A, p. 146.
[44] _Schriften_, ii. p. 785.
[45] _Ibid._ ii. p. 783.
[46] _Ibid._ iii. A, p. 74.
[47] Franck's _Chronica_ (1531), p. ccccli.
[48] Rutherford, _A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist_ (1648), chap. v.
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