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Here I Stood: Marburg

davidl5012

Updated: Jul 12, 2024


Another graduate school professor, Kelly Sowards, was my Reformation history instructor and guided me through both my master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation, both on the subject of Erasmus of Rotterdam. He also introduced me to the life and work of the Reformer Martin Bucer (Butzer, in German) who played a decisive role in the development of the reform movement. His teaching engendered in me a lifelong interest in Bucer that resulted in 2008 in the publication of my biography of Bucer, the “Unsung hero of the Reformation.”


In 2004, as I was completing the manuscript, we took a trip to Europe to visit as many of the places in Bucer’s life as we could. The tour included his hometown of (now Selestat in France), Strassbourg where he preached, and several cities where he established Reformed churches, including Cologne (Köln) where he converted the archbishop, Herman von Wied, and incurred the wrath of the emperor who installed the interim which sought to stop the Reformation’s progress.


One place I most eagerly wanted to visit was Marburg. There is 1529 Bucer organized a meeting between Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli, the reformer from Zürich. Zwingli came to believe hat sacraments were only symbols, effecting no real influence or change upon the person. Luther, on the other hand, believed that sacraments did affect the person. While not being works necessary to salvation, Luther believed that they were signs and sacraments of salvation through which the Spirit worked to convey real blessings.


In regard to the Lord’s Supper Zwingli saw the elements as purely symbolic, but Luther saw them as the real body and blood of Christ. Bucer saw Zwingli’s point; namely, that the real body and blood of Christ were in heaven, but he could not agree with him that they were only “naked symbols.” Bucer sought a midway point, “the spiritual presence” of Christ’s body in the elements. At the same time he desperately sought peace among the reformers, lest the emperor use a “divide and conquer” technique to destroy the new movement. This controversy over the meaning of the elements in the Lord’s Supper, known as “the Supper-strife” (das Abendmahl Streit) threatened to split the movement.


Bucer, working with Luther’s colleague, Philipp Melanchthon, arranged a colloquy, meeting, between Luther and Zwingli at Marburg in the castle of Philip of Hesse, a Reformed prince who supported Bucer’s irenic endeavors. In attendance were around 25 of the leaders of the burgeoning Reformed movement, perhaps the greatest number of Reformers gathered at any one place and time.


The colloquy was a disaster. Zwingli presented his argument for the symbolic nature of the communion elements while Luther took a piece of chalk and wrote on the table cloth “Hoc est corpus meum” (this is my body) and pointed to it while Zwingli was speaking. Bucer was undeterred, and continued to seek a compromise solution. His conclusion of the spiritual presence became the accepted interpretation of the communion for Reformed, Anglican and other Protestant groups.


In 2004, I stood in the very room where the colloquy was held and looked at a picture on the wall depicting the event. It was an unforgettable moment. Here, indeed, I stood in a room where Reformed doctrine was defined and countless numbers of Christians would be affected.

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