Full Text for Church History 2- Volume 23 - Problems in Worship in Wittenberg (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CHURCH HISTORY 02 May 27, 2005 23 CH2 CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: CAPTION FIRST, INC. P.O. BOX 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 1 800 825 7234 * * * * * This is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in Order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings * * * * >> In one of your previous answers, you mentioned that there were problems surrounding changes to worship in Wittenburg while Luther was in hiding? Could you go into this with a little more detail? Exactly what were those problems? >> While Luther was in hiding at the Wartburg, it was up to his colleagues in Wittenberg to continue to pursue the Reformation in Wittenberg and throughout Saxony. Now, one of the issues that they had to confront was the Mass, the worship service of the church, which as I mentioned before was focused on the sacrifice of the Mass, something completely different from what Luther believed the Lord's Supper to be. Now, this created a problem because although the leaders in Wittenberg agreed theologically that this would need to be changed, there was an argument over how to go about it, an argument over the rate of change. Some of the more radical voices, Luther's colleagues at university and in the Augustinian monastery, wanted a rapid, an immediate change to the service to eliminate elements that talked about sacrifice and institute other changes that Luther had suggested, chief among those being that the lay people would receive the bread and the wine, whereas they were previously accustomed to receiving only the bread when they took communion. The Elector, on the other hand, was suspicious of this kind of rapid change. Perhaps some of this was personal. It's very often the case in the history of the Reformation that you run into problems when it comes to changing worship. People are very excited about the preaching of the Gospel. It makes perfect sense to them that Christ's work justifies us. They're a little more reticent to immediately change the way they've been worshipping their whole lives. And that was the case in Wittenberg. So you have an argument over how to proceed with these changes. Luther was not entirely unaware of this. He visited Wittenberg in December in disguise. In fact, it was a disguise so good that it fooled many of his friends. And, yet, he didn't realize how serious the situation was. And the situation became even more serious when one of his colleagues at the university, Andreas Carlstadt, came to the fore as a leader of the movement in Wittenberg. Now, Carlstadt, as I mentioned, had been working with Luther at the university. He had been one of the debaters at Leipzig. And so a good friend and colleague of Luther's. However, during Luther's absence, Carlstadt came to be far more radical than Luther himself would have been in the same situation. Taking control of the Reformation, especially the reformation of the worship service, Carlstadt instituted what he called an Evangelical Lord's Supper, celebrated on Christmas Day in 1521. In this service, Carlstadt appeared before the congregation without vestments, spoke the words of institution over bread and wine, and then allowed the congregation to commune, taking the challis for themselves and coming forward without prior confession or absolution. Now, none of that is necessarily contrary to what Luther had said in his 1525 treatise about the Lord's Supper. However, the people of Wittenberg were scandalized by this. And many of them resisted this kind of immediate and drastic change from what they had been doing. All of this, of course, led to confusion in Wittenberg, which was further complicated by the arrival of the Zwickau prophets from the town of Zwickau. And so you see here you have divisions within the movement in Wittenberg and now challenges from outside. The Zwickau prophets like Thomas Munser claimed to have direct revelation from God. And so they came into Wittenberg preaching that they were prophets of God and questioning especially the practice of infant baptism. This is the first occurrence of this in the Reformation, something that would become a hallmark of the radical reformation and really the basis for the Anabaptist movement first occurs here with the Zwickau prophets. Now, the remarkable thing about the Zwickau prophets is that the teachers at the University of Wittenberg weren't quite sure how to respond to them. People like Melanchthon didn't really know what to say in response to these men from Zwickau. It shows you how up in the air everything was at this time. Fortunately for the city, cooler heads prevailed, and especially the Elector, Frederick the Wise, who hearing what the Zwickau prophets were saying about baptism said he doubted that they knew more about the matter than Augustin, so Melanchthon and others at the university should instruct them in the truth and send them on their way. And so that's what took place. But you see at this time how difficult it was for anybody to really step in and fill Luther's shoes while he was gone. Another conflict between some of the reformers in Wittenberg and the Elector finally forced Luther to return. There was talk in Wittenberg about a new order for the church, new forms of worship, and especially removal of the images from the churches. Now, word that this was going to happen got out prematurely, and there was a popular uprising approved by Carlstadt that led to forcibly removing the images from the churches, taking them out and breaking them, damaging them, and generally creating a riot in the city. That was something that the Elector did not want to see happen. And, again, he stepped in, put an end to talk of the new church order, and put a stop to the kind of change that had been taking place under Carlstadt's leadership. At the same time, Melanchthon retreated from some of the more radical types of change that had been going on and stated that he felt the Mass and ceremonies and images could be tolerated while people became used to the teachings of the Reformation and the newer understanding of the Gospel. Nevertheless, because of especially what Carlstadt had been doing, Luther felt that he had to return to Wittenberg. He was not fond of being isolated at Wartburg at any rate, and so he simply informed the Elector that he was coming back and returned and was ready to respond to these changes. * * * * * This is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in Order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings * * * *