MEET A HERETIC: Hans Denck, 1495 - 1527
Hans Denck< German theologian, was in a bleak mood as he tramped along the road from Strasbourg to the Palatinate on December 24, 1526. The previous day he had been ordered by the city magistrate to leave Strasbourg immediately. Only two years before, he had been banished from Nuremberg, forced to leave his wife and children behind. Denck didn't show the slightest bitterness at his lot, for he was convinced that this was the price he had to pay for his beliefs. "When I began to love God, I fell into the disfavor of many men, and from day to day it grows apace." He was soft-spoken and inclined to avoid controversy: "I open my mouth against my will and reluctantly speak of God before the world; but the world so presses upon me that I dare not keep silent, and in his name alone I would speak cheerfully, hard as that always is for me."
Here was one of the most engaging personalities in the whole age of Reformation. But because he held religious views which differed from the those of the official party, he was driven from pillar to post and could find nowhere to lay his head.
To be sure, Denck did not have the stature of the Wittenberg Reformer. Luther's gigantic personality overshadowed all other men of the sixteenth century. It was inevitable that an antagonist like Denck should have been crushed by the greater man. "There are some brothers who think they have penetrated the Gospel to its ultimate depths, and whoever does not agree in all points with what they say must be a heretic of heretics," Denck lamented.
Denck considered ceremonies in general as superficial and secondary. The imitation of Jesus was what counted; ceremonies were justified only if they furthered love. Anyone who thought to achieve salvation merely by practicing certain forms was steeped in superstition. Inner baptism was far more important that outer baptism.
Denck thought of love as a spiritual force; the more the Christian loved love, the closer he was to salvation. "Therefore a man should not eat a morsel of bread without considering how God loves him and how he should love God." He esteemed the Bible "above all human treasures," but he did not equate it with God's Word. He was careful not to make an idol out of Holy Scripture. It was, to be sure, the light shining in the darkness, but it could not remove the darkness since it too had been written by human hands. He believed that a man illumined by God could achieve salvation even without Holy Scripture. It depended upon the heart; Denck attributed revelatory powers to the spark in the soul, as the medieval Mystics had done. The inner light, he said, "speaks clearly in everyone, in the deaf, dumb, and blind, even in unreasoning beasts, even in leaves and grass, stone and wood, heaven and earth, and all that is in them, that they may hear and do his will. In man alone, who does not want to be nothing and yet is even more nothing, is there resistance to it."
We may well meditate on Denck's fundamental insight: "It is not enough for God to be in you; you must also be in God." And he believed that "in matters of faith all must proceed freely, willingly, and unforced." He had not too long to live when he voiced the touching plaint: "It seems to me an unjust law that it should not be permissible for one man to think differently from another."
It is revealing of the tragedy of the Reformation age that there was no place within Protestantism for such a man, who was purity itself. There was no room for him in the inn.
He died in Basel, Switzerland, in November, 1527, of bubonic plague.
Above was excerpted from The Heretics by Walter Nigg