MEET A HERETIC: Sebastian Franck  1499 - 1542

Sebastian Franck was born in Bavaria, first became a Dominican priest, then switched to the Protestant Reformed Church as a preacher, translator, historian, and theological writer. He promoted governance by an invisible eternal Word without outward mediators. He said, "As soon as people attempt to frame Christianity within rules and fit it into a prescribed law and order, it stops being Christianity. There is a general failure to understand that Christians are handed over to the Holy Spirit. The New Testament is not a book, doctrine, or law, but the Holy Spirit. Where God's Spirit is, there freedom must be; there Moses must keep silent, all laws withdraw, and let no one be so bold as to prescribe law, rules, order, goals, and measures to the Holy Spirit, nor attempt to reach, govern, and lead those who belong to Him."

He was persecuted by Protestants who had become nearly as intolerant and unmerciful as the Roman church had been, and that even while Luther was still alive! He was imprisoned for a brief time, tried to make a living as a soapboiler, and was once banished because of his writings.

Franck came to believe that God communicates with individuals through a portion of the divine remaining in each human being. He came to dismiss the human institution of the church, and believed that theology could not properly claim to give expression to this inner word of God in the heart of the believer. For example, Franck wrote, "To substitute Scripture for the self-revealing Spirit is to put the dead letter in the place of the living Word..."

Luther contemptuously dismissed him as a mouthpiece of the devil. Sebastian Franck died in Basel, Switzerland, at 43 years of age, of unknown cause.

As for me, I long to bow to him in heaven and to know him as a brother. He is not forgotten.

Wikipedia has more details about his life.

"I would not have you think that I regard as heretics

all those whom I have here included in the catalogue

of heretics. The verdict upon their faith is not mine,

but that of the Pope, of the Councils and of their

adherents, whom I here cite as judges. For if the

judgment were mine, I might turn everything around

and canonize many of these, making saints of those

who are here denounced as heretics and consigned to

the devil."

Preface to Chronika der romischen Ketzer

Sebastian Franck (1536)

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