MEET A HERETIC: Thomas Muntzer, 1490 - 1525

        Thomas Muntzer was a product of Catholicism. But the emptiness of the Church became all too evident to him. He spoke of "wretchedly dilapidated Christendom," contended that it had become a "bestial mockery," and that never in his life had monk or priest been able to show him "the proper practice of religion." Corruption had begun early, he maintained, and evil had set into Christendom at the start. Immediately "after the death of the disciples, of the Apostles, the stainless virginal church was made a whore by spiritual adultery, that the scribes might benefit."

        Muntzer charged that Luther was reducing Christianity to bourgeois respectability. Christ had come to set a fire upon the earth; the turning of his message into a comfortable middle-class religion was bound to strike a heretic like Muntzer as sheer betrayal.

        Muntzer saw Wittenberg becoming the center for an idolization of Scripture which came dangerously close to making a paper pope out of the Bible. He regarded blind trust in the Bible as baleful and wrong. Christians, he held, should not be taught that God had spoken once in the Bible "and then vanished into the air." True salvation consisted in the eternal Word of God; every preacher must have revelations, for otherwise he could not truly announce the good tidings. The central issue with Muntzer was the living conception of a God who directly addressed man.

         "They talk directly with God!" Luther exclaimed with a shudder upon hearing of Muntzer's claim.

        Muntzer's proclamation of direct revelation emerged from a mystique of suffering borrowed from Mystics like Johann Tauler (1300-61), whom Muntzer loved and studied. In Muntzer's letters he declared that "no one can feel God's mercy unless he has been abandoned," and that "only in poverty of Spirit can the regiment of Christ be established." He who had not suffered the night of abandonment did not know the artistry of God. Muntzer would have none of the honey-sweet Christ who would be the worst of poisons in this fleshly world.

        Muntzer fell into the hands of the princes, who avenged themselves in terrible fashion. He was stretched on the wheel until he screamed with pain, while the fat duke who watched him grinned scornfully and asked: "Thomas, does that hurt?" There is no proof that he weakened under torture - nor would such weakening mean anything. But, according to Luther, he died an obstinate heretic, refusing to recant in spite of the most fearful tortures. Certainly there is something terribly moving about his appeal to the princes from the scaffold (where he died) "that they be not harsh to the poor people."

information is from The Heretics   by Walter Nigg