The relationship between the magisterial reformation of the Lutherans, the Calvinists and the Anglicans, on the one hand, and that of the radicals, on the other, has come under review of late. H.-J. Goertz, a leading authority on Müntzer, has pointed to the radicality of the Reformation as a whole, and questioned the traditional distinction between its centre and its periphery. Brad Gregory, from a Catholic perspective, has also suggested that our understanding of the relationship needs revision; the radicals, he suggests, were central and the magisterial reformation, having cemented its relationship to the political authorities, was the ‘outlier’.Footnote 1
Luther and Thomas Müntzer have often been seen as the classical representatives of the chasm between the magisterial reformers and the radicals. It may be illuminating, then, to compare Thomas Müntzer, who has both benefited and suffered from his propinquity to Luther, with a very different magisterial reformer, the abrasive and angular figure of John Knox, who manifests many of the features that we tend to regard as ‘radical’. New biographies of both reformers have just appeared, so the time for a comparison may be propitious.Footnote 2 Both men figured as cult figures in the past, and both tend to be viewed by most contemporary historians with a mixture of distaste and post-modern condescension.
The differences between them are, at first blush, clamant. Knox died in bed, Müntzer on the executioner's block. Knox was co-architect of a reformed Scottish Church, Müntzer a ‘reformer without a Church’. Due to his relative longevity Knox had ample time and space to enshrine his views in writing, unlike the Thuringian reformer, who never stayed more than eighteen months in one place, flitting in his short career between some fifty different towns.
Yet both saw themselves as ‘watchmen to the House of Israel’ (Ezekiel xxxiii), both sounded mighty blasts on the apocalyptic trumpet, wrestled with the themes of poverty and privilege, and sought to shepherd the elect into new covenantal structures. Both regarded preaching, printing and liturgical innovation as the way to ‘erect the face of a public church reformed’. Dawson notes how Knox, with others, fashioned a ‘family of texts’ in Geneva for this purpose. Müntzer's liturgies, writings and hymns can be seen in a similar light.Footnote 3 Both were spell-binding preachers, whose sermons galvanised their audiences and transformed expectations.Footnote 4 Even their self-designations display considerable similarities.Footnote 5
Neither brooked compromise. They took no prisoners, metaphorically speaking. It was said of Knox that ‘otheris sned the branches of the Papistrie, but he stryckis at the roote, to destroy the hole’.Footnote 6 They both tasted the bitter salt of exile, and were scarred by their personal experiences of persecution, flight and rejection. Knox had to endure a year and a half in the French galleys. Watching helplessly as their friends were harried or died at the stake marked them for life. Survivor's guilt, as it might be termed today. Certainly the persecution and martyrdom of the elect, as they saw it, was the catalyst which led them to wrestle with the issues raised by Romans xiii.Footnote 7 When does a God-appointed prince turn tyrant, and what can and should the ruler's subjects, including the common folk, do to ‘bridle’ such oppression?
The Scottish Reformation was something of an erratic boulder in terms of Church-State relationships in the early modern period. Müntzer and Knox shared markedly different priorities and theological emphases from those of Luther. They may be closer to one another than to him. Knowing Luther's disdain for the ‘Spirit of Allstedt’ we can imagine the dim view that he would have taken of John Knox. Both have subsequently been regarded as revolutionaries, sallying out as military chaplains for the sake of the Gospel. The denunciation by Müntzer of the princes as little better than thugs and executioners finds ample parallels in Knox's polemic against Mary Tudor and the Guise family.Footnote 8
This article will attempt to set Müntzer and Knox within a wider European context. Outside Scotland and its diaspora, Müntzer is better known than Knox. Scholarship has moved over recent decades to a degree of consensus about the sources for Müntzer's theology: mystical, apocalyptical, biblical, anticlerical and, indeed, Lutheran.Footnote 9 There is growing awareness, too, of his exegetical, liturgical and theological creativity, and a recognition that his social, political and military engagement has to be seen in the light of his theology. The broad parameters of his limited, but significant, role in the Peasants' War are now fairly secure.Footnote 10
What, however, was his significance for Renaissance and Reformation Europe as a whole? Since the collapse of the Communist regime in East Germany in 1989 there has been a diminished willingness to reflect on this, especially in the English-speaking world.Footnote 11 Although Jane Dawson's new biography of John Knox may shift perspectives he, too, has suffered grotesquely from the attentions of hagiographers and debunkers.Footnote 12 To this day he can be summarily dismissed as a zealot or bigot.Footnote 13
Yet, as his debates with Maitland of Lethington demonstrate, Knox was a formidable controversialist. He was also a born leader of men (and women). He stalked the corridors of power with disdainful effectiveness. For all his contempt for the politiques he had a shrewd eye for the possible, and was formidably successful in mustering the varied and discordant forces which set the Scottish reformation in motion. It is doubtful whether they would have coalesced around 1560 as they did without his leadership. As his racy History of the Reformation demonstrates – what other reformer can hold a candle to him as a historian? – Knox knew his Scottish countrymen like the back of his hand.
Knox and Müntzer, therefore, deserve reassessment within the wider European context. They thought in trans-national terms of God's elect throughout the world. Müntzer was at times more confident of reaching the elect among the Jews and the Turks than at home in Germany. He envisaged the renewal of Christianity as beginning in Prague, not Wittenberg, and addressed his writings to a universal audience, to ‘the whole world’. Knox, likewise, took for granted the internationalism of the Calvinist network on the Continent, in England and in Scotland. He had originally hoped to go as a pilgrim to Wittenberg; he was a pastor in Frankfurt and Geneva, famously hailing the latter as the world's ‘most perfect school of Christ’. It is often forgotten, though, that he was also equally at home in England, where he praised the liberality of Edward vi to ‘Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Scots, Spaniards, Poles, Greeks and Hebrews’.Footnote 14
Covenant theology
Of all the convergences between the activities and theology of Müntzer and Knox the most intriguing may be their deployment of the concept of covenant. This has generally been analysed in the past in political terms, which is understandable when one notes, for example, the frequency with which Müntzer's secretive and allegedly sectarian (sonderliche) leagues or covenants were presumed by his foes to be fomenting social anarchy and political revolt.Footnote 15 Yet the covenant undoubtedly played a key role in the ecclesiology of Müntzer and Knox. Müntzer recalled the sacred covenant of King Josiah and all the people to follow the way of the Lord, the eternal covenant witnessed to throughout the Hebrew Bible from Abraham on.Footnote 16 As Siegfried Bräuer notes, Müntzer's leagues and covenants prepared the way for the purification of Christianity and the formation of a Spirit-led Church.Footnote 17 As Tom Scott points out, its liturgical use was significant; the preacher exhorts the ‘friends of God’ at the beginning of Müntzer's German mass to pray earnestly for him, that ‘the mystery of God's covenant be revealed’.Footnote 18
Both reformers saw the Church primarily in dynamic, human terms, as the people of God; God's covenant with ancient Israel, and with the Church as the new Israel was the foundation on which everything stood or fell. Even Sittich von Berlepsch, Duke George of Saxony's official in Langensalza, a bitter opponent of Müntzer, realised that the latter's rainbow flag represented for him God's eternal covenant with the human race after Noah.Footnote 19 Paul's concept of the Body of Christ, in which each member supported and complemented the other, effectively replaced for Müntzer and Knox the hierarchical polity of the Roman Church, as they called it.Footnote 20 For them the Church was no institution, but a prophetic and pastoral community, a solidarity of the elect under the cross. Moses, after all, had chastised Aaron, the high priest. The prophetic word had priority over the priestly.
In the Scottish Reformation the band or covenant was initially an engagement entered into by the high nobility and the lairds, or lesser nobility. They swore a holy oath to defend the Gospel, its preachers and confessors. In Müntzer's case the members of his leagues were generally artisans, miners and peasants, with some members of the nobility joining at a later stage. Both men saw the covenant as a form of self-defence against tyranny and persecution. At first Müntzer insisted that no one should put too much trust in the covenant, and at the end of his life famously regretted that more stringent measures had not been taken to exclude those who ‘sought only their own interests’.Footnote 21 Knox, too, on occasion felt that undue reliance has been placed on the armed might of the nobility, and too little on God's providence. The league or covenant had no direct liturgical or pastoral functions, but it stemmed from the preaching of the Gospel, and embodied a confession of faith. It may have had associations, particularly in the German situation, with the lay brotherhoods of the late medieval Church.
For both reformers, drawing on the Hebrew Scriptures, the covenanted community was primarily a religious one, a ‘congregation’, initiated by solemn oath, and dedicated to the cause of the Gospel, its obligations hammered home by adjurations, private conferences and sermons.Footnote 22 This solidarity of brethren under the cross, of God's holy people, can perhaps be viewed as an ecclesiola in ecclesia, as the left hand of the emergent Church.
Both Müntzer and Knox expected the individual believer to witness to their own faith in word and act, to live up to the excellence of their vocation: ‘If any brother have exhortacion, question or doubt, let him not feare to speake or move the same.’Footnote 23 The covenant was a corporate expression of this. The whole ‘communaltie of Scotland’, Knox believed, were ‘Goddes creatures’, formed in his image, and responsible to provide for the Gospel as much as rulers were. After all, everyone was equal in the hope of the life to come; in Christ Jesus the man has no greater prerogative than the woman.Footnote 24 If they suffered under tyranny and idolatry lay people therefore had the right to maintain and defend true preachers of the word, and it was not in order for them to opt out, excusing themselves as mere subjects.
From the beginning, the covenant or band had a military, a constitutional and a religious function for Knox. Perhaps because the band or bond of maintenance could look back on a long secular history he was seldom troubled by scruples about the use of arms in the service of the Gospel, although his understanding of legitimate resistance only evolved gradually. The covenant's function was to bridle the tyranny of the Regent, Mary of Guise. The relatively disciplined campaigns fought under its authority contrasted with the violence of the ‘raschall multitude’. On the occasions when spontaneous iconoclasm broke out, as in Perth in 1559, Knox disapproved of it, or so his retrospective account of events in his History claims. He did, however, agree to the distribution of the booty to the poor.Footnote 25 He relied primarily on the forces of the nobility, in part paid troops, who were fighting against the ‘congregation of Satan’ and for the ‘trew religioune of Christ’ and his congregation.
The Covenant of 1559, initially made in Edinburgh, involved, however, men from every social estate, saddlers and other artisans for example. They swore to stand by one another as ‘memberis of ane bodie’ in the presence of God, his Son and by the power of the Holy Spirit. Note the Trinitarian language and the sense of sacramental unity. The covenant developed its own semi-constitutional features, meeting in council to plan policy and campaigns, commissioning Knox or Lord Ruthven to act on its behalf, negotiating with the English government, and summoning conventions or assemblies which acted in effect as national synods and appeared to have a juridical function. The ‘band’ was continually morphing into new forms. In the assembly which came to meet half-yearly the preachers worked in the closest conjunction with the nobility and the lairds. Thus the language of the covenant came, as Dawson points out, to legitimise the programme of a revolutionary party which sought not only the reformation of the Church, but freedom from the political and military power of France.Footnote 26
Müntzer operated on an infinitely more modest stage, though it is worth considering whether his initial hopes for gaining support in Prague or for attracting the support of the Saxon princes might have led him closer to the Scottish pattern. Initially he saw the leagues or covenants as non-violent, militant but non-military groupings. The transition to a more proactive stance was gradual.Footnote 27 Müntzer had, of course, nothing comparable to the allies and resources which Knox could deploy, including the latter's impressive intelligence network, though letter-writing was a key tool for both of them.
The outbreak of the Peasants' War signalled for Müntzer a cosmic shift, that the ‘whole world’ was on the move. The cause of the insurgents was that of Christ's poor. The Gospel had taken hold and, as Daniel prophesied, the princely power would now be swept away.Footnote 28 Müntzer now had no hesitation about supporting the resort to arms and approved the looting of monasteries and castles. His ‘army’, however, was at best a people's militia, at worst not far from a rabble. In retrospect it remains remarkable how successful the peasant bands were in developing their own administrative, and even juridical structures.
Müntzer did also have some success in securing the support of the lesser nobility for the covenant, and, as Tom Scott notes, this ‘served to neutralize the Thuringian nobility at the height of the conflict’.Footnote 29 The rapid expansion of the close-knit leagues or covenants into the sprawling peasant bands meant, however, that discipline and spiritual coherence suffered. Unlike Knox, Müntzer could not draw on leaders with wide experience in political and military affairs, with a vision which transcended local interests.
The broad base of support which Knox was able to command for the risky and revolutionary programme in which he, with others, was involved had evolved over many years, not without many painful reverses on the way. He had behind him the anti-French lobby among the Scottish nobility. He could call on anti-clerical, reformist and humanist discontent, and a tradition of vaguely Lutheran sympathies. The jury is still out on how popular the reformist cause was in Scotland by 1560 but support for it was certainly growing, not least among women.Footnote 30 Despite his uncompromising nature Knox seemed able to respond to criticism in a relatively measured manner, and to win over sceptics, carrying along with him on particular issues those who had considerable reservations about other policies. Müntzer, on the other hand, seemed to have lacked these gifts. What he opposed tended to be clearer to his supporters than what he supported and he had considerable prowess in alienating those initially sympathetic to him, whether in Zwickau, Prague or Allstedt.
Church and State
Closely related to the covenant theme is the attitude of the two reformers to the secular powers. Both Müntzer and Knox began with the Davidic concept of the godly prince, whose calling was to promote godliness and punish wickedness and idolatry. They embraced a theology of history in which the Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman empires had succeeded one another.Footnote 31 For Müntzer, persuasion and biblically based argument seemed at first appropriate in his attempt to gain the support of the Saxon princes, as was the case for Knox with Edward vi.Footnote 32 In the eyes of both, however, the ruler became a tyrant when he or she persecuted the godly, tolerated idolatry, listened to hypocritical courtiers and departed from justice. The house of Guise, in particular, never had a chance in Knox's eyes, and his animus against Mary Tudor prompted him to pen his disastrous polemic against the ‘monstrous regiment’ of women.
As the prophetic watchmen of Israel they came to regard political change as the precondition for religious reformation. The people of God had the right and duty to bring about this change, if necessary by the sword. Müntzer talked of a legitimate rebellion, ‘eine fügliche empörung’.Footnote 33 Knox, believing himself to be following prophets such as Isaiah, and Christ Jesus himself, argued similarly that ‘all is not reputed before God sedition and conjuration, which the foolish multitude so estemeth’.Footnote 34 Neither, of course, identified the people as a whole with the elect, the people of God.
Initially, Knox assigned responsibility for ‘bridling’ the sovereign to the nobility, but insisted that every member of the commonwealth had the right to withhold tithes from corrupt clergy, and to defend true preachers; not to act would be to condone idolatry.Footnote 35 Müntzer appears to have come closer eventually to identifying the cause of the common folk with Christ's poor. Both, though, deploy remarkably strident language about the ignorance, cruelty and tyranny of the rulers – who are the real rebels against God – and about the Christian duty of resistance. Müntzer's political thinking has more of an apocalyptical flavour, following Daniel vii.27, while Knox is convinced that he is following in the track of Old Testament precedents. Whether they can be seen as proponents of popular sovereignty ‘avant la lettre’, as Goertz says of Müntzer, is more debatable.Footnote 36 In both, however, the egalitarian dimension is hard to miss.
Knox never frontally challenged the concept of Christendom. He assumed the coherence, even the co-extensiveness of Church and Society. His aim, after all, was a reformed national Church, a covenanted nation, though in practice he seemed often to revert to the language of the holy remnant. Crawford Gribben notes that he commutes between the remnant concept, the idea of the elect nation, and his Calvinist internationalism and argues that his History ‘develops competing visions of national identity’.Footnote 37
Müntzer, on the other hand, broke decisively with the concept of Christendom. God's elect extended well beyond it, for they were to be found among the Jews and the Turks, who might well be more impartial judges in his own case.Footnote 38 The elect would soon be gathered out of their dispersion and given the kingdom of this world to rule. He deploys the language of the holy remnant, the little flock, purified like the men of Gideon by the expulsion of the ungodly. It remains unclear, however, where the dividing line lay for him between the elect and the ungodly. Were the latter limited to the ‘big wigs’ who abused their power in Church and State, the ungodly princes, clerics and academics, that unholy mass of writhing eels and snakes?Footnote 39
His liturgical writings do suggest an inclusivist emphasis; there is no total break in them with the idea of the Volkskirche. His adoption of the ‘peasant’ cause also shows that he was not narrowly sectarian in his thinking. At times he seemed to suggest that the bulk of the common folk could be redeemed, since they were coming to recognise the truth of the Gospel. As the victims of clerical and social injustice he appeared ready to give them the benefit of the doubt. Deceived they might have been, but ready to learn. A true Christianity would soon be in full swing, sweeping away the present Church, ‘a real old whore by comparison’. The traditional social, educational and ecclesiastical structures of the day were doomed.Footnote 40
Theology
Common to both reformers is the undergirding of their ecclesiastical, social and political aims by apocalyptical vocabulary and thought-patterns. They inhabited the last times, in which Satan was fighting for mastery. The harvest was near, the ripe fruit ready to call, the sickle at hand, as Müntzer repeatedly put it. In this cosmic perspective there was no room for compromise, or for the gentler stirrings of solicitude for the weak. Time was as scarce as patience. Neither reformer was willing to postpone action to some remote eschatological future.
The AntiChrist was clearly identified by Knox with the synagogue of Satan, the papal Church and its pope, which in its life, doctrine and legal system was utterly opposed to Christ; its pollution and idolatry were demonstrated above all in the mass. Although this is also true for Müntzer, the scriptural thieves of Wittenberg and their secular patrons increasingly dominated his imagination. Pollution ‘in the devil's bath’ carried much more of a political reference, namely kowtowing to the godless authorities, leading to a declension from the fear of God alone, from possession by his Spirit.Footnote 41
Rather remarkable, given this apocalyptic perspective, was the relative restraint of Knox and his followers after 1560 in shedding the blood of their opponents. No doubt the complex political situation and the influence of Maitland of Lethington and others played a key role. Some of the violence may have been channelled into iconoclasm. Knox himself was not interested in a blood-bath, though he certainly wished that Jezebel, Mary, Queen of Scots, dead. The execution of his threats of vengeance was to be left to the Almighty.
The combination of apocalyptic motifs with reliance on Old Testament Law tended in marginalise, in Müntzer's case effectively to eliminate, Luther's stress on justification by faith. Müntzer was contemptuous of Luther's ‘sweet Christ’ and counterfeit faith; moral purgation played a key role in his mystical piety alongside suffering. With Martin Bucer in Strasbourg Knox added discipline to preaching of the Word and the proper observance of the sacraments as a mark of the true Church.
The Scots Confession of 1560 does have a moving section on justification by faith, yet it is impossible to miss the priority given by Knox to holiness or sanctification. His laments about whoremongers, adulterers and time-servers never cease. Both reformers slipped into moralising at the slightest provocation, though it was not necessarily directed at individuals. There was an awareness of the abuse of power and wealth by groups and institutions, to the detriment of the orphan and the widow, of what we would call today ‘structural sin’.Footnote 42 Personal morality was set in a wider, theocratic context. It certainly found generous embodiment in the Scottish Book of Discipline of 1560. Müntzer had scant opportunities to put his ideas into practice, but such scattered judgements of his as have survived about sexual relationships suggest a puritanical rigourism. Yet the sources are silent about complaints about his pastoral care in Allstedt and there is some indication that he was aware of the need for forbearance with the ‘crudity’ of the common folk.
As leaders of the little flock of the covenanted, as contenders against tyrannical rulers, called like Daniel to witness against Babylon and to cry out for righteousness, both Müntzer and Knox saw themselves propelled into a prophetic role. Whenever they met resistance and opposition they claimed solidarity with the prophets of old. Müntzer regarded Gideon and Elijah, who resisted the priests of Baal, as his forerunners. Knox never tired of citing Elijah's resistance to Ahab to justify his conduct towards Mary of Guise and Mary, Queen of Scots. The frankness of the prophets, their hatred of the oppression of the poor, their passion for righteousness was an inspiration to both men. Müntzer's use of the historical books of the Old Testament was more sparing than Knox's, and his emphasis on the leading of the Spirit moved him towards making more exalted claims for himself.Footnote 43
Language
There are remarkable similarities, too, in the discourse of Müntzer and Knox, not least in their insistence on a ‘plaine speaking’ which disdained the usual courtesies of discourse. The truth must not be concealed under some smooth veneer.Footnote 44 Müntzer believed that the language of the clergy and the academics was a deliberate strategy to disempower the common people. Their words were the ‘forgeries of the devil’. Like the pretty roses and cornflowers such courtly and polite language might be pretty to the eye, but it was without substance.Footnote 45 Moving from Latin to the vernacular was only a necessary first step, if justice were to be done to the Gospel. Yet to deduce from Müntzer's or Knox's published writings that they were abrupt, coarse or violent in their day-to-day speech would be to go beyond the evidence. Both Müntzer and Knox were vulnerable, sensitive men, though embittered by their experiences. Müntzer's prayers and hymns are lyrical and moving. Both developed a distinctive prose style which is vivid and fresh. Even today Knox's History has balladic quality; Kenneth Farrow regards it as the most outstanding Scottish literary work of the period.Footnote 46 Comparisons between the literary achievement of the two men are invidious, as Müntzer never had the time to revise his work in leisure. Though there is some evidence of his awareness of the norms of traditional rhetoric, none of his work has the structural coherence of Knox's History, for example.Footnote 47
Müntzer's language, however, is remarkably innovative. He developed an earthy discourse, with a pronounced metaphorical flavour. Abstract expressions were shunned. There were innumerable reference to the domestic and work life of his parishioners, to animals, plants, to cooking and eating, to the human body. Biblical places and people took on existential reality as they were interiorised. Nazareth was to be found within the soul of the elect. Even his mystical expressions were concrete and figurative, such as the image of the fish which has to dive into the deep, dark water.Footnote 48 The excessive quality of his superlatives and negatives mirrored his apocalyptical expectations.
As a preacher and liturgist Müntzer had to reach out to the illiterate and semi-literate, and form them into zealous believers. He was sharply aware of the performative function of words, and of the futility of commending the message of Scripture by citing texts. His polemic was never against the Bible as such, but against its textualisation, against a lifting of its words and narratives out of context. His innovative language could, however, be rather hermetic at times. Intent on communicating new thoughts, and avoiding the usual pious chatter, one suspects that he left many of the common folk behind. The success of his sermons, however, few of which have survived, reminds us that our evidence of his communication skills is limited.
Knox shared this concern to reach ordinary people, and indeed to change them. Like Müntzer his objection was to the flatterers, the feigned and hypocritical discourse of academics, courtiers and clergy. He was not exactly over-endowed with the social graces. Abandoned on one occasion in Holyrood Palace to a bevy of young ladies-in-waiting, he kept his countenance by reverting to the language of the pulpit.Footnote 49
Even in the greetings at the head of their letters, Müntzer and Knox tend to spurn the usual courtesies.Footnote 50 Müntzer dedicated his perhaps best known writing not to a princely patron but to Christ.Footnote 51 Both adopt an unvarnished tone, speaking out whether it was opportune or not. They delighted in sounding the trumpet, a favourite metaphor for both of them, with its associations of Gideon and Jericho. They were addressing themselves, after all, to the ‘idle bellies’, the wolves which menaced the little flock, the vultures who gorged themselves on human flesh.
Knox's language and argumentation is on the whole rather more measured. Gribben argues that his primary concern was for lucidity.Footnote 52 He can present the objections of an opponent with reasonable clarity, and he shunned the startling obscenities of Müntzer.Footnote 53 His language was both more lucid and less original than Müntzer's, which abounds in neologisms and can be written, as it sometimes seems, almost in code, as he strains to express the inexpressible.
Piety
Müntzer's spirituality was strongly conditioned by his mysticism, both in its language and its substance. His pastoral work focused on the inculcation of what we might call a popular mysticism. Logically, if not necessarily chronologically, order must be restored within humanity before the external world could be brought into harmony. Through purgation and suffering, doubt and despair, God brought to birth in the believer Gelassenheit, a letting go of all earthly bonds. The fear of God replaced the craven fear of creaturely power. We became the possession of the Holy Spirit. Even in the most intimate area of sexuality we had to learn to cast off all merely human attachments. As we were put in order, inwardly, we then became fit, as God's elect, to put the outward world to rights.Footnote 54 Transformed, transfigured in Christ, we became divine, our ‘earthly life swings up into heaven’, an altogether alien concept for Knox.Footnote 55
Knox shuns the technical language of mysticism. His understanding of temptation as opening up the secret motions of the human heart, a process both profitable and necessary, but a powerful assault involving confusion and dismay, shows some similarities to Müntzer's thought.Footnote 56 The testing of the believer's faith, however, which Müntzer regarded as the work of God in the abyss of the soul, was seen by Knox as the raging of Satan, of our adversary the Devil, as he poured forth the venom of his malice. Jane Dawson's biography has made us much more aware of the vulnerability of Knox, of his emotional depth and warmth. As she points out, the heart of Knox's piety, where he ‘cast his anchor’, was the passage in John xvii which speaks of the mystical union of the believer with Christ.Footnote 57 Knox also spoke of the mystical nature of the bread in the Lord's Supper.
For both reformers freedom from the fear of man, as exemplified in the example of Daniel and by God's covenant with his people Israel, was essential for discipleship, though achieving it never came easily.Footnote 58 It paved the way for that disciplining of the elect which enabled them to create a new society. Knox, we might conclude, was primarily a reformer, a programmer, a planner of civic and ecclesiastical landscapes. Müntzer was much more concerned with the inscape, the inner life of the believer. He interpreted dreams, wrote chorales (which are still sung today), and fashioned the basis of a popular mysticism. In the area of spirituality he was undoubtedly the more creative of the two.Footnote 59
Holy Scripture
One great difference between the two men undoubtedly lies in their understanding of Scripture and of the Spirit. We need, however, to avoid exaggeration. Knox was no narrow Biblicist. He saw the hand of God revealed in nature and in history. He was happy to cite the authority of the Classical philosophers, not least in his tirade against women rulers, The first blast against the monstrous regiment of women. Both Müntzer and Knox saw the primitive, apostolic Church as the norm, from which the emergent Roman Church was a sad declension. Knox regularly quoted from Early Church Fathers such as Tertullian, Ambrose and Augustine and appealed to the authority of Continental Reformers. He also came close to what we would today term Sachkritik when he cast doubt upon whether James and Paul were guided by the Spirit when they decided to attend the Temple in Jerusalem.Footnote 60
However, on the absolute authority of Scripture not only in matters of faith and morality but of church order Knox was immoveable. He spoke lyrically of the Bible as the food of the soul: ‘the perpetuall meditation, exercyse, and use of Goddes holye Worde’ was utterly crucial to expel the darkness, to come to ‘lyfe everlasting, and to the illumination and light of the soule’.Footnote 61 In practice he used Scripture as a book of precedents or oracles which could be applied simpliciter to the contemporary situation. He was convinced that he not only cited it appropriately but understood the meaning of its writers. Like Müntzer, and of course Luther and Calvin, he insisted that difficult texts should be interpreted in the light of the whole of Scripture.Footnote 62 Discipline, education, the preaching of the Word were the sinews of the emerging Church for Knox, the means by which order could be restored in a new, reformed polity and piety.
Müntzer, on the other hand, could describe the biblical texts as lifeless, second-hand things, purloined so to speak by the biblical scholars – the term Schriftstehler is a pun on writers and thieves – unless accompanied by the testimony of the Spirit in the living experience and suffering of the believer. Dreams and visions were vital. God's Ordnung, as originally established in creation, could only be restored by transformation within the abyss of the heart. The key to his pastoral work, therefore, was the inculcation of a popular mysticism.
Compared with Müntzer's hermeneutical sophistication, and his belief that God could speak directly to us without and beyond Scripture, Knox's approach may appear rather one-dimensional. However it is important to note the emotional charge of his experience of Scripture, so vividly seen in his correspondence with his ‘sisters in Christ’, which is redolent of the anguish of the sore, bruised heart of the believer.Footnote 63
It is hard to resist the conclusion that both Thomas Müntzer and John Knox were radicals in their approach to Church and Society, and that there are revolutionary features to the reformations that they sought to put in train. Their challenge to the secular powers, their covenant theology, their vision of a transformed social and ecclesiastical landscape has continued to fascinate down the centuries.
This is not to deny that there are significant differences between them, on some of the traditional markers between the magisterial and the radical reformations: the authority of Scripture, and on the nature of Christendom. The greatest gulf between them lies in what they achieved. Both had to steer a course as best they could within a bewildering background of constantly changing social and political constellations. Their leverage on power was always limited. The challenges to communicating their exalted visions were formidable. The magisterial reformer, John Knox, did, however, manage to secure sufficient political support to push through at least some of his main aims. On the other hand the rout of the impromptu army at Frankenhausen symbolises not only the military but also the political failure of the radical, Thomas Müntzer.
Failed experiments, however, are as intriguing as empirical successes. The ‘swerve’ in recent decades away from a political perspective towards interest in Müntzer's theological, liturgical and pastoral creativity is significant, because, as in the case of Karlstadt, it hints, in another sense of the word, at their ‘magisterial’ status. For contemporaries they spoke with authority.
Müntzer emerges as a complex, provocative thinker and personality. His reforming career was a series of bold improvisations. Forced into agonising decisions about the authority of Wittenberg, the frontier between obedience and legitimate resistance, and the legitimacy of armed force, he concealed his uncertainties at times by strident self-assertion. His empathy with the downtrodden and the generosity of his perceptions may have led him to misread both his world and his own vocation.
On the questions of the nature of revelation, however, of scriptural interpretation, of the tension between the call to suffer and to resist injustice, of the relationship between personal and social transfiguration, and of the permeability of Christendom, Müntzer's range of awareness is remarkable, and his insights, though at times fragmentary, and far from integrated, continue to fascinate. (One is reminded of Bonhoeffer, another ‘failure’, whom it would be hard to classify either as radical or magisterial.)
Viewed in its European context, the Scottish Reformation, as launched by Knox and his colleagues, was astonishingly radical. Knox succeeded because of his directness. Who could have ever believed that this often intractable, socially and intellectually undistinguished reformer would achieve what he did? Something about his preaching, though, appears to have riveted noble, burgess and commoner alike. In a critical situation he offered straightforward, if risky remedies.
The Scottish Reformation came, of course, very late, long after Müntzer had disappeared from the scene. It dismantled the scaffolding of theology, piety and church structures to an unparalleled degree, and sowed the seeds of a covenant-based theology of resistance which surfaced repeatedly through the centuries, in the seventeenth-century Covenanters, the nineteenth-century Disruption, and the critical edge of the Church of Scotland's Church and Nation reports throughout the twentieth century.
Like most radicals, Müntzer and Knox could be truculent and ‘difficult’ individuals. Yet without them the heritage of the Reformation in European history would be far more attenuated. Comparing and contrasting them enables us to reshuffle the Reformation cards. We may emerge with a better hand as a result.
