This impressive study reconstructs and interprets the efforts of a group of laymen and women, especially guild members, whom advance a symbolic interpretation of the eucharist in the imperial city of Augsburg, Swabia's most influential town, between the years 1520 and 1530. The research topic, originally encouraged by the late Professor Heiko Oberman (d. 2001), illustrates the city's vigorous opposition to Martin Luther's belief in a corporeal real presence of Christ in the eucharist. Joel Van Amberg, associate professor of history at Tusculum College (Tennessee), focuses on several influential preachers, especially the Franciscan friar Hans Schilling and Michael Keller (Cellarius). These sectarian preachers within the emerging evangelical movement promoted an anti-establishment belief in the symbolic presence of Christ to explicate the meaning of the dominical saying of Jesus at the Last Supper: “this is my body.”
Instead of explaining the eucharist as a corporeal presence, these sectarians developed what might be termed today as “sacramentarian” understanding, admittedly a rather ambiguous term that has been used historically to identify those “heretics” who reject transubstantiation.
Brother Schilling's populist sermons in the local Franciscan church took aim at the sacralization of the eucharistic elements and criticized as papist and sacrilegious such practices as processions with consecrated hosts, as well as tabernacle reservation. His successor, Cellarius, emphasized the communal nature of the eucharist—its demand for ethical responsibilities—and inveighed against clerical abuses, especially greed, and priests' claim to have exclusive power to confect the eucharist. By opposing clerical mediation he highlighted a radically egalitarian, anti-sacerdotal polemic. This emphasis promoted communal values. It aimed at diminishing hierarchical order within the church and marginalized clerical power over the religious lives of the non-ordained. This symbolic eucharistic theology guaranteed that laypersons would have the same sort of status as the clergy and would have direct access to God without the meditation of priests. Laypersons' spiritual authority was after all as real as that of the clerics. Therefore, clergy were not entitled to their many legal exemptions and protections conferred upon them as elite. In his preaching Cellarius also deplored the lack of progress and failure of the Reformation to improve its adherents' moral habits or broader social and economic relationships.
The anti-corporeal eucharistic theology that developed in Augsburg was in part a response to political and economic conditions. It was widely supported not only by theologians and rulers, but also by ordinary people who were the town's backbone. Their eucharistic theology aimed at undermining clerical power over people's lives. These preachers argued that: “the belief in a physical presence of Christ in the Eucharistic host came to signify support for hierarchy and mediation in all its forms, whereas asserting a non-corporeal presence dissociated from the elements represented a rejection of these values” (4).
To contextualize these emerging conflicts, Van Amberg first provides a detailed description of the cautious reactions of Augsburg's city council that tried initially to display formal obedience to the Holy Roman Emperor by not fostering the Reformation in their imperial city. Although the focus of this book is on one specific township, the same local tensions also appeared within wider regions of the Reformation.
These trends in Augsburg help to explain the differences that emerged in contrast to the teachings of Luther, who stressed corporeal presence, versus the anti-corporeal views associated with Zwingli. However, the growing sectarian movement in Augsburg that adhered to a symbolic interpretation of the eucharist gradually moved on from a diminution of the central position of the Lord's Supper, replacing it with a stress on believer's baptism as the most effective way to articulate their religious and social convictions. This accounts for the growth of the Anabaptist communities. Chapter 4, entitled “Sacramentarian Sects in Augsburg and Their Transition to Anabaptism,” illustrates how sectarians defined themselves as over against the evangelical movement, criticizing the evangelicals for failing to improve morals and for re-clericalizing religion. Here attention is drawn to the writings of the little known Augsburg military official Haug Marschalck (Zoller), especially his Ein Spiegel der Blinden, composed between 1522 and 1526. Also included here are the contrasting views of the citizen labeled the “merchant-preacher of Augsburg,” Urbanus Rhegius.
The author's research reflects a thorough familiarity with and accurate analysis of archival and manuscript material located both in the Stadtarchiv Augsburg and the Staats-und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg. He makes use of the historical material in a way that facilitates accessible reading. The book concludes with a helpful bibliography of primary sources and secondary works as well as indexes of subjects, places, and persons.
