Luther, The Greatest who was the Worst. Bucer, the Least who was the Greatest.

Why Bucer, not Luther, should be our model for Reform

As I’ve been researching and writing my book Null and Void: Why Rome Must Reject Apostolica Curae, I’ve worked through many of Luther’s foundational writings at this point. And it’s struck me that Luther was uniquely vitriolic. There was something about the man that wreaks of prideful, arrogant, vitriolic venom. One can find a website that gathers the vitriol he hurled at people here.

There was a season in my life when I found his insults funny and “rah rah go Luther”. I don’t anymore. John Calvin puts it well in his critique of Luther for inflaming the Reformation debates surrounding the Eucharist:

“It was Luther's duty, in the first place, to make it clear that he did not intend to set up such a local presence as the papists imagine; second, he should have protested that he did not mean the sacrament to be adored instead of God; and third, he should have abstained from the similes so harsh and difficult to conceive, or have used them with moderation, interpreting them so that they could not occasion offence. Once the debate was taken up, he went beyond measure not only in declaring his opinion, but also in blaming the other with a too sharp bitterness of speech. For instead of explaining himself so that his opinion could be understood, with his accustomed violence in attacking those who contradicted him, he used exaggerated forms of speech, which were certainly hard to bear by those who otherwise were not very disposed to believe what he said.”

Calvin would regularly critique Luther’s use of vitriol through the Reformation. Now, it’s true that the polemics of the time were generally vitriolic; there were vitriolic Roman Catholics, Calvinists, etcetera. But no one matched Luther’s use of invective.

Roman Catholics often point to this as evidence that the Reformation was corrupt from its Luther-esque roots. However, Luther did not operate in a vacuum. In this post, I want to commend the style of Martin Bucer as a better model for Reform.

Bucer: The Reformer who Loved the Church

Martin Bucer once wrote:

“We cannot give up on those whom Christ is calling in other churches; we have to look to how we can come to an understanding with them, where we can concede to them, and what on their account we can take back for ourselves.”

Martin Greschat. Martin Bucer. op. cit., p. 117

Martin Bucer, the Strasbourg Reformer, was John Calvin’s mentor. When Calvin was expelled from Geneva his first time around, Bucer took Calvin—who was a young hothead at the time—under his wing and discipled him. From Bucer, Calvin learned to dial down his rhetoric and not imitate Luther in this regard. In 1529, when tension between Luther and Zwingli on the nature of the Lord’s supper came to a head, Bucer attempted to mediate. However, Luther eventually denounced Bucer as well as a compromising “snake”. Bucer replied,

“If you immediately condemn anyone who doesn't quite believe the same as you do as forsaken by Christ's Spirit, and consider anyone to be the enemy of truth who holds something false to be true, who, pray tell, can you still consider a brother? I for one have never met two people who believed exactly the same thing. This holds true in theology as well.”

Bucer would eventually try to mediate between Roman Catholics and Protestants, always desiring the unity of the church. He was even called a “fanatic of unity” by one of his contemporaries, Margaret Blauer. Bucer once wrote,

“Nobody truly knows Christ who does not feel the necessity of a communion, of mutual care and discipline among his members. . . .Christ suffered and taught for no other purpose but that we should be one and embrace each other with the same love with which he embraced us, and that we should seek our common salvation with the same eagerness with which he sought ours.”

At the Diet of Regensburg in 1541, Bucer participated in a dialogue with Roman Catholic theologians in a desperate effort to unify the church. In the colloquy, he found much agreement and hope with Roman Catholic theologians. They affirmed a sacramental change of the bread and wine (Bucer affirmed what would basically become the view of the Anglican Caroline divines), and even found much space of agreement on justification itself.

However, the Diet failed because both the Pope and Luther respectively rejected the articles of the Regensburg colloquy. Luther, in his characteristic vitriol, eschewed the articles, saying “we hate the book [of the Regensburg agreements] worse than a dog or a snake.” Of Bucer, he wrote “Bucer, the rascal, has absolutely lost all my confidence. I shall never trust him again; he has betrayed me too often..Bucer stinks sufficiently on his own account because of the Regensburg Articles.”

Bucer, for his part, never ceased reaching out to Luther to seek reconciliation.

Bucer and Luther represent too entirely different approaches to Reformation. The latter represents the impulse that animates Twitter: inflammation, anger, and irate disgust over anyone who disagrees. He was, after all, one of the first media-personalities who pioneered the art behind click-bait (thank God he didn’t have the internet!). Bucer’s ethos, however, is captured beautifully in his own words:

“Right from the time when I first conceived the way of godliness, not from commentaries composed by men but from the Scriptures themselves through the teaching of the Spirit, I purposed at heart both to esteem nothing more highly than love and to keep as far distant as possible from party passions and contentions, especially in matters of religion. . . .Nothing can less benefit the servant of God than favouring sectarianism and indulging in disputes which dispel the truth, sow envy and malice, and occasion the total shipwreck of the whole of true authentic Christianity. . . .So I took pains to keep out of disputes, by leaving the ungodly to flourish unchallenged and by refusing to cast pearls before swine, by instructing the weaker brethren in a spirit of peace and by tendering an open ear and mind to brethren more richly endowed with the divine wisdom of the Scriptures. In this way I thought I could avoid any possibility of being diverted into strife and dissension... .”

Bucer was the lesser known Reformer because, more often than not, those who seek peace, concord, and harmony are less remembered and less interesting to people than those who are loud, boisterous, and conflict-engendering. Luther went down in history not because he was the pioneer of doctrinal Reformation (plenty of folks on either side of Luther were also seeking to Reform the church), but because he was the most boar-like and boisterous. His personality drowned out the peaceable personality of Bucer.

I think it’s high-time for Protestants to amend this mistake. Bucer, not Luther, deserves to be our model for Reformational charity and catholicity. Bucer’s peacableness and brotherly spirit, and not Luther’s boar-headed-ness, is the far better exemplar for ecumenical unity in the 21st century. The Greatest Reformer of history’s memory was in truth, I’m convinced, the least of the Reformers in the kingdom of heaven; and the lesser known Martin, Martin Bucer, was in fact the greatest of them. He captured, in his practical approach, better than anyone of his day our Lord’s prayer for unity in John 17. And it’s for this reason that his approach to Reformation is the one we ought to emulate. It’s about time we recover a Bucerian heart for the renewal of the church catholic.