Bucer, M
NAME: Bucer, Martin
ACHIEVEMENT(S): 16th-century Protestant Reformer and liturgical scholar,
best known as a mediator between the many religious factions of the era and
for his influence on the development of the liturgy of the European and
English Reformed churches.
NICKNAME/ALIAS: also spelled Butzer
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 11 November 1491, at Schlettstadt,
Alsace
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 28 February 1551, at Cambridge, England. Aged 59
DISCIPLINE: Religious reformer
FIELD: Protestantism
LANGUAGE: German
PARENTS: Unknown
SIBLINGS: Unknown
SPOUSE: Elisabeth Pallas (or Silbereisen, d. 1541), married 1522; Wibrandis
Rosenblatt, married 1542
CHILDREN: 13 children, one son surviving, by first marriage; three children,
one daughter surviving, by second marriage
EDUCATION: Schlettstadt Latin School, 1500-06; University of Heidelberg,
1517-21
MAJOR WORK: Translation and exposition of the 'Psalms', 1529
LIFE AND TIMES: Bucer became an ardent admirer of the great scholar Erasmus* and other humanist writers. In April 1518, Bucer then heard Luther* dispute on the dogma of free-will. Deeply affected by Luther's lecture, Bucer arranged to meet with him, and was won over to reformist ideas.
In April 1521 he entered the service of Frederick, Count Palatine of the Rhine, one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V*. After serving as court chaplain for a year, in 1522 Bucer left and became pastor of Landstuhl in the Palatinate, and a member of
the household of his patron, Count Sickengen. Here, in 1522, Bucer became one of the earliest of the ordained reformers to take a wife when he married Elisabeth Pallass.
In early 1523 Bucer left Landstahl for Weissenburg in Lower Alsace, from where, after a series of Lutheran sermons he was excommunicated from the Catholic Church by the Bishop of Speier. In response, Bucer made a public profession of his Lutheran beliefs, and then fled to Strasbourg where his personal charm, intellectual abilities, and religious zeal soon established him as one of the city's chief exponents of the Reformation, and in December 1523 he was appointed a salaried daily lecturer on the scriptures at Strasbourg Cathedral. In March 1524, he was then elected as parish priest of St. Aurelia's, near Strasbourg.
At the same time, he had been increasingly drawn to the doctrines of the Swiss reformer Zwingli*, and during the following years devoted much time and energy to an attempted reconciliation between the ideas of Zwingli and Luther, and he continued to
mediate between the Zwinglians and Lutherans during the next four years.
In 1529 he was summoned along with all the leading European Reformers to the Conference of Marburg by the Landgrave, Philip of Hesse, to settle the dispute. Luther held to the traditional (i.e. Catholic) view that Christ was present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, while Zwingli upheld a purely symbolic interpretation of the sacrament.
Although Bucer supported the Zwinglian doctrine, he believed that the two opposing views could be reconciled by taking a pragmatic middle course (which involved substituting ambiguous and obscure language in place of clear statements of doctrine in the interests of church unity), a policy which was rejected absolutely by Luther and was also unpopular with many other reformers.
But when, at the end of the colloquy, Zwingli and Bucer offered their hands in fellowship to Luther, he refused.
His efforts for union amongst the reformed churches were temporarily halted by the death of
Zwingli in 1531, but during the next five years Bucer toured the south German and Swiss churches and succeeded in establishing a certain amount of unity between them.. In 1533 he advised the English king Henry VIII on his divorce with Catherine of Aragon, and in
1534-35 he successfully instituted a reformed church at Augsburg.
In December 1534 Bucer met the Lutheran theologian Melanchthon* at Cassel, and in early 1536 he participated at Basel in the writing of the First Helvetic Confession. This was followed in May 1536 by a conference with Luther, Melanchthon, Osiander* and other Reformed theologians at Wittenberg, during which he succeeded in making an agreement with the Lutherans (known as the Wittenberg Concord), based on an ostensible acceptance of Luther's position on the Eucharist.
Inevitably the Swiss were unhappy by Bucer's concessions to the Lutherans, and the Concord was not approved at Zurich. However, in 1538 Bucer found another important Swiss ally in the reformer Calvin*, who remained at Strasbourg for the next three years and with whom he shared many theological beliefs. Then, in March 1540, he was implicated, along with Luther and Melanchthon, in sanctioning (and then concealing) the bigamous marriage of an important supporter of the Reformation, Philip, the landgrave of Hesse.
Deeply concerned also by the deep and dangerous rifts between Catholics and Protestants, Bucer took part in unsuccessful religious conferences between the two factions at Hagenau (1540), Worms (1540), and Ratisbon (1541), and he and Melanchthon then assisted the liberal Catholic archbishop-elector of Cologne, Hermann von Wied, in his vain attempt to introduce Reformed
doctrines into the Archdiocese of Cologne (1542). With Melanchthon, Bucer also drew up a 'Book of Reformation' (1543), to which Luther made objections.
During the 1540s, through the efforts of Charles V, more conferences were called between Catholics and Protestants, on one occasion Bucer being selected by Charles as one of three Protestant theologians who, along with three Catholics, were chosen to discuss the anonymous Regensburg Book, which proposed steps toward Catholic-Protestant union.
However, Catholic and Protestant theologians unanimously rejected the Regensburg Book, and in 1548 Bucer strongly opposed the acceptance by Strasbourg, now in the control of the emperor's army, of Charles's compromise scheme, known as the Augsburg Interim.
Bucer was, however, overruled and expelled from Strasbourg in 1548, but, along with several other Protestant ministers, he was almost immediately invited to England by Cranmer*, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Bucer arrived in England in the summer of 1549, and a few months later (December 1549) he was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge.
Bucer spent his two remaining years in England supporting and defending the moderate reform programme for the English Church devised by Cranmer and Nicholas Ridley, while opposing the more radical Zwinglian ideas of John Hooper and the Scottish Reformer Knox*.
Most notably, the First Prayer Book of Edward VI (1549), the liturgical book of the newly reformed Church of England that contained evidence of Lutheran influence, was given to Bucer for formal criticism, and his assessment, the 'Censura', which was delivered to the Bishop of Ely a month before Bucer died, pointed out the vague Lutheranisms of the prayer book, which were then eradicated from the 'Second Prayer Book of Edward VI' (1552).
ASSESSMENT: Martin Bucer was an important 16th-century German Protestant reformer, who was inspired to leave the Dominican order on hearing the sermons of Martin Luther.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: Martin Bucer, major early Protestant
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
EB, DNB, Catholic Encyclopedia
Hopf, C., Martin Bucer and the English Reformation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946