Background
Thomas Müntzer was born in late 1489 (or possibly early 1490), in the small town of Stolberg in the Harz Mountains of Germany. The legend that his father had been executed by the feudal authorities has long since been shown untrue.
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Thomas Müntzer was born in late 1489 (or possibly early 1490), in the small town of Stolberg in the Harz Mountains of Germany. The legend that his father had been executed by the feudal authorities has long since been shown untrue.
He read widely and became a secular priest, first in Frohse and later in a convent in Beuditz.
After meeting Martin Luther at Leipzig in 1519, Münzer experienced a religious crisis in which his doubt as to God's existence was resolved into a concept of the decline of the Church, the spiritual unity of all true believers, and his own conviction that he was an especially chosen instrument of God to purge the world of ecclesiastical abuses.
His appointment to the town of Zwickau in 1520 brought him into contact with the socially radical Zwickau prophets, and Münzer began proclaiming his vision of a purified Christianity, devoid of ecclesiastical and social hierarchies and dependent upon personal revelation and the immediacy of the Day of Judgment.
Forced to leave Zwickau in 1521, Münzer went to Prague, where he further preached his visionary theology and vociferously denounced the social oppression of the poor which had been a result of ecclesiastical distortion of true Christian doctrine.
His increasingly radical position was made clear in his famous sermon to the princes of Saxony in 1524, in which Münzer urged the temporal rulers to lead God's chosen people against the "forces of antichrist. " Forced to leave Allstedt later in the same year, Münzer joined the Peasants' Rebellion, which had broken out in June 1524. The rebellion was the result of a complex series of social, legal, and theological disputes, and it soon swept up many peasants in what is now southwestern Germany.
Demanding considerable social and religious reforms, the peasants practiced an apocalyptic Christianity and, with Münzer's influence, came to regard themselves as God's purifying army and Münzer as the "sword of Gideon. "
Münzer, from his base in Mühlhausen, issued broadsides proclaiming his completely radicalized theological and social views. He urged the destruction of all religious images, the sharing of property in common, and the immediate establishment of God's kingdom on earth. Vilifying Luther as "Doctor Liar, the Wittenberg Pope, " Münzer was in turn denounced by Luther: "Anyone who has seen Münzer can say that he has seen the devil at his worst. " After the defeat of the peasants at Frankenhausen in 1525, Münzer was forced to recant his "errors" before being beheaded.
Müntzer was foremost amongst those reformers who took issue with Luther’s compromises with feudal authority. He became a leader of the German peasant and plebeian uprising —commonly known as the German Peasants' War— of 1525, was captured after the battle of Frankenhausen, and was tortured and executed.
Few other figures of the German Reformation have raised so much controversy —which continues to this day— as Müntzer.
A complex and unique figure in history, he is now regarded as a significant player in the early years of the German Reformation and also in the history of European revolutionaries. Almost all modern studies of Müntzer stress the necessity of understanding his revolutionary actions as a consequence of his theology: Müntzer believed that the end of the world was imminent and that it was the task of the true believers to aid God in ushering in a new era of history.
Within the history of the Reformation, his contribution —especially in liturgy and Biblical exegesis— was of substance, but remains undervalued.
In 1522 Münzer was appointed provisional pastor at Allstedt, where he married and carried out liturgical reforms (including services in the vernacular).
