7 Johannes Bugenhagen (1485–1558): Structures of the Church

Johannes Bugenhagen loved to preach and was reluctant to quit. His long‐windedness, though it was well intentioned and generally tolerated, got to be something of a joke in Wittenberg. Luther in his Table Talk told about a man who came home from church on Sunday, expecting to find a hot meal waiting for him.¹Close When his wife hurriedly put a half‐cooked meal on the table before him, he was outraged and demanded an explanation. “Well,” his wife said, somewhat flustered, “I thought Dr. Pommer [Bugenhagen's nickname] was going to preach today.”

If it had been anyone but Bugenhagen, the joke might have had a bitter edge. But Bugenhagen was so widely respected that his penchant for preaching long sermons was overlooked as the one regrettable weakness in an otherwise splendid pastor. Bugenhagen was the minister of the city church in Wittenberg, the translator of the Bible into Low German, and Luther's spiritual adviser. If he had been nothing more than Luther's pastor, that very fact would have been enough to merit him a paragraph in subsequent history books. But he earned a place in history in his own right by his composition of liturgies and church orders. He was, above all else, the one man in Luther's entourage in Wittenberg who was able to translate the insights and principles of Luther's theology into the forms and structures of congregational life.²Close

Bugenhagen was born at Wollin near Stettin in Pomerania on June 24, 1485.³Close He studied classics at the University of Greifswald and in 1504 became rector of the school in Treptow on the Rega. Though he had not studied theology at the university, he was nevertheless ordained to the priesthood in 1509. Like many of the other Protestant reformers, he was influenced by Erasmus to undertake a deeper study of the Bible and the Church Fathers. Unlike Luther he had no real background in late medieval scholastic theology.

In 1517 he was appointed as lecturer on the Bible at the cloister school of Belbuck. The same year he was commissioned by the duke to write a history of Pomerania. Though he completed the book in a very reasonable period of time, it was not published until many years after his death (1728). The book was important mainly for its collection of rare documentary materials and for its criticisms of the life of the late medieval German church.

While still at the cloister of Belbuck, Bugenhagen read the first writings of Luther to be published in Germany. Luther's criticisms of the medieval Catholic theology of the sacraments in his “Babylonian Captivity of the Church” shocked Bugenhagen at first but eventually persuaded him. He began to correspond with Luther and to discuss the questions Luther's searching attack on the medieval church had forced to the surface. Finally Bugenhagen was convinced of the truth of Luther's interpretation of the gospel and set out for Wittenberg in order to learn more from Luther himself. He arrived in 1521, shortly before Luther departed for his fateful confrontation with Charles V at the Diet of Worms.

Bugenhagen matriculated at the University of Wittenberg, where he made friends with Melanchthon. He began to lecture in private on the Bible, continuing in Wittenberg the courses he had taught at Belbuck. He lectured on the Psalms and on the letters of Paul. Luther was quick to see that a man of unusual talent had come to Wittenberg and cast about to find a place where he could make the best use of him. He settled on the city church, whose pulpit had recently fallen vacant, and over the protests of the chapter, which felt its rights were being violated, succeeded in installing Bugenhagen there. From 1523 through the turbulent years that followed Bugenhagen remained as the pastor of the city church.

Of all the reformers in Wittenberg, Bugenhagen was the first to marry. In 1522, after courting briefly one woman, he married another instead. When Luther in 1525 decided to follow Bugenhagen's example, it was Bugenhagen who performed the ceremony and who defended the marriage of Christian clergy in print. In a very real sense it was Bugenhagen and not Luther who founded the Lutheran manse.

Bugenhagen was the great popularizer of the Lutheran reformation. Like Geiler von Kaysersberg he had the common touch, a gift for making difficult ideas clear and understandable to people who lacked the ability to follow an intricate argument or to distinguish subtle shades of difference. The lectern in the university was the proper place to juggle a paradox or balance a conundrum, not the pulpit. The preacher who missed his audience proved not that he had superior ammunition but only that he had bad aim.

Bugenhagen's gifts for popularization won him recognition far outside the city limits of Wittenberg. His commentaries on Scripture as well as his translation (1524) of Luther's New Testament into Low German gained him the favorable attention of Protestants in Hamburg, who wished to call him to the pulpit of the Church of Saint Nicholas. The city council, however, balked at the appointment of Bugenhagen and the proposal came to nothing. Bugenhagen was not bitter at the rebuff and even wrote for the Lutherans in Hamburg one of his most important works, Von dem Christenloven und rechten guden Werken, a lucid and popular explanation of the main points of Lutheran theology.

Luther always regarded Bugenhagen (or Pomeranus, as he liked to call himself) as one of the most capable theologians he knew. In part this admiration for Bugenhagen grew out of the fact that Bugenhagen agreed with him on every chief point of doctrine. No one was more faithful to Luther in the quarrels that troubled the church than Pomeranus. He stood with Luther against Zwingli when the question was the Lord's Supper⁴Close and against Johannes Agricola when the question was the nature of Christian freedom.

But Bugenhagen was not simply an echo chamber in which the ideas of Martin Luther could reverberate with a minimum of static interference. He was a gifted organizer who translated the theology of Luther into the structures of congregational life and who, by doing so, actually carried Luther's reformation one step further. Luther did not begin, as Calvin did, with the doctrine of the church and then move from there to a consideration of the status of the individual believer. Rather, his doctrine of the church and his concept of the believer developed together.

Luther stressed the personal and intensely individual character of the act of faith. Everyone, as Luther pungently put it, must do his own believing, just as everyone must do his own dying. However, people of faith find, when they believe, that they are not alone. They belong to a great company of people who have experienced the wrath and mercy of God. The church is the communion of believers, created and nurtured by the Word of God. It is by the proclamation of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments in this company that faith is kindled and nurtured. For Luther both sides of the paradox must stand: without faith no church; without church no faith.

Just as faith does not rest on any human institution, so too the church is independent of its various institutional forms. Catholics are wrong to insist that the hierarchy and the visible, juridical structures of the church are in any sense necessary to salvation. Similarly, Anabaptists are wrong to insist that their voluntary associations are the only genuine structures for the authentic existence of the true church of Christ. The church of Christ is pluriform and can thrive in a wide variety of ecclesiastical structures.

Because faith is invisible, the true church is a scattered and invisible fellowship as well. That does not mean that there are no distinguishing marks by which the church may be differentiated from other human communities. After all, while faith is invisible, love is not. The church is invisible in its faith but visible in its works.

Luther could list as many as seven marks of the church, though he generally preferred to settle on the two principal marks, the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments. And yet, though Luther could list marks of the church, his attitude toward visible institutions was still ambiguous. The marks do not prove that the true church is present; they mark out the space in which the event of the church takes place. They are like the signs ornithologists may post around a valley to indicate that a rare bird is in the habit of nesting there. They do not mean to imply that every moose one may meet in that valley is a robin. Where the Word of God is preached and the sacraments are administered, one may dare to believe that the true church is to be found. That does not mean that the true church is simply identifiable with the local congregation—though on occasion it may be.

The local congregation does not have the right to be called a church, in the strictest sense of the term, because it is not filled with true believers to the exclusion of all unbelievers. Or, to make that judgment even sharper, since the line between faith and unbelief runs through believers and not simply between believers and unbelievers, the congregation does not have the right to be called a church because it is not a place of unmixed faith. Even the believers are just and sinful at the same time. The congregation is called a church because the true church is hidden in it. The congregation contains believers as a penny contains some copper. But the alloy in the penny is not copper, just as the unbelievers are not members of the church, even though they are part of the congregation.

Luther was opposed to any attempt to separate the true believers from the rest of the congregation, the invisible community of faith from the visible institution. The Anabaptists with their voluntary associations of true believers failed to understand that the revelation of God is always hidden under the form of its opposite. It is not evident to the eye that Jesus Christ is really the Messiah, that the church is really the body of Christ, or that Christians are really just. The evidence the eye sees is always ambiguous. If this were not so, then the church would have nothing to do with this world. Ambiguity may be dissolved in heaven; it is certainly not dissolved on earth. Even the greatest people of faith are still sinners. Their justice before God (coram Deo), which is real, is hidden before other human beings (coram hominibus) under the ambiguity of their sin.

Insofar as the church is a human institution, it must have some constitution or form of church order. That was for Luther simply a matter of common sense. But he attributed no special theological significance to the order or constitution chosen. If the church, however structured, is free to preach the word and administer the sacraments, then it may have whatever form of government it chooses. Luther would not even be opposed to the papacy if the pope were willing to restore freedom to the church. Liberty to preach the gospel and administer the sacraments is the essential thing. All else is theologically indifferent.

Bugenhagen perceived, as Luther did not, that the freedom of the congregation cannot be taken for granted but must be preserved by the judicious use of institutional forms. It is not simply the case that Reformation theology has consequences for the institutional life of the congregation that cannot be ignored (e.g., a Protestant liturgy can no longer speak of the Eucharist as a re‐presentation of the sacrifice of Christ for the sins of the people) but, just as importantly, the freedom of the congregation to act for itself in matters truly indifferent must be preserved in the constitution and structure of the church. A freedom that is unguarded is swiftly lost. Therefore, Bugenhagen could use the language of obligation and necessity in describing the polity and liturgy of Lutheran congregations—language that would have sounded strange had it come from Luther.

Bugenhagen became for the Lutherans, as Bucer and Calvin did for the Reformed, the theoretician of ecclesiastical life. He wrote church orders, liturgies, and instructions for various church bodies throughout northern Germany: for Braunschweig (1528),⁵Close Hamburg (1529), Lübeck (1531), Pomerania (1534), Denmark (1537), Holstein (1542), Braunschweig‐Wolfenbüttel (1543), and Hildesheim (1544). His command of Low German made him the obvious choice to travel throughout northern Germany on behalf of the other Wittenberg reformers who, like Luther, were Thuringians or Saxons or, like Melanchthon, South Germans. He assisted in the coronation of the Danish king Christian III and ordained superintendents to take the place of the Catholic bishops who had been deposed. Though he later declined an invitation to become a professor at the University of Copenhagen, he did assist in the reorganization of that center of learning.

In 1533 Bugenhagen earned his doctorate at the University of Wittenberg, and two years later he became a professor. In spite of his role as professor at the university and various calls to become a Lutheran bishop (from Schleswig and Kammin), he retained his position as pastor of the city church. In 1539 he assisted Luther in his revision of the German Bible and in 1544 published his own great commentary on the Psalms. His chief contribution, however, lay in his composition of church orders. These orders shaped the character of Lutheranism in northern Germany and in Denmark.

Two characteristics of Bugenhagen's church orders deserve special mention. The first is his persistent attempt to give as much autonomy as possible to the local congregation; the second is his effort to provide for some supervision through the provision for an office of superintendent. The superintendent was for Bugenhagen the evangelical equivalent of the Roman Catholic bishop. He was to oversee the pastors in his district to make certain that the doctrine they preached was “pure” and that the life they lived conformed to the gospel they preached. One can see in Bugenhagen's description of the task of the superintendent something of the Melanchthonian concern for the church of pure doctrine, which is not quite the same thing as Luther's concern. There is a conserving tendency in the church orders that is different from the more prophetic and pioneering character of Luther's own work.

When Luther died, Bugenhagen gave his funeral address on February 22, 1546. He took the death of Luther harder than some of the other men in Wittenberg and seemed to age more rapidly after that. Nevertheless, he remained by his post, even when the city was besieged and fell to the emperor. The emperor treated Bugenhagen with considerable respect, as did his ally Moritz of Saxony. Because Bugenhagen wished to remain at the university and in the city church, where he felt he was still needed, he adjusted to the terms of the Leipzig Interim with what seemed to many other Lutherans disgraceful ease. Both Duke Albert of Prussia and the deposed elector became alienated from Bugenhagen in the last years of his life, and there were even rumors that he had been bought off. The rumors were not true, and Bugenhagen tried to win back his friends with a commentary on Jonah in which he sharply criticized the Catholic church and charged it with the heresy of Montanism. But his effort was not a great success, and his last years were spent under a cloud.

Bugenhagen died on April 20, 1558, and was buried under the altar of the city church in Wittenberg. He had been throughout his life Luther's close friend and adviser. Luther was more than his friend; he was his fate. The whole direction of his life was changed by his encounter with Luther. The same thing, of course, could be said of Melanchthon. But Melanchthon, unlike Bugenhagen, emerged from the shadow cast by Luther to win a place in the sun for himself. There was no place in the sun for Bugenhagen. Yet his contribution was no less significant. Next to Luther he was the formative influence on the Lutheran church in northern Germany. With the regaining of much of South Germany in subsequent years for Roman Catholicism, the importance of his contribution was heightened rather than diminished. He was the one Lutheran reformer who grasped the importance of institutions for the life of faith.