9 - Bucer

Summary

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Martin Bucer (1491-1551) came from an artisan family in Alsace - then part of Germany - at Séléstat (Schlettstadt), south of Strasbourg. After a twenty-eight-year career, becoming a major reformer, he died exiled in England. Reared by his grandfather because of the migration of his parents, Bucer acquired a progressive schooling at the local prestigious humanist Latin school of Schlettstadt. Further education was guaranteed on entering the Dominican order there in 1507. Ordained at Mainz in 1516, he demitted his vows in 1521, becoming a secular priest. From 1517 till 1521 he had studied at Heidelberg University, also acting as tutor and lector in the local Dominican seminary. He had, in addition, developed an enthusiasm for Erasmian Christian humanism. Encountering Luther at the Disputation of Heidelberg in 1518, Bucer experienced a religious and theological seachange. He perceived Luther as providing a cutting edge to what Erasmus advocated; both were lights of the gospel, showing the way from a depleted church, an atrophied theology, and a disorientated spirituality to the purer faith and love of original Christianity. Anxiety about the Cologne Dominican inquisitor, Hoogstraten, to whom he had been reported, helped Bucer to decide to flee the monastery in early 1521. Subsequently, his prospects were uncertain, though he networked with sympathizers with the humanist and evangelical causes, Erasmians and ‘Martinians’. He was in the vicinity of the Diet of Worms when Luther was sentenced, obtaining his release there from the Dominicans at the time. Having secured the patronage of knights such as Sickingen and Hutten, during their religious and political agitation, Bucer was provided in 1522 with pastoral charges at Landstuhl, near Kaiserslautern, and then Wissembourg (Weissenburg) in northern Alsace.