King Charles V: Protestant Colloquy

Marburg Colloquy The year was 1529; and the Catholic forces of King Charles V (1500-1558) were nearing the end of their escapades in the south against the Muslim forces of Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566). In the North in the town of Marburg, Germany, the Swiss and German Protestants planned a meeting to form alliances and unite against the Catholic regime under the Pope and Charles V. For four days (October 1-4) the Protestant leaders of the day met at Marburg Castle by order of Landgrave Philip of Hesse (1504-1567) and conversed with each other with the ultimate goal of deciding common rules of the Protestant religion. Without a unified creed, there would be no alliance between all the disparate factions of the Protestant faith.
Representing the Luther based following were Martin Luther (1483-1547) and Philip Melanchthon (1487-1560) and the Zwinglians were represented by their leader Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) and his “right hand,” John Oecolampadius (1482-1531). Martin Bucer (1491-1551), another great reformer of the day, served as the unifier. Philip of Hesse wanted to unify all followers of the Protestant faith and create an alliance of German and Swiss Reformers. However, his alliance would have been defensive: rather than mounting an all-out war campaign against the Catholics, Hesse sought a unified Protestant following that would focus solely on defending their own lands. Martin Luther was at the head of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. He sought to create an official treatise that provided for the defense of individual Protestant cities and towns by a larger, more organized force.
Philip Melanchthon and Martin Luther were both from the town of Wittenberg, Germany. Luther had been on Charles V’s hit list for 10 years after his refusal to surrender on the king’s terms and renounce his ideas. Ulrich Zwingli, the leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, was from Zurich, Switzerland and John Oecolampadius was from Basel, Switzerland. Zwingli was a growing irritation to the Pope and Charles and would later die as a result of his revolutionary and his so-called “heretical” ideals. Martin Bucer was from Strasbourg, France (very close to the disputed border between France and Germany) and served as mediator between the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican reformers. All of these men had been excommunicated by the Pope. In order for the Protestant movement to take place there were a series of fifteen sacraments, called the Fifteen Articles of Faith or the Marburg Articles, which the leaders must have agreed upon.
Without complete agreement on these 15 Articles, a true union of the Protestant factions would fail against the Catholics. The congregation made it through fourteen of these sacraments with little issue before conflicts arose surrounding the 15th. Zwingli, Luther, and their colleagues disagreed on how the Eucharist or Lords Supper should be viewed. Zwingli viewed the Lords Supper as a symbolic ceremony where eating of the bread and drinking of the wine symbolized Jesus’ flesh and blood merely for the purpose of commemorating and remembering the Savior and his sacrificial act. Luther on the other hand believed that at the moment of presenting and blessing the Eucharist, the previously normal bread and wine became holy, equal to the actual flesh and blood of the Christ, and that Jesus was thenceforth in the presence of the people at the ceremony. Zwingli argued that Jesus was not omnipresent and was up in heaven watching you partake in the Lords Supper and acknowledging it. Luther argued that the phrase “hoc est corpus meum” meant “this is my body,” and was meant to be taken literally. Zwingli countered that “hoc est corpus meum” meant instead “this signifies my body,” and emphasized the symbolism of the act rather than the literal presence of the Christ. At the end of the
sessions Philip asked Luther to compile the fifteen into a single document and have each theologian sign it (over 60 in all). Luther compiled them and had the first fourteen written as they were commonly accepted as were but for the fifteenth he wrote “at present we are not agreed as to whether the true body and blood (of Christ) are bodily present in the bread and wine.” At the end of all this Luther and Zwingli grew to hate each other over the disagreement, and Luther especially spoke out publicly of his dislike of Zwingli. Bucer, serving as the mediator between the two sides, still believed a unity of common belief could unite the two feuding groups of Protestants; unfortunately for the vying factions, this would never be. The Luther-vs-Zwingli feud led to a permanent split between the two groups because of their unwillingness to reach a compromise on the Lords Supper, and their disagreement would affect all future Lutheran and Zwinglian followers (who cannot agree on the proper theology of the Eucharist to this day). At times, the disagreement between the two factions has contributed to acts of persecution toward other groups of Protestants (such as Anabaptists), leading to extreme intolerance in some cases. This split also left the Protestants military forces divided (and inherently weaker) against the returning Catholic armies of Charles V.
Two years after the Marburg Colloquy, Zwingli would die in a Catholic victory against Protestant forces near Kappel, Switzerland.
Luther would continue to lead the German Protestants until 1547 when he died of an apoplectic seizure. Bucer would later print volumes and works that pertained to his views of the conflict at Marburg. He argued that the disagreement over the Lords Supper should not stop the Protestant unification as the faith had much bigger concerns, mainly defense against the Catholics. He also argued that the Catholic and Protestant faiths shouldn’t be divided by their differences of opinion regarding the Christian Doctrine and that followers of either faith shouldn’t be charged with counts of Heresy by the officials of the other. After all was said and done Protestantism became fairly popular and is a major part of the Christian religion of today as we know it; and it continues to thrive and
grow.

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