The following are excerpts from:
Robert Kolb, Martin Luther as
Prophet, Teacher, and Hero: Images of the Reformer, 1520-1620 (Texts and
Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought], Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Baker Books; Carlisle, U.K.: Paternoster Press, 1999)
In
1520 Ulrich Zwingli—later no friend of Luther at all—wrote that he and others
in the circles of south German and Swiss humanists regarded Martin Luther as a
contemporary Elijah (Ulrich Zwingli, letter to Oswald Myconius, 4 January, 1520).
(p. 17)
Even
more prominent in [Cyriakus] Spangenberg’s picture of Luther was the ascription
of the prophetic office. This motif had already been thoroughly expounded by
another of Luther’s students at Wittenberg, Andreas Musculus, who was professor
at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder was also engaged in transforming the
authority of the mythical figure of Martin Luther into authority for his
writings. In the preface of a treatise “on the devil’s tyranny, power, and
might, particularly in these last days,” published in 1561. Musculus examined
the prophecy of Malachi (4:5) that Elijah would return before the last day.
Echoing Luther’s own judgment, he explained why that prophecy would not be
fulfilled by Elijah himself brought back from the dead, but rather by one who
would exercise the same office and responsibility. Just as John the Baptist had
been called a true Elijah in his day (Matt. 11:14; 17:10-12), so Martin Lither was
a genuine Elijah whose coming had signaled the imminent approach of the end of
the world. The figure of Luther had become a commonplace in the eschatological
delineation of the era; viewed as a signpost of the horizon of human history,
his person and message were already altering the apocalyptic imagination.
Musculus
proceeded to compare Luther with the original Elijah, in much the same fashion
in which Spangenberg would. The ancient spokesman of God and the contemporary
Reformer possessed the same spirit and teaching, and both had stood against the
priests of Baal, Luther in his opposition to pope, monks, and priests. They
lived in similar times when God’s teaching and true worship had been covered by
terrible darkness. Both exhibited the strength of God, the strength of one poor
individual man with the sword of the Spirit against the four hundred fifty
priests of Baal and against the might of popes and emperors. “Since the
apostolic era no greater man than Luther, who had so many great and superior
spiritual gifts bestowed by God, has lived or come to earth,” Musculus
concluded. (pp. 51-52)
[Cyriakus
] Spangenberg agreed with those who at the beginning of the Reformer’s carer
had regarded Luther as a modern-day apostle and evangelist. Three of his
sermons on Luther, preached in 1564 and 1565, analyzed his significance in such
terms. When the Swiss theologian Henrich Bullinger disputed the claim that
Luther was an apostle for his age, Spangenberg undertook a refutation of
Bullinger. He traced Luther’s struggles as a youth to find Christ. As in the
case of Peter, it was not flesh and blood, but the heavenly Father, who
revealed Christ to the despairing monk (Matt. 16:17). Like Paul, Luther had
been raised by pious parents and sent at an early age to school. Like Paul, he
relied on his own works as a Pharisaic monk. Like Paul, he was converted by God’s
miraculous working. Luke Paul’s his teachings were based solely on the
Scripture, was absolutely certain, and focused on Christ alone. The two of them
shared similar gifts of wisdom, prophecy, disputation, courage, and spirit. They
both had the same virtues—faithfulness, zeal, candor, patience, joy in the
Spirit, constancy, humility, prudence, and mercy. Both suffered persecution at
the hands of the religious and political leaders of their time.
In
the next sermon in the series Spangenberg sketched twelve ways in which Luther
resembled the evangelist John. He regarded his mentor as a true evangelist, a
German Cicero and Demosthenes, because of his skill in presenting the gospel.
Luke John, Luther could be called “the beloved of the Lord.” John had prepared
the way for the paschal Lamb, and Luther prepared the way for the Lamb as he
was about to return to judge all things (here Spangenberg’s references seem to
point to John the Baptist rather than the evangelist). Both lay at Christ’s
breast. As Christ commended his mother into John’s care, so the Lord commended
the church into Luther’s care. Both fought heretics and both clearly taught
the two natures of Christ. Both fought heretics, and both clearly taught the
two natures of Christ. Their writings are similar because Luther depended on
John to a great extent. Both prophesied the future, both possessed any gifts,
both had their own Patmos (to designate the Wartburg during his period of
hiding there, Luther chose the name of the island on which the evangelist had
spent his last days), and both brought the erring to repentance and faith. Both
longed for the second coming of Christ. As artificial as some of these comparisons
seem to moderns, they represent an honest effort to convey the significance of
am an who had changed the world for the likes of a Cyriakus Spangenberg.. . . Spangenberg regarded Luther as a true Elijah.
He noted six similarities between Luther and Elijah. Elijah means “strong man”
in Hebrew, and Martin is the Latin equivalent of “He(e)rmann,” man of hosts.
Both received their strength from the Lord and exhibited it. Elijah came form a
small, insignificant village just as Luther cam from modest Eisleben. Both
lived in times if idolatry and persecution. God performed miracles to preserve
the lives of both, and just as Elijah had raised the son of the woman of
Zarephath (1 Kings 17:21-22), so Luther had raised up those who were in the
grip of death under the papacy. Both Elijah and Luther had exhibited the seven
gifts of the Holy Spirit. Their greatest similarity in Spangenberg’s view,
however, was that both proclaimed God’s law and God’s gospel. Throughout the
sermons on Luther, Spangenberg used the simple rhetorical device of comparison
to reinforce his larger-than-life picture of the teacher whom he had experienced
as God’s prophet. These comparisons with biblical figures ascribed to Luther
the authority of the prime interpreter of Scripture, authority which, Spangenberg
was convinced, he exercised as a living voice of God’s gospel. (pp. (pp. 50-51, 54)
Beyond
Elijah and Enoch, the angel of Revelation 14:6-7 stood ready for use as a
symbol of Luther’s significance. In 1522 his fellow Augustinian Michael Stiefel
published a song entitled “On the Christ-Formed, Properly Grounded Teaching of
Doctor Martin Lither.” Luther’s message struck a sympathetic chord in Stiefel’s
mind, strongly influenced by later medieval apocalyptic longing as he was. The
first of the thirty-two stanzas of his poetic appeal for Luther’s cause played
on Luther’s name as it recalled the angel that John had described in Revelation
14: “John wrote for us of an angel who would set forth God’s Word with complete
charity [gantz luter offenbar].” Stiefel set the stage for an eschatological battle
in which this angel was to engage the wolf in God’s stall, that is, the pope. A
reference to Daniel’s apocalyptic visions (8:26) makes it quite clear that
Stiefel believed contemporary events were transpiring in an eschatological setting.
Nonetheless, Stiefel did not lift Luther to the heavenly plane. Instead, he
interpreted the angel as someone who would come “with an eternal gospel to
proclaim to those who dwell on earth” (Rev. 14:6). For Siefel, God was working
within the context of human history. He was sending his angel to proclaim the
gospel and to confront his foes. Luther had done both with his fearless confession
of the truth at Worms. (pp. 29-30)
According
to popular tales, Luther fulfilled several prophecies. The astronomer Johannes
Lichtenberger had prophesied that a “small prophet” would be born in 1484, and
some believed that Luther was indeed that prophet even though Luther had dismissed
Lichtenberger’s claim as fantasy. Much more popular was the prophecy
constructed out of utterances of Jerome of Prague and John Huss as they were condemned
to the stake at the Council of Constance in 1415. Huss predicted that although
his goose (in Czech “Huss”) would be cooked, eagles and falcons with greater
power and insight than he had would arise to complete his work of reform. His
colleague, Jerome of Prague, expressed his wish to see what the church would be
like a century later. From these two statements came the popular belief that
Huss had predicted that a swan would come to grace Christendom a hundred years
after his burning. Robert Scribner had traced the evolution of this prophecy
from Luther’s own designation of himself as a swan singing the “clear, sweet
song of the evangelical message,” through Bugenhagen’s phrasing of Huss’s
prophecy in the words “You may burn a goose, but in a hundred years will come a
swan you will not be able to burn,” to the assertion in 1556 that this sentence
was uttered by Huss as he was taken to his execution. Both populace and
theologians took this prophecy very seriously as a confirmation that Luther was
indeed a special agent and hero whom God had commissioned against the papacy for
the reform of his church.
Johannes
Mathesius listed two other predictions which he regarded as certain indications
of Luther’s role as a divine prophet. As Luther lay deathly ill at some time
during his youth, an old man had prophesied that he would not die but become an
important man. And while imprisoned in Eisenach in 1483, a Franciscan heretic,
Johann Hilten, predicted that another reforming monk would be sent to the
church in 1516. In the popular imagination Luther clearly it into God’s plan. (pp.
83-84)
