The Colloquy of Marburg

Marburg Castle, Hesse · October 1 to 4, 1529 · the only time Luther and Zwingli met face to face.

hey agreed on fourteen articles out of fifteen. On the fifteenth they agreed about almost everything except one sentence. And on that sentence the Reformation divided, and has stayed divided for five centuries.

Marburg is the most painful few days in the history of the Reformation. Not because anyone behaved disgracefully — the debate was more courteous than the pamphlet war that preceded it — but because two men who had recovered the same gospel from the same Scriptures, and who needed each other badly, discovered that they could not sit down at the same table.

Why They Met

The reason was political, and the politics were genuinely frightening.

At the Second Diet of Speyer in April 1529, the Catholic majority moved to revoke the toleration granted three years before. The evangelical princes and cities entered the formal protest that gave Protestants their name. Meanwhile Charles V's hands were coming free: he had turned back the Turks, come to terms with Francis I of France, and settled with the Pope. For the first time since Worms he was in a position to enforce the edict against Luther by arms.

Philip of Hesse, one of the ablest and most far-sighted of the evangelical princes, saw what was coming and concluded that the Protestant territories had to stand together or fall separately. The obstacle was that the Lutherans would not enter a military alliance with men whose doctrine they judged to be in error. A common confession had to come first. So Philip invited the theologians of Wittenberg, Zurich, Basel, and Strasbourg to his castle to settle the one question that divided them.

Zwingli came gladly; he had long wanted the alliance and did not regard the eucharistic difference as church-dividing. Luther came reluctantly, and said so. He suspected the whole enterprise of subordinating truth to strategy, and he was not entirely wrong about that.

The Men at the Table

From Wittenberg: Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Justus Jonas, and Caspar Cruciger. From Zurich: Huldrych Zwingli. From Basel: Johannes Oecolampadius. From Strasbourg: Martin Bucer and Caspar Hedio. Andreas Osiander of Nuremberg, Johannes Brenz of Schwäbisch Hall, and Stephan Agricola of Augsburg arrived on October 2.

Philip was present throughout, along with his court and a considerable audience of pastors and notables. Luther spent the Friday in private conference with Zwingli and Oecolampadius; it went nowhere, and a public discussion was arranged for six o'clock on Saturday morning.

The Debate

Luther began by chalking four words on the table and covering them with the velvet cloth: hoc est corpus meum — this is my body. Through the sessions that followed he would draw back the cloth and point. His position never moved from those words, and he did not think it was his business to move it. Christ had said is. Luther could not make it mean signifies without setting himself above the text.

Zwingli and Oecolampadius pressed from two directions. First from Scripture: our Lord's own words in John 6, that the flesh profits nothing and the Spirit gives life, and the plain fact that Scripture is full of figures — Christ is the vine, the door, the rock. Second from the creed: Christ ascended and is seated at the right hand of the Father, and a real human body is a body in one place.

Zwingli put the second argument as a syllogism. Luther himself acknowledged Christ's body to be finite; whatever is finite is in a place; Christ's body is not in the Supper as in a place; therefore it is not there. Luther's answer was that God knows modes of presence that are not local, and that the words of institution stand whether or not we can explain the manner.

Neither man was able to move the other, and by October 3 it was clear that neither would.

The Fifteen Articles

At Philip's request Luther then drew up fifteen articles, working from a set already prepared at Wittenberg which would shortly appear as the Seventeen Articles of Schwabach. The point was to establish on paper how much the two sides actually held in common. The answer surprised nearly everyone present.

Read that list slowly. The Trinity, the person of Christ, original sin, justification by faith alone, the Word and the Spirit, the sacraments, vocation, Christian liberty — the entire evangelical recovery is there, agreed and signed by both sides. A Reformed reader will recognize in it the substance that the Three Forms of Unity and the Westminster Standards would later set out at greater length.

Ten men subscribed the articles on October 3: Luther, Jonas, Melanchthon, Osiander, Agricola, and Brenz; Oecolampadius, Zwingli, Bucer, and Hedio.

Article Fifteen

The last article is the one worth studying closely, because it shows how narrow the breach actually was.

Both sides confessed together that the bread and the cup should both be given according to Christ's institution; that the Supper is a true sacrament of the body and blood of Christ; that spiritual partaking of that body and blood is necessary for every Christian; and that the sacrament, like the Word, was ordained by God so that the Spirit might stir up weak consciences to faith. The Zurich manuscript adds that the mass is not a work by which grace can be procured for anyone, living or dead.

Then comes the sentence they could not sign together: they had not reached agreement on whether the true body and blood of Christ are bodily present in the bread and wine.

And then, remarkably, the article does not end in anathema. It asks each side to show Christian love to the other so far as conscience permits, and both to pray that God would confirm them in the right understanding. They signed a document that admitted they were still praying about it.

What Was Actually at Stake

The dispute looks like a quarrel about a preposition. It was not. Underneath lay two different accounts of the person of Christ.

If the body of Christ can be present in, with, and under the bread wherever the Supper is celebrated, then the properties of His divine nature — omnipresence among them — must in some manner be communicated to His human nature. That is the doctrine the Lutheran churches would later codify in Article VIII of the Formula of Concord.

The Reformed answered that this dissolves the very humanity it means to honor. A body that is everywhere is not a body. Christ took real flesh, and real flesh is somewhere — at the Father's right hand, until He comes. That conviction is not a diminishing of the Supper but a safeguarding of the incarnation, and of the ascension as a real event rather than a change of metaphysical status.

What the Reformed then had to say, and what Zwingli said less adequately than his successors, is how believers truly feed on Christ if His body is in heaven. The answer the Reformed churches settled on is the Holy Spirit: by the Spirit, who dwells in Christ and in us, the believer is really and truly united to the Christ who is in heaven, so that the Supper is no bare memorial but a genuine communion. That is the teaching of the Heidelberg Catechism, of the Belgic Confession, and of Westminster, and it is Calvin's mature contribution rather than Zwingli's earliest formulation.

“A Different Spirit”

When the articles were signed, the Swiss asked to be recognized as brethren. Zwingli, by several accounts in tears, said there were no people on earth with whom he would rather be at one than the men of Wittenberg.

Luther refused. He would grant peace and charity; he would not grant the hand of brotherhood. His reason, given to Bucer, has echoed ever since: you have a different spirit than we do.

It is worth being careful here, in both directions. Luther was not being merely peevish. He genuinely believed that a man who could empty Christ's plain words of their sense had something wrong at the root, and that a false peace over the sacrament would corrupt everything downstream. That is a serious conviction seriously held.

But it was also, on any honest reading, a failure. Schaff, who admired Luther deeply, observed that the two men were not opposed as orthodox and heretic but were agreed in every fundamental article of the evangelical faith — and that Marburg itself proved it.¹ Luther had also badly misjudged his opponent, confusing Zwingli with Karlstadt and the radicals, and charging him with reducing the Supper to a common meal and the elements to empty signs — which was not Zwingli's position.

What Came of It

Philip's alliance failed on confessional grounds. When the evangelical estates came to Augsburg the following year, they did not come with one confession but with three: the Augsburg Confession from the Lutherans, the Tetrapolitan Confession from the four south German cities that could not sign Article X, and Zwingli's own Fidei Ratio, submitted separately and read by almost no one.

Zwingli died two years later at Kappel, still under Luther's censure. Bucer spent the rest of his life trying to repair the breach and achieved a partial settlement in the Wittenberg Concord of 1536. Calvin, a boy of twenty when the reformers met at Marburg, would in time give the Reformed doctrine its mature form and reach agreement with Zurich in the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549 — a Reformed unity, not a Protestant one.

The fifteen articles themselves had a longer life than the alliance. Reworked as the Schwabach Articles, they fed into the Augsburg Confession of 1530, and so into the whole Lutheran confessional tradition.

A Reformed Assessment

This site holds the Reformed confession, and on the substance of the fifteenth article we believe Zwingli and Oecolampadius had the better of the argument, though not always the better statement of it. Christ's body is a true body; the ascension means what it says; and the Spirit, not a suspension of Christ's humanity, is how believers feed on Him.

But there is a second thing to say, and a Reformed site should say it first about itself. Marburg is a standing rebuke to the way Christians handle real disagreement. Two men who agreed on the Trinity, the person of Christ, original sin, justification by faith alone, and the authority of Scripture — who each faced the prospect of dying for those convictions — parted over the manner of Christ's presence at a table He instituted for communion. The irony is not lost on anyone, and it should not be smoothed over.

The lesson is not that doctrine does not matter; Luther was right that it does, and the men who think every difference can be split are usually the ones who end up confessing nothing. The lesson is narrower and harder. It is that we must be able to say which differences divide the church and which do not, and that getting that judgment wrong has consequences measured in centuries. Article fifteen's own closing words — show Christian love, and keep praying for a common mind — were wiser than the men who signed them.

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