Johannes Oecolampadius

Reformer of Basel, 1482–1531

Johannes Oecolampadius was the reformer of Basel, the scholar who stood beside Zwingli at Marburg, and the pastor who welcomed the Waldensian barbes as brethren. His family name was Hausschein, which he put into Greek as Oecolampadius, “light of the house.” Merle d’Aubigné describes a man “of a mild and pacific disposition,” whose “chief pleasure was to labour in his study, and produce concord among Christians.”1

From Weinsberg to the Cloister

He was born in 1482 at Weinsberg in Franconia, the only surviving child of wealthy parents. His father intended him first for business and then for the law, but on his way home from studying law at Bologna he turned to theology.2 At Basel he became the friend of Erasmus, who told him, “In the Holy Scriptures … one thing only ought to be sought, viz., Jesus Christ.”3 At the end of 1518 he was called to Augsburg as cathedral preacher and declared himself for Luther. Seeking quiet for study and prayer, he entered a Brigittine monastery near Augsburg on April 23, 1520, having first asked the brothers, “Can I live among you according to the Word of God?” Within two years Eck’s party was threatening to arrest him, and friends carried him off on horseback. “I have sacrificed the monk,” he wrote, “and have regained the Christian.”4

The Reformer of Basel

After a few months under the protection of Franz von Sickingen at the Ebernburg, where he read the Gospels and Epistles to the people in German, he arrived in Basel on November 16, 1522. In 1523 he was appointed to the university and as preacher at St. Martin’s. Crowds filled the church, and even Erasmus was forced to admit, “Oecolampadius triumphs.”5 He defended the evangelical cause against Johann Eck at the Disputation of Baden in 1526 and joined Zwingli, Bucer, and Capito at the Disputation of Bern in 1528.6 In February 1529, after years of his preaching and disputing, the citizens of Basel forced the issue; the council abolished the Mass, removed the images, and formally adopted the Reformation on April 1, 1529. Oecolampadius then drew up a church order and a system of discipline, and argued, against the council, that excommunication belonged to the church rather than to the magistrate.7

At Marburg

Oecolampadius held with Zwingli, though “not slavishly,” that the Lord’s Supper is a spiritual eating, and at the Colloquy of Marburg in October 1529 he argued the case against Luther.8

It cannot be denied that there are figures of speech in the Word of God; as John is Elias, the rock was Christ, I am the vine. The expression This is my body, is a figure of the same kind.9 Johannes Oecolampadiusat Marburg, 1529

Even the Lutheran Justus Jonas, who found Zwingli rustic and Bucer foxlike, saw in Oecolampadius “a natural goodness and admirable meekness.”10 The next year, when two Waldensian barbes came to his study in Basel, he examined their faith frankly and then gave them his hand: “Christ … is in you as he is in us, and we love you as brethren.”11

Marriage and Death

In 1528, at forty-five, he married Wibrandis Rosenblatt, a young widow of Basel. “Pray the Lord to give us a long and happy marriage,” he wrote to Farel. They had three years together.12 Zwingli fell at Kappel in October 1531, and the grief of it, Foxe thought, hastened Oecolampadius’s own end.13 On November 23 he called his small children to his bed, “Eusebius, Irene, Alethea,” and told them, “love God who is your Father.” That night, with the pastors of Basel around him, a friend asked whether the light troubled him. He laid his hand on his heart and answered:

There is light enough here.14 Johannes OecolampadiusNovember 1531

At daybreak he repeated the fifty-first Psalm, said, “Lord Jesus, help me!” and died as the sun rose. He was forty-nine.15 He left behind commentaries on the prophets, an emphasis on the Old Testament that d’Aubigné thought marked the whole Reformed tradition, and the draft confession that his successor Oswald Myconius completed as the First Confession of Basel (1534).16 The light of the house had shone where God had set it.

Cautions

Foxe calls him “the preacher of the city of Strasbourg”; he was the preacher of Basel, as Foxe himself says elsewhere. Nichols gives his death as November 23, 1531; d’Aubigné places the farewell to his children on the 23rd and his death at dawn the next morning, the usual date of November 24. Nichols also calls Farel “his friend in Geneva,” though Farel was not settled in Geneva at the time of the marriage.17 D’Aubigné offers a fair judgment of his limits: his meekness “yielded too much to the energetic will of the minister of Zurich.”18

Other Reformers   Ulrich Zwingli

Notes

  1. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, vol. 2 (Glasgow: William Collins, 1846), bk. 8. James T. Dennison Jr. glosses the name as “shining light” or “house light”: Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2008), introduction to the First Confession of Basel (1534). ↩
  2. D’Aubigné, Sixteenth Century, vol. 2, bk. 8; vol. 3 (New York: American Tract Society, 1848), bk. 11, chap. 8, which names Weinsberg as “his native place.” Dennison gives the dates 1482–1531. ↩
  3. D’Aubigné, Sixteenth Century, vol. 2, bk. 8. ↩
  4. D’Aubigné, Sixteenth Century, 3: bk. 11, chap. 8. ↩
  5. D’Aubigné, Sixteenth Century, 3: bk. 11, chap. 8; Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 1: introduction to the First Confession of Basel (1534). ↩
  6. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 4th ed. (London: John Day, 1583), vol. 2, on the disputations of Baden and Bern. Online at EEBO-TCP. Dennison dates Baden May 21–June 8, 1526: Reformed Confessions, vol. 1, introduction to the Ten Theses of Bern (1528). ↩
  7. Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 1: introduction to the First Confession of Basel (1534). ↩
  8. Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 1: introduction to the First Confession of Basel (1534); Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chap. on Zwingli. ↩
  9. D’Aubigné, History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, vol. 4 (New York: Robert Carter, 1846), bk. 13. ↩
  10. Ibid. ↩
  11. D’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, vol. 3 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864), bk. 5, chap. 5. See The Waldensians. ↩
  12. Stephen J. Nichols, The Reformation: How a Monk and a Mallet Changed the World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), chap. “Women in Black Too.” After his death Wibrandis married Wolfgang Capito and then Martin Bucer. ↩
  13. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2. ↩
  14. D’Aubigné, Sixteenth Century, 4: bk. 16. ↩
  15. Ibid.; Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2. ↩
  16. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2; d’Aubigné, Sixteenth Century, 4: bk. 16; Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 1: introduction to the First Confession of Basel (1534). ↩
  17. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2; Nichols, The Reformation, chap. “Women in Black Too”; d’Aubigné, Sixteenth Century, 4: bk. 16. ↩
  18. D’Aubigné, Sixteenth Century, 4: bk. 16. ↩