ZWICKAU, PROPHETS. — Three visionaries from this small town in Saxony—the weavers Nicola Storch and Tommaso Drechsel, and the student Marco Thomae, known as Stubner—who, claiming to have been directly called by the Holy Spirit to teach, strengthened the radical iconoclastic party in Wittenberg, aggravating the religious and social disorders.
They had been initiated into the prophetic-millenarian interpretation of the Bible by Tommaso Münzer, who had been sent as a preacher to Z. by Luther himself; from him they had learned the principle of the primacy of the spirit over the letter, that the inner word was worth more than the external word read or heard, and that those enlightened by the Spirit were to form closely united communities, called to establish Christ’s kingdom on earth and his judgment upon unbelievers. True believers were to be rebaptized as a sign of their conscious faith, since the Baptism of infants had no value; just as Baptism, the Eucharist too had only a symbolic meaning (the Zwinglian conception); salvation derived neither from the opus operatum of the Sacraments nor from the Lutheran faith of trust, but from personal commitment to the practice of God’s commandments, interpreted, however, according to inner illumination. Every existing distinction and institution was condemned, not only in the Church but also in civil society; consequently, their kingdom of Christ excluded all private property and admitted polygamy, as a singular interpretation of the “liberty of the children of God”; this kingdom was to be governed by 12 apostles and 72 disciples, in order to reproduce the structure of the apostolic Church. In 1521, after Münzer’s flight from Z., who had been their supporter among the ruling class, they—preaching revolutionary ideas to the lower classes—were expelled through the joint intervention of the ecclesiastical and civil authorities. They thus transferred the center of their propaganda to Wittenberg, where, in Luther’s absence (then concealed at the Wartburg to evade execution of the ban of Worms), the radicals, under the leadership of Carlostadio, had gained the upper hand, though opposed only feebly by Melantone. He had received the newcomers with consideration; they immediately supplied further arguments for the polemic against the old Church, while also challenging Luther’s claim to have truly reformed II. The prophets of Z. aggravated the disorders already under way so alarmingly that Luther himself intervened to oppose them with the work Faithful Admonition to All Christians to Beware of Disorders and Insurrections (1522). Expelled from Wittenberg, where they had won numerous adherents even within the University, they went to Thuringia, preaching Anabaptism there successfully in the countryside; here Storch was one of the leaders of the Peasants’ War and, following its defeat, suffered the same death as the other insurgents.