Founding documents of the Reformed tradition: Works of Oecolampadius (5 vols.)

For the last 18 years I have been teaching at a seminary that was founded to equip pastors in the German (i.e., German-speaking Swiss) Reformed tradition. For this entire new millennium, the seminary and the university in which it is now nested have been led by two successive presidents who have had the good sense to study carefully and honor the mission of the university's founders. For my part, since my first of two semester-long sabbaticals (in 2012), I have been laboring over the founding documents of the (German-speaking Swiss) Reformed tradition itself, many of which are now, in the Works of Oecolampadius series (B&N Press, 2017—2026), available for the first time in English.

  

Why claim such a distinction for the works of this too little known Reformer? 

• In 1512, when John Calvin was only three years old and five years before Luther's 95 Theses, Oecolampadius preached that the penitent thief on the cross was "justified by faith."
• In 1516, Oecolampadius worked on Erasmus' team of scholars on the Novum Instrumentum Omne, the first edition of the (parallel) Latin-Greek New Testament on which the Reformers would come to base their interpretive work. Oecolampadius, who was asked to write the Epilogue to this seminal resource, was the only eventual Reformer to be part of this team. 
• In April 1517, Oecolampadius issued, On the Paschal Laughter, an astute and multi-lingual critique of the popular misuse of the sermon for comic relief after Lent.
• From 1518 — 1522, Oecolampadius produced a number of translations of the Greek fathers, including Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom, whose style of exposition inspired both Zwingli, Capito, and Oecolampadius to reclaim serial lectio continua preaching.
• In 1521, in order to counter the abuses of the confessional rite, Oecolampadius issued a liberating treatise asserting: The paradox, that Christian confession should not be onerous. Eventually regular, corporate confession in public worship would replace the private confessional.
• In 1522, Oecolampadius was the first to translate the mass, read the scriptures, and preach in the vernacular, thus reforming both Word and Sacrament within a six-week span, some four months before Luther's September Testament (German New Testament) was published. 
• In 1523, Oecolampadius lectured through the Book of Isaiah to packed auditoriums, using all three sacred languages: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin; he also preached a continuous exposition of 1John more thoroughly than anyone in the Christian era, including Augustine, had done before. Both became landmark works of biblical interpretation that were applauded in Wittenberg and thus represent the height of Reformed scholarship in the early period of evangelical unity. 
• On March 19, 1525, Oecolampadius began his sermon, "On the Power of Christ over Satan," with the following: "The singular failing in which is all misfortune is ignorance of God and of ourselves." Eleven years later, in the same month (March 1536), the first edition of Calvin's Institutes was published, which began: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists in two parts: The knowledge of God and of ourselves.”
• c. 1525-26, Oecolampadius drafted and circulated the Kinderbericht — the earliest children's catechism — from the Reformation; this would later, after his death, be developed into the Basel Confession of 1534.
• In the final pages of his recent biography of Zwingli, Yale professor Bruce Gordon acknowledges that between Zwingli and Oecolampadius, the latter was the stronger theologian. 

This series (as it stands thus far) concludes with a sampling of sermons, popular in their day, and other writings on the sacrament, but stops short of a comprehensive translation of all the works that arose during the controversy over the Lord's Supper, which eventually resulted in the famous rupture at the Marburg Colloquy (1529). 

The aim of this series is no ivory-tower exercise, but an answer to the oft-posed questions: Where did the Reformed tradition come from? What are its origins and priorities? What does it mean to be Reformed? The series offers the most complete portrait of Oecolampadius, "the Reformer of Preaching," that we have in English; it arises from the primary sources in which key reforms were first made, several ahead of Luther himself. Though admittedly one of many pivotal characters among the first generation of Reformers, which includes Zwingli, Capito, Bucer, and others, Oecolampadius' series of "firsts" were truly groundbreaking and foundational for the Reformed tradition, of which Calvin himself was an heir and eventually became "the theologian."

Meanwhile, here are a handful of other resources that will shed further light on this consummate Reformer and on the origins and priorities of the Reformed tradition:

    

At the headwaters of the Reformed tradition

 ... we have this summary statement from Karl Barth's colleague on the Divinity faculty at the University of Basel: 

Luther becomes a reformer because he cannot reach the assurance of salvation in the system of the Roman Catholic church; Oecolampadius becomes a reformer because, in the Roman Catholic church, he does not find the new creature in Christ sufficiently realized. For Luther it is about justification; Oecolampadius says in connection with 1Thessalonians 4:3, “God’s will is our sanctification.” With Luther, faith stands in the foreground, with Oecolampadius, that which flows from faith, the “piety,” the “sanctity,” the “charity,” both individually and in the totality of the “mystical body of Christ.” Luther represents a Christianity more strongly characterized by Paul, Oecolampadius by John. 

—Ernst Staehelin, Breakthrough to the Reformation, pp. 128-129.

In case you were ever wondering what it means to belong to the Reformed tradition, this, I would suggest, is what it originally meant.

The First Year in Basel (corrected edition is up)

Corrected edition is up, just as the last days of 2023 (500th anniversary of Oecolampadius' first year in Basel) tick down. 

The First Year in Basel contains the earliest German mass (published three years before Luther's), the next nine letters between Oecolampadius and Zwingli (the first two having appeared in previous volume: The Sermon on the Vernacular and the Correspondence with Hedio), excerpts from the famous Isaiah lectures, three prefaces to his Chrysostom translations (including those to the Psegmata and the 66 Genesis homilies), the four Theses for a Disputation, a painful rant from Capito against his colleague Hedio and Oecolampadius' pastor response, and his long letter to Bernhard Adelmann On the Distributions of Alms (or not discriminating among the poor). All (or most of it) "first-time-in-English" stuff. Perhaps the latter might make for instructive reading in Basel at the Bank of International Settlements? That may be too much to hope for. But certainly Presbyterian "Matthew 25" churches should read this.

A Short Course in Preaching

Subtitle: Daily Reading as the Seedbed of Sermons.

It's looking like I'll be teaching preaching a lot to various constituencies and at various levels in the near and foreseeable future, so I figured it was time to boil down the basics, as I see them, into a "short course in preaching." Includes a "Second Short Course" in the form of a sermon on the Benedictus, and a first English translation of the ten summary paragraphs of Heinrich Bullinger's 1556 Summa, which was itself a summary of his famous sermon series, Decades. The Decades were as important and popular as Calvin's Institutes for several centuries and generations. So imagine having the Institutes boiled down—twice—into seven pages. I have included these paragraphs here as a way of (unofficially) supplementing the Book of Confessions as a tool for dogmatic testing. 

 

"Sown on Rock": Oecolampadius' Sermon on the Vernacular (1522) is finally — after 500 years — in English translation

The late Phyllis Tickle famously observed that, every 500 years, the Church cleans out its attic. Well, here you go, Church: a 500-year old classic, now translated into English for the first time. 

If any one sermon is emblematic of the Reformation of preaching itself, this is it. Preached and promptly published in the spring of 1522, it made the biblical and practical case for reading and preaching in the local language. Oecolampadius, serving as chaplain for the household of Franz von Sickingen, noted how time was wasted in worship with the Latin readings, since no one understood them, and in fact they were read so poorly that those in attendance ridiculed the whole thing. But the Word of God himself wants to speak plainly his promises of eternal life and salvation to his people and, of course, to be understood, so the love of God for his people motivated Oecolampadius to read and preach in German. 

Rarely has a single sermon ever caused such a stir. To this sermon, preached three months before the publication of Zwingli's famous "Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God" (September 1522), can be traced the most important homiletical development in Reformation, a simple pastoral decision made by a chaplain and former monk who, at the time, was also reaching back 1000 (500 x 2) years or so into the church's attic and translating the sermons of the Greek fathers, especially Chrysostom, and refreshing the preaching office with the greatest examples of public proclamation in the Christian era. Sure enough, Oecolampadius' sermon itself, and the "Beautiful Letter" in which he explained his modest, common sense liturgical changes to his friend Caspar Hedio, became one of the great sermonic moments of all time.

To Hedio, Oecolampadius wrote of his service on the Ebernburg, "here I carry on sowing on rock," a clear reference to the quintessential parable of the Word, and thus to preaching itself. The parable of the sower, of course, as Jesus told it, promised no harvest from seed that falls on the path or among stones or thorns, but — another major point of emphasis in the sermon — the miracle of preaching is at work here. Yes, by a sheer miracle of God, when Jesus himself preaches with us as we preach, even a single seed, like this sermon, can strike such a strong root as to break through rock, find water, and bear a harvest to surpass all expectations. Has the last 500 years seen or heard a more seminal sermon than The Sermon on the Vernacular? 

The whole of Oecolampadius 1522 correspondence is included here, as is the balance of his letters with Hedio through 1525. Among the latter is Hedio's (1524) Foreword to his German translation of Oecolampadius' Sermons on the First Epistle of John. In the generous Supplement to this new volume the reader also finds the first English translation of Ernst Staehelin's exhaustive and groundbreaking 1916 essay on Oecolampadius' translations of the patriarchs.

 
Dedicated with thanksgiving to the Triune God for preachers of the Word everywhere.

BTW, Amazon's hardcover platform is still in Beta, so the two JO translations linked here (in hardcover with djs), plus this hardcover reprint of Sime's short double biography of Zwingli and Oecolampadius, are all available at Barnes & Noble. Paperback will go live in a day or so. Don't expect Amazon to list BN titles, though. I'm not sure "do unto others" has quite penetrated the greatest retailer on earth. For that reason, it would be most helpful if you would spread the word, link, like, share, gift, recommend, purchase, order through your local BN, ask your library to acquire it, shout it from the rooftops, all of the above, etc. Don't let Behemoths go unchallenged. But the current paragraph constitutes the major part of my very low-tech and organic marketing plan. May the Lord give the growth. Thank you and may the Lord be with you.

Liturgical Elements for Reformed Worship

Consisting of one RCL cycle, plus Year D ...

       

One colleague suggested issuing them in a slip case. Now that would be nice, wouldn't it!

Have you visited the LERW Facebook page?

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Lightning from the East: Liturgical Elements for Reformed Worship, Year A

I'm happy to introduce the latest volume in the Liturgical Elements series, this one for Year A, available now from Cascade Books. 

 

Coming soon to Amazon. Check back soon.