February 27 – March 1, 1525

Since the spring 1524, rebel peasant armies had been forming across the southern German countryside, aggrieved by increasing limitations that their lords seemed to be placing on their abilities to work for their own subsistence and enjoy the fruits of their labors. On February 27, delegates from several peasant armies assembled in the Upper Swabian town of Memmingen to articulate the most important causes they wanted to demand of their lords. They unified around a manifesto of “Twelve Articles” that they quickly published after the assembly and disseminated throughout southern Germany, where peasant uprisings subsequently broke out in larger number during the spring and summer of 1525, eventually mobilizing up to 300,000 peasants.

The Twelve Articles had been drafted by a journeyman tanner and furrier named Sebastian Lotzer, who had taken up itinerant preaching throughout the countryside, feeling empowered by Martin Luther’s ideas of the “priesthood of all believers” and the “freedom of a Christian” to assure the peasants that God’s law was on their side. An ordained evangelical pastor in Memmingen, Christoph Schappeler, likely added a preamble and scriptural citations for the articles. Once published, the Twelve Articles became the most prominent model for dozens of manifestos that volunteer peasant armies drafted in 1525 to assert the righteousness of their cause.¹

Although most of the articles concerned peasants’ economic circumstances, it is notable that the first two articles set out reforms that the peasants desired to see in their churches.  The authors repeatedly cast their economic and political agenda as a matter of restoring “godly law” to their communities, and they likely desired to reinforce the impression that “godly law” was their overarching cause by anchoring their political program in church reform from the start.

Article 1 set out a challenge to lords’ and bishops’ control over the appointment and discipline of parish churches’ shepherds. “First, it is our humble desire and request, and the intention and conviction of us all, that henceforth we want to have the full power for the whole congregation to select and elect its own pastor; and also the power to remove him if he acts improperly.”²  This request set out a vision of local church leadership based on congregational authority, rather than the hierarchical authority reflected in coordination of temporal rulers and bishops over the assignment of pastors. Thus, it posed a strong challenge to long-running customs of state involvement in church leadership.

That challenge applied to evangelical and Catholic rulers alike. Lords and town councils that had adopted evangelical theology still operated on a notion that they bore a responsibility for the care of their subjects’ souls (cura religionis), and they presumed that a primary device for this care was control of the appointment of pastors for the churches in their territories. In rejecting the Catholic clerical hierarchy, evangelical rulers actually shifted the appointment of clergy even more firmly under the management of temporal government.

The peasants thus spoke the language of evangelical soteriology while attempting to indicate that evangelicals’ emphasis on salvation by faith should be expressed in their ecclesiology, as well: they wanted their leaders to make room for the people of a congregation—who were the ones who heard their pastors’ sermons on a weekly basis—to hold the pastors directly accountable to preach the Gospel in a way that led people to voluntarily place their faith in Christ for their salvation. “This elected pastor should preach the gospel to us purely and clearly,” they wrote. “[O]nly through true faith can we come to God, and only through his mercy will we be saved. Thus such an elected leader and pastor is necessary for us and is grounded in Scripture.”³ 

The peasants also reasoned that the people of a congregation would be the first ones to notice pastors’ behavior causing scandal to the Gospel, so they believed that a congregation should have authority to vote on removing pastors too. As the preamble asserted, “the basis of all the peasants’ articles…is directed toward hearing the gospel and living according to it,” and “the peasants want to be taught and to live by such as gospel.”⁴ Congregational members notice discrepancies between their pastor’s teachings and his lifestyle, and the peasants had tired of tolerating politically-placed pastors who failed to model practical Christianity in their lives. The cause of acquiring congregational authority over pastors, they believed, would establish a culture that would be more likely to respect “godly law” broadly, including in the economic sphere. 

Relatedly, Article 2 also called for tithing to be directly handled by local congregations for the support of their elected pastors and the poor in their communities, rather than paid to government authorities or distant bishops. “We are willing that henceforth our churchwardens, chosen by the congregation, collect and receive this tithe,” they wrote. “From it they shall give the parson, who has been elected by the whole congregation, enough to maintain himself and his family modestly, according to the determination of the whole congregation.  And whatever is left over should be distributed to the destitute people of the village, according to their circumstances and the congregation.”⁵ The peasants presented here a vision of congregational management of finances, with congregational meetings giving all members a voice in the use of funds and the election of the individuals who would disburse them.

These ideas, though suppressed through the lords’ defeat of the peasant armies later in 1525, found quieter implementation among the Anabaptist congregations that began to form independently of the state while the peasants’ revolt raged. Early Anabaptists like Wilhelm Reublin and Conrad Grebel has also been calling for reform of tithing practices in the canton of Zurich for several years.⁶ But their difference with the leaders of the peasants who published the Twelve Articles became obvious already in 1524 when they admonished Thomas Müntzer not to lead the peasants to take up arms for the sake of church reform.⁷ The peasants felt empowered to demand change by threatening armed rebellion, while the Anabaptists of Zurich simply chose to start doing church life according to their principles—and then suffer the consequences willingly if their civil disobedience brought them into punishment. 

About This Series

This post is part of a series entitled “The Reformation at 500: Timeline of the Free-Church Movement.” Click here for more information on this series.

Featured image courtesy of the Wick’sche Sammlung, ca. 1575, Zentralbibliothek Zurich, Ms. F 23, fol. 294.

Image depicting the agreement of the Upper Swabian peasants on the Twelve Articles courtesy of Frontispiece of the Dye Grundelichen und rechten haupt Artickl / aller Baurschafft und Hyndersessen der Gaistlichen und Weltlichen oberkayten / von wöchen sy sich beschwert vermainen (1525), https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Die12artikelDecke.jpg.

1. Michael G. Baylor, ed., “Twelve Articles of the Upper Swabian Peasants,” in The Radical Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 231 fn. 1; Ashley Null, Introduction to “Admonition to Peace: A Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants in Swabia,” in The Annotated Luther, vol. 5, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), 281, 283; James Stayer, The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 49. ↩︎
2. “Twelve Articles of the Upper Swabian Peasants,” in Baylor, 232. ↩︎
3. “Twelve Articles of the Upper Swabian Peasants,” in Baylor, 232-33. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 232. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 233. ↩︎
6. Stayer, 62. ↩︎
7. Conrad Grebel, et al., Letter to Thomas Müntzer (Zurich, 5 September 1524), in The Radical Reformation, ed. Michael G. Baylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 46. ↩︎