Martin Bucer (1491-1551)
 One
of the leaders in the South German Reformation movement, b.
11 November, 1491, at Schlettstadt, Alsace; d. 28 February,
1551, at Cambridge, England. He received his early education
at the Latin School of his native place, where at the age
of fifteen (1506) he also entered the Order of St. Dominic.
Later he was sent to the University of Heidelberg to prosecute
his studies, and matriculated, 31 January, 1517. He became
an ardent admirer of Erasmus, and soon an enthusiastic disciple
of Luther. He heard the Saxon monk at a public disputation,
held at Heidelberg in 1518, on the occasion of a meeting of
the Augustinian order, became personally acquainted with him,
and was immediately won over to his ideas. Having openly adopted
the new doctrine he withdrew from the Dominican order, in
1521, became court chaplain of Frederick the Elector Palatine,
and laboured as secular priest at Landstuhl, in the Palatinate
(1522), and as a member of the household of Count Sickengen
and at Weissenburg, Lower Alsace (1522-23). During his incumbency
at Landstuhl he married Elizabeth Silbereisen, a former nun.
When, in 1523, his position became untenable at Weissenburg,
he proceeded to Strasburg. Here his activity was soon exercised
over a large field; he became the chief reformer of the city
and was connected with many important religio-political events
of the period. His doctrinal views on points controverted
between Luther and Zwingli at first harmonized completely
with the ideas of the Swiss Reformer.
Subsequently he sought to mediate between Lutherans and
Zwinglians. The highly questionable methods to which he resorted
in the interest of peace drew upon him the denunciation of
both parties. In spite of the efforts of Bucer, the Conference
of Marburg (1529), at which the divergent views of Luther
and Zwingli, especially the doctrine regarding the Eucharist,
were discussed, failed to bring about a reconciliation. At
the Diet of Augsburg, in the following year, he drew up with
Capito the "Confessio Tetrapolitana", or Confession
of the Four Cities (Strasburg, Constance, Memmingen, and Lindau).
Later on, moved by political considerations, he abandoned
this for the Augsburg Confession. In 1536, he brought about
the more nominal than real "Concordia of Wittenberg"
among German Protestants. He gave his own, and obtained Luther's
and Melanchthon's approbation for the bigamy of the Landgrave
Philip of Hesse, attended in 1540 the religious conference
between Catholics and Protestants at Hagenau, Lower Alsace,
and in 1541 the Diet of Ratisbon. The combined attempt of
Bucer and Melanchthon to introduce the Reformation into the
Archdiocese of Cologne ended in failure (1542). Political
troubles and the resistance of Bucer to the agreement arrived
at by Catholics and Protestants in 1548, and known as the
"Augsburg Interim", made his stay in Strasburg impossible.
At the invitation of Archbishop Cranmer, he proceeded to England
in 1549. After a short stay in London, during which he was
received by King Edward VI (1547-53), he was called to Cambridge
as Regius Professor of Divinity. His opinion was frequently
asked by Cranmer on church matters, notably on the controversy
regarding ecclesiastical vestments. But his sojourn was to
be of short duration, as he died in February, 1551. Under
the reign of Queen Mary (1553-58) his remains were exhumed
and burned, and his tomb was demolished (1556), but was reconstructed
in 1560 by Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603).
Bucer was, after Luther and Melanchthon, the most influential
of German Reformers. For a clear statement of doctrine he
was ever ready to substitute vague formulas in the interest
of unity, which even his able efforts could not establish
among the Reformers. He forms a connecting link between the
German and the English Reformation. Of the thirteen children
he had by his first marriage, only one, a weak-minded son,
survived. Wibrandis Rosenblatt, the successive wife of several
Reformers (Cellarius, Oecolampadius, Capito, and Bucer), whom
he married after his first wife died from the plague in 1541,
bore him three children, of whom a daughter survived. Only
one of the ten folio volumes in which his works were to appear
was published (Basle, 1577). It is known as "Tomas Anglicanus"
because its contents were mostly written in England.
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