Martin Luther

MARTIN LUTHER: THE RELUCTANT REVOLUTIONARY
PROF. M. M. NINAN
Now their rainbow, which had appeared just before the battle began, had vanished. For days it had
brought the peasant armies hope: God’s signal to his elect ensuring that with prayers and pitchforks
they would soon sweep the threshing floor clean. The hour of vengeance was at hand, they
believed, and God’s judgment was on its way.
But God didn’t descend that day in Frankenhausen.
Only six of the princes’ army fell or were wounded, while peasant casualties numbered in the
thousands. Their shattered barricade, made of chains and farm wagons, along with makeshift
weapons, lay abandoned as surviving peasants fled, leaving their pure white banner trampled and
spattered with gore. Many who tried to escape were hunted down and executed on the spot.
Müntzer himself was soon captured, hiding in a farmhouse and still clutching his bag of writings,
giving him away as one of the leaders of the rebellion. At the hands of the conquering princes he
was detained, examined, and tortured. On May 27, humiliated and broken, he was beheaded.
Under torture prior to his execution, Müntzer called out, “Omnia sunt communia” (all things in
common), still envisioning a world with equal distribution according to each person’s need. His
vision became reality in the communal life of brotherhood that grew out of the Anabaptist
Reformation in 1527. The Hutterites and other Moravian Anabaptists shared everything in common
as outlined in Jesus’ teachings, not founding their life through violent defense but through
repentance and believer’s baptism. As summarized in Peter Riedemann’s Hutterite Confession of
Faith, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Müntzer’s example had made clear the terrible cost of promoting the kingdom of God through
violence, yet it was in these pacifist communities, in which brotherly and sisterly love was not just a
word but an economic and social reality, that the heart of his vision was realized.
75