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Updated: June 8, 2025
Luther insisted, notwithstanding, that Carlstadt was 'an associate of the new prophets. He challenged him finally to abandon his intrigues and confute him openly in writing, and the heated interview ended by Carlstadt promising to do so, and by Luther giving him a florin as a pledge and token of the bargain. From Jena Luther went through Kahla, where also he preached, to Orlamunde.
At first, indeed, Carlstadt kept silent, and continued quietly, till Easter 1523, his lectures at the university. But inwardly he was inclined to a mysticism resembling that of the Zwickau fanatics, and imbibed, like theirs, from mediaval writings; and he too, soon turned, with these views, to new and practical projects of reform.
The thing, which had especially awakened his dislike to the Zwinglian view, and which he does not here tell us, was the circumstance, that, before Zwingli had yet expressed himself publicly in regard to the Lord's Supper, Doctor Carlstadt had come out in Saxony with a still bolder interpretation, by which he attempted to break up the connection of Christ's own words of institution in such a way, that half of them lost all their meaning.
The time at Leipzig had only been wasted; the disputation had been unworthy of the name; Eck and his friends there had cared nothing whatever about the truth. Eck, he said, had made more clamour in an hour than he or Carlstadt could have done in a couple of years, and yet all the time the question at issue was one of peaceful and abstruse theology.
Doctor Andrew Carlstadt has deserted us and become our bitterest enemy."
The inhabitants of the neighbouring town of Kahla were seized with the same spirit. These mystical ideas and phrases assumed strange forms of expression among the common people, who jumbled together in wild confusion the supernatural and the material. Carlstadt kept up also a secret correspondence with Munzer. The question of the authority of the Old Testament soon took a wider range.
A young Silesian wrote home from the university of Wittenberg about him, saying: 'God has raised up for us another prophet; many call him a second Luther. Melancthon is never absent when he preaches. For the clergy Carlstadt sought, by a perverse interpretation of Scripture, to make the married state into a law. Only married men were to be appointed to offices in the Church.
Then Carlstadt reached the conclusion that all learning was superfluous, for the Scriptures said plainly that God had concealed himself from the wise and revealed the truth unto babes. He astonished the tradespeople by consulting them in regard to obscure passages in the Bible. The school at Wittenberg was turned into a bake-shop.
With some of the changes advocated by Carlstadt he sympathized. He would, for instance, have done away with the adoration of the host and the celebration of private masses.
Here Eck, a German theologian noted for his devotion to the pope and his great skill in debate, challenged one of Luther's colleagues, Carlstadt, to discuss publicly some of the matters in which Luther himself was especially interested. Luther therefore asked to be permitted to take part. The discussion turned upon the powers of the pope.
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