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The First Martyrs of the Reformation · Martyrs And Missionaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Martyrs and Missionaries is a production of Revive Studios.
• 0:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're listening to Martyrs and Missionaries.
• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Elise and in every episode I'll bring you a new martyr and or missionary, the called and the brave.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this episode we're talking about some of the first martyrs of the Protestant Reformation.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The last time Reformation Martyrs were covered on this show was almost three years ago, and with Reformation Day coming up, I figured it was about high time we covered them again.
• 0:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: But instead of talking about the heavy hitters, we're going to talk about the first Martyrs from England, France and Germany, and how Augustine and influence their earliest arguments, and how Martin Luther helped give us our Protestant Martyrology.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first martyr on this list we're going to talk about is William Sotry, who lived in England in the last few years of the 1300s.
• 1:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sotry was an English priest and he was also a Lollard, which is why he was killed.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we talked about Lollards a bit on the show before, but they didn't necessarily have a firm theological framework that they all agreed to as a general rule.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they all agree that the Eucharist was not the literal body and blood of Christ.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is one of the reasons why Sochru was killed.
• 1:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: He taught that the bread remains in the same nature as before, even after it has been consecrated by a priest.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the lawlets were a proto-reformation group, but their very name was meant to be derogatory.
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: It first appeared in a 1387 mandate,
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: against five poor preachers, and it comes from the Dutch meaning mumbleer or mutterer, essentially a lazy mal content.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then it further evolved as a prejudice of the educated churchmen against the uneducated.
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if you were a poor uneducated preacher, you got called a lawlared.
• 2:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you held to lawlared beliefs, but you were educated, you were a wicklified actor, of course, John Wickliffe, who inspired many of the
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: William Sautre was one of these poor priests, but he wasn't sent out personally by Whickliffe in large part because Whickliffe had been dead for 10 years, so it would be disconcerting had he been sent out by him.
• 2:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in 1399, Sautre was bought before a, he's a really cool guy.
• 2:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I, you want to hate him because of course he kills Sautre, but he is, he has one of the coolest little size stories I think I've come across.
• 2:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's basically a warrior bishop.
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: his name is Henry Law Dispenser, and you should definitely look him up.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: But he accuses Satri of denying free will, refusing to worship images, and Satri is also against these long hours of recitations, which he felt could be better spent preaching.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was also against
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: pilgrimages, because he felt that money could be better spent on the poor, and he of course denies the presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Henry asks him to recant and sawtory does.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: He swears on all four gospels that he will no longer teach law learned beliefs, and then following his recantation, he moves to London where he immediately begins teaching law learned beliefs, and he's not been there for very long before he comes under the microscope of a man named Thomas Arendel.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thomas Arendel's story is one of those that you just
• 3:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: wonder into.
• 3:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have no idea it exists before you begin digging into something, do you think is entirely unrelated?
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Thomas Rendell's story is fascinating.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: So he is an ambitious man, he was quite wealthy, he had been made Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of York by Richard II, who had been a friend of the Wallards but then changed his mind.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then Thomas is made the Archbishop of Canterbury and then he's exile by the King a year later as a traitor.
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: His brother is actually executed.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then a year or so later his equally ambitious cousin joined Thomas in exile where they potted a coup to overthrow the king.
• 4:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: and they did.
• 4:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: They put him in prison.
• 4:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Relator died and then Thomas's cousin was made Henry the fourth and Henry the fourth fell ill not long into his reign.
• 4:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: So then Thomas is essentially holding the reins and he pushed through a heresy act in 1401 which when condemned all heretics to die in a high and public place by burning and have the state confiscate all of their goods.
• 4:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: This would apparently put them into the same category basically
• 4:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then Thomas used this law to execute Sautre as a relapsed heretic, and he added a new charge to the previous one that Sautre did not worship the Cross itself, but only the Christ who suffered upon the Cross.
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Sautre defended himself against these charges using Augustine and the New Testaments.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we don't have a specific record of what parts of Augustine he appealed to.
• 5:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Actually, these guys, we don't have any of the specific arguments they give of Augustine.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: But we do have a pretty good idea, and later on, we'll look at those.
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, Thomas is angered by much of what he's heard from a Sochery's defense, but he is specifically angered because of the Eucharist, and Sochery was condemned to die.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: But first, he was publicly and systematically.
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think if the term is like defroctor, something like that's more intense, maybe than defrocking.
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: But he was taken from a priest to a doorkeep, and his vestiments were removed, and they even shaped his head.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: to remove any signs of his munkish tauncer, and then he was tied with chains to the stake in the presence of a large crowd, and then he was burned to death on March 2, 1401.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now we're going to slide over to France and jump about 120 years into the future to Jean Le Clare.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Le Clare was a medieval mechanic which meant that he wasn't working on fixing forwards.
• 6:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was a wool carder, one of those guys who cleaned and smoothed wool between two brissely paddles.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: He came to have a Protestant understanding of Christianity after reading the New Testament, which had recently been translated into French for the first time.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the man who did that, I can't even begin to pronounce his name, but he was in a perpetual beef with arasmus who was also translating things, so they were very critical of each other.
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: but all of the copies of the New Testament were supposedly rounded up and burned by the church.
• 6:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm not really sure when he came into possession of this New Testament, especially because he wasn't an academic, so he wouldn't have the normal avenues that the more educated class would have had.
• 6:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: But either way, he was bold.
• 6:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: He posted his grievances against the Catholic Church on the door of the local cathedral, which functioned as a local community board.
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was then taken in by officials, whipped, had his forehead branded, and then he was exiled to a town almost 200 miles outside of the metropolitan area of Paris, which is where he had been previously.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there he took up Wolkarni again, and this all takes place within 1525.
• 7:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: So not much time elapsed before he quietly destroyed a bunch of images, statues, and things that the church was preparing to parade around town with.
• 7:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he didn't even try to hide it.
• 7:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: He fest up and then he was arrested and brutally tormenting.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the account, his right hand was cut off, his nose was torn out, his arm embraced torn with red-hot pincers, and his head was encircled with two or three bands of red-hot iron.
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Amid all his torments, he sung aloud the verse of Psalm 115.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands.
• 7:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was finally thrown to the fire, where he then died.
• 8:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now we're going to cross the border into Germany just a few years later and talk about Peter fleshed it in.
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: We don't know really anything about his life before he comes to the attention of the church.
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: He seems to be just another average man.
• 8:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was attending mass in 1527 and when they elevated the host of the bread and prepared to take communion, Peter covered his head turned around and spat.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was then taken in.
• 8:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and kept print prison for almost two years, and he denied the presence of Christ on the Eucharist, he denied the need for confession to a priest, he condemned the monastic orders and the priesthood, and like Satry, it was his belief in the Eucharist that really got their goats.
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: and in 1529 he was condemned to be burned at the stake, but he was shouting out something to the crowd.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: We don't know what it was, but it was enough that his executioner tried to quiet him by strangling him with a chain and Peter actually died before he let the flames, which in some ways I think is a much more tame death than the alternative.
• 8:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now Peter had been condemned to die with another man who's name was Adolf Klaarembach.
• 9:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Klaarembach was a teacher and a follower of Luther as well, and he became a Protestant after reading Luther's on the freedom of a Christian in 1523.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he began proclaiming his views, and he kicked out of his teaching position and he bounced around from city to city.
• 9:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: He even kicked out of Munster because he was just a few years too early for their shift to Lutheranism, and thankfully a few years too early for their Anabaptist takeover.
• 9:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was finally arrested in Cologne in 1528 and made sure his trial took as long as possible.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: He denied the authority of the ecclesiastical course to try him, and then he got moved to the imperial court system.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: His friends and clone were writing lengthy defenses of him, bogging down the legal system even more, and the church was losing the court of public opinion, but it also seems the church officials didn't actually want to kill him.
• 9:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because for six months, after he had been handed out his death sentence, they tried to get him to moderate his heresy.
• 10:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And an eyewitness to his death would erote this about him.
• 10:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: After two years arrest, he could have escaped the cruel imprisonment.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: If only he had admitted that the Leity have no claim to have the sacrament.
• 10:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Twice I heard him in desputation with the so-called theologians, of excellent memory and in every way to the point, he proved all his teachings from the Holy Scriptures.
• 10:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And of the church fathers, he particularly quoted Augustine.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: As he was led out to the stake, he raised his voice to be heard by the crowd and proclaimed, and when you have killed me, you will still not have your way, but I will have eternal life.
• 10:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: So even this death does not terrify me, for I know that Christ has overcome death, the devil, and hell.
• 10:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Clarembox name is still honored in Germany today through streets, seminaries, and schools, a concert has been held
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: This episode is sponsored by Send International.
• 11:13
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• 11:21
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• 11:25
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• 11:30
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• 11:39
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• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: These are the kinds of stories we talk about all the time on martyrs and missionaries, ordinary Christians choosing to faithfully serve what the gifts and abilities God has given them.
• 12:00
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• 12:06
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• 12:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now I want to pivot a little and talk about how and why Augustine was such an important source when the earlier farmers were refuting the church.
• 12:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I came across this introduction to a special reformation issue of the magazine Standard Bearer.
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It says, although it might seem a bit strange at first blush to devote the annual reformation issue to a church father who died almost 1100 years before the great 16th century reformation, we have good grounds for doing so.
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our two main reasons are expressed well by the noted church historian Philip Schaff.
• 12:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: First, Augustine's theology was foundational for the Reformation.
• 12:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: In his history of the Christian Church, Schaff contains that Augustine is of all the fathers nearest to evangelical Protestantism.
• 13:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And may be called in respect to his doctrine of sin and grace, the first four-bunderm of the Reformation.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Second, among the church fathers, Augustine had unparalleled influence on the reformers.
• 13:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the same volume, shaft maintains that Augustine, of all the church fathers, most resembles an experience and doctrine.
• 13:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: This very apostle Paul and stands next to him in his influence upon the reformers.
• 13:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well-documented is that Calvin, Luther, and the rest of the reformers quoted none so much as Augustine.
• 13:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The theology of the Reformation was a return and development of the better parts of Augustine's theology long discarded or perverted by the church of the Middle Ages.
• 13:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rest of this magazine is honestly really good, so I'm going to post it in the episode description if anybody wants to check it out.
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Luther himself was an Augustine and monk, but he said of himself, I did not defend Augustine because I am an Augustinean, before I began reading his works, he meant nothing to me.
• 14:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later in life, Luther shifts away from Augustine, he becomes frustrated with Augustine's appeal to the authority of the church.
• 14:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I think that is because they were actually dealing with two different iterations of the church.
• 14:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because in Augustine's day, it does share some crossover with Luther's, but Augustine's understanding of the church was not really the Middle Ages Romanish church that Luther was dealing with.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The themes and Augustine's writings of the Reformers, both the famous and the lesser known like Sochery and Clarembach, cited were those of original sin, God's sovereignty, salvation being all God, grace as a free gift, election and predestination.
• 14:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we rightly credit Luther and Calvin with defining our Protestant theology, but we also owe it in large part to Augustine who influenced them.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I came across this quote that I really love, it says, if all philosophy is a footnote
• 15:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: All theology is a footnote to Augustine.
• 15:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, obviously, this is a side from the scriptures.
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're way up here, Augustine's way down there.
• 15:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: But even Thomas Aquinas, who wrote the sumat theologica, when he wrote it, he was taking large bulk of it from Augustine.
• 15:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we really can't minimize or try to diminish the influence of Augustine on the reformers, even though there are some things.
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: We would naturally now disagree with him on, especially his thoughts on
• 15:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: but we can't put the baby out with the bath water and try to step away from Augustine because clearly he is very important to our reformation.
• 15:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now one thing we can credit almost wholly to Luther is our framework of martyrrology, but even this is intermingled and inspired by the early church martyrdom accounts.
• 15:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Luther's martyrrology all began in 1519,eterasmus wrote to him and said,
• 15:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a prior in your monastery in Antwerp, a pure Christian man who holds you in high regard.
• 16:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: He has been your student for a long time as he himself proclaims.
• 16:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of nearly all the clergy, he alone proclaims Christ.
• 16:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: This man's name was probest and he also appears to have had a hand in the translation of Luther's writings which began appearing in and around Antwerp in that time period.
• 16:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Luther's teachings spread to the other monks in Antwerp, and it became known to the authorities in a single outpost because he was the sole cause in their mind of the consternation.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they arrested him and under pressure probes to sadly recance it and he renounced Luther from the pulpit and as far as we know, he never comes back around.
• 16:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: But his recantation didn't slow down the Antwerp monks at all.
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the authorities ended up rounding up all the monks and interrogated them under the edict of the died of worms, which condemned Luther as a heretic and banned any form of defense of his person or his works.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most of them were released, but eight of them were imprisoned, and eventually five recount recounted and only three stood firm.
• 17:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: These three were Lambert Thorne, Hendrick Foes, and Johan Von Eschen.
• 17:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're inquisitors to pair to document detailing 62 articles of heterodox faith, sufficient evidence to condemn all three of the Augustinian monks as heretics.
• 17:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lambert asked for extra time, and he was sent back to his cell where he died of an illness, in reading from the accounts.
• 17:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: On July 1, 1523, the two were arrayed in full ecclesiastical regalia of their order and land in a procession.
• 17:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The procession terminated at
• 17:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: the square in front of the Brussels Cathedral, where Pires stood prepared.
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The friars were then ceremonially degraded, their monastic guard replaced with plain robes.
• 17:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both were given one last chance to recant, refusing the offers of last minute reprieve, foes and eshen were fastened to the stakes.
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Torches applied fire to the wood.
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to reports, the two young friars saying, the God we praise, which is a him dating back the days of Ambrose and Augustine, before succumbing to the smoke and flames.
• 18:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: After their death, there were a series of pamphlets that were published detailing their martyrdom.
• 18:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: These were spread far and wide, and they were widely read.
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It took Luther about a month to hear of their deaths.
• 18:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when he heard about it, he said to have begun to cry and say, I thought, I would be the first one to be martyr about a holy gospel, but I am not worthy.
• 18:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: He then wrote both a hymn and also a letter of consolation about their deaths, and impart the hymn breeds.
• 18:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: A new song here shall begin, the Lord God help our singing, of what our God Himself have done, prays honor to hymn bringing, our Brussels and the Netherlands by two young boys, he gracious displays the wonders of his hands, giving them gifts right precious and richly them adorning.
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then in his letter, he congratulated the Netherlands for being the first to shop for shame and injury, anxiety and distress, imprisonment and death for Christ's sake.
• 18:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then in this fame, Luther lauded foes and Eshen as those two precious jewels who considered their lives of no account, in order that Christ and his word may be glorified.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the true moment that helped define our framework, our morgurology comes from Luther's writing on the death of the man who picked up the mantle of prior probes, the sky who decided to recant this writing is entitled, the burning of brother Henry.
• 19:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brother Henry was actually snatched from his bed, can then be burned, and then when the fire wouldn't burn,
• 19:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: they beat him to death instead, and this account by Lutheran supposedly quite graphic, but it stands apart even from the other Protestant murder stories of the day, which followed the Catholic tradition of magical powers being bestowed on those who beheld their mains of a saint or other strange things we've all come across.
• 19:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Luther hated those stories and thought they were nonsense.
• 19:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, his goal in writing the burning of brother Henry was to point the reader's attention to the eternal impact of his death, and that would compel an evangelical outpouring to share the gospel.
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: He even invites the reader to pity those who killed Henry, saying,
• 20:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is really far more reason to weep and lament for them than for the St. Henry, and to pray that not only they, but the whole land, may be converted and come to the knowledge of the truth.
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is to be expected confidently that this will indeed be the fruit of Henry's martyrdom.
• 20:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there is an excellent article on Luther's impact on Protestant Martyrology by a man named Hans Weirma that I will quote more fully here.
• 20:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The second section of the Henry Memorial, the Psalm commentary, is the most unique of the three sections.
• 20:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Although many martyr narratives are interlaced with scripture quotations and illusions,
• 20:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Luther exigetes Psalm 9 verse by verse to demonstrate that the persecution of the faithful is part of the divine plan.
• 20:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Luther puts it, here you see how this Psalm comforts us and bids us hope.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hans then concludes his article by hammering home the impact of Luther's writing, and its intentional callback to the early church martyrdom accounts.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: By adhering closely to the features typical of the Church's martyrdom literature, Luther adapted a centuries-old genre to nurture and promote his novel movement.
• 21:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because he did, later Christians can properly recognize and honor the earliest evangelical martyrs.
• 21:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is honestly pretty incredible.
• 21:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in part because of Luther's rejection of mysticism and his insistence on a biblical understanding of martyrdom, we can have faithful and encouraging accounts of our faith heroes, honoring them and honoring Jesus and his gospel.
• 21:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: By remembering their sacrifice and why they gave themselves over to heinous torture and abuse because they loved God and they bleed in the death and the resurrection of his son.
• 21:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: and they found that truth worth dying for.
• 21:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: We don't have to add anything extra to it.
• 21:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing incredible at all because the story itself of the reason they died is incredible enough.
• 21:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we can thank God for martyrs like Satri, like Claire, fleedishden, Clarembach, foes, and Eshen who were among the first martyrs of the Protestant Reformation.
• 22:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you enjoyed this episode, pass it on to a friend or two, happy Reformation Month, and as always, thank you for listening to martyrs and missionaries.
• 22:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Elise.