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Luther & Fellow “Reformers”: Shocking Divisions Revealed

Luther & Fellow “Reformers”: Shocking Divisions Revealed

Last updated on: June 13, 2026 at 1:05 pm by Dave Armstrong

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Luther & Fellow “Reformers”: Shocking Divisions Revealed 2026-06-13T13:05:13-04:00 Dave Armstrong

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

: copyright Lux Veritatis, 2025.

His words are in blockquotes below, time-stamped to the video, so you can find each one.

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After the Protestant Revolt began in 1517 with founder Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, and especially after 1521 when he was excommunicated, everything was supposed to be all peaches and cream and harmonious. It was to be a new beginning of a massive revival leading to a big happy Protestant family built around a common love and knowledge of the Bible as their sole infallible authority. This alleged freedom would bring all non-Catholics together. So they naively thought . . . But what we in fact find is that the earliest Protestant leaders regarded most of the other leaders as either not Christians at all or very poor ones: certainly not exemplary role models. Let’s take a journey across time 500 years ago to early Protestantism, shall we?

Ulrich Zwingli, the Swiss reformer, had attacked Luther very early on: “May I be lost if he does not surpass Faber in foolishness, Eck impurity, Cochlaeus in impudence, and . . . all the vicious in vice.” [Letter to Conrad Sam, August 30th, 1528]. All three men mentioned were Catholic, so Zwingli was contending that Luther was even worse than them.

Luther responded to these sorts of attacks in his treatise from March 1527 called, That These Words of Christ, “This is my Body,” etc. Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics. That’s in volume 37 of Luther’s Works. Luther stated, “They regard us as ‘un-Christians’ whom the Spirit of God has forsaken” [p. 21]. “We ‘un-Christians’ . . . suffer such horrible slander and shameful vilification from them . . . They regard me as full of devils” [p. 23].

“These are two of Dr. Oecolampadius‘ shameful, dreadful blasphemies when he asks of what use or need it is for Christ’s body to be in the bread. What shall I say of the outrageous audacity of this hellish Satan?” [p. 127] “This is the second abominable blasphemy of Oecolampadius. For he who asks why something which God says and does is necessary surely is trying to elevate himself above God and be wiser and better than God” [p. 139].

The footnotes by the editors in this volume elaborate: Reformer Martin Bucer wrote in 1527, “Let Luther acknowledge that he is being led by a spirit far different from that of Christ” [p. 21]. “Zwingli compared ‘worshiping the consecrated bread’ with the worship of the golden calf” in his letter to Matthew Alber from 1525 [p. 22].

Zwingli’s successor in Zurich, Heinrich Bullinger, was equally critical, writing to Bucer on December 8th, 1543:

Everyone must be astonished at the harsh and presumptuous spirit of the man. . . . The opinion of posterity will be that Luther was . . . a man ruled by criminal passions. Luther’s rude hostility might be allowed to pass would he but leave intact respect for Holy Scripture. . . . What has already taken place leads us to apprehend that this man will eventually bring great misfortune upon the church.

John Calvin, the second most important Protestant founder and even more historically influential than Luther, wrote to Bucer on January 12th, 1538:

Luther . . . will never be able to join along with us in a sincere agreement respecting the pure truth of God, for he has sinned against it not only from vainglory and abusive language, but also from ignorance and the grossest extravagance. For what absurdities he pawned upon us in the beginning when he said the bread is the very body! . . . very foul error.

Writing again to Bucer, who seems to have been involved in a lot of the high level inter-Protestant gossip, in June 1549, Calvin opined, “In their madness, they even drew idolatry after them. For what else is the adorable sacrament of Luther but an idol set up in the temple of God?” Calvin, despite having been good friends with Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s best friend and successor, wrote on July 2nd, 1563 in a letter to Bullinger about his concerns that Lutheranism was gaining ground and might even make inroads in France and actually described Lutheranism as “evil.” In a letter to Protestant leader and his friend and co-worker Wilhelm Farel in August 1557, Calvin says,

With regard to [Joachim] Westphal [a Lutheran] and the rest, it was difficult to follow your advice and be calm. You call those ‘brothers,’ who, if that name be offered to them by us, do not only reject but execrate it. And how ridiculous should we appear in bandying the name of brother with those who look upon us as the worst of heretics?

And in another to Bullinger at about the same time we find “you shall judge how dexterously I have treated the Saxons. . . . I know that I shall excite the hatred of them all. . . . I have indeed not hesitated cheerfully and fearlessly to provoke the fury of those beasts against me because I am confident that it will be pleasing to God.”

Luther, never one to mince words, got in more digs in his Brief Confession Concerning the Holy Sacrament, from September 1544 which is found in Luther’s Works, volume 38. He addressed those who denied his doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist and opted for a symbolic Eucharist: “Zwingli, Carlstadt Oecolampadius . . . called him a baked God, a God made of bread, a God made of wine, a roasted God, etc. They called us cannibals, blood-drinkers, man-eaters. . . . Even the papists have never taught such things as they clearly know.”

In this work, Luther calls these three men, and by implication, anyone who believed as they do, “fanatics and enemies of the sacrament,” men who are guilty of “blasphemies and deceitful heresy”; “loathsome fanatics”; “murderers of souls” who “possess a bedeviled, thoroughly bedeviled, hyperbedeviled heart and lying tongue” and “blasphemers and enemies of Christ” and “God’s and our condemned enemies.” He describes Zwingli as a “full-blown heathen” and wrote, “I am certain that Zwingli, as his last book testifies, died in a great many sins and in blasphemy of God.”

Luther summed up the endless attacks of fellow Protestants on him in a letter to William Pravest on March 14th, 1528: “All the sectaries think they are a hundred times wiser than I and do not listen to me; I am more at war with them than with the Pope, and they do more harm.” Ten years later, nothing had changed. He wrote in a letter to James Propst on September 15th, 1538: “New sects always rise up against me. . . . We are attacked by so many sects which constantly disagree with one another — sometimes they even originate within our own ranks.”

To his credit, John Calvin noted how absurd and self-contradictory all the Protestant divisions were, at least in a private letter to his Lutheran friend, Philip Melanchthon, dated November 28th, 1552:

The wicked take occasion from our dissensions to speak evil, and the weak are only perplexed by our unintelligible disputations. Nor in truth is it of little importance to prevent the suspicion of any difference having arisen between us from being handed down in any way to posterity. For it is worse than absurd that parties should be found disagreeing on the very principles after we have been compelled to make our departure from the world. . . . Meanwhile, Satan is busy scattering here and there the seeds of discord, and our folly is made to supply much material.

Melanchthon was in despair over all the divisions, as is a well-known fact in all his biographies. He wrote to Thomas Cranmer in England on April 1st,

1548 about some disagreement that “has severely shaken the churches and will shake them still more severely. I do not, however, desire in this letter to do anything more than express my grief which is so great that it could not be exhausted, though I were to shed a flood of tears as large as our Elbe or your Thames.”

Let’s also not forget that both Calvinists and Lutheran advocated the death penalty for Anabaptists because they believed in adult baptism as I discussed in another documentary in this series. Thus, in this view, Baptists like Billy Graham and Reformed Baptists today like Gavin Ortlund and James White could have been executed for heresy in the domains of both men. But I would have survived as a Catholic, perhaps run out of town at worst.

Protestantism has always been divided and unable to resolve its internal differences. It was so at the beginning of the movement and remains so to this day.

*****

My Related Articles

Sacramentarian Controversies (Calvin vs. Luther vs. Zwingli) (3-29-04)

“Absurd” Protestant Divisions: Calvin’s Revealing Lament to Melanchthon (2-6-06)

Zwingli, Bucer, Oecolampadius: Luther & Lutherans Not Christians (1-10-08)

Melanchthon’s Agonized Tears Over Early Protestant Divisions (10-11-17)

My Related Books

Martin Luther: Catholic Critical Analysis and Praise (April 2008, 264 pages)

Protestantism: Critical Reflections of an Ecumenical Catholic (May 2003, 188 pages)

My Related Web Pages

Martin Luther: a Catholic Critique & Appraisal
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Lutheranism: Catholic Critique

John Calvin: Catholic Appraisal

Calvinism & General Protestantism: Catholic Critique

Protestantism: Historic Persecution & Intolerance

Videos in The Martin Luther Series on Lux Veritatis

Martin Luther Support the DEATH PENALTY for Heretics? [Lux Veritatis, 5-1-25]

13 Reasons Luther Was Excommunicated from the Catholic Church [Lux Veritatis, 5-2-25]

The MYTH of Luther’s “Snow-Covered Dung Hills” [Lux Veritatis, 5-3-25]

Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation: Shocking Divisions Revealed! [Lux Veritatis, 5-4-25]

Martin Luther’s Belief in Mary’s Immaculate Conception [Lux Veritatis, 5-5-25]

Luther & the Myth of a Supposed Catholic Ban of the Bible [Lux Veritatis, 5-6-25]

Was Martin Luther an Extreme “Faith Alone” Antinomian? [Lux Veritatis, 5-8-25]

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Photo Credit: copyright Lux Veritatis, 2025.

Summary: The Protestant Revolt from its inception was a chaotic mess of mutually anathematizing, ever-warring factions: initiated by Luther’s principle of private judgment & sola Scriptura.

Calvinism & General Protestantism

Lutheranism

Martin Luther

denominationalism

Luther vs. Other Protestant Leaders

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