Edward J. Furcha

I've actually read this a couple of times and still skim through it on occasion. I really like Hans Denck; and since I had reviewed Schwenckfeld and mentioned Denck, I decided to review this collection of Denck's writings.
As I said in the Schwenckfeld review, I discovered Hans, or John, Denck when going through reformation reader collections. He caught my attention right away when I first came across him. He has a writing style that is very reminiscent of St. John and it really endeared me to him. As with Schwenckfeld, he puts more emphasis on the Holy Spirit, or the inner word, than on the Bible, but he did hold that the Bible was authoritative as being inspired by the Spirit and he quoted it regularly in his writings.
Denck was an early German convert to reformation ideals. He made himself unpopular with the largely Lutheran population in the cities he resided in because he opposed certain Lutheran ideas. He was taken before councils and often persecuted for not swearing allegiance to Lutheran theology. He died at the age of 27 of the plague. He is classed as both a spiritual reformer and as an Anabaptist. He doesn't fit neatly within Anabaptism because he actually downplayed the necessity of outward rituals like baptism in his writings. He was, however, heavily influential among the Anabaptists and is often included among them. Like other spiritual reformers, he collected biblical paradoxa, or scriptural passages that are seemingly contradictory. He did this in order to show that it is the Spirit and not scriptural literalism that is needed when interpreting the Bible. His position was one that was very taboo among the Lutheran sola scriptura crowd because he took emphasis away from the kind of literalism that they often resorted to. Denck is a rather complex writer and merits reading more than once because his mystical sensibilities often pay off after study and contemplation. One should ignore some treatments of him. The wikipedia article is very inaccurate.
Denck is a great reformer to be acquainted with even if one does not agree with all of his points. Like many reformers of the day, his tendency for polemics in some of his writings can be grating to more modern sensibilities. In all fairness though, he is often less rigidly didactic than Calvin and Luther. He was certainly more irenic than either. He is worth reading for Protestants who are used to believing that all early reformers held to the same theology. He certainly shows that there were different streams of theology running through early reformation ideals.… (plus d'informations)