The Reformation Era · 1540s-1650 · Silesia, later Pennsylvania
Schwenckfelders
An open theological question
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
About This Movement
Caspar Schwenckfeld was a Silesian nobleman who welcomed Luther's reform and then broke with it, concluding that outward means — preaching, sacraments, church order — could not do what only the inward work of Christ could do. In 1526 he urged that the Lord's Supper be suspended until Christians could agree what it was, a 'standing still' his followers kept for generations, and he taught a distinctive doctrine of the glorified, heavenly flesh of Christ that Lutherans and Reformed alike condemned. His followers never built a church in the ordinary sense. They met in houses, copied his writings out by hand, and were harried in Silesia for two centuries until a remnant emigrated to Pennsylvania in the 1730s.
Sources
- Corpus Schwenckfeldianorum (19 vols, 1907-61), incl. the Great Confession on Christ's glory (1540) (primary) — The 'celestial flesh' Christology and the Stillstand ('standing still') documented in his own words, across a 19-volume collected corpus. Mostly in Latin and German; English translations exist only as piecemeal selections.
- The community's own texture: Silesian conventicle letters and devotional manuscripts, the Schwenkfelder hymn and prayer-book tradition, the 1734 Pennsylvania migration records and Gedaechtnistag (primary) — Evidence of the small fellowship's continuity across two centuries, held at the Schwenkfelder Library in Pennsburg.
- The condemnations: Lutheran polemic and the Formula of Concord article against the 'Schwenkfeldians' (1577); Silesian suppression records; Jesuit mission pressure (1719-25) (primary) — Hostile sources — the majority churches' own filter on the community's memory. The 1719-25 material comes from a later period than the rest.
- R. Emmet McLaughlin, Caspar Schwenckfeld, Reluctant Radical (Yale, 1986) (secondary) — The standard modern study.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 6, ch. 3 (McLaughlin, the radical Reformation) (reference) — The chapter's author is also the movement's standard biographer.