Marburg

Philip of Hesse wanted a military alliance. The emperor was Catholic, the Protestant princes and the Swiss cities were separately vulnerable, and a common front was worth more to him than a common doctrine. What stood in the way was a quarrel about the Lord's Supper that had been running in print for years, so Philip brought the principals to his castle at Marburg between the first and the fourth of October 1529 and had them work through fifteen prepared articles.

They agreed on fourteen. The Trinity, the two natures of Christ, original sin, justification by faith, the ministry of the word, baptism, good works, confession, civil authority, tradition: on all of it the Wittenberg and the Zurich parties found they could sign the same text. Luther and Melanchthon sat on one side, Zwingli and Oecolampadius on the other, with Martin Bucer of Strasbourg trying to build a bridge between them.

The fifteenth article was the Eucharist. Luther held that the words this is my body mean what they say and that Christ is bodily present in the bread and the wine; he is reported to have written the Latin of that sentence on the table in chalk and to have kept returning to it. Zwingli held that the sacrament is a memorial, and that Christ, being bodily in heaven, is present in it spiritually and by faith. Neither moved. The article was signed as a statement of what they had failed to agree, with an undertaking that each side would show Christian charity to the other so far as conscience allowed, and the alliance Philip wanted never came.

The religious weight of Marburg is older than the colloquy. Elizabeth of Hungary, landgravine of Thuringia, was widowed young, gave her wealth to a hospital she founded at Marburg and died there in 1231 at the age of twenty four. She was canonised in 1235, and the Teutonic Order began in the same year to build over her grave the church that carries her name. It was finished in 1283 and is among the earliest churches in Germany built wholly in the Gothic manner, with no Romanesque compromise anywhere in it. Her shrine drew pilgrims from across the empire for three centuries, until 1539, when Philip of Hesse, by then Lutheran, had her relics removed to end the cult. The building stayed; the pilgrimage did not.

In 1527 the same landgrave founded a university at Marburg. It was established with neither a papal bull nor an imperial charter behind it, which made it Protestant by constitution rather than by conversion, and it turned the town into a place where the Reformation argued with itself in public.

The habit held. Hermann Cohen taught philosophy at Marburg from 1876 and built there the neo-Kantian reading of Judaism that shaped a generation of Jewish thought. Rudolf Bultmann held the chair of New Testament from 1921 to 1951 and wrote his programme of demythologising from it. For a town of this size, an unusual quantity of argument about what a text means has come out of it.