FRANCK, SEBASTIAN

born c. 1499, , Donauwrth, Bavaria died c. 1542, , Basel, Switz. German Protestant Reformer and theologian who converted from Roman Catholicism to Lutheranism but, in eventually departing from Luther's views, emphasized a mystical attitude in place of dogmatic belief. A fellow student of the Reformer Martin Bucer at Heidelberg, Franck was named a curate in the Roman Catholic diocese of Augsburg soon after 1516. About 1525 he joined the Lutherans at Nrnberg, giving up his curacy to become a preacher for the Reformation. Franck was apparently disappointed by the moral results of the Reformation, however, and as a result he began to move away from Lutheranism. At Nrnberg he evidently came in contact with the Anabaptist Hans Denck's disciples, but he soon denounced Anabaptism as dogmatic and narrow. Increasingly at odds with Lutheran doctrines, dogmatism in general, and the concept of an institutional church, Franck moved in 1529 to Strassburg, which was then a centre of the spiritual movement in Protestantism. There he became a friend of the Reformer and mystic Kaspar Schwenckfeld, who furthered Franck's development as a fierce anti-dogmatician. Franck's major work, Chronica: Zeitbuch und Geschichtsbibel (1531; Chronica: Time Book and Historical Bible), is a wide-ranging anti-Catholic study of heresies and heretics. After a short imprisonment for his views, Franck was expelled from Strassburg by the civil authorities. He drifted about Germany and in 1533 moved to Ulm, where he established himself as a printer. Martin Luther finally came to view Franck as a man who wanted to avoid both belief and commitment, and Lutherans at Ulm compelled Franck to leave that city in 1539. Franck combined the humanist's passion for freedom with the mystic's devotion to a religion based on an inner illumination of the spirit. He regarded the Bible as a book full of contradictions that veiled its true and eternal message, and he considered dogmatic controversy meaningless. He even asserted the extremely anti-dogmatic notion that Christians need know no doctrines beyond the Ten Commandments and the Apostles' Creed. In the end he became a solitary figure who found no realm of truth left but the inner life of a few mystics. Franck's unbiased search for God in various cultures and historical traditions and his emphasis on nondogmatic, nonsectarian, noninstitutional forms of religion mark him as one of the most modern thinkers of the 16th century.