Sebastian Franck

His first work was a German translation (with additions) of the first part of the Diallage (or Conciliatio locorum Scripturae), directed against Sacramentarians and Anabaptists by Andrew Althamer, then deacon of St. Sebald at Nuremberg.

To his translation (1530) of a Latin Chronicle and Description of Turkey (Turkenchronik), by a Transylvanian captive, which had been prefaced by Luther, he added an appendix holding up the Turk as in many respects an example to Christians.

He also substituted, in lieu of the restrictions of Lutheran, Zwinglian and Anabaptist sects, the vision of an invisible spiritual church, universal in its scope.

Here he also published, in 1531, his most important work, the Chronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtsbibel, largely a compilation on the basis of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), and in its treatment of social and religious questions connected with the Reformation.

Driven from Strassburg by the authorities, after a short imprisonment in December 1531, he tried to make a living in 1532 as a soapboiler at Esslingen, removing in 1533 for a better market to Ulm, where on 28 October 1534 he was admitted as a burgess.

But his courage did not fail him, and in his last year, in a public Latin letter, he exhorted his friend Johann Campanus to maintain freedom of thought in face of the charge of heresy.

For example, Franck wrote, "To substitute Scripture for the self-revealing Spirit is to put the dead letter in the place of the living Word..."[1][verification needed] Franck’s comment “God is an unutterable sigh, lying in the depths of the heart,” quoted by Julius Wilhelm Zincgref[2] was described by Ludwig Feuerbach as “the most remarkable, the profoundest, truest expression of Christian Mysticism”[3]