Thomas Aderpul

Who is Thomas Aderpul?

Thomas Aderpul was a preacher of the Protestant Reformation who taught an extreme form of egalitarian religious polity; consequently, the German Democratic Republic admired him as a proto-communist.

Aderpul came to public notice in 1529 in the Klützer Ort, a district between Wismar and Lübeck, which was on Mecklenburg territory but fell within the Bishopric of Ratzeburg, and was mostly owned by the von Plessen family who had built up considerable debts to the diocese. They saw the Reformation as an opportunity to evade their financial obligations. Appointments to livings on estates were generally made by the lord of the manor with the approval of the diocesan bishop. Bernd von Plessen deliberately provoked the Bishop of Ratzeburg, Georg von Blumenthal, by dismissing the two Catholic incumbents of the parish of Gressow, which was on his estates, one of them on the non-theological grounds that he only had one eye, and to replace them with Aderpuhl, who was already married, as the pastor. The church bureaucracy was slow to react, but eventually on 20 December the Cathedral Provost Mus reported this irregularity to the Bishop.