Last lecture I gave a chronological treatment of the early Reformation and especially Martin Luther's role in it.
This lecture will take a thematic look at the question: What was behind the Reformation?
A desire for salvation? Yes.
A revulsion for the abuses of power committed by the church (a revulsion shared by laity and many clergy)? This certainly gave Luther a ready audience.
An important contributing factor was the desire of the laity to stand
as equal members of the church, which in the right circumstances could
become the out and out rejection of the clerical ideal -- which was
that a certain group, the clergy, was more pleasing to God because of its
unique discipline and ordination, and was for those reasons entitled to
rule the church.
Lay people had been disenchanted with this ideal for a very long time.
In the Reformation, they finally gave practical expression for their discontent.
Another motivation: profit. The institutional church owned vast properties, only a small proportion of which was devoted to the spiritual needs of the laity. Reform meant some degree of disendowment of the largest power group in society, which meant gain for other groups.
A final motivation that I want to discuss, the one that interests me the most, is the desire for autonomy. The Reformation, at least in its early stages, was the assertion by local communities of their claims and interests against large, rich, privileged and unresponsive organizations. If this characterization of the Reformation is accepted, it explains why Germany and Switzerland took the lead. Both areas were made up of a large number of small communities, self-governing cities and semi-rural republics known as cantons. Except for Wittenburg and Electoral Saxony, almost all of the first reformed churches were located in such places, where lay political life was intense and personal.
Communities like the German cities were hard pressed in the early 16th century. Inflation was eroding their commercial prosperity. Their was a constant threat of domination by larger neighbors, the more successful princes. At the same time all of Germany was more vulnerable than most countries to clerical power. The country was a happy hunting ground for ambitious clerics at Rome.
Geneva, later an important center of the Reformation, is again an excellent example of how abuses impacted the lay population. Its ruler was its bishop, who was an oppresive outsider. For decades he had been a relative or a close connection of the Duke of Savoy, a man himself well-connected at the papal court. The citizenry was simply a source of funds for these unresponsive lords, who did little or nothing to aid the city in a time of commercial stagnation.
For such places, the Reformation was a revolt, an attempt to control their own fate.
Revolts against the established church were not led by the highest rank of the citizenry, the so-called patricians. Patrician families were the old rich, who had built up fortunes and political influence over generations. They were well-off as things were, and no doubt got some benefit from the system of ecclesiastical patronage. It was the lower and middle ranks of the citizens, those who had a vote or a voice in the assembly and the elections, but were not secure or rich, who were unhappy.
In Germany and Switzerland, many such people were not completely helpless or disenfranchised. Their vote and voice still meant something. When they found their cause, they had enough leverage to overturn the local church and assert lay control over its practices and its property.
The civic supporters of reform, though they took some drastic actions, were by and large a conservative bunch. They basically wanted to reform the church so that they would be free to run their lives much as they already did, but without the unjustified interference of a useless privileged clergy. Luther, though a monk and a university trained theologian, was a prophet of middle-class respectability. He visualized no big changes to lay life; indeed, Luther and his followers had no plans to change the structure of lay society or politics. They were very dutiful to authority.
But Luther's vision and his defiance of the papacy unleashed other religious and social forces. Outside of the citizen body of the self- governing cities and cantons, those who claimed to be reformers were often looking for entirely different things. The peasantry of southwestern Germany, for instance, took Luther's talk of the freedom of Christians as justification for pressing for a thorough restructuring of society. It is a mistake to think of the peasant rebels of the 1520s as a group of starving serfs, the poorest and most oppressed members of German society. Actually the core of the movement was made up of prosperous peasants, not unlike Luther's family. The rebels fought because they feared that inflation and their lords' demands would eventually reduce them to penury and servitude. Their demands were usually based in part on old charters and customs that limited their obligations, charters that they lacked the resources and cohesion to enforce. Luther's vision of Christian freedom seemed to offer them an ideological basis for common action. But this was not enough; the princes still had the power to beat them down, and used it, with the blessing of Martin Luther. As a member of a somewhat more privileged group, he saw the Peasant's War as a dangerous attack on right order.
The anabaptists, too, took Luther's vision of Christian freedom and the priesthood of all believers much farther than he could approve. Like the townsmen who supported Luther, they sought autonomy -- but not the autonomy of a privileged citizen body, rather the autonomy of the individual believer, or perhaps the congregation of the saved. Anabaptists, like Luther, knew that only some professing Christians would be saved, but unlike him, thought that the saved, who would be rebaptized as adults to signify their knowing acceptance of Christ, could know each other in this world, and that they should gather in a small, exclusive congregation that would be purer than the outside world. It was a return to the vision of the early, pre-Constantinian church, which likewise saw the world at large as being damned for unbelief. And like the very earliest Christians, Anabaptist congregations submitted to no outside authority, not even that of Scripture. The Holy Spirit spoke to them directly, gave them guidance, so that they could live by the living spirit, and not by the dead letter of the law.
The early anabaptists are chiefly remembered for the Kingdom of Munster, a violent dictatorship of the saved established in the German city of that name in 1534.
This colorful and horrible incident, however, was quite atypical of Anabaptism. Most Anabaptists were not out to conquer the world, but to divorce themselves from it. They refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of any secular authority, and would not take oaths. They were radical pacifists, too, and said they would not fight, not even against the Turk. It is indicative of the political values of the time that Anabaptists of this type were as feared and as bloodily repressed as the Munsterites.
It is worth emphasizing that most everybody, whatever their other religious conflicts, agreed on two points: everyone should believe the same thing, and the basics of morality and religious practice should be enforced on everybody, even unto death.
The basic conservatism of Lutheranism did not spread well outside of Germany. Outside of Germany, Scandinavia, and the German Baltic, Lutheranism did not make much headway. The pope and Charles V together kept Italian reformers from making any popular impact, and in Spain, clergy and crown were tight enough to stop all talk of reform.
In France, things worked out somewhat differently. There was a popular response to the agitation from Germany. Francis I was at first rather favorable to reform. But in 1534 a poster campaign showed him that Lutheranism meant junking the sacraments of the church, and he cracked down.
Francis's purges inadvertantly turned French Protestantism into the militant faith that Lutheranism had never been. The key figure was John (Jean) Calvin, a French cleric, lawyer and humanistic scholar who was about a generation younger than Luther. For much of his early life he had shown no particular interest in religious reform. But he did have friends who were involved in the movement, and in 1534 he had to chose sides. He opted for reform, and fled the kingdom.
Chance brought him to Geneva in the early days of the reform there, when the political and religious situations were both fluid and dangerous. In desperation the city turned to a man with a clear vision of what needed to be done. Calvin provided it.
What did Calvin believe in that made him such an important figure in Geneva, and in Europe? First, he was puritan. Luther, though a sober fellow, who believed that religion should be simple and that everyone should lead a decent and quiet life, knew how to have fun and had nothing against worldly beauty, in its way. Calvin, in contrast, was the kind of person who thought that anything not compulsory should be forbidden. Under his influence, Geneva rid itself of not only religious images, but of all frivolity. It became the kind of place where one could be punished for dancing at a wedding.
Calvin also had a vision of the church as a disciplined, organized body, under the leadership of a clerical elite. One can exaggerate this point. Calvin was never the official leader of Geneva, and did not always get his way with the town council. Nor did he try to exclude laymen from ecclesiastical office. But his church was in large part a self-governing body, and the pastors took the most important role in it. It was they who enforced religious and social discipline. The separateness of the clergy vis a vis the laity was emphasized in Geneva by the fact that most of the clergy were refugees from Catholic persecution in France and elsewhere.
Finally, Calvin provided his followers, especially that new clerical elite, with a sense of mission. For Calvin, the most important tenet of theology was the kingship of God, who ruled the universe in a most absolute manner. Calvin's predestination grew out of this divine absolutism. He put front and center something that Luther had never emphasized, that God had chosen both who was to be saved and who was to be damned before all time, with complete disregard to the merits of any human individual.
Many people find this abhorrent, but in this time of crisis predestination assured the believer that he could not fail to be saved, and he could not fail to advance God's will in the world, because God was absolutely with him.
Thus Calvin's followers had no hesitation in fighting established authority in the interests of true religion. Calvin created in his almost thirty years in Geneva the Reformation equivalent of the (early 20th century) Communist Party. Calvinists were a tightly knit, well-trained, disciplined group who knew that their cause could not, in the nature of things, lose in the end.
Calvin's leadership saved Geneva from being absorbed by stronger neighbors, which was probably one of the things the citizens had hoped for when they turned to him. But he did far more. He made Geneva a godly city, an example to the world. Geneva was a place where Christian self- denial was combined with the bourgeois virtues, especially the virtue of diligence. These virtues were systematically instilled through education in the Bible and the the Catechism and enforced by church and civil courts and social pressure.
John Knox, the Scots reformer, looked at Geneva and said: "In other places, I confess Christ to be truly preached; but manners and religion so sincerely reformed I have not yet seen in any other place." For Knox and many others, Geneva demonstrated that their goal of a godly society was possible.
Calvin's Geneva became a center of propaganda, education, and agitation for the Protestant cause. Refugees came to Geneva not just to save their lives, but to regroup for the next offensive against the godless. The incoming traffic was balanced by an outflow of books and missionaries. The major source of one and the major goal of the other were the same: France. But religious dissent in the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Scotland and England was promoted and reinforced from this protestant fortress, too.
Calvin's theology and Calvin's Geneva provided the energy and the direction for the second surge of Protestantism. By 1555, the Lutheran movement had come to a near-stop, and was consolidating itself as the national religion of the German and Scandinavian north. Calvinism, as a fighting faith, was intent on making new conquests, and added fuel to the fire of religious controversy and conflict.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
E. William Monter, Calvin's Geneva.
Lewis W. Spitz, The Protestant Reformation.