Читать книгу Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World - Alec Ryrie - Страница 12
ОглавлениеBehold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!
– PSALM 133:1
Protestantism was born in conflict, not only with the rest of the world, but with itself. Its rejection of fixed authorities condemned it to division from the very beginning, and it has repeatedly shown a propensity to fissure into new, quarrelling sects. But this is not the whole story. If it were, then Protestantism would have blown itself completely to bits, until there were as many churches as individual believers. In fact, the centrifugal force spinning into sectarian chaos has been matched by a gravitational pull towards unity.
As the dust of sectarian confusion settled during the late 1520s, two major Protestant blocs appeared, alongside the smaller fragments: Luther’s own, and a Swiss and south German grouping who lacked a single leader but whose most prominent figure was the city preacher of Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli. For a time, it seemed as if his movement, not Luther’s, could be the centre around which Protestantism’s orbiting fragments could coalesce. Calvinism, as it came misleadingly to be called, was the last, best hope for serious Protestant unity. It failed, but it came agonizingly close. Its story is a parable of what Protestantism can and cannot do.
Zwingli claimed that his Reformation owed nothing to Martin Luther’s. He claimed that the two movements arose almost simultaneously, with strikingly similar ideas, because both were inspired by God. Believing this does require a leap of faith. Zwingli’s doctrine of salvation was very similar to Luther’s. It is natural to assume that, deliberately or unconsciously, he had been influenced by his northern counterpart.
Yet the two men were very different. Luther was a monk and professor whose revolution was grounded in his own private spiritual crisis. Zwingli was a more public figure. If Luther’s Reformation was a theology for lovers, Zwingli’s was prosaic, politically aware, and more self-consciously scholarly. Erasmus and the Renaissance scholars had initially thought that Luther was one of them, before discovering when it was too late that his earthiness and love for theological paradox were too raw for their taste. By contrast, Zwingli, who had exchanged letters with Erasmus in his youth, enthusiastically adopted both his biblical scholarship and his zeal for social and political reform. Erasmus himself died a Roman Catholic in 1536, but he lived out his last years in the Swiss city of Basel, where a Reformation in Zwingli’s tradition had taken hold. Many of those who shared Erasmus’s vision of a purified Christendom found Zwingli’s movement more congenial than Luther’s.
Zwingli’s Reformation was also unmistakably Swiss. Switzerland in his day was, incongruous as it may now seem, a revolutionary entity: a popular republic formed in the high Alps to resist the Holy Roman Empire. Through the fifteenth century, it was expanding, reaching cities of the southern German plain like Bern, Basel, and Zurich. It would grow no further, partly because the Reformation divided it, but the danger that half of Germany might “turn Swiss” still seemed real. To turn Swiss meant to assert one’s liberty, but a liberty that was communal and communitarian rather than individualistic.1
Sixteenth-century Switzerland was fiercely independent and politically idiosyncratic, but also poor. Its one lucrative export was its much-feared mercenary soldiers, but being paid by foreigners to slaughter one another has its drawbacks. The young Zwingli served as a military chaplain, and in September 1515 he was present at the catastrophic battle of Marignano, when Swiss forces fighting for the pope were crushed by a larger French army. Around half of the Swiss soldiers present were killed. For Zwingli, this was almost a conversion experience. He began to denounce mercenary service, and his rural parish threw him out. However, in the cities, which could afford to despise the mercenary trade, he won a hearing. With the country still reeling from Marignano, in 1518 Zwingli was elected Zurich’s city preacher.2
His sermons were a heady mixture: denunciations of blood money blended with doctrine akin to Luther’s, faith alone, Bible alone, and rejection of Church hierarchy. Soon, with cautious permission from the city’s magistrates, Zurich’s churches were purged of Catholic images and rites: the kind of cleansing that Luther called fanaticism. Basel and Bern followed close behind. Strassburg’s great reforming minister, Martin Bucer, was also drawn to the Swiss reformers.
An alliance between Luther and this loose grouping seemed natural. They shared a Gospel of salvation, an exclusive loyalty to Scripture, and enemies in both Catholicism and Anabaptism. The Swiss reformers openly admired Luther. Politicians on both sides also wanted agreement, both to unite the sundered body of Christ and to seek safety in numbers. But despite repeated attempts, and a summit conference between Zwingli and Luther at Marburg in 1529, there would be no agreement. The sticking point may seem trivial to modern eyes: differing views of the sacrament variously known as the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion, or (to Catholics) the Mass. It is worth pausing on this issue, because, abstract as it may appear, it was fundamental to early Protestants’ religious experience.
At his Last Supper before his death, Jesus Christ gave bread and wine to his disciples, saying, “This is my body” and “This is my blood”, and told them to eat and drink in remembrance of him.3 Christians have done so ever since, but without agreement on exactly what is being done. In Catholicism, this rite became the Mass, a numinous celebration of Christ’s saving presence in which his promise, “This is my body”, is literally fulfilled. For Catholics, the sacramental bread is wholly transformed, or “transubstantiated”, into Christ’s flesh, retaining only the outward appearance of bread and making the saving power of his unique sacrifice immediately present.
Luther and Zwingli alike saw this as wholly unacceptable. It sounded like manipulating God, re-crucifying Christ, and little more than magic. But there agreement ended. Zwingli’s view was bluntly commonsensical: bread is bread. Yes, Christ said, “This is my body”, but he also said, “I am the true vine.” Obviously, he did not mean it literally. The rite was simply a symbolic memorial. For Luther, this was a worse blasphemy than the Catholic Mass itself. He insisted that Christ’s words were literally true, because, in Christ, heaven touches earth. He rejected transubstantiation as a piece of Aristotelian sophistry, but argued that Christ was wholly, physically present in the sacramental bread, just as the Son of God was wholly present in the man Jesus and just as the Word of God was wholly present in Scripture. Zwingli’s cramped rationalism was, he thought, tantamount to atheism, reducing Christ to an abstract notion and denying Christians the greatest comfort their Saviour offered: his own physical presence, dwelling within them as they ate and drank his body and blood.4
Zwingli looked at Luther’s doctrine and saw unreformed dregs of popery, sodden in superstition. Luther looked at Zwingli’s and saw intolerable blasphemies. Condescension versus outrage: not a promising mix. The colloquy at Marburg that tried to resolve the issue was carefully stage-managed, but on this key point there would be no budging. Luther began by writing Christ’s words – “This is my body” – on the table in chalk and insisting that until Zwingli admitted those words were true, there was nothing to discuss. That fundamental disagreement was the rock on which attempts at pan-Protestant unity would founder for generations.
Luther characteristically claimed Marburg as a victory, and soon it began to look as if he were right. Zwingli’s ideas might have reached into Germany, but much of Switzerland remained staunchly Catholic. In 1530–31, the tensions between the reformed and the Catholic cantons boiled over into the Reformation’s first religious war. For the reformers, it was a disaster. Zurich’s army was decisively beaten by the Catholic cantons at the battle of Kappel on 11 October 1531. The subsequent treaty banned Protestantism from advancing any further; Switzerland has been religiously divided ever since. Worse, Zwingli himself was killed in the battle, and his body mutilated by the victorious Catholic forces. Luther crowed mercilessly over his rival’s shameful death, sword in hand, when he should have laid down his life in unresisting innocence like a true Christian martyr.
Zwingli’s Reformation was left leaderless. His young successor in Zurich, Heinrich Bullinger, would eventually go on to steer his legacy with a cool head and steady hand for nearly half a century. For now, however, the most prominent figure was Bucer, in Strassburg. Bucer was the era’s great ecumenist, forever churning out treatises and formulas to paper over doctrinal cracks, trying always to keep everyone talking. In May 1536, he secured an apparent triumph: the Wittenberg Concord, an agreed statement with Luther on the Eucharist. In fact, Bucer’s view was distinct from both Zwingli’s and Luther’s. He disliked Luther’s crude talk of Christ’s physical presence but did insist that the bread and wine were no mere symbol; Christ was spiritually present in the faithful believer who received the sacrament, which mattered far more than any fleshly presence. So he and Luther did have some real common ground, and the Wittenberg Concord concealed their disagreement under ambiguous language. If both sides had been happy to bracket their dispute, it could have worked, but Luther loudly insisted that he had not budged an inch. Bucer sent the text to Basel with an accompanying note explaining his understanding of what it meant. In Zurich, however, where Zwingli’s memory was kept pure, it looked like a sellout. And indeed, at the same time, Bucer was writing to Luther offering a different understanding of the text, explaining that he had told the Swiss what they needed to hear, because of their “weakness”. Predictably, a copy of the letter found its way to Zurich. The Zurichers never trusted Bucer again. Basel and Zurich became alienated from each other, and Bern was contested between them. It was an utter fiasco. Protestantism’s destiny to shatter into fragments was fulfilling itself.5
Enter, late in the day, John Calvin. Calvin has always been easier to admire than to love. As his best modern biographer, Bruce Gordon, puts it, Calvin “never felt he had encountered an intellectual equal, and he was probably correct”.6 He could not abide to be crossed by enemy or friend, and once he had begun an argument, he pursued it with unforgiving tenacity. While Luther’s emotional theatricality gave even his faults a kind of grandeur, Calvin was a man of reserve and precision. But he was a spiritual writer of luminous clarity, fired by a ravishing vision of the light and sweetness of Christ. He also came closer than anyone else to unifying the disparate pieces of Protestantism. The Reformed Protestant tradition that Zwingli started is commonly called Calvinism, inaccurately but not unjustly. Calvin did not found it, but he did keep it together.
Calvin was eight years old when Luther’s revolt began: a mere child next to the theological giants who spent his youth clashing with one another. He converted to the new German doctrines when he was a law student in Paris in the early 1530s. A clampdown on heresy in France in 1534 forced him to flee abroad, never to return. He went, initially, to Basel, where in 1536 he published the first edition of the book that would become his life’s work: Institutio Christianae religionis, best translated as An Instruction in Christian Religion.
The Institutio had two immediate purposes. First, it was a letter to his home country, dedicated to the king of France. Calvin wanted to prove, in the wake of Münster, that Protestantism was not politically subversive and so could safely be tolerated. His other avowed purpose was nothing less than to unify Protestantism. All the hairsplitting arguments about Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, he claimed, missed the point. The focus should instead be on how the sacrament spiritually nourished believers.
One book by a clever Frenchman was not, however, going to heal Protestantism’s divisions. Its immediate effect was to derail Calvin’s career. In 1536, his travels took him through the city of Geneva, where he intended to stay a single night. Geneva was then an independent French-speaking city-state under the military protection of the Swiss city of Bern. The previous year, the Bernese had encouraged a raucous little Reformation in the city, and a French preacher, Guillaume Farel, had been installed as minister. The city remained gravely divided, and Farel was conscious of needing backup. When the author of the Institutio strayed into his city, Farel confronted him with a prophet’s certainty and convinced the reluctant Calvin that God was calling him to work in Geneva. Farel was more firebrand than theologian, but he managed to browbeat John Calvin into changing his mind: precious few could say as much.
Geneva was a briar patch for Calvin. The city’s factional divisions continued, and in 1538 both Farel and Calvin were banished. For Calvin, it was a liberation. He went to Strassburg, spending three happy, fruitful years working with Bucer and revising the Institutio. His peace was interrupted in 1541, when Genevan politics turned again and the city invited him to return, without Farel. He felt obliged to accept, but he drove a hard bargain. He would now structure the Genevan church in his own way. As we saw in the last chapter, this meant imposing a systematic structure of moral policing. He set out to create a model of what a reformed Christian city could be. Calvin remained Geneva’s chief pastor until 1564, when he worked himself into an early grave.
From his new Alpine Jerusalem, Calvin continued his dogged pursuit of Protestant unity. In 1540, he had criticized both Luther and Zwingli for their intransigence and called for reconciliation. With Zwingli safely dead, Luther let it be known that he liked the young Frenchman’s book, a wisp of hope to which Calvin clung.7 His first real opportunity came in the late 1540s, not long after Luther himself had died. In 1547, the Emperor Charles V at last confronted the Protestants in battle and won a crushing victory at Mühlberg. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Alps in the Italian city of Trento (Trent), Pope Paul III had finally assembled a General Council to rebut the Protestant challenge. In this moment of dreadful urgency, Calvin persuaded Bullinger, in Zurich, to open theological negotiations. In May 1549, he went to Zurich himself, and the two men hammered out a full agreed statement on the Eucharist: the Zurich Consensus.
Despite the title, this was Calvin’s achievement. It was he who had pursued the agreement and made concessions to make it happen. The result was an ambiguous formula that stuck fairly closely to Bullinger’s views while still emphasizing that, in the Eucharist, Christ is received by faith. Crucially, though, there was enough goodwill to ensure that this was no rerun of the Wittenberg Concord. The Zurichers trusted Calvin, and even accepted two amendments he suggested to strengthen the text of the Consensus a few months later. One by one, the Swiss Protestant churches formally adopted the Consensus. Bucer, in exile after the wars in Germany, feared that Calvin had given too much ground. Calvin replied, “Let us bear therefore with a sigh what we cannot correct”, but then persuaded Bullinger to accept the changes – to Bucer’s evident surprise.8 A stable, inclusive Reformed Protestantism had been born, with Calvin as its midwife.
Only one detail remained: bringing in the Lutherans. Calvin genuinely believed it could be done. His own position was reasonable and self-evidently correct, and many reformed Christians had already united around it. He also had considerable faith in his own persuasive powers. In particular, with Luther himself having died in 1546, Calvin’s hopes were pinned on Luther’s right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon. Melanchthon shared Bucer’s eagerness for conciliation and Calvin’s own scholarly brilliance. He was also mild-mannered – to the point of spinelessness, his enemies muttered. The two men had met several times, and Calvin felt they were kindred spirits. Melanchthon was on friendly terms with other Swiss reformers; Bullinger’s son even lived with Melanchthon for a year when he was a student. Surely something could be done.9
It was not to be. For one thing, Calvin the statesman could not always keep Calvin the theological street fighter muzzled. In the 1540s, Calvin and Melanchthon disagreed in print over the doctrine of predestination, and Calvin would not shut up and let it go. When Melanchthon was openly friendly toward one of Calvin’s critics in 1557, Calvin could not bring himself to overlook it. More profoundly, Calvin never seems to have believed that he and Melanchthon really differed. He appealed repeatedly to Melanchthon to admit that he really did agree with him on disputed issues. Melanchthon tended to respond to these appeals by falling silent, and reportedly tore up one letter in fury.10
Calvin and his allies were wounded by Melanchthon’s inexplicable reticence. They believed they represented a broad, centrist reformism drawing on the best scholarship. As their movement put down roots across Europe, in the British Isles, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, and parts of Germany, it seemed perverse that Luther’s crude sacramental theology should be a barrier to unity.
In other words, Calvin and the Reformed theologians never took Lutheranism seriously. Calvin had the nerve to claim that Luther would have signed the Zurich Consensus had he lived.11 Melanchthon at least continued corresponding with Calvin, but other Lutherans were less ready to accept his condescension. The Lutheran theologian Joachim Westphal denounced the Consensus in a book subtly titled A Farrago of Confused and Divergent Opinions on the Lord’s Supper. Calvin, surprised and stung by Westphal’s bitterness, responded in vituperative kind. It did not bode well.
Westphal’s fury was a sign that Calvin had stirred a hornets’ nest. By the 1550s, two parties of so-called Lutherans were at each other’s throats. The split went back to that crushing military defeat in 1547 and to Melanchthon’s penchant for appeasement. In 1548, facing threats to reimpose a virtually unreformed Catholicism, Melanchthon had persuaded Duke Maurice of Saxony to support a compromise, the so-called Leipzig Interim, which would have permitted Protestant preaching while conceding a great deal else in the ritual life and outward organization of the Church. Such compromises were not ideal, Melanchthon admitted, but if the peace of the Church and the will of princes demanded it, then so be it. It was, from one point of view, a brave stand.
From another, it was a cowardly betrayal, typical of a timid scholar whose spine had only ever been stiffened by having Luther at his side. A group of self-styled “Gnesio-Lutherans” or “true” Lutherans, who aspired to cherish every scrap of Luther’s legacy, were holed up in the besieged city of Magdeburg, from where they poured contempt on Melanchthon’s concessions. Men like Flacius Illyricus argued that even if outward ceremonies were unimportant, they should not be changed at sword point. It was a time for boldly confessing the faith, not for a faintheartedness that was tantamount to apostasy.12
The immediate crisis passed – the gyrations of German politics eventually produced a peace with established rights for Lutherans in 1555 – but the rift between Gnesio-Lutherans and Melanchthon’s “Philippist” supporters was not so easily healed. The Philippists were suspected of selling out not only to the Catholics but also to the Calvinists, whom the Gnesio-Lutherans loathed just as much as their master had loathed Zwingli. Even if Melanchthon did agree with Calvin, then, he could scarcely say so. No wonder he found Calvin’s naive appeals frustrating.
Lutheranism in Search of Concord
The running battle between Philippists and Gnesio-Lutherans consumed the Lutheran world for thirty years. The Philippists were the establishment, even after Melanchthon’s death in 1560. They controlled the universities of Wittenberg and Leipzig and held high office in most Lutheran territorial churches. They were politically much more palatable; it was after all the Gnesio-Lutherans who had been dreaming up dangerously subversive theories of resistance. Philippists, like Calvinists, had a patrician sense of themselves as the natural intellectual centre of gravity. They were reluctant to stoop to polemical fistfights and disdained the quarrel that the Gnesio-Lutherans were forcing on them.
The Gnesio-Lutherans, by contrast, were revolutionaries. Luther had taught that worldly success was a sign of God’s displeasure. His followers knew why they had been frozen out and why his intoxicating, world-upending vision had been diluted into insipid moralism. If the Philippists were condescending pragmatists, the Gnesio-Lutherans were bomb-throwing idealists, convinced that true faith never compromises and that criticism only proved them right. They deplored the Philippists’ readiness to bend with the political wind. In particular, they feared that the Philippists’ talk of ethics betrayed their Erasmian roots: this was not real Protestantism. Real Protestants would understand how absolutely pervasive human sin was and would not pretend it could be tidied up with a little good behaviour.
In 1560, the tub-thumping Gnesio-Lutheran Flacius Illyricus claimed that humanity’s fall from grace, in the Garden of Eden, had transformed human nature so fundamentally that men and women were made no longer in God’s image but in the devil’s: a kind of backward transubstantiation. Most Gnesio-Lutherans hastened to distance themselves from this bizarre idea, but it does tell us something about their movement. They were not interested in compromises between truth and error. Human depravity was absolute, and any softening of that line with oh-so-reasonable Renaissance idealism risked eviscerating the Protestant Gospel altogether.13
The standard to which Gnesio-Lutherans rallied was the Augsburg Confession: the statement of Lutheran faith submitted by the first “Protestants” to the imperial Diet of Augsburg in 1530 and written, ironically enough, by Melanchthon. The Augsburg Confession acquired totemic status. For Luther’s friend Georg Spalatin to call it “the most significant act which has ever taken place on earth” was a little hyperbolic, but it was perfectly normal for Gnesio-Lutherans to place it on a par with the ancient Christian creeds.14 For Philippists, by contrast, it was the product of a particular historical moment, subject to amendment or change. Indeed, Melanchthon himself later amended the text, making changes that Gnesio-Lutherans saw as weasel words contaminating Luther’s prophetic insights with brackish rationalism. In this battle for the Augsburg Confession, the Gnesio-Lutherans had one significant tactical advantage. The 1555 peace treaty made adherence to the original, unaltered Augsburg Confession the only legal alternative to Catholicism in the Holy Roman Empire. The Gnesio-Lutherans managed to position themselves simultaneously as fearless opponents of imperial tyranny and blameless upholders of imperial law.
Finally, in 1570–71, the Philippists were goaded to respond to their critics. A polemical counter-attack labelled the Gnesio-Lutherans as fanatical perverters of Luther’s legacy and accused them of a series of fullblown heresies, from misunderstanding Christ’s nature to implying that the devil was God’s equal.15 No doubt it felt good, but these overblown caricatures only dented the Philippists’ own credibility. German princes who had until now tried to broker compromise began to shift their ground. The turning point came in 1574, when the elector of Saxony, Augustus, purged the Philippists from the theology faculty at Wittenberg, on the grounds of crypto-Calvinism. In 1576, the Saxons set about trying to resolve the issue once and for all. The Formula of Concord, which six theologians under Saxony’s sponsorship produced in May 1577, looked moderate only by comparison with Philippist hyperbole. Pressured by Augustus, one by one Germany’s Lutheran territories adopted it as the only legitimate interpretation of the Augsburg Confession. In 1580, it was incorporated into a Book of Concord, a collection of Lutheran texts that became the canonical definition of Lutheran orthodoxy. Philippism’s back was broken, and with it any wish to build bridges with Calvinism.
That, at least, was the story within Germany, the Lutheran world’s centre of gravity. On the periphery, there were different stories. Poland’s history as a crucible of early Protestantism is now largely forgotten. Poland had a Catholic majority, but substantial numbers of Lutheran and Reformed Protestants mixed with radicals who denied the doctrine of the Trinity. There were also the Bohemian Brethren, representatives of a tradition going back a century before Luther to the Czech preacher Jan Hus but who were broadly sympathetic to Protestantism. Out of this fragile and splintered situation emerged Jan Łaski, the Polish Calvin. A former student of Erasmus’s, he returned home from a decade’s exile in 1556 to try to unite Polish Protestantism. He aimed to shore up relations between the Reformed church and the Bohemian Brethren and to cast this alliance in sufficiently open terms to make it seem safe for the Lutherans to join too.
Łaski died in 1560, but his dream did not die with him. As the political tides turned against Polish Protestantism over the following decade, the pressure to unite increased. The Polish Lutherans were reluctant, but their relations with the Bohemian Brethren were relatively warm, and they eventually agreed to submit the Brethren’s Confession of Faith to the theologians at Wittenberg for their judgment. The Philippists at Wittenberg were happy to approve it. Suddenly Lutherans and Calvinists found themselves with a shared ally. A moment of goodwill opened up and was seized. A three-way conference lasting a mere six days in April 1570 produced the Consensus of Sendomir.
The Consensus of Sendomir is a fair picture of what the much-imagined Protestant unity might have looked like. It committed all parties to mutual goodwill and peace. Its statement on the Eucharist is masterfully ambiguous, along lines that Calvin and Bucer would have recognized: Christ’s body and blood are “truly” received, and what that means is left to the individual believer. The consensus was accepted by Polish Protestants of all stripes, who urged their brethren elsewhere to follow the Polish example. Instead, most ignored it and have done so ever since.16
Denmark was no keener on Gnesio-Lutheran rigidity. Frederik II, king of Denmark from 1559 to 1588, was the Lutheran world’s most powerful prince and was trying to forge an alliance with the more or less Calvinist kingdom of England. On a Europe-wide scale, the Formula of Concord was far more divisive than unifying. Frederik accused the Germans of behaving like miniature popes, and they accused him of crypto-Calvinism. When his sister, Elector Augustus’s wife, sent him two beautifully bound presentation copies of the Book of Concord as a gift in 1581, he publicly threw them on the fire. The Formula had pacified Germany, but concord had its limits, and its price.17
By the 1580s, Protestant theological consensus seemed out of reach. But there were other routes to unity. One looked back to Erasmus: instead of all this ridiculous doctrinal hairsplitting, why not simply live a good Christian life? In Strassburg in the early 1540s, Katharina Schütz Zell, the sixteenth century’s most distinguished female Protestant theologian, made a valiant attempt to bring three of her colleagues – a Lutheran, a Zwinglian and a radical – into dialogue on the basis of love of neighbours and a common acceptance of Scripture.18 Significantly, like Erasmus himself, she lacked a formal, academic training in theology, and like Erasmus she suspected that the whole business of theology served only to breed dissent.
Such approaches were, therefore, less impartial than they looked, because they depended on belittling other people’s deeply held convictions. It was, again, a Calvinist, or Philippist, approach rather than a Gnesio-Lutheran one. Calvinists were the more direct heirs of Erasmus and saw ethics as vital for defining a Christian community. That was one of the things Gnesio-Lutherans most disliked. For them, all this talk of ethics seemed to miss the point that sinful human beings simply cannot live ethically without the transforming power of true faith. Doctrine had to come first.
Where an appeal to shared ethics failed, however, more pragmatic considerations might succeed. Nothing unites like a common enemy, and early Protestants were under mortal threat from the Catholic powers. This was unity not for the sake of peace but so as to fight all the better. It was temporary: an agreement to shelve disputes only until the emergency was over. It therefore did not require absolute agreement, merely a broad recognition of spiritual kinship.
However, not all Protestants faced the same threats. As we shall see in the next chapter, in the religious wars of the later sixteenth century, Calvinists in France, the Netherlands, and the British Isles were in the front line. Some Lutheran princes and territories did provide logistical and diplomatic support, but it was the Calvinists who needed unity urgently. During the terrible existential crisis of the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648, the entire survival of northern European Protestantism seemed at stake. Some Lutherans, especially the Scandinavians, discovered a renewed zeal for cooperation. Now, however, the premier Calvinist power, Great Britain, remained aloof. Unity at gunpoint was fleeting at best.
The battle with Catholicism did decisively shape Protestant attempts at unity, however. Catholics mocked Protestants for their divisions and tried to damn them all with the worst excesses of a few extremists. Protestants therefore had a strong incentive to present a moderate, united front, rather than appear like a sackful of squabbling fanatics. The chief victims of this need were the radicals. It became imperative for “mainstream” Protestants of all kinds to draw a line between themselves and the radicals, by any means necessary. Hence the most notorious incident of Calvin’s career. In 1553, a Spaniard named Miguel Servetus came to Geneva. “Radical” hardly does justice to Servetus, a brilliant physician and freethinker who denied the doctrine of the Trinity, the authority of the Bible, and virtually everything else that respectable Christians held dear. He was already on the run from the Inquisition. Virtually any territory in Europe would have executed him, and Calvin, who had read his books with horror, had warned him never to come to Geneva. When Servetus came nevertheless, he was arrested, tried for heresy, and, eventually, burned alive.
Calvin’s defenders have advanced various excuses for his part in Servetus’s death. It was the only such trial in which Calvin was involved, and most other leading Protestants were implicated in more bloodshed. Servetus was executed by the Genevan city government, not by Calvin, who petitioned for the more merciful punishment of beheading. All this is true. Yet Calvin testified against Servetus at his trial and solicited condemnations of him from a range of other Protestant leaders. When the city authorities considered banishing Servetus, on the grounds that they had no jurisdiction over him, Calvin insisted that Geneva be seen to take responsibility for stopping this menace to orthodoxy.19
Calvin’s concern was not simply to stop Servetus’s blasphemous mouth but also to vindicate his own model godly republic. In retrospect, Servetus appears like a harmless crank, but in the early 1550s, with radical ideas of various kinds bubbling up across the continent, it was not foolish to fear that the Reformation might dissolve into self-defeating revolutionary chaos. A line had to be drawn. Calvin positively wanted radical blood on his hands; it was a marker of respectability for the Lutherans and for potential converts, and a challenge to Catholics who could not, now, easily dismiss him as an extremist. But unsurprisingly, a quest for Protestant unity built on the ashes of Protestant dissidents did not succeed.
As Protestants’ divisions hardened, they still dreamed dreams of reconciliation. Many Calvinists nursed an unrequited love for Lutheranism. The English historian John Foxe was an unmistakable Reformed Protestant but also a dewy-eyed fan of Luther’s who had a slew of Luther’s works translated into English. He recognized that there were doctrinal differences, but refused to blow “one small blemish” in Luther’s sacramental theology out of proportion and urged his readers to give “a moderate interpretation” to Luther’s work. Other English theologians, like the royal chaplain Richard Field, tried to explain the doctrinal differences away altogether, arguing that it was all a misunderstanding. Some of Luther’s English fans even argued that it was his German successors who were “ridiculous imitators” and perverters of his legacy, while they themselves were his true heirs. They were in love with an imagined Lutheranism, not the real thing.20 This was the kind of condescension that Gnesio-Lutherans had come to expect from Calvinists.
Other Calvinists had more practical ideas. In out-of-the-way places, they just got on with it; in Batavia (modern Jakarta), the colonial capital of the Dutch East Indies, the Dutch Reformed Church simply admitted Lutherans to church membership. For those who wanted to turn local pragmatism into something more systematic, the way forward was obvious: a council, a full-scale theological conference that could thrash out the issues once and for all, on the ancient Church’s model. But who would convene such a council? Who would attend? Who would set the agenda? Worse, given that Protestants rejected all authority aside from the unmediated Bible, who could possibly compel anyone to accept what a council might say – if it did not degenerate into a slanging match and break down irreconcilably? For the advocates of a council, these were not reasons to despair, merely to lay their plans carefully.
Initially, some hoped for a big bang. Thomas Cranmer, the first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury, was a Reformed Protestant of Martin Bucer’s kind. (He invited Bucer to England and gave him a plum job in Cambridge, where the climate promptly killed him.) At that moment, in the early 1550s, England was the most powerful Protestant state in Europe. The ancient councils had been convened and stage-managed by Roman emperors. Perhaps England’s pious boy-king, Edward VI, could now serve the same function? In 1552, Cranmer invited Bullinger, Calvin, and Melanchthon, the three most visionary Protestant leaders then alive, to England. Calvin, characteristically, was enthusiastic, though wary of the long journey. Bullinger had the same concerns and none of the eagerness. Melanchthon would have been the prize catch. Cranmer tried everything to lure him, even sending his travel expenses in advance, but Melanchthon’s irrational fear of sea travel was matched by an entirely rational fear of Tudor England, a land of murderously capricious politics where Cranmer himself would meet a martyr’s death less than four years later. Even if he had come, and even if some sort of deal had been reached, his involvement would hardly have persuaded the fledgling Gnesio-Lutheran caucus. But no one came. Then the English king died in 1553, Queen Mary briefly returned England to Catholicism, and the scheme died.21
In later generations, a multistage process seemed more prudent. The basic scheme, which resurfaced with many variations, was for an initial conference between the various Calvinist churches. This would allow them to present a common front at the second stage, when the Lutherans would be allowed into the room. Some imagined a third stage, of reconciliation with Catholicism. The scheme was like a child’s plan to dig a tunnel to the other side of the world: utterly impossible, but easy to begin.
That is, uniting the Calvinists ought to have been easy. Calvinists across Europe recognized one another informally as brethren, studied at one another’s universities, shared ministers, read the same books, and in some cases even shared formal confessions of faith. But those family ties were not enough for any kind of coordinated dialogue with the Lutherans. The Formula of Concord spurred an attempt to formalize matters; in 1577, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish and French Calvinist theologians attended a conference at Frankfurt and prepared an agreed confession of faith, published in 1581. But it was merely a private initiative, with no formal status. The English regime even banned it.22
For the awkward truth was that even Calvinists were keenest on unity when their own situation was precarious. French Calvinists, who were fighting desperately for survival in a series of civil wars from 1562 to 1595 and who thereafter were a vulnerable minority, were cheerleaders for international Protestant solidarity. Elizabeth I’s England, home to Europe’s largest and oddest Calvinist church, was suspicious of any encroachment on national sovereignty. The weak pursued unity, and the strong distrusted it: not a promising situation.
Hopes were rekindled when, on Elizabeth’s death in 1603, King James VI of Scotland inherited the English and Irish crowns, creating a formidable British monarchy that made him, at least in his own eyes, the leader of the Protestant world. Uniting that world, as a prelude to reuniting all Christendom, was a project fit for such a king. In 1613–14, a Franco-Scottish theological team sponsored by James drew up a kind of road map to Protestant unity, which was formally endorsed by a French Reformed synod at Tonneins. It proposed an initial meeting of a dozen Calvinist theologians, under James’s patronage, to produce a common confession of faith. The churches involved would then commit not to decide any major controversies or make any innovations without consulting one another. A year later, there would be a second conference to which the Lutherans would be invited, where the delegates would condemn Anabaptism as beyond the pale while agreeing to tolerate one another. At that point, because we are already in lands of fantasy, the Catholics, too, would repent of their errors and be welcomed back into the fold.23
It was not altogether ridiculous. Determined politicians might have been able to bang the theologians’ heads together hard enough to produce some grudging, temporary tolerance. Tonneins seemed as if it might have been such a moment. Another such came in 1630, during the Thirty Years War, when the Swedish warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus dramatically invaded Germany and so saved German Protestantism from what looked like certain destruction. John Dury, an indefatigable Scottish peddler of schemes for Protestant unity, smelled an opportunity and pestered his way into Gustavus’s court, finally managing to meet him in December 1631. Dury outlined his vision, which amounted to the Tonneins scheme reheated. Gustavus was enthusiastic and promised to give Dury letters authorizing him to summon Lutheran and Calvinist representatives from across Germany.
Or so Dury claimed. Unfortunately, Gustavus did not write anything down. Less than a year later, he was dead in battle, and Dury was once again without a patron. If anyone could ever have made this scheme work, it was Gustavus Adolphus in 1631–32. But even if Gustavus had truly meant it, it would have been a tall order. The Germans were grateful to him, but they would not have taken orders, especially as the military situation moved on. The English would have been a harder nut still. Any conceivable agreement would have been both temporary and partial, with significant numbers of Protestants left carping outside.24
The same problems had left the Tonneins scheme stillborn. It bore a French endorsement and the British king’s fingerprints, but no one else would actually pick it up. One of those stirred by it was the German Calvinist David Pareus, who published his own blueprint for unity in 1615, imagining a council that would be convened jointly by King James and by his brother-in-law, the Danish king Christian IV. Twinning the Protestant world’s two premier princes would make the project look less like a Calvinist plot. However, James disliked Pareus’s attitude toward royal authority and in any case would never have agreed to share equal billing with a king he regarded as his inferior. Nothing more was heard either of James’s plan or of Pareus’s. Only politics could have made such schemes work, and it was politics that made them impossible.
In 1618–19, however, something very like the long-imagined international council did take place. The Synod of Dordt was called not to pursue some abstract project of unity but to resolve a bitterly divisive issue that is still almost synonymous with Calvinism: predestination.
Lutheranism and Calvinism alike stress that we human beings cannot save ourselves. We are too mired in our own evil to dig ourselves out. Only God can rescue us, through Jesus Christ’s redeeming sacrifice. But this doctrine, which Luther and others found so liberating, has a sting in the tail. If salvation is entirely God’s work, then it is also entirely God’s choice. Our human wills are too corrupt to choose God, too corrupt, even, to choose to accept God’s offer of salvation. Only God himself enables us to accept that offer, and because God is sovereign, if he gives us that grace, we cannot refuse it. So, if God chooses to save us, we will be saved. We are not saved because we are good; we only become even partially good as a consequence of God’s decision to save us. His decision to save us is free, sovereign, and inscrutable, and if he does not choose to save us, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. In other words, our eternal fate is predestined.
Predestination was not Luther’s idea. St Augustine, Western Christianity’s single most influential theologian, taught a strong doctrine of predestination, and the germ of the idea is in the New Testament. Luther did, however, quickly conclude that it was an essential consequence of his doctrines, and it was over this issue that Erasmus finally and decisively broke with him in 1524. However, most Lutherans chose to soft-pedal this part of their master’s teaching. Like Erasmus and many others, they found it intuitively morally offensive. Melanchthon smuggled in a human ability to reject God’s grace. On this point, at least, it was Melanchthon, not Luther, who shaped “Lutheran” orthodoxy.
Zwingli and the early Swiss reformers also had no affection for predestination, and Bullinger never embraced it fully. Calvin, however, would not evade the doctrine’s iron logic and added the final deduction that Augustine and Luther had been too squeamish to make: if God predestines some people to heaven, he must therefore equally deliberately predestine the rest to hell.
Calvin initially suggested the preachers should be discreet in handling such a controversial doctrine. It was only when he was challenged on the point that, characteristically, he dug in and made it a test of loyalty. But he also found the idea unexpectedly nourishing. It fitted his almost rapturous emphasis on God’s absolute sovereignty. More practically, for those under persecution, predestination is liberating. If your salvation is wholly in God’s hands, you do not need to fear that your courage will fail you when the torturer comes. One English Protestant awaiting a heretic’s death enthused that the doctrine “so cheereth our hearts and quickeneth our spirits that no trouble or tyranny executed against us can dull or discomfort the same”.25 For Calvinists, who emphasized that Christians were a covenanted people, set apart for God, predestination seemed almost natural. They were God’s chosen people: the new Israel.
By the end of the century, a hard-line doctrine of predestination had become orthodoxy across most of the Calvinist world, but it was never unchallenged. Moral revulsion refused to fade away. Predestination’s ablest opponent was the Dutch theologian Jakob Arminius, whose ideas were confined to the academy while he lived. After his death in 1609, however, a group of his disciples presented the Dutch church with a public “Remonstrance,” insisting that human beings can cooperate with God in salvation.
The Remonstrance provoked a dangerous split in Dutch Calvinism, to the point that civil war seemed a real possibility. Remonstrant militias were formed. The state of Holland, the Remonstrant stronghold, was on the point of seceding from the Netherlands. The federal Dutch government eventually intervened, purging Remonstrants from a string of Dutch cities and, following a show of force, persuading the Hollanders to abandon their quixotic stance without a fight. In August 1618, a series of Remonstrant leaders were arrested, and some executed. The crisis was over.
But it is unseemly to resolve theological arguments with armies, so during the winter of 1618–19 a national synod of the Dutch Reformed Church met at the town of Dordrecht, or Dordt, to pronounce solemnly on Arminius’s doctrines. To lend it additional gravity, delegates from across Europe were invited. There were German, Genevan, Swiss, and English representatives, plus a solitary Scotsman. The French king banned his subjects from coming, but the French Reformed Church sent written submissions, and the synod symbolically kept chairs vacant for them in the assembly. Suddenly something very like the council of which so many had dreamed was actually taking place. Dordt could have been a template for international Reformed unity.
The synod did its job well. Naturally, it condemned Arminius’s teachings, but without straying into some of the more extreme formulations of predestination. Most national churches quickly endorsed its rulings. Arminianism survived in the Netherlands, but the Remonstrant leaders were banished, and public preaching of their doctrines was banned. And yet no Protestant synod could bind the consciences of those who came after it. Soon the questions supposedly settled at Dordt were being reopened. A French theologian, Moyse Amyraut, published his own solution to the predestination problem in 1634, arguing that God’s grace extended at least hypothetically to all humanity. He was accused of crypto-Arminianism, but he escaped formal censure, and his ideas stirred up fresh trouble in the Dutch church too. Protestant theological debate simply could not be closed down.
More immediately, Dordt was undercut by its own prominence. The English delegates endorsed the synod’s conclusions, but close interest in the event in England meant that Arminius’s arguments were widely aired there for the first time. A group of avant-garde young ceremonialists felt that the Dutch disputes had awakened them from a “dead sleep”. The most brilliant of these preachers, Lancelot Andrewes, mocked how the predestinarians claimed to know everything about God’s secret and inscrutable will.26
So in fact Dordt, the high-water mark of Calvinist internationalism, did as much to spread as to contain disunity. The dream of councils and of consensus was dangerous as well as impossible. This was the objection that John Dury kept encountering during his thankless quest for unity in the 1620s, 1630s and 1640s. He promised theological discussions, but in real life discussions caused divisions, not reconciliation.27 When Protestants of different kinds seemed to be rubbing along tolerably well, starting to talk theology could only cause trouble.
By the later seventeenth century, Calvinism’s promise of Protestant unity had dissolved, and Calvinism itself was splintering. In England, Arminian theology and ceremonial revival were fusing to form a weird hybrid called Anglicanism, which increasingly disowned its Calvinist heritage. The line between “orthodox” Calvinism and the “radical” Reformation, which Calvinists had tried to draw so clearly in the radicals’ blood, was being blurred by constant passage across it.
In truth, this was nothing new. Bucer’s ecumenism had extended to the more respectable Anabaptists. Even Calvin, as a young man, had given them unintended comfort. In 1537, he had been accused, falsely, of denying the doctrine of the Trinity. He rashly decided to try to refute the charge using only the language of the Bible itself, bypassing the ancient Christian theologians who had defined the doctrine and produced the relevant technical terminology. This seemed to give comfort to those radicals who had rejected all the early Church’s theological baggage in favour of the unadorned Bible. Worse, during this dispute, Calvin refused to sign the so-called Athanasian Creed, an exhaustive summary of Trinitarian doctrine that had been seen as a touchstone of orthodoxy since the sixth century. None of this meant that Calvin was a secret anti-Trinitarian, simply a little rash and overconfident.28 But it does show that Calvinists’ worries about the need to distinguish themselves from the radicals were not imaginary.
Soon fears that Reformed Protestantism might bleed into radicalism were coming true – in, of all places, Italy. Politically decentralized and intellectually sophisticated, Italy in the 1530s was fertile soil for freewheeling evangelical thinking. Most of the so-called spirituali made no open breach with Rome, hoping instead that the Catholic Church would take on the Protestants’ most compelling ideas. When it finally became clear that that cause was lost, some returned to Catholic orthodoxy, others became more or less orthodox Calvinists, but others still ploughed their own furrows. Some, following the logic that had entangled Calvin in 1537, questioned the doctrine of the Trinity. Italy was now too dangerous a place to think such thoughts, and the radical Italian fringe scattered, many of them finding refuge in east-central Europe: the thinly populated east of Switzerland, the borderlands of Hungary and Transylvania, or religiously fragmented Poland. In Transylvania, a Calvinist leader named Ferenc Dávid publicly abandoned the doctrine of the Trinity in 1565. Soon a Transylvanian anti-Trinitarian church was organized, teaching a rationalistic Christianity in which Jesus Christ was less divine redeemer than human exemplar. Polish Calvinism likewise incubated anti-Trinitarians. In 1565, the Polish radicals formally constituted a “Minor” Reformed church, which acquired its own university and printing press. They became known as Socinians, from their articulate Italian-descended leader Faustus Socinus. Anti-Trinitarian radicalism began to look less like a lunatic fringe and more like a serious alternative.
During the seventeenth century, as Poland’s hardening religious politics scattered Socinians into exile, adventurous Calvinists kept stumbling across their ideas. It was a Dutch Reformed minister who, in 1642, first proved that the Athanasian Creed, about which Calvin had been so recklessly fastidious, was actually written two hundred years after St Athanasius’s death. Socinian or “Unitarian” Christianity became a stubbornly established part of the landscape, especially in Britain and the Netherlands. Its self-conscious rationalism, its emphasis on individual freedom of choice, its concentration on ethics rather than doctrine – all these traits were like water in the desert to freethinkers who felt cramped by Calvinist orthodoxy. Calvinism had once seemed like the inheritor of Erasmus’s mantle, but now Socinianism made a play for it. If Calvin had seen a fundamental threat in Servetus, the original anti-Trinitarian, he had been right.
Were Socinians and Unitarians Protestants? Lutherans and Calvinists denied it in horrified tones, citing the Trinity as a touchstone of all Christian orthodoxy. It is hard to see those denials as anything other than special pleading. Socinianism was an almost purebred descendant of Calvinism, and like most children it sheds some light on its parents’ true nature. Its emergence on a wave of doubting and questioning makes Calvinism’s failure to unify Protestantism seem all the more complete. It also makes the real achievements of that project, at moments so tantalizingly near to success, seem all the more remarkable.
