Читать книгу The World's Christians - Douglas Jacobsen - Страница 62

The Protestant movement burst on the scene in the early 1500s and gave European Christians a new religious alternative to Catholicism. Protestantism was warmly welcomed in many parts of Northern Europe, and it soon spread from Germany to Scandinavia, England, Switzerland, France, and Poland. In Germany, Martin Luther (1483–1546) was the main promoter of the new movement, and the Lutheran tradition codifies his thinking. A generation later, John Calvin (1509–64) led the way in articulating a slightly different Protestant vision, the Reformed perspective, which he summarized in his theological masterpiece, the Institutes of the Christian Religion. Another more radical expression of Protestantism, known as Anabaptism, emerged during these years in Switzerland, Germany, and the Low Countries. Anabaptists (meaning “re‐baptizers”) would only baptize adults (not infants), and they were pacifists who would not serve as soldiers. The Mennonites founded by Menno Simons (1496–1561) became the largest Anabaptist group. Meanwhile, in England, the Church of England was slowly evolving from its status as an independent Catholic Church governed by King Henry VIII (monarch from 1509 to 1547) toward becoming a solidly Protestant church under Queen Elizabeth (who ruled from 1558 to 1603).

The Catholic Church, which was accustomed to having a religious monopoly in most of Europe, responded vigorously to the various Protestant challenges. Catholic rulers across the continent felt compelled to defend the one, true, Catholic faith, and eventually almost all of Europe was embroiled in a tangle of religious violence that continued for more than a century. At times, Protestant armies clashed with Catholic armies, but sometimes different kinds of Protestants fought each other, and the pacifistic Anabaptists were persecuted by almost everyone. After a century of fighting, Europe’s Christians were religiously exhausted, and the violence slowly abated. The political solution, known as the “Peace of Westphalia” (1648), allowed each local kingdom, duchy, principality, or nation to choose its own religion – either Catholicism or some form of Protestantism – but each state was supposed to be religiously homogeneous. Long before 1650, Lutheranism had become the state‐designated religion in Scandinavia, the Church of England (Anglicanism) had become the official faith of England and Wales, and Reformed (or Presbyterian) Protestantism had become the dominant religion in Scotland and in various parts of what is now Germany, Switzerland, and Hungary.