Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie

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СКАЧАТЬ middle ways: “The destruction of the world is to be expected every hour.” It was time to take a stand against the forces of Antichrist, whatever their guise.²⁴

      On 15 May 1525, nine days after Luther’s pamphlet was written, the Thuringian peasants met a Saxon-Hessian mercenary army near Frankenhausen. Müntzer preached before the battle, pointing to a rainbow as an omen of victory and promising the peasants that bullets could not hurt them. Meanwhile, they were encircled with artillery. The peasants tried to flee to the town. Thousands died before they reached it. The wounded were left to die on the field. The town itself surrendered, but not quickly enough. The reprisals were on a genocidal scale. The victorious lords, one witness wrote, “seem bent on leaving a wilderness for their heirs”. Müntzer himself was found hiding, in disguise, and was beheaded. A few weeks later, the southern German peasants suffered equally catastrophic defeats. The total number killed during the whole appalling business is probably well over eighty thousand. And while the peasants would certainly have been crushed with or without Luther’s blessing, his moral responsibility for the slaughter is inescapable.

      For the reforming movement as a whole, the Peasants’ War was a calamity. Fairly or not, it was widely blamed on reformist preaching. By no coincidence, it was in September 1524, as the violence was bubbling up, that Erasmus finally decisively distanced himself from Luther. He argued, all too plausibly, that Luther’s teaching on God’s grace left no room for personal responsibility and so threatened moral anarchy and social collapse. If this was where conscience governed by Scripture alone led, perhaps the authoritative, binding interpretation of the Church was not so bad after all.²⁵ In the early 1520s, it had been possible to hope that one of the various strands of the reforming movement might take over the old Church wholesale. That hope died on the battlefields.

      The radicals, those who survived, now began to preach withdrawal from Christian society, to form perfect communities of saints in expectation of the imminent Last Judgment. For many of them, the symbol of this withdrawal was adult baptism. All the baptisms described in the New Testament are of adults able to confess their own faith. So perhaps infants should not be baptized? In which case, all Christendom had been in error since at least the second century, and the community of the faithful could only be a small, self-selected group. This meant abandoning the ideal of a universal church, to which Luther and most other reformers still aspired, for sectarianism. Beginning in Zurich in January 1525, the radicals began to mark that withdrawal by baptizing adults. “Anabaptists”, or rebaptizers, their enemies called them, and they were not short of enemies. To the old Church, they were heretics like the rest. To Luther and other reformers who desperately needed to be thought respectable, the radicals risked discrediting the reforming movement as a whole. A sharp line needed urgently to be drawn in these shifting sands.

      That effort to differentiate between radical “Anabaptists” and safe, mainstream reformers was strikingly successful. To this day, it remains controversial to describe the radicals as Protestants. Yet their shared heritage is unmistakable. The Anabaptists’ doctrines were very similar to those of establishment, “magisterial” Protestantism. Even infant baptism was openly questioned by some “mainstream” reformers, before the subject became too hot to touch. One hundred and twenty years later, the Baptists, a new group with its roots firmly in mainstream Protestantism, followed the Anabaptists in renouncing infant baptism, despite coming from a distinct theological tradition.

      Like Luther’s moderates, the radicals claimed to base their doctrines wholly on the Bible. But like Luther, they did so as lovers, perceiving the Bible’s core message by God’s grace and using it to interpret the rest. Some were more explicit about this than Luther. The south German radical Jörg Haugk complained that “many accept the Scriptures as if they were the essence of divine truth; but they are only a witness to divine truth which must be experienced in the inner being”. Hans Hut, a survivor of the battle of Frankenhausen who became a compelling Anabaptist missionary before his death in prison in 1527, argued that the Bible, if taken literally, bristled with contradictions. It could therefore only be properly understood by the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit. In this way, theologically uneducated radicals could defy learned professors like Luther. One self-taught Anabaptist preacher called scholars “Scripture wizards”, arguing that their hairsplitting subtleties blinded them to the simple truth.²⁶

      Luther and the “fanatics” both exemplify Protestantism at work. Both were driven by dazzling religious insights, which they discovered by reading the Bible and which then taught them how to read the Bible. Both denied that any human authority could teach them they were wrong. The Christian liberty that Luther had preached reached far further than he had anticipated. That was his tragedy, and perhaps also his glory.

      For while 1525 was a catastrophe, Luther did win a kind of victory. The first revolution was over. But for those princes, city councils, and people who had imbibed the reformers’ preaching, going back to the pre-1517 world was hard to imagine. So Luther found himself representing a safe middle way, the acceptable face of reform. It was an outcome that neither he nor anyone else had expected. His Reformation neither transformed the Church nor was crushed by it. Instead, a de facto partition took shape. One by one, a series of German and Scandinavian cities and territories abolished the Catholic Mass, repudiated the Church’s hierarchy, and required preachers to proclaim Luther’s doctrines. A new form of Christianity was starting to come into being. Luther’s revolution had, like all great revolutions, failed. But like all great revolutions, it had created a new world.

       CHAPTER 2

       Protectors and Tyrants

      There is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.

      – ROMANS 13:1

      The Reformation became notorious for two fat men. The first, Martin Luther, we have already met. The second, King Henry VIII of England, was in most things Luther’s opposite. Yet the two men shared a titanic stubbornness, near-messianic self-belief, a knack for dividing Christendom into admirers and enemies, and a lifelong mutual hatred.

      Henry VIII was not, except in his own eyes, a great spiritual leader. And yet while the Reformation began as Luther’s story, it quickly became Henry’s. Protestantism started in believers’ souls, as a love affair with God, but it could not be kept tidily in its place. It spilled out into every part of life, and in particular, as we will see throughout this book, it collided with politics, stymied and hijacked by it, but also subverting and occasionally transforming it. Like mating spiders, religious reformers and political leaders needed and exploited each other, but they could never trust each other. To the politicians, Luther’s movement was both a threat to be negotiated and an opportunity to be seized. At the same time, it was either the work of divine providence or a fearful scheme of Satan’s. For politicians are human beings. They felt the tug of Luther’s teachings and of the Church’s warnings on their souls like everybody else.

Taming the Reformation

      The intertwined alliance-rivalry between Church and state had been a constant theme of medieval politics. The two sides were like an old married couple, with plenty of accumulated grievances but held together by powerful bonds of affection, loyalty, convenience and habit. Still, even placid marriages can be disrupted when an eye-catching interloper waltzes in.

      For the reformers, breaking up this cosy twosome was a necessity. They knew that the pope’s power depended on the cooperation of secular rulers: the kings, princes, and magistrates who actually governed Europe. In this sense, the Reformation was fundamentally a struggle for the backing of secular governments. Without their support, no religious dissidents could last for long. With it, the old Church was СКАЧАТЬ