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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ reading of the two sharply separated kingdoms: short-lived, but it lingered in Christendom’s memories. This view, first articulated by Luther’s nemesis Thomas Müntzer, held that the kingdom of the world should in fact submit to Christ’s kingdom. It was an apocalyptic doctrine. If the two kingdoms could be allied, then this world’s violent methods could be used to usher in the next. Müntzer tried to turn the peasant rebellions of 1524–25 in this direction, to no avail, but the idea did not die with him. It was taken up, most notoriously, in the western German city of Münster.

      When the city’s pastor and several of its leading citizens were converted to apocalyptic Anabaptist doctrines in 1532, Anabaptists from across the region converged there and succeeded in throwing out the bishop and taking over the city’s government. A Dutch baker named Jan Matthys prophesied that Münster was the new Jerusalem to which Christ would imminently return. Over a thousand adults accepted baptism. They began to muster an army. The expelled bishop raised forces too and laid siege to the city in 1534. Matthys was killed in a suicidal sortie early in the siege, but one of his comrades, a tailor named Jan Bockelson, was now proclaimed king and the successor of King David. Within his besieged Jerusalem, he abolished private property; all goods were to be held in common. He legalized polygamy, taking sixteen wives for himself. We are told that when one of them crossed him, he beheaded her himself, in public.

      The “kingdom” of Münster ended as violent, apocalyptic cults usually do. After a yearlong siege, the city was overrun. Bockelson and his fellow prophets were tortured and executed. The gibbets in which their bodies were displayed still hang from the cathedral tower. Münster became a notorious atrocity, comparable to the 11 September 2001 attacks in our own age. It convinced plenty of sober observers that Anabaptism was an existential threat that could engulf all Christendom.

      Protestants who wished to claim respectability now scrambled to distance themselves from the radicals. They distinguished radicals sharply from so-called magisterial Protestants: those who sought Reformation in alliance with the existing princes, magistrates, and other secular powers. The distinction was manifestly self-serving. In truth, the boundary between “magisterial” and “radical” was almost as arbitrary and porous as Luther’s distinction between true Christians and “fanatics”. Some of those who ended up on the “magisterial” side of the line had earlier dallied with “radical” ideas. The eminent Strassburg reformer Martin Bucer questioned infant baptism. John Foxe, chronicler of the English Reformation, opposed executing religious offenders and had qualms about oaths and church taxes.¹²

      The radicals themselves only forswore state help when they had no prospect of receiving any. As in Münster, they set up governments when they had the chance. In 1526–27, something like a state-led Anabaptist Reformation unfolded in the small Moravian town of Nikolsburg. The Anabaptist preacher Balthasar Hubmaier baptized a string of converts there, including the dominant nobleman and the town’s evangelical pastors. Hubmaier explained that he was trying to create “a Christian government at whose side God hung the Sword”, with the secular power coming to his Reformation’s aid.¹³ The experiment lasted mere months. Austrian forces seized Hubmaier in 1527, and he was burned in Vienna the following year. Anabaptists subsequently glossed over this embarrassing lapse, but if more opportunities to lapse had arisen, there would surely have been more Anabaptists unable to resist the temptation.

      Reformed, “Calvinist” Protestants, whom we will meet properly in the next chapter, accepted Luther’s two-kingdoms theory but applied it in a very different setting. The Swiss and south German cities were much more politically complex than Saxony: republics and city-states with dispersed power, layers of law and bureaucracy, and wide political participation. From this perspective, Luther’s ill-defined, arm’s-length relationship with secular authority seemed like a missed opportunity. Surely the kingdom of this world should be summoned to the aid of Christ’s kingdom, not merely by maintaining peace and order, but also by promoting education, caring for the poor, and institutionally reforming the Church. In Zurich, where political power and religious power were already so intertwined that the chief preacher was an employee of the city government, they now became almost indistinguishable. Erastianism, the supposed theory that churches ought to be subordinate to states, takes its name from a theologian of this party. That was not quite what Thomas Erastus meant, however, nor is it a fair representation of the Swiss Reformation. Swiss churches were not so much subordinate to the state as a part of the same organic whole.

      This tradition’s most important theologian, John Calvin, brought characteristic rigour to the question. Luther dreamed of good princes, disliked law on principle, and had little interest in institutions. As a result, Lutheran churches ended up with a mishmash of governing structures. Calvin, by contrast, had trained as a lawyer, knew that structures matter, and favoured more participatory government. He insisted that pastors should never have control over money: a simple change, but who knows how many scandals it has averted down the centuries? More momentously, he distinguished pastors, the ordained ministers who preach and celebrate the sacraments, from elders, senior laymen who would take charge of discipline and who became the sharp edge of a cultural revolution.

      The simple justification for the elders and their work was Christ’s detailed prescription in Matthew’s Gospel for how Christians should deal with sinners among the faithful: first private admonition, then progressively more formal reprimands, and finally, if repentance was not forthcoming, expulsion from the community.¹⁴ Calvin saw the Church as a covenanted community, a new Israel in which all were bound to be their brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. His elders were charged with systematically overseeing everyone’s moral conduct, hauling adulterers, drunkards, and those who fell asleep during sermons before a tribunal, not to punish them, but to elicit repentance.

      Nowadays, Calvinist discipline smells very totalitarian. “Repentance” could mean public humiliation, and penitents might be asked to prove their sincerity by denouncing others. However, most premodern societies were deeply communitarian and conformist. Notions of privacy and individual liberty scarcely existed. Calvinist discipline worked (and it did work) because of widespread consent. Maintaining moral order was in everyone’s interest. Drunkenness led to injuries, damage, and lost working days. Fornication led to illegitimate children for whom the community would have to care. The system could be genuinely pastoral. To read disciplinary records is to be struck by the painstaking care these men (they were all men) took to reconcile neighbours, to resolve family disputes, and to protect the victims of domestic violence.¹⁵

      Yet Calvinist discipline was ultimately neither a form of oppression nor a marriage-counselling service. It was God’s instrument to form his Church into a living example of Christ’s kingdom. Hence its most radical feature: its egalitarianism. Every Christian fell under the elders’ jurisdiction, including elders and pastors themselves, many of whom had at some time to face a grilling, although Calvin himself never did. Magistrates, noblemen and other grandees could in principle be judged on the same basis as a street beggar.

      That was the theory. Making it stick was almost impossible in rigidly hierarchical societies, but Calvinists at least tried. The laboratory was the city-state of Geneva, where Calvin was chief pastor from 1541 to his death in 1564. The city’s councillors and leading families were all in favour of clearing out whorehouses, but being publicly humiliated for dancing at their own children’s weddings was a different matter – especially at the hands of a French refugee, for Calvin was not even a native Genevan. They feared that immigrants were subverting the city’s government. Calvin himself believed he was engaged in a simple contest between morality and immorality. Remarkably, morality won. In the faction-ridden city, Calvin and his swelling band of immigrants allied themselves with a grouping who in 1555 swept the elections to the city council. Their opponents were banished from the city and a swathe of immigrants became citizens. In an unsettling echo of Münster, the refugees had taken over their asylum. Calvin’s prize was not a royal title but something more tangible and enduring: the power of excommunication. His church was now empowered to expel obstinate sinners from Christian society, whoever they might be.¹⁶

СКАЧАТЬ