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

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      This was not exactly a theocracy, but it was a church that was robustly independent of government. In particular, it cracked a problem that Lutheranism never even properly acknowledged: how to be Protestant in the face of an actively hostile state. Luther’s advice was to pray. Calvin also wanted Protestants to organize. Informal groups of believers who chose elders to police themselves found that they had become cell churches, able to support and regulate one another even when under active persecution. Luther disliked the idea of secret meetings, which he said reminded him of rats. Calvin had found a way of forming the rats into a choir and then drilling them to march.

      In the same year as his victory in Geneva, Calvin began sending missionary pastors into his native France to organize underground congregations there, riding a wave of dramatic Protestant growth in France over the following seven years. Variants on Calvin’s model began appearing like mushrooms across Europe. One example can stand to show how far this model could go.

      Scotland was a latecomer to the Reformation. In 1559–60, an inchoate evangelical movement fused with nationalist resentment to spark a rebellion against a pro-French Catholic regime. The man who crystallized this movement was John Knox, a disciple of Calvin’s who lacked his master’s subtlety and made up for it in zeal. He had seen the future as a refugee in Geneva and wanted to make it work in Scotland. Above all, he was entranced by the idea of spiritual equality. In a series of polemics in 1558, he warned his fellow Scots that they could not shirk their responsibilities to reform the Church simply because they were commoners. In God’s eyes, he insisted, “all man is equal”: equal not in rights but in responsibilities. If you lived in a land of idolatry, it was your duty to demand reform and to take action to separate yourself from the sin around you. Otherwise, when God’s judgment fell on the whole nation for tolerating blasphemies in its midst, it would engulf you too.¹⁷ This frankly revolutionary agenda stretched Luther’s two kingdoms to breaking point.

      After a decade of confusion, Scotland’s Protestants succeeded in deposing their Catholic queen, Mary, and replacing her with her infant son, now King James VI. But having fought for Christ’s kingdom against all odds, they were disinclined to submit to a king of their own making. James was raised Protestant, but spent his adult life in a running battle with Protestant churchmen who would not accept his power over them in any meaningful sense. They wanted a church that elected its own leadership – so-called Presbyterianism, from the Greek word for “elders”. The king wanted the church to be governed by bishops, partly for tradition’s sake, but mostly so that he could appoint them himself.

      Worse, like the true Calvinists they were, the Presbyterians wanted comprehensive moral discipline and to be able to haul even the king before church elders. In 1596, the Presbyterian leader Andrew Melville expounded his turbocharged version of the two-kingdoms doctrine to James VI’s face. There were two kingdoms in Scotland. James was king of one, but the other, rapidly turning itself into a recklessly expansionist empire, was the kingdom of Christ, “whose subject King James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member!”¹⁸ The effect was to reduce earthly monarchs to puppets, who on any matter of moral significance – that is, virtually every political decision – ought to take their steer from Christ’s duly authorized representatives.

      No actual government could accept this sort of arm’s-length theocracy. All Protestants, therefore, potentially faced the same basic problem: how to deal with a secular government that would not conform to God’s will. Luther’s doctrine of strictly passive disobedience had theological clarity and long Christian tradition behind it. Unfortunately, it also had a tendency to crack under pressure. In a militarized, structurally violent society, when a community finds its principles repeatedly thwarted, when it is goaded beyond endurance or faces direct, sustained persecution, it will eventually fight back.

      We will come back to those bloody struggles, but for now we simply need to notice how Protestants justified resistance to their divinely ordained rulers. These justifications were daughters of necessity, scrabbled together after the fact to legitimize self-defence. But once formulated, they took on a life of their own. The political cultures they created have shaped how Protestants relate to one another and to the world around them down to the present.

      Early Protestants found two broad ways to justify resisting their sovereign lords. One, which started more slowly but mattered more in the long run, was legal. Most European monarchies were not absolute autocracies, but were governed by law, custom, and tradition. These laws, customs, and traditions often contained hints that rulers depended on some kind of consent from their subjects. By mixing a few carefully chosen legal and historical precedents with a hefty dose of wishful thinking, one could confect an argument for constitutional monarchy. Philip of Hesse, when he was not fathering children, was drawn by this approach. The Holy Roman Emperor, who was after all an elected rather than a hereditary ruler, traditionally made a series of promises when he acceded to the throne, including promises to respect the legitimate rights of the princes under him. Philip argued that the emperor’s continued legitimacy depended on his keeping those promises. If he did not, the princes who had elected him could surely depose him and install someone better in his place.¹⁹

      Likewise, French and Scottish Calvinist theorists used tendentious historical arguments to claim that their kings were implicitly chosen by the nation as a whole. Never mind that neither realm had consciously done this for centuries, if ever. It meant that Protestants who took up arms against their sovereigns could soothe themselves that they were not defying the law but defending it. Excavating and reviving Europe’s genuine, long-buried antimonarchical precedents suddenly became the Protestant reformers’ business.

      The other justification for resistance was being talked about by some of Luther’s colleagues in the mid-1520s, by Martin Bucer, the influential Strassburg reformer, in 1535, and by Philip Melanchthon in 1546–47. It was fully formulated for the first time by Lutheran diehards besieged in the city of Magdeburg in 1550. In the 1570s, French Protestants would use it to justify resistance up to the point of assassinating a tyrannical king. This argument began from St Paul’s dictum that all ruling powers – plural – rule by God’s permission: not just kings and emperors, but also the lesser princes, magistrates, and officials who hold authority under them. Those people too are obliged to uphold justice and defend true religion. So it may be that private citizens oppressed by a tyrant can do no more than resist passively and embrace martyrdom. But these other authorities –”lesser magistrates” – might have the right and the duty to stand firm for justice in the face of a tyrant. It was their obligation to reprimand an unjust king, to defy his orders, and even to defend their people with all necessary force. After all, their authority, like the king’s own, comes from God.²⁰

      This theory’s neat division between private citizens humbly submitting and lesser magistrates violently resisting was completely impractical. Yet it allowed Protestants fighting for their lives to convince themselves that they were not revolutionaries intent on anarchy but defenders of the existing social order. This quickly degenerated to the point where everyone who had any power of any kind to resist could claim that they therefore had the right to do so. Using Knox’s principle that “all man is equal”, even a mob could claim that its rough-edged power was granted by God. Knox went on to argue that any private citizen who had the power to assassinate an idolatrous prince could and should do so. Like the two-kingdoms doctrine itself, this theory could be used to justify almost anything.

      The effects of all this can be overplayed. An inattentive Protestant prince in 1600 who compared himself to his great-grandfather a century before might conclude that things had not actually changed very much. Most of the time, Protestant politics worked better in practice than in theory. Churches believed in conscientious obedience and valued states that preserved peace and administered justice. Protestant princes believed the Gospel their ministers taught and valued the moral order, sobriety and social cohesiveness their churches fostered. All sides usually rubbed along well enough.

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