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

Чтение книги онлайн.

       CHAPTER 3

       The Failure of Calvinism

      Behold, 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.

Parallel Reformations

      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 СКАЧАТЬ