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

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СКАЧАТЬ Obviously, he did not mean it literally. The rite was simply a symbolic memorial. For Luther, this was a worse blasphemy than the Catholic Mass itself. He insisted that Christ’s words were literally true, because, in Christ, heaven touches earth. He rejected transubstantiation as a piece of Aristotelian sophistry, but argued that Christ was wholly, physically present in the sacramental bread, just as the Son of God was wholly present in the man Jesus and just as the Word of God was wholly present in Scripture. Zwingli’s cramped rationalism was, he thought, tantamount to atheism, reducing Christ to an abstract notion and denying Christians the greatest comfort their Saviour offered: his own physical presence, dwelling within them as they ate and drank his body and blood.⁴

      Zwingli looked at Luther’s doctrine and saw unreformed dregs of popery, sodden in superstition. Luther looked at Zwingli’s and saw intolerable blasphemies. Condescension versus outrage: not a promising mix. The colloquy at Marburg that tried to resolve the issue was carefully stage-managed, but on this key point there would be no budging. Luther began by writing Christ’s words – “This is my body” – on the table in chalk and insisting that until Zwingli admitted those words were true, there was nothing to discuss. That fundamental disagreement was the rock on which attempts at pan-Protestant unity would founder for generations.

      Luther characteristically claimed Marburg as a victory, and soon it began to look as if he were right. Zwingli’s ideas might have reached into Germany, but much of Switzerland remained staunchly Catholic. In 1530–31, the tensions between the reformed and the Catholic cantons boiled over into the Reformation’s first religious war. For the reformers, it was a disaster. Zurich’s army was decisively beaten by the Catholic cantons at the battle of Kappel on 11 October 1531. The subsequent treaty banned Protestantism from advancing any further; Switzerland has been religiously divided ever since. Worse, Zwingli himself was killed in the battle, and his body mutilated by the victorious Catholic forces. Luther crowed mercilessly over his rival’s shameful death, sword in hand, when he should have laid down his life in unresisting innocence like a true Christian martyr.

      Zwingli’s Reformation was left leaderless. His young successor in Zurich, Heinrich Bullinger, would eventually go on to steer his legacy with a cool head and steady hand for nearly half a century. For now, however, the most prominent figure was Bucer, in Strassburg. Bucer was the era’s great ecumenist, forever churning out treatises and formulas to paper over doctrinal cracks, trying always to keep everyone talking. In May 1536, he secured an apparent triumph: the Wittenberg Concord, an agreed statement with Luther on the Eucharist. In fact, Bucer’s view was distinct from both Zwingli’s and Luther’s. He disliked Luther’s crude talk of Christ’s physical presence but did insist that the bread and wine were no mere symbol; Christ was spiritually present in the faithful believer who received the sacrament, which mattered far more than any fleshly presence. So he and Luther did have some real common ground, and the Wittenberg Concord concealed their disagreement under ambiguous language. If both sides had been happy to bracket their dispute, it could have worked, but Luther loudly insisted that he had not budged an inch. Bucer sent the text to Basel with an accompanying note explaining his understanding of what it meant. In Zurich, however, where Zwingli’s memory was kept pure, it looked like a sellout. And indeed, at the same time, Bucer was writing to Luther offering a different understanding of the text, explaining that he had told the Swiss what they needed to hear, because of their “weakness”. Predictably, a copy of the letter found its way to Zurich. The Zurichers never trusted Bucer again. Basel and Zurich became alienated from each other, and Bern was contested between them. It was an utter fiasco. Protestantism’s destiny to shatter into fragments was fulfilling itself.⁵

Calvin’s Contribution

      Enter, late in the day, John Calvin. Calvin has always been easier to admire than to love. As his best modern biographer, Bruce Gordon, puts it, Calvin “never felt he had encountered an intellectual equal, and he was probably correct”.⁶ He could not abide to be crossed by enemy or friend, and once he had begun an argument, he pursued it with unforgiving tenacity. While Luther’s emotional theatricality gave even his faults a kind of grandeur, Calvin was a man of reserve and precision. But he was a spiritual writer of luminous clarity, fired by a ravishing vision of the light and sweetness of Christ. He also came closer than anyone else to unifying the disparate pieces of Protestantism. The Reformed Protestant tradition that Zwingli started is commonly called Calvinism, inaccurately but not unjustly. Calvin did not found it, but he did keep it together.

      Calvin was eight years old when Luther’s revolt began: a mere child next to the theological giants who spent his youth clashing with one another. He converted to the new German doctrines when he was a law student in Paris in the early 1530s. A clampdown on heresy in France in 1534 forced him to flee abroad, never to return. He went, initially, to Basel, where in 1536 he published the first edition of the book that would become his life’s work: Institutio Christianae religionis, best translated as An Instruction in Christian Religion.

      The Institutio had two immediate purposes. First, it was a letter to his home country, dedicated to the king of France. Calvin wanted to prove, in the wake of Münster, that Protestantism was not politically subversive and so could safely be tolerated. His other avowed purpose was nothing less than to unify Protestantism. All the hairsplitting arguments about Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, he claimed, missed the point. The focus should instead be on how the sacrament spiritually nourished believers.

      One book by a clever Frenchman was not, however, going to heal Protestantism’s divisions. Its immediate effect was to derail Calvin’s career. In 1536, his travels took him through the city of Geneva, where he intended to stay a single night. Geneva was then an independent French-speaking city-state under the military protection of the Swiss city of Bern. The previous year, the Bernese had encouraged a raucous little Reformation in the city, and a French preacher, Guillaume Farel, had been installed as minister. The city remained gravely divided, and Farel was conscious of needing backup. When the author of the Institutio strayed into his city, Farel confronted him with a prophet’s certainty and convinced the reluctant Calvin that God was calling him to work in Geneva. Farel was more firebrand than theologian, but he managed to browbeat John Calvin into changing his mind: precious few could say as much.

      Geneva was a briar patch for Calvin. The city’s factional divisions continued, and in 1538 both Farel and Calvin were banished. For Calvin, it was a liberation. He went to Strassburg, spending three happy, fruitful years working with Bucer and revising the Institutio. His peace was interrupted in 1541, when Genevan politics turned again and the city invited him to return, without Farel. He felt obliged to accept, but he drove a hard bargain. He would now structure the Genevan church in his own way. As we saw in the last chapter, this meant imposing a systematic structure of moral policing. He set out to create a model of what a reformed Christian city could be. Calvin remained Geneva’s chief pastor until 1564, when he worked himself into an early grave.

      From his new Alpine Jerusalem, Calvin continued his dogged pursuit of Protestant unity. In 1540, he had criticized both Luther and Zwingli for their intransigence and called for reconciliation. With Zwingli safely dead, Luther let it be known that he liked the young Frenchman’s book, a wisp of hope to which Calvin clung.⁷ His first real opportunity came in the late 1540s, not long after Luther himself had died. In 1547, the Emperor Charles V at last confronted the Protestants in battle and won a crushing victory at Mühlberg. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Alps in the Italian city of Trento (Trent), Pope Paul III had finally assembled a General Council to rebut the Protestant challenge. In this moment of dreadful urgency, Calvin persuaded Bullinger, in Zurich, to open theological negotiations. In May 1549, he went to Zurich himself, and the two men hammered out a full agreed statement on the Eucharist: the Zurich Consensus.

      Despite the title, this was Calvin’s achievement. It was he who had pursued the agreement and made concessions to make it happen. The result was an ambiguous formula that stuck fairly closely to Bullinger’s СКАЧАТЬ