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

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СКАЧАТЬ though, there was enough goodwill to ensure that this was no rerun of the Wittenberg Concord. The Zurichers trusted Calvin, and even accepted two amendments he suggested to strengthen the text of the Consensus a few months later. One by one, the Swiss Protestant churches formally adopted the Consensus. Bucer, in exile after the wars in Germany, feared that Calvin had given too much ground. Calvin replied, “Let us bear therefore with a sigh what we cannot correct”, but then persuaded Bullinger to accept the changes – to Bucer’s evident surprise.⁸ A stable, inclusive Reformed Protestantism had been born, with Calvin as its midwife.

      Only one detail remained: bringing in the Lutherans. Calvin genuinely believed it could be done. His own position was reasonable and self-evidently correct, and many reformed Christians had already united around it. He also had considerable faith in his own persuasive powers. In particular, with Luther himself having died in 1546, Calvin’s hopes were pinned on Luther’s right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon. Melanchthon shared Bucer’s eagerness for conciliation and Calvin’s own scholarly brilliance. He was also mild-mannered – to the point of spinelessness, his enemies muttered. The two men had met several times, and Calvin felt they were kindred spirits. Melanchthon was on friendly terms with other Swiss reformers; Bullinger’s son even lived with Melanchthon for a year when he was a student. Surely something could be done.⁹

      It was not to be. For one thing, Calvin the statesman could not always keep Calvin the theological street fighter muzzled. In the 1540s, Calvin and Melanchthon disagreed in print over the doctrine of predestination, and Calvin would not shut up and let it go. When Melanchthon was openly friendly toward one of Calvin’s critics in 1557, Calvin could not bring himself to overlook it. More profoundly, Calvin never seems to have believed that he and Melanchthon really differed. He appealed repeatedly to Melanchthon to admit that he really did agree with him on disputed issues. Melanchthon tended to respond to these appeals by falling silent, and reportedly tore up one letter in fury.¹⁰

      Calvin and his allies were wounded by Melanchthon’s inexplicable reticence. They believed they represented a broad, centrist reformism drawing on the best scholarship. As their movement put down roots across Europe, in the British Isles, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, and parts of Germany, it seemed perverse that Luther’s crude sacramental theology should be a barrier to unity.

      In other words, Calvin and the Reformed theologians never took Lutheranism seriously. Calvin had the nerve to claim that Luther would have signed the Zurich Consensus had he lived.¹¹ Melanchthon at least continued corresponding with Calvin, but other Lutherans were less ready to accept his condescension. The Lutheran theologian Joachim Westphal denounced the Consensus in a book subtly titled A Farrago of Confused and Divergent Opinions on the Lord’s Supper. Calvin, surprised and stung by Westphal’s bitterness, responded in vituperative kind. It did not bode well.

      Westphal’s fury was a sign that Calvin had stirred a hornets’ nest. By the 1550s, two parties of so-called Lutherans were at each other’s throats. The split went back to that crushing military defeat in 1547 and to Melanchthon’s penchant for appeasement. In 1548, facing threats to reimpose a virtually unreformed Catholicism, Melanchthon had persuaded Duke Maurice of Saxony to support a compromise, the so-called Leipzig Interim, which would have permitted Protestant preaching while conceding a great deal else in the ritual life and outward organization of the Church. Such compromises were not ideal, Melanchthon admitted, but if the peace of the Church and the will of princes demanded it, then so be it. It was, from one point of view, a brave stand.

      From another, it was a cowardly betrayal, typical of a timid scholar whose spine had only ever been stiffened by having Luther at his side. A group of self-styled “Gnesio-Lutherans” or “true” Lutherans, who aspired to cherish every scrap of Luther’s legacy, were holed up in the besieged city of Magdeburg, from where they poured contempt on Melanchthon’s concessions. Men like Flacius Illyricus argued that even if outward ceremonies were unimportant, they should not be changed at sword point. It was a time for boldly confessing the faith, not for a faintheartedness that was tantamount to apostasy.¹²

      The immediate crisis passed – the gyrations of German politics eventually produced a peace with established rights for Lutherans in 1555 – but the rift between Gnesio-Lutherans and Melanchthon’s “Philippist” supporters was not so easily healed. The Philippists were suspected of selling out not only to the Catholics but also to the Calvinists, whom the Gnesio-Lutherans loathed just as much as their master had loathed Zwingli. Even if Melanchthon did agree with Calvin, then, he could scarcely say so. No wonder he found Calvin’s naive appeals frustrating.

Lutheranism in Search of Concord

      The running battle between Philippists and Gnesio-Lutherans consumed the Lutheran world for thirty years. The Philippists were the establishment, even after Melanchthon’s death in 1560. They controlled the universities of Wittenberg and Leipzig and held high office in most Lutheran territorial churches. They were politically much more palatable; it was after all the Gnesio-Lutherans who had been dreaming up dangerously subversive theories of resistance. Philippists, like Calvinists, had a patrician sense of themselves as the natural intellectual centre of gravity. They were reluctant to stoop to polemical fistfights and disdained the quarrel that the Gnesio-Lutherans were forcing on them.

      The Gnesio-Lutherans, by contrast, were revolutionaries. Luther had taught that worldly success was a sign of God’s displeasure. His followers knew why they had been frozen out and why his intoxicating, world-upending vision had been diluted into insipid moralism. If the Philippists were condescending pragmatists, the Gnesio-Lutherans were bomb-throwing idealists, convinced that true faith never compromises and that criticism only proved them right. They deplored the Philippists’ readiness to bend with the political wind. In particular, they feared that the Philippists’ talk of ethics betrayed their Erasmian roots: this was not real Protestantism. Real Protestants would understand how absolutely pervasive human sin was and would not pretend it could be tidied up with a little good behaviour.

      In 1560, the tub-thumping Gnesio-Lutheran Flacius Illyricus claimed that humanity’s fall from grace, in the Garden of Eden, had transformed human nature so fundamentally that men and women were made no longer in God’s image but in the devil’s: a kind of backward transubstantiation. Most Gnesio-Lutherans hastened to distance themselves from this bizarre idea, but it does tell us something about their movement. They were not interested in compromises between truth and error. Human depravity was absolute, and any softening of that line with oh-so-reasonable Renaissance idealism risked eviscerating the Protestant Gospel altogether.¹³

      The standard to which Gnesio-Lutherans rallied was the Augsburg Confession: the statement of Lutheran faith submitted by the first “Protestants” to the imperial Diet of Augsburg in 1530 and written, ironically enough, by Melanchthon. The Augsburg Confession acquired totemic status. For Luther’s friend Georg Spalatin to call it “the most significant act which has ever taken place on earth” was a little hyperbolic, but it was perfectly normal for Gnesio-Lutherans to place it on a par with the ancient Christian creeds.¹⁴ For Philippists, by contrast, it was the product of a particular historical moment, subject to amendment or change. Indeed, Melanchthon himself later amended the text, making changes that Gnesio-Lutherans saw as weasel words contaminating Luther’s prophetic insights with brackish rationalism. In this battle for the Augsburg Confession, the Gnesio-Lutherans had one significant tactical advantage. The 1555 peace treaty made adherence to the original, unaltered Augsburg Confession the only legal alternative to Catholicism in the Holy Roman Empire. The Gnesio-Lutherans managed to position themselves simultaneously as fearless opponents of imperial tyranny and blameless upholders of imperial law.

      Finally, in 1570–71, the Philippists were goaded to respond to their critics. A polemical counter-attack labelled the Gnesio-Lutherans as fanatical perverters of Luther’s legacy and accused them of a series of fullblown heresies, from misunderstanding Christ’s СКАЧАТЬ