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

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СКАЧАТЬ and Calvinism alike stress that we human beings cannot save ourselves. We are too mired in our own evil to dig ourselves out. Only God can rescue us, through Jesus Christ’s redeeming sacrifice. But this doctrine, which Luther and others found so liberating, has a sting in the tail. If salvation is entirely God’s work, then it is also entirely God’s choice. Our human wills are too corrupt to choose God, too corrupt, even, to choose to accept God’s offer of salvation. Only God himself enables us to accept that offer, and because God is sovereign, if he gives us that grace, we cannot refuse it. So, if God chooses to save us, we will be saved. We are not saved because we are good; we only become even partially good as a consequence of God’s decision to save us. His decision to save us is free, sovereign, and inscrutable, and if he does not choose to save us, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. In other words, our eternal fate is predestined.

      Predestination was not Luther’s idea. St Augustine, Western Christianity’s single most influential theologian, taught a strong doctrine of predestination, and the germ of the idea is in the New Testament. Luther did, however, quickly conclude that it was an essential consequence of his doctrines, and it was over this issue that Erasmus finally and decisively broke with him in 1524. However, most Lutherans chose to soft-pedal this part of their master’s teaching. Like Erasmus and many others, they found it intuitively morally offensive. Melanchthon smuggled in a human ability to reject God’s grace. On this point, at least, it was Melanchthon, not Luther, who shaped “Lutheran” orthodoxy.

      Zwingli and the early Swiss reformers also had no affection for predestination, and Bullinger never embraced it fully. Calvin, however, would not evade the doctrine’s iron logic and added the final deduction that Augustine and Luther had been too squeamish to make: if God predestines some people to heaven, he must therefore equally deliberately predestine the rest to hell.

      Calvin initially suggested the preachers should be discreet in handling such a controversial doctrine. It was only when he was challenged on the point that, characteristically, he dug in and made it a test of loyalty. But he also found the idea unexpectedly nourishing. It fitted his almost rapturous emphasis on God’s absolute sovereignty. More practically, for those under persecution, predestination is liberating. If your salvation is wholly in God’s hands, you do not need to fear that your courage will fail you when the torturer comes. One English Protestant awaiting a heretic’s death enthused that the doctrine “so cheereth our hearts and quickeneth our spirits that no trouble or tyranny executed against us can dull or discomfort the same”.²⁵ For Calvinists, who emphasized that Christians were a covenanted people, set apart for God, predestination seemed almost natural. They were God’s chosen people: the new Israel.

      By the end of the century, a hard-line doctrine of predestination had become orthodoxy across most of the Calvinist world, but it was never unchallenged. Moral revulsion refused to fade away. Predestination’s ablest opponent was the Dutch theologian Jakob Arminius, whose ideas were confined to the academy while he lived. After his death in 1609, however, a group of his disciples presented the Dutch church with a public “Remonstrance,” insisting that human beings can cooperate with God in salvation.

      The Remonstrance provoked a dangerous split in Dutch Calvinism, to the point that civil war seemed a real possibility. Remonstrant militias were formed. The state of Holland, the Remonstrant stronghold, was on the point of seceding from the Netherlands. The federal Dutch government eventually intervened, purging Remonstrants from a string of Dutch cities and, following a show of force, persuading the Hollanders to abandon their quixotic stance without a fight. In August 1618, a series of Remonstrant leaders were arrested, and some executed. The crisis was over.

      But it is unseemly to resolve theological arguments with armies, so during the winter of 1618–19 a national synod of the Dutch Reformed Church met at the town of Dordrecht, or Dordt, to pronounce solemnly on Arminius’s doctrines. To lend it additional gravity, delegates from across Europe were invited. There were German, Genevan, Swiss, and English representatives, plus a solitary Scotsman. The French king banned his subjects from coming, but the French Reformed Church sent written submissions, and the synod symbolically kept chairs vacant for them in the assembly. Suddenly something very like the council of which so many had dreamed was actually taking place. Dordt could have been a template for international Reformed unity.

      The synod did its job well. Naturally, it condemned Arminius’s teachings, but without straying into some of the more extreme formulations of predestination. Most national churches quickly endorsed its rulings. Arminianism survived in the Netherlands, but the Remonstrant leaders were banished, and public preaching of their doctrines was banned. And yet no Protestant synod could bind the consciences of those who came after it. Soon the questions supposedly settled at Dordt were being reopened. A French theologian, Moyse Amyraut, published his own solution to the predestination problem in 1634, arguing that God’s grace extended at least hypothetically to all humanity. He was accused of crypto-Arminianism, but he escaped formal censure, and his ideas stirred up fresh trouble in the Dutch church too. Protestant theological debate simply could not be closed down.

      More immediately, Dordt was undercut by its own prominence. The English delegates endorsed the synod’s conclusions, but close interest in the event in England meant that Arminius’s arguments were widely aired there for the first time. A group of avant-garde young ceremonialists felt that the Dutch disputes had awakened them from a “dead sleep”. The most brilliant of these preachers, Lancelot Andrewes, mocked how the predestinarians claimed to know everything about God’s secret and inscrutable will.²⁶

      So in fact Dordt, the high-water mark of Calvinist internationalism, did as much to spread as to contain disunity. The dream of councils and of consensus was dangerous as well as impossible. This was the objection that John Dury kept encountering during his thankless quest for unity in the 1620s, 1630s and 1640s. He promised theological discussions, but in real life discussions caused divisions, not reconciliation.²⁷ When Protestants of different kinds seemed to be rubbing along tolerably well, starting to talk theology could only cause trouble.

      By the later seventeenth century, Calvinism’s promise of Protestant unity had dissolved, and Calvinism itself was splintering. In England, Arminian theology and ceremonial revival were fusing to form a weird hybrid called Anglicanism, which increasingly disowned its Calvinist heritage. The line between “orthodox” Calvinism and the “radical” Reformation, which Calvinists had tried to draw so clearly in the radicals’ blood, was being blurred by constant passage across it.

      In truth, this was nothing new. Bucer’s ecumenism had extended to the more respectable Anabaptists. Even Calvin, as a young man, had given them unintended comfort. In 1537, he had been accused, falsely, of denying the doctrine of the Trinity. He rashly decided to try to refute the charge using only the language of the Bible itself, bypassing the ancient Christian theologians who had defined the doctrine and produced the relevant technical terminology. This seemed to give comfort to those radicals who had rejected all the early Church’s theological baggage in favour of the unadorned Bible. Worse, during this dispute, Calvin refused to sign the so-called Athanasian Creed, an exhaustive summary of Trinitarian doctrine that had been seen as a touchstone of orthodoxy since the sixth century. None of this meant that Calvin was a secret anti-Trinitarian, simply a little rash and overconfident.²⁸ But it does show that Calvinists’ worries about the need to distinguish themselves from the radicals were not imaginary.

      Soon fears that Reformed Protestantism might bleed into radicalism were coming true – in, of all places, Italy. Politically decentralized and intellectually sophisticated, Italy in the 1530s was fertile soil for freewheeling evangelical thinking. Most of the so-called spirituali made no open breach with Rome, hoping instead that the Catholic Church would take on the Protestants’ most compelling ideas. When it finally became clear that that cause was lost, some returned to Catholic orthodoxy, others became more or less orthodox Calvinists, but others still ploughed their own furrows. Some, following the logic that had entangled Calvin in 1537, questioned the doctrine of the Trinity. Italy was now too dangerous СКАЧАТЬ