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Overview
Hart’s approach features significant episodes in the institutional history of Calvinism that are responsible for its contemporary profile. He traces the political and religious circumstances that first created space for Reformed churches in Europe and later contributed to Calvinism’s expansion around the world. He discusses the effects of the American and French Revolutions on ecclesiastical establishments as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century communions, particularly in Scotland, the Netherlands, the United States, and Germany, that directly challenged church dependence on the state. Raising important questions about secularization, religious freedom, privatization of faith, and the place of religion in public life, this book will appeal not only to readers with interests in the history of religion but also in the role of religion in political and social life today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300148794 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/30/2013 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Calvinism
A HISTORY
By D.G. Hart
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2013 D.G. HartAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-14879-4
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
CITY LIGHTS
During the winter of 1522, a group of Christians in the city of Zurich met in the home of the printer Christopher Froschauer. Church teaching required Christians during the Lenten season to abstain from meat. In a bold act of defiance, comparable to flag burning today, the assembled ate the sausages served by the host. One of those present was the local priest, Ulrich Zwingli, who was surprised by the food and abstained from eating. Even so, Zwingli defended the choice of food the following month with a sermon entitled "On the Choice and Freedom of Foods." His reasoning was simple even if it captured a theme at the heart of the Swiss Reformation: if the Bible did not require a Lenten fast or specify foods to be avoided, then Christians were free to eat.
This principle became in turn the substance of the Twenty-Fourth Article (out of sixty-seven) adopted in November 1523 by the city council of Zurich: "That no Christian is bound to do those things which God has not decreed, therefore one may eat at all times all food, wherefrom one learns that the decree about cheese and butter is a Roman swindle." Reformed opposition to Roman Catholic requirements would become such a matter of conviction that in 1530 when the emperor, Charles V, requested Protestants in his lands to explain their culinary practices, Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito, ministers in the Imperial City of Strasbourg, followed Zwingli's lead and added a chapter to the Tetrapolitan Confession (1530) on "The Choice of Meats." It stated that the apostle Paul had called "the selection of meats prescribed for certain days" a "doctrine of demons." This did not mean that Christians should indulge in gluttony or avarice. It did mean that the church should not create rules that God himself had not revealed.
Fourteen years after the sausage-eating incident in Zurich, on May 25, 1536, the citizens of Geneva pledged to "live according to the Law of the Gospel and the Word of God, and to abolish all Papal abuses." The apparent orderliness and consensus of that expression of popular sovereignty in Geneva could not hide the turmoil by which the Reformation had come to a city that, although not part of the Swiss Confederacy, would soon rival Zurich for leadership among Reformed Protestants. For the better part of a decade, the citizens of Geneva had been trying to gain independence from the House of Savoy. To do this Geneva needed the support of nearby Swiss cities, Fribourg and Bern. When the political autonomy of the 1520s led to religious reforms in the 1530s, political rivalries turned ugly. Fribourg officials, who were Roman Catholic, used the death of one of their citizens during a religious riot in Geneva in 1533 to pressure the Genevans back into the fold of Rome. But thanks to friendly relations with Protestant Bern, Geneva resisted Fribourg's intimidation. In turn, Geneva sponsored two public debates between Protestant and Roman Catholic representatives, one in January 1534, the second in June 1535. Both led to riots. They also increased Geneva's resolve regarding for political independence and the prerogative to establish the city's religious identity. By the time that Geneva's citizens vowed to submit to the word of God in the spring of 1535, the city had withstood intimidation from both Fribourg and Bern, and had informed its Roman Catholic clergy that they needed either to convert to Protestantism or leave.
In 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his famous Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg's cathedral, no one had any idea, except for John Calvin's predestinating deity, what would become of a university professor's protest against the corruption of the Roman Catholic church. In the early sixteenth century Europe was already a society in flux, and evangelical preachers like Luther, Zwingli, and Guillame Farel in Geneva, thanks to that social, economic, and political instability, had sufficient wiggle room to avoid martyrdom. None of these Protestants had a plan for reforming the church, much less for poking a hole through the sacred canopy that had united Christendom. Switzerland was an especially unlikely place from which to launch a comprehensive reform of the church. But like the rest of Calvinism's history, the trickle of protests and changes that emerged among the Swiss Confederacy's cities would overflow to drench practically all of Europe.
The Limits of the Holy Roman Empire
The Reformation happened mainly because it could. No matter how much the Holy Roman Empire connoted political stability, cultural coherence, and unity on matters of ultimate importance, this sacred regime, as opposed to the pagan one it emulated, was more intimidating on paper than in most cities or villages under its authority. The Holy Roman Empire may have had an emperor – Maximilian I until 1519 and Charles V until 1558 – yet by the end of Charles's rule Protestantism was an established reality for Europe. But below the emperor were a host of lesser nobles, church officials, and rulers of specific territories or estates, who elected the emperor, met in various assemblies to deliberate on his proposals, and ran the affairs of their own principalities. Of course, the monarchs of France and England, for instance, also needed the consent of the nobility to maintain their authority and so a king did not necessarily control his kingdom any more than the Holy Roman Emperor. But the Holy Roman Empire provided more nooks and crannies for dissenting Christians to gain a foothold than in France where the monarchy battled fiercely with the new Christians, or in England where Henry VIII himself functioned as head of the church.
The lands of Germany and Switzerland prove the point about political decentralization within the Holy Roman Empire, while suggesting why Protestantism took hold first in that part of Europe. Was it the case that the Roman Catholic church was most corrupt in those territories? If the Reformation depended solely on clerical abuse then those Italians closest to Rome should have produced a mass of souls ready and willing for Reformed Christianity. If commercial factors were responsible for the rise of Protestantism then the reforms of the sixteenth century could have taken hold in any number of cities throughout a European economy that generated significant wealth and a burgeoning middle class – the Italian city-states come to mind. Meanwhile, if education were a chief factor then Paris would have been more likely to produce a Reformation than Zurich. In other words, the Protestant Reformation depended overwhelmingly on political variables and the Holy Roman Empire provided as much variation as Europe could muster.
During the sixteenth century the Habsburg Empire, under Charles V, who ruled from 1519 to 1558, and his brother Ferdinand I, from 1558 to 1564, dominated European society in ways reminiscent of the Franks in the eighth and early ninth centuries under Charlemagne, who also claimed an empire of sacred and Roman proportions. Not only did the Habsburgs control the German estates, but through marriages and alliances amassed the lands of the Netherlands (1506), the Spanish kingdoms (1516), and then the Austrian lands with the 1519 election of Charles as emperor. Charles' brother, Ferdinand, controlled Austria for the emperor and added Bohemia and part of Hungary (1526) to the Habsburgs' domain. The Habsburgs also had designs on England. Charles' son Philip was married to Mary Tudor and became King of England for a brief period (1553–58), when England veered from Protestantism into fellowship with Rome. Meanwhile, Ferdinand's son Charles almost married Queen Elizabeth I, who restored the Church of England to a moderately Protestant identity. Eventually, through Philip, the Habsburgs in 1580 would take charge of Portugal and also commandeer that nation's explorations in the New World, thus adding to its colonial interests through Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors. Charles V's great-grandfather, Frederick III, had claimed during his reign (1452–93) through the acrostic AEIOU in Latin that "the rule of the whole world is Austria's." Under Frederick, an underachieving ruler, that line was far-fetched.
For the Holy Roman Empire of the sixteenth century it gained plausibility. And yet the Reformation happened on Charles V's watch rather than in France, the Habsburgs' constant rival, where Protestantism received its fiercest initial opposition. This difference says something about the capacity of rulers with inherent limits of time, energy, and talent to manage affairs of almost limitless detail. The task of confining and even defeating religious dissenters was relatively easier in one nation than across an entire continent. Whether owing to circumstance or providence, Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire had the benefit of a ruler whose ability to keep the new faith in check was akin, to use a biblical metaphor the Reformers would have appreciated, to old wine skins containing new wine.
At first, Martin Luther's objections to papal policy on the sale of indulgences that combined forgiving sin with fund-raising for St Peter's Basilica were little more than the personal opinions of a tormented monk who taught theology to university students. In fact, his famous Ninety-Five Theses, in which he disputed the pope's power to grant indulgences, was tangential in Luther's deeper doubts about his own standing before God, simmering since 1513 when he started to lecture on the Psalms. Soon after October 31, 1517, when Luther posted his views on indulgences, he engaged church officials in a series of debates, while responding to papal condemnations. Both sides dug in their heels, and on June 15, 1520, Pope Leo X threatened Luther with excommunication. The university had sixty days to calm the situation, but instead began to appeal to the German nobility to throw off the yoke of Italian hegemony. By the fall of 1520, the threat had become a reality and Charles V, only a year into his tenure as emperor, needed to confer in Cologne with Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony and patron of the university where Luther taught. Charles petitioned Luther to defend his views before the Diet of Worms, which he did the following spring, in April 1521. Despite the rousing "Here I Stand" speech that would turn Luther into a hero of both zealous Protestants and modern individualists, he could not change the emperor's mind. The next month Charles placed Luther under imperial ban. Were it not for the protection of Frederick and a well-timed kidnapping after Worms that removed the reformer to Wartburg, Luther would likely have become another martyred forerunner of the Reformation, listed after John Huss and John Wycliffe.
These circumstances allowed Luther's colleagues back at the university, Andreas Karlstadt and Philip Melanchthon, to implement ecclesiastical reforms in the city of Wittenberg. Among their changes were marriage for clergy and making the sacrament of the Lord's Supper more accessible to the laity. Some of these reforms went farther than Luther desired. Even so, city officials had embraced a form of Christianity yet to be called Protestantism, and were reforming the local church. As Philip Benedict astutely observes, the reformation in Wittenberg set the pattern for the way other cities and principalities would institutionalize religious change: the preaching of evangelical priests stirred up a "sizable fraction" of the urban population and pressured city officials to enact the goals of reformation. In early 1522 when Luther returned to the city he put the brakes on reform, partly because of differences with Karlstadt and partly to protect his political patron, Frederick. Luther was no radical and knew reform should not alienate sympathetic political patrons, a position that would become particularly and painfully evident during the Peasants' War two years later. But even if Luther knew the value of compromise, his political supporters took risks that made Protestantism possible.
A similar pattern obtained in other German principalities even without the presence of a figurehead like Luther or lieutenants like Melanchthon. To be sure, a combination of Luther's own arguments against the abuses of clergy and the papacy, as well as the longing of devout souls for guidance better than Rome's, was part of the appeal. Also assisting the spread of Protestantism was the printing press and university faculty, who under the influence of Renaissance humanism were willing to give Luther's appeal to the ancient texts of Scripture a hearing and who often felt a resonance with his calls for clerical reform. But without the patronage of local rulers Protestantism would never have spread beyond Saxony. Mark Greengrass explains that princes throughout the German territories "were well aware of the possible advantages to be gained from annexing neighbouring secularized bishoprics and lands." At the same time, rulers needed to balance the consequences of supporting Protestantism with retaliation by the emperor and neighboring princes. Dynastic rivalries and financial gains, as well as conscientious religious devotion, were all factors in the spread of Protestantism. The growth of Protestantism (specifically Lutheranism) proceeded between the 1520s and the 1560s amid political intrigue, war, religious alliances, and ecclesiastical compromise, from the duchies of Hesse, Brandenburg, the Rhine Palatinate, and Bavaria, to numerous German principalities including East Prussia, Württemberg, and Neuberg, each with its own prince. Such an expansion was testimony to the limits of the emperor's power to control religious dissent, not to mention the papacy's dependence on secular authorities to enforce Rome's spiritual bonds.
If Protestantism could gain a foothold in the German portions of the Holy Roman Empire, the lands that constituted the Swiss Confederacy provided even more fertile soil for religious reform, thanks to a heritage of the Swiss people's commitment to independence, geographical isolation, and political savvy. The term Switzerland, first used in the sixteenth century, stood for a patchwork of territories, largely German speaking (but also including French and Italian), roughly four hundred miles southwest of Wittenberg. The confederation originated with the late thirteenth-century formation of a defensive alliance among the cantons of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden. By the middle of the fourteenth century, Zurich had joined this original confederation along with three other cities or cantons. Two more joined in 1481, which proved to be the basis for Swiss independence – sometimes de facto and sometimes militarily achieved – from the Holy Roman Empire and other potential hegemons. The Swiss in 1499 defeated Emperor Maximillian I in the Swabian War, a battle in which Maximillian had hoped to teach the Swiss that they needed a master. Adding to the Swiss capacity to form alliances for mutual defense was the skill of its young men as mercenary soldiers. Providing fighters for foreign sovereigns such as the king of France or the pope was an important part of Switzerland's economic and political existence on the eve of the Reformation. The damage done to the Swiss people through mercenary service, as well as the defeat the confederation suffered to the king of France (Francis I) at the battle of Marignano in 1515, were matters much on the minds of preachers in Switzerland, who also had designs on reforming the church.
Within the Swiss cantons themselves residents witnessed a great deal of variety of local rule. What was true of the Swiss Confederacy itself at the level of European politics was true of individual territories and cities among the Swiss. Free townsmen and peasants worked out complex agreements that permitted access to land and mountain passes; they also met formally in confederation diets that facilitated local rule. Whether the experience of the Swiss would justify idealistic arguments about the virtues of spontaneous democracy and local government, it did prove how much autonomy was possible even within regimes that possessed titles like the Holy Roman Empire. Political independence was not simply coincidental with the Reformation; it was necessary for church reforms to become a reality. In fact, if one pattern applied to Protestant developments it was the need for political patronage. The variety of polity might differ – the ruler might be a king, a prince, or a member of a city council – but Protestant churches could not survive without the state's support.
The Reformation in Zurich
Zwingli (1481–1531) may not have been the Luther of the Reformed branch of Protestantism, and he was by no means acting alone in the work of evangelical preaching and church reform, but he did bolster the Swiss reputation for independence by establishing a variety of Protestantism distinct from Lutheranism. Zwingli was born only six weeks after Luther, in the village of Wildhaus in the territory of St Gallen. His father was a wealthy peasant who held a position in the ruling class of the local republic, a circumstance that likely a position in the ruling class of the local republic, a circumstance that likely endeared Zwingli to rulers in Zurich and that predisposed him to regard highly the usefulness of magistrates in church reform. Thanks to the family's resources, Zwingli received a good education that took him eventually to the universities of Vienna and Basel. The rigors and formalities of medieval scholasticism dominated his official education but while serving as a priest in Glarus he began to read the works of humanists who lauded the study of ancient Greek and Latin sources. By 1516 Zwingli had discovered Erasmus, and wrote a letter in which he identified with the humanist's program of reinvigorating the church, and personal devotion through disciplined study and renouncing worldliness.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Calvinism by D.G. Hart. Copyright © 2013 by D.G. Hart. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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