Reforming Reformation

Thomas F. Mayer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317069515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Reformation used to be singular: a unique event that happened within a tidily circumscribed period of time, in a tightly constrained area and largely because of a single individual. Few students of early modern Europe would now accept this view. Offering a broad overview of current scholarly thinking, this collection undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the many and varied meanings of the term concept and label 'reformation', particularly with regard to the Catholic Church. Accepting the idea of the Reformation as a process or set of processes that cropped up just about anywhere Europeans might be found, the volume explores the consequences of this through an interdisciplinary approach, with contributions from literature, art history, theology and history. By examining a single topic from multiple interdisciplinary perspectives, the volume avoids inadvertently reinforcing disciplinary logic, a common result of the way knowledge has been institutionalized and compartmentalized in research universities over the last century. The result of this is a much more nuanced view of Catholic Reformation, and once that extends consideration much further - both chronologically, geographically and politically - than is often accepted. As such the volume will prove essential reading to anyone interested in early modern religious history.

PART I
Long-term Perspectives Toward the Present

CHAPTER 1
Reforming the Reformation: God's Truth and the Exercise of Power

Brad S. Gregory

This essay proposes a different way of thinking about the relationship between what we usually call the magisterial and the radical Reformations. Although it is primarily concerned with the Holy Roman Empire and Switzerland in the 1520s and 30s, its compass is much broader both chronologically and geographically. It spans from the beginning of the evangelical movement in German-speaking central Europe around 1520 through the English Revolution in the 1640s and 50s. This different way of thinking derives from an analytical distinction between the endeavor to know God’s truth on the one hand (the central concern of those reformers who rejected the authority of the Roman church), and the exercise of political power on the other. Taken together, the analysis suggests a different perspective on the Reformation and its legacy — hence “Reforming the Reformation.” It is imperative to start, though, with some sense of the character of Latin Christendom on the eve of the Reformation, else we cannot know what changed and how the Reformation differed from late medieval reforming efforts.

Considerable research in recent decades suggests that, seen as a whole, Western Christianity at the outset of the sixteenth century exhibits two major paradoxes. First, it combined a wide tolerance of diverse local beliefs and practices with sharp limits on orthodoxy. We are now well aware that any picture of medieval Latin Christianity as a homogeneous, uniform set of practices that were rigidly prescribed, strictly enforced, and closely followed is simply mistaken. Variety and voluntarism were hallmarks of late medieval religious life beyond a few basic expectations and implicit affirmation of the truth claims that they presupposed, from minimal participation in practices expected of all the baptized to the heights of spiritual life sought by individuals such as Henry Suso or Catherine of Genoa.¹ At the same time, orthodoxy conceptually and necessarily implied heterodoxy, simply as a corollary of the fact that the church made truth claims, no less in the fifteenth century than it had in the fifth. If some things are taken to be true, their contraries are necessarily false. Crossing the wrong lines could thus quickly land one in serious trouble — as the late medieval Waldensians, Lollards, and Hussites knew from their own experience.² In doctrinal and liturgical as well as devotional and institutional terms, the church around 1500 exhibited an identifiable unity across Latin Christendom from the British Isles to Poland, from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula. But it also exhibited a vast range of local religious customs, preferential devotional practices, syncretistic beliefs, particular jurisdictional privileges, divergent theological approaches, and specific ecclesiastical sub-groups in a spectrum that ranged from the indisputably orthodox to the edge of heresy.³ Any adequate depiction of late medieval Christianity must include both its commonalities as well as its variety. One-sided references to medieval “Christianities” that minimize the common beliefs, practices, and institutions of Latin Christendom are no less but differently distorting than now discredited exaggerations about the Middle Ages as an allegedly homogeneous “age of faith.”

Late medieval Christianity’s second major paradox consists in its combination of widely criticized shortcomings with unprecedented lay devotion and dedication. Despite Huizinga’s influential opinions about the fifteenth century’s purported spiritual decadence,⁴ much recent research suggests that it was arguably more devout than any preceding century in the history of Western Christianity. At no time before had so many of the laity participated so enthusiastically in their religious lives, devoting themselves to Christ and the saints, enacting works of charity, joining (often multiple) confraternities, voluntarily practicing prayer and pious reading, and offering monetary contributions in support of the church.⁵ At the same time, the late Middle Ages were filled with criticisms of clerical corruption and greed, lay superstition and ignorance, and manifest sinfulness by individuals in every station of life.⁶ Such problems did not go unnoticed. From the fourteenth-century Avignonese papacy through the decades of the Western schism and into the sixteenth century, Christians were urged to live as the church taught that they should live, pursuing holiness through imitating their Lord and the saints and practicing the virtues, a message common to academic administrators such as Jean Gerson (1363–1429), preachers such as Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444), and churchmen such as Antonino of Florence (1389–1459).⁷ The effects of such efforts were apparent in new spiritual movements such as the devotio moderna, which enjoyed success despite provoking suspicion; in the Observantine movement among the established religious orders, which renewed hundreds of male and female monasteries; in new confraternities such as the Oratory of Divine Love, which attracted many members even as existing confraternities continued to thrive; and in the sacred philology of the northern humanists, which sought through scholarship and new forms of pedagogy to instruct and thus morally to renew Christians.⁸ No adequate account of Christianity in the decades prior to the Reformation can ignore such developments. But at the same time, recurrent calls for a thoroughgoing reform in capite et membris received no sustained response among popes and the cardinals at the papal curia, even when a politically pressured Pope Julian II called the Fifth Lateran Council in 1512.⁹ The nepotistic, curial cardinals and the aristocratic prince-bishops of the Holy Roman Empire saw that their privileges and wealth would be subverted by any serious, sustained reforms concerning simony, pluralism, and ecclesiastical revenues.¹⁰ So they tended to resist any ambitious (and therefore threatening) reforming initiatives. It was precisely the gulf between the church’s prescriptions and the practices of its members that inspired constant calls to close the chasm, from Catherine of Siena in the 1370s to Erasmus in the 1510s, whether the issue was clerical avarice or lay superstition and ignorance.¹¹

But apart from their rejection by members of minority groups such as the Bohemian Hussites and the small numbers of English Lollards, and of course aside from the comparatively small numbers of European Jews and Iberian Muslims who were geographically within Latin Christendom but not among the baptized, the church’s prescriptions and truth claims remained a given. Practices such as the celebration of the liturgy, pilgrimages, processions, and prayers to saints, as well as institutions such as the papacy, the sacerdotal priesthood, religious orders, and confraternities, presupposed the (sometimes implicit) doctrines that delimited orthodoxy. Neither the church’s teachings nor its claims about proper religious practice were changed by the negotiated concordats that began in the 1410s between late medieval rulers and popes.¹² Nor, when certain city councils and territorial princes in the Holy Roman Empire began asserting jurisdictional control over many ecclesiastical affairs in opposition to their respective local bishops, were there changes in the church’s doctrines.¹³ To reject the church’s truth claims was to repudiate its authority as the caretaker of God’s saving truth and thus to spurn the means of eternal salvation legitimated biblically for more than a millennium by reference to the church’s establishment by Jesus himself.

A rejection of the Roman church’s truth claims is precisely what happened in the Reformation, and is most fundamentally what distinguishes its leaders from the many late medieval reformers who sought to inspire more members of the clergy and laity to live up to the teachings of the Roman church. The reformers who, beginning in the early 1520s, denied that the established church remained the church established by Jesus jettisoned many traditional teachings of medieval Christianity. Their repudiation was not based primarily on pervasive ecclesiastical abuses, the manifest sinfulness of many clergy and laity, or deep-seated obstacles to reform. All of these problems and more had been apparent to earnest clerical reformers and other clear-eyed Christians for well over a century. The real point of the Reformation was different: it was that Roman Catholicism was a wayward form of Christianity even at its best, even if all of its members had been deliberately following all of the Roman church’s teachings and knowingly enacting all of its allowed practices. The real problem was a flawed foundation of false and dangerous doctrines, of which the institutional abuses and immorality were symptomatic expressions.¹⁴ Errors and lies were being taught as truths by the established church itself. This rotten root had to be torn up and the Gospel planted in its stead. Small wonder that it looked to so many anti-Roman reformers as if the apocalypse was imminent, given that the church had pressed so pervasively into so many aspects of politics, social life, economic activity, and culture — in myriad ways damaging them all, according to those who came to oppose the established church.¹⁵ Savonarola had preached as much in Florence already in the early 1490s, and when Charles VIII of France invaded the Italian peninsula in 1494, it looked disturbingly as though the Dominican’s fiery admonitions were being confirmed.¹⁶ According to its protagonists, the Reformation would be Christendom’s urgently needed, last-hour rescue and recovery mission before God’s growing wrath had reached its full, final strength.

Once Christendom’s situation had been recognized and its base problems diagnosed in the early Reformation, God’s truth provided the criterion for recognizing the errors of a stubborn, self-interested, papist church. This meant comparing latter-day doctrines, practices, and institutions with the one genuine source for Christian faith and life, namely God’s Word in scripture, and cleaving to the latter. Martin Luther articulated the principle at the Leipzig Disputation as early as July 1519: “[n]o faithful Christian can be forced beyond the sacred scripture, which is nothing less than divine law, unless new and approved revelation is added. On the contrary, on the basis of divine law we are prohibited to believe, unless it is approved by divine scripture or palpably obvious [manifestam] revelation.”¹⁷ In the German and Swiss cities that played such a central part in the early Reformation, other anti-Roman reformers concurred with Luther about scripture’s foundational importance. In 1521 Melanchthon stated in the first edition of his Loci communes that “[w]hoever seeks the nature of Christianity from any source except canonical scripture is mistaken.”¹⁸ While he was still the dean of the theology faculty in Luther’s Wittenberg, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt stated in a sermon in February 1522 that “all preachers should always state that their doctrine is not their own, but God’s … They can discover nothing out of their own heads. If the Bible is at an end, then their competence is also at an end [Wan die Biblien aus ist, sso ist ir kunst auch auss].”¹⁹ Zwingli held the same view in Zurich, declaring in his 1522 treatise on scripture’s clarity and certainty that “no such trust should be given to any word like that given to [the Word of God]. For it is certain and may not fail. It is clear, and will not leave us to err in darkness. It teaches itself on its own [es leert sich selbs].”²⁰ In the same vein, Balthasar Hubmaier stated in the second Zurich Disputation in October 1523 that “in all divisive questions and controversies only scripture, canonized and made holy by God himself, should and must be the judge, no one else … For holy scripture alone is the true light and lantern through which all human argument, darkness, and objections are recognized.”²¹ Those who drew up the Mühlhausen Articles, one of many such lists of demands and grievances composed during the German Peasants’ War, asserted in September 1524 that the right standard of justice was given “in the Bible or holy word of God,” and stated that the city’s craftsmen and other parishioners who had formulated the articles had “derived their judgments from the Word of God.”²² Argula von Grumbach, along with Katharina Schütz Zell of strasbourg one of the very few women who wrote evangelical pamphlets in the 1520s, shared similar v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Contributors
• Series Editor's Preface
• Introduction
• PART I Long-term Perspectives Toward the Present
• PART II From the General to the Particular and Back
• PART III Trent and its Impact
• Index