~ Der Ewige Protest ~
Religion in Central Europe c. 1520-1580
The emergence and growth of the Protestant movement in Western Christianity has traditionally been seen as something that occurred in distinguishable phases of development, with each seeing Protestantism take on new interpretations and idiosyncrasies, gradually distancing itself further and further from Catholicism. The first phase was marked by the early companionship of Martin Luther and Andreas Karlstadt and the society of like minded individuals that blossomed around them beginning in 1515, followed by the departure between the two primarily over issues pertaining to secular authority and the sacraments, and ending in 1521 with the destruction of Karlstadt’s radicals in the Bauernkrieg and the temporary protection of Luther's moderates in the Pact of Bayreuth. The second phase more or less overlapped with the end of the first, with David Vinter’s theology flourishing in the relatively tolerant environment of Scandinavia and the Baltic beginning roughly in 1518, which indirectly turned Protestantism into an authentic international force in Europe due to the success of Christian III of Denmark and Barnim XI of Pomerania-Prussia’s church orders (
kirchenordnungen). This phase is most definitively marked by the crucial revival of German Protestantism in the late 1520s under the eloquent and tenacious Johann Albrecht Meyer, the death of Luther - who still constituted a bridge between the Catholic and Protestant sentiment - and the splintering and dissolution of many of his followers in 1538, and, lastly, by the return of Andreas Karlstadt from his Norwegian exile, turning Radical Protestantism into a subversive branch of its own, distinct from Meyer’s “Mainline Protestantism.” A third of these phases is generally accepted to have begun in the climactic denouement of the 20 Years War (the Schwarzkrieg in particular), with consequences so broad and new doctrines so divergent that it is often considered a second Protestant Reformation in and of itself.
The downfall of the League of Fulda, the symbolic strong arm of German Protestantism intended to overturn the Catholic domination of the Empire, had left Meyer a broken man. So much quasi-apocalyptic hope had been placed in its success and subsequent reform of the German secular and ecclesiastical order, yet it had been bowled over all the same to the sound of
Te Deums and the smoke of incense. With its bid for authority or complete autonomy in ruins, Mainline Protestantism now found itself assailed in peace as well, with its prior monopoly on public speaking and education in the Empire challenged by new Catholic religious orders who seemed to mimic Protestant tactics. Luckily for Meyer, the Protestants present at the Diet of Mühlhausen made it very clear that surrendering him to Catholic authorities was completely out of the question (Franz Otto, the new duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg and host of Meyer at the time, threatened to renew the rebellion). Nonetheless, just as the Bauernkrieg had decided that Thomas Müntzer's social revolutionaries would no longer be leading the Protestant charge, the Schwarzkrieg had likewise shifted the spotlight away from Meyer and his followers.
Strangely enough, the unshakeable doctrinal opinions of Johann Albrecht Meyer, Andreas Karlstadt, David Vinter, and Guillaume Farel - which had hitherto defined the four most popular Protestant sects - would be slowly altered or even replaced by undercurrents in Protestant thought that by all appearances were thought to have been repressed. The most outstanding turnaround for one such undercurrent would be the acceptance of adult baptism.
Anabaptist preaching in the Netherlands, c. 1540
- Geboren aus Wasser und Geist -
"And Jesus being baptized, forthwith came out of the water: and lo, the heavens were opened to him: and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon him. And behold a voice from heaven, saying: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."
Matthew 3:16-17
Beginning as early as the 1520s, as issues of interpretation multiplied and the rifts created by them intensified, numerous previously marginalized groups of Protestants polarized around what they could agree on and carved out their own congregations. One group in particular was notably widespread during the early Protestant movement, and - while there were many different doctrines purported by its original members, what united them was their belief in adult baptism. “Anabaptist” - meaning someone who re-baptizes - quickly became the byword amongst Catholics and Mainline Protestants for this group, even though their self-identification was as “Baptists” as they did not consider their first baptism as infants to be valid. Adult baptism had been a popular amongst many of the early reformers, but it existed primarily as a personal belief held by a few rather than as a mandatory requirement in any of the newly established church orders. While both Luther and Meyer had vigorously defended infant baptism, the Anabaptists saw it differently. For them, baptism was the first and only required Sacrament - a necessity for salvation and, as such, something that was intended as a profound internal rebirth in Christ. They argued, then, that just as full understanding and consent of the will was necessary for acceptance of their Lord and Savior, it naturally followed that baptism, as the watershed moment in one’s salvation, should be reserved for the conscious adult rather than thrust on some unwitting infant through a ritual that it could not possibly comprehend. This naturally led to numerous episodes in which Catholics were scandalized by adults repeating the Sacrament they had already received at birth - referring to them disparagingly as “Dunkers” (“
die Tunker") - with George van Egmond, the archbishop of Utrecht, remarking in 1556 that “these [Anabaptists] engage themselves in the rites of baptism whenever they please, often multiple times in a year.”
A predominantly Southern German movement at first, Anabaptists originally held very similar sociopolitical aspirations as Lutheran or Meyeran Protestantism, but as their teachings began to align more closely with that of Andreas Karlstadt, their radical views and close vicinity to the fiercely Catholic Hapsburgs and Dukes of Bavaria meant that their continued presence in the region was untenable. Due to their dismissal of secular and ecclesiastical authority, the Anabaptists were deemed by their Catholic rulers to be cut from the same cloth as the peasant insurrectionists who had rampaged across Northern Germany, and were systematically expelled from their hubs in the southern half of the Empire during the 1520s, with populations ranging from the hundreds to thousands driven out from such cities as Ingolstadt, Pilsen, Zwickau, and Landshut. Zürich, which was considered the beating heart of the early Anabaptist movement, was the last major city to outlaw Anabaptism. After the execution of 55 convicted Anabaptist leaders over the course of 3 years, Zürich’s sizeable Anabaptist community (numbering more than 2,000) was forced to leave the city in 1529, following which it primarily relocated to Swabia and Alsace (particularly Strassburg). Most of the important early Anabaptist preachers and theologians, such as Felix Manz, Jakob Hutter, Balthasar Hubmaier, and Conrad Grebel, had either been executed or had fallen in with a different Protestant movement by the mid 1530s, and Anabaptism was more or less dead as a distinct sect of Protestantism.
Strassburg, hotbed of Protestant thought
However, beginning in the 1540s, the doctrines of Anabaptism began to sputter awake again. Once the doctrine of adult baptism was no longer in vogue amongst the Protestant elite of Strassburg (which had rapidly become the epicenter of Protestant intellectual activity), Melchior Hoffman - one of the city’s last genuine Anabaptist teachers - went into self-imposed exile in the Netherlands, where he found fertile ground with the long-established Dutch tradition of popular devotion, and many Dutch reformers - such as David Joris, Johann Campanus, Obbe Philips, and Menno Simons - soon joined the Anabaptist ranks. The most influential of these newcomers proved to be Simons, who preached a life of simplicity, pacifism, and active charity which he believed to be most consistent with the Gospel:
“For true evangelical faith is of such a nature that it cannot lie dormant; but manifests itself in all righteousness and works of love; it … clothes the naked; feeds the hungry; consoles the afflicted; shelters the miserable; aids and consoles all the oppressed; returns good for evil; serves those that injure it; prays for those that persecute it; teaches, admonishes and reproves with the Word of the Lord; seeks that which is lost; binds up that which is wounded; heals that which is diseased and saves that which is sound.”
But Anabaptism was still quite loosely defined during this period, and was poorly understood by the outside world, which for decades lumped the Anabaptists with the Brethren Churches, the Antitrinitarians, and even the Waldensians. Significant debate frequently flared up between the Anabaptists over matters such as the Eucharist, ordination of ministers, and even polygamy, but the defining rift of the Anabaptist movement came over the issue of violence. While later Anabaptists would argue over whether or not one might be allowed to defend oneself or one’s family, the Anabaptists of the 1540s were split on whether or not society should be overturned directly by violent revolution. Jan van Batenburg, the leading voice behind the “
Zwaardgeesten” (“sword-minded”) Anabaptists, was a proponent of millenarianism (that is, the belief that Christ’s return and 1000 year reign over the Earth were imminent, although contingent on whether or not the Earth had been sufficiently prepared for such an event) and called on his followers to take advantage of the chaos of the Schwarzkrieg to re-work society into the godly community of believers it was meant to be.
As Hoffman's Anabaptists comprised the largest Protestant group in rural northwestern Germany by the mid-1540s, the Zwaardgeesten easily overran the cities of Münster and Osnabrück, forcing their prince-bishops to flee and founding in them experimental utopias intended to precipitate Christ’s Second Coming. As copycat uprisings took control of nearby towns and villages, cracks in the Zwaardgeesten regime began to manifest almost immediately. Apart from the predictable wanton violence, the redistribution of hierarchical positions also brought power struggles, and a massive scandal was generated by the redistribution of women (many of them already married) into polygamous arrangements with the leadership, who cited the Old Testament patriarchs and their belief in the non-sacramental nature of marriage as justification. The Zwaardgeesten found themselves forcibly removed from their strongholds not by Catholic intervention, but by the horrified and outraged populace they lorded over.
Once the split between the violent and nonviolent Anabaptists had been commonly accepted, the term “Anabaptist” fell out of popular use and the Anabaptists began to be designated by their different congregational names - even though the distinction quickly became unnecessary, as Anabaptists movements such as the Zwaardgeesten rapidly fell out of favor through a combination of defeat on the battlefield and general disillusionment in the community. However, the concept of adult baptism had already tapped into a strong and longstanding tradition of personal spirituality in the Netherlands and Germany.
It should come as no surprise that Western Christianity tends to languish when its leadership grows neglectful or lethargic in its mission. In most cases, it can be observed that this is a self-correcting problem. In the long history of Christianity in Europe there exists a ceaseless record of ups and downs in its spiritual vigor, with each slump followed by a rejuvenation of sorts that sought to reinforce the duty of the Church to its adherents. Before the development of Protestantism and Reform Catholicism, this rejuvenation had come in the form of the great mendicant orders of the 13th century and the restoration of monastic life in general, and the development of popular mysticism of the likes of the Thuringian Dominican “Meister” Eckhart in particular. In the nadir that followed, the mendicant orders and monasteries contributed less and less to the spiritual life of Europe, but the devotional movements that had emerged in Germany and the Netherlands maintained a fairly steady and vibrant course into the 16th century, marked by one of the most influential books on Christian devotion,
The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, who emphasized the responsibility of the individual to accept the love of God:
“Would that I obtain this favor, Lord, to find Thee alone and by Thyself, to open unto Thee my whole heart, and to enjoy Thee as my soul desireth; and that henceforth none may look upon me, nor have regard to me; but that Thou alone mayest speak unto me, and I to Thee.”
Therefore, unlike the Renaissance humanism of Italy and Southern Germany - which kept the realms of humanist knowledge and the Christian faith compartmentalized and apart - it was the Christian humanism of Desiderius Erasmus that had captivated Northern Europe. Erasmus (who had been an inspiration to Luther and Karlstadt) may have been a product of the Renaissance but still took in the world through the lenses of the spirituality of Thomas à Kempis. As revolutionary as Erasmus and his treatises and translations were, he was merely another step in this long tradition and was heavily indebted to his predecessors. When he published his new Greek translation of the New Testament (the same translation used by Luther and Meyer to translate the Bible into German), it was done so as an effort to return to the Scriptures rather than as a simple scholarly pursuit in classical philology.
The simple fact was that for many the ritual of baptism - when undertaken as an adult - was an intensely personal, almost primal experience of pure Christian spirituality, bringing with it all of the feelings of absolution and new beginnings so inherent to the Gospel. Such a deep and simple act of spiritual cleansing was equally attractive to the rural classes as well as the landed gentry, who had found themselves burdened for meaning and a desire for self-purification in the increasingly chaotic 16th century. By the 1590s, only the followers of Menno Simons remained of the original Anabaptists. However, the defining Anabaptist practice of adult baptism had forced its way back into the more mainstream Protestant movements: for instance, the Frisian Brethren (known as the
Broederskerk in Dutch), a union of Karlstadter congregations in the Netherlands that was the largest of its kind, declared its approval of adult baptism in a synod held at Assen in 1580, to be followed by the majority of the other churches in the Karlstadter circuit within the next 20 years.
- Zurück zum Zeichenbrett -
When considering the course of Anabaptism - from a promising early start, to repression, to revival, and ultimately subsiding to a small and peculiar sect - it is tempting to classify it as simply another failed Protestant movement. However, when considering the effect it had on Protestantism in general and Radical Protestantism in particular, it is difficult to overestimate the part Anabaptism played in developing a full-fledged Protestant worldview. The lengthy persecution of the Anabaptists at the hands of both the Catholics and fellow Protestants had engendered a new worldview in the Protestant camp. If there was one lesson to be learned by the Anabaptists from the ordeals of their great experiment, it was that the true Church was meant to endure throughout history - no matter how silently or inconspicuously - as the narrow way, hated by the world. There was a wealth of comparisons to draw from the Bible which reinforced this feeling: the Hebrews in Egypt and Babylon, the early Church in the Roman Empire, and the promised days of tribulations to come. The true Church, then, would not bear its face to the world adorned in riches and vested with political power, but would remain as it always ostensibly had - in the catacombs, bedeviled by false prophets and antichrists until the day of Reckoning.
This was an outlook that provided a much needed answer for Protestants everywhere in the aftermath of the Schwarzkrieg. The German Evangelical Union, the largest conglomerate of Protestants within the Empire and Meyer’s brainchild, was left in a state of helplessness after 1556. Conditional but indefinite toleration had been secured from the emperor, but the fact that both Meyeran Protestantism had not triumphed in the Empire and that Protestantism as a whole had not swept everything before it were in direct contradiction to Meyer’s confident rhetoric and incredibly confusing to those who had truly believed in his message. The failure of Meyer’s distinct triumphalism left the Protestants within the Empire worried about the validity of their movement and whether or not they had articulated some fatal flaw in their doctrine. What was more, it left many Protestants doubtful of Meyer’s insistence that world rulers were to be obeyed in almost all circumstances. It made sense, then, for the new current in Protestant thought to accept the reality of Protestantism’s more marginal, besieged status in the world and to be more cautious with the dispensation of trust when it came to secular princes. Paul’s Letter to the Romans may have advised the followers of Christ to submit to the governing authorities, but the Psalms still urged against putting one’s faith in princes.
The development of this outlook also owed much to the contemporary writings of French Protestants such as Théodore de Bèze, François Hotman, Nicolas Barnaud, and Hubert Languet, all of whom were wrestling with the fact that their own king regarded them as enemies of the state for what amounted to mere crimes of conscience, and was engaged in an active attempt to exterminate them through warfare. These Protestant thinkers formed a group known as the “Monarchomachs” (“
Monarchomaques”), who advocated for resistance against tyrannical monarchs, and, in some cases, for outright regicide. Beyond the borders of France, this emergent movement would be brought to the fore not by the followers of Karlstadt or Meyer, but by none other than the Lutherans.
Some speculate that something major would have been accomplished for Luther’s congregation had he lived longer, whether in the form of a full reconciliation with Rome or a more definitive association with Protestantism. It is more likely, however, that Luther considered that things were as they should be when he expired - in his eyes he had done all he could to form a community of true believers that rejected empty ritual and embraced justification by faith alone, but also held true to the sacraments and sacred mysteries of the ancient Church. To Luther, the distance which he had set himself from both Rome and from the other Protestant reformers was ideal. Yet this middle ground was much less satisfactory to his posthumous followers. A significant early controversy of course involved the matter of the Papacy and with what regard he should be held by proper Lutherans. Martin Luther frequently excoriated the Papacy of his generation, citing its spiritually manipulative endorsement of paid indulgences and the rampant immorality which consumed the Roman Curia to be evidence that the Papacy was captive to Babylon. However, Luther also stood by his belief that the Pope was truly the successor to St. Peter and held a preeminent position in Christendom that deserved the highest esteem - albeit as the “first among equals” that should in most cases be subordinate in magisterial authority to the pronouncements of Ecumenical Councils. In fact, in the adjusted liturgy that Luther and his colleague Christoph Scheurl painstakingly assembled for their congregation - known as the Old Saxon Rite - the general intercessions include a prayer for their Roman brethren and all the patriarchs of the Church, specifically mentioning the Pope in Rome in order that God might protect him and imbue him with “true faith in the teachings of Jesus Christ” so as to “bring dignity to his office.”
A High Church Lutheran - or "Hochlutherischer" - Service
For a great many Lutherans, there was enormous difficulty in accepting this intercession’s place in the service. It seemed, at best, wishful thinking and, at worst, completely absurd to treat the Papacy and the Roman Church so reverently, especially after the works of Luther were indiscriminately placed on the Index of Prohibited Books by the Second Council of Basel. This was viewed by many Lutherans as a certain subservience toward the hated Pope at the expense of their founder and all of his beliefs, arguing that considering oneself to being in communion with Rome after Luther himself was excommunicated by Pope Ignatius I in 1536 put their whole congregation at a moral impasse. Of great concern was Luther's reaction to the news of his excommunication two years before his death, in which he was condemned alongside Johann Albrecht Meyer - meaning that, interestingly enough, Martin Luther would be the last of the original generation of Protestant reformers to be excommunicated. Luther damned Meyer in particular for this, accusing him of calling the Pope’s bluff and evolving what would be known as Protestantism from a reform movement within the Church into an entirely separate Christian sect. Luther was put over the edge by this chain of events, and he showed a marked radicalization in the remaining two years before his death, putting out treatises questioning the validity of the Petrine supremacy and even of the episcopal office and ordained priesthood.
The failure of German Catholics and Protestants to reach a peaceful compromise and the consequent interconfessional violence of the Schwarzkrieg and Bildersturm further poisoned the perception of the Papacy for these skeptical Lutherans, and another liturgy would be written without the permission of the congregational leadership in 1556 by a Brandenburger Lutheran by the name of Martin Chemnitz. This new liturgy was only the beginning of the controversy. Beyond a relatively small area in Thuringia and Upper Saxony, the established leadership of the Lutheran congregation had little power to keep its many satellite congregations in line, and, as such, Chemnitz was beyond the reach of the mainline Lutherans, being a native of Brandenburg. The inconsistent oversight afforded to this leadership meant that those who considered themselves “Lutheran” were constantly splintering over theological differences, with some congregations disagreeing on matters a fundamental as the Lord’s Supper, adult baptism, and justification by faith alone. The liturgy put forward by Chemnitz only barely revealed just how much he and the others in his camp differed from the predominant Lutheran interpretation of the Christian faith, as shown in their other writings - Chemnitz and those like minded were much closer in theology to Meyer (in some cases even more radical) than the members of the congregational leadership, and argued that they were also more in line with the teachings of Luther himself. Unlike the Lutherans led by Johannes Agricola who departed the congregation in 1538 and joined with Meyer’s Evangelical Union, the group that would become known as Neulutheraner - Neo-Lutherans - remained with their brethren until 1562, when a Lutheran committee led by the incumbent congregational superintendent, Paul Eber, declared Chemnitz’s new liturgy heretical, leading to a mutual severing of ties between the two groups.
Martin Chemnitz - the "Alter Martinus"
The Neo-Lutherans seemed poised to join the Evangelical Union, but heated disagreements over the Real Presence (something which the Neo-Lutherans still maintained, although without Transubstantiation) and submission to secular authorities prevented the union from ever occurring. Chemnitz and his fellow Neo-Lutheran, Cyriacus Spangenberg, had both spent a good deal of time in the Netherlands, where they were exposed to Anabaptist ideals (Chemnitz and Spangenburg would remain divided over the matter of adult baptism) and became both close acquaintances of the monarchomach Hubert Languet, whom they had met in Antwerp and whose works they read voraciously. The worldview developing amongst these individuals finally manifested itself coherently in the "Nordhausen Centuries," a colossal and meticulously researched account of Church history written by the Neo-Lutheran bishop of Pomesania, Johann Wigand, giving Protestantism a unique historiography to root itself in.
Meyer treated his commitment to Protestant Christianity and his loyalty to the German people as one and the same. For him, Protestantism was a specifically German phenomenon, born of the unique German genius and thus being an ideological breakthrough best suited to reforming German society. Meyer of course believed that the doctrine he had meticulously detailed in his Hessian Confession possessed the fullness of truth, and represented the purest interpretation of the Christian faith. However, it cannot be denied that Meyeran Protestantism seemed to be lacking a sense of universality. Further, Meyer’s writings were only very rarely intended for contemplative or devotional purposes, having become perhaps too wrapped up in his political vision from his first days of notoriety until the end of his life. Meyer may have had his doctorate in theology, but one could easily classify him as a political philosopher given how many pages he dedicated to agonizing over the proper levels of municipal and imperial bureaucracy necessary to run a German state. The Neo-Lutherans, on the other hand, possessed a great deal of religious hymns, prayers, parables, and poetry to draw on, much of which was penned by Luther himself. The only other comparable devotional fervor was to be found in the Brethren Churches, but their denunciation of excessive wealth and wholesale rejection of the rights and privileges of the aristocracy were profoundly unsavory to a great many members of society.
What all of this meant was that Neo-Lutheranism was found immensely appealing to those who were alienated by Meyeran Protestantism’s provisions for submission to earthly monarchies and by its distinctly German flavor. Neo-Lutheranism offered a form of Mainline Protestantism that was the more flexible of the two, and by the 1580s it had begun to rival Meyeran Protestantism (at least in terms of geographical spread), finding ready adherents not only in Germany but also especially amongst the non-German speaking nobility and middle classes of Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Bohemia, and the Netherlands. Thanks in part to the Neo-Lutherans, the designation of “Protestant” - which was originally intended to denigrate the members of the movement, of whom most were at first loath to accept the title - was now embraced as a perfect representation of what Protestantism was supposed to be. The great Protestant revolution hoped for by Meyer and so many others had vanished before their eyes, but the "Eternal Protest" would continue.
The high water mark of Protestantism in Europe, c. 1580