Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie
knew it.
A notorious crisis in 1539–40 showed just how badly wrong this could go. Philip, landgrave of Hesse, was one of the most powerful Lutheran princes. He was also a walking scandal. He had made a political marriage at the age of eighteen and had disliked his wife from the first – not that it stopped him from fathering ten children by her. His unabashed adultery was embarrassing, but he was tempted by a more radical solution: bigamy, like the Old Testament patriarchs. In this new religious world, when old rules were up for renegotiation in the name of Christian liberty, why not? The theologians disapproved, but not unreservedly. Luther had once publicly teased his wife with the prospect of polygamy, and Melanchthon had at one point suggested bigamy as a solution to King Henry VIII’s marital crisis. In 1539, a brush with illness and the appearance of a suitable young lady crystallized Philip’s determination. He gave Luther and Melanchthon a blunt ultimatum: if they did not support him, he would seek the pope’s blessing instead.
They gave in. Of course they did. How could they not? Finding a sliver of theological justification, in December 1539 they reluctantly advised that a fresh marriage could proceed. They insisted that the whole affair be concealed, because “this act was not defensible before the world and the imperial laws”. Keeping such an explosive secret would probably always have been impossible, but in the event Philip scarcely tried. To Luther’s horror, in March 1540 he openly celebrated his new marriage, and the whole rotten scandal burst open. It permanently damaged Philip, although he stayed with his new wife for the rest of his life (they had nine children). It also permanently stained Luther’s reputation. It did not help that instead of repenting, Luther merely grouched that the secret should never have come out. Asked about the matter by a visitor, he reportedly said, “Bigamy has well-known examples in the Scriptures and could have been kept secret. . . . Just be calm! It will blow over. Perhaps she will soon die.”11
The point is not merely that Luther gave way under intolerable pressure but that his political theology had led him into a trap. He was too ready to believe in a benevolent prince, and he had mixed for that prince a cocktail of God-given authority and Christian liberty that would have proved heady for anyone, let alone an old goat like Philip. Innocence had been lost and would not easily be regained.
Other branches of the sundered Protestant family found other solutions. The “Anabaptists” and other radicals separated Luther’s two kingdoms much more sharply. Agreeing with Luther’s view that the secular state was little more than organized banditry, they concluded that Christians should therefore have nothing to do with it. They should obey its orders but not swear its blasphemous oaths, serve on juries that hang the hungry for stealing bread, or fight in armies that plunder the innocent. Perhaps they should not even pay taxes that funded such things. All they should do is live their lives in peaceful separation and prepare for the persecution that these rejections would inevitably bring down on their heads. The most enduring strand of Anabaptism was marked by pacifist withdrawal from a corrupt world, making Christ’s kingdom visible in the godly communities they formed.
There was another, older Anabaptist reading of the two sharply separated kingdoms: short-lived, but it lingered in Christendom’s memories. This view, first articulated by Luther’s nemesis Thomas Müntzer, held that the kingdom of the world should in fact submit to Christ’s kingdom. It was an apocalyptic doctrine. If the two kingdoms could be allied, then this world’s violent methods could be used to usher in the next. Müntzer tried to turn the peasant rebellions of 1524–25 in this direction, to no avail, but the idea did not die with him. It was taken up, most notoriously, in the western German city of Münster.
When the city’s pastor and several of its leading citizens were converted to apocalyptic Anabaptist doctrines in 1532, Anabaptists from across the region converged there and succeeded in throwing out the bishop and taking over the city’s government. A Dutch baker named Jan Matthys prophesied that Münster was the new Jerusalem to which Christ would imminently return. Over a thousand adults accepted baptism. They began to muster an army. The expelled bishop raised forces too and laid siege to the city in 1534. Matthys was killed in a suicidal sortie early in the siege, but one of his comrades, a tailor named Jan Bockelson, was now proclaimed king and the successor of King David. Within his besieged Jerusalem, he abolished private property; all goods were to be held in common. He legalized polygamy, taking sixteen wives for himself. We are told that when one of them crossed him, he beheaded her himself, in public.
The “kingdom” of Münster ended as violent, apocalyptic cults usually do. After a yearlong siege, the city was overrun. Bockelson and his fellow prophets were tortured and executed. The gibbets in which their bodies were displayed still hang from the cathedral tower. Münster became a notorious atrocity, comparable to the 11 September 2001 attacks in our own age. It convinced plenty of sober observers that Anabaptism was an existential threat that could engulf all Christendom.
Protestants who wished to claim respectability now scrambled to distance themselves from the radicals. They distinguished radicals sharply from so-called magisterial Protestants: those who sought Reformation in alliance with the existing princes, magistrates, and other secular powers. The distinction was manifestly self-serving. In truth, the boundary between “magisterial” and “radical” was almost as arbitrary and porous as Luther’s distinction between true Christians and “fanatics”. Some of those who ended up on the “magisterial” side of the line had earlier dallied with “radical” ideas. The eminent Strassburg reformer Martin Bucer questioned infant baptism. John Foxe, chronicler of the English Reformation, opposed executing religious offenders and had qualms about oaths and church taxes.12
The radicals themselves only forswore state help when they had no prospect of receiving any. As in Münster, they set up governments when they had the chance. In 1526–27, something like a state-led Anabaptist Reformation unfolded in the small Moravian town of Nikolsburg. The Anabaptist preacher Balthasar Hubmaier baptized a string of converts there, including the dominant nobleman and the town’s evangelical pastors. Hubmaier explained that he was trying to create “a Christian government at whose side God hung the Sword”, with the secular power coming to his Reformation’s aid.13 The experiment lasted mere months. Austrian forces seized Hubmaier in 1527, and he was burned in Vienna the following year. Anabaptists subsequently glossed over this embarrassing lapse, but if more opportunities to lapse had arisen, there would surely have been more Anabaptists unable to resist the temptation.
Reformed, “Calvinist” Protestants, whom we will meet properly in the next chapter, accepted Luther’s two-kingdoms theory but applied it in a very different setting. The Swiss and south German cities were much more politically complex than Saxony: republics and city-states with dispersed power, layers of law and bureaucracy, and wide political participation. From this perspective, Luther’s ill-defined, arm’s-length relationship with secular authority seemed like a missed opportunity. Surely the kingdom of this world should be summoned to the aid of Christ’s kingdom, not merely by maintaining peace and order, but also by promoting education, caring for the poor, and institutionally reforming the Church. In Zurich, where political power and religious power were already so intertwined that the chief preacher was an employee of the city government, they now became almost indistinguishable. Erastianism, the supposed theory that churches ought to be subordinate to states, takes its name from a theologian of this party. That was not quite what Thomas Erastus meant, however, nor is it a fair representation of the Swiss Reformation. Swiss churches were not so much subordinate to the state as a part of the same organic whole.
This tradition’s most important theologian, John Calvin, brought characteristic rigour to the question. Luther dreamed of good princes, disliked law on principle, and had little interest in institutions. As a result, Lutheran churches ended up with a mishmash of governing structures. Calvin, by contrast, had trained as a lawyer, knew that structures matter, and favoured more participatory government. He insisted that pastors should never have control over money: a simple change, but who knows how many scandals it has averted down the centuries? More momentously, he distinguished pastors, the ordained ministers who preach and celebrate the sacraments, from elders, senior laymen who would take charge of discipline