Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie
simple justification for the elders and their work was Christ’s detailed prescription in Matthew’s Gospel for how Christians should deal with sinners among the faithful: first private admonition, then progressively more formal reprimands, and finally, if repentance was not forthcoming, expulsion from the community.14 Calvin saw the Church as a covenanted community, a new Israel in which all were bound to be their brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. His elders were charged with systematically overseeing everyone’s moral conduct, hauling adulterers, drunkards, and those who fell asleep during sermons before a tribunal, not to punish them, but to elicit repentance.
Nowadays, Calvinist discipline smells very totalitarian. “Repentance” could mean public humiliation, and penitents might be asked to prove their sincerity by denouncing others. However, most premodern societies were deeply communitarian and conformist. Notions of privacy and individual liberty scarcely existed. Calvinist discipline worked (and it did work) because of widespread consent. Maintaining moral order was in everyone’s interest. Drunkenness led to injuries, damage, and lost working days. Fornication led to illegitimate children for whom the community would have to care. The system could be genuinely pastoral. To read disciplinary records is to be struck by the painstaking care these men (they were all men) took to reconcile neighbours, to resolve family disputes, and to protect the victims of domestic violence.15
Yet Calvinist discipline was ultimately neither a form of oppression nor a marriage-counselling service. It was God’s instrument to form his Church into a living example of Christ’s kingdom. Hence its most radical feature: its egalitarianism. Every Christian fell under the elders’ jurisdiction, including elders and pastors themselves, many of whom had at some time to face a grilling, although Calvin himself never did. Magistrates, noblemen and other grandees could in principle be judged on the same basis as a street beggar.
That was the theory. Making it stick was almost impossible in rigidly hierarchical societies, but Calvinists at least tried. The laboratory was the city-state of Geneva, where Calvin was chief pastor from 1541 to his death in 1564. The city’s councillors and leading families were all in favour of clearing out whorehouses, but being publicly humiliated for dancing at their own children’s weddings was a different matter – especially at the hands of a French refugee, for Calvin was not even a native Genevan. They feared that immigrants were subverting the city’s government. Calvin himself believed he was engaged in a simple contest between morality and immorality. Remarkably, morality won. In the faction-ridden city, Calvin and his swelling band of immigrants allied themselves with a grouping who in 1555 swept the elections to the city council. Their opponents were banished from the city and a swathe of immigrants became citizens. In an unsettling echo of Münster, the refugees had taken over their asylum. Calvin’s prize was not a royal title but something more tangible and enduring: the power of excommunication. His church was now empowered to expel obstinate sinners from Christian society, whoever they might be.16
This was not exactly a theocracy, but it was a church that was robustly independent of government. In particular, it cracked a problem that Lutheranism never even properly acknowledged: how to be Protestant in the face of an actively hostile state. Luther’s advice was to pray. Calvin also wanted Protestants to organize. Informal groups of believers who chose elders to police themselves found that they had become cell churches, able to support and regulate one another even when under active persecution. Luther disliked the idea of secret meetings, which he said reminded him of rats. Calvin had found a way of forming the rats into a choir and then drilling them to march.
In the same year as his victory in Geneva, Calvin began sending missionary pastors into his native France to organize underground congregations there, riding a wave of dramatic Protestant growth in France over the following seven years. Variants on Calvin’s model began appearing like mushrooms across Europe. One example can stand to show how far this model could go.
Scotland was a latecomer to the Reformation. In 1559–60, an inchoate evangelical movement fused with nationalist resentment to spark a rebellion against a pro-French Catholic regime. The man who crystallized this movement was John Knox, a disciple of Calvin’s who lacked his master’s subtlety and made up for it in zeal. He had seen the future as a refugee in Geneva and wanted to make it work in Scotland. Above all, he was entranced by the idea of spiritual equality. In a series of polemics in 1558, he warned his fellow Scots that they could not shirk their responsibilities to reform the Church simply because they were commoners. In God’s eyes, he insisted, “all man is equal”: equal not in rights but in responsibilities. If you lived in a land of idolatry, it was your duty to demand reform and to take action to separate yourself from the sin around you. Otherwise, when God’s judgment fell on the whole nation for tolerating blasphemies in its midst, it would engulf you too.17 This frankly revolutionary agenda stretched Luther’s two kingdoms to breaking point.
After a decade of confusion, Scotland’s Protestants succeeded in deposing their Catholic queen, Mary, and replacing her with her infant son, now King James VI. But having fought for Christ’s kingdom against all odds, they were disinclined to submit to a king of their own making. James was raised Protestant, but spent his adult life in a running battle with Protestant churchmen who would not accept his power over them in any meaningful sense. They wanted a church that elected its own leadership – so-called Presbyterianism, from the Greek word for “elders”. The king wanted the church to be governed by bishops, partly for tradition’s sake, but mostly so that he could appoint them himself.
Worse, like the true Calvinists they were, the Presbyterians wanted comprehensive moral discipline and to be able to haul even the king before church elders. In 1596, the Presbyterian leader Andrew Melville expounded his turbocharged version of the two-kingdoms doctrine to James VI’s face. There were two kingdoms in Scotland. James was king of one, but the other, rapidly turning itself into a recklessly expansionist empire, was the kingdom of Christ, “whose subject King James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member!”18 The effect was to reduce earthly monarchs to puppets, who on any matter of moral significance – that is, virtually every political decision – ought to take their steer from Christ’s duly authorized representatives.
No actual government could accept this sort of arm’s-length theocracy. All Protestants, therefore, potentially faced the same basic problem: how to deal with a secular government that would not conform to God’s will. Luther’s doctrine of strictly passive disobedience had theological clarity and long Christian tradition behind it. Unfortunately, it also had a tendency to crack under pressure. In a militarized, structurally violent society, when a community finds its principles repeatedly thwarted, when it is goaded beyond endurance or faces direct, sustained persecution, it will eventually fight back.
We will come back to those bloody struggles, but for now we simply need to notice how Protestants justified resistance to their divinely ordained rulers. These justifications were daughters of necessity, scrabbled together after the fact to legitimize self-defence. But once formulated, they took on a life of their own. The political cultures they created have shaped how Protestants relate to one another and to the world around them down to the present.
Early Protestants found two broad ways to justify resisting their sovereign lords. One, which started more slowly but mattered more in the long run, was legal. Most European monarchies were not absolute autocracies, but were governed by law, custom, and tradition. These laws, customs, and traditions often contained hints that rulers depended on some kind of consent from their subjects. By mixing a few carefully chosen legal and historical precedents with a hefty dose of wishful thinking, one could confect an argument for constitutional monarchy. Philip of Hesse, when he was not fathering children, was drawn by this approach. The Holy Roman Emperor, who was after all an elected rather than a hereditary ruler, traditionally made a series of promises when he acceded to the throne, including promises to respect the legitimate rights of the princes under him. Philip argued that the emperor’s continued legitimacy depended on his keeping those promises. If he did not, the princes who had elected him could surely depose him and install someone better in his place.19
Likewise,