Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie
to claim that their kings were implicitly chosen by the nation as a whole. Never mind that neither realm had consciously done this for centuries, if ever. It meant that Protestants who took up arms against their sovereigns could soothe themselves that they were not defying the law but defending it. Excavating and reviving Europe’s genuine, long-buried antimonarchical precedents suddenly became the Protestant reformers’ business.
The other justification for resistance was being talked about by some of Luther’s colleagues in the mid-1520s, by Martin Bucer, the influential Strassburg reformer, in 1535, and by Philip Melanchthon in 1546–47. It was fully formulated for the first time by Lutheran diehards besieged in the city of Magdeburg in 1550. In the 1570s, French Protestants would use it to justify resistance up to the point of assassinating a tyrannical king. This argument began from St Paul’s dictum that all ruling powers – plural – rule by God’s permission: not just kings and emperors, but also the lesser princes, magistrates, and officials who hold authority under them. Those people too are obliged to uphold justice and defend true religion. So it may be that private citizens oppressed by a tyrant can do no more than resist passively and embrace martyrdom. But these other authorities –”lesser magistrates” – might have the right and the duty to stand firm for justice in the face of a tyrant. It was their obligation to reprimand an unjust king, to defy his orders, and even to defend their people with all necessary force. After all, their authority, like the king’s own, comes from God.20
This theory’s neat division between private citizens humbly submitting and lesser magistrates violently resisting was completely impractical. Yet it allowed Protestants fighting for their lives to convince themselves that they were not revolutionaries intent on anarchy but defenders of the existing social order. This quickly degenerated to the point where everyone who had any power of any kind to resist could claim that they therefore had the right to do so. Using Knox’s principle that “all man is equal”, even a mob could claim that its rough-edged power was granted by God. Knox went on to argue that any private citizen who had the power to assassinate an idolatrous prince could and should do so. Like the two-kingdoms doctrine itself, this theory could be used to justify almost anything.
The effects of all this can be overplayed. An inattentive Protestant prince in 1600 who compared himself to his great-grandfather a century before might conclude that things had not actually changed very much. Most of the time, Protestant politics worked better in practice than in theory. Churches believed in conscientious obedience and valued states that preserved peace and administered justice. Protestant princes believed the Gospel their ministers taught and valued the moral order, sobriety and social cohesiveness their churches fostered. All sides usually rubbed along well enough.
Yet the ground had shifted under their feet. The tremors can, ultimately, be traced back to Luther’s rejection of every authority beyond the believer’s conscience bound by Scripture. Obedience was a Christian virtue, but who exactly should Protestants obey? A godly prince? A tyrant? A preacher – and if so, which one? In the end, only their own consciences, before God and informed by Scripture, could answer that question. Some Protestants found their consciences leading them on unexpected adventures. Even the vast majority who continued to obey their traditional rulers now had to justify their obedience in conscientious terms. Luther had argued that true Christians were subject to everyone, but only because, as redeemed and liberated souls, they voluntarily chose that subjection. When no human power can direct or absolve the conscience, it is the conscience that becomes the true sovereign.
King James VI feared that this line of thinking was leading “some fiery spirited men in the ministry” to envisage a “Democratic form of government”.21 That was not too wild an exaggeration. Compare the original “Protestation” of 1529, when the German princes first defied the emperor’s authority:
These are matters that concern the glory of God and that affect the salvation of each and every one of us; here we must . . . acknowledge our Lord and God as the highest King and the Lord of lords.
It was hardly a new idea that Christians should answer to a higher authority than the emperor. The novelty was bypassing the chain of command. They could not settle their consciences with the thought that they should submit to God’s anointed authorities in Church and state. “In this respect no man can conceal himself behind other people’s acts or behind majority resolutions.”22 Every soul had to stand before God alone. In politics, as in faith, no other authority could hold.
Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!
– PSALM 133:1
Protestantism was born in conflict, not only with the rest of the world, but with itself. Its rejection of fixed authorities condemned it to division from the very beginning, and it has repeatedly shown a propensity to fissure into new, quarrelling sects. But this is not the whole story. If it were, then Protestantism would have blown itself completely to bits, until there were as many churches as individual believers. In fact, the centrifugal force spinning into sectarian chaos has been matched by a gravitational pull towards unity.
As the dust of sectarian confusion settled during the late 1520s, two major Protestant blocs appeared, alongside the smaller fragments: Luther’s own, and a Swiss and south German grouping who lacked a single leader but whose most prominent figure was the city preacher of Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli. For a time, it seemed as if his movement, not Luther’s, could be the centre around which Protestantism’s orbiting fragments could coalesce. Calvinism, as it came misleadingly to be called, was the last, best hope for serious Protestant unity. It failed, but it came agonizingly close. Its story is a parable of what Protestantism can and cannot do.
Zwingli claimed that his Reformation owed nothing to Martin Luther’s. He claimed that the two movements arose almost simultaneously, with strikingly similar ideas, because both were inspired by God. Believing this does require a leap of faith. Zwingli’s doctrine of salvation was very similar to Luther’s. It is natural to assume that, deliberately or unconsciously, he had been influenced by his northern counterpart.
Yet the two men were very different. Luther was a monk and professor whose revolution was grounded in his own private spiritual crisis. Zwingli was a more public figure. If Luther’s Reformation was a theology for lovers, Zwingli’s was prosaic, politically aware, and more self-consciously scholarly. Erasmus and the Renaissance scholars had initially thought that Luther was one of them, before discovering when it was too late that his earthiness and love for theological paradox were too raw for their taste. By contrast, Zwingli, who had exchanged letters with Erasmus in his youth, enthusiastically adopted both his biblical scholarship and his zeal for social and political reform. Erasmus himself died a Roman Catholic in 1536, but he lived out his last years in the Swiss city of Basel, where a Reformation in Zwingli’s tradition had taken hold. Many of those who shared Erasmus’s vision of a purified Christendom found Zwingli’s movement more congenial than Luther’s.
Zwingli’s Reformation was also unmistakably Swiss. Switzerland in his day was, incongruous as it may now seem, a revolutionary entity: a popular republic formed in the high Alps to resist the Holy Roman Empire. Through the fifteenth century, it was expanding, reaching cities of the southern German plain like Bern, Basel, and Zurich. It would grow no further, partly because the Reformation divided it, but the danger that half of Germany might “turn Swiss” still seemed real. To turn Swiss meant to assert one’s liberty, but a liberty that was communal and communitarian rather than individualistic.1
Sixteenth-century Switzerland was fiercely independent and politically idiosyncratic, but also poor. Its one lucrative export was its much-feared mercenary soldiers, but being paid by foreigners to slaughter one another has its drawbacks. The young Zwingli served as a military chaplain, and in September 1515 he was