Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie
the city, and a French preacher, Guillaume Farel, had been installed as minister. The city remained gravely divided, and Farel was conscious of needing backup. When the author of the Institutio strayed into his city, Farel confronted him with a prophet’s certainty and convinced the reluctant Calvin that God was calling him to work in Geneva. Farel was more firebrand than theologian, but he managed to browbeat John Calvin into changing his mind: precious few could say as much.
Geneva was a briar patch for Calvin. The city’s factional divisions continued, and in 1538 both Farel and Calvin were banished. For Calvin, it was a liberation. He went to Strassburg, spending three happy, fruitful years working with Bucer and revising the Institutio. His peace was interrupted in 1541, when Genevan politics turned again and the city invited him to return, without Farel. He felt obliged to accept, but he drove a hard bargain. He would now structure the Genevan church in his own way. As we saw in the last chapter, this meant imposing a systematic structure of moral policing. He set out to create a model of what a reformed Christian city could be. Calvin remained Geneva’s chief pastor until 1564, when he worked himself into an early grave.
From his new Alpine Jerusalem, Calvin continued his dogged pursuit of Protestant unity. In 1540, he had criticized both Luther and Zwingli for their intransigence and called for reconciliation. With Zwingli safely dead, Luther let it be known that he liked the young Frenchman’s book, a wisp of hope to which Calvin clung.7 His first real opportunity came in the late 1540s, not long after Luther himself had died. In 1547, the Emperor Charles V at last confronted the Protestants in battle and won a crushing victory at Mühlberg. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Alps in the Italian city of Trento (Trent), Pope Paul III had finally assembled a General Council to rebut the Protestant challenge. In this moment of dreadful urgency, Calvin persuaded Bullinger, in Zurich, to open theological negotiations. In May 1549, he went to Zurich himself, and the two men hammered out a full agreed statement on the Eucharist: the Zurich Consensus.
Despite the title, this was Calvin’s achievement. It was he who had pursued the agreement and made concessions to make it happen. The result was an ambiguous formula that stuck fairly closely to Bullinger’s views while still emphasizing that, in the Eucharist, Christ is received by faith. Crucially, though, there was enough goodwill to ensure that this was no rerun of the Wittenberg Concord. The Zurichers trusted Calvin, and even accepted two amendments he suggested to strengthen the text of the Consensus a few months later. One by one, the Swiss Protestant churches formally adopted the Consensus. Bucer, in exile after the wars in Germany, feared that Calvin had given too much ground. Calvin replied, “Let us bear therefore with a sigh what we cannot correct”, but then persuaded Bullinger to accept the changes – to Bucer’s evident surprise.8 A stable, inclusive Reformed Protestantism had been born, with Calvin as its midwife.
Only one detail remained: bringing in the Lutherans. Calvin genuinely believed it could be done. His own position was reasonable and self-evidently correct, and many reformed Christians had already united around it. He also had considerable faith in his own persuasive powers. In particular, with Luther himself having died in 1546, Calvin’s hopes were pinned on Luther’s right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon. Melanchthon shared Bucer’s eagerness for conciliation and Calvin’s own scholarly brilliance. He was also mild-mannered – to the point of spinelessness, his enemies muttered. The two men had met several times, and Calvin felt they were kindred spirits. Melanchthon was on friendly terms with other Swiss reformers; Bullinger’s son even lived with Melanchthon for a year when he was a student. Surely something could be done.9
It was not to be. For one thing, Calvin the statesman could not always keep Calvin the theological street fighter muzzled. In the 1540s, Calvin and Melanchthon disagreed in print over the doctrine of predestination, and Calvin would not shut up and let it go. When Melanchthon was openly friendly toward one of Calvin’s critics in 1557, Calvin could not bring himself to overlook it. More profoundly, Calvin never seems to have believed that he and Melanchthon really differed. He appealed repeatedly to Melanchthon to admit that he really did agree with him on disputed issues. Melanchthon tended to respond to these appeals by falling silent, and reportedly tore up one letter in fury.10
Calvin and his allies were wounded by Melanchthon’s inexplicable reticence. They believed they represented a broad, centrist reformism drawing on the best scholarship. As their movement put down roots across Europe, in the British Isles, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, and parts of Germany, it seemed perverse that Luther’s crude sacramental theology should be a barrier to unity.
In other words, Calvin and the Reformed theologians never took Lutheranism seriously. Calvin had the nerve to claim that Luther would have signed the Zurich Consensus had he lived.11 Melanchthon at least continued corresponding with Calvin, but other Lutherans were less ready to accept his condescension. The Lutheran theologian Joachim Westphal denounced the Consensus in a book subtly titled A Farrago of Confused and Divergent Opinions on the Lord’s Supper. Calvin, surprised and stung by Westphal’s bitterness, responded in vituperative kind. It did not bode well.
Westphal’s fury was a sign that Calvin had stirred a hornets’ nest. By the 1550s, two parties of so-called Lutherans were at each other’s throats. The split went back to that crushing military defeat in 1547 and to Melanchthon’s penchant for appeasement. In 1548, facing threats to reimpose a virtually unreformed Catholicism, Melanchthon had persuaded Duke Maurice of Saxony to support a compromise, the so-called Leipzig Interim, which would have permitted Protestant preaching while conceding a great deal else in the ritual life and outward organization of the Church. Such compromises were not ideal, Melanchthon admitted, but if the peace of the Church and the will of princes demanded it, then so be it. It was, from one point of view, a brave stand.
From another, it was a cowardly betrayal, typical of a timid scholar whose spine had only ever been stiffened by having Luther at his side. A group of self-styled “Gnesio-Lutherans” or “true” Lutherans, who aspired to cherish every scrap of Luther’s legacy, were holed up in the besieged city of Magdeburg, from where they poured contempt on Melanchthon’s concessions. Men like Flacius Illyricus argued that even if outward ceremonies were unimportant, they should not be changed at sword point. It was a time for boldly confessing the faith, not for a faintheartedness that was tantamount to apostasy.12
The immediate crisis passed – the gyrations of German politics eventually produced a peace with established rights for Lutherans in 1555 – but the rift between Gnesio-Lutherans and Melanchthon’s “Philippist” supporters was not so easily healed. The Philippists were suspected of selling out not only to the Catholics but also to the Calvinists, whom the Gnesio-Lutherans loathed just as much as their master had loathed Zwingli. Even if Melanchthon did agree with Calvin, then, he could scarcely say so. No wonder he found Calvin’s naive appeals frustrating.
Lutheranism in Search of Concord
The running battle between Philippists and Gnesio-Lutherans consumed the Lutheran world for thirty years. The Philippists were the establishment, even after Melanchthon’s death in 1560. They controlled the universities of Wittenberg and Leipzig and held high office in most Lutheran territorial churches. They were politically much more palatable; it was after all the Gnesio-Lutherans who had been dreaming up dangerously subversive theories of resistance. Philippists, like Calvinists, had a patrician sense of themselves as the natural intellectual centre of gravity. They were reluctant to stoop to polemical fistfights and disdained the quarrel that the Gnesio-Lutherans were forcing on them.
The Gnesio-Lutherans, by contrast, were revolutionaries. Luther had taught that worldly success was a sign of God’s displeasure. His followers knew why they had been frozen out and why his intoxicating, world-upending vision had been diluted into insipid moralism. If the Philippists were condescending pragmatists, the Gnesio-Lutherans were bomb-throwing idealists, convinced that true faith never compromises and that criticism only proved them right. They deplored the Philippists’ readiness to bend with the political wind. In particular, they feared that the Philippists’ talk of ethics betrayed their Erasmian roots: this was not real Protestantism. Real Protestants would understand how absolutely pervasive human sin was and would not