Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie
career. In 1553, a Spaniard named Miguel Servetus came to Geneva. “Radical” hardly does justice to Servetus, a brilliant physician and freethinker who denied the doctrine of the Trinity, the authority of the Bible, and virtually everything else that respectable Christians held dear. He was already on the run from the Inquisition. Virtually any territory in Europe would have executed him, and Calvin, who had read his books with horror, had warned him never to come to Geneva. When Servetus came nevertheless, he was arrested, tried for heresy, and, eventually, burned alive.
Calvin’s defenders have advanced various excuses for his part in Servetus’s death. It was the only such trial in which Calvin was involved, and most other leading Protestants were implicated in more bloodshed. Servetus was executed by the Genevan city government, not by Calvin, who petitioned for the more merciful punishment of beheading. All this is true. Yet Calvin testified against Servetus at his trial and solicited condemnations of him from a range of other Protestant leaders. When the city authorities considered banishing Servetus, on the grounds that they had no jurisdiction over him, Calvin insisted that Geneva be seen to take responsibility for stopping this menace to orthodoxy.19
Calvin’s concern was not simply to stop Servetus’s blasphemous mouth but also to vindicate his own model godly republic. In retrospect, Servetus appears like a harmless crank, but in the early 1550s, with radical ideas of various kinds bubbling up across the continent, it was not foolish to fear that the Reformation might dissolve into self-defeating revolutionary chaos. A line had to be drawn. Calvin positively wanted radical blood on his hands; it was a marker of respectability for the Lutherans and for potential converts, and a challenge to Catholics who could not, now, easily dismiss him as an extremist. But unsurprisingly, a quest for Protestant unity built on the ashes of Protestant dissidents did not succeed.
As Protestants’ divisions hardened, they still dreamed dreams of reconciliation. Many Calvinists nursed an unrequited love for Lutheranism. The English historian John Foxe was an unmistakable Reformed Protestant but also a dewy-eyed fan of Luther’s who had a slew of Luther’s works translated into English. He recognized that there were doctrinal differences, but refused to blow “one small blemish” in Luther’s sacramental theology out of proportion and urged his readers to give “a moderate interpretation” to Luther’s work. Other English theologians, like the royal chaplain Richard Field, tried to explain the doctrinal differences away altogether, arguing that it was all a misunderstanding. Some of Luther’s English fans even argued that it was his German successors who were “ridiculous imitators” and perverters of his legacy, while they themselves were his true heirs. They were in love with an imagined Lutheranism, not the real thing.20 This was the kind of condescension that Gnesio-Lutherans had come to expect from Calvinists.
Other Calvinists had more practical ideas. In out-of-the-way places, they just got on with it; in Batavia (modern Jakarta), the colonial capital of the Dutch East Indies, the Dutch Reformed Church simply admitted Lutherans to church membership. For those who wanted to turn local pragmatism into something more systematic, the way forward was obvious: a council, a full-scale theological conference that could thrash out the issues once and for all, on the ancient Church’s model. But who would convene such a council? Who would attend? Who would set the agenda? Worse, given that Protestants rejected all authority aside from the unmediated Bible, who could possibly compel anyone to accept what a council might say – if it did not degenerate into a slanging match and break down irreconcilably? For the advocates of a council, these were not reasons to despair, merely to lay their plans carefully.
Initially, some hoped for a big bang. Thomas Cranmer, the first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury, was a Reformed Protestant of Martin Bucer’s kind. (He invited Bucer to England and gave him a plum job in Cambridge, where the climate promptly killed him.) At that moment, in the early 1550s, England was the most powerful Protestant state in Europe. The ancient councils had been convened and stage-managed by Roman emperors. Perhaps England’s pious boy-king, Edward VI, could now serve the same function? In 1552, Cranmer invited Bullinger, Calvin, and Melanchthon, the three most visionary Protestant leaders then alive, to England. Calvin, characteristically, was enthusiastic, though wary of the long journey. Bullinger had the same concerns and none of the eagerness. Melanchthon would have been the prize catch. Cranmer tried everything to lure him, even sending his travel expenses in advance, but Melanchthon’s irrational fear of sea travel was matched by an entirely rational fear of Tudor England, a land of murderously capricious politics where Cranmer himself would meet a martyr’s death less than four years later. Even if he had come, and even if some sort of deal had been reached, his involvement would hardly have persuaded the fledgling Gnesio-Lutheran caucus. But no one came. Then the English king died in 1553, Queen Mary briefly returned England to Catholicism, and the scheme died.21
In later generations, a multistage process seemed more prudent. The basic scheme, which resurfaced with many variations, was for an initial conference between the various Calvinist churches. This would allow them to present a common front at the second stage, when the Lutherans would be allowed into the room. Some imagined a third stage, of reconciliation with Catholicism. The scheme was like a child’s plan to dig a tunnel to the other side of the world: utterly impossible, but easy to begin.
That is, uniting the Calvinists ought to have been easy. Calvinists across Europe recognized one another informally as brethren, studied at one another’s universities, shared ministers, read the same books, and in some cases even shared formal confessions of faith. But those family ties were not enough for any kind of coordinated dialogue with the Lutherans. The Formula of Concord spurred an attempt to formalize matters; in 1577, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish and French Calvinist theologians attended a conference at Frankfurt and prepared an agreed confession of faith, published in 1581. But it was merely a private initiative, with no formal status. The English regime even banned it.22
For the awkward truth was that even Calvinists were keenest on unity when their own situation was precarious. French Calvinists, who were fighting desperately for survival in a series of civil wars from 1562 to 1595 and who thereafter were a vulnerable minority, were cheerleaders for international Protestant solidarity. Elizabeth I’s England, home to Europe’s largest and oddest Calvinist church, was suspicious of any encroachment on national sovereignty. The weak pursued unity, and the strong distrusted it: not a promising situation.
Hopes were rekindled when, on Elizabeth’s death in 1603, King James VI of Scotland inherited the English and Irish crowns, creating a formidable British monarchy that made him, at least in his own eyes, the leader of the Protestant world. Uniting that world, as a prelude to reuniting all Christendom, was a project fit for such a king. In 1613–14, a Franco-Scottish theological team sponsored by James drew up a kind of road map to Protestant unity, which was formally endorsed by a French Reformed synod at Tonneins. It proposed an initial meeting of a dozen Calvinist theologians, under James’s patronage, to produce a common confession of faith. The churches involved would then commit not to decide any major controversies or make any innovations without consulting one another. A year later, there would be a second conference to which the Lutherans would be invited, where the delegates would condemn Anabaptism as beyond the pale while agreeing to tolerate one another. At that point, because we are already in lands of fantasy, the Catholics, too, would repent of their errors and be welcomed back into the fold.23
It was not altogether ridiculous. Determined politicians might have been able to bang the theologians’ heads together hard enough to produce some grudging, temporary tolerance. Tonneins seemed as if it might have been such a moment. Another such came in 1630, during the Thirty Years War, when the Swedish warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus dramatically invaded Germany and so saved German Protestantism from what looked like certain destruction. John Dury, an indefatigable Scottish peddler of schemes for Protestant unity, smelled an opportunity and pestered his way into Gustavus’s court, finally managing to meet him in December 1631. Dury outlined his vision, which amounted to the Tonneins scheme reheated. Gustavus was enthusiastic and promised to give Dury letters authorizing him to summon Lutheran and Calvinist representatives from across Germany.
Or so Dury claimed. Unfortunately, Gustavus did not write anything down. Less than a year later, he was dead in battle, and Dury was once again without a patron. If anyone could ever have made this scheme work,