Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (105 page)

Therefore the two could never agree on the Eucharist, even when in 1529 their frustrated princely supporter Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse, brought them face to face at Marburg to heal the breach. Such was the bitterness that in 1530 Luther told his followers that they should get married and have their children baptized in Catholic churches rather than among Zwinglians, as Zwingli was far more in error than the Pope.
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This was all the more remarkable because Luther, as much as Zwingli, found that he was reliant on German princes for help in two directions: first, against ordinary people who did not want to be reformed and who needed orders from princes to move them along; second, against the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who had outlawed him after Worms, and who now wished to destroy him and his whole programme. In fact from princely support came a new label for the movement, when a group of the princes supporting Luther made a protest against the decisions of the Imperial Diet at Speyer in 1529. They were accordingly nicknamed Protestants, the first time this word had been thus used; the nickname stuck. At the next imperial Diet, at Augsburg in 1530, the party of Luther's supporters presented a statement of doctrine to Charles V, drafted by Philipp Melanchthon, which in its studied moderation was intended to win the Emperor's assent. It failed in that purpose, but the group who were increasingly being styled 'Lutheran' retained this 'Augsburg Confession' as their flagship statement of faith.

REFORMATIONS RADICAL AND MAGISTERIAL: ANABAPTISTS AND HENRY VIII

So the period after 1525 was one in which the dark memory of the Farmers' War ended any chance of a united continent-wide popular revolution. Instead a 'magisterial' Reformation was created: these were the Protestant movements led by the
magistri
, the theologically educated masters, and magistrates of all descriptions - kings, princes, city councils. The description 'magisterial Reformation' is worth using, and I will frequently use it in this narrative, because there were nevertheless still many radical Christians, who proposed their own versions of religious revolution, and whose radical Reformations remained very different in character and belief from magisterial Protestantism. In Switzerland, some were inspired by their realization that Zwingli was much more systematic and logical in his rejection of the past than Luther. They took up Zwingli's thinking on Eucharist and baptism. If Zwingli said that the sacraments were pledges of faith by Christian believers who had already received God's gift of saving faith, surely Christian baptism ought to be a conscious act of faith by the person baptized - 'believers' baptism'. Clearly babies could not make such an act, so baptism ought to be reserved for adults. After all, the New Testament contained not a single explicit example of infant baptism. Historically, this was correct, but the argument against infant baptism had hardly ever been made before in Christian history, and it came as an unpleasant shock to magisterial Reformers. Because the radicals sought to give a new and genuine baptism to those who had been baptized as infants, their enemies called them in cod-Greek 'rebaptizers' or Anabaptists. Clearly no proponent of believers' baptism would see what they were doing as rebaptizing; their self-image would better be expressed in the neutral term which German uses for them,
Taufer
(baptizers).

Zwingli was appalled at this logical deduction from his own theology, because it contradicted another axiom of his thought, that the Church of Zurich embraced the whole city of Zurich. To opt in to baptism as an adult was to split the wholeness of the community, into believers and non-believers. That would end the assumption which both he and Luther held as dear as the Pope, that all society should be part of the Church in Christendom. So from 1526 Zurich, embittered by the recent Farmers' War, persecuted Anabaptists to the extent of drowning four of them in the River Limmat, just at the time when the old Church began persecuting champions of the magisterial Reformation. The Anabaptists were harried out of ordinary society. Their one alliance with a magistrate, when Count Leonhard von Liechtenstein allowed them to take over the Moravian town of Nikolsburg and form an established Church professing believers' baptism, ended abruptly in 1527 on the orders of the Count's Habsburg overlords; the Habsburgs burned at the stake the would-be Zwingli of Nikolsburg, a former senior academic called Balthasar Hubmaier. Accordingly, radicals began stressing their difference from ordinary society.

When they turned to the Bible for guidance, such people noticed quite correctly that early Christians had separated themselves from the world around. The Book of Acts talked of Christians holding all goods in common (see pp. 119-20). 'Do not swear at all,' said Jesus Christ (Matthew 5.34). 'Commit no murder,' said the Ten Commandments. So radicals looked for the rare corners of Europe where they had a chance to create their own little worlds, in which goods could be held in common, where no one would force them to swear the oaths which governments and magistrates required, or take up the sword when rulers ordered them to. They took a selective view of the demand for obedience in Romans 13.1, infuriating and frightening the superior powers. Many looked back to the nearest thing that 'Anabaptists' ever had to a common confessional statement: articles drawn up in 1527 at the Swiss town of Schleitheim, which were insistent on 'separation from the Abomination'. Their principal author was a former Benedictine monk, Michael Sattler, and it is tempting to see the communal institutions of radicals as a new effort to return to the early Benedictine ideal. Yet one feature was far from Benedictine: it returned radicals to a still earlier Christianity, which had suffered from official persecution. 'True believing Christians are sheep among wolves, sheep for the slaughter. They must be baptized in anguish and tribulation, persecution, suffering, and death, tried in fire, and must reach the fatherland of eternal rest not by slaying the physical but the spiritual,' wrote the young Zurich patrician Conrad Grebel to Thomas Muntzer, a year before Muntzer, a leader in the 1525 revolts, was cut down by the vengeful soldiers of princes.
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More frightening still for Christendom was that, even after the defeats of 1525, some radicals continued to believe that they needed force to usher in the Last Days. They heard Jesus say, 'I have come not to bring peace, but a sword' (Matthew 10.34), and they wanted to help God fulfil his political programme in the Book of Revelation. So in the early 1530s, groups from the Low Countries began joining with other radicals in converging on the western German city of Munster. They arrived in thousands; they took over Munster's civic Reformation, which had begun in conventionally Lutheran mode, and their charismatic leaders proclaimed the new Jerusalem. A joint force of Lutherans and Catholics besieged them. Under pressure, with the city running short of food, the radicals' revolution turned to nightmare. Their final leader, a young Dutchman, Jan Beuckelszoon ('John of Leyden'), lived as their king in insane luxury, surrounded by his harem, as his followers starved and died defending him. In the end, the besiegers breached the defences in 1535 and Munster Anabaptists were sadistically suppressed. Radicalism thereafter turned from militancy to quiet escapes from ordinary society, tolerated by some rulers who recognized that such gathered communities were actually industrious and honest-dealing. Yet Munster remained as a constant dark memory: peaceable, inoffensive Anabaptists were burned and harried because of what John of Leyden had done.
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The challenge of radicalism to Western Christianity was in fact more long term and subtle than this.
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Perhaps basic to all of it was a newly negative view of the Emperor Constantine I - 'the Great', as he had so long been called. It was a general conviction among radicals that over the previous millennium the Church had made a grave error in entering into alliance with the powerful, after a decisive wrong turn in Constantine's alliance with Christianity. Radicals noted that a very great deal of the Church's doctrine had been formulated by agreements of councils in that tainted period after Constantine's seizing of the doctrinal reins at Nicaea in 325 (see pp. 214-15), and if that was so, all such doctrine was ripe for reassessment. If one looked at the Bible with fresh eyes, where were some of the central doctrines of traditional Christianity which the Church said were there, such as the Trinity? Obstinately, many Bible readers continued to fail to find infant baptism mentioned in its pages. Some went further and came to the conviction that the Bible was not the ultimate guide to divine truth: they called it a 'paper Pope', and affirmed that God spoke to the individual as he (or even she) pleased through 'inner light'. If so, it was unlikely that there was any one normative perception of truth, un-Christian to coerce any beliefs and even undesirable that there should be one single Church. The radicals in the Reformation may posthumously claim success, for something of all these notions can now be found in Churches which are the heirs of the magisterial Reformation, and even within the Church of Rome.

The magisterial Reformers went on battling for the minds of rulers, partly because they were appalled by hearing any selection of such beliefs. They succeeded in much of Germany and Scandinavia; they failed in Jagiellon Poland, Valois France and the Habsburg lands. Yet through much of central Europe, nobility were receptive where monarchs were not, sensing the advantages of challenging the religion of their overlords. In 1525 the Estates in Upper Austria backed the Habsburg King Ferdinand's suppression of the Farmers' War, but their price for further cooperation in suppressing Anabaptists was to force him to tolerate evangelical activists and preachers in the mould of Luther. From the mid-sixteenth century, the overwhelming majority of the Lower Austrian nobility, and of the inhabitants in the Habsburg capital Vienna, were avowed Lutherans, despite all Habsburg efforts to obstruct this growth, and Lutheranism quietly consolidated itself elsewhere.
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In central Europe, a defining catastrophe for traditional authority was the Ottoman victory at Mohacs in 1526, when the Holy Roman Emperor's twenty-year-old brother-in-law, King Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia, was killed, along with a large proportion of his nobility, five bishops, two archbishops and sixteen thousand of his soldiers; the Turks occupied a wide sweep of the former kingdom. Quite apart from the shattering of a ruling elite, the blow to the old religion's prestige was severe; the situation was wide open for many varieties of religious reform, and individual noblemen took up the cause of Reform as they pleased.

The early Reformation gained a curious sort of victory in England, where the murderously opinionated monarch Henry VIII found an alliance with Reformers useful during his eccentric marital adventures. Determined to rid himself of his tiresomely loyal first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to secure a legitimate male heir, he found himself frustrated by the Pope's refusal to accept his contention on theological grounds that the marriage had never actually taken place. Henry demanded that it should be recognized as null so that he would be free to marry whomever he wished - by the late 1520s that meant a spirited young lady at Court, Anne Boleyn. Pope Clement VII was under pressure from Queen Catherine's nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was rather nearer to hand than the King of England, and who in 1527 had demonstrated what that might mean when his soldiers (mostly Lutheran sympathizers) rampaged through Rome itself uncontrolled for weeks on end, bringing horror and chaos within earshot of the terrified Pope taking refuge in Castel Sant'Angelo.

Henry, increasingly convinced that the Pope was God's enemy as well as England's in denying him his annulment, conceived the idea of repudiating papal jurisdiction. He was the first king in Europe to do so, and in order to underpin this revolutionary measure with wide political consent, he used the organizing skills of a newly recruited royal minister, Thomas Cromwell, to secure legislation in his Parliament enacting a break with Rome. His new wife, Anne Boleyn, was a none-too-discreet sympathizer with evangelical Reformation, and was able to encourage evangelicals at Court.
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Among them was Cromwell, who was working closely with another new recruit, the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, appointed in 1533 to formalize Henry's annulment and new marriage. Between them, from 1534 Cromwell and Cranmer discreetly encouraged a piecemeal dismantling of the old Church, not always in harmony with the King's wishes; in 1540, Cromwell was disgraced and executed, partly because of this, and partly because of his disastrous recruitment of yet a fourth royal wife who turned out unacceptable.
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By then, Henry was twice a widower. Queen Anne had failed to provide the much-sought male heir. Henry could not foresee that the birth of her daughter, Elizabeth, in 1533 had furnished a worthy successor to the throne, and in default of any boys, Anne preceded Cromwell to the scaffold, beheaded in 1536 on absurd charges of adultery and incest. Her replacement, Jane Seymour, suited the king well, and provided the vital male heir, Prince Edward, but she died of post-partum infection. Through all these crises and more, Cranmer's survival skills were sorely tested.

One of King Henry's most celebrated executions was done by proxy, the victim dying on the command of the Emperor Charles V. He was William Tyndale, one of the geniuses of the English Reformation; after Henry's agents secured his kidnap while he was in exile in Antwerp, he was strangled at the stake before his corpse was burned near Brussels. He bequeathed the English nothing less than the first translation of the New Testament and Pentateuch in their own language since the by then archaic version of the Lollards 150 years before. Tyndale, an Oxford scholar from Gloucestershire, made the English Bible his life's work, had to flee his native land to continue his labours on it and lost his life because of it. He brought not just evangelical fervour and an exceptional skill in Greek and Hebrew to his task, but an exceptional ear for languages, perhaps borne of his childhood spent in English western borderlands, where the sound of Welsh was almost as familiar as English. He understood that English might actually be closer than Latin to Hebrew in its rhythms and driving narrative force, and the results coruscate with life and energy - here is the moment at which Adam and Eve fell from obedience to God, that greatest tragedy of humankind in the Christian story: