Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!
King Lear
It may be that artists, because they see further than the rest of us, can occasionally foresee the coming of epochal changes to which the common herd may be blind. But it would hardly have taken much perspicacity to note the changes that were enveloping Europe as it rolled toward the mid-sixteenth century. In a continent full of kings, princes, and dukes, there had always been additional power configurations. In addition to the considerable prince-bishops of the church, in addition to the venerable stato della Chiesasurrounding Rome and ruled by the pope, there was the unique role of the Holy Roman Emperor whose uneven powers shadowed the power structures of several countries. There were ancient independent city-states, such as Florence and Milan, and much newer models, such as the Swiss cantons of Zurich and Geneva. Classical, relatively stationary Europe had always looked toward the Mediterranean, but now a larger, venturing Europe was often casting its glances toward the formerly blank Atlantic as it followed the amazing exploits of the rising coastal sea powers of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and even islanded England.
As if this subtly reconfiguring, strategically maddening map were not enough, into the constantly shifting tides and tornadoes of power was now thrown what we might call the Religion Bomb. There have always been people in every land and culture who are willing not only to live by their religion but to die by it. But for what seemed untold centuries there had been for Western and Central European Christians only Roman Catholicism. If you wished to be true to something large and overwhelming, it was to this traditional form that you must be true. Some, surely, were aware of the Orthodoxy of the Christian East, though Orthodoxy never appeared as threatening to the West, only as a bit off base and generally far away. Some few were aware no doubt of occasional heresies—the Bogomils, say, or (more ambiguously) the Hussites—but these movements operated weakly, usually at the margins of societies, and glimmered only for brief periods. Their threat never loomed large in European imagination.
But now whole towns and cities, dioceses and archdioceses, provinces and countries were embracing what seemed to be radical, permanent changes in their basic religious beliefs and practices. And this astonishing, seemingly overnight religious shift was only exaggerated by the normal, if sometimes quick and radical, shifts and instabilities of European power politics. Singular would be the prince who was simply rethinking his religious beliefs and practices; he was thinking about his power. In which camp will I fare more prosperously and securely? Who is going to prevail in my corner of the world? Will I be on the winning team?
In our day, a fairly close parallel to these early modern religio-political developments may be glimpsed in the unsettling, often boiling changes in the current Islamic societies of the Middle East and North Africa. To quote from a recent dispatch from Doha, Qatar, on the instabilities of Islamic countries:
The fury has roots in the slow breakdown of religious authority in the Islamic world over the past century or more, an erosion that has allowed self-appointed interpreters to render instant judgment on issues that might once have been left to established, respected figures. In the past, even an insult to the Prophet [Mohammad] would have to be investigated in accord with Islamic jurisprudence before anyone was licensed to take action.
“People used to look to their local imams on matters of faith and interpretation,” said Michael A. Reynolds,…a professor of Middle East studies at Princeton. “But in a more mobile and transnational world, with more people living in cities and much higher rates of literacy, it’s easier for ideologues and extremists to assert their own views.”1
If what it takes to tell the truth—from a Christian point of view (or from a Muslim one, for that matter)—is a pure heart, we can expect soon enough to be surrounded by a veritable Babel of conflicting truth tellers, for the pure of heart are just as careful cultivators of their own egos as are painters and princes. And thus it was that Luther’s Reformation quickly turned into a nearly endless series of Reformations, each vying for the attention and commitment of masses of human beings, few tolerant of other interpretations, and fewer still willing to abide the flourishing (or sometimes even the continuing existence) of those other interpretations.
Huldrych Zwingli of Zurich, a Swiss city, was the instigator of the first of these supposedly separate Reformations. He insisted that he “began to preach the Gospel of Christ in 1516, long before anyone in our region had ever heard of Luther” and that his thinking was in no way dependent on the German professor. Though Zwingli, who was “the people’s priest,” a lowly appointment at the principal church in Zurich, admitted the influence of Erasmus’s humanistic contempt for the “silly little ceremonies” of Catholic tradition, he would not hear of his owing any debt to Luther himself. Nonetheless, his foundational theology—of scripture as the only guarantor of theological truth, of the human inability to merit salvation, and of God’s freely bestowed forgiveness—sounds exactly like Luther’s. As the British historian Euan Cameron put it skeptically, “If Zwingli really did develop the distinctively ‘Reformation’ message of salvation by free forgiveness, apprehended through faith, simultaneously but entirely independent of Luther, it was the most breathtaking coincidence of the sixteenth century.”
But Zwingli did eventually go further than Luther. As early as 1524, all religious images, scorned as expressions of idolatry, were torn from Zurich’s churches, and all church organs were destroyed. Art had no biblical warrant and therefore could not be made Christian; and music, like art, distracted the people with its sensuousness from hearing the word of God.
For some, however, neither Luther nor Zwingli was moving fast enough to satisfy the requirements of scripture. Though both were careful to align their Reformations with the wishes (or at least the consent) of local magistrates, there were young Turks, so to speak, in each of their movements who felt such alliances unnecessary or even ungodly. In Zurich, Konrad Grebel and his followers adopted a slogan of “not waiting on the magistrate,” intended to encourage individual inspiration. Their devotion to the New Testament also inspired their conviction that only adults capable of making a commitment in faith could be baptized, something Luther had specifically rejected, though a similarly radical interpretation against both gradualism and images and in favor of limitingbaptism to adults began to run through Wittenberg during Luther’s absence in the Wartburg, requiring his sudden return. The tug-of-war over these more radical interpretations would continue for generations, as the opprobrious term “Anabaptist” (or rebaptizer) began to be flung about—and rejected by the proponents of adult baptism, who believed that infant baptisms, since they were scripturally illegitimate, had no standing. (They weren’t engaged in rebaptizing since no prior baptism had really taken place.) In particular, Luther’s formerly admiring follower, Andreas von Karlstadt, began to spout these more radical proposals, gradually turning into an implacable enemy whom Luther dismissed as having swallowed the Holy Spirit “feathers and all.”
Soon enough, there arrived in Wittenberg three semiliterate rejects from the large Saxon cloth town of Zwickau, who announced that they, not needing the direction of scripture, were directly inspired by God, who had imparted to them the news that the world was about to end. Philipp Melanchthon, a very young professor of Greek and a staunch admirer of Luther, was impressed, as were not a few other Wittenbergers. But these “Zwickau Prophets” were summarily evicted from their new refuge by an outraged Luther, who classified them and virtually all other innovators who would take reform beyond what he had proposed as Schwärmer (gushing nutcases). Not for him the wholesale despising of Christian tradition. He would continue to insist on infant baptism as the New Testament equivalent of the welcoming rite of circumcision and on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, as implied by Jesus’s so-called words of institution (“This is my body”; “This is my blood”)—another revered doctrine of the old church that the radicals were calling into question.
The sudden hatching of so many figures more radical than Luther was of course laid at his door. Had he remained loyal to the old dispensation, none of this would have happened. His rebellion had encouraged these others, many of them sorely lacking in settled wisdom or even common sense. The conservative Luther, promoter and friend of local magistrates, who had never questioned the role of local or even national political authorities, was appalled.
But the waves of Reformation could not be contained. Peasants of southwest Germany, toiling in the domains of the Black Forest, were now reading Luther’s New Testament for themselves, rekindling amid the fields and woodlands of der Schwarzwald the same spiritual sparks that had long ago lit the fires of rebellion in Wat Tyler’s England (this page and following). The uprising of 1524 spread west to Alsace, east across the entire swath of Germany north of the Alps as far as Bohemia, and farther north into Thuringia. The movement began to leap borders as miners struck in Hungary and farmers took up weapons in Switzerland, Austria, and even Poland. At its height, the Peasants’ War, as it came to be called, would stand as the largest armed rebellion in Europe prior to the French Revolution. The enemy was the landlord, clerical or lay—whoever exacted taxes and tithes from tenants.
A horrified Luther published An Admonition to Peace, but as the emperor’s armies began their bloody march north against the ill-equipped and untrained peasants, Luther republished his tract with a hateful appendix, “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants.” “Let everyone who can,” cried Luther shrilly, “smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel!” (Oh, really?) The widespread torture and hideous slaughter administered by the emperor’s armies, as well as by the forces of local lords, were without equal in the annals of Christian Europe.
Alone of all his class, Frederick the Wise, on his deathbed, wondered if the uprisings represented divine punishment on European rulers who had for so long treated “common folk” so unjustly. In the far future, Marxists would dishonestly claim these rebelling, gospel-inspired peasant farmers as their precursors. A far more secure interpretation of these events would show that Luther’s known role as a collaborator in official injustice and horrendous bloodshed permanently diminished his standing in the eyes of many: outside militant Lutheran strongholds, he would never again be able to claim the unsullied mantle of Christ-connected leader of the Reformation. All the same, his subjectively framed theological challenge had already altered the face of the earth—or at least of the globally reaching Western world.