Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

More documents

Recommendations

Info

questions of the Reformation, given the anti-Roman implications of the shared insistence on scripture as the sole legitimate authority for Christian faith and life. The consequences of the divergent answers given were wide-ranging precisely because the Christianity that Protestant reformers sought to set right was not a discrete set of beliefs and practices called “religion” separated off from the rest of human life, but an institutionalized worldview that shaped all its domains. If the reformers who disagreed among one another about what God‟s Word said had thought their divergent views relatively unimportant—as some scholars today seem to think in seeking to distinguish “central Reformation principles” from alleged “secondary issues” 31 —then their views might not have had important social, political, or economic ramifications. They might have overlooked them for the sake of shared fellowship, community, and the exercise of power. But their words and actions demonstrate that this is not what happened. By March 1522, Karlstadt disputed Luther‟s marginalization of the book of James, plus his views on the character of the Old Testament, eucharistic practice, the oral confession of sins, and the permissibility of religious images. 32 Luther and Melanchthon 31 For two examples, see Mark U. Edwards, Jr., Luther and the False Brethren (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 197, and McKee, Katharina Schütz Zell, vol. 1, pp. 265, 273. Edwards distinguishes between “central reformation principles” and “issues such as acceptable ceremonial practice, the real presence in the Lord‟s Supper, the separation of secular and spiritual authority, and the relation between law and gospel” (p. 197), and McKee contrasts “the Reformation basics” with “the secondary issues which were debated among Protestants,” relegating to the latter category the boundaries between different groups, the toleration of those with different views, the Lord‟s Supper, baptism, and church order (vol. 1, p. 265). The problem of minimizing the differences that in fact concretely (and often with hostility) divided Christians among themselves characterizes the entire conceptualization of the Reformation era in Scott Hendrix, Recultivating the Vineyard: The Reformation Agendas of Christianization (Louisville, Ky., and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004). 32 For the Old Testament, eucharistic practices, and oral confession, see Sider, Karlstadt, pp. 108-112, 143- 146; for images, see Karlstadt, Von abtuhung der Bylder, Vnd das keyn Betdler vnther den Christen seyn soll [1522], repr. in Flugschriften der frühen Reformationsbewegung (1518-1524), vol. 1, ed. Adolf Laube et al. (Verduz: Topos Verlag, 1983), pp. 105-127. Karlstadt refused to change his views, so his preaching was restricted and a treatise that he had written (in a veiled manner) against Luther was confiscated and destroyed. See James S. Preus, Carlstadt’s Ordinaciones and Luther’s Liberty: A Study of the Wittenberg Movement 1521-22 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 73-77. 12
disagreed with Zwingli and the latter‟s reforming allies about the nature of Christ‟s presence in the Lord‟s Supper. Between 1525 and 1527, at least nine different evangelical reformers—including Zwingli, Martin Bucer, Johannes Oecolampadius, Wolfgang Capito, Leo Jud, and Johan Landtsperger—published no fewer than twenty- eight treatises, in Latin as well as German, against Luther‟s views on the Lord‟s Supper, before the dramatic, face-to-face standoff and non-resolution between the two sides at the Marburg Colloquy in October 1529. 33 This became the doctrinal—and therefore also the ecclesial and social—headwaters of the division between Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism, notwithstanding how much they continued to share in common with one another. 34 Zwingli also disagreed with his former Zurich colleagues Hubmaier and Conrad Grebel about the biblical basis for infant baptism, with its dramatic ecclesiological implications for the nature of the Christian community. This conflict precipitated the first adult baptisms by early 1525, a year before the Zurich city council, with whose members Zwingli worked to dismantle inherited ecclesiastical institutions and practices, enacted capital legislation against local Anabaptists. 35 In their denunciations of infant baptism, 33 See the list of the treatises in Luther’s Works, vol. 37, ed. Robert H. Fischer (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961), pp. 8-11; see also G. R. Potter, Zwingli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 296. The classic, magisterial work on the theological controversy is Walther Köhler, Zwingli und Luther: Ihr Streit über das Abendmahl nach seinen politischen und religiösen Beziehungen, 2 vols. (1924, 1953; New York and London: Johnson, 1971). 34 For an overview of the early conflict between Luther and Zwingli, and its consequences, see Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 15-48. That the theologians at Marburg agreed on fourteen of fifteen disputed points only underscores how important was the disagreement about this one issue, which, through centuries of variegated relations between Lutherans and Reformed Protestants, has had enormous political and social consequences down to the present. 35 On Zwingli and the earliest Swiss Anabaptists, see Potter, Zwingli, pp. 160-197; for a recent, thorough overview of the origins of Swiss Anabaptism, see C. Arnold Snyder, “Swiss Anabaptism: The Beginnings, 1523-1525,” in A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521-1700, ed. John D. Roth and James M. Stayer (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), pp. 45-81. For the city council‟s mandate of 7 March 1526 sentencing 13
Page 1 and 2: Reforming the Reformation Brad S. G
Page 3 and 4: Christianity must include both of t
Page 5 and 6: Julian II called the Fifth Lateran
Page 7 and 8: church‟s teachings and enacting a
Page 9 and 10: sich selbs].” 20 So too, Balthasa
Page 11: gutduncken].” 27 In September of
Page 15 and 16: view salvation and the soul had not
Page 17 and 18: tumultuous years of the early Germa
Page 19 and 20: and New Testaments or the permissib
Page 21 and 22: English monasteries and friaries, H
Page 23 and 24: centuries. 52 These do not include,
Page 25 and 26: pursued by niche specialists while
Page 27 and 28: theology of baptism because it conf
Page 29 and 30: A second, different kind of example
Page 31 and 32: 1578, and indeed, into the early 15
Page 33: empirical range of divergent claims

Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?