Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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irreconcilable Christian truth claims, not only in the 1520s and 30s but throughout the Reformation era and beyond. This was the problem. On the other hand, scripture officially interpreted by hermeneutic authorities and backed by political authorities led to confessional Protestant cities, territories, and states, whether Lutheran or Reformed Protestant (including the Church of England), which stipulated, imposed, and policed their respective versions of what the Bible said in a manner analogous to the doctrinal policing of Catholic confessional regimes. Especially in the wake of the Peasants‟ War, political leaders drew the obvious conclusion that biblical ideas could be dangerously subversive. So their appropriation would have to be carefully monitored and policed. Reformers such as Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Bucer agreed—the “freedom of a Christian” was not a license to disobey secular authorities, for as Paul had said, “whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed” (Rom 13:2). But Christian freedom also demanded a principled disobedience and the cutting of all ties to the Italian, interventionist, money-sucking papacy and its usurpatious Roman minions. Predictably, secular authorities persuaded by the reformers‟ truth claims liked the distinction drawn between the necessity of disobedience to Rome and the duty of obedience to them. They liked hearing “the Gospel” accompanied by such “good news”—it would allow them, for starters, to appropriate all ecclesiastical property, including the many buildings and lands that belonged to Catholic religious orders, and to use it or the money from its sale in whatever ways they saw fit. 47 In the late 1530s, seizing for himself the vast holdings of all the 47 On imperial cities and territories in general, see especially Christopher Ocker, Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany, 1525-1547: Confiscation and Religious Purpose in the Holy Roman Empire (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006); see also Henry J. Cohn, “Church Property in the German Protestant Principalities,” in Politics and Society in Reformation Europe: Essays for Sir Geoffrey Elton on His Sixty- 20
English monasteries and friaries, Henry VIII would demonstrate how thoroughly a ruler could learn this lesson without even having to accept Lutheran or Reformed Protestant doctrines about grace, faith, salvation, or worship. 48 Assertions of royal authority over the church were enough, provided they were backed by enough force. By the time Henry was demonstrating that his will was up to the task, a frightening, polygamist and communitarian “New Jerusalem” in Münster led by the prophet-king Jan van Leiden had removed any lingering doubts among secular authorities in Europe about the dangers of religious radicalism and dissent. 49 Lest rulers‟ negligence permit another Peasants‟ War or Kingdom of Münster, rebellion inspired by religion had to be suppressed in accord with the divinely given duty, as Paul put it, to “execute wrath on the wrongdoer” (Rom 13:5). Thus was forged the confessionalizing alliance between those Protestants who supported and worked with secular political authorities, and those who did not—in short, the difference between magisterial and radical Protestants. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, only a carefully controlled and domesticated Reformation would be permitted to exert a widespread influence. As a result, Lutheranism and Reformed Protestantism became the great exceptions of the Reformation—precisely the opposite of how they usually have been and fifth Birthday, ed. E. I. Kouri and Tom Scott (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 158-187; and Walter Ziegler, “Reformation und Klosterauflösung,” in Reformbemühungen, ed. Elm, pp. 585-614; on Strasbourg in particular, see Thomas A. <strong>Brad</strong>y, Jr., Protestant Politics: Jacob Sturm (1489-1553) and the German Reformation (Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press, 1995), pp. 170-174. 48 The classic study of the Henrician suppression of the monasteries is David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, vol. 3, The Tudor Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), pp. 268-417; see also Joyce Youings, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971); Ethan H. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 162-196; Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, 2nd ed. (Houndmills, U. K.: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 45-55; and most recently, Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Last Divine Office: Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries (New York: BlueBridge, 2009). 49 For a recent overview, see Ralf Klötzer, “The Melchiorites and Münster,” in Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, ed. Roth and Stayer, pp. 217-256; on the immediate reactions to Münster by both Catholics and magisterial Protestants, see Sigrun Haude, In the Shadow of “Savage Wolves”: Anabaptist Münster and the German Reformation during the 1530s (Boston, Mass.: Humanities Press, 2000). 21
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Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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