Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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Lutherans and Reformed Protestants by confessional historians continue among post- confessional secular historians to flow in the same channels—not because of admiration for Luther‟s or Calvin‟s putative theological genius or the supposed sublimity of magisterial Protestant piety, but because political backing gave Lutheran and Reformed confessionalization a broad, deep, and enduring impact across large populations. As a result, because of their influence on the lives of millions of ordinary men, women, and children over centuries, Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism continue to merit the attention of post-confessional historians. Radical Protestants command nowhere near the same attention because their social impact was minimal. Schwenckfelders shaped gender roles as little as the Swiss Brethren affected state-building; Familists wielded no coercive power and the Davidite influence on wider cultural trends was nil. Yet negligence of the radical Reformation has distorted our understanding of the Reformation as a whole—or, if one prefers, our understanding of early modern non-Roman Western Christianity. To treat the radical Reformation as a curious theological sideshow with little social influence is to miss its critical importance. We quite literally do not see what a shared commitment to sola scriptura produced unless we historically reintegrate radical with magisterial Protestantism, and thus we misconstrue the Reformation as a whole. Unless radical and magisterial Protestants are studied together, historically and comparatively, the character of the Reformation simply cannot be seen. But studying them together is exactly what the research-channeling distinction between magisterial and radical Protestantism usually prevents. Hence for the period between the fall of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster and the onset of the English Revolution, the study of radical Protestants is usually 24
pursued by niche specialists while “Reformation scholars” study the important stuff: state and society, politics and power, culture and confessionalization. Yet again and again, radical Protestants were simply doing what magisterial Protestants were doing. For example, in just the same way that conscientious Protestants in general were obliged to leave the Roman church once they grasped the implications of their convictions, conscientious radical Protestants were obliged to reject communities such as Luther‟s Wittenberg, Zwingli‟s Zurich, or Calvin‟s Geneva. As the former Benedictine monk turned Swiss Anabaptist leader Michael Sattler summed it up in 1527, “everything that is not united with our God and Christ is nothing other than the abomination [dy grewel] which we should shun and flee.” 54 In their heterogeneous ways, radical Protestants were simply sharing in the same exodus of the politically more secure Protestant antagonists who opposed them. Radical Protestants were doing exactly what Bucer, Melanchthon, Osiander, Capito, Oecolampadius, Bugenhagen, Calvin and every other politically protected Protestant reformer did: they rejected objectionable Christian communities whose claims they would not abide, convinced that the leaders of such communities taught dangerous errors in place of God‟s truth. All Protestants in the Reformation era based their flight on the same foundation: their interpretation of scripture (including notions derived from it) and their experience. Because they read differently, they fled differently. Some theologically minded Reformation scholars are likely to dispute this reintegration of magisterial and radical Protestant reformers based on their shared appeal 54 Michael Sattler, Brüderlich vereynigung etzlicher kinder Gottes, sieben Artickel betreffend . . . ” [1533], ed. Walter Köhler, repr. in Flugschriften aus den ersten Jahren der Reformation, ed. Otto Clemen, vol. 2 (Leipzig and New York: Rudolf Haupt, 1908), p. 309. On the significance of Sattler‟s life as a Benedictine monk and its relationship to his later Anabaptist ideas, see C. Arnold Snyder, The Life and Thought of Michael Sattler (Scottdale, Pa., and Kitchener, Ont.: Herald Press, 1984), esp. pp. 30-65. 25
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Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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