Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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corollaries. First, situations in which the promotion of particular versions of Protestantism by confessional authorities was lacking, whether because of concrete disruptions or authorities‟ deliberate intent, should be marked by a greater profusion of diverse Protestant views. Second, non-magisterial expressions of Protestantism should have flourished in political situations in which their proponents enjoyed at least relative toleration. And this is indeed what we find in looking across Western Europe between 1520 and the mid-seventeenth century. I will give two examples of each. The most obvious example of the profusion of Protestant truth claims, practices, individuals, groups, and churches in a situation of the breakdown of confessional oversight is of course England during the 1640s and 50s. The exertions of anti-Laudian puritans and the disruptions of the civil wars permitted an efflorescence of Protestant diversity unseen since Germany and Switzerland in the 1520s. According to the Presbyterian preacher Thomas Edwards, already in 1646 it constituted a deplorable, gangrenous cancer of subjectively arbitrary doctrinal pluralism and socio-political disruptiveness, even before the advent of Quakers, Fifth Monarchists, Diggers, Levellers, Ranters, and Muggletonians. 59 In the absence of confessional control by hermeneutic and political authorities, the character of the Reformation unfettered was again manifest, just as it had been in southwestern and central Germany in the 1520s. 59 Thomas Edwards, Gangraena, or, A Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time, vented and acted in England in these four last years . . . . (London: T. R. and E. M. for Ralph Smith, 1646). For an important recent analysis of Edwards‟s work in context, see Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). On religious radicals during the English revolution, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Harmondsworth, U. K.: Penguin, 1972); Radical Religion in the English Revolution, ed. J. F. McGregor and Barry Reay (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). On the rationalist criticism of Christian prophetic and spiritualist claims in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Michael Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995). 28
A second, different kind of example of the proliferation of divergent Protestant claims and groups in the absence of confessional control is provided by the Dutch Republic. Especially in the cities of Holland and Zeeland, politically powerful Dutch regents saw the deleterious effects of unyielding Catholicism, militant Calvinism, and war on commerce in the southern provinces, once again under Spanish control after 1585. So to the north they experimented in the opposite direction. Reformed Protestantism was made the “public church” of the United Provinces, but it never became the established church or state religion. In contrast to contemporary confessional regimes elsewhere in Western Europe, attendance at Reformed Protestant worship services was not compulsory, nor was membership in the Gereformeerde Kerk mandatory. Alongside the religiously dominant minority of Reformed Protestants, ruling urban regents practiced a significant de facto toleration of most other Protestants, a sizeable Catholic minority, and even Sephardic Jews, which turned on a carefully monitored, novel distinction between public and private space. 60 Consequently not only could and did a wide range of divergent and fissiparous Mennonite groups flourish, but by the height of the Dutch Golden Age even rationalizing spiritualists such as the Collegiants (with whom Spinoza was friends) and Socinians, plus Quakers after 1650 or so, could be found in the cities and towns of Holland. 61 Again, in the absence of confessional prescription and control 60 The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic, ed. C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997); Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia and H. F. K. van Nierop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); S. Zijlstra, Om de ware gemeente en de oude gronden: Geschiedenis van de dopersen in de Nederlanden, 1531-1675 (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, and Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 2000); Parker, Faith on the Margins; Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997); Kaplan, Divided by Faith, pp. 172-176, 237-239, 241-243, 321-324. 61 See Zijlstra, Ware gemeente, and Andrew C. Fix, Prophecy and Reason: The Dutch Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 29
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Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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