POLITICAL THEMES IN THE REFORMATION OF JOHN CALVIN
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken… we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world. —from John Winthrop's sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," 1630
James Mitchell November, 2008
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The differing political contexts in which the reformations of early modern Europe took place had an important, if not critical, influence on the individual Protestant denominations as they gradually came into being. It is a common perception that without the support and protection of the Prince Elector of Electoral Saxony, Luther’s reformation would have likely not succeeded at all in the German‐speaking areas of the Holy Roman Empire. The system of civic self‐government undertaken by the appointed church doctors, elders, pastors and deacons in Calvin’s Geneva, and the success of Calvin’s reformation as a whole, would have proved impossible in the autocratic, aristocratically controlled political environments that existed in the Empire or in France. In Britain, the retention of an administrative church hierarchy ruled by bishops and archbishops in the national Church of England during the reign of Elizabeth I coincided with the establishment of the Church of Scotland in 1560 and led also to the immediate emergence of Puritan sects in England, which aspired to the same degree of self‐governance enjoyed by Calvinist congregations and government‐sponsored churches in Geneva and Holland. In this essay, we will examine three geographical areas—Germany, Geneva and Great Britain— to show how the different political backgrounds influenced the progress of the resulting church institutions, and in so doing we will show how the success of these churches reflexively impacted their own political environments.
3 Political protection of dissident scholars and authors by members of the nobility was well‐known in Europe before the intervention of the Elector Frederick the Wise to prevent Luther’s arrest by imperial authorities. A good example is that of Marsilius of Padua (1270‐1342), who was excommunicated by the Avignon Pope John XXII for publishing a treatise with conciliarist tendencies 1 called Defensor pacis. The work attacked aspects of papal authority (including the issuance of indulgences), but its author escaped apprehension for charges of heresy thanks to the good offices of Duke Ludwig of Bavaria. 2 Similarly, Frederick shielded Luther from imperial prosecution by arranging his safe conduct to the Reichstag at Worms, 3 and he provided Luther with safe refuge at the Wartburg, where he translated the New Testament. On occasion Friedrich functioned also as Luther’s personal political advisor. In 1520, for example, the elector urged Luther to formulate a peace proposal to counter Catholic opponents. Luther rejected his counsel and composed instead his first major polemical treatise in the form of an address to the Marsilius wrote, “The general council of Christians or its majority alone has the authority to define doubtful passages of the divine law, and to determine those that are to be regarded as articles of Christian faith....” Quoted in Lindberg, Carter, The European Reformations Sourcebook. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 12. 2 New Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Marsilius of Padua.” New York: McGraw‐Hill, 1967. 3 And in 1518 to an Augustinian chapter conference in Heidelberg and to a meeting with Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg. But in a letter of March 5, 1522, Luther rather ceremoniously writes a letter to Frederick rejecting an offer of safe conduct back to Wittenberg from the Wartburg, cf. Lindberg, Sourcebook, 61. 1
4 German nobility, written with the “extensive cooperation of members of the Saxon court.” 4 Frederick, who remained a life‐long Catholic, may have had reasons of a less spiritual nature for supporting Luther—Lindberg explains that the elector, although loyal to the Habsburg emperors, nevertheless opposed the expansion of imperial hegemony and the increasing influence of the neighboring states of Ducal Saxony and Brandenburg 5 —and yet the relationship between Frederick and Luther was clearly symbiotic and contributed significantly to the success of the Lutheran reformation. As Lindberg puts it, “the politics of the time were in Luther’s favor.” 6 However, Luther was never able to achieve more than a fifty‐percent victory on German soil, for the politics of the time also worked equally against him. The territorial rulers quickly divided into opposing camps, armed conflicts ensued, and the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 provided an ad hoc political solution to an otherwise ecclesiastical controversy by empowering the rulers to decide the religious affiliations of their subjects. In this respect it is interesting to compare Luther’s partial victory in Germany with the complete success of Calvin’s brand of reformation in the countries and regions where it took root, namely in Geneva, the Dutch Republic, Scotland, and Massachusetts Bay Colony. We will argue that a prime constituent of Calvinism’s success was politically inspired, Luther, Martin. Three Treatises. Transl. Charles M. Jacobs, A.T.W. Steinhäuser and W.A. Lambert. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973), 5. 5 Lindberg, Carter. The European Reformations. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 65. 6 Lindberg, Reformations, 82. 4
5 namely the organization of the individual congregations or churches into self‐governing bodies, in rejection of an overriding ecclesiastical authority which Calvinists viewed as an undesirable feature of the Papacy. A second‐generation Reformer, Jean Calvin began his career as a law student with Protestant leanings in Paris. The intrusion of Lutheran enthusiasts into the town of Meaux near Paris and the “affair of the placards” of 1534, in which the “horrible abuses of the papal mass” 7 came under attack, triggered a series of reprisals by François I and his successors which culminated in the notorious St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. The final suppression of the Huguenot movement succeeded because the French monarchy, which perceived no benefit from a Protestant take‐over in France, was able to exercise absolute power within the framework of a highly centralized state. Escaping French persecution after the “Cop affair” at the Sorbonne, Jean Calvin had left Paris in 1533 for Basle, where he published in 1536 the Institutes of the Christian Religion, a theological work that was to become “the most significant single statement of Protestantism.” 8 In the period 1541‐1564, Calvin became the leader of what has been known since as the Genevan reformation, which succeeded better than the previous ones due largely to the fact that there was, after 1541, no political authority that opposed it. In 1527 a “Council of Two Hundred,” elected from the Genevan citizenry and cooperating with a “Little Lindberg, Reformations, 278. At least in the opinion of Lindberg, Reformations, 253.
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6 Council” of twenty‐five elected representatives, replaced the judicial and legislative authority previously exercised by the Duke of Savoy. This model of self‐government was derived in part from Italy, where self‐legislating communal councils in larger city‐states such as Venice and Florence had existed in one form or another since the thirteenth century. Despite some initial disagreements, which led to his temporary exile in Strasbourg in 1538‐41, Calvin was able by degrees to introduce a regimen of theocratic and at least partially democratic rule in Geneva. 9 The justification for an ecclesiastical polity and its organization is given in “The Ecclesiastical Ordinances of 1541,” and a description of the Consistory set up to oversee civic morals is included in a contemporary treatise by François de Bonivard. 10 This quasi‐theocratic, partially‐democratic system of government combined emancipation from feudal despotism with liberation from a self‐appointing clerical hierarchy. And this is in turn an important reason why Calvinism aroused enthusiasm in different areas of Europe and in America, while Luther’s reformation enjoyed only partial success in Germany. When John Knox, the founder of the Church of Scotland, spoke of the Genevan reformation as “the most perfect school of Christ,” 11 he was To be sure, Swiss instincts for self‐government were already at work in Geneva before the emergence of Calvin’s leadership: Lindberg mentions a general assembly of citizens to approve reform measures in held in May 1536 (Lindberg, Reformations, 256). 9
Both appear in Lindberg, Carter, The European Reformations Sourcebook. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 170‐73 . 11 Lindberg, Reformations, 253. 10
7 surely as much impressed by the fact that Genevan Christians had become their own political masters, as with local Calvinist views on predestination or other theological fine‐points. In his eyes, it must have seemed that the Genevans had succeeded in creating a radically new kind of government founded in the service of applied Christian morals. We turn now to Great Britain, where the Genevan reformation expressed itself most forcefully in the creation of the Church of Scotland and in the Puritan movement. Both were presbyterian in nature, meaning that they rejected the ecclesiastical authority of bishops and archbishops, priests and deacons, as retained by the Church of England. The English Reformation proceeded in several stages, yet the authority of the monarchy remained at all times absolute. What eventually resulted during the reign of Elizabeth I, who had embarked upon “a course between the extremes of Catholicism and Calvinism,” 12 was a Protestant church which was both Lutheran and Calvinist in theological terms, but which insisted on the institution of the episcopacy, since Elizabeth apparently believed it essential for the retention of the monarchy. The development of the Church of Scotland was quite different. Organized in 1560 by John Knox and others, the Kirk’s main task was to rid Scotland—still a sovereign country with a small population living in remote areas—of Catholicism. This task was initiated in 1560 with the adoption of the foundational “Scotch Confession of Faith,” which reiterated the customary Protestant arguments Lindberg, Reformations, 331.
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8 against Catholicism, but which did not discuss how the Kirk was to be organized. Certain clues are discernible, however, in the section entitled “Of generall councellis, of their power, authoritie, and cause of their convention,” 13 in which the idea of holding church councils to set Kirk policy is rather subtly urged, but, perhaps purposefully, quite imprecisely defined. The Kirk later assented to the Westminster Confession of Faith, a statement of Calvinist doctrine resulting from the Westminster Assembly held in 1646 when the Puritans were in control of Parliament. This agreement affirmed the principle of self‐government for local Reformed churches, which by this time included Presbyterians, Baptists and Congregationalists, asserting that “It belongeth to synods and councils, ministerially, to determine controversies of faith, and cases of conscience; to set down rules and directions for the better ordering of the public worship of God, and government of his Church....” 14 The Confession thus effectively mandated the separation of church and state authority. The dissenting Puritan denomination known to history after 1798 as the Pilgrims faced no such constraints, however. Leaving Leiden in the summer of 1620, they arrived in Massachusetts Bay and founded Plymouth Colony, which, despite proprietary allegiance to the Crown, was in practice self‐governing. Strangers in a strange land, the Pilgrims were challenged initially with the simple task of survival. From 1629 through 1643 Schaff, Philip. The Creeds of Christendom: The Evangelical Protestant Creeds. Volume III. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1977), 465. 14 Schaff, Creeds, 669. 13
9 approximately 21,000 Puritans emigrated to New England, and Plymouth Colony gradually evolved into Massachusetts Bay Colony, governed by a code of laws called “The Massachusetts Body of Liberties.” This was the first code of laws introduced in New England, compiled by Nathaniel Ward (d. 1652)—like Jean Calvin a leading English Puritan minister who had been trained as a lawyer. 15 In carefully crafted language, the “Massachusetts Liberties” established a separate civil authority subordinate to the requirements of the Puritan church: “Civil Authority hath power and liberty to see the peace, ordinances and Rules of Christ observed in every church according to his word, so it be done in a Civil and not in an Ecclesiastical way.” 16 In other words, the state exists to enforce the will of the religious community, and also where necessary to discipline its membership. How favorably Calvin might have reacted to this particular hybridization of church and state authority will never be known, but we can be sure he would have been fascinated to observe this attempt to build a new Christian state, based on Reformed principles, in the New World. Ward came to the colony in 1634, and was for a time pastor at Ipswich. The “Liberties” were established by the Massachusetts General Court in December, 1641. Plymouth Colony had been legitimated as a legal entity in 1620 by a brief document called the “Mayflower Compact,” which did not however design a government or construct laws. 16 Eliot, Charles W. American Historical Documents 1000 to 1904. (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004). Article 58, p. 70. 15
10 CONCLUSIONS We have seen that the measure of success achieved by the Protestant reformations depended upon conditions in the political matrix in which each occurred. In tightly‐ organized absolutist states such as France and England and Sweden, monarchs could deny or allow Protestantism, and in the latter case create national churches which would then define the doctrines, liturgies, and administration of the Protestant sects involved. The authority of the Holy Roman Empire, a loosely‐structured collection of mainly German‐speaking states, was not in a position to enforce uniformity, and therefore decisions about religious adherence eventually fell to the territorial rulers. In Switzerland pre‐existent democratic mechanisms that pre‐ vailed in several cities and cantons allowed a Calvinist take‐over of the government in Geneva. In England, nonconforming Puritans could abandon the established national church and head for Massachusetts, where they were able for a time not only to enjoy religious freedom, but also set up a civil government in accordance with their own requirements. But if politics exercised a decisive influence on the development of reformations, it is likewise true that the reformations had a reflexive effect on their political environments. Doctrinal differences between Lutherans and Calvinists were not overwhelming, but the Calvinist instinct for political representation, combined with its unique ministerial system of pastors and elders to replace bishops and priests, was a source of inspiration to Protestants in Scotland and the Dutch Republic, and to
11 dissenters and non‐conformists in England. If we add to the mix some further democratic forms of representation which appeared after Calvin, such as the rights of individual churches to select their own pastors, or the conduct of periodic councils representing the parishes to decide church policy, it is not difficult to understand how so many Protestants today derive their heritage from Calvin rather than Luther.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY I. Primary sources Eliot, Charles W. American Historical Documents 1000 to 1904. Harvard Classics, Part 43. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004. Luther, Martin. Three Treatises. Translated by Charles M. Jacobs, A.T.W. Steinhäuser and W.A. Lambert. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973. Lindberg, Carter. The European Reformations Sourcebook. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. Schaff, Philip. The Creeds of Christendom: The Evangelical Protestant Creeds. Volume III. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1977. II. Secondary Sources Lindberg, Carter. The European Reformations. Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1996.
New Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Marsilius of Padua.” New York: McGraw‐Hill, 1967.