Radical Reformation

9 Key excerpts on "Radical Reformation"

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  The Radical Attitude and Modern Political Theory

  • J. Edwards(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  While Luther had hoped this reformation would occur without violence, at least against fellow Christians, 29 the proximity of the Catholic Church to the politics of the Holy Roman Empire and its con- stituent states meant that were reformation to succeed this was never a likely prospect. In practice the Reformation took place within states with the community of equals identifying ever more closely with their sovereign. As we have noted, the effect of the Reformation was, there- fore, to consolidate the power of the sovereign territorial state. At least this was the effect of the ‘magisterial’ Reformation. Aside from Luther, the Reformation threw up figures whose conception of the priesthood of all believers led to the belief in the legitimacy of challenges not just to Reformation and the Radical Attitude 19 the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church but to the temporal authorities that acted as its defender. Müntzer and Calvin The ‘Radical Reformation’ is a term that has been employed to describe the variety of Protestant movements that, from the 1520s onwards, posed a serious threat to both temporal and spiritual authority. 30 The best known of these were the Anabaptists who, under John of Leiden, introduced a short-lived revolutionary and communist form of govern- ment in the city of Münster in 1534–5. 31 Anabaptism as a theology orig- inated in the positions set out by a number of the early reformers who, while broadly accepting Luther’s central doctrine of justification by faith alone, were displeased with his compromises with secular authority and his belief that the reformation of the church could occur incrementally. There were also points of theological difference, most notably Luther’s acceptance of childhood baptism.

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  The Global West: Connections & Identities

  • Frank Kidner, Maria Bucur, Ralph Mathisen, Sally McKee(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 375 I n the sixteenth century a church renewal move-ment swept over Europe, led by people like the Dominican Girolamo Savonarola (jeer-oh-LAH-mo SAH-von-oh-ROLL-ah) whose portrait is shown at the beginning of this chapter. Church reform had been a fea-ture of Christian life throughout the Middle Ages, but the movement that gained strength around the year 1500 was unparalleled in intensity and scope. It also split the Catholic Church apart. One branch of reform, known as Protestant-ism, rejected the authority of the pope, who until then had been the head of western Christianity. The other branch remained loyal to the pope while insisting on the need for basic change within the Catholic Church. Only the Ortho-dox churches of eastern Europe and the Middle East were largely untouched by these reforms. In Germany, Martin Luther launched Protestant reform. He was followed by other Protestants who began reforms of their own that sometimes disagreed with Luther’s. Thus, Protestants had to choose which reformer to follow. The leaders in Catholic reform were the religious orders of the church and the Roman popes. Together they refashioned Catholicism in ways that lasted until the mid-twentieth century. Because Catholics could rally around the person of the pope, they remained more united than the Protestants, although they, too, experienced division and controversy. As reform touched more and more people’s lives, both Protestants and Catholics had to rethink what it meant to be a Christian.

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  Western Civilization

  A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500

  • Jackson Spielvogel(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  The Spread of the Protestant Reformation 311 Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. would lead to in the sixteenth century. Unable to find peaceful ways to agree on the meaning of the Gospel, the disciples of Christianity resorted to violence and decision by force. When he heard of Zwingli’s death, Martin Luther, who had not forgotten the confronta-tion at Marburg, is supposed to have remarked that Zwingli “got what he deserved.” The Radical Reformation: The Anabaptists Although many reformers were ready to allow the state to play an important, if not dominant, role in church affairs, some people rejected this kind of magisterial reformation and favored a far more radical reform movement. Collectively called the Anabaptists, these radicals were actually members of a large variety of groups who had certain characteristics in common. To the Anabaptists, the true Christian church was a voluntary association of believers who had undergone spiritual rebirth and had then been baptized into the church. Anabaptists advocated adult rather than infant baptism. No one, they believed, should be forced to accept the Bible as truth. They also tried to return liter-ally to the practices and spirit of early Christianity. Adhering to the accounts of early Christian commun-ities in the New Testament, they followed a strict sort of democracy in which all believers were considered equal. Each church chose its own minister, who might be any member of the community because all Chris-tians were considered priests (though women were of-ten excluded).

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  Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany

  • R. W. Scribner(Author)
  • 1988(Publication Date)
  • Hambledon Continuum

    (Publisher)

  THE REFORMATION AS A SOCIAL MOVEMENT In recent years it has become common to speak of the social dimensions of the Reformation, to relate it to social historical phenomena, and to adopt socio-logical terminology in its analysis *. This trend has gathered such momentum that some church historians have begun to call for a reversal of its course, to argue that the Reformation as a religious phenomenon should be rescued from the in-cursions of the social historian 2 . This is highly ironic, for serious social analysis of the Reformation has scarcely begun. We could have no clearer proof of this than the frequent use of the term movement (Bewegung) to describe the Refor-mation as some kind of popular social event. The term is rarely defined precisely, and the social historical implications of its use less rarely evaluated3. In this paper I want to examine more closely the nature of the Reformation as a move-ment and to bring out some of these implications. The term movement is most commonly applied to the beginning of the Reformation in Wittenberg in 1521—22 4 . I should like to give a brief resume* of these well-known events in order to establish a more precise understanding of how they constitute a movement. The events can be divided into those which were public and those which were private. Thus during the autumn of 1521 the implications of the religious revival sparked off by Luther's ideas were hotly 1 See, for example, the use of the notion of legitimation in P. Blickle, Die Revolu-tion von 1525, Miindien 1975; the argument for the use of historical sociology in Thomas A. Brady Jr., Ruling Class, Regime and Reformation in Strasbourg 1520— 1555, Leiden 1978, pp. 19—47; and the more extended application of sociological therory in O. Rammstedt y Sekte und soziale Bewegung, Koln 1966, and id., Stadt-unruhen 1525, in: H.-U. Wehler (ed.), Der deutsche Bauernkrieg 1524—1526, Got-tingen 1975, pp.

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  The Reformation

  • Williston Walker(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Gorgias Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER VIII. THE MORE RADICAL REFORMERS. T has already been pointed out, in con-nection with the radical movements that preceded and found their expres-sion in the Peasants' War of Germany and the rise of the Anabaptists of Switzerland, that to many the Reformation as guided by Luther and Zwingli seemed but a half-accomplished task. To the thinking of these radi-cals, the reformers just named were the foes rather than the friends of a thorough purification of the Church. The reverence paid by Luther and Zwingli and their associates to civil rulers, their retention of rites such as infant baptism, their deference to the letter of the Scripture, their inclusion of all non-excommunicate inhabitants of a country in its State Church, seemed to one element or another of these radicals incompatible with any complete and praiseworthy reform. As in all movements which profoundly stir men, the more moderate party of the spiritual revolution was accompanied by many groups, of most varying shades of opinion, having little affinity one with another, but each more ex-treme than it in breaking with the heretofore estab-lished orthodoxy. 335 336 The Reformation. The question of the exact origin and ancestry of these more radical manifestations of the revolution-ary spirit is difficult and controverted. To some investigators it would seem that these radicals were simply the survivals of Evangelical mediaeval sects, with whom Luther stood at first in spiritual affinity and from whom he fell away in the direction of a less spiritual dependence on the State and an in-sistence on a rigid doctrinal system. Others can see in these movements but the extreme radical outlappings of the waves started by the Wittenberg and Swiss reformers. For either of these positions many arguments may be urged.

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  Radical Religious Movements in Early Modern Europe

  • Michael Mullett(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 3 Religious Radicalism and the Protestant Reformation

  In 1518 Martin Luther saw to the publication of the late-mediaeval devotional work, the Theologia Deutsch (German Theology). Luther was interested in the discovery and re-issue of such mediaeval religious works, especially when they had a Wyclifite or Hussite origin which might establish the existence of a tradition of religious dissent throughout the centuries of papal dominance.1 Luther’s problem was that, alone, he seemed to be challenging many centuries of Catholic belief. The answer to this charge was to turn history against the orthodox by producing the pedigree of religious nonconformity. Research into ecclesiastical history with the aim of proving that the Protestant Reformation had roots deep in the mediaeval past became a preoccupation of Reformation scholarship and resulted in masterpieces of Protestant historical writing, such as Flacius Illyricus Magdeburg Centuries. But the efforts of Luther and his disciples, especially with regard to the publication of mediaeval religious works, brought to light not only the existence of mediaeval dissent but also the vitality of mediaeval lay religion. This lay religion provided a seed-bed for the growth of religious radicalism, but its emergence was also an achievement of the mediaeval Church, whose constant missionising, preaching and publishing had their effect in creating a pious Christian people.

  The formation of the devout laity was the work of the institutional Church. Clerics acted as influential urban preachers; they wrote some of the most widely read pious treatises; they acted as chaplains to guilds, beguinages and confraternities. Above all, as confessors, writers, preachers and authors, clerics acted as highly responsible mediators between official doctrine and the religious needs of the laity. In this last function university-trained clerics, such as Meister Eckhart, popularised the doctrine and philosophy of the Church. This work of popularisation was performed in part by simple, but sometimes inspired, translations of Latin technical terms into their vernacular equivalents. Thus the Latin term for the concept of the ‘spark’ of divinity in the human soul – the Scintilla – was rendered into German as Seelenfünklein – literally ‘little soul spark’ – a key term in the vocabulary of later mediaeval German mysticism. But successful spiritual counsel on the part of clergymen necessitated more than the invention of a new vocabulary. What was required was a fusion between the mind of the counsellor and those of his auditors and readers. The popularisation of religious thought in response to the needs of lay, conventual and semi-conventual people – apparent, for example, in the Rhineland and the Low Countries – helped produce a flowering of mediaeval mysticism and pietism. In this context lay people, or individuals enrolled in semi-regular order like the Beguines, could themselves assume the initiative from their spiritual guides and produce authentic works of devotion and mysticism. This lay and vernacular piety was a major contributing factor in the enlargement of the individual consciousness, which is a key feature of late mediaeval and early modern European civilisation.2

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  Permanent Revolution

  The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism

  • James Simpson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  If we were so emboldened (as I am) to join such a tradition of scholarship, I would hasten to underline that sixteenth- century evangelical religion provides a robust template for later instantia-tions of the package. 32 II Is there any authorization from within early modernity to use the word “revolution,” in its modern sense of “overthrow,” with regard to events in the period 1642–1649, let alone the entire culture of evangelical religion be-tween 1517 and the 1680s? The answer is yes, even if the semantic work done by the word “revolution” is more often effected lexically by the word “reformation,” with its usual early modern sense of total ( not reformist) change. The word “reformation” occupies a much higher profile than the Revolutionary Religion 23 word “revolution” in early modern Britain, though the word “revolution” in its modern sense does begin to displace “reformation” by the middle of the seventeenth century. As in other European languages, astronomy is the primary discourse in which the word “revolution” itself was used in English in the late medieval and early modern periods. 33 Its primary sense is “return to beginnings.” 34 In this sense, the word “revolution” is semantically parallel to the late me-dieval word “reformation,” which had designated a return to beginnings, ad pristinum statum ire. 35 Usage of the word “reformation,” indeed, for the Prot-estant Reformation, is itself a Catholic borrowing, since reformatio was the standard term for ecclesiastical renewal from at least the twelfth century.

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  Jesus Is Female

  Moravians and Radical Religion in Early America

  • Aaron Spencer Fogleman(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  Their critiques of society and alternative models of religious-social organization addressed the roots of power, authority, and legiti-macy that most considered normal in Christian belief and practice. Many radical religious groups rejected traditional hierarchies in gender and/or class relations. Others altered understandings of marriage and the family, or economic relations within the community. 1 In the mid-eighteenth century the unusual combination of tolerance, diversity, and opportunity in a colonial environment, especially in and around Penn-sylvania, combined with the simultaneous pressure on many radical reli-gious groups in Europe, meant that more than the usual amount of religious radicalism was present in this society. Many colonists who cher- The Challenge of Radical Religion 3 ished unbridled freedom liked it this way, but many others who clung to tradition and authority in a strange, new colonial environment did not. At times these colonists were ready to take steps to limit freedom in order to promote and preserve order. This might have been easy enough to do under normal circumstances, but now the number of radi-cals was growing, and what seemed most frightening was that radical reli-gion of some form or another was beginning to look appealing to ordinary people in the large, mainstream churches. Ultimately, radical religious groups in British North America contributed significantly to the rising tensions between religious freedom and order in ways that profoundly shaped American religious culture, and still do. And then came the Great Awakening, the grand revival movement that swept through the British North American colonies from the 1730s to the early 1750s and brought new religions and religious styles, and with this even more radical religion and more tension. The Great Awak-ening was the North American component of an international, transat-lantic Protestant revival.

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  Church History, Volume Two: From Pre-Reformation to the Present Day

  The Rise and Growth of the Church in Its Cultural, Intellectual, and Political Context

  • John D. Woodbridge, Frank A. James III(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Zondervan Academic

    (Publisher)

  This disillusionment took varied forms. Some, like Thomas Müntzer, linked spiritual disaffection with social unrest and thus joined the Peasants Revolt of 1524–25. Some, such as Melchior Hoffman, concluded that the world was on the precipice of the millennial kingdom and embraced an apocalyptic vision; others such as Hans Denck, inspired by medieval mysticism, turned inward to the voice of the Spirit. Still others, including Servetus, turned to the rational capacities of the mind and judged that the traditional doctrine of the Trinity is both irrational and unbiblical.

  These variations on the Reformation theme tended to be disjointed, erratic, and localized movements. Still, the modern historian can discern the broad outlines of a movement characterized by a vision of a restored New Testament Christianity with a pronounced emphasis on discipleship (Nachfolge), biblical literalism, the power of the Holy Spirit, a conception of church as pure and independent of state control, as well as a commitment to nonviolence and the sharing of goods.

  These were radical ideas for sixteenth-century Catholics and Protestants and seemed to hold the prospect of social upheaval. This fear was realized in the Peasants Revolt and the Münster Debacle, which led to the wholesale rejection of Anabaptists as revolutionaries. For this, Anabaptists were persecuted to death. Estimates vary, but as many as 5,000 of them were executed in the sixteenth century, by both Protestants and Catholics. Only three groups survive in our day: the Mennonites, the Hutterites, and the Unitarians.

  The Anabaptist movement has been described as an “abortive counter revolt within the Reformation.” Yet, ironically enough, the values and principles of the Anabaptists have become part and parcel of American evangelicalism. The separation of church and state, advocacy of religious toleration, the proliferation of independent churches as voluntary associations, and the Spirit-led Pentecostalism are all fundamental, not only to the American evangelical landscape, but to the emerging global Christianity. Perhaps the Anabaptist movement was not abortive after all.

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