Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517-1648 by Mark Greengrass

Author:Mark Greengrass
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780241005965
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-07-02T22:00:00+00:00

PROTESTANT DIVISIONS

The Reformation placed the spotlight on controlling the relationship between what people believed and how they behaved. The significance of the written ‘Confession’ was that it sought to do just that. It is no coincidence that the first of these, the Schleitheim Confession (1527), was Anabaptist. In the wake of the defeat of the Peasants’ War, scattered remnants endeavoured, under the pressure of those who denied everything they stood for, to put in place their vision of the Church, such as it had existed in the days of the Apostles. They were mostly country people. The Schleitheim Confession was a declaration in time and space – many later Anabaptists would express their own beliefs differently. Anabaptists’ theology was often of secondary importance to the way that they lived their lives. To live in, but not of, the world created hard choices. These included whether, and in what circumstances, they should acknowledge the rule of princes who, they thought, were not Christian at all. A Christian community of goods was another common ideal, albeit differently realized among Anabaptists. In Swiss and southern German Anabaptism, it was compatible with family households as the primary focus for living and believing. In Moravia, however, a further Anabaptist diaspora led to Anabaptist missions to smaller towns (Nikolsburg, Brünn and Znaim) and then (after internal divisions) to settlements on noble estates. Proclaiming themselves the true adherents of Jacob Hutter, a charismatic Anabaptist from the Puster valley, they lived in communities of about 500 people in which elders organized communal houses, crèches, schools and craft-production, keeping themselves to themselves in a world that, by and large, let them be. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the Anabaptists contended with persecution – Protestant as well as Catholic. In time they learned to adapt to it, avoiding military service or other duties against their consciences, outwardly conforming to the religion of the prince, ensuring that their children married only Anabaptists, and keeping the faith. Territorialized, confessional religion encouraged such outward conformity, allowing Anabaptism to remain a minority presence across central Europe. Where local conditions favoured it, as in southeast Moravia or in the chaos of the emerging Dutch northern provinces, it may have been the religion of about 10 per cent of the population by around 1600. Princely persecution and urban magisterial surveillance did not eradicate it. Anabaptism stood for issues which the Reformation had raised but not resolved.

The growing superstructure of Protestant theologians drafted Lutheran and Zwinglian confessions and cemented the ‘magisterial Reformation’. In fact, the process had already begun with treatises defining Reformation beliefs. What Luther regarded as canonical beliefs emerged in his ‘Large Catechism’, published in April 1529 for study by the growing cohorts of students in theology from Wittenberg. That generated the ‘Small Catechism’, which Luther intended for use in domestic environments and schools. The Reformation changed what religious belief was about. Confessional Christianity became a credal religion in which secular and religious authority had a joint stake in administering tests of belief and monitoring behaviour.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.