The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

by Michael Reeves

Luther believed that when Adam sinned and was declared guilty, the entire human race became, as it were, ‘clothed’ in his guilt; but when we turn to Christ we are ‘clothed’ in his righteousness. Zwingli, on the other hand, believed more that we each become guilty when we actually sin, but that Christ makes us righteous in ourselves.

And so Zwingli set about the creation of a school for preachers. The first stage was a grammar school for boys, to get them literate. After that, the next stage was a theological college. There the students were, as Zwingli put it, ‘given the gift of tongues’ (the knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin) and taught how to ‘prophesy’ (preach).

At home, Zwingli showed that, while he disapproved of music in church, he was in fact an accomplished musician who could play a number of different instruments. Mostly these talents seem to have been spent on amusing the children and sending them to sleep!

Churches were transformed in every way: relics, images of saints, crucifixes, candles, altars, and priestly robes were removed. Even organs were taken out, for Zwingli disapproved of instrumental music in church, fearing that its beauty would lure people to idolize music itself.

Once the evils of idolatry had been proclaimed from the pulpit, it was often near impossible to stop mobs from going on alcohol-fuelled shrine-smashing rampages. This isn’t to deny the religious sincerity of the image-smashers. Many were deeply opposed to those images and all they stood for. The thing was, there wasn’t much in the way of exciting recreation in the sixteenth century, but smashing up statues, breaking glass, and burning wooden images was definitely fun. The drunk and the bored didn’t need much to entice them.

Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.

Luther

The radicals, Luther believed, had missed the point of the Reformation. His attack was on the idea that we could ever do anything to earn merit before God. Their attack was on external things like images, the sacraments and, in the case of the Zwickau ‘prophets’, the Bible. His message was that all salvation is a pure gift to be received with simple faith. Theirs was that external things must be rejected.

For the Magisterial Reformers2 like Luther, theology came first, informing how we then live; for the Anabaptists, holiness came first, and theology was then done to spur on Christian obedience. Luther believed that this was a disastrous step backwards, for by failing to study the gospel of grace sufficiently, the Anabaptists were regressing into a religion of works.

Their theology was not just insubstantial, though. Separatism and the primacy given to Christian living combined to create theologies that often outrightly contradicted the essential thoughts of Protestantism.

Though historically all radicals got called Anabaptists, historians today tend to divide the Radical Reformation into three camps: the Anabaptists, the Spiritualists, and the Rationalists.

Sebastian Franck, for example, in his The Book with Seven Seals (1539), listed what he saw as all the contradictions in the Bible in order to turn readers from the dead and useless written word to the living inner word of the Spirit.

Getting rid of the Trinity had always been more popular at the edges of Europe, where there was more interaction with Jews and Muslims. Life there could be so much easier without the offence of the Trinity.

Clearly there were many different models of reformation, some a very far cry from Luther’s! What made all the difference was neither zeal, nor strategy, nor hard work, but theology.

Anabaptists should not be confused with the Baptists. Despite similarities and agreements, the Baptists are not directly descended from the Anabaptists, but have a different history, starting a century later in England.

With that, Geneva officially allied herself to the Reformation. The city’s motto had been Post tenebras spero lucem (‘After darkness I hope for light’),

Calvin proposed, among other things, that every household should receive a pastoral visit every year; that everyone should learn the catechism that explained the evangelical faith; and that only those who did so should be allowed to the Lord’s Table. And, to make absolutely certain that Geneva could never be spoken of in the same breath as Jan van Leiden’s polygamous commune of Münster, he proposed that a disciplinary committee be set up to ensure an orderly society.

Servetus became the voice of that movement, arguing that the Trinity was a later belief added on to the simple, no-frills monotheism of Old Testament religion, where God the Father was God alone. If we could all just go back to that basic and original truth, then Jews and Christians need no longer be divided.

Even when he was arrested on sight he was optimistic: from prison he wrote to the city council, demanding Calvin’s arrest and charitably offering to take Calvin’s house and goods when Calvin was executed.

Calvin never intended to found something called ‘Calvinism’, and he hated the word. He spent his life fighting for what he believed was the mere orthodoxy of the early post-apostolic church, whereas the word ‘Calvinism’ suggested some new school of thought. However, something called ‘Calvinism’ did come into being, and its story would lead many to misunderstand the man himself. As a result, one of the most popular images of Calvin today is that of a man obsessed with God’s election of who will and who will not be saved.

Thus when, in 1547, Henry died and his son became King Edward VI, England was poised for a true reformation. Cranmer was thrilled: at last he would be able to take his wife out of her box and set about promoting unadulterated evangelicalism.

At the time, that was a view held only by the hardcore. But by the end of Elizabeth’s reign, that the pope was the antichrist was obvious to everyone.

By the ‘regiment’ (rule) of women, he was referring to the reigns of the two Catholic queens, Mary, Queen of Scots, and ‘Bloody’ Mary of England. To Knox’s mind, the root of all the horrors being unleashed in Britain was the ‘monstrous’ fact that women were ruling, when rulership was the preserve of men.

It was an extraordinary turnaround. In 1558, both England and Scotland had been Catholic; in 1560, they were Protestant.

The very fact that it is so easy to spot the difference between Martin Luther and Henry VIII says it all. It was quite possible to use the Reformation for political ends (as Henry did), but the Reformation itself was a theological revolution (as Luther showed).

It was here that some of the Puritan ministries that are still most refreshing came in with the cure. Richard Sibbes is a glowing example.

Response to Lutheran pietism.

Speaking into the culture of introspection and moral self-reliance, Sibbes preached a series of sermons on Matthew 12:20 (itself a citation of Isaiah 42:3), ‘A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory’ (KJV).

More, for the first time in nearly four hundred years, Jews were allowed back into England (the idea was that they might be converted, the conversion of Israel precipitating the Second Coming, but they were allowed to worship freely).

Not everybody grasped or shared this: men like Erasmus thought reformation could be a mere moral spring-clean; radicals took it to be a simple revolt against the old ways; Zwingli just opened the Bible, but not really to find Luther’s idea of justification there; and some, like Martin Bucer and Richard Baxter, understood justification differently.

In 1555, Palestrina, then almost the official musician of Rome, wrote a new score for the ‘Hosanna’ in his Mass for Pope Marcellus. To hear it is to hear Rome’s Counter-Reformation spirituality: it is exquisite music, but there is something cerebral and dutiful about the choir’s intoning of the hosannas. A hundred and ninety years later, Johann Sebastian Bach, an ardent Lutheran all the way down to his tapping toes, wrote his version of the ‘Hosanna’, and the difference is striking.

For Erasmus, the Bible was little more than a collection of moral exhortations, urging believers to be more like Christ, their example. For Luther, this viewpoint turned the gospel on its head: its optimism displayed its utter ignorance of the seriousness of sin. As he saw it, what sinners need, first and foremost, is a saviour; and in the Bible is, first and foremost, a message of salvation.