Calvin and Luther: The Continuing Relationship 9783666550577, 9783525550571, 9783647550572

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© 2013, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783525550571 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647550572

Refo500 Academic Studies

Edited by Herman J. Selderhuis In Co-operation with Günter Frank (Bretten), Bruce Gordon, (New Haven), Ute Lotz-Heumann (Tucson), Mathijs Lamberigts (Leuven), Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer (Bern), Tarald Rasmussen (Oslo), Johannes Schilling (Kiel), Günther Wassilowsky (Linz), Siegrid Westphal (Osnabrück), David M. Whitford (Waco) Volume 12

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R. Ward Holder (ed.)

Calvin and Luther : The Continuing Relationship

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht © 2013, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783525550571 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647550572

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-525-55057-1 ISBN 978-3-647-55057-2 (e-book) Ó 2013, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen/ Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht LLC, Bristol, CT, U.S.A. www.v-r.de All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Typesetting by : Konrad Triltsch GmbH, Ochsenfurt Printed and bound in Germany by Hubert & Co, Göttingen Printed on non-aging paper.

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Content

R. Ward Holder Calvin and Luther : The Relationship that Still Echoes . . . . . . . . . .

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Reformers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 G. Sujin Pak Luther and Calvin on the Nature and Function of Prophecy : The Case of the Minor Prophets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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David M. Whitford ‘Forgetting him selfe after a most filthie and shamefull sorte’: Martin Luther and John Calvin on Genesis 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Paul Westermeyer Theology and Music for Luther and Calvin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Timothy J. Wengert Philip Melanchthon and John Calvin against Andreas Osiander : Coming to Terms with Forensic Justification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Confessions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Susan C. Karant-Nunn Postscript on the Religious Emotions in the Lateand Post-Reformation Era: Path Dependence and Innovation

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Jeffrey R. Watt Reconciliation and the Confession of Sins: The Evidence from the Consistory in Calvin’s Geneva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Robert Kolb The Prophet of the German Nation and Other Saint-Sinner Martyrs among the Lutheran Stars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

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Content

Henning P. Jürgens Intra-Protestant Conflicts in 16th Century Poland and Prussia – The Case of Benedict Morgenstern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

Contemporary Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 J. Todd Billings The Contemporary Reception of Luther and Calvin’s Doctrine of Union with Christ: Mapping a Biblical, Catholic, and Reformational Motif . . 165 Theresa F. Latini The Church as Mother : The Theme of Union in Christ in Calvin’s and Luther’s Ecclesiology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Christine Helmer United And Divided: Luther and Calvin in Modern Protestant Theology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 Bibliography

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Contributors

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Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

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R. Ward Holder

Calvin and Luther : The Relationship that Still Echoes

In 1542, John Calvin wrote a letter to Martin Luther, but sent it to Philip Melanchthon hoping that Melanchthon would pass the letter on to Luther.1 For Melanchthon, however, the letter arrived at an inauspicious time – Luther was in a perfect fury with the Swiss over the eucharist, and Melanchthon chose not to share Calvin’s letter. Thus, the relationship that might have exercised enormous influence on the fortunes of the Protestant future actually ended before it began. Luther was the one figure whom all Germans accepted as authoritative, and perhaps no one worked harder at Swiss unity than the Frenchman Calvin.2 Instead of the successful unification for which Calvin so dearly hoped, Calvin and Luther came to represent the two sides of the magisterial Reformation. They, and the schools and confessions that would bear their names, were cast as opposites, two great Protestant protagonists locked in a battle for Europe’s very soul. This despite the fact that Calvin spoke of Luther as an apostle, and always refused the chances to criticize him openly.3 Calvin was wonderfully able to convince himself of unlikely things, and one of those was the idea that the Lutherans who opposed him were not following the truth that Martin had set down so clearly in the years before his death. For his part, Luther spoke sparingly, but occasionally positively of Calvin.4 In the popular imagination, however, their differences became greater than their enormous areas of agreement. So it came to pass that Lutherans would rather share the Holy Roman Empire with adherents of the Church of Rome than with Zwinglians, Calvinists, or whatever the Swiss were to be called. Luther himself used many terms to describe the Swiss, and few were complimentary. The ongoing antipathy between Zurich and Wittenberg fomented the Consensus Tigurinus, a document gleefully used by Calvin’s Lutheran opponents as a damning piece of 1 Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 169. 2 This is by no means to suggest that a pan-European Protestantism would have definitely existed had Melanchthon delivered the letter. There are enormous problems with the likelihood of that alternative history. But the possibilities are interesting to contemplate. 3 For instance, see Calvin’s reference to Luther as one who leads the way unto salvation, in The Necessity of Reforming the Church, CO 6.459. 4 Luther’s view of Calvin was far more mixed than Calvin’s unfailing approval of Luther, even in those instants when he disagreed with a point of Luther’s doctrine. See Gordon, 169 – 170.

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evidence that Calvin was a Zwinglian.5 Calvin’s counterattacks against Westphal’s polemics set the tone – Calvin and Luther, and the movements that bore their names, were two opposing and armed camps. Thinkers and authors who failed to understand this would pay a dear price in the early modern period.6 The oppositional setting of Calvin and Luther did not end with the onset of the modern world – the ongoing confessional divisions can be felt to the present. For example, Karl Barth, in his lectures to the students at Göttingen in the summer of 1923, stated that the spirit of Reformed confessionalism was significantly different from that of the Lutheran confessions. He claimed that the Augsburg Confession, in its “invariant” form, stood and stands within Lutheranism almost on par with scripture, that the “difference between Scripture and confession according to the teaching of the Formula of Concord is in fact only a quantitative one and not qualitative.” Against this, Barth saw the genuine spirit of Reformed Christianity as fundamentally unable to place anything beside scripture, and thus as setting out confessions that were radically historically contingent.7 For Barth, Reformed and Lutheran faith were foundationally and irreconcilably divergent. The reforms begun by Luther and Calvin became two of the largest and most influential movements to arise in the sixteenth century, and their influence has continued, with significant cultural and theological weight not only in Europe and North America, but also in South America, Asia, Australia and Africa. Karl Barth’s argument from the 1920s continues to be representative of a generally accepted modern view that Calvinism and Lutheranism are completely separate, opposing movements and theologies. And yet, in many ways the movements built on the teaching of Luther and Calvin developed in relationship and resonance—not only opposition—with one another. Despite this fact, very few scholars have explicitly considered the relationship between Calvin and Luther or between Calvinism and Lutheranism.8 But does it have to be this way? Are the confessional divisions that historically defined these communities still as potent as they once were? It is part of the argument of this volume that the answer to this question is a qualified negative. Historically, of course, Lutheranism and Calvinism or Reformed Protestantism were rival confessions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some of the 5 And Westphal hoped to smear Melanchthon through his relationship with the Swiss. See Gordon, 234 – 243. For a modern analysis of Calvin’s position, see Anthony N. S. Lane’s “Was Calvin a Crypto-Zwinglian?” in Adaptations of Calvinism in Reformation Europe: Essays in Honour of Brian G. Armstrong, Mack P. Holt, ed. (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 21 – 42. 6 An example is illustrated in Henning Jürgen’s article on Benedict Morgenstern in this volume. 7 Karl Barth, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions, translated and annotated by Darrell L. Guder and Judith J. Guder, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002). 8 Two important exceptions are Randall Zachman’s Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); and Harro Höpfl’s Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). It is telling how few exceptions exist to this rule.

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Calvin and Luther : The Relationship that Still Echoes

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historical and historical-theological explorations in this volume bear that out. But it is hardly enough to say that Lutherans and Calvinists differed stridently. Through these explorations of the different ways that Calvin and Luther interpreted the scriptures, in both broad categories of the scriptures and narrow readings within it, modern thinkers get a sense of the manners in which Luther and Calvin diverged exegetically. Similarly, the assessment of the career of Benedict Morgenstern demonstrates the ways that various Protestantisms of the early modern period struggled with each other. Far from being a simple binary system of Lutheran vs. Reformed, various types of Lutherans sought to influence the direction of the reforms and to gain the upper hand in power and doctrinal struggles against both the Reformed and each other. The name-calling alone both makes for salacious reading, and gives an insight into what the protagonists thought was at stake. But just as surely as the historical question of the boundaries between Calvin and Luther, or Lutheranism and Calvinism must be answered with a resounding yes, the ongoing doctrinal questions offer a different picture. In the more systematic doctrinal articles, an argument is forwarded that the broad confessional continuity between Luther and Calvin on the soteriological theme of union with Christ offers still-unexplored avenues to both deeper understandings of soteriology, and the manner in which these two great theologians were set in opposition by their camps, rather than by their thoughts. Another article sets out the historiography even more clearly, demonstrating how contextualized the two Reformers would appear as sources in later Protestant thought. Through these articles, we begin to see the possibility of a rapprochement between Calvin and Luther as sources, though not as historical figures. But that insight allows the conversation to extend, and bear far greater fruit. The chapters are divided into three larger sections. The first is entitled “Reformers,” and is historical and historical-theological. G. Sujin Pak begins with an investigation of Luther and Calvin’s exegesis of the minor prophets, especially seeking to explicate their understandings of prophecy and its role in the early modern church. David M. Whitford analyzes the specifics of Luther and Calvin’s interpretations of the “curse of Ham” in Genesis 9, and finds that both built their interpretations upon slender textual footings, rather than extracting them from the text. This section continues with Paul Westermeyer’s consideration of how Calvin and Luther’s theological ideals contributed to their musical and liturgical theories. The first section closes with Timothy Wengert’s comparison of Calvin’s and Melanchthon’s repudiations of Osiander’s doctrine of justification. While firmly situated in the sixteenth century, Wengert demonstrates the enormous importance of grasping the theology of the sixteenth century figures for the modern conversations about soteriological theology. The second section is entitled “Confessions,” and examines various aspects of how the two confessions handled different issues, both with deep investigations of a single confession or figure, and with comparative efforts.

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Susan Karant-Nunn’s analysis of Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed affective strategies in the preaching of the passion generates significant insights into the mentalities of the confessions and their adherents. The next two offerings are deep investigations into each tradition: Jeffrey Watt’s examination of the Genevan Consistory finds that it was an instrument of communal formation, and that no analogue to this existed in Lutheran or Catholic territories. Robert Kolb investigates the role that Luther played in Lutheran culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a role that Calvin definitely did not play in Reformed thought and culture. Concluding this section, Henning Jürgens’ consideration of Benedict Morgenstern’s career in Poland and Prussia clarifies that there were not only issues between Reformed and Lutherans, but also different types of Lutherans. The last section, entitled “Contemporary Perspectives”, moves from the more strictly historical treatments of Calvin and Luther to the doctrinal loci. J. Todd Billing’s consideration of the theme of union with Christ in both Luther and Calvin maintains that soteriological focus, and argues that Luther and Calvin have much to offer as foundations for building a biblical and catholic theology of union with Christ that takes theology beyond confessionalism. Theresa Latini’s examination of the true koinonia in the image of the church as mother in both Calvin and Luther’s theology finds that this motif directly addresses the contemporary crisis of loss of community. Finally, Christine Helmer’s analysis of Calvin and Luther in modern Protestant theology demonstrates how frequently the use of these forebears is contextualized by the framework of the modern theologian. Taken together, these essays demonstrate both the necessity of coming to greater understanding of the heritage of Calvin and Luther and Calvinism and Lutheranism, while establishing the still-untapped potentials of considering the two in their joint theological programs. Calvin and Luther’s epistolary conversation never truly got off the ground, but the legacies that they left must be understood in light of each other, both in the past and the present. The Calvin Studies Society would like to thank Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota for being such a wonderful host, and the North American Luther Forum for being such engaging conversation partners. Special thanks are due to Prof. Mary Jane Haemig of Luther Theological Seminary, whose tireless work on the program made this event so successful. Finally, the 2011 colloquium was blessed with the gracious sponsorship of the Office of Theology and Worship of the Presbyterian Church (USA); the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan; Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Lyle and Barbara Sall. And one last thank you goes to Jessika Garcia, a graduate student at United Theological Seminary who worked long and hard at making the bibliography come out right.

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Reformers

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G. Sujin Pak*

Luther and Calvin on the Nature and Function of Prophecy : The Case of the Minor Prophets

Within the scholarship of the past decade there has been a noteworthy interest in developments in the views of history and prophecy in the early modern era. Works such as Anthony Grafton’s What Was History? and Irena Backus’s Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation come foremost to mind, but also pertinent is a very current interest in Calvin’s lectures on the Minor Prophets represented in two books recently published— Jon Balserak’s Establishing the Remnant Church in France and Frederick Harms’s In God’s Custody.1 It strikes me as a useful exercise to compare and contrast Martin Luther and John Calvin’s interpretations of the Minor Prophets in particular for a number of reasons. First of all, a study of Luther and Calvin’s readings of the Minor Prophets pinpoints their understandings of prophecy that are largely, if not quite thoroughly, free of apocalyptic content. Neither Luther nor Calvin read the Minor Prophets in an apocalyptic light.2 Hence, one is able to arrive at other important aspects of their views concerning biblical prophecy, as well as explore the continuities and * English translations for Calvin’s writings come from A Commentary on the Twelve Minor Prophets, trans by Rev. John Owen (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1986), Volumes 1 – 5. Citations of these volumes are by the volume number and page reference. I have sometimes slightly revised. 1 Anthony Grafton, What was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Irena Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378 – 1615) (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Jon Balserak, Establishing the Remnant Church in France: Calvin’s Lectures on the Minor Prophets, 1556 – 59 (Leiden: Brill, 2011); and Frederick A. V. Harms, In God’s Custody: The Church, a History of Divine Protection: A Study of John Calvin’s Ecclesiology based on his Commentary on the Minor Prophets (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010). See also the article by Barbara Pitkin, “Prophecy and History in Calvin’s Lectures on Daniel (1561)” in Die Geschichte der Daniel-Auslegung in Judentum, Christentum und Islam: Studien zur Kommentierung des Danielbuches in Literatur und Kunst, eds. Katharina Bracht and David S. du Toit (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 323 – 47. 2 At times Luther referred to an apocalyptic reading given by prior Christian tradition, but usually argued that it is not the better reading. More often, both Luther and Calvin explicitly argued against apocalyptic reading of the Minor Prophets. This may be a surprising fact for readers of Robin Barnes’s study on Lutheran apocalypticism. Barnes demonstrates a “proliferation of last things” among Lutheran authors, but Barnes’s study focuses mostly upon Lutheran apocalyptic treatises and readings of Daniel and the Apocalypse of John. See Robin Bruce Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), esp. 60 – 99.

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discontinuities this might have for their conceptions of any ongoing role of prophecy in the church. Furthermore, both of these men turned to lecture on these twelve biblical books at significant points in their careers and employed these texts to address the immediate concerns they were facing at the time. Luther lectured on the Minor Prophets in Latin from about March 1524 until around March 1526— that is, during the years surrounding the Peasants’ War. He also issued German versions of his lectures on Jonah (1526), Habakkuk (1526) and Zechariah (1527) at this time, which were not simply translations of his Latin lectures.3 The prefaces to his German lectures on these three books indicate his clear concerns to argue against the Enthusiasts and to help the layperson focus upon the most important thing for exegesis and preaching: simple faith in Christ.4 Hence, Luther employed these three prophets in particular, and the Minor Prophets more generally, to propound clear teachings about faith, the power of the preached Gospel, and justification by faith alone. In some ways, one might view these lectures as a culmination of his prior theological work on Psalms, Romans, Galatians and Hebrews now expounded from the genre of prophecy. John Calvin’s lectures on the Minor Prophets appeared at a significant point in his career, as well. He commenced his lectures on the Minor Prophets around late 1555 or early 1556. As Jon Balserak has set forth more thoroughly in his book, the year 1555 can be viewed as one of the turning points in Calvin’s career. It was the year when the Peace of Augsburg was implemented. It was a time when French evangelicals were turning to Calvin and Geneva for support and also when Calvin’s authority had become more secured in Geneva. Thus, one also finds that 1555 was the year when Geneva sent out its first official missionaries. Calvin, not unlike Luther, found persuasive power in the prophetic genre generally and in the writings of the Minor Prophets specifically to call and commission the teachers and pastors of Geneva to uphold the purity of Christian faith and worship in a time in which he understood these to be under acute attack.5 Thus, this article argues that there is a considerable link between Luther and Calvin’s turn to biblical prophecy to address the events of their day, their understandings of the nature and function of prophecy, and the prophetic 3 The history of the transmission of the Latin texts of Luther’s lectures is quite complex. The Weimar edition of Luther’s lectures on the Minor Prophets provides the most detailed account. See WA 13:vii–xxxvi. Brief accounts of the transmission histories of both the Latin and German texts may also be found in prefaces to volumes eighteen to twenty in Luther’s Works. 4 For example, Luther wrote in his preface to Zechariah: “Today everyone claims to be a master interpreter. One studies Daniel, another the Apocalypse, and so on, whichever is most difficult or offers the most allegories; and in this way they hope to show their cleverness. They do not consider, however, whether they are teaching the poor common man anything … Now one might be able to put up with the splendid work of these spirits if they … gave the unlearned people their due—that is, the simple teaching of faith in Christ” (LW 20:155 – 56; WA 23:485). 5 See Balserak, 3 – 5 for a more detailed account of this context.

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The Case of the Minor Prophets

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awareness of each. The essay begins by outlining some of the most important agreements between Luther and Calvin on Old Testament prophecy as represented in the Minor Prophets. Then it turns to three key differences concerning their conceptions of the prophetic content, duty of the prophet, and vision of sacred history and the implications these have for Luther and Calvin’s theology, exegetical practices, and prophetic self-awareness. The essay concludes with reflections upon the continuities between Luther and Calvin’s views of Old Testament prophecy and their articulations of the possible, ongoing function of prophecy in the church.6 Basic Agreements Concerning Old Testament Prophets and Prophecy Not surprisingly, there are several basic points upon which Luther and Calvin agreed concerning the Minor Prophets and their prophecies. First and foremost, Luther and Calvin understood the Old Testament prophets as heralds of God’s Word, who proclaimed God’s will and called the people to repentance.7 As Luther wrote in his preface to Amos, “[God] sends his prophets or ministers of the Word to announce his Word, to foretell the ills that are coming and, after preaching the Word, to turn at least a few hearts and call them to repentance.”8 Calvin, in particular, emphasized that the Old Testament prophets did not add anything of their own but proclaimed only that which God commanded, thus investing the prophecy with divine authority.9 Likewise, Luther and Calvin each viewed the Old Testament prophets as instruments of the Holy Spirit, who sealed their prophecies with authority and authenticity.10 Furthermore, they each acknowledged that true prophets were often not well received by the people.11 Luther and Calvin both found an observable pattern in Old Testament 6 Though beyond the means of this essay, these differences could lay a foundation for the role of biblical interpretation in confessional identity formation. This is not necessarily claiming anything new. Barbara Pitkin notes the important differences between Luther and Calvin’s conceptions of history and points to their implications for confessional formation in her article, “Calvin, Theology and History” Seminary Ridge Review 12/2 (2010): 3. See also Backus’s study previously cited. 7 WA 13:2, 158 – 59, 315, 424, 546 – 47, 614 – 15 and LW 18:3, 127, 232; 19:108; 20:3, 80. CO 42:202 – 203, 517 – 18; 43:1, 247, 265 – 66, 435; 44:188, 228 – 29 and Calvin, 1:42, 2:18 – 19, 148; 3:92, 122 – 23, 417; 5:116, 183. 8 WA 13:158; LW 18:127. 9 There are multiple references to the prophet not adding anything throughout Calvin’s commentaries on the Minor Prophets. See CO 42:203, 395, 517; 43:1, 36, 178 – 79, 282, 307, 466, 467; 44:2, 94, 202 – 203, 228 – 29, 497 and Calvin, 1:42 – 43, 329; 2:18, 148, 200, 421 – 22; 3:152, 197, 467, 468; 4:184, 341; 5:141, 183, 630. On the divine authority of prophecy, see CO 42:517, 43:39, 437; 44:2, 202 – 203 and Calvin, 2:19, 203; 3:418; 4:184; 5:141. 10 WA 13:315, 555, 614 – 15; 19:245, 349 and LW 18:232, 19:97, 151; 20:12 – 13, 80. CO 42:199 – 200, 201, 203, 517 – 18; 43:1, 3, 31, 36, 44, 117, 179, 307, 314 – 15, 329 and Calvin, 1:38, 40, 42; 2:18, 19, 148, 150, 191, 200, 212, 323, 422; 3:197, 208, 233. 11 See, for examples, WA 13:159, 180 and LW 18:128, 157 and CO 42:510 and Calvin, 1:503.

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prophecies, particularly in the prophecies of the Minor Prophets. Namely, these prophets interspersed threats with promises.12 More importantly, Luther and Calvin interpreted this interspersion of threats with promises to denote the mixed nature of the people of God and point to a remnant theology at work. Calvin described this most thoroughly in his comments on Hos 6:4: The prophets had to deal with the whole people; they [also] had to deal with the few faithful … When therefore the prophets reproved the people, they addressed the whole body ; but at the same time, as there was some remnant seed, they mingled consolations … and mingled them that the elect of God might ever rely upon his mercy and thus patiently submit to his rod and continue in his fear, knowing that there is in him a sure salvation. Hence the promises that we see inserted by the prophets among threats and reproofs ought not to be referred in common to all … but only to the faithful.13

Such a theology of a remnant and doctrine of election demonstrated for both Luther and Calvin the ways in which God remains true to God’s covenantal promises in the midst of impending punishment or even destruction, which otherwise might undermine convictions about God’s faithfulness and sovereignty. Luther and Calvin also agreed on a couple of significant technical issues about the Minor Prophets. They each argued that the texts of the Minor Prophets should be understood as compilations of shortened versions of the original prophecies given. Hence, Luther commented from time to time that a prophet “undoubtedly” explained his prophecies in much more copious words than what was recorded in short form in the text.14 Luther contended, as well, that each prophet’s prophecies were given at different times, sometimes over a period of many years, and later collected together.15 Similarly, Calvin wrote in his opening comments on the fourth chapter of Hosea, “We must bear in mind that the prophets did not literally write what they delivered to the people, nor did they treat only once of those things that are now extant to us, but we have in their books collected summaries and heads of those matters that they wanted to address to the people.”16 Luther and Calvin also maintained that the 12 WA 13:2 – 3, 99, 100 – 101, 102, 158 – 59, 173 – 74, 178, 180, 192, 195, 241, 299, 317 – 18, 371 – 72, 424 – 25, 492, 493, 534, 546 – 47; 19:193, 355; 23:547 – 48 and LW 18:3, 95, 97, 98 – 99, 127, 148, 154 – 55, 158, 173, 177, 207, 237, 281, 282, 338, 339, 371; 19:3, 40, 108, 157; and 20:3 – 4, 210 – 11. CO 42:256, 325, 498; 43:197 – 98, 339, 430, 460; 44:34 – 35, 36 – 37, 40, 59 – 60, 62, 66, 305, 320, 321 – 22, 339, 358, 402 and Calvin, 1:122, 224, 485; 2:452; 3:250, 402, 456; 4:239 – 40, 243, 250, 282 – 83, 288, 293 – 94; 5:312, 337, 340, 369, 401, 473. 13 CO 42:325; Calvin, 1:224. See also his comments on Mic 4:1 – 2 (CO 43:339; Calvin, 3:250). 14 See, for examples, WA 13:22, 538 and LW 18:26, 378. 15 For example, Luther comments on Zechariah: “What I have said about the discourses of the prophets is true: that they delivered some at one time, others at another, and that they did not deliver them all in a single address” (WA 13:555; LW 20:13). 16 CO 42:265 – 66; Calvin, 1:136 – 37. See also CO 42:410; 43:525; Calvin, 1:503 – 504, 4:67. This echoes Calvin’s account in his preface to Isaiah: “The prophets, after having publicly addressed

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prophets did not necessarily follow each other in history in the same order in which they appear in Scripture.17 Another technical concern that Luther and Calvin shared is a marked attention to the language of the prophet.18 For both reformers, Old Testament prophecy has a particular expression: it is expressed through metaphors and figures in order to place a “vivid picture” or “living image” before the eyes of the people that carries persuasive force.19 Luther wrote that it is the “custom of the prophets to use poetic figures and expressions”; indeed, he added, “those whom we call the ‘minor’ prophets generally use more figures of language than the major prophets.”20 For Luther, the prophet’s proliferation of metaphors and figures of speech was due to his abundance of the Holy Spirit.21 Metaphors, said Luther, may serve to enlighten or obscure, and prophets used such language in order to persuade a difficult audience.22 Calvin concurred that these figures of speech served to persuade the people, but he added two more reasons for their usefulness. They assisted in the prophet’s ability to address two very different audiences—the wicked versus the children of God and the less mature versus the more mature in faith.23 Moreover, argued Calvin, metaphors indicated the accommodated quality of the prophet’s speech. This accommodated quality includes the idea that prophets used figures to persuade a difficult audience, but more broadly Calvin argued that the prophet

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the people, drew up a brief abstract of their discourse and placed it on the gates of the temple that all might see and become more fully acquainted with the prophecy. When it had been exposed for a sufficient number of days, it was removed by the ministers of the temple and placed in the treasury that it might remain as a permanent record. In this way, it is probable, the books of the prophets were compiled” (CO 36:24). WA 13:89; LW 18:80. Calvin wrote in his preface to Isaiah, “Those who have carefully and judiciously perused the Prophets will agree with me in thinking that their discourses have not always been arranged in a regular order, but that the roll was made up as occasion served” (CO 36:24). Jon Balserak discusses this point concerning Calvin’s treatment of the Minor Prophets in Establishing the Remnant Church, 133 – 37. Luther described Haggai’s prophecy about the kingdom of Christ in these terms: “Here you see the prophet is describing the kingdom of Christ in such a way that it appears as if it were standing at the door” (WA 13:539; LW 18:379). Calvin, in particular, used the descriptions of “vivid picture” [hypotyposin] (CO 44:364; Calvin, 5:411), “painted picture” [pictam tabulam] (CO 42:204; Calvin, 1:45), and “living portrait” [viva pictora] (CO 42:204; Calvin, 1:45). In his comments on prophecy in the Institutes, Calvin wrote that the prophets’ exhortations were to give the people a “living image of God” (Institutes 4.1.5). WA 13:161; LW 18:131. WA 13:118, 328; LW 18:117, 253. WA 13:118; LW 18:117. Luther wrote, “Habakkuk employs many words here. He portrays everything realistically and embellishes it with figures of speech. And it is necessary to do that when preaching to a hard and rude rabble; one must paint it for them, pound it into them, chew it for them, and resort to every means to see whether they can be moved” (WA 19:370; LW 19:171 – 72). See the use of metaphor to persuade in CO 43:462, 464; Calvin, 3:459, 463 – 64. Concerning the different audiences, see CO 42:326, 44:118; Calvin, 1:225, 4:381.

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accommodated himself to human weakness through the employment of metaphors by using images common to their life experiences.24 Moreover, both Luther and Calvin emphasized that knowledge of the original language of the prophet is vitally important in order to read these metaphors and other figures of speech well. This is implicit in Calvin’s careful attention to Hebrew terms and grammar throughout his exegesis of the Minor Prophets. Luther explicitly insisted on this importance in his comments on Mic 1:8, stating: “We are absolutely insane, then, when we undertake the interpretation of the prophets without a very great skill and understanding of the Hebrew language.”25 A final point of agreement between Luther and Calvin on the prophecies of the Minor Prophets involves another aspect of their identification of the primary content of these prophecies. In addition to calling people to repentance and consoling the faithful, they both underscored the concern for true worship over and against false worship. They agreed that in exhorting the people to repentance, the prophets were specifically calling the people to turn from their idolatry and blasphemous worship to the true worship of God. Both reformers also deployed the prophets’ castigation of false worship over and against Roman Catholicism. Yet, Luther and Calvin also exhibited important distinctions in how they defined this contrast between true and false worship. Luther summed up the contrast through the category of faith versus works. False worship trusts in human works, whereas true worship recognizes that only faith pleases God.26 False worship not only relies wrongly upon works, works righteousness, and the Law, but it also operates apart from or contrary to God’s Word.27 Luther employed this contrast to denounce Roman Catholic worship practices as forms of works righteousness.28 At the 24 For example, Calvin wrote that Joel “accommodates his manner of speaking or his discourse to the comprehension of his people, for he knew whom he addressed” (CO 42:569; Calvin, 2:95). Jon Balserak relates this practice to Calvin’s “awareness of the social, cultural, and historical aspects of the text” so that Calvin conceives language as a “historical artifact” passed down to the reader (Establishing the Remnant Church, 134). See also CO 44:364, 43:176; Calvin, 5:411, 412; 2:413. 25 WA 13:304; LW 18:214. Luther made even more forceful statements on this topic in his address “To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany that they Establish and Maintain Christian Schools,” where he insisted that “languages are absolutely and altogether necessary” to interpret Scripture well and rightly (WA 15:40; LW 45:363). 26 WA 13:3 – 4, 7 – 8, 17 – 18, 19, 34 – 35, 62, 186, 246, 254, 302 – 303, 332, 429, 482, 611, 655; 19:194, 207, 409 – 12, 414; 23:597, 636 and LW 18:4, 9 – 10, 21, 23, 39, 70, 166, 211 – 13, 260, 322 – 23; 19:11, 24, 41, 55, 115, 211 – 14, 217; 20:74 – 75, 133, 268, 314. 27 WA 13:176, 201, 303. LW 18:151 – 52, 184, 213. Luther wrote, “This is the source of every wickedness—namely, worship and sacrifices that God has not instituted and that the Word of God has not commanded. And here we see again—as we do in all Scripture—how it does not please God, and, in fact, how he hates it, if we establish anything outside the Word of God, however good and holy it may appear” (WA 13:303; LW 18:213). 28 WA 13:17 – 18, 184 – 85, 185; 19:207, 409 – 12, 414; 23:597. LW 18:21, 163 – 64, 165; 19:55, 211 – 14, 217; 20:268.

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top of Luther’s list were the monks and their monastic devotion, for they lead the people away from the Word of God and produced terrified consciences through their reliance on works.29 Though many of Calvin’s concerns about worship in the Minor Prophets may also be understood under a general rubric of faith versus works, it is significant that the actual language of “faith” and “works” was not at all dominant—as it was for Luther—in his descriptions. Rather, Calvin was more prone to speak against superstition, corruption, and pollution—where worship mingles with human inventions. Most prevalent in Calvin’s account of the concern for pure worship were the dual and often interrelated denunciations of superstition and a “blended” worship.30 This “blended worship” resulted from the mixing of sacred things with profane things, especially when worship practices commanded by God were mixed with human inventions.31 Like Luther, Calvin deployed these condemnations of false worship against Roman Catholics, though his rhetorical import centered less upon works righteousness per se and much more upon superstition and blended worship. Moreover, Calvin’s criticisms of Roman Catholic worship were far more extensive, numerous and detailed than those of Luther.32 Indeed, recent works on Calvin’s commentaries on the Minor Prophets stress the vital importance of his context for these lectures, for he was in the midst of

29 WA 13:39, 201, 246, 314, 482, 664. LW 18:44, 184, 231, 322 – 23; 19:11; 20:145. Luther also assailed Roman Catholic practices of fasting (WA 13:611; LW 20:74 – 75), their continued enforcement of Law for Christians (LW 19:41), their injustice to the poor by making themselves rich (WA 13:309; LW 18:222), and their exaltation of the clergy that undermines the priesthood of all believers (WA 13:111; LW 18:108 – 109). 30 Calvin’s condemnations of superstition are too numerous to list in full. For examples, see CO 42:230, 239, 245 – 56, 288 – 90, 329 – 31, 369, 379, 477 – 78, 480, 503; 43:49, 57, 74, 97 – 98, 126, 150, 222, 244, 290, 393, 558 – 59, 561 – 63; 44:3, 7, 8 – 9, 11, 13, 343, 427; Calvin, 1:84, 97, 106 – 107, 170 – 73, 230 – 33, 290, 305, 453 – 54, 457 – 58, 492; 2:219, 231, 256, 293 – 94, 336 – 37, 374; 3:51, 88 – 89, 166, 339; 4:125, 129 – 31, 185, 192, 194, 198, 201; 5:378, 381, 429, 448. 31 For examples of denunciations of blended worship and human innovation or invention, see CO 42:239, 369 – 70, 470; 43:20 – 21, 27 – 28, 73, 94, 222, 243 – 44, 291; 44:9 – 10, 94, 110 – 11, 343 – 44, 427; Calvin, 1:97, 291, 442; 2:176, 186 – 87, 255, 289; 3:51, 87, 167; 4:195 – 96, 341, 368; 5:378, 512. 32 Calvin condemns a number of specific attitudes and practices of Roman Catholic worship throughout his commentaries on the Minor Prophets. These include mistaken views of sacrifices and vows (CO 42:283 – 84, 377 – 78, 404 – 405, 407 – 408; 43:232 – 33, 245, 392, 393; 44:11 – 12, 348 – 50, 421; Calvin, 1:164 – 65, 302 – 303, 344, 348 – 49; 3:68 – 70, 89 – 90, 339, 341; 4:198 – 99; 5:386 – 88, 502, 507), trust in the title of priest (CO 42:274, 279; 43:287 – 88, 325 – 26, 333 – 34, 429, 432; 44:49, 174 – 75, 315 – 16, 346; Calvin, 1:150, 158; 3:160 – 61, 227 – 28, 241 – 43, 401, 405, 407; 4:265; 5:92 – 94, 330, 381), saints and images (CO 42:246, 284; 44:10, 12, 140 – 41; Calvin, 1:107, 165; 4:197, 199, 202; 5:38 – 39), fasting (CO 42:255, 257; 44:224; Calvin, 3:106, 109 – 10; 5:175), prayer (CO 42:357, 43:263; Calvin, 1:272; 3:119), vestments (CO 42:240, 44:348 – 50; Calvin, 1:99; 5:386 – 88), and authority of the church (CO 42:273, 44:110, 112 – 13; Calvin, 1:148; 4:368, 370 – 71), along with criticisms of Roman Catholic pride (CO 42:216, 231, 297, 405, 407 – 408; 43:143; 44:348 – 50, 424; Calvin, 1:63, 85, 183, 344, 348 – 49; 2:362; 5: 386 – 88, 507), outward pomp (CO 42:217, 329; Calvin, 1:65, 231) and avarice (CO 43:324 – 25; Calvin, 3:225 – 26).

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fostering, encouraging and training pastors and teachers to evangelize France and resist Catholicism.33 Naturally, Calvin also, like Luther, condemned works righteousness and worship that departed from God’s Word.34 Whereas he agreed with Luther that true worship obeys God’s Word, Calvin equally named this as a worship that honors God’s Law.35 Calvin insisted that the Law provided everything necessary for the perfect worship of God. People wrongly understood the Law’s guidance for worship if they viewed it as merely a set of external rites and rules, contended Calvin, for a spiritual worship has always been the intent of the Law. He affirmed an analogy “between the legal rites and the spiritual manner of worshipping God prescribed in the Gospel.”36 Accordingly, the Old Testament prophets were not condemning the external rites prescribed by the Law; rather, they were denouncing the corruption of these. These rites became corrupt when they were divorced from their true intent, when external rites were “torn asunder” from their true aims of faith and piety, the true spiritual worship of God.37

33 Balserak provides the most extensive study to date of the importance of Calvin’s context for his commentaries on the Minor Prophets in chapter two of his Establishing the Remnant Church in France. See also Harms, In God’s Custody, 19 – 44 and the articles by Peter Wilcox, “Evangelisation in the Thought and Practice of John Calvin,” Anvil 12/3 (1995): 201 – 17; “The Lectures of John Calvin and the Nature of His Audience, 1555 – 1564,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 87 (1996): 136 – 48; “Calvin as Commentator on the Prophets” in Calvin and the Bible, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 107 – 30, and “The Progress of the Kingdom of Christ in Calvin’s Exposition of the Prophets,” in Calvinus sincerioris religionis vindex (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Pub, 1997), 315 – 22. 34 For examples of condemnation of works righteousness, see CO 42:304, 458; 43:344, 531 – 34; 44:223, 469 – 70; Calvin, 1:193 – 94, 425; 3:260; 4:78 – 82; 5:173, 583. For insistence that worship cannot be apart from God’s Word, see CO 42:278, 284, 469, 476, 478; 43:20 – 21, 57, 97, 244, 343, 344, 394; 44:13, 47, 109, 385, 386 – 87, 420 – 21; Calvin, 1:155, 164, 441, 452, 454; 2:176, 230; 293; 3:87, 257, 260, 343; 4:202, 262, 366; 5:446, 448, 501 – 502. For Calvin, like Luther, true worship is characterized by faith. For example, Calvin wrote, “We indeed know that God cannot be rightly and from the heart worshipped but in faith” (CO 43:564; Calvin, 4:132). But he also described true worship in terms of prayer, praise, and the shunning of superstition. See, for examples, CO 42:463; 43:232, 245; 44:256 – 57; Calvin, 1:432; 3:68, 89; 5:229. 35 See especially CO 43:97, 394; 44:13 – 14, 420 – 21; Calvin, 2:293, 3:342 – 43, 4:202 – 203, 5:501 – 502. 36 Calvin commented on Zeph 1:6, “For there is nothing omitted in the Law that is needful for the perfect worship of God: but as God requires in the Law a spiritual worship…” (CO 44:13; Calvin, 4:202). See also CO 44:420; Calvin, 5:501. He wrote, “[T]here was also under the Law the spiritual worship of God” (CO 44:421; Calvin, 5:502). 37 See especially Calvin’s comments on Hos 6:6 – 7 (CO 42:330; Calvin, 1:232) and Mic 6:6 – 8 (CO 43:393; Calvin, 3:342). Calvin viewed most Old Testament ceremonies and sacrifices as annulled by the coming of Christ and the Gospel; however, the unity of the covenant lead him to insist that the intent of these practices was the true spiritual worship of God.

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Key Differences of Prophetic Content, Office, and History Though Luther and Calvin shared certain significant views about the Old Testament prophet’s office, content of biblical prophecy, the Minor Prophets as a set of texts, concern for true worship and attention to the prophets’ language, key differences have already become apparent. These differences can be summed up under three main headings: identification of the chief subject matter of the prophecies, description of the prime duty of the prophet, and perception of the prophet’s vision of sacred history.

Chief Subject Matter of Old Testament Prophecy There is a striking difference between Luther and Calvin’s identification of the primary subject matter of the prophecies of the Minor Prophets. Concisely stated, Luther set forth their principal content as Christ and the Gospel, whereas Calvin comprehended the primary content as Law. Luther wrote in his preface to his lectures on Joel, “All the prophets have one and the same message, for this is their one aim: they are looking toward the coming of Christ or to the coming of the kingdom of Christ. All their prophecies look to this, and we must relate them to nothing else.”38 In consequence, almost every page of Luther’s lectures on the Minor Prophets directed the prophecies either to Christ, the preaching of the Gospel, or the inauguration of Christ’s kingdom at Christ’s first coming. Luther not only interpreted christologically the passages in the Minor Prophets cited by New Testament authors in relation to Christ, but also many, many more.39 The prophets proclaimed the saving events of Christ’s life—his passion, resurrection, and ascension. Thus, according to Luther, “he will revive us” in Hos 6:2 and “the day when I arise” in Zeph 3:8 were prophecies of Christ’s resurrection, whereas “he who opens the way” in Mic 2:13 proclaimed Christ’s two natures, death, resurrection, and ascension.40 Even more so, Luther persistently viewed the prophet’s message as a proclamation of the Gospel. Indeed, when he asserted that all the prophecies point to Christ and Christ’s kingdom, what he had specifically in mind was 38 WA 13:88; LW 18:79. 39 The passages in the Minor Prophets explicitly cited by New Testament authors include: Hos 1:10 and 2:23 (cited in Rom 9:25 – 26 and I Pet 2:10), Hos 11:1 (cited in Matt 2:15), Hos 13:14 (cited in I Cor 15:54 – 55), Joel 2:28 – 32 (cited in Acts 2:17 – 21 and Joel 2:32 cited in Rom 10:13), Amos 5:25 – 26 (cited in Acts 7:42 – 43), Amos 9:11 – 12 (cited in Acts 15:16 – 17), Mic 5:2 (cited in Matt 2:6), Hab 1:5 (cited in Acts 13:41), Hagg 2:21 (cited in Heb 12:26), Zech 9:9 (cited in Matt 21:5), Zech 13:7 (cited in Matt 26:31 and Mk 14:27), and Mal 3:1 (cited in Matt 11:10). 40 WA 13:27, 313 – 14; LW 18:31, 229. Other relevant examples include Luther’s view that Mic 4:7 teaches Christ’s divinity (WA 13:320; LW 18:241) and Zech 14:3 prophesies Christ’s ascension (WA 23:656; LW 20:338).

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that they prepared the way for the first advent of Christ and the Gospel in apostolic times.41 Calvin, in contrast, viewed the prophets as primarily interpreting and applying the Law in order to call the people back to right keeping of it. As he stated in his explanation of Mal 4:3 (“Remember the Law of Moses”): It must yet be observed that the prophetic office was not separated from the Law, for all the prophecies that followed the Law were, as it were, its appendages so that they included nothing new, but were given that the people might be more fully kept in their obedience to the Law. Hence, as the prophets were interpreters of Moses, it is no wonder that their doctrine was subjected or, as they commonly say, subordinated to the Law. The object of the prophet was to make the Jews attentive to that doctrine that had been delivered to them from above by Moses and the prophets, so as not to depart from it even in the least degree.42

Indeed, he made similar statements about the prophets as interpreters of the Law in his earlier comments on I Corinthians 14 (1546) and his preface to Isaiah (1551). Calvin contended that the only difference between Moses and the prophets was the additional work prophets provided in accommodating the truths and teachings of the Law to their own particular circumstances and time.43 Yet, it should be clarified that identifying the chief subject of the prophets as Law was not separate for Calvin from the assertion that the prophets also set forth Christ and Christ’s kingdom, for he had always insisted that the substance of the old and new covenants was one and the same.44 The difference from Luther is the way in which Calvin maintained the intrinsic value of Law itself—an affirmation already seen in his arguments about how legal and ceremonial rites had spiritual worship as their intent. Thus, in his preface to Hosea, he wrote, But with regard to the Prophets, this is true of them all … that they are interpreters of the Law. And this is the sum of the Law, that God designs to rule by his own authority the people he has adopted. But the Law has two parts: a promise of salvation and 41 For example, Luther applied all of Micah 5 to Christ’s first coming and the first proclamation of the Gospel (WA 13:324 – 30; LW 18:247 – 56) and viewed all of Zephaniah prophecies as concerning the first coming of Christ and the Gospel (WA 13:480, 503 – 509; LW 18:319, 355 – 64). Likewise, the key teachings of Joel, Jonah, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zechariah are the gospel teachings of faith, particularly justification by faith and not by works (WA 13:100, 243, 244, 246, 372, 373, 431, 434; 19:364; 23:485, 487, 507, 609, 632. LW 18:96, 282, 284; 19:5 – 6, 8, 11, 119, 123 – 24, 166; 20:156, 157, 164, 282, 310). 42 CO 44:493 – 94; Calvin, 5:624 – 25. 43 See CO 36:19 – 20. In his comments on I Cor 14:20, he wrote, “For the prophets did not have a ministry that was unconnected to Law, but were in fact interpreters of the Law, and all their teaching is something like a supplement to it” (CO 49:525; Calvin, The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, trans by John W. Fraser [Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1960], 296). See also CO 44:23, 92; Calvin, 4:219, 337. 44 Institutes 2.10.1.

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eternal life and a rule for a godly and holy living. To these is added a third part: that men not responding to their call are to be restored to the fear of God by threats and reproofs. The prophets do further teach what the Law has commanded respecting the true and pure worship of God … in short, they instruct the people in a holy and godly life and then offer them the favor of the Lord. And as there is no hope of reconciliation with God except through a Mediator, they ever set forth the Messiah, whom the Lord had long ago promised.45

For Calvin, the Law already contained the promise of Christ and salvation, an effective ethical code, and a vision of true worship. The prophet served as an enforcer of the Law—first, through interpretation by accommodating it to different times and circumstances and, secondly, through threats and reproofs when the people strayed. Primary Duty of the Prophet This difference in the identification of the prime subject of Old Testament prophecies directly relates to each of Luther and Calvin’s differing conceptions of the chief function of the biblical prophetic office. For Luther, the Old Testament prophet was first and foremost a preacher—indeed, a preacher of the Gospel. For Calvin, the prophet was first and foremost a teacher—a teacher of Law—for he was an interpreter of the Law who instructed the people so that they may apply it to their immediate context. The distinct language of the prophet as preacher was just as widespread in Luther’s lectures as the portrayal of the prophet as teacher in Calvin’s lectures. Luther repeatedly called the prophet a preacher, depicted him as preaching, and referred to his proclamations as “sermons.”46 He often took brief detours from his comments on the text in order to expound on the power of preaching.47 Moreover, the view of the prophet as a preacher is thoroughly consistent with what Luther named as the prime subject of Old Testament prophecy : Christ and the Gospel; for Luther the Gospel was always something preached or proclaimed.48 45 Calvin, preface to Hosea (CO 42:198; Calvin, 1:36). A very similar statement can be found at the very beginning of Calvin’s preface to Isaiah (CO 36:19). 46 For example, Luther wrote, “You see, these books of the prophets are nothing else than sermons” (WA 13:179; LW 18:157). Yet, it should be noted that Luther also on a few occasions describes the prophet as a teacher. See WA 13:160, 315, 372; 19:245; LW 18:129, 232, 282; 19:97. Hence, this distinction between Luther and Calvin is more one of terminology and should not be overstated. 47 See especially WA 13:686, 242, 253; 19:186 – 87; LW 18:401 – 402; 19:4, 24, 37. 48 There are numerous examples. Luther wrote about Jonah: “In the Hebrew tongue ‘Jonah’ means ‘dove.’ In the New Testament the dove is a symbol for the Holy Spirit … Thus Jonah with his name is a prototype of the Holy Spirit and his office, namely, of the Gospel” (WA 19:245; LW 19:97). On Micah, Luther commented, “[T]he prophet is speaking about a spiritual gathering that takes place when the Gospel has spread throughout the world … In this passage, then, he

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Alternatively, Calvin constantly portrayed the prophet’s activities as forms of teaching and instruction. More specifically, he often depicted the prophet’s “ordinary” office as one of teaching God’s people, but also saw that when the need arose, God sometimes called the prophet to additional duties beyond instruction.49 For examples, in the cases of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, though Calvin still insisted upon their ordinary office as teachers, he added that only these three “were divinely inspired to proclaim the future condition of the people”—thus adding to their office of teaching an aspect of foretelling.50 Perhaps this understanding of the ordinary office of the prophet as one of teaching—which entailed specifically the duties of interpretation and application of Scripture, to which may sometimes be added the act of foretelling—helps to explain a curiosity some scholars have raised about Calvin’s own prophetic self-awareness. Max Engammare describes the ambiguous character of Calvin’s prophetic self-awareness in this way : “sometimes Calvin considered his vocation as being based on an extraordinary prophetic ministry, sometimes simply as a pastoral and teaching ministry.”51 I would add, though, that this is exactly how Calvin already understood the biblical prophets! He viewed their ordinary office as one of teaching to which sometimes was added a duty of foretelling as the particular circumstance demanded. In other words, Calvin had always viewed the

[Micah] is speaking about the ministry of the Word [Gospel], just as all the prophets do in similar passages” (WA 13:312 – 13; LW 18:228). 49 The depiction of the prophet “teaching” can be found on nearly every page. It suffices to show that Calvin introduced the prime office of each of the Minor Prophets (often in his preface to each book) as an office of teaching: see his comments on Hos 1:1, preface to Joel, preface to Amos, Obad 1, preface to Jonah, Jon 1:1, Mic 1:2, preface to Nahum, preface to Habakkuk, Hab 1:2 – 3, preface to Zephaniah, preface to Haggai, and Zech 1:1 – 3 (CO 42:199, 515; 43:1, 178, 201, 202, 284, 435, 493, 494; 44:1, 79, 126, 127; Calvin, 1:37, 2:xv, 147, 422; 3:xvii–xviii, 19 – 20, 155, 413; 4:xiii, 16, 181, 315; 5:16, 17). Notably, Calvin did not emphasize Malachi’s office as much as an office of teaching. Calvin understood Malachi as foretelling the first advent of Christ; hence, the aspect of foretelling is more at the forefront of Malachi’s prophetic duties than it is in Calvin’s understanding of the rest of the Minor Prophets. 50 See Calvin’s preface to Haggai (CO 44:79; Calvin, 4:315 – 16) about Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi’s tasks as witnesses and foretelling. Calvin wrote that these three witnesses confirm the predictions of Daniel. For his continuing conception of these prophets (especially Haggai and Zechariah) primarily as teachers, see CO 44:93 – 94, 112 – 16, 118, 169, 249, 256, 285 – 86, 294, 303, 315, 319, 323, 328, 367, 373, 374, 375, 378, 432, 449, 462, 494, 498; Calvin, 4:340 – 41, 371 – 75, 381; 5:84, 217, 228, 280, 293, 308, 330, 335, 342, 352, 415, 427, 428, 430, 434, 520, 547, 570, 625, 631. 51 Max Engammare, “Calvin: A Prophet without a Prophecy,” Church History 67/4 (1998): 646. Jon Balserak answers this curiosity by arguing that for Calvin some duties of the prophet continue and some duties cease (Establishing, 73). I think this is correct, but Balserak stresses that some duties of the OT prophet—such as foretelling—no longer apply for Calvin to present day. Here I highlight that actually Calvin had frequently described the duty of foretelling as something extraordinary and additional to even the biblical prophet’s regular duties of teaching/interpreting.

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primary duty of a prophet as one of interpretation and application of God’s Word, especially the Law. If the biblical prophet’s primary duty was one of interpreting and applying God’s Law, then it is not at all surprising to find that the vast majority of Calvin’s commentary on the Minor Prophets consisted of explicating these exact lessons in which the prophet accommodated God’s Law for a particular time and place. Yet, Calvin not only wanted to impart to his readers the teachings of the prophet, but he equally aimed to convey their continuing significance for the church across time and, specifically, the church of Calvin’s day. Thus, throughout his lectures Calvin turned to what the prophet “teaches us.” Indeed, Calvin insisted (Hagg 1:2 – 4), “We now see that the prophet not only spoke to [people] of his age, but was also destined through God’s wonderful purpose to be a preacher to us so that his doctrine sounds at this day in our ears and reproves our torpor and ungrateful indifference.”52 In his comments on Zechariah, as well, he maintained that what the prophet taught did not merely apply to the prophet’s specific setting but should apply to the whole church extended over time: “We now then see that this prophecy was not only useful in the age of Zechariah, but that it has been so in all ages, and that it ought not to be confined to the ancient people, but extended to the whole body of the church.”53 This very language of “extension” is a vital element that distinguishes Calvin’s understanding of the prophet’s vision of history from Luther’s own distinctive understanding. Prophet’s Vision of Sacred History If Calvin argued for the ways in which the teachings of the Minor Prophets extended across all time to teach the church both before and after the first coming of Christ, Luther’s emphasis went in another direction. Calvin held a 52 CO 44:86; Calvin, 4:326. Though Calvin overwhelmingly described the prophet’s office as teacher, there are occasions, not surprisingly, when he also described it as preacher, such as we find here. 53 CO 44:151; Calvin, 5:56. Calvin made numerous statements like this throughout his lectures on the Minor Prophets. For example, on Mic 1:1 he wrote, “For when we understand that Micah condemned this or that vice, as we may also learn from the other prophets and from sacred history, we are able to apply more easily to ourselves what he said, inasmuch as we can view our own life as it were in a mirror” (CO 43:281; Calvin, 3:151). And on Mic 5:5, “It must at the same time be observed that this prophecy is not to be confined to that short time, for the prophet speaks generally of the preservation of the church before as well as after the coming of Christ” (CO 43:373; Calvin, 3:308). And Zech 14:21, “Whenever then the prophets speak of perfection under the reign of Christ, we ought not to confine what they say to one day or to a short time, but we ought to include the whole time from the beginning to the end” (CO 44:390; Calvin, 5:454 – 55). Additional examples are cited in footnote 61. To complicate matters, Melanchthon appears to agree at least in part with this view that the history of the prophets extends to the church over time, for he writes in his summary of Haggai’s argument, “in part of this history nevertheless every time of the church may be contemplated” (CR 13:984).

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profoundly unified vision of sacred history, which was part of the reason he could argue for the ongoing importance of the Law even after Christ and the understanding that the intent of Old Testament rites was the true spiritual worship of God. Luther, on the other hand—consistent with his dichotomy of Law/Gospel—emphasized a kind of fissure in history.54 Indeed, in his preface to Habakkuk, Luther provided the reader with clear instructions on how to properly read Old Testament prophecy : But before beginning with the text, I must pave the way with a general introductory remark. This is necessary and useful for better understanding not only of this prophet but also of most of the others. For it has been most confusing in the past to hear the prophets speak of the Jewish kingdom and then to break off so abruptly and intersperse remarks about Christ. Everybody who is not familiar with their method regards that as an odd way of doing things, and he supposes that they observe no order but ramble along from one subject to another … It is certain, first of all, that all the prophets direct their prophecies primarily toward Christ … Moreover, the entire Old Testament has been nothing else but a preparation for and forerunner of the New Testament … The fact that the prophets meanwhile reprove the people, that they pronounce many prophecies that pertained only to their own time and served only their time … all this has been done to train the Jewish people and to prepare them for the advent of Christ.55

In other words, for Luther, the threats and rebukes of the Minor Prophets applied to those of the prophet’s own time while other portions announced the coming of Christ and the Gospel in apostolic times. Either way, these were in many respects histories of the past for Luther. Of course this does not mean that Luther did not find pertinent theological teachings that stood the test of time; yet, Luther’s understanding of the Minor Prophets’ vision of history reveals a striking contrast to Calvin’s vision of that same history. Drawing a distinction between the threats and the prophecies of Christ and Christ’s kingdom contained in the Minor Prophets was something Luther and Calvin shared. Yet, the differences appeared when Luther limited the import of these prophecies to before the time of Christ’s incarnation and insisted on the methodological necessity of distinguishing between the threats meant for those in the prophets’ own time from the prophecies of Christ that point to apostolic times. He repeatedly maintained that these two aspects must be kept separate through a terminology of separation and transition. For example, on Joel’s prophecy of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit (Joel 2:28) Luther demarcated that which pertained to the prophet’s own time and that which foretold Christ: 54 Indeed, the unity of the Old and New Testaments for Luther is precisely this dichotomy of Law/ Gospel that appears across both testaments. 55 LW 19:152 – 53; WA 19:350 – 51. Emphasis added.

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Here the real prophecy begins, which we must clearly separate from what has gone before … First we must speak about the transition of the prophet. If readers of the prophets do not understand it, it offends them very much. You see it is the custom of the prophets that when they have declared that prophecy for which they had been sent, they put aside what has taken place after the revelation of their prophecy and immediately go on to prophesy about Christ. Although all the prophets were sent to announce some temporal punishment, yet they would always connect something about Christ to it too. Here the prophet Joel did the same thing. He quickly passes across from the Jews to the future people of Christ, and he meanwhile skips everything that took place after the declaration of the prophecy about the destruction of Israel.56

Thus, Luther’s understanding of the prophet’s vision of sacred history insisted on keeping distinct those things concerning the prophet’s immediate historical circumstances and those things that spoke of the coming of Christ and the Gospel in apostolic times. Such teachings still held much ongoing theological import for Luther ; yet, in terms of the Minor Prophets’ vision of sacred history, at least, it remained primarily as a history of the past.57 Calvin, in contrast, read the vast majority of the prophecies of the Minor Prophets as a “mirror” for the church across the ages.58 This meant that the history expounded by Old Testament prophets extended across time and spoke concretely to the church of Calvin’s own day and potentially at any point in history. Thus, Calvin’s assertion of the unity of the two Testaments was not merely a biblical or theological assertion, but it was for him a historical one, as well. His profound affirmation of one covenant included within it a distinct perception of the unity of the history of God’s interactions with God’s church across all time. As Calvin often liked to say when commenting on the prophets, “God is always like Himself,”59 by which he maintained God’s faithfulness and consistency in the ways in which God acts with God’s people across all history. Hence, rather than a terminology of separation or transition as found in Luther, Calvin employed a terminology of extension. Almost as if Calvin had Luther in mind, he wrote: “Whenever, then, the prophets make known God’s favor in the deliverance of his people, they make a transition to Christ but 56 WA 13:108 – 109; LW 18:105 – 106 (emphasis added). For other citations where Luther used this language of “transition” or “separation,” see WA 13:186, 204 – 205, 216, 312, 317, 595, 615, 644; LW 18:166, 188 – 90, 194, 227, 236 – 37; 20:53, 82, 116. 57 In addition, Luther frequently upheld this separation by a contrast of the physical kingdom versus the spiritual kingdom: “Now all of [the prophets] prophesied about the destruction of the old people and the bringing in of a new people, about the abolition of the external kingdom and the establishment of a new spiritual kingdom that would happen through Christ” (WA 13:299; LW 18:207). See also WA 13:24, 27, 54, 64, 220, 312, 319, 320, 320 – 21, 324 – 25, 342, 506, 622, 626 – 27; 23:629; LW 18:28, 30, 61, 73, 200 – 201, 227, 238, 240, 241, 247 – 49, 275, 359; 20: 89, 94 – 95, 306. 58 Calvin applied the image of the “mirror” several times to argue for the continuing aptness of these prophecies across time. See CO 43:216, 281, 471; 44:150, 355; Calvin, 3:41, 151, 475; 5:54, 397. 59 See CO 43:261, 309, 425, 500, 544, 581, 582; Calvin, 3:115, 198, 394; 4:26, 99, 150, 162, 164.

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included also the whole intermediate time.”60 Likewise, Calvin commented on Zeph 3:16 – 17: What the prophet says of “that day” is to be extended to the whole kingdom of Christ. He indeed speaks of the deliverance of the people, but we must ever bear in mind what I have already stated: that it is not one year or a few years that are intended when the prophets speak of future redemption, for the time that is now mentioned began when the people were restored from the Babylonian captivity and continues its course to the final advent of Christ … [T]hat redemption of the people of Israel ought at this day to be borne in mind by us, for it was a memorable work of God by which he intended to afford a perpetual testimony that he is the deliverer of all those who hope in him.61

This quote captures the heart of much of what Calvin found so powerful in the teachings of the Minor Prophets for his own context of Protestant churches struggling against Roman Catholicism and, more specifically, the persecuted Reformed faith trying to make inroads into Roman Catholic France. Time and again, Calvin applied the proclamations of the Minor Prophets to his own day to call Christians in Geneva to take faith and comfort in the fact that God had always delivered those who place their trust and hope in God. Countless numbers of these prophecies in the Minor Prophets served as “perpetual testimonies” to God’s covenantal faithfulness and mercy to the church from the beginning to the end of time. Calvin wanted the faithful to be assured that God had always been and will always be sufficiently strong to defend the church.62 Yet, these prophecies also teach the church across all time, averred 60 CO 43:421; Calvin, 3:387. However, given the history of the transmission of Luther’s lectures on the Minor Prophets and their inaccessibility for a number of years, it is highly unlikely that Calvin had direct access to these lectures. 61 CO 44:73 – 74; Calvin, 4:305 – 306, emphasis added. There are lots more examples, such as on Mic 4:11 – 13: “But they have refined too much in allegories, who have thought that this prophecy ought to be confined to the time of Christ, for the prophet no doubt meant to extend consolation to the whole kingdom of Christ from the beginning to the end” (CO 43:362; Calvin, 3:289); on Mic 5:5: “this prophecy is not to be confined to that short time, for the prophet speaks generally of the preservation of the church before as well as after the coming of Christ” (CO 43:373; Calvin, 3:308); on Nah 1:12: “This promise has been once given to the church, and it is now in force and will be in force to the end of the world” (CO 43:452; Calvin, 3:444); on Obad 7 – 8: “what the prophet says here is no more than what applies to the whole church and to every member of it” (CO 43:186; Calvin, 2:434); on Hab 3:8: “feel assured that [God] would not act otherwise toward the church to the end of the world than what he had done from the beginning” (CO 43:574; Calvin, 4:150); on Zech 1:16: “This doctrine ought also to be extended to the state of the church at all times” (CO 44:147; Calvin, 5:49); on Zech 3:10: “But as this promise is to be extended to the whole kingdom of Christ, what is said ought to be applied to that spiritual peace that we enjoy when we are fully persuaded that God is reconciled to us…” (CO 44:180; Calvin, 5:104); on Zech 14:4: “It is fitting for us now to apply to ourselves what is here said, for Zechariah did not speak only for the men of his age or for those of the next generation, but he intended to furnish the church with confidence until the end of the world so that the faithful might not faint under trials” (CO 44:364; Calvin, 5:410); and on Mal 3:2: “There is here a part stated for the whole, for the promise belongs to the whole church” (CO 44:463; Calvin, 5:572). 62 See CO 43:455, 44:155 – 56, 169, 187, 190, 326; Calvin, 3:432; 5:62 – 63, 84, 114, 119, 347 – 48.

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Calvin, about the necessity of rightly receiving God’s discipline, the nature of true repentance, the need of critical self-examination, patience in adversity, and the responsibility to guard and maintain purity of worship.63 Hence, for Calvin, both the rebukes and the promises applied to those in the prophet’s own time, to the church of apostolic times, to the church of Calvin’s day, and, indeed, to the church from the beginning until the end of time. Implications for Theology, Prophetic Self-Awareness & Christological Exegesis These differences between Luther and Calvin pertaining to the chief subject matter, the prime duty of the prophet, and the understanding of the prophet’s vision of sacred history in their interpretations of the Minor Prophets have significant implications for the specific theological doctrines and teachings each found, the prophetic self-awareness each held, and their practices of christological exegesis of the Minor Prophets.64 Luther’s views of the chief 63 On receiving discipline, see CO 42:246 – 47, 257 – 58, 315; 44:28 – 29, 33, 145; Calvin, 1:108, 124 – 25, 209; 4:228 – 29, 235 – 36; 5:46. On true repentance, see CO 42:233, 396 – 97, 410; 43:67, 235 – 36, 413 – 14; 44:88 – 89; Calvin, 1:89, 331 – 32, 352; 2:244 – 45; 3:74 – 75, 375 – 77; 4:331. On necessity of self-examination, see CO 42:381, 465; 44:466 – 67, 478; Calvin, 1:308 – 309, 436; 5:578, 597. On patience in adversity, see CO 43:439, 491 – 92, 587 – 88; 44:358, 483 – 85; Calvin, 3:421, 506 – 507, 4:174 – 75, 5:400 – 401, 606 – 609. For a few examples on guarding and maintaining purity of worship, see CO 43:100, 564; 44:9 – 10; Calvin, 2:298, 4:133, 196. 64 It also has implications for how Jews were interpreted in these prophecies. Affirming that both Luther and Calvin represent forms of anti-Judaism, their different views of Old Testament prophecy did lead to noticeable differences in how Jews were treated in their exegesis of Old Testament prophecy. Luther’s emphasis on a clear separation between the physical kingdom (Jews, physical Israel) and the spiritual kingdom (Christ and the church) lead him frequently to use these prophecies to confirm that the Jews and their physical kingdom are utterly rejected and abandoned by God. See WA 13:5, 6, 17, 192, 202, 300, 325, 488 – 89, 540, 542, 569 – 70, 570, 601 – 602, 606, 644, 648, 649, 653, 676, 681, 683, 699; 19:187, 193 – 94, 250 – 52, 353, 360 – 61, 371, 374 – 75; 23:576, 579, 581, 588 – 89, 640, 655; LW 18:6, 8, 20, 173, 185, 186, 208 – 209, 249, 332, 381, 383, 391, 396, 398, 415, 417; 19:37, 40, 102 – 103, 103 – 104, 155, 163, 172, 176 – 77; 20:27, 28, 60, 66, 116, 123 – 24, 130, 243, 247, 250, 258, 319, 337. Furthermore, explicitly negative mentions of Jews come up far more frequently in his anti-Catholic rhetoric. See, for a few examples, WA 13:184 – 85, 303, 543, 596 – 97, 655; 23:636; LW 18:162 – 65, 212, 213, 386; 20:54, 55, 56, 133, 314. On the other hand, since Calvin read the Jews and Israelites to which these prophecies were directed as part of the one church, he was significantly much less inclined to emphasize these prophecies as specifically signaling Jewish rejection of Christ. Rather, when he saw the threat of rejection or punishment, he was more inclined to apply that as a warning to the whole church, which included applying them to Protestant churches of his own day to stay faithful lest they find themselves no longer situated in God’s faithful remnant. However, the one place where there was a notable anti-Jewish tone toward contemporary Jewry is in his interpretation of Malachi. See CO 44:419, 430, 446, 498; Calvin, 5:498 – 99, 516, 543, 631. This might be explained by the fact that Calvin treated Malachi differently from the other Minor Prophets—as a prophet sent to the Jews specifically to foretell the first coming of Christ and denounce Jewish unbelief, rather than the larger providential vision of the history of the whole church that characterized his exegesis of the other eleven prophets. Amy Plantiga Pauw also argues that Calvin “very rarely used Isaiah’s

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subject matter as Christ and the Gospel and the prophet as first and foremost a preacher led him to find abundant and powerful theological insights concerning right understandings of faith and works, the contrast of Law and Gospel, and justification by faith alone. Thus, to be clear, while Luther was significantly less likely than Calvin to read the prophecies of the Minor Prophets with the tool of analogy in order to apply them to the church in every age, he most certainly found compelling theological lessons that resounded in and beyond his time. For Luther, these sermons of the Minor Prophets contained compelling declarations of the right understanding of faith and salvation. Thus, according to Luther, Hosea announced the distinction between Law and Gospel and justification by faith alone.65 Joel, Jonah, and Haggai pronounced the contrast between Law and Gospel and faith and works,66 while the key proclamations of Amos and Obadiah were the condemnation of works and the necessity of faith for salvation.67 Micah, especially, preached justification by faith alone,68 and the description of true faith in contrast to works comprised the core messages of Nahum and Habakkuk.69 And Malachi proclaimed justification by faith alone and the right function of Law to reveal sin. Zechariah, above all, expounded upon every one of these central theological insights.70 There is certainly some overlap between Luther and Calvin concerning the theological content of the Minor Prophets, for Calvin also ascertained teachings about the right understanding of faith and works. They both also highlighted the general consolation offered in the Minor Prophets’ assertions of God’s ability to save God’s people despite any circumstance.71 Yet, since for Calvin the prime subject matter was Law and the chief duty of the prophet was to teach, interpret and apply that Law for the church across the ages, Calvin

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reproaches of Israel as the basis for invidious comparisons between Jews and Christians.” See “‘Becoming a Part of Israel’: John Calvin’s Exegesis of Isaiah,” in “As Those Who are Taught”: The Interpretation of Isaiah from the LXX to the SBL, eds. Claire Mathews McGinnis and Patricia K. Tull (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literatures, 2006), 215. See WA 13:6, 10, 10 – 11, 13, 15, 27 – 28, 54 – 55. LW 18:8, 11, 12 – 13, 16, 17, 19, 31 – 33, 61 – 62. WA 13:100, 113 – 14, 115 – 19, 122, 243, 244, 246 – 47, 251, 253 – 54, 543; 19:193 – 94, 198 – 200, 219, 230 – 31, 238 – 39. LW 18: 96, 111 – 12, 114 – 19, 122 – 23, 385; 19:5 – 6, 8, 11 – 13, 20, 23 – 25, 40 – 41, 46 – 48, 68, 80, 88 – 90. WA 13:171, 180, 181, 186, 217. LW 18:144, 158, 159, 161, 166, 196. WA 13:331 – 32, 333 – 34, 342 – 43. LW 18:259, 261, 262 – 63, 276 – 77. See WA 13:372, 372 – 73, 431, 434; 19:364, 393, 394; LW 18:282, 284; 19:119, 123 – 24, 166, 196, 197. That is, he expounded on Law versus Gospel, faith versus works, the nature of true faith, and justification by faith alone. See WA 13:551, 643, 648 – 51, 662 – 63; 23:485 – 87, 507, 508, 576, 591 – 93, 608 – 609, 613, 616 – 17, 617, 619, 627 – 28, 632, 637 – 38, 640; LW 20:9, 115, 122 – 26, 144, 156 – 57, 164, 165 – 66, 244, 261 – 63, 263 – 64, 282, 287, 290 – 91, 292, 294, 304, 309, 310, 315 – 16, 319. WA 13:159 – 60, 248 – 49, 378, 393 – 94, 547 – 48; 19:222, 224, 231. LW 18:128, 291, 315; 19:15, 71, 73, 82; 20:4 – 5. CO 42:257 – 58, 43:62, 381, 435 – 36, 439, 445, 455 – 56, 491 – 92, 573, 574, 575; 44:28 – 29, 31, 45 – 46, 147, 149, 155 – 56, 180, 326; Calvin, 1:124 – 25; 2:238; 3:321, 413 – 14, 421, 432, 448, 506 – 507; 4:148, 150, 153, 228 – 29, 234, 259; 5:49, 53, 62 – 63, 103 – 104, 347 – 48.

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highlighted different theological teachings. He constantly drew an analogy between the historical circumstances of the Old Testament prophet and God’s interactions with the biblical people, the church of Calvin’s era, and the church across the ages. This entailed for Calvin a particular three-step technique in rightly reading the Minor Prophets: one must begin by uncovering the Old Testament prophet’s design or intention, discern the ways the biblical prophet applied it to his day, and then by analogy draw applications for the church of one’s own time.72 Thus, Calvin’s lectures on the Minor Prophets were filled to the brim with precisely these three steps. Calvin’s theological teachings, then, focused upon the nature of true worship, precautions against corruption of worship, and exhortations to receive God’s discipline and practice true repentance, self-examination, and patience in adversity.73 Furthermore, his conception of the prophet’s unified vision of sacred history lead him to expound upon the teaching of God’s providence. Such a unified vision of sacred history had the doctrine of providence at its core, for above all what Calvin wanted the church of his time—but also for the church of all times—to grasp and seize with faith was the conviction of God’s providential care of the church in any age and circumstance.74 Furthermore, there is a direct correlation between Luther and Calvin’s differing conceptions of the Old Testament prophets’ subject matter, duty, and vision of sacred history and the differences in the prophetic self-awareness of each. As scholars have already shown, Luther understood himself as a prophet for his time. He and others understood him to be called as a prophet bearing a message for a church in dire need of the preaching of the Gospel and clarity concerning the doctrine of justification by faith alone, which entailed correcting certain views about faith, works, Law and Gospel.75 Calvin, on the 72 For a more detailed study of the significance of Calvin’s concern for the Old Testament’s prophet’s “design” [consilium], see G. Sujin Pak, “Calvin on the Shared Design of the Old and New Testament Authors: The Case of the Minor Prophets,” Westminster Theological Journal 72.2 (Fall 2011): 255 – 72. 73 See note 68. 74 See, for examples, CO 42:218, 255, 352, 475, 504 – 505; 43:275, 344 – 45, 368 – 69, 415, 435 – 36, 445, 455 – 56, 491 – 92, 536, 577 – 79; 44:42, 92 – 93, 120 – 22, 144, 203, 208 – 209, 233, 260, 268, 302, 307, 355 – 56; Calvin, 1:66, 121 – 22, 264, 450, 494 – 95; 3:137, 260, 300 – 301, 378, 394 – 95, 413 – 14, 432, 448, 506 – 507; 4:85, 156 – 59, 254, 338 – 39, 358, 384, 385, 386; 5:44, 141 – 42, 150, 190, 234, 248, 308, 315 – 16, 397 – 98. 75 For Luther’s prophetic self-awareness, see Helmar Junghans, Der junge Luther und die Humanisten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985), 304 – 13; Karl Holl, “Martin Luther on Luther,” in Interpreters of Luther : Essays in Honor of Wilhelm Pauck, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968), 9 – 34; and especially Robert Kolb’s Martin Luther as Prophet, Teacher, and Hero: Images of the Reformer, 1520 – 1620 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999). Kolb writes, “Luther’s concept of himself as a prophet differed, therefore, from the medieval eschatological vision of the prophet who was to come. His claims to the calling of apostle or prophet rested solely on his proclamation of the gospel … he saw himself as a prophetic man of action with a positive mission of preaching God’s truth embodied in Christ and a negative mission of op-

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other hand, understood himself to be doing for his own congregation precisely what the Old Testament prophet was doing for his audience—that is, interpreting and applying God’s Word to the contemporary needs of the church.76 Thus, that Luther’s lectures on the Minor Prophets were filled with teachings concerning the contrasts of faith/works and Law/Gospel and that Calvin’s lectures were filled with contemporary applications for the Reformed churches of Geneva is eminently consistent with each of their understandings of the nature and function of prophecy, as well as the prophetic self-awareness of each. The practice of christological exegesis of prophecy is another key issue for which Luther and Calvin’s differing understandings of the Old Testament prophet’s content, duty and view of history have immediate consequence. As formerly set forth, Luther’s exegesis of the Minor Prophets was extensively christological, which of course is consistent with his identification of the prophet as a preacher who announced the disclosure of Christ and the Gospel to defeat reliance on works and the Law. Thus, for Luther the central and overwhelming subjects of these prophecies were Christ, Christ’s kingdom, and the Gospel. As would be expected, then, he whole-heartedly concurred with the christological readings of every prophecy of the Minor Prophets cited by the New Testament in reference to Christ.77 Indeed, to these he added numerous other passages in the Minor Prophets that applied to Christ. Quantitatively, Calvin offered far less explicit christological exegesis of the Minor Prophets than Luther. Moreover, he even quibbled with the christological interpretations church fathers gave to many of those passages cited in reference to Christ by New Testament authors. Most significant in Calvin’s objections to the traditional ways these prophecies had been read in reference to Christ was his insistence that these prophecies should not be read solely in reference to Christ but applied to the whole church. In other words, he did not posing the enemies of the faith, who were embodied in the papal system” (31, 32). Hence, some have argued for this as an apostolic awareness. See Timothy J. Wengert, “Martin Luther’s Movement toward an Apostolic Awareness as Reflected in his Early Letters,” Lutherjahrbuch 61 (1994): 71 – 92. See also Mark U. Edwards Jr., Luther and the False Brethren (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 112 – 26. 76 For studies of Calvin’s prophetic self awareness, see Alexandre Ganoczy, Le Jeune Calvine: GenÀse et evolution de sa vocation r¦formatrice (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1966), 336 – 68 and “Calvin avait-il conscience de reformer d’Êglise?” Revue de Th¦ologie et de Philosophie 118 (1986): 172 – 77; Richard Stauffer, “Les Discours — la premiÀre personne dans les sermons de Calvin,” in InterprÀtes de la Bible: Êtudes sur les Reformateurs du XVIe siÀcle (Paris: Beauchesne, 1980), 185 – 93; Olivier Millet, Calvin et la dynamique de la parole Êtude de rh¦torique reform¦e (Paris: Champion, 1992), 268 – 79 and 324 – 29; and Engammare, “Calvin: A Prophet without a Prophecy.” Engammare sets forth three ways in which Calvin was a prophet: as an interpreter of Scripture, as an advisor to political powers, and as one who had a special vocation from God (645). 77 WA 13:63 – 64, 64, 108 – 14, 257 – 58, 324, 426 – 27, 625 – 31, 665 – 68, 692 – 93; 23:656. LW 18:71 – 72, 74, 105 – 12, 247, 408 – 409; 19:31, 111; 20:94 – 100, 148 – 51, 338.

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necessarily reject the christological reading per se so much as he insisted that it must be extended to include the whole church.78

Conclusion: Implications for Ongoing Role of Prophecy in the Church? This study of Luther and Calvin’s views concerning the nature and function of prophecy in the Minor Prophets has argued that while there are several important shared convictions, there are significant differences in their understandings of the prophetic content, duty and vision of sacred history that pivot around their differing central theological commitments—such as Luther’s commitment to the distinction of Law and Gospel and Calvin’s commitment to the ongoing role of the Law and doctrine of providence. It should be noted that a study of biblical prophetic texts such as Daniel and the Apocalypse of John lead to slightly different conclusions, precisely because of their genre as “apocalyptic” literature. Concerning these, scholars have noted that Calvin insisted that a text such as the Book of Daniel is not about the End Times (i. e., the second advent of Christ), but about the first advent of Christ, whereas Luther and other Lutherans viewed it as a prophecy of the future eschaton.79 Thus, in such a case, one might argue that it is now Luther who has 78 Examples where Calvin argued that the prophecies should not be read solely concerning Christ include: on Hos 11:1, Calvin wrote, “In the first place it must be remembered that Christ cannot be separated from his church, as the body will be mutilated and imperfect without a head. Whatever then happened formerly in the church ought at length to be fulfilled by the Head” (CO 42:433; Calvin, 1:387). On Zech 9:9, Calvin insisted concerning the phrase “just and saved is he” that it makes no sense to apply this to Christ alone, since Christ is not in need of salvation; rather it must be applied to the condition of the church (Co 44:271; Calvin, 5:254). Likewise, Calvin rejected the traditional reading of addressing Zech 9:11 to Christ, for it addresses the whole church (CO 44:275; Calvin, 5:260). On Zech 13:7, as well, Calvin insisted that “shepherd” does not refer solely to Christ but to all shepherds, that is, to all pastors of the church (CO 44:354; Calvin, 5:395). See also his comments on Hab 2:2 – 3: “Many confine this to the coming of Christ… but it is one thing to take a passage in a restricted sense as applying to Christ himself and another thing to set forth those promises that refer to the preservation of the church” (CO 43:524; Calvin, 4:66) and his comments on Mic 4:11 – 13: “But they have refined too much in allegories who have thought that this prophecy ought to be confined to the time of Christ, for the prophet no doubt mean to extend consolation to the whole kingdom of Christ from the beginning to the end” (CO 43:362; Calvin, 3:289). 79 See especially Barbara Pitkin’s article on the distinctiveness of Calvin’s readings of the book of Daniel in “Prophecy and History in Calvin’s Lectures on Daniel (1561),” 323 – 47. See also W. Stanford Reid, “The Four Monarchies of Daniel in Reformation Historiography,” Historical Reflections 8/1 (1981): 115 – 23. Anthony Grafton gives an account of Jean Bodin’s rejection of the use of Daniel’s four empires to read history (What was History? 167 – 75). As I have stated before, neither Luther nor Calvin viewed the prophecies of the Minor Prophets apocalyptically ; rather, Luther viewed them as prophesying the first advent of Christ. Calvin viewed some of the prophecies as prophesying the first advent of Christ, but more often applied the language of “extension” outlined above. However, Calvin tended to view the whole of Malachi, in particular, as a prophecy of the first advent of Christ.

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the ongoing, dynamic view of prophecy, rather than Calvin who viewed it as a prophecy of the past!80 Of course, a more thorough study of Luther and Calvin on prophecy would have to take these other texts and factors into account; yet this study reveals that when the apocalyptic factor is taken out of the equation, there are other significant distinctions to be made. Another important question, as well, addresses Luther and Calvin’s views concerning the possibilities and nature of a continuing function of prophecy in the church after apostolic times. This question is too large to attend to thoroughly here; however, I would like to highlight some ways in which their interpretations of the Minor Prophets resonate with some of Luther and Calvin’s statements concerning the ongoing function of prophecy in the church. When Luther spoke about a contemporary function of prophecy in the church, he set forth four basic parameters. First, he maintained that the office of preaching is the foundation of all other functions, offices and gifts in the church.81 In this way, Luther’s identification of preaching as the Old Testament’s prophet’s primary duty is consistent with his view of offices and duties in the church more broadly. Secondly, though the ministry of God’s Word belongs to all in the priesthood of all believers, the authority to exercise this ministry publicly belongs only to those who are commissioned and called by God—a point also highlighted by his understanding of the Old Testament prophet’s authority.82 Third, Luther introduced the function of the prophet for scriptural interpretation specifically within the contemporary context. At first glance this looks like a new addition to his understanding of the Old Testament prophet’s function, in which one does not necessarily find an overt emphasis of the prophet as an interpreter. Concerning rightly practiced, ongoing prophecy in the church, however, Luther prominently interspersed descriptions of preaching with teaching and interpretation. For example, in an explanation of I Cor 14 in his treatise against Infiltrating and Clandestine Preachers (1532), Luther wrote, “In this passage Paul is speaking of the prophets who are to teach, not of the people who are to listen. For prophets are teachers who have the office of preaching in the churches.”83 Yet, Luther recognized the need to clarify that not all preachers are prophets and not all interpreters of Scripture are prophets. Instead, a fourth parameter may be seen in his insistence upon the knowledge of biblical languages as something that is distinctive about the office of the prophet, particularly for the ongoing, valid practice of prophecy in post-apostolic times. Luther set apart the contemporary prophet as a keeper of doctrinal purity through the knowledge of biblical languages: 80 However, Barbara Pitkin’s study of Calvin’s lectures on Daniel shows that Calvin continued to read a text like Daniel with the tool of analogy. See Pitkin, 325, 337, 340, 344 – 45. 81 WA 12:191; LW 40:36. 82 WA 12:189, 30/3:520 – 21; LW 40:34, 386 – 87. 83 WA 30/3: 522; LW 40:388.

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[I]t is one thing with the unlettered preacher of faith and quite another with the interpreter of the Scriptures, or the prophet, as St. Paul calls the latter. The unlettered preacher … in the vernacular … can understand Christ and his doctrine, lead a holy life himself, and preach all this to others; but to set forth the sense of the Scriptures … to do battle against heretics and errorists, this can never come about except with the help of the languages. Accordingly, we must ever in the Christian church have such prophets who shall study and expound the Scriptures and … be stalwart champions of the faith … Hence, the languages are of the first necessity to pure Christianity, as they are the source of the power that resides in prophets or commentators.84

Of central importance here is the overlap this has with his understandings of the office and function of the Minor Prophets. In finding the teachings of justification by faith alone and the proper distinctions between faith/works and Law/Gospel, Luther essentially viewed the Minor Prophets as explicating Scripture to fight heresy and be “champions of faith.” Moreover, the assertion that knowledge of biblical languages is necessary to read Scripture well reinforces and illuminates Luther’s concern with the prophets’ language throughout the Minor Prophets. For Luther, the continuity of ongoing, contemporary prophecy with biblical prophecy centered upon the modern prophet’s defense of sound doctrine through an act of preaching (or teaching) that is founded upon his knowledge of the biblical languages. Indeed, is this not exactly how Luther conceived of his own prophetic calling?85 There is, perhaps, even more explicit continuity between Calvin’s conceptions of the Old Testament prophet and the ongoing function of prophecy in the church. Calvin described the prophet as one who not only taught but who specifically applied Scripture to the current needs of the church. Just as the Old Testament prophets showed biblical Israel how to apply the Law to the new setting of exile or captivity, so the post-apostolic church should attend to this model and these teachings to discern how to practice ongoing prophecy through the application of Scripture to the present day. Hence, in order to understand how prophecy might function for the church of post-apostolic times, Calvin delineated Paul’s account of prophecy as a gift of the Spirit in I Cor 14 in this way : 84 WA 15:40; LW 45:363. This translation is from Karl von Raumer. 85 One might note that it was very important to Luther to have persons skilled in the biblical languages positioned in Wittenberg University to teach and guide others and specifically for the task of biblical translation. Stephen Burnett cites the account given by Johannes Mathesius about a meeting of the translation committee in Wittenberg in 1540: “Dr. Martin Luther came … with the Old Latin and New German Bible in addition to the Hebrew text. Herr Philip [Melanchthon] brought the Greek text, and Dr. Cruciger both the Hebrew Bible and the Targum” (“Reassessing the ‘Basel-Wittenberg Conflict’: Dimensions of the Reformation-Era Discussion of Hebrew Scholarship” in Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe eds. Allison P. Coudert and Jeffrey S. Shoulson [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004], 194). Hebrew scholars at Wittenberg in the sixteenth century included Matthaeus Adrianus, Johannes Boeschstein, Johannes Forster, and Matthaeus Goldhahn.

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I am certain, in my own mind, that he [Paul] means by prophets, not those endowed with the gift of foretelling, but those who were blessed with the unique gift of dealing with Scripture, not only by interpreting it, but also by the wisdom they showed in making it meet the needs of the hour … when he defines the work of the prophet … he says that [the prophet] devotes himself to consolation, encouragement, and teaching. From this verse let us therefore learn that prophets are outstanding interpreters of Scripture and men endowed with extraordinary wisdom and aptitude for grasping what the immediate need of the church is and speaking the right word to meet it. … The difference between them [prophets] and teachers can be pointed out, that the task of teachers consists in preserving and propagating sound doctrines so that purity of religion may remain in the church … I have a reason for not sharing in the opinion of those who confine the task of the prophet to the interpretation of the scriptures … In a word, my view is that the prophets referred to here are those who are skilful and experienced in making known the will of God by applying prophecies, threats, promises, and all the teaching of Scripture to the current needs of the church.86

I believe my account of Calvin’s understanding of the nature and function of prophecy in the Minor Prophets resonates strongly with this statement of the ongoing function of prophecy, for Calvin already understood the primary task of the Minor Prophets not as one of foretelling nor simply as interpreting, but specifically as making “known the will of God by applying prophecies, threats, promises, and all the teaching of Scripture to the current needs of the church.” Thus, when Calvin wrote in the Institutes about “an end to all the prophecies,”87 this statement was more about the perfection of Christ’s manifestation and teaching than a comment on the ongoing function of prophecy in the church. It is Christ and the Gospel who is this “wisdom” that is “perfect in all its parts.” One cannot annex something extra to the Gospel, but should be content with the Gospel and realize that the perfection and completion of prophecy is found in it.88 In this way there is no “new” prophetic content after the manifestation of Christ and the Gospel, but this does not mean for Calvin that there was no longer any ongoing function of prophecy. Rather, his comments in the beginning of book four of the Institutes provided strong arguments to the contrary. Calvin maintained that just as God instructed God’s ancient people through human means, so God “is pleased to instruct us in the present day by human means.” Just as in ancient days God gave the people priests and interpreters, so “in the present day [God] would 86 CO 49:506 – 507; Calvin, The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, 271. 87 Institutes 2.15.2. 88 Calvin wrote, “[B]y the perfection of doctrine that he brought, an end was put to all the prophecies, so that those who, not contented with the Gospel, annex somewhat extraneous to it, derogate from its authority … it is unlawful to go beyond the simplicity of the Gospel. The purpose of this prophetical dignity in Christ is to teach us that in the doctrine that he delivered is substantially included a wisdom that is perfect in all its parts” (Institutes 2.15.2).

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not only have us to be attentive to reading but has also appointed masters to give us assistance.”89 Furthermore, Calvin maintained that there were clear reasons that God should choose to act in this way. The use of human interpreters—or prophets as he called them in his comment on I Cor 14— provides a clear test of obedience, a lesson in which the church can learn to obey God’s ministers as they should obey God. Furthermore, speaking through these human interpreters is the way in which God can speak “familiarly” and make God’s message more accessible to human weakness. Perhaps most importantly, Calvin argued, “[T]here is no other bond by which the saints can be kept together than by uniting with one consent to observe the order that God has appointed in his church for learning and making progress,”90 namely, God’s ordination of human interpreters, teachers, and/or prophets in the church.91 While Calvin did not always consistently define “prophecy” in the Institutes,92 in his insistence that the church listen to and obey the human instructors ordained by God to apply Scripture to the current needs of the church, one can certainly hear echoes of Calvin’s own prophetic self-awareness and confidence in his authority. Indeed, it comes as no surprise, then, that when Calvin interpreted the Minor Prophets, he was acting as a prophet himself; he sought to make “known the will of God by applying prophecies, threats, promises, and all the teaching of Scripture to the current needs of the church.”93

89 Institutes 4.1.5. 90 Ibid. 91 Likewise, Calvin wrote in Institutes 4.3.2 after a long quotation of Eph 4:4 – 16 (concerning the gifts and offices of the church): “By these words he shows that the ministry of men, which God employs in governing the church, is a principal bond by which believers are kept together in one body. … By the ministers to whom he has committed this office and given grace to discharge it, he dispenses and distributes his gifts to the church and thus exhibits himself as in a manner actually present by exerting the energy of his Spirit in this his institution… In this way, the renewal of the saints is accomplished and the body of Christ is edified; in this way we grow up in all things unto Him who is the Head and unite with one another; in this way, we are all brought into the unity of Christ, provided prophecy flourishes among us, provided we receive his apostles and despise not the doctrine that is administered to us. Whoever, therefore, studies to abolish this order and kind of government of which we speak, or disparages it as of minor importance, plots the devastation, or rather the ruin and destruction, of the church.” 92 In Institutes 2.15.2, Calvin connected the office of teaching with prophecy. Likewise, in his comments in Institutes 4.1.5 he spoke of teaching and prophecy together: “in all ages prophets and pious teachers have had a difficult context to maintain with the ungodly,” after which he continued his comments on Eph 4:10 – 13 that the church should observe the order appointed by God for the church’s learning and progress. And likewise, in his comments on Eph 4:4 – 16 in Institutes 4.3.2 – 3 there is a kind of conflation of prophecy and teaching (“provided that prophecy flourishes among us”). Yet, in Institutes 4.3.4 he wrote that only pastors and teachers have “an ordinary office in the church” and that prophets, apostles and evangelists were raised up at the beginning of Christ’s kingdom and only now “occasionally” when the “necessity of times” requires it. 93 CO 49:506; Calvin, The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, 271.

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David M. Whitford

‘Forgetting him selfe after a most filthie and shamefull sorte’1: Martin Luther and John Calvin on Genesis 9 On 4 November 1954, the Rev. Dr. Guy T. Gillespie, who had just retired as the president of Bellhaven College, rose to preach before the Presbyterian Synod of Mississippi. He chose Genesis 9 as his biblical text. Speaking just six months after the landmark Brown v Board of Education decision in May 1954, Gillespie did not hide from this matter of national importance. Instead, he declared forcefully to those present that America was at an important crossroads in its national existence: It is essentially a choice between the Anglo-Saxon ideal of racial integrity maintained by a consistent application of the principle of segregation, and the Communist goal of amalgamation, implemented by the wiping out of all distinctions and the fostering of the most intimate contact between the races in all the relations of life.2

In this choice between the Anglo-Saxon ideal racial integrity and the Communist goal of amalgamation, God himself and Natural Law are not indifferent, according to Dr. Gillespie. Natural Law might best be summed up, according to him, with the adage, “birds of a feather flock together.” God’s countenance against amalgamation is found in Genesis 9: After the flood the three sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, became the progenitors of three distinct racial groups which were to repeople and overspread the earth. The descendents of Shem migrated eastward and occupied most of Asia; the descendents of Japheth migrated westward and ultimately occupied the continent of Europe, while the children of Ham moved generally southward toward the tropics and occupied the continent of Africa … This brief record, the accuracy of which has not been successfully disputed by the anthropologists and ethnologists, while affirming the unity of the race, also implies that an all-wise Providence has ‘determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.’ Which same Providence by determining the climatic and other physical conditions under which many successive generations of the several racial groups should live, is thereby equally

1 John Calvin, A Commentarie of Iohn Caluine, Vpon the First Booke of Moses Called Genesis, ed., trans. Thomas Tymme (London: Henry Middleton, 1578), 227. 2 Guy T. Gillespie, Christian View on Segregation, (Greenwood, MS: Education Fund of the Citizens’ Councils, 1954), 2.

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responsible for the distinct racial characteristics which are chiefly responsible for the segregation of racial groups acoss the centuries and in our time.3

As Gillespie’s appeal to anthropologists and ethnologists makes clear, Gillespie believed that a literal reading of Genesis 9 required racial segregation. Though race is never mentioned a single time in Genesis 9, this text via the so-called “Curse of Ham” demonstrated to President Gillespie that God had intended the races to be separate and discriminate. The “Curse of Ham” is based on the story of Genesis 9 in which Ham, one Noah’s sons, sees his father’s nakedness, and in response Noah curses Ham’s son, Canaan, to slavery. Though Ham is not cursed and race is never mentioned in the biblical text, the “second curse (or fall) of Ham” became an ideological and theological defense for African slavery and then American segregation. I have been particularly interested in how the Curse of Ham came to be focused so intensely on Africans and African-Americans specifically. In The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era, I explored both cultural and exegetical traditions surrounding the text.4 In this essay, I would like to take the opportunity to explore another aspect of the tradition that was not investigated deeply in that book – the homiletic tradition. In the book, I argued that the “Curse of Ham” as we know it today became possible because Genesis 9 is fundamentally a text of opportunity. It is remarkably short, but is asked to carry an enormous amount of etiological freight. It records the refounding of human community on the earth after the Deluge. During the Renaissance and Reformation, this text underwent a number of dramatic modifications that had enormous unintended consequences. Long calcified medieval traditions broke apart creating a period of interpretive fluidity. The myth of the African Ham cursed in his progeny to eternal bondage was still unknown in 1500 and even 1550. It was, by no means, the only possible interpretation of the text that might have emerged from the early modern period. But by 1700 it was the predominate interpretation and by 1800 almost the only one. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth century, a number of hermeneutical shifts made this possible. The two most important shifts are the abandonment of medieval interpretations and a new focus on the literal sense of the text. Let me be clear, however, at the very beginning. I am not arguing that these hermeneutical moves created the Curse of Ham myth. What I have argued is that they created the space for that myth to take form. In what follows, it is my aim to test whether or not these exegetical and cultural tendencies can be seen in the homiletic work of Martin Luther and John Calvin.

3 Gillespie, Christian View on Segregation, 9. 4 David Whitford, The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era: The Bible and Justifications for Slavery, St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).

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Martin Luther Martin Luther’s earliest homiletic forays into Genesis 9 that we know of come from sermons preached in 1519.5 In these early sermons, Luther emerges as a preacher who is both deeply conversant with the medieval traditions of the text while simultaneously feeling free to set aside part of that tradition. As Genesis 9 records, after the land dried and the ark landed, Noah and his family emerged from the ark, received the blessing of God and the assurance of the rainbow. Soon afterward, Noah began to till the earth and planted a vineyard. Harvesting the grapes, he drank the wine, became drunk, and lay in his tent uncovered. As both Roland Bainton and John Thompson have examined in great detail, the seemingly sinful behavior of notable Patriarchs caused much consternation to many medieval preachers and exegetes. The most common solution to this conundrum was to explain away the sinful behavior. There were a number of devices used to exonerate Noah. Perhaps the most common excuse offered in defense of Noah was that, as the first man to plant a vineyard, he did not realize that the fruit of the vine had inebriating qualities. This tradition actually stretches back to at least Origen and could be found in the Glossa Ordinaria and Lyra as well as many medieval sermons.6 After explaining Noah’s drunkenness, a second excuse was required to explain his nakedness. Though its origin is unknown, one of the most popular explanations for Noah’s nakedness appears almost simultaneously in the work of two friends and colleagues – Peter Comestor and Peter the Chanter. They both note that Noah lay naked in his tent because underpants had not yet been invented.7 The beautifully illustrated compendium of late medieval preaching – the Egerton Genesis contains both of these excuses for Noah’s behavior.8 For unexplained reasons, here in 1519, Luther passes over in silence these very common expository aspects of the text. Instead of discussing the behavior of Noah, Luther focuses all of his attention on the actions of Noah’s son Ham. While there were broader exegetical and social or political interpretations of Genesis 9 in the medieval era – for example, the legal association between the three sons of Noah and the three medieval estates – homiletically, one theme dominated – the allegorical association between Ham’s mocking of Noah and the Jew’s mocking of Christ. This theme can be found in Augustine,

5 For the dating of these sermons, see Heinrich Bornkamm, Luther and the Old Testament, ed. & trans. Eric Gritsch and Ruth Gritsch, 2 ed. (Mifflintown, PA: Sigler, 1997), 229. 6 See, for example, Textus Biblia: Glosa Ordinaria, Nicolai De Lyra Postilla…Prima Pars, (Basel: Froben, 1506), 56r. 7 Peter Comestor, Scholastica Historia Magistri Petri Comestoris, ed. (Argentorati [Strasbourg]: Husner, 1500), B4v. See also, PL 198: 1087. 8 M.R. James, ed., Illustrations of the Book of Genesis: Being a Complete Reproduction in Facsimile of the Manuscript, British Museum Egerton (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1921), 14.

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Jerome, Hugh of St. Cher, Lyra, the Glossa Ordinaria, and others. The Venerable Bede has an excellent summary of this analogy : For in this passage Moses, who is telling the story of Noah and his sons, signifies figuratively the passion of the Lord …The Lord drank the wine when he took the chalice of the passion. He was made drunk by drinking when through suffering for us he came to extreme death. He was uncovered in his tent when he endured abuses and derision and submitted to the ultimate torment of the cross among the people of the Jews…Ham, who laughed when he saw his father’s private parts were uncovered signifies the insulting and incredulous Jewish people.”9

Over time, this tradition became immensely popular. For example, it was summarized in a commonplace couplet: Ham laughed when he saw the shameful nakedness of his parent/The Jews laughed at the pain of the dying God.10 It can also be found in preaching manuals such as the nearly ubiquitous Biblia Pauperum, almost all of which contain a page illustrating the mocking of Christ together with a picture of Ham mocking Noah. On the same page with these two images, one reads, “Noah signifies Christ, when the Jews laughed at and scorned him and crowned him and stripped him.”11 In both of the 1519 sermons, Luther embraces this tradition. In the first sermon, Noah/Christ is ridiculed by Ham/Jews.12 According to Luther, Ham was scandalized by Noah’s drunkenness as the Jews were scandalized by the cross. When Noah awoke from his slumber, he cursed Canaan and blessed Shem and Japheth. Similarly, Christ when he arose, cursed the Jews to be the servants of Japheth. What Luther means here is that Judaism has been set aside in favor of Gentile Christianity. In a final bow to medieval interpretation, Luther ends by noting that Ham, himself, is not cursed because he could not be cursed by Noah for he had already been blessed by God when the family first left the ark. Luther’s second sermon from 1519 continues the allegorical connection between Noah and Christ. In a slight turn of interpretation, Ham is now envisioned as a faithless son of Noah, as many Jews were faithless before Christ. Shem, largely ignored in the first sermon, is regarded as the embodiment of faithful Jews – the apostles and disciples of Christ. Japheth, as in the earlier sermon, represents Gentile Christians. Thus, in these two 1519 sermons we see that early in the Reformation, Luther has stayed close to the medieval tradition. There is no sense in which he 9 Bede, On Genesis, ed., trans. Calvin B. Kendall (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 209. See also, CCSL 118 A: 136 – 37. 10 Cham ridet dum nuda videt pudibunda parentis; iudei risere dei penam morientis. For an excellent discussion of the Ham couplet, see Sabrina Longland, “A Literary Aspect of the Bury St. Edmunds Cross,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 2 (1969). Here quoting from p. 45. 11 Avril Henry, Biblia Pauperum: A Facsimile Edition (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 94. Biblia Pauperum (Bamberg: n.p., 1463), 21: “Noe christum significant quem iudei deridentis ipsum coronauerunt et denudauerunt.” 12 WA 9: 349 – 50; WA 9: 421.

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is shaping his message either for the particular audience to which he is speaking or to reflect the theological concerns of the emerging Reformation. In fact, by 1523, new avenues of interpretation which would help guide Protestant thought regarding Genesis 9 can already been seen in Luther’s next sermon series on Genesis. If in 1519, Luther passed quietly by Noah’s behavior, now in 1523 he focuses in on it almost immediately. Luther begins by shunning the belief that Noah knew nothing of wine’s potency. If he stops shy of noting that Noah was a sinner, he nevertheless tells his congregation that if they emulated Noah it would certainly be sinful and then uses Noah’s behavior to teach his congregation that they are justified by faith and not works. Luther brings Hebrews 11 into the discussion of Genesis 9 to remind his audience that by faith they are reckoned righteous adding that Paul “does not say that we are saved by our works.”13 As he moves past Noah’s actions and onto Ham’s he begins with a short tropological lesson to be derived from the story, examines the literal interpretation of divine curses, and then finishes with a critique of an allegorical interpretation. Tropologically, Luther sees in Ham a dire warning for Christians. He reminds the congregation that Ham – chosen to survive the Deluge by God – must have been more excellent and godly than any currently living person. And yet, this “perfect man Ham” fell from grace. We, who are less secure than him, must listen to Paul and “stand firm lest we too fall.”14 Luther seems to have pounded this home to the congregation to such a degree that the student copying out the sermon slipped into German and declaring Ham “loß” – “lost.”15 The result of Ham’s fall was a curse proclaimed by Noah, through the power of the Holy Spirit, upon him. Canaan has been left out of the sermon. Noah’s malediction falls upon Ham directly. Luther puzzles with his congregation about the nature of Divine proclamations and declares that even if they at first seem forgotten – as when Egypt – the descendants of Ham – enslaved Israel, they are always confirmed ultimately – as when the Israelites escaped from Egypt and subdued the people of the Promised Land. Canaan is, again, unmentioned.16 As he leaves the literal interpretation of the story and turns to the allegorical, he focuses his attention on a critique of a particular aspect of the anti-Jewish analogical understanding of the Noah/Ham story. Most likely beginning with Peter the Chanter in Paris in the late twelfth century and popularized in the next century by Odo of Cheriton, whose sermons were immensely popular and “served as a model for preachers,”17 one aspect of the anti-Jewish denunciation of Ham’s behavior was to connect it to any critique 13 14 15 16 17

WA 14.205. Luther here is paraphrasing 1 Cor. 10: 12. WA 14: 206. WA 14: 206. Albert C. Friend, “Master Odo of Cheriton,” Speculum 23, no. 4 (1948): 641.

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or criticism of church leaders. In a sermon on the obedience laity owe their prelates, Odo writes, Like [Ham] are those people who slander their prelates, and if they perceive the shame of their shepherd, who is a spiritual father, immediately they publish it to their brothers, not realizing that Canaan was cursed in his children because his father, when he saw the shame of his father Noah, laughed and told his brother. And the children and deeds of such people who are the spiritual sons, and who slander superiors, are cursed by God. Of this kind, indeed similar, are the Jews deriding Christ. Whence is employed: Cham laughs when he sees the uncovered limbs of his parent; the Jews laugh at the pain of the suffering God. Shem and Japheth deserved a blessing because they clothed the shame. Thus God blesses those laymen who cover up or excuse the sins of their superiors, unless perchance they are publicly known, seeing that the subdued ass reproved Balaam, who is the prelate.18

At some point between the thirteenth century and the sixteenth century, the corrective of Balaam’s ass seems to have disappeared from this homiletic tradition and any criticism of a prelate was regarded as Ham’s mocking of Noah. Luther, almost certainly having felt the sting of just this criticism, remarks that the secret sins of all men, including bishops and prelates, ought to be rebuked privately – for this is how each Christian would wish to be treated. However, since the sins of bishops are public, avarice and whoring principal among them, they must be publicly admonished according to the example of Paul in 1 Timothy and Jesus in his encounters with the Pharisees. He ends this section by declaring that these bishops should not be understood as Noah.19 The rejection of this one aspect of the Ham/Jews analogy actually leads Luther to almost completely silence the rest of the allegory. Gone are the powerful critiques of Ham/Jews as mockers of Christ/Noah. They are replaced with a single reference that Christ, as with Noah, planted a vineyard, the Jewish people, and suffered because of it. The actions of the Jews are no longer the focus of the message.20 The suffering of Christ is central. Luther declares to his congregation that they are saved through Christ’s sufferings. The Hams of the 18 Longland, “Bury St. Edmunds,” 58. Longland translated the text from MSS BN lat. 16506, fol. 141r. 19 WA 14: 207. 20 For all intents and purposes, that is the last time a Protestant will use the analogy of Christ and Noah in a way to attack Jews. Luther himself, when he returned to this text in the classroom in 1536, never mentions the traditional connection between Ham and Jews. Jews, in fact, are hardly mentioned in the lectures on Genesis 9. The 1562, Genesis cum catholica – or what is often called the Nova Glossa Ordinaria, is a compend of Protestant exegesis. The work of Calvin, Luther, and others is gathered and presented in a way deeply reminiscent of the medieval Glossa Ordinaria. In this compendium, the admonition to avoid drunkenness is present; as is the dismissal of the idea that Noah might be excused drunkenness. However, the allegory of Christ being mocked does not. A search of the online database of Protestant texts, The Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts, finds no hits except for those in early Luther for searches connecting Ham, Jews, and mocking in all their various Latin and vernacular cognates.

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world boast of their own abilities and mock the sufferings of Christ. The follower of Christ knows that the Gospel brings with it persecution and suffering. The 1523 sermon, then, is a very different sermon from the one in 1519. It embodies many of the reorientations that will emerge as a Protestant tradition relative to Genesis 9. Noah’s behavior here still ambiguous will soon be seen as entirely sinful. Ham, the fallen son, will serve as a dire warning to those who mock or deride their parents. As the literal interpretation of Scripture gains ever greater currency among Protestants, the nature of God’s curse will play an ever increasing role in the exegesis of Genesis 9. Ironically, almost always the presence of Canaan in this curse narrative will be ignored and the curse of Noah will fall almost always directly on Ham. At the same time that these themes are emerging, Luther’s new interpretation also embodies the core “Reformation” tenets of sola fidei and sola gratia as well as an understanding of the Theology of the Cross. John Calvin John Calvin preached a series of sermons on Genesis 9 in January 1560. Thirtyseven years lie between Luther’s sermon and Calvin’s and many of the emergent themes in Luther have matured and expanded. The Genesis sermon series also follow his extensive commentary on Genesis that was first published in 1554. That themes first apparent in Luther are expanded upon and amplified by Calvin, should not surprise us. As Anthony Lane and Randall Zachman have both noted, Luther’s Lectures on Genesis served as the principle source for much of Calvin’s Commentary on Genesis.21 Calvin is also significantly less conversant with the medieval interpretations of the text than was Luther perhaps because Luther had almost entirely abandoned those traditions by the time he gave his Genesis lectures. The sermons began on the Sunday following Epiphany the first of which lays out the overarching themes of the chapter. According to Calvin, this chapter is fundamentally about being grateful for surviving the flood, the benefits of godly marriage, the gifts of food and drink, and the necessity of self-control. The fourth and fifth sermons in the series focus on the events surrounding Noah and Ham. Both sermons cover the entire Noah/Ham narrative and have similar narrative arcs. They begin with the lessons that might be drawn from Ham’s presence on the Ark. Whereas Luther used this opportunity to highlight Ham’s sinless nature before he dramatically fell from grace, Calvin uses him as an example of the wicked who “occupy a place within the church.” Though it is impossible, of course, to know whether or not he had Guillaume Farel’s 21 Anthony N.S. Lane, John Calvin: Student of the Church Fathers, ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999), 211; Randall Zachman, “Calvin as Commentator on Genesis,” in Calvin and the Bible, ed. Donald McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 19.

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scandalous marriage in mind when he says that these sinners within the church even include those “who preach the word of God” and that they are not “without weakness and vice,” the connection certainly could not have escaped at least some in his congregation. A year earlier, the 69 year-old Farel had announced his upcoming marriage to a 16 year-old girl and invited Calvin to the nuptials. Too late to prevent the marriage, Calvin did not attend and was shocked by Farel’s seeming unwillingness to concede the impropriety of the event.22 Though Calvin cut himself off from Farel, his words in the sermons echo advice he had offered to others regarding Farel’s fall. The failure of one within the church was not an invitation to righteous judgment but to sincere self-reflection on one’s sin and a call to “pity and compassion” for those who had fallen. Their fallen state, Calvin tells his congregation, ought to serve as a dire warning, calling them to greater fidelity to God. We must treat this experience as an opportunity to be “threatened, exhorted, rebuked, or even completely condemned” by God’s word.23 The condemnation of God’s word hangs over Calvin’s congregation as he immediately moved on to consider the prophetic nature of Noah’s curse upon Ham passing in silence the cognitive dissonance in the difference between his own call for pity and compassion and Noah’s condemnatory curse. Though Noah declares, “Cursed be Canaan,” Calvin explains that he did this to signify that the “judgment of God” is not limited to “one who committed the offence,” but extends to “all those who will come from his lineage.”24 Then in a move that will become ever more commonplace over the early modern era, Calvin seeks to correct Noah, “He should have said, ‘Cursed be Ham, for he is the one who perverted the order and appropriateness of nature by dishonoring his father, such as he was.’ He should have been the first one chastised.”25 He quickly moves on to reject as “frivolous” the idea that Ham could not be cursed directly because he had been blessed by God when Noah and his family first left the ark. Though Calvin claims this was a Jewish interpretation of the text, it was the most common medieval explanation for why Ham was not directly cursed.26 Instead of this frivolous excuse, Calvin offers up that Canaan is cursed in order to demonstrate the severity of God’s curse upon Ham:

22 Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 281 – 82. 23 Jean Calvin, Sermons Sur La GenÀse, ed. Max Engammare (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchen Verlag, 2000), 515. 24 Calvin, Sermons Sur La GenÀse, 515: “Il ne s’adresse point — celuy qui a commis le delict, mais il s’adresse — ceux qui devoient venir de sa race.”Race, here, should not be understood in the modern sense of ethic race, but lineage, household or family. See, Randle Cotgrave, Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London: Adam Islip, 1611), s.v. Race (Vuui1r). 25 Calvin, Sermons Sur La GenÀse, 515: “Il devoit dire: ”. 26 Calvin, Sermons Sur La GenÀse, 515 n.30 – 33.

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God was not content to punish just Ham, who offended, but his harshness and severity but reaches further, until it reaches out to ten generations and God demonstrates from age to age that this monstrous lineage is an abomination to him. That is how Ham is included and was even the first.27

Calvin then states that he would add that Ham’s entire posterity share in the curse. Though many others would later follow Calvin in declaring that Ham’s entire posterity share in the curse, there is no textual basis for this claim. Calvin, however, will not countenance any questions or critiques of the severity of this purported curse. He reifies his own curse on all of Ham’s posterity by declaring it God’s curse and condemns those who might critique the severity of it by stating that those who raise questions seek to make themselves God’s judges. The malediction of Ham’s entire lineage then forms the basis for all that follows. As Calvin turns to point out the central lesson that might be drawn from the text, he reiterates his point about the scope of God’s punishment, “In short, the first thing that we must remember about this passage is that God wanted to punish Ham in his entire lineage.”28God punished Ham in his entire lineage because God sought to demonstrate “how detestable a crime it is when children rise up and dishonor their fathers,” for this is crime not only against parents but against God’s “own person.”29 Children, according to Calvin, can learn from this chapter that they owe their parents not only honor but that they should follow their wise advice, submit to their authority, and support them when old.30 Calvin ends his discussion of Ham and Noah by asking why Canaan is mentioned in the story at all if Ham’s entire lineage is cursed. It is not there to signify that Ham’s other children escape God’s curse. Rather, Canaan is mentioned in order to give to the descendants of Shem and Japheth a foretaste of their future blessings. The land of Canaan would one day be subject to their authority and to teach all of us that God’s prophecies are often delayed but will always be fulfilled. Trends and Implications The sermons of Martin Luther and John Calvin allow us to draw a few conclusions about Genesis 9 and development of the so-called Curse of Ham. First, Luther’s and Calvin’s sermons on Genesis 9 demonstrate the degree to 27 Calvin, Sermons Sur La GenÀse, 515: Dieu ne se contentera point de punir Cham, lequel a ainsi offens¦, mais il faudra que sa rigueur et severit¦ se dilate plus loin, c’est — savoir qu’elle parvienne jusques — dix generations, et que d’aage en aage Dieu monstre toujours que c’este lign¦e l— luy est en abomination. Voil— donc comme Cham est ici encloz, est mesmes qu’il est le premier.” 28 Calvin, Sermons Sur La GenÀse, 517: “Voil— donc en somme ce que nous avons — retenir sur ce passage, c’est en premier lieu que Dieu a voulu punir l’offense de Cham sur toute sa lin¦e.” 29 Calvin, Sermons Sur La GenÀse, 518. 30 Calvin, Sermons Sur La GenÀse, 519.

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which Genesis 9 was a biblical text in transition. Long held concerns relative to the text disappeared relatively rapidly. The Renaissance and Reformation opened up the homiletic frontiers of the story. The transitional nature of the story is important because a number of scholars have made the claim that there was a long tradition of associating Ham, slavery, and Africans that dated back to the early medieval era.31 There was no such medieval connection. However, even if there were such a connection, what the work of Luther and Calvin – and many others as well – demonstrates is that the medieval concerns of this text were almost entirely abandoned. New concerns and questions were brought to the text. During the sixteenth century, Ham was not only Martin Luther’s fallen saint or John Calvin’s sinner in the midst of the church or disobedient son. For a number of genealogists, he was the progenitor of many great noble houses of Europe. To others, Ham was the founder of magic and a famous debaucher of women.32 In the sixteenth century, there was no consistent representation of Ham. Ham and Noah’s curse were shaped and fashioned by preachers, exegetes, legal scholars and other to fit the needs of their congregations or patrons. Over time, the interpretation of Ham would calcify again as it did in the medieval era. As the allegorical interpretation of Ham as the faithless Jew eventually smothered other competing interpretations during the medieval era, a view of Ham as a hypersexual African eventually emerged as the sole interpretation of Genesis 9 in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But, here in the work of Luther and Calvin, we see the intermediate period of interpretation where one old system has collapsed but it is not yet clear what shall replace it. Beyond the fact that this demonstrates that there was no direct conduit of anti-African interpretation, it also highlights the fact that Ham as a cursed African did not have to arise. The text opened itself up to many different interpretations. Ham as a cursed African, then, was forged to meet certain needs that arose as the Transatlantic Slave Trade was critiqued and questioned. It was not a foregone conclusion. However, part of what made that interpretation so powerful was the belief that it was the most historically accurate interpretation. That belief depended upon the Protestant rejection of the medieval quadriga. As early as 1515, in the introduction to his lectures on the Psalms, Luther highlights the importance of the literal interpretation of scripture over and against the analogical, tropological, and anagogical senses. Indeed, in that introduction, he makes clear that the literal sense of scripture functions as something like a bridle for the other three senses, “In the Scriptures, therefore, no allegory, tropology, or anagogy is valid, unless the same truth is expressly stated historically elsewhere. Otherwise Scripture would become a mock31 See, for example, Ania Loomba, “Periodization, Race, and Global Contact,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 3 (2007) and Joseph R. Washington, Anti-Blackness in English Religion, 1500 – 1800, ed. (New York: E. Mellen Press, 1984). 32 See, chapter three of my Curse of Ham.

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ery.”33 Nevertheless, compared to other Reformation colleagues he was slower to completely abandon the medieval quadriga. That hesitancy can be seen in the still present but dramatically reduced allegory in his later sermon on Genesis 9. Over time, this medieval inheritance will continue to diminish. When we turn to Calvin, we see that the quadriga as quadriga has almost completely disappeared. Indeed, Calvin can refer to these as frivolous imaginings. Nevertheless, as David Steinmetz has helpfully pointed out where Calvin abandoned the “medieval quadriga in principle, [he] retain[ed] it in fact … the literal sense was for Calvin what the allegorical sense had been for Origen, a sensus plenior, a generous, big-bellied letter filled with spiritual significance and unfailingly edifying. It was never reducible to a bare narrative of events.”34 The difficulty, however, is that sometimes Calvin presents his interpretation as a narrative of events. Repeatedly in the sermons on Genesis 9, Calvin makes clear that in Genesis 9 the entire lineage of Ham falls under Noah’s and God’s curse. None of Ham’s heirs escape it. A brief survey of the actual text of Genesis 9 makes abundantly clear, however, that this is absolutely not the case. The other children of Ham are nowhere mentioned in Genesis 9. Calvin further revises the text by declaring that Ham was actually the one cursed. Though Calvin uses these textual augmentations for the rather benign purpose of encouraging children to obey and care for their parents the implications of this move are more significant than Calvin could have appreciated. Calvin’s sensus plenior, to use Steinmetz’s helpful phrase, actually hides analogical and tropological interpretations within a supposed literalhistorical or literal-prophetic sense. The importance of this move is that it releases the allegorical and tropological from the controls that these types of literature have built into them. In the medieval analogy, Ham is like the faithless Jews who mocked Christ. The similarity between the supposed mocking of the Jews and the mocking of Ham is pronounced but also controlled by the phrase “is like.” Jews are not literally the descendants of Ham. Their behavior marks them as similar to him. However innocent the stripping away of this control on the allegorical was in Calvin’s preaching, it would later come to have disastrous implications for all those who fell under the Curse of Ham, during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Then, as in Calvin and many others, allegorical and sometimes even tropological insights were framed as literally and historically true. When the legitimacy and uprightness of the slave trade was questioned, the Curse of Ham was used to justify and support the bondage and sale of Africans. Though Africans are never mentioned in the biblical text, they came to be seen not as similar to Ham, but as the historical descendants of Ham and quite literally as the inheritors of his “Heavy Curse”35 of perpetual slavery. Thus, their capture, transportation, and 33 LW 10:4; WA 3:11. 34 David C. Steinmetz, Calvin in Context, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 274. 35 John Milton, Paradise Lost ed. Edward Le Comte (New York: Penguin, 2007), XII.103 (p.310).

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permanent bondage was not only allowed, but actually sanctioned by God through Noah’s curse upon Ham. An actual literal-historical interpretation of Genesis 9 is, in many ways, mystifying. The text makes little sense as “text,” and so interpreters have always poured their own meanings onto the text. The difference between those who came before the Reformation and those who followed it was a recognition that what they were doing was allegory. Those who followed the Reformation continued, as Calvin does in this sermon, to fill in the large gaps within the story with their own interpretations and meanings. Now, however, they were seen as embodying not analogy but Truth.

Conclusion Genesis 9 is what I have called a “text of opportunity.” Its brevity and etiological significance invite exegetes to shape its message to fit current concerns. In Paris of the early thirteenth century, Ham was one who criticized prelates. In a fundamentally pre-Reformation Luther, Ham and Noah were representatives of rebellious Jews and a faithful Christ. As Luther’s theology matured, his representations of Noah and Ham evolved. Noah became the embodiment of justification by faith rather than works and Ham became a warning to those who might fall from grace. For Calvin, Ham reminds the church that sinners often sit in pews next to saints and reminds children to obey their parents. Both Luther and Calvin, no less than in Odo of Cheriton or Peter Comestor, however, are largely building interpretations rather than gleaning them from the text itself. Luther’s message of sola gracia and a fallen Ham would have spoken to a congregation still in some turmoil surrounding his very public dispute with Andreas Karlstadt.36 Likewise, Calvin’s message of a sinner within the church could likely have spoken to those still upset by Farel, but is also a particularly appropriate message to those new seminarians studying at the newly founded Genevan Academy. As a new pastor himself, he learned the bitter lesson that the church is often less a sanctuary of saints than it is the dwelling place of sinners both extraordinary and pedestrian. There is, of course, nothing wrong with a pastor or preacher accommodating a particular scripture lesson to a particular congregation. In fact, our homiletics professors often encourage or require such application. There is, however, an inherent danger that was unfortunately amplified by the Reformation’s rejection of the quadriga. The quadriga for all its flaws did exert some controls on exegetical interpretation. The Reformation continued to use the four-fold senses of scripture – as indeed many pastors do today – but the controls were now gone. The danger in this scenario arises when the pastor 36 Ronald J. Sider, Andreas Bodenstein Von Karstadt: The Development of His Thought, 1517 – 1525 (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 181 – 90.

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or preacher no longer seeks to accommodate the text to students and congregants struggling with the questions of faith and works or of young idealistic seminarians soon to be disavowed of their rosy conceptions of the pastorate, but a preacher such as Dr. Gillespie who used the Curse of Ham to confer a divine imprimatur on racial prejudice and segregation.

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Paul Westermeyer

Theology and Music for Luther and Calvin

The Assignment My assignment is to unpack Luther’s and Calvin’s theologies of music with musical examples.1 The point of confluence between the two reformers is congregational song, so examples have been chosen from that genre plus ones for choir and organ in the Lutheran heritage.2

Luther Luther said that music is next to theology.3 If you line up the Trivium with its Grammar, Logic (or Dialectic) and Rhetoric, and then the Quadrivium with its Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music, you see what Luther meant. After working through the Trivium and Quadrivium, a person is ready to study theology. That is, music as a discipline of study is next to theology as a discipline of study. Luther also said that “next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise.”4 Music is not only next to theology ; it is next to the Word of God. Here we get a more profound and theological sense of what Luther has in mind. Oskar Soehngen expressed it like this. That music comes from the auricularia, i. e., from the sphere of the miraculous audible things – like the Gospel, that it is a unique gift of God’s creation which comes to us in the same 1 This lecture was adapted from my chapter on Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, called “Sound, Silence, and Strictures.” Adapted from Te Deum: The Church and Music by Paul Westermeyer copyright Ó 1998 Fortress Press. Reproduced by permission of Augsburg Fortress Publishers. All rights reserved. 2 At the lecture the assembly sang the congregational examples, aided by a double quartet plus two from Luther’s Seminary’s Schola Cantorum. The small schola also sang two Lutheran pieces alone, and Zachary Busch played the organ. 3 Martin Luther, Letter to Ludwig Senfl (1530), Dr. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar: Herman Boehlaus Nachfolger, 1933) Briefwechsel (hereafter WA [Weimar Ausgabe]), V. 639, No. 1727. 4 Luther, “Preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae iucundae,” Luther’s Works (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965), hereafter LW (Luther’s Works), 53, 323.

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way the Word of God does, namely, mediated by the voice, that is a point at which Luther is lost in wonder again and again.5

Luther was not simply fond of music. Luther thought music has a theological reason for being: it is a gift of God which comes from the “sphere of miraculous audible things” just like the Word of God. Music is unique in that it can carry words. Since words carry the Word of God, music and the Word of God are closely related. As Soehngen pointed out, Luther put the co-ordination of music and theology on a new footing. The musica speculativa of the Pythagorean school was replaced by the “elemental experience of music as a sounding form.”6 Luther did not approach music first as a reflection of the numerical laws of the universe; nor did he view sound ordered in time as first of all a faint resemblance of math or universal relationships – though he may have thought music was about those things. Rather, he fundamentally approached music as sound itself, sound which he regarded as important and critical in its own right. With that perspective, one can isolate certain elements in Luther’s thought by referring largely to his “Preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae iucundae” (“Delightful Symphonies,” fifty-two motets for the Sundays of the Church Year), one of his most complete statements about music. First, music is a gift of God’s good creation.7 There are two parts here. Music is an incredible gift about which Luther was overwhelmed; he could not find words to describe it. And it is a creation of God, not of humanity.8 That does not mean humanity should leave it in its “natural” state. On the contrary, when [musical] learning is added to this and artistic music which corrects, develops, and refines the natural music, then at last it is possible to taste with wonder (yet not to comprehend) God’s absolute and perfect wisdom in his wondrous work of music.9

5 Oskar Soehngen, “Fundamental Considerations for a Theology of Music,” The Musical Heritage of the Church, ed. Theodore Hoelty-Nickel (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1963) VI, 15 – 16. 6 Ibid., 9. 7 See Luther, “Preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae iucundae,” LW 53, 321 and 324. 8 See Schalk, Luther on Music, Paradigms of Praise (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1988), 34. In the translation Walter Buszin (Luther on Music, p. 6), gives of this passage, someone who does not appreciate music hardly deserves to be called human. Buszin translates, “A person who gives this some thought and yet does not regard it [music] as a marvelous creation of God, must be a clodhopper indeed and does not deserve to be called a human being; he should be permitted to hear nothing but the braying of asses and the grunting of hogs.” The German version (the text is also in Latin) reads as follows. “Wer aber dazu kein luft noch liebe hat und durch solch lieblich Wunderwerck nicht bewegt wird, das mus warlich ein grosser Klotz sein, der nicht werd ist, das er solche liebliche Musica, sondern das wuesste, wilde Eselgeschren des Chorals, oder der Hunde oder Sewe Gesang und Musica hoere.” WA 50, 373. 9 Luther, “Preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae iucundae,” LW 53, 324.

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This gift “of nature and of art” can be “prostituted” by “perverted minds with their erotic rantings”10 so that one has to shun those who do the perverting, but the weight falls on the gift and its goodness. Second, music bears the Word. “God,” says Luther, has the “Gospel preached through the medium of music.”11 This has a rich and varied meaning. It almost seems as if Luther sees music in its own right as a parallel to preaching: it is the instrument for the proper work of the Holy Spirit through whom the inclination to virtue was instilled in the prophets,12 and it casts out Satan. But the weight falls on its association with the Word and words that carry the Word. the fathers and prophets wanted nothing else to be associated with the Word of God as music. Therefore we have so many hymns and Psalms where message and music join to move the listener’s soul,”13

said Luther. Or again, “music and notes . . . do help gain a better understanding of the text.”14 This is true in the compositions by skillful composers like Josquin,15 and also when the people participate earnestly in the singing.16 Third, Luther joined praise to proclamation. “The gift of language combined with the gift of song,” he said, was given to human beings to let us know that we “should praise God with both word and music, namely, by proclaiming the [Word of God] through music.”17 To praise is to proclaim, and to proclaim is to praise. They both take sounding form. There is a circle of musical doing here where exegesis and proclamation run into each other on a circuit of sound. Fourth, a closely related point is sufficiently different to be separated out. The following quotation isolates it.

10 Ibid. 11 Martin Luther, “Table Talk,” Dr. Martin Luthers Saemmtliche Schriften, ed. Johann Georg Walch (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1880 ff.), hereafter SL (Saint Louis edition), XXII, 427 f., No. 38, and LW 54, 129. 12 Luther, “Preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae iucundae,” LW 53, 323. 13 Ibid. 14 Luther, “Auslegung der letzen Worte Davids,” 2 Sam. 23: 1 – 2, SL, III, 1888 (LW 15, 273 – 274). This is the translation of Walter Buszin, Luther on Music, 14. 15 Luther, “Table Talk,” LW 54, 129 – 130. Joyce Irwin, Neither Voice nor Heart Alone: German Lutheran Theology of Music in the Age of the Baroque (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 147, takes another view of this passage. She thinks Luther is not referring to music’s ability to communicate a text here, but is making music analogous to the gospel in opposition to the law. She may well be right, or Luther may have had both ideas going as background for his comment. Both point to music in relation to preaching – as natural analogue or parallel to preaching, or as exegetical means to break open a text. 16 Luther, “Auslegung der letzen Worte Davids,” SL, III, 1888 (LW 15, 274). 17 Luther, “Preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae iucundae,” LW 53, 323.

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For God has cheered our hearts and minds through his dear Son, whom he gave for us to redeem us from sin, death, and the devil. He who believes this earnestly cannot be quiet about it. But he must gladly and willingly sing.18

Here is the Christus Victor motif.19 In Christ God has won the victory. Those who know it are compelled to sing. That is, music is an important way the Christian community celebrates the victory Christ has won. The celebration is especially obvious in the hymns Luther wrote, like the first stanza of Nun freut euch, the first two stanzas of Christ lag, and the first two stanzas of Ein feste Burg.20 Bold, vigorous rejoicing tells the story of God’s victory and our deliverance. The battle is won in Christ, and we sing with jubilation. The tunes Luther wrote, like EIN FESTE BURG,21 themselves give sounding form to this explosion into song. As Eva Grew said, “Not one of Luther’s tunes is sweet, soft, clinging, sentimental nor touched even by the subjective qualities of reflection.22 On the contrary, they are bold, confident, joyful. That does not stop prayer or the cry of deep despair, as in Luther’s setting of Psalm 130,23 but it does mean that even such a cry is bold and happens within the context of a community who knows a gracious God who has won the battle on their behalf. When Carl Schalk sought to sort out Luther’s thoughts about music, he included “Music as Liturgical Song,” “Music as the Song of Royal Priests,” and “Music as a Sign of Continuity with the Whole Church.”24 This cluster might be subsumed here under a fifth category labeled Luther’s ecclesiology of music. Luther was a conservative reformer. Except for the canon of the Mass, he kept the whole communion liturgy with its chant in Latin and with metrical forms in German. Both the Latin Formula Missae of 1523 and the German Deutsche Messe of 1526 were sung services; lessons, prayers, the Ordinary and the Propers of the Mass in their Gregorian and German hymnic versions plus new hymns all were sung by the people and the choir. The Offices were also sung. As Schalk points out, this was “the song of the royal priesthood confessing and proclaiming to the world the Good News of God in Christ.”25 And it meant “no parochial exclusiveness, nor provincial self-sufficiency, but a stand in solidarity and continuity with the church catholic.”26 To miss Luther’s catholic ecclesiology of music is to misunderstand Luther. He was evangelical, to be sure, but he was also catholic. And sound was central to both positions. 18 Luther, “Preface to the Babst Hymnal,” LW 53, 333. 19 See Gustaf Aulen, Christus Victor, trans. A. G. Hebert (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1961). 20 Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006), (hereafter ELW), #s 594, 370, and 503. For all of Luther’s texts and tunes, see LW 53. 21 ELW, # 503. 22 Eva Mary Grew, “Martin Luther and Music,” Music and Letters, XIX (1938): 76. 23 ELW, # 600. 24 Schalk, Luther on Music, Paradigms of Praise, 39 – 49. 25 Ibid., 44. 26 Ibid., 49.

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What was the musical result of all this? Luther and the tradition he spawned used Gregorian chant; sacred folk songs; contrafacta, that is, pieces in which a new sacred text replaced an old secular one, keeping the same melody, as in Vom Himmel hoch; newly composed pieces like hymns and motets; instruments along with or in alternation with voices; polyphony for trained groups; and the simpler unison line in its rhythmic form (the isorhythmic form with a series of essentially equal notes came later) for the congregation.27 In his hymn tune writing Luther followed the Minnesingers and Meistersingers and used Barform, a German word which means a poem with more than one stanza, each stanza in the form AAB. It has nothing to do with bars in the sense of pubs. Luther’s sources were Gregorian chant, medieval vernacular hymns, and two secular folk melodies which didn’t have staying power and themselves were abandoned for new tunes. Luther did not use “popular music.”28 The distinction between sacred and secular was not nearly so strong for him as for us, but he did distinguish what was appropriate to worship.29 The tune Luther wrote for his metrical version of the Sanctus, for example, is adapted from Gregorian chant and is neither easy nor “popular,” though I have heard some Lutheran congregations sing it with love and incredible force.30 “The very last thing Luther was,” says Erik Routley, “or could have been, was what we now call an adapter of popular styles. He had no use for the ‘popular’ in the sense of the careless, or the standards of ignorance.”31 Luther united old and new, high art and folk art, rural and urban by the chorale itself which appealed across these lines, and by the ancient principle of alternation. One stanza of a hymn would be sung by the congregation in its simple unaccompanied unison, the next one by a choir or instruments in a more complex polyphonic setting. It is no accident that the Lutheran tradition has stimulated a string of hymn writers, tune writers, and editors who created congregational materials: like Laurentius Petri (1499 – 1573), Philipp Nicolai (1556 – 1608), Johann Crüger (1598 – 1662), Paul Gerhardt (1607 – 1676), Nikolai F. S. Grundtvig (1783 – 1872), Magnus Brostrup Lanstad (1802 – 1880), Martin Franzmann (1907 – 1976), and Jaroslav Vajda (1919 – 2008). Nor is it an accident that the Lutheran tradition has stimulated a string of composers who created choral and instrumental materials: like Heinrich Schütz (1585 – 1672), Dietrich Buxtehude (1637 – 1707), Johann Pachelbel (1653 – 1706), the Bach family (throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth 27 For detail see Friedrich Blume, rev. Ludwig Finscher, trans. F. Ellsworth Peterson, “The Period of the Reformation,” Friedrich Blume et al., Protestant Church Music (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1974), 3 – 123. 28 See Paul Westermeyer, The Church Musician, Revised Edition (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997), 132. 29 See LW, 53, 306. 30 ELW, # 868. 31 Erik Routley, The Music of Christian Hymns (G. I. A. Publications, Inc., 1981), 21. Cf. Erik Routley, Christian Hymns Observed (Princeton: Prestige Publications, Inc. 1982), 18.

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centuries), J. S. Bach (1685 – 1750) its pinnacle, Ludvig Matthias Lindeman (1810 – 1887), Ernst Pepping (1901-), Hugo Distler (1901 – 1942), F. Melius Christiansen (1871 – 1955), and Carl Schalk (b. 1929) with their settings of hymns, the Ordinary, Psalms, and canticles; and with their motets, Passions, and cantatas. Luther was both radical and conservative. He used the best of the past, and he welcomed new texts and music as long as they were well crafted and durable. Texts which denied the centrality of justification by grace through faith were unacceptable, but a wide variety of fine musical craft from the past and present was warmly welcomed. The parts of the Ordinary of the Mass were cast into the vernacular for the congregation, and vernacular chorales were spawned. Choirs still sang choral settings of the Ordinary in Latin while the congregation had vernacular settings it could sing, and the mix made possible all sorts of combinations: 1) a service completely in Latin, 2) a service completely in German, 3) the substitution of a German chorale for any portion of a Latin text, 3) the substitution of a German chorale for any Latin or German prose text, 4) the addition of a German chorale to any Latin or German prose text, 6) additions of German chorales to the Mass, either before or after the Sermon, or during Communion.32 The congregation’s tunes for the vernacular texts were conceived in unison without accompaniment like their chant predecessors. The ones for the Ordinary were adapted from the church’s heritage. In addition to many chorales, the following parts of the Ordinary are still in use today : for the Kyrie, “Kyrie! God Father ;”33 for the Gloria in Excelsis, “All Glory Be to God on High;”34 for the Nicene Creed, “We All Believe in One True God;”35 for the Sanctus, “Isaiah in a Vision Did of Old;”36 and for the Agnus Dei, “O Christ, Lamb of God”37 and “Lamb of God, Pure and Sinless.”38

Calvin The contours of Calvin’s thoughts about music can be found in the Institutes III. xx. 31-32, the Preface to the Genevan Psalter of 1542, and the Preface to the Genevan Psalter of 1543. The 1543 Preface added 917 words to the 1305 words 32 This list is from Friedrich Blume, “The Period of the Reformation,” Protestant Church Music: A History, 63. Robin Leaver, ‘Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes,’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 16, gives a more detailed list of how chorales were sung in the liturgy. 33 ELW, # 409. 34 ELW, # 410. 35 ELW, # 411. 36 ELW, # 867. 37 ELW, # 196. 38 ELW, # 357.

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in the Preface of 1542; the two were combined in the 1545 Preface to form an unbroken unit of 2222 words.39 Calvin considered church singing in the Institutes in the section on prayer. This is decisive, for it gives Calvin’s frame of reference. Both the Institutes40 and the 1542 Preface41 indicate that for Calvin there are two kinds of prayer. One is “with words alone,” the other “with singing.”42 Calvin also said, Now there are briefly three things which our Lord commanded us to observe in our spiritual assemblies: namely, the preaching of His word, prayers public and solemn, and the administration of the Sacraments.43

Since one kind of prayer involves singing, singing then, as Garside says, is for Calvin part of “one of the three fundamental expressions of Christian worship.”44 Calvin viewed singing in church as no recent invention. It is “very ancient,” he said, used “among the apostles.”45 He quoted Paul (I Corinthians 14:15 and Colossians 3:16) to prove his point, but also noted that the practice was not universal. He reported Augustine’s observation that men like Hilary attacked the singing of hymns from the book of Psalms.46 He also made it clear he did not mean to follow their lead. Rather, he said, we do not condemn speaking and singing but rather strongly commend them, provided they are associated with the heart’s affection.47

What is the point of singing in church? First, music was “peculiarly created to tell and proclaim the praise of God.”48 Second, Calvin saw it as a means “by which the godly may mutually edify one another.”49 These two characteristic motifs of the church run together for Calvin. In the addition to the 1543 Preface Calvin began with praise, but quickly moved to edification and the power of music. Music, said Calvin, is “either the first, or one of the principal” things “for recreating” us and giving us “pleasure.”50 He was quite cognizant of music’s power.

39 See Charles Garside, Jr., “Calvin’s Preface to the Psalter: A Re-Appraisal,” The Musical Quarterly, XXXVII: 4 (October, 1951): 569. 40 Calvin, Institutes, III. xx. 31. 41 Garside, “Calvin’s Preface”, 568. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Calvin, Institutes, III. xx. 32. Cf. Garside, “Calvin’s Preface”, 568. 46 Calvin, Institutes, III. xx. 32. 47 Ibid., III. xx. 31. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., III. xx. 32. 50 Garside, “Calvin’s Preface”, 570.

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there is scarcely anything in the world which is more able to turn or bend this way and that the morals of men, as Plato prudently expressed it. And in fact, we find that it has a secret and almost incredible power to move hearts in one way or another.51

In this discussion Calvin even called music a gift of God. That almost sounds like Luther, but, as Oskar Soehngen pointed out, for Calvin it was a gift “in an indirect sense. In the foreground of Calvin’s view of music is the idea that it is an invention of human beings and that musical instruments were invented by the descendants of Cain.”52 Calvin also knew, like Luther, that this gift can be perverted, and he spent more energy than Luther warning against the perversion. Music was for him like a funnel which made the word pierce the heart more strongly, so that melodies joined to bad words “distill” the “venom and corruption . . . to the depths of the heart.”53 If music is so potent and can be misused to our condemnation, what is to be done? How is it to be used rightly? It is to have songs not only honest, but also holy, which will be like spurs to incite us to pray to and praise God, and to meditate upon His works in order to love, fear, honor, and glorify Him.54

And what songs are holy? The answer is the Psalms of David, “which the Holy Spirit spoke and made through him.”55 When we sing the Psalms, said Calvin, we can be sure that God puts them in our mouths as if God were singing in us “to exalt His glory.”56 John Witvliet notes that “this divine action is construed in Trinitarian terms, where Christ is ‘the chief conductor of our hymns’ and the Spirit the prompter.57 How then are the Psalms to be sung? What music do you use? Calvin thought that out. He drew a distinction between the music one makes to entertain people at table in your home and the “Psalms which are sung in the Church in the presence of God.”58 Music in church cannot be “light” or “frivolous,” but must have “weight” and “majesty.”59 The result of this perspective was a series of strictures. Calvin did not welcome music as eagerly as Luther did. The strictures he imposed were these: metrical psalms, a single monophonic line, one note for each syllable of text, without melismas, without polyphony, without instruments, and without 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Ibid. Soehngen, “Fundamental Considerations for a Theology of Music”, 13. Garside, “Calvin’s Preface”, 570 – 571. Ibid., 571. Ibid. Ibid. John Witvliet, “Spirituality of the Psalter: Metrical Psalms in Liturgy and Life in Calvin’s Geneva,” (manuscript), 9. 58 Garside, “Calvin’s Preface,” 568 (1542 Preface). 59 Ibid.

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choirs except as a group (of children) led the congregation’s unison singing.60 (Actually it was singing in octaves, of course, since the women and children sang an octave above the men.) The Genevan Psalter, with its tunes like OLD HUNDREDTH61 by Louis Bourgeois, was the result.62 Polyphonic or homophonic settings were made by Clement Jannequin (c.1474-c.1560), Claude Goudimel (c.1514 – 1572), Philibert Jambe-de-Fer (c.1515-c.1566), Claudin Le Jeune (c. 1528 – 1600), Orlando di Lasso (1532 – 1594), and Jan Sweelinck (1562 – 1621),63 but they were for use at home or elsewhere outside the liturgy,64 not when the church gathered for public worship. As usual, the strictures did not always hold. Reformed churches in the Netherlands and Germany brought the organ and polyphony into public worship.65

Comparisons Home use should not be missed here. For both Lutherans and Calvinists the home was very important, but for Calvinists there was a musical distinction the Lutherans did not know. Lutherans sang chorales in unison, their choirs sang polyphonic settings in alternation with the congregation, and both unison and contrapuntal singing were welcomed in public worship and at home. In public worship Calvinists sang the psalms in unison. At home the same texts could be sung contrapuntally. Though a fuller musical practice was present than the public face suggests, the Calvinist restrictions created a worshiping context very different from the Lutheran one. Calvin’s position may be seen as closest to Augustine and the early church (Luther realized that and said, “but if [Augustine] were living today, he would hold with us.”66), but it was not quite the same. Calvin set up restrictions on the texts of worship – Psalms only, though the Apostles’ Creed and canticles like 60 See John Witvliet, “Spirituality of the Psalter,” 8. 61 ELW, # 883, is one place where it may be found. 62 For the tunes in modern notation, with comments, see Waldo Selden Pratt, The Music of the French Psalter of 1562: A Historical Survey and Analysis, with the Music in Modern Notation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 79 – 206. For a summary of more recent thought about the sources of the tunes, whether from secular chansons or Gregorian chant, see John Witvliet, “Spirituality of the Psalter,” 14 – 15. 63 Witvliet, “Spirituality of the Psalter,” 19 – 21, points to the “explosion of polyphonic settings of Genevan tunes” (p. 19), “with 13 volumes of polyphonic music printed between 1554 and 1559, and 28 volumes printed by the end of the century. In all over 2000 settings of the Genevan texts and tunes were produced,” (p. 20). 64 See Witvliet, “Spirituality of the Psalter,” 20 and 15 – 23. 65 See Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), I, 22. 66 See Robert M. Stevenson, Patterns of Protestant Church Music (Durham: Duke University Press, 1953), 9.

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the Nunc Dimittis were also included in Calvinist Psalters – which were more severe than the early church knew. Neither did the early church know the kind of musical restrictions Calvin imposed. It adopted the unaccompanied vocal song of the synagogue in its worship and banned instruments outside worship at banquets and the like because of their associations with idolatry and immorality.67 More importantly, the song of the early church was what would become chant – not “musica” but “psalms and hymns” which indicated a unique performance practice consciously or unconsciously distinct from the world.68 Calvin consciously wanted music that was distinct from the world, but he also thought the church had to use music that was in a “known tongue.”69 He regarded both instruments and chanting as an “unknown tongue” and “an empty sound.”70 Unlike the early church which used what it inherited from the synagogue, Calvin broke with the church’s musical past. The way he got the weight and gravity he sought was through tunes like OLD HUNDREDTH. That was music with, if Oskar Soehngen is right, an eye for the inflammability of the Roman temperament [which] aims in this direction. The Psalms of the Geneva Reformation,when seen from the standpoint of their musical type, are closely related to the Marseillaise of the French Revolution, the gripping melody of which fascinated the people, and it is the same line which leads to the electrifying rhythm of Bizet’s “Carmen” and Ravel’s “Bolero.”71

Luther and Calvin spawned different things for the congregation. These things are clear in three ways. First, musically Luther embraced the past. Calvin denied it. Second, though both traditions used unison song for the congregation, Luther’s was “practically based” and Calvin’s “theologically based.”72 Third, the reformation in Wittenberg produced proclamatory chorales of bold, vigorous, and objective rejoicing, whereas the reformation in Geneva produced a song that was at once separate from the world but nonetheless more subjective than the early church or what the Lutherans knew. Lutherans looked with some dismay therefore at the seductive “siren” of Reformed congregations. Two final specifically theological matters further illuminate the differences between Luther and Calvin. The first relates to their Eucharistic theologies. 67 I have tried to summarize the position of the early church in Chapter 5 of Te Deum and Augustine’s position in Chapter 6. 68 McKinnon, “The Meaning of the Patristic Polemic Against Musical Instruments,” Current Musicology I: 70 – 71. See also Calvin R. Stapert, A New Song for an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007). 69 John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1949), Psalm XXXIII, Volume I, 539. 70 Ibid. Cf. Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, Psalm LXXI, Volume III, 98. 71 Soehngen, “Fundamental Considerations for a Theology of Music,” 15. 72 Erik Routley, The Music of Christian Hymns, 28. For Routley’s take on Lutheran and Reformed music in more detail, see pp. 21 – 34.

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Luther understood Christ to be present in, with, and under the bread and wine. Calvin understood Christ to be present in the whole action of the Supper. For Luther the finite bears the infinite, but for Calvin the finite cannot bear the infinite. There is a parallel in their thoughts about music: Luther welcomed the physicality of music; Calvin was nervous about it, probably cognizant of the “siren” he engendered.73 A second parallel relates to the uses of the law. Luther was not sure there even is a third use of the law, whereas for Calvin the third use is the most important. Gerhard Forde argued that for Luther the third use was indistinguishable from the first. (The numbering of the two differs for Luther and Calvin. The law as curb is for Luther the first use and for Calvin the second; the law as mirror is for Luther the second use and for Calvin the first.) For Luther of course there is the curb, restraint, and guide of the law in music as in all things. For Luther you craft music as well as possible so that it is the finest you can imagine. But you let it burst out however it will in all its bold Christus Victor proclamation and rejoicing – for choir and congregation with all the imagination you can muster ; with what is fitting; in unison for the congregation; in polyphony as complex as you like for the choir ; with instruments; without instruments; with instruments alone or not; in appropriate styles of chant, folksong, high art, simple pieces, complex pieces, from the past, from the present; and on and on. Calvin’s view of music as prayer combined with the importance of the third use of the law, on the other hand, created a kind of canon law with restrictions – only the congregation, no choir, no instruments, no polyphony, no chant, only metrical psalms, and only a certain set of psalm tunes to go with them.

Examples Luther’s setting of Psalm 130, Aus tiefer Not, with its tune AUS TIEFER NOT (1523). Genevan Psalter setting of Psalm 130, Du fonds de ma pensee, with its tune GENEVAN 130 (1539). GENEVAN 130 with Psalm 116, from the “Pilgrim’s” Psalter (1612) of Henry Ainsworth – the Psalter on Priscilla’s lap in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish III, The Lover’s Errand. “Out of the Depths” (Luther’s metrical version of Psalm 130, translated into English, with his tune) at ELW # 600, as a Lutheran congregation might sing it. Organ introduction, improvised by Master of Sacred Music student 73 One way to further understand this is to follow H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1951). Musically Luther’s position is Christ and Culture in Paradox, and Calvin’s position is Christ the Transformer of Culture.

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Zachary Busch 1 – 2, all, in unison, unaccompanied 3, organ setting of Max Reger (1873 – 1916), played by Busch 4, all, in unison, unaccompanied “Out of the Depths,” ed. Elwood Coggin (Augsburg 11 – 1546, 1969), a perky choral setting of Psalm 130 in a seventeenth century style, the text translated into English in the twentieth century, with music ascribed to Schütz, not based on AUS TIEFER NOT. I have not been able to find this music in Schütz’s works. If it is not by Schütz, it is a very skillful imitation. John Ferguson, Psalm 130, The Augsburg Choir Book, ed. Kenneth Jennings (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1998), p. 292 – 299, a twentieth century setting of Psalm 130 with more Angst than Schütz’s setting and with music based on AUS TIEFER NOT.

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Timothy J. Wengert

Philip Melanchthon and John Calvin against Andreas Osiander : Coming to Terms with Forensic Justification1 The modern struggle over the meaning of justification by faith alone may trace its roots to the 1917 article by Karl Holl, who claimed that Philip Melanchthon destroyed Martin Luther’s Reformation breakthrough to a “sanative” understanding of justification (a la Augustine) by replacing it with imputation.2 This skepticism about Melanchthon and other Protestants, who shared a hankering after a forensic view of justification, has more recently come to expression in two separate but related venues. On the one hand, several Finnish scholars have argued that Luther’s understanding of justification had much in common with the Orthodox Church’s commitment to theosis and that German Luther scholars in particular, by being wedded to existentialist philosophy, had denied the ontological nature of Luther’s theology in general and his view of justification in particular.3 On the other hand, a self-designated “New” Pauline school, by assuming that Luther interpreted justification in Romans and Galatians in terms of imputation, have announced a new approach to Paul that minimizes the role of justification in the apostle’s writings, reinterprets Paul’s understanding of law and, in the process, excoriates Lutherans and other Protestants for distorting the actual Pauline message.4 In point of fact, the “new” Luther research has much in common with Holl’s thesis, mixing in a deep commitment to ecumenism, a deep resentment of German scholarship and a deep love of Lutheran Pietism. Similarly, the “new” Pauline school has much in common with the interpretations of Jerome and Erasmus, has curiously no knowledge of or interest in the chief interpreter of 1 In this article, the following abbreviations will be used: CR: Corpus Reformatorum: Philippi Melanthonis opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. Karl Bretschneider and Heinrich Bindseil, 28 vols. (Halle: A. Schwetschke & Sons, 1834 – 1860); GA: Andreas Osiander, Gesamtausgabe, ed. Gottfried Seebass, 10 vols. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1975 – 1997); MBW: Melanchthons Briefwechsel: Kritische und kommentierte Gesamtausgabe: Regesten, ed. Heinz Scheible, 12+ vols. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977– ; the numbers refer to MBW’s chronological numbering of the letters). 2 Karl Holl, “Die Rechtfertigungslehre in Luthers Vorlesung über den Römerbrief mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Frage der Heilsgewißheit,” in: Karl Holl, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte, vol. 1: Luther (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1932), 111 – 54; here, 128. 3 See, for example, Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, eds., Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). 4 A popularized view of this argument is in Nicholas T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009).

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Romans, Philip Melanchthon, and marches to the beat of some very important modern moral-philosophical drums at war with traditional Protestant approaches to justification. This essay proposes to begin a correction of the historical record championed by both of these “new” schools by looking at a very old debate: the reactions to the anti-forensic understanding of justification proposed by Andreas Osiander (1498 – 1552), then professor of theology at the University of Königsberg. It will focus on the refutations of Osiander by two of the most important theologians of the time: Philip Melanchthon and John Calvin. In the process, we will not only discover why both men, along with other opponents of Osiander, insisted on a forensic understanding of justification but also how Calvin in particular shaped the arguments of Lutherans to prosecute his own case.

Osiander’s View of Justification: Indwelling of Christ’s Divine Righteousness On 24 October 1550, Andreas Osiander, the “primarius” professor of theology (as he often referred to himself) at the recently founded University of Königsberg, presented and defended before a packed house eighty-one theses on justification by faith. Justification, he argued, must be viewed as a making alive by divine indwelling and not as a forensic declaration of forgiveness. It consisted of two parts, forgiveness and reconciliation. Skipping over forgiveness (which Christ won on the cross), Osiander concentrated on reconciliation, which meant for him union with Christ’s righteous, divine nature. Without such a view of justification, he argued, Zwingli’s teaching on the Lord’s Supper was unavoidable. Forgiveness alone did not adequately describe justification; which had to include the indwelling of Christ’s divine nature. Only this divine righteousness, understood as effecting righteousness in us, could properly define justification.5 Osiander was now a year into his position as university professor in Königsberg after having been driven out of his pastorate in Nuremberg because of the defeat of some Evangelical princes and their allies in the Smalcald War and the resultant harsh measures passed at the Imperial Diet meeting in Augsburg in 1547 – 1548. In part, he intended these theses as a sharp correction of the theology of Philip Melanchthon and his pupils—and for several good reasons. Osiander was completely surrounded by theologians trained in Wittenberg. Already when he held his earlier, inaugural disputation on law and gospel in 1549, some of these Wittenbergers had raised objections. 5 See GA 9: 422 – 47 and especially the useful summary on pp. 422 – 23.

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And later, when he insisted that Christ would have become incarnate even had Adam not sinned, many theologians complained about his eccentric theology. Osiander had another motivation for setting his sights on Wittenberg theologians. As had Melanchthon, von Amsdorff and a host of others, in 1548 Osiander joined the chorus of attacks against the Augsburg Interim, that decree of the Imperial Diet agreed to by the Brandenburg theologian Johannes Agricola, one which permitted the Evangelicals little more than married priests and communion in both kinds until a general council could meet.6 A later memorandum to his prince demonstrates that Osiander rejected Wittenberg’s attempts at coming to terms with the hated Augsburg Interim through compromise on matters of adiaphora (what in the course of that intraLutheran controversy became known incorrectly as the Leipzig Interim). Thus, attacks concerning adiaphora against Melanchthon and Wittenberg by others may also have emboldened Osiander to criticize what he viewed as Wittenberg’s weak understanding of justification.

Philip Melanchthon: Attacking Osiander through Romans Certain aspects of this dispute have captured the attention of modern scholars, especially on the question of the relation between Melanchthon and Osiander. In her dissertation on the subject, Anna Briskina examines the theology of both Osiander and Melanchthon, scrutinizing many of their most important tracts and pamphlets in the controversy.7 Briskina, however, overlooked one crucial document in her study, the 1556 Enarratio ad Romanos, which demonstrates beyond question how thoroughly Melanchthon rejected Osiander’s point of view and defended a forensic understanding of justification.8 Although Melanchthon referred to Osiander throughout his commentary both directly and indirectly, comments on Romans 3:21 provided readers with an all-out assault on the by then deceased chief theologian of Königsberg. In fact, Melanchthon’s refutation of Osiander’s position takes up twelve columns 6 See Thomas Kaufmann, Das Ende der Reformation: Magdeburgs “Herrgott Kanzlei” 1548 – 1551/ 52 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), “Bibliography,” 494 – 503 (1548). Osiander’s attack came in the summer of 1548. 7 Anna Briskina, Philipp Melanchthon und Andreas Osiander im Ringen um die Rechtfertigungslehre: Ein reformatorischer Streit aus der ostkirchlichen Perspektive (Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 2006). 8 The following section is based upon my article, “Commentary As Polemic: Philip Melanchthon’s 1556 Enarratio ad Romanos against Andreas Osiander,” in: Hermeneutica Sacra: Studies of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Torbjörn Johansson, Robert Kolb and Johann Anselm Steiger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 147 – 63, and appears in Defending Faith: Lutheran Responses to Andreas Osiander’s Doctrine of Justification, 1551 – 1559 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 317 – 50.

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in the CR.9 This contrasted strikingly to his comments on other opponents. Osiander’s position on justification was so virulent that Melanchthon felt the need to interrupt or, rather, preface, his entire discussion of the topic with an attack.10 Since he first lectured on the Latin text of Romans in 1521, Melanchthon had always insisted that the very heart of Paul’s first argument in Romans, justification, introduced in Romans 1:16 – 17, actually commenced with Romans 3:21 and ran to 5:12, when Paul introduced a different theme, at which point he employed analytical (dialectical) techniques to prosecute this second topic. In 1556, having arrived at Romans 3:21, Melanchthon let out all the stops, revealing just how seriously he took his Prussian opponent. Indeed, he did not think that he could teach the students (iuniores) the meaning of this all-important text without first setting aside Osiander’s wayward interpretation. At the very beginning of his interpretation of Romans 3:21 (“But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God is revealed”), Melanchthon described the disagreement with Osiander this way. “Osiander understands the righteousness of God to be God dwelling in the reborn person and moving that one to do righteous things. So, by this approach [res] itself he teaches that a human being is righteous by renewal [novitas] and works.”11 From this synopsis, Melanchthon focused not so much on the indwelling of Christ’s divine nature—other opponents attacked Osiander on this point—but on the consequences of such an indwelling: namely, moving a person to do righteous things, which Osiander considered true justification. Where Trent spoke of an indwelling of the habitus of love or grace, Osiander simply replaced it with the indwelling of God himself. Melanchthon, who was more familiar with medieval exegetical and theological debates than some give him credit, recognized that the differences between these two positions (indwelling habitus versus indwelling divine nature) went back to an old dispute over Romans 5:5 (“The Holy Spirit is poured out in our hearts”). At first glance, especially if viewed as a debate over competing “ontologies,” it would seem that Melanchthon had gotten it all wrong. Osiander had insisted upon the indwelling of Christ’s divinity (or, in other places, the Trinity) precisely to argue against an approach to justification that rested “merely” upon a “forensic” declaration of forgiveness, which, Osiander went on to say, had no effect upon the human being. The medieval teaching about habitus argued in a similar way. The habitus entered the soul and changed its very essence. But, in fact, Melanchthon’s objection (that the Holy Spirit or habitus 9 CR 15: 855 – 67. 10 Here Briskina’s work is less than satisfying. It is not a matter of whether she sees more agreements between Melanchthon and Osiander than they did, but that Melanchthon saw no basis for agreement with Osiander at all. 11 CR 15: 855.

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is poured into the soul like wine into a jug) revealed a vastly different approach to justification that rejected ontological speculation about the nature of the soul and its ontological connection to God and had everything to do with relatus, relation.12 As Melanchthon had consistently stated, at least since his 1532 commentary on Romans and in every major theological treatise since then including the 1556 Enarratio, the word justificatio had to be understood as a Hebraism. This comment alone made clear that he saw Paul’s use of the word in direct conflict with the regnant (though often competing) ontologies of his day. In the 1556 Argumentum he put it this way. Thomas Aquinas and others (Melanchthon was probably thinking of Osiander, given later comments linking the two) understood iustificatio and iustitia in terms of the law, philosophically, as a matter of possessing certain virtues. The Gospel spoke otherwise. When your mind is in anguish about whether you are righteous or not, it is not principally seeking what are the qualities in the heart but … whether you are accepted by God, whether God receives you and forgives you…. Thus, the word “to justify” means to absolve from sin and “righteous,” that is, accepted, means to repute or to pronounce, as commonly in judicial speech [in forense sermone], although the Hebrews speak [this way], as if they said, “The Roman people justified Scipio accused by the tribune,” that is, they pronounced him just.13

In the midst of his attack on Osiander, Melanchthon went into even more detail, this time explaining that “to impute” “signified a relation, as elsewhere that term is usually defined.”14 Then, rather than using the example of Scipio, Melanchthon cited a biblical example (in this context unusual for him), namely Joseph’s comment in Genesis 50 (“You intended it for evil but God for good”), adding, “this intention [cogitatio] is acceptation.” He concluded that the word “to impute” had to be understood “relative.” While relative and relatus are first attested in post-classical Latin,15 the 12 See Briskina, Melanchthon und Osiander, 307 – 08, and Günter Frank, Die theologische Philosophie Philipp Melanchthons (1497 – 1560) (Leipzig: Benno, 1995), 90 – 95. 13 CR 15: 815. Melanchthon was referring to the story of Scipio Africanus who, when accused in 185 B. C., on the anniversary of his victory over Carthage, of having been bribed by the Syrian King, Antiochus III, was surrounded by the people of Rome and brought to the Capitol, where they prayed the gods to give them more citizens like Scipio. (Livy, Ab urbe condita libri, XXXVIII, 52 – 53.) It was just this definition that Osiander attacked in Von dem einigen Mittler (GA 10: 148, 150): “Dann es sein etliche, die halten, lehren und schreiben, wir warden umb des glaubens willen gerecht gesprochen, aber vom gerechtmachen schweigen sie gantz und gar still und setzen die ursach, das wörtlein ‘rechtfertigen’ sey ein gemein wort, von den gerichtshendeln genommen, und heis nichts anders, den das man einen beklagten vor gericht gerecht und ledig sprech, gleichwie das römisch volck den Scipion, der da beklagt war, als were er gemeinem nutz nicht treulich vorgestanden, fur gerecht hielt und ledig zelet. Solchs sey nun gemeinet, wie es wolle, so ist es an im selbs ein philosophische, fleischliche und unbedachte rede.” 14 CR 15:859. Osiander had attacked this notion at the very outset, having dismissed defining fides as relatio in his Disputatio de Iustificatione of 24 October 1550. thesis 19 (GA 9: 430). 15 Cf. Augustine, De Trinitate 5, 16 & 5, 71, according to Lewis & Short, A Latin Dictionary, q. v.

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classical Latin term from which they are derived, relatio, includes several technical meanings. Literally, it means a carrying or bringing back (cf. refero). In philosophy and grammar it denotes a reference or relation (as in a “relative” pronoun).16 In rhetoric it refers to the repetition of a word for effect. Of course, it can also mean repaying or simply a report or relating of something. However, when Melanchthon employed the term, his reference to Genesis 50 (and to Scipio) demonstrated that he was thinking of the technical usage in law: a retorting or rejecting of a charge, that is, turning a charge back on the accuser.17 In this case, however, Melanchthon inverted the meaning. Here not the accused but the accuser (God) overturned the accusation with the beneficia Christi.18 In this sense, relative implied something close to what we mean by relationship or experience. That is, Melanchthon was not simply talking about a mental construct, a fictive judicial “as if,” but an actual turn of events before God’s judgment seat. Thus, the actual sinner, oppressed by sin (that is, under the law), hears the judge speak a completely unexpected word of grace. No wonder that, to prove his point Melanchthon, both in his argumentum for the entire epistle and in the discussion of Romans 5:5 proffered examples of famous sinners in the Bible (Adam and David). Far from “nothing happening,” everything changed because of this divine pronouncement of judgment (law) and forgiveness (gospel).19 This very pronouncement carried with it the presence of Christ and the Holy Spirit and the gifts of comfort and joy, because the Son and the Holy Spirit were not there like water in a jug but the person was reborn and could bear the fruits of the Spirit. On the contrary, “smug reason [ratio secura] neither discerns the wrath of God against sin nor the presence of God in consolation nor the joy in God,” that is, neither law nor gospel.20 Melanchthon expressed the centrality of this relational meaning of iustitia far more completely in his direct attack on Osiander in the Enarratio. In Paul’s view, believers become righteous “not by an indwelling or essential righteousness which causes us to do righteous things, but rather [imo] by the obedience of the Mediator, which is infinitely preferable and which is active in the one reborn.”21 But what did the term iustitia mean? Melanchthon first noted that in political essays it had two meanings. It referred, on the one hand, to a iustitia universalis (obedience to all laws which had their origin in God’s wisdom, which distinguished righteous and unrighteous deeds). Under this 16 Quintillian, Institutio oratorio, 8,4,21. 17 Cicero, De inventione, 1,11,15: “Relatio criminis est cum ideo jure factum dicitur, quod aliquis ante injuria lacessierit.” 18 See the insightful work by Risto Saarinen, God and the Gift: An Ecumenical Theology of Giving (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005), 45 – 58. 19 See, in the Argumentum, CR 15: 799 – 801 (Adam), 801 – 02 (David) and, in arguments against Osiander, CR 15: 858 (David) and 915 (Adam). 20 CR 15: 915. 21 CR 15: 856.

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definition Aristides was called righteous because he obeyed all laws according to externa disciplina.22 Melanchthon also provided two common adages to this effect: one from Theognis, on whom he lectured in Wittenberg, and the other from Horace.23 On the other hand, it referred to a iustitia particularis, “which is equality preserved in contracts.” Thus, [Gaius Cilnius] Maecenas was just in emotions but not in public shows.24 But, Melanchthon concluded, these were legal definitions, occasionally used by the prophets and apostles when speaking about works. “It is another thing to speak about the righteousness of the person before God, that is, concerning the acceptance of the person.”25 Such a person was accepted and righteous by faith. Only afterward [postea] was such a one said to have a good conscience, which referred to the particular righteousness of one’s calling. Thus, this legal definition (both universal and particular) was behind Clement’s phrase (cited in Greek but without attribution) that “righteousness is the fellowship of God with equality [i.e., with an equal].”26 The first part (fellowship with God) referred to the renewal of the believer and the latter (in equality) with the works of the second table. This brings us to Melanchthon’s simul. Luther, of course, was and is famous for the phrase “simul iustus et peccator.” Melanchthon’s simul had a quite different flavor. For him faith clung to this pronouncement of forgiveness, but at the same time (simul) the Holy Spirit was given and indwelt the believer to begin the process of renewal. This is related to the “hermeneutical circle” described above. While this renewal was not to be confused with justification (precisely what Osiander was doing in Melanchthon’s eyes), it should also not be separated from it.27 Nevertheless, a person was righteous even after justification “on account of the mediator [Christ] by faith alone through mercy.”28 Melanchthon summarized his position with reference to David. 22 Aristides (530 B. C. – 468 B. C.), an Athenian soldier and stateman who was given the nickname “the Just” and about whom Herodotus wrote that there was not a man in Athens as just as he. 23 CR 15: 857. “Sic usitate dicitur de iusticia universali: ‘Iustitia in sese virtutes continet omnes.’” He repeated this later in the commentary (CR 15: 989), where he identified Theognis (v. 147) the poet as his source. (Cf. Melanchthon’s lectures in CR 19: 86, which makes clear that he was not dependent upon Erasmus, Adagia, 1273). “Et apud Horatium [Odes, III.3] ‘Iustum et tenacem propositi virum, Non vultis [=voltus] instantis tyrannis mente quatit solida, Si fractus illabatur urbis [=orbis], impavidum ferient ruinae.’” E.T.: “The man who is just and tenacious of his purpose … the face of a threatening tyrant shakes not from his solid determination … if the world should fall shattered, the ruins will strike him unafraid.” 24 Perhaps a reference to Horace, Odes, II.17. Maecenas was accused of misuse of funds for circuses. 25 CR 15: 857. 26 Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, III.2.6. Osiander used a similar definition to quite different ends. See GA 10: 841, 4 – 5. 27 See CR 15: 803, 805, 825 (here the simultaneity of the hearing of the Word of God and the work of the Holy Spirit) and 858 – 59. 28 CR 15: 805.

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Therefore, when David, filled with this sense of God’s wrath seeks righteousness, what does the promise and voice of the gospel offer? It does not say that he is righteous by fulfilling the law but it shows the benefits of the Mediator: forgiveness of sins and gratuitous reconciliation, or imputation of righteousness on account of the Mediator, with which at the same time [simul] vivification occurs, when he believes that he is received on account of the obedience of the Mediator.29

David did not ask what virtues were in him or the quality of the indwelling essential righteousness but how he received forgiveness. Here what is reduced by some scholars (especially under the influence of Karl Holl) to “mere” psychology or existential philosophy was for Melanchthon something quite different: a fundamentally divergent way of doing theology, one that rested in the experience of the sinner but rejected the medieval addiction to psychology and ontology in favor of a relationship with the sinner borne by the Word of forgiveness won by the mediator (cf. Romans 3:25).30 What followed in the Enarratio were a series of syllogisms, similar in form to those in the Argumentum.31 Through them, Melanchthon sought to show how ungodly Osiandrian definitions really were. “Only God is good; therefore only God is righteousness.” When he said that only God was good, Osiander should have added that God was the source of goodness (by implication Melanchthon opposed this dabbling in speculation and sheer abstractions about the goodness of God per se). At the same time, to imagine that Christ justified per accidens is a horrible lie, since it confused cause and effect. In Romans 3 Paul stated that “God justifies the one who has faith from Jesus.” Here Paul named two causes: God as efficient cause and Christ as impulsive cause per se (impulsiva causa per se).32 The nature of Melanchthon’s theology and method meant that he also focused his rebuttal of Osiander on what had been a leitmotiv for his (and others’!) attacks on Osiander from the very beginning: Osiander’s position robbed the person of comfort.33 Again, this objection had for Melanchthon not simply ethical or psychological aspects (as Briskina and a host of others have argued).34 Instead, it was grounded in his understanding of the nature of meaning. Throughout his career Melanchthon remained wedded to the notion that proper theology comprised two parts: proper definition of a thing and accurately understanding its effects or goal. The goal of justification was comfort (cf. Romans 5:1); Osiander robbed the believer of comfort; therefore 29 CR 15: 858. 30 See Briskina, Melanchthon und Osiander, 17 – 46, and the references there. 31 The only other set in the commentary itself comes in a series refuting Melanchthon’s Roman opponents, into which he inserted an attack on Osiander (CR 15: 895). 32 CR 15: 862. 33 This complaint is also expressed by many others in this debate. At one point, Osiander noted this objection in Melanchthon’s first tract against him by simply dismissing it out of hand, a sure indication that he had no grasp of its significance. See GA 10:642 – 46. 34 See Briskina, Melanchthon und Osiander, 272 – 96.

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his construal of justification could not be true. This experience of grace (Adam hearing the proto-Evangelium of Genesis 3:15 and David receiving God’s forgiveness in Psalm 51) defied reason and, effectively, broke the very syllogism on which human existence after the Fall was based. Any attempt to skirt this human predicament by pure logic destroyed the “native meaning” of the text and left a person stuck in sin. Moreover, this perspective makes sense of Melanchthon’s other forays into the battle against Osiander.

John Calvin: Learning from Lutherans Ever since Wilhelm Niesel’s article on the subject, scholars have been aware of Calvin’s opposition to Andreas Osiander.35 In the twenty-first century, systematic theologians have renewed their scrutiny of Calvin’s statements in their desire to compare Calvin’s thought to the “New” Pauline school of N. T. Wright and others and the “new” approach to Luther studies supported especially by some Finnish scholars.36 Debate over a forensic understanding of justification, fueled by nineteenth-century German liberalism and supported by the historical arguments of Karl Holl and his students continues! A proper appreciation of Calvin’s position has been especially hampered by a lack of knowledge of the history of Lutheran reactions to the Osiandrian controversy and the ways in which Osiander’s opponents read one another’s works and used them in their own writings. No one can truly appreciate Calvin’s contribution to the debate without coming to terms with the fact that what he had to say others had said before him and that he borrowed and 35 Wilhelm Niesel, “Calvin wider Osianders Rechtfertigungslehre”, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 46 (1927): 410 – 30. 36 See already in the twentieth century Trevor Hart, “Humankind in Christ and Christ in Humankind: Salvation as Participation in Our Substitute in the Theology of John Calvin,” Scottish Journal of Theology 42 (1989): 67 – 84. More recently, see Seng-Kong Tan, “Calvin’s Doctrine of Our Union with Christ,” Quodlibet Journal 5 (2003 [accessed at: http://www.quodlibet.net/ articles/tan-union.shtml]); Julie Canlis, “Calvin, Osiander and Participation in God,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 6 (2004): 169 – 84; idem., Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); Carl Mosser, “The Greatest Possible Blessing: Calvin and Deification,” Scottish Journal of Theology 55 (2002): 36 – 57; J. Todd Billings, “United to God through Christ: Assessing Calvin on the Question of Deification,” Harvard Theological Review 98 (2005): 315 – 34 (especially 325 – 28); idem., Calvin, Participation and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (New York: Oxford, 2008); Mark A. Garcia, “Imputation and the Christology of Union with Christ: Calvin, Osiander, and the Contemporary Quest for a Reformed Model,” Westminster Theological Journal 68 (2006): 219 – 51; idem., Life in Christ: Union with Christ and Twofold Grace in Calvin’s Theology (Waynesboro, GA: Pater noster, 2008); Michael S. Horton, Covenant and Salvation: Union with Christ (Louisville, WJK, 2007); Dennis E. Tamburello, Union with Christ: John Calvin and the Mysticism of St. Bernard (Louisville, WJK, 2007). See also Charles Partee, The Theology of John Calvin (Louisville: WJK, 2008), 225 – 30.

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reshaped their arguments. Lacking a proper historical context, scholars could easily treat Calvin’s comments in the 1559 Institutes much like the mythic origins of the Koran—something that dropped out of heaven in a basket. Calvin’s comments on Osiander come only in the 1559 Institutes, most importantly in a section of his discussion of justification in III.xi, where he interrupted a general explanation of justification from earlier versions with a lengthy excursus specifically directed at refuting Osiander (par. 5 – 12). As interesting as the other sections, which clearly have Roman opponents in their sights, might be, we will restrict our comments here to Calvin’s direct confrontation with Osiander.

Calvin’s Sources Of the nearly ninety tracts written opposing Osiander’s position, Calvin would have had access to less than one-third, since most of the debate took place in German. Moreover, not all the Latin tracts would have found their way down to Geneva. Yet some Lutheran writings, especially those from important printing centers and by well-known Lutheran theologians, doubtless made their way to Geneva. Melanchthon’s most thorough refutation of Osiander, contained in his 1556 commentary on Romans, would surely have been at Calvin’s disposal.37 If other material from Wittenberg itself made it down to Geneva, it could have included two speeches of Melanchthon, an imprimatur for Joachim Mörlin’s work, and two Latin tracts of Matthias Flacius.38 Other important Latin voices included Alexander Alesius, the Scottish theologian at the University of Leipzig; three Nurembergers Jerome Besold, Osiander’s son-inlaw who wrote a defense of forensic justification into the preface to Luther’s lectures on Genesis, Sebald Heyden and Michael Roting, one of the very first to attack Osiander in print; Johann Aepinus, Hamburg’s superintendent whose 37 For Philip Melanchthon, Epistolae Pauli scriptae ad Romanos enarratio (Wittenberg: Veit Kreutzer, 1556), see above. 38 Philip Melanchthon, Oratio de definitione iusticiae, quae extat apud Clementem Alexandrinum, recitata a Mag. Luca Hetzer, Decano, an. 1551 (Wittenberg: [Kreutzer], 1551); idem., Oratio in qua refutatur calumnia Osiandri, reprehendentis promißionem eorum, quibus tribuitur testimonium doctrinae, recitata cum decerneretur gradus Doctroi Tilemanno jj Heshusio Wesaliensi. Wittebergae. M. D. LIII (Wittenberg: Crato, May 1553); Johannes Bugenhagen, Johann Forster and Paul Eber, Iudicium Ecclesiae Witebergensis de hoc ipso libro nostro contra Osiandrum ([Königsberg: Weinrich], 1552); Matthias Flacius, De Iesu, nomine Christi servatoris nostri proprio, contra Osiandrum, De Iehova nomine veri Dei proprio (Wittenberg: Johann Krafft, 1552); idem., Explicatio loci Sancti Pauli Rom. 3. Nunc autem reuelata est Iusticia Dei sine lege &c. In quo tum propositio ac scopus Epistolae ad Romanos continetur, tum tota ratio Iusticiae ac Iustificationis exponitur, Contra Osiandrum, Matth. Flacij Illyrici (Wittenberg: J. Lufft, 5 August 1553). Melanchthon’s preface to Alexander Hale’s work and his additions of a string of definitions to the third edition of the Loci communes may also have been known to Calvin.

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book on justification predated Osiander’s attack; Peter Paladius from Denmark and Erhard Schnepf, the Gnesio-Lutheran theologian from ducal Saxony, whose works summarized and refuted a collection of heresies; and Andreas Musculus, later co-author of the Formula of Concord, whose work focused especially on Osiander’s division of the two natures of Christ.39 Among all of these authors (German or Latin), only one, Johannes Bretschneider (Placotomus), wrote a tract specifically against Osiander’s bizarre (in sixteenth-century eyes) speculation about whether the incarnation would have occurred had Adam not sinned.40 It may even be that this tract, which this Danzig physician (having been banished from Königsberg for his opposition to Osiander) published in Lübeck, stimulated Calvin to refute Osiander’s unusual position. In any case, during the entire dispute with Osiander only two theologians, Bretschneider and Calvin, took Osiander’s position on the incarnation seriously enough to refute it.41 39 Alexander Alesius. Diligens Refutatio errorum quos sparsit nuper Andreas Osiander in libro, cui titulum fecit: De unico mediatore Christo (Wittenberg: Lufft, 1552); idem., Disputatio de iustitia Dei et iustitia hominis mediatore Christo Alexander Alesius (Leipzig: Hantsch, 1553); idem., Tres disputationes de mediatore et reconciliatione ac iustificatione hominis, ante seorsim vt in dispvtatione propositae fverant ab Alexandro Alesio D. Impressae, nvnc vero simvl editae in Gratiam eorvm qvi exemplaria invenire non poterant. Anno 1554. Calendis Ianuarij (Leipzig: Georg Hantzsch, 1554); Jerome Besold, ed., the preface to: In Genesin enarrationum … Martini Lutheri… Quartus tomus (Nuremberg: Berg und Neuber, 1554); Michael Roting, Testimonium optimi ac doctissimi viri D. Michaelis Rotingi unius e populo ecclesiastico contra falsam Andreae Osiandri de iustificatione sententiam, quam in Prussia libellis ac propositionibus spargit. ([Nuremberg: Hans Daubmann], 1551); Sebald Heyden, Assertio Christiana, quod per sanguinem, mortem et obedientiam Christi Iesu filij hominis, omnes credentes iustificentur. Contra novam et Antichristianam sectam Osiandristarum, qui essentiali & aeternae Dei iusticiae peccatoris iustificationem, ita proprie attribuunt, ut Christo homini eam prorsus adamant (Nuremberg: Johann Montanus & Ulrich Neuber, 1555); Johann Aepinus, Liber de iustificationis hominis operibus legis. Fidei iustitia & origine. Fidei discrimine & virtute. Notis signis iustificantis fidei et hominum iustificatorum. Imbecillitate et peccatis sanctorum. Discrimine peccatorum. Praemijs fidei et bonorum operarum. His addita est confutatio argumentorum, quae adversarijs opponi solent iustificatione fidei (Frankfurt/Main: Brubach, 1551); Peter Palladius, Catalogvs aliquot haeresium huius aetatis, et earvm refutatio, Scripta, a Petro Palladio doctore theologiae gvbernante ecclesiam Dei in inclyto Regno Danico (Wittenberg: Peter Seitz, 1557); Erhart Schnepf, Propositiones, complectentes sumam verae & incorruptae Doctrinae, de Iustificatione, & de bonis operibus: ad disputandum propositae in Schola Ihenensi, die XXVI. Iulij, Anno M. D. LV. Praeside Erharto Schnepffio, & Respondente Baltasare Vuintero (Jena: Christian Rödinger, 1555); Andreas Musculus, De adorando summa veneratione et fide inconcussa amplectendo mysterio Vnitionis duarum naturarum Christi, in unam personam, contra Antichristum septentrionis Osiandrum (Frankfurt/Oder: Johann Eichhorn, 1552). 40 Johannes Bretschneider [Placotomus], De incarnatione Christi conclusiones quaedam contra novam, minime necessariam, inutilem, & impiam opinionem Andr. Osiandri asseuerantis, Christum oportuisse fieri hominem, etiamsi Adam lapsus non fuisset (Lübeck: Georg Richolff, 1552). 41 Philip Melanchthon penned an oration based upon Psalm 2, Oratio de nativitate filii Dei, Domini nostri Iesu Christi, hoc est, de admiranda copulatione divinae et humanae naturae in filio Dei, assumente humanam naturam in utero virginis Mariae, et de causis cur missus sit, et quomodo sit excipiendus, delivered, according the the editor of CR, in December 1552, but for which no

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Matthias Flacius wrote more against Osiander and his followers than anyone else, and he also provided substantive Latin material, including his wide-ranging attacks against the “Dikaeusiasts,” as he nicknamed Osiander and his followers.42 What marked Flacius’s argument off from others was that he, like Calvin, attacked Osiander’s idea of twofold righteousness. Indeed, as we shall see, Calvin’s own opposition, when viewed in the light of Flacius’s work, may well be a sophisticated reworking of the Croatian theologian’s original arguments.

Calvin’s Use of Sources There are two criticisms often leveled against the search for sources in intellectual history. For one thing, similar ideas do not necessarily mean that the later thinker borrowed from the earlier one. Given that all Western theologians had a plethora of common sources (the church fathers, creeds, and, above all Scripture), it would not be surprising that thinkers of the same era could concoct similar solutions to theological problems. For another, it is not immediately clear what one gains by pointing out a thinker’s sources. Theologians are always putting together their sources in creative ways, using and abusing what they have gleaned from others. The temptation of historians of dogma, for example, to reduce Luther to his medieval sources or Lutherans to Luther (or, less often, to Melanchthon) misunderstands how sources functioned in early modern western Europe. If everyone is Augustinian, for example, then no one is, and the term loses its meaning. Nevertheless, there are some important advantages to asking the question of thinkers’ sources. It helps put in sharper relief how they used the material, what they created from it, and whom they were reading. It may also help overcome a modern (and post-modern) penchant for imagining that no one separate printing exists. It first appeared, however, in volume three of Melanchthon’s Selectarum Declamationum Philippi Melanchthonis, quas partim ipse recitauit in Schola Vitebergensi, partim alijs recitatndas exhibuit, hactenus nunquam editarum, Tomus III (Basel: Herwagen, 1551), 47 – 70. See CR 11: 1030 – 44. This means that the oration was held at the latest in December 1550, and thus it could not have been an attack against Osiander, despite the claims in GA 9: 454. 42 In addition to the two exegetical tracts printed in Wittenberg, there were Matthias Flacius, Contra Haereticum Dikaeusiastam de dicto Ioannis: Spiritus arguet munde iustitia, quia trado ad Patrem … Audio editam esse meam Confutationem confessionis Osiandri latine, sic mutilam & inemendatam, ut eam initio quibusdam amicis petentibu exhibueram, Quae editio quoniam sine meo iussu facta est, ideo remitto lectorem ad Germanicum exemplar quod & integrum est & meo iussu editum. Quod facere me necesse est, ut aduersarij cauillationes cauere possim (Magdeburg: Rödinger, [1552]) and idem., with Nicholas Gallus, Confessionis An. Osiandri de iustificatione, in qua acerbe et impie insectatur adflictas ecclesias earumque ministros, qui hactenus doctrinam in Augustana confessione compraehensam sonuerunt, Refutatio erudita et pia scripta Magdeburgi (Frankfurt: P. Brubach, 1552).

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had anything to learn from anyone and that theology especially was only done in opposition to others and not in conversation with them. Yet, particularly among Europe’s Protestants, the use of others’ arguments was necessary, especially in the face of disagreements with Rome or among themselves. Developing steps toward building consensus in the absence of a papal or conciliar magisterium became one of the most important activities among Reformed and Evangelical Christians alike. As a close analysis of Calvin’s excursus against Osiander in the 1559 Institutes and of other comments scattered throughout its pages reveals, John Calvin had not only Osiander’s tract, De unico mediatore, on his writing desk, but he also seemed to mine for insights the works of at least three theologians north of the Alps: Philip Melanchthon, Johannes Bretschneider and Matthias Flacius. In one important passage, Calvin even admits to knowing something of these writers. But Osiander, by scorning this spiritual bond [between Christ and the believer], forces a gross mingling of Christ with believers. And for this reason, he maliciously calls “Zwinglian” all those who do not subscribe to his mad error of “essential righteousness” because they do not hold the view that Christ is eaten substantially in the Lord’s Supper. I consider it the highest glory to be thus insulted by a proud man, and one entangled in his own deceits, although he attacks not only me but also worldrenowned writers whom he ought modestly to have respected.43

Of course, first among these authors would have been Philip Melanchthon himself, and it is hard to imagine that the Institutes’ readers would not have known that from the wording (scriptores orbi satis cogniti). And yet, Flacius was also well known and respected, especially since his writings against Osiander occurred before his own entanglement in controversy over original sin. For Calvin to link himself positively with people whom he knew still held to a view that Christ was substantially present in the Lord’s Supper was, of course, deeply ironic, especially given the attacks on him by Joachim Westphal going on at the same time.44 In the same paragraph, Calvin underscored the fact that he had no dog in this fight and, thus, could be trusted to give a balanced assessment of Osiander’s errors. “It makes no difference to me,” he continued, “for I am not pleading my own private cause. I am the more

43 Institutes, III.xi.10, in McNeill’s translation with the author’s corrections throughout. See also MBW 7273 (CO 15: 215 – 17), Calvin to Melanchthon dated 27 August 1554, in which Calvin speaks about his anguish over the Osiandrists. According to David Steinmetz, Reformers in the Wings (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971), 91 [cited in Billings, “United to God,” 325, n. 56], Joachim Westphal and Tileman Heshus, during their dispute with him over the Lord’s Supper, had accused Calvin of being an Osiandrist. This alone may have driven Calvin to include such a lengthy refutation of Osiander in the 1559 Institutes. 44 Wim Janse, “Joachim Westphal’s Sacramentology,” Lutheran Quarterly, 22 (2008): 137 – 60.

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sincerely pleading this case for the reason that I am free from every vicious motive.”45 1. Johannes Bretschneider and the Necessity of the Incarnation As mentioned above, Calvin was one of only two theologians who found it necessary to attack at length Osiander’s peculiar arguments regarding the necessity of the Incarnation. While others simply shrugged it off as further proof of Osiander’s theological instability, it was a cause c¦lÀbre for Johannes Bretschneider. No one bore the brunt of Osiander’s viciousness more than Bretschneider, the former court physician in Königsberg, driven out by Osiander and his supporters and forced to seek refuge in Danzig already for his opposition to Osiander’s earlier theses regarding the incarnation. The title of the tract tells it all: Some Conclusions concerning the Incarnation of Christ against the New, Completely Unnecessary, Useless, and Impious Opinion of Andreas Osiander, Who Asserts that Christ Would Have Become a Human Being Even If Adam Had Not Fallen. Bretschneider’s anger toward Osiander may also be seen in a poem he appended to his work, penned by a student, Heinrich Moller, expelled from the University of Königsberg (for having written an even more scurrilous poem against Osiander).46 Bretschneider’s arguments began with an attack on Osiander’s vain curiosity, but included a defense of the reality of the Fall and the assurance that only with the promise of Genesis 3:15 did humanity know anything about a savior. Thus, Christ came because of God’s promise to send a savior and for no other (knowable) reason. By his own testimony (especially to the SyroPhoenician woman), Christ revealed that he came to save the house of Israel. To split the testimony of the Nicene Creed (“for us and for our salvation”) in two is diabolical. To imagine that Christ would have taken on flesh for some other reason than to save fallen humanity implies that he would have come in vain. Osiander’s medical analogy (that doctors also come to prevent illness not only to cure it) was inappropriate, since, as it happened, Christ came both to cure the illness of sin and to prevent its recurrence. Calvin’s thorough refutation of Osiander’s position (Institutes II.xii.4 – 7) shows that he doubtless had access to the original theses propounded by the Königsberg professor.47 However, certain turns of the argument match Bretschneider’s work. Like him, Calvin began with an attack on “vague speculations that captivate the frivolous and the seekers after novelty” 45 Institutes, III.xi.10. Calvin described the motive as vicious (pravo) not, as McNeill renders it, perverted. One of the biggest complaints about Osiander from Melanchthon and others was the viciousness of his attacks. 46 De incarnatione, A 1v. 47 GA 9: 450 – 91. The first and only printing occurred in 1550 in the Königsberg press of Hans Lufft’s heirs.

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(II.xii.4). Like him, Calvin emphasized over against such presumption the universal witness of Scripture.48 While not mentioning the Syro-Phoenician woman as Bretschneider had, Calvin also cited places where Christ himself referred to his purpose. “There would be no end of passages if we wished to refer to all of them!” (Institutes II.xii.4). What Calvin added to the discussion in II.xii.4 was a thorough discussion of how such speculation undermined the honor of Christ’s priesthood—a familiar theme in the Institutes but one that Bretschneider at least touched upon in his reference to Christ’s coming in vain. Focusing more specifically on Osiander’s arguments in II.xii.5, Calvin responded again by complaining that it was “not lawful to inquire further” into this mystery. Here, however, unlike Bretschneider, he fixed his argument on “God’s unchangeable ordinance” established before creation according to Ephesians 1:4 – 7 and 3:14 – 19. After this biblical refutation, Calvin mentioned Osiander by name, accusing him of ignoring (like the scholastics Osiander cited) Paul’s advice in Titus 3:9 to “avoid stupid questions.” In any case, the argument about God’s unbreakable predestination most clearly differentiated Calvin’s response from Bretschneider’s. In the same tract, however, Osiander also investigated the notion of God’s image. Calvin took this charge so seriously that he dealt with it not only in Institutes II.xii.6 but also earlier in I.xv.3 – 5. This was the linchpin of Osiander’s argument about the incarnation, since he insisted that God’s creation of human beings in God’s “image and likeness” meant according to the image of the promised Messiah. Whereas Bretschneider constructed an infralapsarian argument based upon the first promise of the savior in Genesis 3:15, Calvin took a different approach. First, he argued that the “image and likeness” of God marked humanity as standing above all other living creatures, reflecting God’s own glory as did the angels. Any reference to Christ’s incarnation would imply that Christ would have had to become an angel for them to partake of God’s image. In Institutes II.xii.7 Calvin offered a more detailed refutation of Osiander. He dismissed Osiander’s argument that God would be made out to be a liar had Christ’s incarnation not occurred apart from the Fall. Indeed, Calvin realized that Osiander’s fear rested in imagining that Christ was born in Adam’s image, thereby sullying Christ’s person with the image of a created being. In Calvin’s view, not only did this undermine clear statements of Scripture that Christ was descended from Adam and was a second Adam, but it also misconstrued the notion of God’s image. Indeed, for Calvin Osiander failed to distinguish between Christ as “first-born of all creation” (in that he is God’s eternal Word; Col. 1:15) and Christ as “first-born of the dead” (in that he was incarnate as Redeemer ; Col. 1:18). Calvin’s disgust over Osiander’s arguments, a feeling shared with Bretschneider, boiled over in a final comment: “Osiander 48 Institutes II.xii.4: “But since all Scripture proclaims that to become our Redeemer he was clothed with flesh, it is too presumptuous to imagine another reason or another end.”

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considers these trivialities, which I have by now refuted, to be the firmest of oracles! Drunk with the sweetness of his own speculations, he is wont to intone his absurd paeans over nothing!”

2. Melanchthon and the Meaning of Justification Calvin’s use of Lutheran sources is even clearer when it comes to the chief dispute over justification. Here, comments of Julie Canlis vis-—-vis Melanchthon have no place.49 Calvin paid close attention to everything that Melanchthon wrote, even when he did not always agree with him. In the case of Osiander, there can be little doubt that Calvin had read especially Melanchthon’s comments in his 1556 commentary on Romans, where the Wittenberg reformer reiterated and expanded upon some of the basic arguments already formulated in the 1532 Commentarii on Romans. Crucial for Melanchthon, as we have seen, was the definition of iustitia and iustificatio. Beginning in 1532, he consistently declared Paul’s usage in Romans a Hebraism, referring it to legal usage and then to the (Roman) story of Scipio, who was declared righteous by the Roman people. In 1556 he employed the same approach to refute Osiander. Calvin knew full well that this was Melanchthon’s contribution to the debate. No wonder he could write, “Osiander laughs at those people who teach that ‘to be justified’ is a legal term, since [he argues] we must be in reality [re ipsa: intrinsically] righteous. Indeed, he despises nothing more than that we are justified by free imputation.”50 Basing his arguments on 2 Cor. 5:19, Calvin held that “those who are reconciled to God are accounted righteous. Included [in this passage] is the means: that God justifies by pardoning.” But, in direct reliance on Melanchthon, who had been saying this since before Calvin was a Protestant, Calvin added, “Anyone moderately versed in the Hebrew language, provided he has a calm mind, is not ignorant of the fact that the phrase arose from this source—in sum, what it implies and what it means.”51 Calvin insisted that such imputation meant complete righteousness and not simply a part.52 To Osiander’s claim that such forensic justification contradicted God’s nature, Calvin again echoed Melanchthon. “Yet it must be remembered what I have already said, that the grace of justification is not separated from 49 50 51 52

Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 145. Institutes III.xi.11. Institutes III.xi.11. Institutes III.xi.11: “Surely, Paul does not adduce the prophetic witness [David in Ps. 32:1; Rom. 4:7] as if he taught that pardon of sins is part of righteousness or that it happened at the same time in assisting toward justifying the person. But he includes the whole of righteousness in free remission, pronouncing that person blessed whose sins are forgiven, to whom God has forgiven iniquities and to whom God does not impute transgressions.”

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regeneration, although they are distinct things.”53 In the same vein, Melanchthon had written about the simultaneity of imputation and vivification. At this point both Calvin and [to an even greater degree] Melanchthon appeal to the believer’s own experience. Calvin wrote: “But because it is very well known by experience that the traces of sin always remain in the righteous….”54 They also appealed to the conscience, which can only be put at peace in knowing that the person is pleasing to God.55 Indeed, Calvin’s summary of the effects of uncertainty on the conscience simply paraphrased Melanchthon’s argument. “From this it follows that the doctrine of justification is perverted and utterly overthrown when doubt is thrust into human souls, when the assurance [fiducia] of salvation is shaken and the free and fearless calling upon God suffers hindrance—nay, when quietness and tranquility with spiritual joy are not established.”56 If in these places Calvin and Melanchthon shared common ground, there are also places where Calvin’s rendition of Melanchthon’s position bore the Genevan reformer’s unique stamp. Perhaps most importantly, Calvin explicitly described forensic justification as an “as if” (quasi). God “does not justify in part but liberally, so that they [believers] may appear in heaven as if [quasi] endowed with the purity of Christ.”57 Already in the 1539 version of the Institutes, Calvin had construed the courtroom scene quite differently from Melanchthon. Whereas Melanchthon consistently used the example of Scipio, a crooked general “justified” by the Roman citizenry, Calvin described it this way : Now, the one justified is reckoned in the condition not of a sinner, but of a righteous person and for that reason stands firm before God’s judgment seat while all sinners fall. If an innocent accused person be summoned before the judgment seat of a fair judge, where he will be judged according to his innocence, he is said to be “justified” before the judge. Thus, justified before God is the person who, freed from the company of sinners, has God to witness and affirm that one’s righteousness.58

For Melanchthon, as we have seen, the important term was relatus and the example of Scipio was specifically an example of an unrighteous person being declared righteous. 53 Institutes III.xi.11. See also III.xi.6: “Whomever, therefore, God receives into grace, on them he at the same time [simul] bestows the spirit of adoption….” 54 Institutes III.xi.11. 55 Institutes III.xi.11: “No portion of righteousness sets our consciences at peace [pacaret] until it has been determined that we are pleasing to God, because we are without exception righteous before him.” 56 Institutes III.xi.11. The criticism of uncertainty would be raised by later Lutherans against Calvin’s successors on the question of predestination, which to the former also seemed to undermine the certainty of God’s promises in Christ. 57 Institutes III.xi.11. 58 Institutes III.xi.2.

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Melanchthon also focused his opening remarks on what he perceived as the works-righteous direction that Osiander’s understanding of justification implied. Early in his argument, Calvin downplayed Osiander’s works righteousness, arguing that “although not intending to abolish freely given [gratuita] righteousness, he [Osiander] has still enveloped it in such a fog as to darken pious minds and deprive them of a lively experience of Christ’s grace.”59 Calvin made the same point as Melanchthon but reduced it to a minor point in a much more complicated argument about the nature of the term “righteousness” (iustitia). By mixing regeneration and justification, Calvin wrote, Osiander had missed Paul’s point in Romans 4, namely that “there is in justification no place for works.”60 Calvin appended to this comment a lengthy discussion of the role of faith, an instrument that implies human emptiness before God. “We compare faith to a kind of vessel; for unless we come having been emptied and with the mouth of our soul open to seek Christ’s grace, we are not capable of holding [capaces] Christ.”61 Melanchthon for the most part ignored any differences between himself and Osiander on this question, focusing his comments about faith in Romans 4 almost exclusively on his Roman opponents.

3. A Contribution from Matthias Flacius Both Calvin and Melanchthon dealt with Osiander’s unique interpretation of Jeremiah 23:6 [“Jehovah is our righteousness”]. Melanchthon insisted that this referred not to Christ’s divine nature but to both natures and not to one’s own righteousness but to Christ’s righteousness imputed to human beings.62 Calvin also stressed the obedience of the Incarnate One as the source of righteousness referred to here, combining his interpretation with Isaiah 53:11, which he rendered, “By knowing him shall my righteous servant justify many” and Phil. 2:8.63 But a closer examination of Calvin’s argument in the Institutes III.xi.8 shows interesting parallels to the arguments of Matthias Flacius. Like Calvin, Flacius spent an important portion of his Refutatio showing the weakness of Osiander’s view of faith. Moreover, he contrasted God’s eternal righteousness, 59 60 61 62 63

Institutes III.xi.5. Institutes III.xi.6. Institutes III.xi.7. CR 15: 864. Institutes III.xi.8. A mistake in McNeill’s translation, makes it sound as if Calvin supported some sort of ontological participation. The last sentence in this section should read: “For even though God alone is the source of righteousness, and we are righteous only by his [Christ’s!] participation [in God], yet, because we have been alienated from his righteousness by an unhappy separation [dissidium], we must have recourse to this lower remedy, so that Christ may justify us by the power of his death and resurrection.”

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upon which believers will feast in heaven, to God’s offer of righteousness through Word and sacrament, Calvin’s “lower remedy.” Calvin and Flacius also agreed on the “causes” for the believer’s righteousness. Osiander had argued that the material cause was Christ’s divine righteousness and the formal cause its indwelling in believers. Both Calvin and Flacius addressed the issue by continuing to distinguish among causes. Flacius argued that the material cause is Christ’s merit in the flesh. In a similar vein, Calvin wrote This method of teaching [ratio docendi, i. e., in John 6] is perceived in the sacraments, which, although they direct our faith to the whole Christ and not to a half Christ, teach at the same time [simul] that the matter [materia] both of righteousness and of salvation resides in his flesh; not that as mere man he justifies or quickens by himself, but because it pleased God to reveal in the Mediator what was hidden and incomprehensible in himself.64

For Flacius, faith was then the formal cause. Calvin talked instead of faith as “at most the instrument for the received righteousness” which Osiander “ignorantly confused with Christ, who is the material cause and at the same time the Author and Minister of such a benefit.”65 While these moves may simply demonstrate Calvin and Flacius’s independent reliance on Aristotelian causation, another argument, unique to these two thinkers, binds them more closely together and suggests that Calvin may have used some of the Croatian theologian’s ideas to refute Osiander. While most of Osiander’s opponents, including Melanchthon, posited two definitions for righteousness—one that operates in this world (based upon Ciceronian adage, “To each his own”) and one that God bestows freely in Christ and is received by faith alone—both Calvin and Flacius insisted upon a single definition for all forms of righteousness. Everything hinged on this definition of iustitia. Calvin criticized Osiander for dividing righteousness into two instead of distinguishing justification and regeneration (“which two things Osiander confuses under the term ‘double righteousness’”), and he sarcastically accused Osiander of clothing “the saints with this ‘double righteousness,’ like a furred garment.”66 He continued to refute this notion throughout Institutes III.xi.12, concluding the entire section against Osiander with a warning about this 64 Institutes III.xi.8. 65 Institutes III.xi.7. In Contra Haereticum Dikaeusiastam, Flacius listed two efficient causes for humanity’s salvation: God’s essential righteousness and Christ’s overwhelming satisfaction for sin. 66 Institutes III.xi.11. Calvin and Flacius were reacting to Osiander’s statements in De unico Mediatore (GA 10: 161 – 65), where he distinguished God’s wrath, which is sometimes called righteousness in Scripture, from probitas (uprightness; German: frommikeit), in which all other virtues are included. The first was turned aside by Christ’s atoning death; the second given by his divine indwelling.

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“furred garment”: “In short, whoever wraps up [involvit; or : obscures] two kinds of righteousness in order that miserable souls may not repose in God’s sheer, univocal mercy [mera et unica … misericordia], crowns Christ in mockery with a wreath of thorns.”67 Under Calvin’s concern over this two-fold righteousness lay his suspicion that Osiander wanted to undermine Christ’s substitutionary atonement. Earlier in the Institutes (III.xi.9), Calvin remonstrated that “Every schoolboy should know that God’s righteousness is taken for that [righteousness] approved by God, as in the Gospel of John [12:43] … [D]iscerning readers will recognize without my saying anything that in this text [about divine and human glory and, thus about righteousness] nothing is to be understood than that we stand before God’s judgment seat supported by the sacrifice of Christ’s death.” When enumerating Osiander’s errors near the beginning of the entire excursus, Calvin noted that the whole dispute revolved, first, around the meaning of the words “righteousness” and “justify” and, second, that Osiander “sharply denies that Christ is our righteousness insofar as he, the Priest, by expiating sins appeased the Father on our behalf, but [only insofar] as he is eternal God and life.”68 Flacius also insisted that Osiander’s two-fold righteousness obscured the fact that there was only one righteousness, broken by humanity and restored by Christ’s atoning death and resurrection.69 Indeed, he went so far as to accuse Osiander of creating two divine beings by such a two-fold righteousness.70 For Flacius there was only one righteousness, a iustitia legalis, which Christ fulfilled through his atoning death. Unlike most other Lutheran opponents of Osiander, Flacius, too, concentrated on the sacrifice of Christ as fulfilling God’s righteousness on the believer’s behalf. In a similar fashion, both Calvin and Flacius also attacked Osiander’s understanding of an inner and outer Word. Flacius claimed it would create two Sons of God. Calvin worried that it would divide Christ and confuse the persons of the Trinity.71

67 Institutes III.xi.12. 68 Institutes III.xi.6. 69 Matthias Flacius, Verlegung des Bekentnis Osiandri von der Rechtfertigung der armen sünder durch die wesentliche Gerechtigkeit der hohen Maiestet Gottes allein Durch Matth. Fla. Illyr. Mit vnterschreibung Nicolai Galj/ darin der grund des jrthums Osiandri sampt seiner verlegung auffs kürzest verfast ist (Magdeburg: Rödinger, 1552), O 2v. Another possible Latin source for this emphasis on the substitutionary atonement was Sebald Heyden, Assertio Christiana, A 5v : “Propter quam unicam ac solam iusticiam statuendam, ipse filius Dei de coelo descendisse, & humanam carnem assumpsisse credatur : uidelicet ut posset pati, ut posset mori, & pro peccatis poenas debitas pendere, & essentiali Dei iusticiae ita satisfacere.” 70 Contra Haereticum Dikaeusiastam, C 1v. 71 Verlegung, N 2r and Institutes III.xi.8.

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Calvin’s Own Voice against Osiander This examination of Calvin’s possible sources in constructing his arguments against Osiander is not meant to question Calvin’s contributions to the debate by reducing him to his sources. As already indicated, every instance in which Calvin’s discussion reflected the broader contours of the debate also showed his own approach to theology. Especially the way in which he structured the entire excursus of the 1559 Institutes displays Calvin’s unique perspective. Calvin characterized Osiander’s essentialist position on justification as a monstrum (III.xi.5). This monstrosity arose in large part from Osiander’s penchant for speculation (speculatio) and contemptible curiosity (ieiuna curiositas) and even Manichaeanism. Osiander imagined (fingere) this view and twisted (torquere) the truth with sleights-of-hand (prestigiae). Osiander was a sophist using tortuous figures (tortuosae huius sophistae figurae; III.xi.6). He was pushing a crass mixture (crassa mixtura; III.xi.10) of Christ with the faithful. Some of his arguments were simply venomous (plus veneni latet; III.xi.11). Osiander argued foolishly (stulte; III.xi.12), and his proofs were frivolous (frivolum). In the end, Osiander’s invention of a double righteousness simply crowned Christ with thorns (Christum implexis spinis per ludibrium coronat). Yet Calvin did not simply dismiss Osiander’s arguments. Indeed, at several important places he granted that at least parts of Osiander’s arguments were true. “We are one with Christ” (III.xi.5). “The power of justification does not adhere to faith from itself but only insofar as it receives Christ” (III.xi.7). “The need for [Christ’s] presence transcends human nature” (III.xi.9). “Nor do we deny that in Christ righteousness is plainly shown to us to flow from the hidden grace and power of God. Nor do we dispute that this righteousness, which Christ confers upon us, is the righteousness of God, which proceeds from him…. Nor do we deny that God reshapes us by his Spirit in sanctity and righteousness of life” (III.xi.12). These seeming concessions may give careless readers the impression that Calvin held to some sort of essentialist understanding of righteousness. Instead, they functioned rhetorically in two ways. First, they demonstrated a certain fairness (since Calvin proclaimed himself a neutral observer to this Lutheran brouhaha). Second, they permitted a very clever logical argument, wherein one conceded the major premise of an argument while decimating the opponents’ conclusion—precisely the essentialist position championed by Osiander. Moreover, many of these concessions parallel arguments of Melanchthon and Flacius. The most unique aspect of Calvin’s line of reasoning came from the way he organized his argument. In Institutes III.xi.5, Calvin provided an introduction to the problem and outlined the most serious charges against Osiander, including his abandonment of forensic justification for the notion that one is

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substantially righteous through the infusion of Christ’s essence or quality. Calvin also linked Osiander’s curiosity to the early arguments about the nature of God’s image in Adam. He also stated here the result of Osiander’s arguments: a mistaken mixing of Christ’s two natures with the Trinity that would only confuse the simple folk and draw them from Christ. Calvin then introduced the central argument over the meaning of the terms iustitia and iustificatio (III.xi.6). While admitting that Osiander’s error would not have been as egregious had he managed to unite the two natures in the work of justification, Calvin first attacked Osiander’s understanding of iustificatio as an improper mixing of justification and sanctification and showed that the Scriptural proofs adduced by the Königsberg theologian (especially from 1 Cor. 1:30) were completely wrong. By missing the clearly imputative nature of Rom 4:5, Osiander also had misconstrued the meaning of iustitia. Calvin turned to a related issue, namely the relation of faith to the power of justification (III.xi.7). Rather than dismiss the role of faith, as he suspected Osiander had, Calvin defined faith as an empty vessel or instrument through which Christ’s divine righteousness comes to the person. Having proved to his satisfaction that Christ is indeed the Christian’s righteousness, Calvin had then to show that that righteousness consisted not simply of the eternal righteousness of Christ’s divinity but precisely the righteousness exercised by Christ as priest and mediator (III.xi.8). In this context, Calvin also had to reject Osiander’s claim that Jeremiah 23:6 (“Jehovah will be our righteousness”) proved his assertion that only the divinity of Christ made believers righteous. The Genevan reformer asserted, to the contrary, that the text referred to Christ becoming “our righteousness” through his death and resurrection. In the next three sections of the Institutes (III.xi.9 – 11), Calvin dealt with Osiander’s insistence that since this work of righteousness transcended human nature, it could only be ascribed to Christ’s divine nature. Although appearing to concede the first half of Osiander’s argument, Calvin actually spent more time correcting Osiander’s misunderstanding of it—again insisting that Paul included Christ’s (human) obedience in this righteousness (Rom. 5:19). God was surely the author of this righteousness, but Christ’s death was the means by which it came to sinners. But this very distribution to sinners brought up one of Osiander’s favorite proof texts from 2 Peter 1:4 (“Through Christ great and precious promises are given to us, so that we may become participants of the divine nature”; referred to in III.xi.9 & 10). Here Calvin began quite differently from any of Osiander’s Lutheran opponents, speaking of a mystical union (unio mystica). This union, however, was in his mind clearly one “in our hearts” (in cordibus nostris), a conjoining of head and members. This spiritual union Calvin contrasted to Osiander’s “crass mixture,” pointing out that Osiander’s hyperrealism of Christ’s presence in the Supper (and, thus, his accusation that his opponents were Zwinglians) contrasted precisely to Calvin’s more spiritual understand-

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ing of Christ’s presence in the meal and in believers. But Calvin also noted that 2 Peter was promising future union with Christ in heaven not a physical union on earth. Calvin then turned directly to Osiander’s conclusion that righteousness could only be attributed to Christ’s divine nature (III.xi.11) and spoke of the mode of justifying. Relying on Melanchthon’s arguments, Calvin introduced a defense of the forensic nature of justification and, mirroring Flacius’s arguments, rejected Osiander’s notion of a double righteousness, a constant refrain in these last two sections (11 – 12). Far from introducing righteousness mixed with sin (contrary to God’s nature), the declaration of righteousness operated as if (quasi) clothing the sinner in Christ’s righteousness. With this false distinction between two kinds of righteousness, Osiander, by contrast, only caused doubts. Distinguishing justification and sanctification, on the contrary, protected God’s mercy and strengthened faith. To Osiander’s second objection, that such an approach to justification created a contradiction in God, Calvin’s rhetoric became especially heated, comparing Osiander’s double righteousness to a fur coat. Indeed, Osiander was actually insulting the Highest Judge (summus iudex) for forgiving sin gratis, against which Calvin cited Exodus 33:19: “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.” This argument continued into III.xi.12, where Calvin took on especially Osiander’s flawed interpretation of 1 Corinthians 1:30 and Colossians 2:3. “What [Christ] had from the Father he revealed to us, and so what Paul says is referred not to the essence of the Son of God but to our use” and to the incarnate One not simply to the divine nature. With the final turn of phrase, Calvin repeated his argument that Christ is righteousness according to both natures. Moreover, he saw in Osiander’s arguments a confusion between the source of righteousness (God and, thus, Christ’s divinity) and the mode through which believers gain access to that righteousness (Christ’s incarnation and sacrificial death). For Calvin, the latter does not happen without means (“faciatne hoc per se et immediate”). Christ is our holiness through the incarnation; thus the humanity of Christ is involved. We receive the Holy Spirit from the hand of Christ, who is our righteousness both in his divinity and through his redemption. Finally, Osiander’s imagined double righteousness, from which these errors sprang, resulted in nothing but troubling miserable souls by leading them away from the plain and simple mercy of God. Hardly a single paragraph in this section of the Institutes does not reveal Calvin’s dependence upon Lutheran theologians to the north. To be sure, he had read Osiander, but this analysis has also shown that he used arguments first coined by the likes of Philip Melanchthon and Matthias Flacius, among others, to make his case. At the same time, however, the stress of certain aspects of the standard arguments against Osiander and the rhetorical organization of them here showed what was most central to the Genevan reformer. Not only do the arguments regarding forensic justification appear twice, but Calvin repeated ad nauseam that Osiander’s position was flawed

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from the outset, a vana curiositas already revealed in his earliest theses published in Königsberg. Calvin’s shrewd concessions to Osiander only served to strengthen Calvin’s arguments. Osiander’s enemies rejected the very things that Osiander thought they taught! Thus, Calvin could admit to divine indwelling while—like some Lutherans—denying emphatically that this was a non-mediated, infused habitation. While other Lutherans, such as Joachim Mörlin, could accuse Osiander of Platonism, Calvin seemed content to employ a far subtler way of refuting his opponent. Calvin could also insist, in apparent agreement with Osiander, to the origin of the righteousness of justification in the divine. But Osiander’s clear separation of the two natures of Christ and restriction of Christ’s human righteousness to the atonement actually resulted in questionable Christology (similar to that of Calvin’s Eucharistic opponents) and thus obscured the mode by which God worked righteousness. Moreover, Calvin could agree that believers also became intrinsically righteous, but only after one accurately distinguished justification and sanctification and avoided the crude mixtures of Osiander.

Concluding Remarks For both Melanchthon and Calvin (and even Flacius and Brettschneider), Osiander’s view—that one becomes righteous before God by an indwelling of Christ’s divinity rather than through the declaration of God’s mercy—had no basis in Scripture (which defined justification forensically), separated the two natures of Christ, denied the centrality of the substitutionary atonement of Christ and did not come to the aid of terrified souls. The differences among these theologians are real but nuanced and were not important enough to divide Protestants. Some theologians today have tried either to dismiss this unity in diversity as misguided interpretation of Paul or to revive a medieval Orthodox construal of theosis and find it in Luther and other early Protestants. The texts of this singular debate point in a far different direction. For these reformers, God declares sinners righteous by virtue of Christ’s righteousness alone. Whatever righteous life follows is result of the concomitant work of the Holy Spirit and never the measure of Christian righteousness. Moreover, the divine and human natures of Christ cannot be divided in justification, as if the human nature brought about atonement and the divine nature justification. Most importantly, these reformers consistently used the measuring stick of comfort for the terrified to measure the legitimacy of their theology, over against which Osiander’s approach was weighed in the balance and found wanting. This same criterion, when applied to modern exegetes and theologians, shows just how useless these new positions are, measured not simply by some academic (modernist) standard of truth and falsehood but by

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the effect such teaching has on weak believers in Christ. When theologians measure the relation to God in terms of the intrinsic righteousness or divinization of the individual, then there is, literally, only hell to pay—that is, only uncertainty of one’s relation to God and terror in the face of continuing sin. Precisely this abyss the reformers closed by appealing to the unconditional proclamation of God’s mercy in Christ’s righteousness.

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Confessions

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Susan C. Karant-Nunn

Postscript on the Religious Emotions in the Late- and Post-Reformation Era: Path Dependence and Innovation Few of us Reformation scholars will have grappled with the historical sociologists’ concept of “path dependence.” Nor do these colleagues clearly define it. Drawing on James Mahoney’s article, “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology,” I would define the term in a way that assists us in placing the emotional tones that we encounter in the late- and postReformation era.1 In Mahoney’s terms, “The past influences the future.”2 Sociologists do not want to be distracted by specific cases, most especially not by those that do not bear out a general rule or model that they are constructing. We historians, by contrast, have, over the last generation, tended to see historical phenomena as increasingly complex and embedded in a cultural matrix that practically defies a summary analysis.3 Nonetheless, we can benefit from one another’s perspectives. Path dependence in our Reformation context would refer to established cultural patterns that, helped by the weight of their entrenchment, simply will replicate themselves over a long period even as changing conditions alter some of their aspects. In late medieval Catholicism, flamboyant religious expression was an approved style of devotion. So customary was it that it was eradicable only with unrelenting supervision, as in Geneva, and not in every case. Affective piety continued to flourish not only within Counter-Reformation Catholicism, where one might anticipate that continuity would prevail. Path dependence in this and other dimensions of emerging Protestant practice are still visible within Lutheranism, Zwinglianism, Anabaptism, and Calvinism. Ernst Walter Zeeden did not quite put his findings this way, but his meaning and mine are not far apart.4 The Reformation marks off no radical departure— although we should not overreact against the still-dominant tendency to divide the modern age from the medieval with the year 1500 and insist upon some sort of complete paradigm shift. Nonetheless, we go too far in attributing originality to everything that was reformed. This generalization pertains to 1 In Theory and Society 29, 4 (2000), 507 – 48. 2 Ibid., 507. 3 Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1007), for example, offers differences rather than generalizations that, in the end, provide a unified model of early modern toleration. 4 Zeeden, Katholische Überlieferungen in den lutherischen Kirchenordnungen des 16. Jahrhunderts (Münster: Aschendorff, 1959).

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emotional patterns of spirituality and to sentimental models intensively offered to the faithful in the age of confessionalization.

Postscript to What? The word Postscript in the title implies that you have all read my most recent book, The Reformation of Feeling.5 This is surely not the case. As background, then, a brief summation of dominant clerical ideals of proper Lutheran and then Calvinist religious sentiment would be helpful. In numerous hundreds of Passion sermons and other types of devotional literature that were directed at the laity, Lutheran divines ranged from the model provided by Martin Luther to the quite continuous adherence to Catholic traditions. Luther himself broke with the high outer demonstrativeness that Catholic preachers held out to their audiences. Luther urged the abandonment of weeping and wailing over the suffering of Christ in favor of the calm but heartfelt realization that the love of God for his human children had moved the Heavenly Father—the Scriptures describe a range of divine emotions too—by means of the Atonement, to remove the deserved consequence of sin from them. God as loving Parent had reconciled his children to himself. Luther treasured the closeness of the conversations that he had with God and sometimes spoke of these as intimate whisperings into each other’s ear. Sentimental response to this parental affection ought to be an acknowledgment of individual sin and of the penalties that this deserved; followed by sincerest inner gratitude for Jesus’s suffering as loving recompense. This gratitude would show itself in love of God and service of neighbor. Outbursts came to be disapproved, even during Holy Week. The Cranach predella of the altarpiece in the city church in Wittenberg sets the mood for all Luther’s followers.6 Luther points to the relaxed body of the dead Christ, drawing attention to the accomplished Atonement; and his hearers calmly absorb the lesson of image and sermon. Nonetheless, there was perceptible variation among those who counted themselves as inspired by Luther. Johannes Brenz (1499 – 1570) carried on in detail concerning the ordeal, that is the Passion, endured by the Son of God. In his 23 Passion sermons, he inveighs against the sinners before him and includes rousing aspects of the crucifixion story that Luther had neglected, such as Judas’s abdomen bursting open and pouring forth his intestines as he hanged himself. Brenz invokes Jesus’s intolerable psychic torment as the 5 Subtitled Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); the chapter on the Lutheran churches, 63 – 100. 6 Apart from having seen this in person several times, I viewed this small painting as reproduced in Karlheinz Blaschke, Wittenberg, die Lutherstadt (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1977), plates 23 – 24. A slide of the predella may be purchase from the Stadtkirche Lutherstadt Wittenberg, slide no. 1110 – 4.

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preacher tries to make his listeners and his readers feel it.7 Another prolific and, we must assume, charismatic Lutheran preacher of the sixteenth century was Cyriakus Spangenberg (1528 – 1604). In his 23 Passion sermons, Spangenberg too attempts to move his hearers to grief over their guilt. He desires his congregation to suffer along with Christ.8 Still and all, the prevailing mood within Lutheran devotion is that which is borne of Trost, of the consolation that God offers faithful Christians; and clerics consistently bring this word of comfort into the dying chamber. Trost, with the calm and thankfulness that this word implies, could be the singlesyllabic motto of sixteenth-century, pre-confessionalized Lutheranism. Feelings that grip the devout, however, still resemble some of their Catholic predecessors. Luther admired the Theologia Deutsch. For him the figurative heart—now much less so the physical heart—had to be involved in true faith.9 Luther could not conceive of worship that did not call up such sentiments as filial love, gratitude, and trust. John Calvin’s sermons and spiritual works for the laity written by his followers in German-speaking lands suggested to me that these men, Calvin and Luther, shared a different vision. Calvin’s and his followers’ pronouncements do in fact support the widespread stereotype that they emphasized the profound unworthiness of most of their congregants, emphatically including the Elect of God. Although Calvin may have been more unrelenting than others who modeled themselves on him, all attempted to bring their listeners to a state of self-abasement and admission of unworthiness. This was for them no preliminary stage, conditioning a subsequent lifting up of the spirit as with the Catholic mystics of the age, or indeed with the Lutherans. Rather, it was to inform all devotions. The glorification that one offered to the Divine Majesty derived from a sense of the wondrousness that the Deity on High would stoop as low as his degraded, worm-like creatures. The language of self-derogation is merciless and as such is intermittently shocking to modern senses. This is not to say that Lutherans and Calvinists disagreed totally either on the desirability of admitting one’s moral corruption or on the validity of the Atonement for the faithful. Both parties mainly agreed—although Calvinists were persuaded that the Atonement was offered only to the Elect. The sentiments that each side held out as ideal, however, contrasted markedly.

7 Passio Vnsers Herren Jesu Christi leyden vnd sterben (Nuremberg: Johann Daubman, 1551). 8 Passio: Vom Leiden vnd sterben vnsers HErrn, Heilands vnd Seligmachers Jesu Christi (Wittenberg: [Rhaw], 1557). 9 I talked further about this in my plenary address, “Martin Luther’s Heart,” given at a conference entitled, “Emotions in the Medieval and Early Modern World,” University of Western Australia, Perth, June 2011. This will be published in a volume of proceedings, but the details are unknown to me.

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The Struggle over Reformation of Life These may be important generalizations, but the ideals of suitable religious emotion did not ever encompass or permeate the convictions of all clergymen or all ordinary Christians. From an early date, Zwinglians and Anabaptists reveal a discontent with Lutheran leaders’ toleration of the ongoing and obvious sinfulness of members of their churches. Despite their contrasting approaches to the theology of salvation, they were of one mind on a larger matter : The faithful will bear witness to their devotion in their outward behavior. In the daily living out of their faith, Christians did have to perform works as evidence of their interior state, albeit the condition produced the works. For Zwingli, God’s Elect, although ever imperfect in this life, will gradually acquire greater control over their sinfulness, so that their inclusion among the Saved will be evident or at least probable to their neighbors. Calvin thought this too, but the negative mood of his sermons may have eclipsed his more constructive messages. Anabaptists as a very diverse category believe that committed Christians would be able to contain their base impulses within bounds. Should they abandon that course, they would fall away from the ranks of the Saved—from which they might, perhaps, arise again. The point is that behavior was a paramount indicator of a person’s internal condition. Luther was, by comparison, far more pessimistic about human capacities for selfdiscipline and relied in practice even more completely than Zwingli did on the saving power of God’s love. Luther’s God, ever the loving Parent, responds to the struggling individual. Whence this good behavior came brings us at last to the emotional ideas of the foundational devout. Especially the Anabaptists envisioned the Holy Spirit at work within the soul, either in conjunction with the reading or preaching of the Word or as an independent motion. The Holy Spirit descended upon, gripped, and converted the individual. This interior process of regeneration, then, transformed the mere hearer or attender at services into a believer and presumably enabled him to reap the beneficial spiritual, emotional, and moral consequences of his transformation. Historians of theology and specialists in the thought of the Anabaptist leaders will know the precise nature of the believer’s cooperation with the Godhead as each saw it. What developed inside the believer afforded her a good measure of control over her inner impulses and her outer acts. In general, the Anabaptists, along with the Catholics, left the human will in a participatory state, adhering to Saint Augustine’s theology of cooperative grace more closely than the “mainline” Protestant leaders. Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin were attracted more toward Augustine’s thought as formulated in his refutation of Pelagianism. Luther’s more permissive conception of adiaphora may have contributed to the outbreak of theological conflict after the Reformer’s death in 1546. The possibility of variation was left in place for each prince to deal with as he saw

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fit. Not that Luther intended for princes to have the decisive say in defining correct belief and practice. The tenor of the second half of the sixteenth century was, nonetheless, coercive and disciplinary. A man such as Father August of Saxony, who deliberately sponsored the reconciliation to be found in the Formula and the Book of Concord, could mete out the penalty of banishment to his faithful subject, the superintendent Nicholas Selnecker, for largely imagined ideological transgressions.10 In an age of militant orthodoxy, not even the most loyal men could be certain of retention in their clerical posts. There was no coherent agenda for the emotions, for sixteenth-century divines did not think in our interpretive framework. German Lutheranism taken as a whole tacitly left to its devotees a range of choices. The word and substance of Trost (comfort, consolation) characterizes the entire range. An issue remained, however, that was closely tied to the emotions, and this was the necessity of works for salvation. This is usually thought of in abstract terms, as a debate simply over whether the presence of faith, making the “good tree” distinct from the “bad,” did not inevitably produce “good fruit.” Approached within a framework of the study of sentiment, the presence of faith had consequences in feeling. The faithful Christian genuinely loves God and neighbor. The faithful Christian does not only understand the gift of the atonement but appropriates it joyfully. The faithful Christian is susceptible of comfort, of that Trost, that God proffers. The emotional core is enlisted in the Christian’s devotional life and in his being within the church of Christ. It colors all human relations. The shape of one’s being in the world is evidence of it. This emotional core nevertheless exists within fallen humanity, from the Lutheran perspective. Thus, for Luther, the vulnerability to sin will ever mark life on earth, reminding the believers how completely beholden to God’s grace they are for their salvation. The faithful will not fall away. Their interior sensibilities will sometimes succumb to the wiles of Satan. To affect outward expression, the forces of evil must first exert their power over people’s hearts—that is, over the figurative seat of their frame of mind, that kernel where inclinations take shape.

The Heart as Reformation Legacy Before taking up the late-Reformation conflict involving the emotions, I need to mention a highly relevant modern historiographic conflict. Two parties of colleagues have drawn their lines and debated against one another in print. 10 Franz Diberlius, “Selnecker,” Realencyklopaedie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, 3rd ed., vol. 18 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1906), pp. 184 – 191. This banishment was painful to Selnecker, who faithfully informed Elector August by letter of important events in those other parts of Germany where he took employment.

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The one is led by Hartmut Lehmann and the other by Johannes Wallmann; at issue is the definition and time-frame of Pietism.11 Pietism has as we know distinct emotional components. Lehmann has declared—and even Martin Brecht has acceded to his view12–that Pietism encompasses virtually everything from fifteenth-century mysticism as exemplified by Johannes Tauler, up to world-wide Pentecostalism today.13 What binds all these strains together is their insistence that the Christian feel his/her faith, that the Christian be moved—and not just slightly—to love of God and neighbor, that he/she perceive God’s love within him-/herself and ardently reciprocate it. Johannes Wallmann, one of the elders of Pietist research, declares that such inclusion deprives the concept of Pietism of any historiographic meaning. To attempt to blend the Puritans and the Pentecostals and other feverish fundamentalists injures the distinct differences that separate them, and a great deal that took place in between. For Wallmann, Pietism is a time-confined movement, emerging especially within German Lutheranism but also visible within certain Swiss, German, and Dutch Reformed groups, beginning in the late seventeenth century with Philipp Jakob Spener (1635 – 1704) and August Hermann Francke (1663 – 1727). My own position falls on the side of Wallmann; I highly value the achievement of both these colleagues. To be influenced by and to have similarities with is not to be the same as. Networks of affect, both lesser and greater, existed within the synchronic and diachronic spheres; their generators cannot be seen as synonymous and must be weighed discretely. Willem J. op ‘t Hof has observed Reformed Pietists’ attraction to monastic ways of life and yet they rejected monasticism.14 Wallmann traces Pietist uses of the devotion of Bernard of Clairvaux, and yet it would be absurd to label the twelfth-century saint a Pietist.15 Even if we accept the principle of 11 For an overview, see the essays included in a new anthology : Wolfgang Breul, Marcus Meier, and Lothar Vogel, eds., Der radikale Pietismus: Perspektiven der Forschung, Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Pietismus 55 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010). Even though these are directed toward so-called radical Pietism as contrasted with in-church Pietists, numerous issues of differentiation are addressed. 12 Martin Brecht, ed., Der Pietismus vom siebzehnten bis zum frühen achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), in his introduction, 1 – 10; and the inclusion of Klaus Deppermann, “Der englische Puritanismus” as Chapter 1, 11 – 55. 13 For an introduction to Lehmann’s argumentation, see “Engerer und weiterer und erweiterter Pietismusbegriff: Anmerkungen zu den kritischen Anfragen von Johannes Wallmann an die Konzeption der ‘Geschichte des Pietismus’,” in idem, Transformationen der Religion in der Neuzeit: Beispiele aus der Geschichte des Protestantismus, Veröffentlichungen des Max-PlanckInstituts für Geschichte 230 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 156 – 75. This volume is a collection of Lehmann’s pertinent essays. Cf. Lehmann, “Four Competing Concepts for the Study of Religious Reform Movements, Including Pietism, in Early Modern Europe and in North America,” in F. A. van Lieburg, ed., Confessionalism and Pietism: Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2006), 313 – 22. 14 Willem J. op ‘t Hoff, “Protestant Pietism and Medieval Monasticism,” in Confessionalism and Pietism, 31 – 50. 15 “Bernhard von Clairvaux und der deutsche Pietismus,” included in Wallmann’s Pietismus und

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path dependence—that is, the persistence of established patterns—cultural contexts do alter over half a millennium. Not the Pietists but men such as Johann Arndt and Paul Gerhardt are those upon whom we should focus as we search for the emotional heritage of German Lutheranism in the four generations from the death of the Reformer to the advent of true Pietism. Such as these manifest the heritage late medieval Catholicism as conveyed both through direct exposure to monastic devotional texts and via the emergent Lutheran churches. There are no straight lines in cultural histories. George A. Lindbeck has distinguished between those who were “experiential-expressive” and others who preferred “cognitive-propositional theology.”16 Arndt and Gerhardt are among the former. The dour fathers of Lutheran orthodoxy are clearly of the latter stripe. But if we include in our scrutiny of even these, Lutheran song and symbolism, the level of emotional articulation rises. Several general developments condition the rise of desire for and explicit demand for more intensive expression and outward conformity to it. Lehmann himself notes the coincidence of glacial expansion, low harvests, higher taxes, and rising mortality from disease and war. He asks whether these played a part in witch hunts, anti-Semitism, apocalyptic urgency . . . and their seeming opposite, an increased demand for edifying literature.17 The stylistic preferences of the era are altogether called the Baroque. Whether in music or pictorial art, they are demonstrative, characterized by bright colors, swirling visions of heaven, elaborate and highly expressive sound.18 How easily, then, might the assertion of full-hearted spirituality fit into this broader cultural context. Religious thinkers, then, are never simply spinners of novel and abstract ideas who draw on other creative theological minds within their shared profession in their shared chronological niche. Lutheranism left open myriad possibilities for legitimate expression, passing these down from its broad inheritance from Holy Mother Church. Every one of those who purported to follow Luther maintained, and not incorrectly, that he adhered to the Wittenberger’s model of sincere inner devotion along with his doctrinal message. Luther’s vast opus afforded his successors a spectrum of choices that, Orthodoxie: Gesammelte Aufsätze III (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 83 – 102. Wallmann cites [Albrecht] Ritschl’s affirmation, with which Wallmann concurs, that early Lutheranism had already appropriated elements of Bernardine Jesus-spirituality (p. 88). 16 The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Post-Liberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), pp. See Carter Lindberg’s discussion in The Pietist Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 2005), 1 – 20. 17 Lehmann, “Die Krisen des 17. Jahrhunderts als Problem der Forschung,” in idem, Transformationen der Religion in der Neuzeit, 15 – 17. 18 Lyndal Roper has interpreted the witch craze as the shadow side of the baroque imagination, with elaborate fears and terrifying visions of hell: Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

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if not as broad as the Catholic Church’s, was nonetheless not parsimonious. All meant to tread the path that Luther himself had laid down, using in its construction elements that had been provided to him by the medieval Church. Johann Arndt (1555 – 1621) was a contemporary of every high orthodox Lutheran in this tense age. The son of a pastor, he did not demonstrably study theology. Rather, he took up medicine and alchemy, which, at the end of the Middle Ages, would not have been seen as incompatible with the cure of souls. Parish visitation committees, though, did make such clerical practitioners abandon their ministrations to bodies and confine their efforts to souls. A ceaseless writer and preacher, Arndt’s chief concern was fostering the interior along with the exterior imitation of Christ. His first major book (1605) contained the core of his program: Vom wahren Christenthumb heilsamer Busse, wahrem Glauben, heyligem Leben und Wandel der rechten wahren Christen19 (Concerning True Christianity, Salutary Repentance, [and the] Holy Life and Conduct of Proper [and] True Christians). During the seventeenth century alone, according to the Verzeichnis der im Deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des XVII. Jahrhunderts20, 133 editions of all or part of this title appeared in print. Arndt’s second most popular book was Paradiß Gärtlein, voller christlicher Tugenden . . . (Little Garden of Eden, Full of Christian Virtues, [and] How by Means of Devout, Edifying, and Consoling Prayers, These May be Planted in the Soul, toward the Goal of Practicing True Christianity).21 This title was reprinted 42 times in seventeenth-century Germany. Brecht cites the Giessen theologian Johann Georg May’s estimate that every household in his city possessed a copy.22 These publication statistics suggest that these devotional works met the perceived need of a large audience, one that surpassed the ranks of those whom Lehmann and others count as early Pietists. Robert Friedmann suggests that Arndt’s books held special appeal for Mennonites.23 It makes sense that Mennonites should have been among Arndt’s avid readers for two centuries, for these too demanded the participation of the heart. But the rate of reproduction suggests a readership far beyond Mennonite circles. Both these titles express Arndt’s pastoral and personal commitment to the spiritual improvement of his charges. They need to be judged against the background of a longer cross-section of Arndt’s opus. Among the items on a vast list, including hundreds of sermons (461 on the Psalms alone) that remain to be thoroughly examined for their emotional

19 20 21 22

Frankfurt/Main: Rosen, 1605. Called VD 17 for short. Begun in 1996 and still underway. Magdeburg: Schmidt, 1612. Brecht, “Das Aufkommen der neuen Frömmigkeitsbewegung in Deutschland,” in idem, ed., Der Pietismus vom siebzehnten, 112 – 203, here at 149. 23 Robert Friedmann, “Arndt, Johann (1555 – 1621,” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, 1953. Consulted 25 March 2011: http://www.gameo.org/encyclopedia/contents/A773ME. html

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tendencies, he produced edited versions of the Theologia Germanica and Thomas ‚ Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. Arndt’s expository books are alive with feeling. Hardly any page is devoid of an apt quotation for the present purpose. Arndt’s goal is to engage the Christian’s emotions and thereby to enable her and him to display the “good fruits” of faith. Faith must alter behavior. “You must bear the fruits of faith,” Arndt declares at the outset in On True Christianity. Prayer and virtue are mutually reinforcing. Through prayer the devout “come into the company of angels [and] attain heavenly wisdom and the gifts of the Holy Ghost.”24 The Lutheran pastor then outlines a semi-mystical and to us familiar scheme for deepening prayer-life that includes weeping over the suffering of Christ—a well-known Catholic rite of Holy Week, but here not to be engaged in collectively. This prayer is carried out individually and privately. The words of prayer “awaken our hearts, lift up our spirits to God, inflame devotion, strengthen faith and hope, and are useful to those who desire to persevere in asking, seeking, and knocking—who want to progress through the levels of prayer and attain tearful prayers, loving prayers, and joyful prayers.”25 To classify Arndt as a mystic and a spiritualist has been to excise him from the Lutheran legacy and label him an outsider. My own view is that his spirituality is altogether compatible with strains to be found in Martin Luther’s ample message. An equally well-known representative of this highly emotive and Lutheran devotional path is the pastor and hymnist Paul Gerhardt (1605 – 1676). Along with Arndt, Gerhardt was firmly within the Lutheran sphere, although he was not unchallenged by others in his rank. Heinz Schilling has opined, “Paul Gerhardt appears to be an excellent example of the fact that the quest for stability, resolution, and renewed security [in that age] can also be found in song lyrics and music.”26 Gerhardt was born near Wittenberg in 1607. His first systematic exposure to hymns was probably in the princely school at Grimma, for schoolboys in early Lutheranism were simultaneously choir boys. Gerhardt trained for the pastorate in Wittenberg. His theological frame of reference was the Book of Concord. Early on in his career, as a tutor to a family in Berlin, he composed most of the hymns for which he is today chiefly remembered—yet he did follow a ministerial track. He responded emotionally to the suffering of the Thirty Years’ War around him; to the baroque esthetic that ripened in his lifetime; and to his own natural inclination, which resonated with Luther’s earlier mood, toward a moving relationship with God. His hymn lyrics always expressed his sense along with his conviction that the faithful will demonstrate 24 Cited from the 1753 edition (Leipzig: Johann Samuel Heinsii Erben), p. 17. 25 Ibid., pp. 23 – 24. 26 Schilling, “Deutschland zur Zeit Paul Gerhardts,” in Paul Gerhardt—Dichtung, Theologie, Musik, edited by Dorothea Wendebourg (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 1 – 13, here at 2. My thanks to Wendebourg for giving me a copy of this volume and thereby bringing it to my attention.

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their commitment. From an early date, other church musicians such as Johann Crüger (Praxis pietatis melica [1642]) were drawn to Gerhardt’s words and incorporated them in their own anthologies of various men’s hymns. The 1661 and last edition of Crüger’s Praxis contained 90 hymn texts of Gerhardt.27 Establishment Lutheranism was not at odds with him.28 Rather, Gerhardt could not consent to the demands of the Reformed Elector Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg that he, for example, eliminate exorcism from baptism and not engage in polemics with Calvinist colleagues.29 In his letter to his son of 1676, he admonished, “Study holy theology in pure schools and at unfalsified universities and beware of the syncretists, for they seek what is temporal and are faithful neither to God nor to men.”30 Open sentiment characterizes virtually all of Gerhardt’s lyrics. John Wesley later translated one hymn as follows; it is very close to the original German and yet poetic: Jesus, Thy boundless love to me No thought can reach, no tongue declare; O knit my thankful heart to Thee, And reign without a rival there! Thine, wholly Thine alone, I’d live, Myself to Thee entirely give. O Love, how cheering is Thy ray! All fear before Thy presence flies; Care, anguish, sorrow, melt away, Where’ere Thy healing beams arise: O Jesus, nothing may I see, Nothing desire, or seek, but Thee!31

As this paper has stressed, such demonstrativeness may be found in the opus of Martin Luther and in those of a number of his more immediate disciples. One respect in which we may see Gerhardt drawing apart, whether consciously or not, and reverting to an earlier mood of observing Holy Week is in his, the hymnist’s, attention in verse to each of Christ’s suffering members as the Savior met his end. Gerhardt is not typical in addressing in turn Jesus’s feet, 27 Christian Bunners, Paul Gerhardt: Weg—Werk—Wirkung, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 91 – 92. 28 Bunners agrees with this: 18, 26, and passim. 29 On the Kirchenstreit in Brandenburg, Bunners, Paul Gerhardt, 64 – 86. The definitive work (not mentioning Gerhardt) and the introduction of the Reformed faith and people’s resistance to it is Bodo Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 30 Taken from Paul T. McCair, “Paul Gerhardt (Hymn-Writer),” http://www.bach-cantatas.com/ Lib/Gerhardt.htm Translated by Benjamin T. G. Mayes, 2007. Consulted 2 April 2011. 31 Hymn no. 222, The Methodist Hymnal (Nashville: The Methodist Publishing House, 1932).

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his knee, his hands, his side, his chest, his heart, and his face.32 Johann Sebastian Bach, whose religious corpus coincides fully with Gerhardt’s sensibility, arranged the last set of lyrics, on Christ’s countenance, and transmitted it to posterity as “O sacred Head, now wounded, With grief and shame weighed down.” Apart from seasonal observances, Gerhardt’s fundamental stance was that the Christian cultivates an intimate relationship with God through prayer and song, at all seasons and at all times of day. The hymnist wrote verses meant to accompany the devout in their most mundane activities. This is one verse of a hymn even for adults’ use in preparing to go to bed at night: Spread out both wings, Jesus my Joy And take Thy chick inside. Should Satan want to devour me, So let the angels sing: “Do not injure this child!”33

Each Christian is and remains a child of the Heavenly Father. The late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries presented an atmosphere in which at least some clergy and some of their lay adherents were firmly persuaded that outer affirmation did not signify interior fidelity. One of the great theological disputes, over whether good works were a prerequisite of salvation, preoccupied a small circle of learned men. A broader group, including devout laypeople, regarded it as self-evident that faith transforms. It transforms spiritually, and it produces results of this metamorphosis in acts of lovingkindness. We cannot know what percentage of believers made up the entire visible church. Surely they were a minority. But they drew upon Martin Luther’s own sense that the Christian will strive utterly to love God and serve his neighbor. These people did not deviate either from some of the ideals to be found in late medieval Catholicism or in early Lutheranism.34 They did not insist that love of God and neighbor made one more worthy of salvation. Rather, faith must radically alter each person whom it takes hold of; the manner of living must change. Such Christians were also affected by the 32 Philipp Wackernagel (1800 – 1877) was the great collector and systematizer of Gerhardt’s and other church musicians’ compositions. See the entry to him in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1986), 40: 452 – 59. Gerhardt’s lyrics on the Passion may be found in a modern reprint of his Paulus Gerhardts geistliche Lieder, 2nd ed. (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1974), 19 – 44; and on the parts of his body alone, 25 – 32. 33 Axel Gebhardt, Die güldne Sonne: Lieder von Paul Gerhardt in Fassungen des Freylinghausenschen Gesangbuches (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2007), 11, v. 8. The title page expresses Gebhardt’s reliance upon Dianne Marie McMullen and Wolfgang Miersemann’s critical edition of the Freylinghausenschen Gesangbuch. 34 Notger Slenczka, “Paul Gerhardt und Martin Luther,” in Wendebourg, ed., Paul Gerhardt, 141 – 58, inquires whether Lutheran Orthodoxy did not in fact discourage the individuation of the Christian before God, in contrast with both Luther himself and Gerhardt.

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emotive tenor of that age, which would be, in Brecht’s terminology, a “multiplier.”35 The Lutheran churches of Germany were not the only ones that felt the impulse of the day toward interior regeneration and the reform of life. Some followers of Calvin were also attracted.36 As Johann Friedrich Gerhard Goeters points out, however, no Reformed churches ever used the word Pietism. Goeters observes the drive of seventeenth-century Calvinists, many with contacts in the Netherlands, to require the upright life as proof of election— but at the very same moment, orthodox Lutheran fathers were nudging their congregations throughout Germany toward righteousness. This was in general an age of discipline. Calvinists shared the expectation that Christians would give evidence of being among God’s chosen people, whereas most Lutherans did not make such a link but simply supervised closely. Joachim Neander (1650 – 1680), the leading writer of Reformed hymns, stressed features that were consistent with Calvinism from its beginning: humility in relation to God’s Majesty ; total personal derogation and reliance on grace; and the repeated singing of praise to God. Neander’s best-known hymn has come down to many of us as follows: Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation! O my soul, praise Him, for He is thy health and salvation! All ye who hear, Now to His temple draw near ; Join me in glad adoration! Praise to the Lord, who o’er all things so wondrously reigneth, Shieldeth thee under His wings, yea, so gently sustaineth! Hast thou not seen How thy desires e’er have been Granted in what He ordaineth? Praise to the Lord, who doth prosper thy work and defend thee: Surely His goodness and mercy here daily attend thee. Ponder anew What the Almighty can do. If with His love He befriend thee.”37

The emotions are indeed involved here, and they are not entirely the same ones that I have come to expect of this branch of Protestantism: self-abasement and glorification of God, rather than a joyful sense of intimacy with the Heavenly Father. When the Reformed pious gather, they should comfort but also 35 Der Pietismus, 121 – 22. He uses it here apropos of Caspar Schwenkfeld’s possible influence in some circles. The words seems to refer to any additional factor that reinforces or complicates our consideration of a set of ideas’ descent from previous articulators of those ideas. E. g., Arndt was accused of spiritualism in Danzig (Brecht, Pietismus, 143). See in the same volume, Brecht, “Die deutschen Spiritualisten des 17. Jahrhunderts,” 205 – 40, which has a catalog-like aspect. 36 Johann Friedrich Gerhard Goeters, “Der reformierte Pietismus in Deutschland 1650 – 1690,” in Der Pietismus, 241 – 77. 37 I have used Catherine Winkworth’s (1829 – 1878) translation, in The Methodist Hymnal, no. 60.

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admonish one another. If they look back to medieval mysticism as part of their heritage, they often do not rise beyond the first or second state of the soul’s declaration of its total unworthiness. The Calvinist, I have found, must remain profoundly unworthy. This rigorous self-scrutiny may well form a component of early modern subjectivity—but surely this goes back in the Western tradition to the insistence on the enumeration of sins in confession; and surely it is not absent from Lutheranism, which retained auricular confession (without enumeration). It would be interesting to know, if we were to examine the later Reformed Pietism from an emotional point of view, whether its representatives were as capable of spiritual happiness as their Lutheran counterparts were. This hymn of Neander suggests that they could be. Its kinship with Psalms of praise is evident, and the language of the sheltering wings has to be noted. One does wonder whether the original wording, translated by Winkworth as befriend, potentially includes all humanity : . . . der dir mit Liebe begegnet. Does God encounter every person with love? I provisionally find less distance and a greater intimacy between the Christian and God in seventeenth-century Lutheranism than in the descendants of the Genevan faith. But surely in later times, as predestination is preached with less regularity, this emotional distance may shrink.

Path Dependency and the Emotions Margaret Levi, writing on the concept of path dependency in modern political decision-making, has stated: Path dependence has to mean, if it is to mean anything, that once a country or region has started down a track, the costs of reversal are very high. There will be other choice points, but the entrenchment of certain institutional arrangements obstructs an easy reversal of the initial choice. Perhaps the better metaphor is a tree rather than a path. From the same trunk, there are many different branches and smaller branches. Although it is possible to turn around or to clamber from one to the other—and essential if the chosen branch dies—the branch on which a climber begins is the one she tends to follow.38

I myself would adopt the metaphor of the tree, for late medieval Catholicism, in all its striking diversity, and given the alternatives and combinations it inherently held out to its offspring, remains in the Western Christian world the vast reservoir of historic possibilities. The tapping of this reserve is circumscribed by every denomination’s appointed theologians, of course. 38 Levi, “A Model, a Method, and a Map: Rational Choice in Comparative and Historical Analysis,” in Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure, edited by Mark I. Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 19 – 41, here at 28.

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Nonetheless, the emotional strains that we observe in the early modern period do not abandon their antecedents. Path dependence as a theory suggests that they could not. But I would add the historian’s caveat that times and charismatic personalities do introduce modifications that sometimes take hold. The sociological concept itself is a bit too deterministic. Circumstances and individuals add ingredients that, over time, produce change. Arndt and Gerhardt and many others, including ordinary persons, shared both an inclination and a conviction that Christian hearts had to be profoundly moved, and that this movement would inevitably show itself in acts. The orthodox fathers might well have forborne had later generations that can properly be called Pietist not threatened them by organizing devotional meetings outside of regular worship, with withdrawal from established parishes, and even with ecstatic outbursts. These Pietists characterized the condoned clergymen as cold and authoritarian—indeed as unchristian. However tense the relations between the appointed churchmen and the recusants became, both trod upon a well-worn path of precedent. Whatever unique opportunities they introduced, whatever novel ideas they introduced, they also tapped the great reservoir that they had inherited. It appears that those people who cultivated the warmed heart after some demarcating action such as physical separation, were always a distinct minority within the churches. Far more numerous were those who subscribed less dramatically, through reading Arndt’s books and Gerhardt’s lyrics in their homes, to the principle that true Christianity changed lives. These, too, gently broke with Luther’s more pessimistic view of humankind as helpless to foster a reliable correspondence between faith and behavior.

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Jeffrey R. Watt

Reconciliation and the Confession of Sins: The Evidence from the Consistory in Calvin’s Geneva

In 1541, the reformer John Calvin created the Consistory, the institution entrusted with the enforcement of Reformed morality in the Republic of Geneva. Comprised of the city’s pastors and elders—collectively known as the assistants of the Consistory—this quasi-tribunal had the power to convoke those suspected of deviating from Reformed mores. Though it could not impose secular penalties on those appearing before it, the Consistory had many means to bring about conformity in behavior. It regularly censured the morally suspect and often referred miscreants for criminal sentencing to the Small Council, the board of twenty-five members in which political power was concentrated in the Republic of Geneva. More important, the Consistory exerted enormous direct influence over the rank and file through its authority to deny the right to participate in the Eucharist or, as Calvin and his colleagues referred to it, the Holy Supper. Calvin was a most assiduous member of the Consistory, religiously attending the weekly meetings and dominating that institution until his death in 1564. The Consistory served as a model for others who shared Calvin’s religious convictions; throughout Europe, religious and political authorities established similar institutions to impose social discipline in Reformed communities. Blasphemy and illicit sexuality were among the most common sins for which Genevans had to appear before Calvin and the other assistants, but the registers of the Consistory also show that many people were summoned simply because of disputes or quarrels with others. The Consistory made great efforts to reconcile feuding parties. When it addressed personal conflicts and sought to reconcile those in dispute, the Consistory resembled more a type of mandatory counseling service than a tribunal and, in these and most other cases heard by the Consistory, we see Calvin as pastor rather than theologian. The testimony found in the registers provides occasional glimpses of Calvin and other pastors trying to reconcile feuding parties outside the Consistory. For example, the Consistory convoked the weaver Claude Besson and his wife, Philippa, several times for their bitter disputes. When they failed to appear in November 1561, Calvin explained to his colleagues that the couple had come “to see him at his abode, where they let him know that they were having some differences but did not tell him that they had been called to the Consistory. . . . [H]e reconciled them and sent them home.” The Consistory declared that this extra-

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consistorial reconciliation superseded the subpoena to appear, but it would record this matter in case the couple were called again for marital discord, notwithstanding the reconciliation that Calvin had mediated.1 At their own initiative, this couple had sought out the reformer at his private dwelling to assist them in settling their differences, clearly indicating that they viewed Calvin as a marriage counselor.2 When two parties were quarrelling, the Consistory was less interested in determining who the guilty party was than in settling the dispute. We of course cannot know how sincere these reconciliations were, but we do know that it was rather rare for people, other than married couples, once reconciled to return before the Consistory for the same disputes. The principal goal of the Consistory was to maintain social order and to assure that people bore no hard feelings toward others. Calvin and the Consistory were convinced that animosity toward one’s neighbor was incompatible with authentic piety. The pastors and the Consistory were quite interested in the celebration of the Supper, celebrated four times a year, and had the power to determine who had permission to participate in it. Starting in 1550, the pastors, usually accompanied by a dizenier (an officer who oversaw one of 25 dizaines or districts in the city) and perhaps by an elder, went to see all parishioners in their homes in the weeks preceding the Supper, especially that of Easter, in order to determine if they were spiritually in the proper frame of mind to take communion. In practice, this meant that the ministers wanted to know if people knew the rudimentary tenets of the faith and were capable of reciting appropriate prayers and the credo. In these visits, the pastors were also interested in knowing if people had committed any sins that would render them unfit to take communion. In that regard, these visitations can be viewed as an alternative, non-sacramental form of auricular confession.3 1 Archives d’Etat de GenÀve (hereafter AEG), Registres du Consistoire (hereafter R.Consist.) 18: 167v. As it turned out, the Bessons were called again for their marital discord in March 1562 (R.Consist. 19: 18r-v) and, following the recommendation of the Consistory, the Small Council banished them from the city as incorrigible. When, in October of the next same year, they asked permission to return to Geneva, Calvin and his colleagues recommended not acceding to this request; ibid., 162v. 2 Similarly, in March 1562 Simon Force and Louis Rabier were summoned because of alleged violence. Force confessed to having struck the other but protested that he had not done so “volluntairement”; Rabier admitted that Force’s actions could indeed have been unintentional. The Consistory sent them and four other men who had witnessed this incident to go next Sunday after dinner “chez Monsieur Calvin” in order to be reconciled, forbidding Force to take the Supper ; AEG, R.Consist. 19: 22. 3 See Christian Grosse, Les rituels de la cÀne: Le culte eucharistique r¦form¦ — GenÀve (XVIe – XVIIe siÀcles) (Geneva: Droz, 2008), especially 400 – 407. The ecclesiastical ordinances of 1561 decreed that these visitations should take place once a year, before Easter. On the Supper, see also Bernard Roussel, “Comment faire la cÀne ? Rite et retour aux Ecritures dans les Eglises r¦form¦es du Royaume de France au XVIe siÀcle,” in Les retours aux Ecritures, fondamentalismes pr¦sents et pass¦s, ed. Evelyne Patlagean and Alain Le Boulluec (Louvain and Paris: Peeters, 1993), 195 – 216; “’Faire la CÀne’ dans les Eglises r¦form¦es du Royaume de France au seiziÀme siÀcle (ca 1550–ca

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In Geneva the pastoral visitations preceding the Supper could be the source of conflicts. There were several cases of people trying to avoid these meetings either because they did not know the basics of Reformed doctrine or because they did not want to confess certain sins that they had committed. In April 1560, a female servant had to appear before the Consistory because she had fled when the pastor Nicolas Des Gallards was conducting the visitation. The Consistory mandated that she go to catechism lessons to show that she knew her faith (pour rendre rayson de sa foy).4 More striking was the “rebellion” in April 1562 of a “large number of people—men, women, and children—of the dizaine . . . of Bourg de Four,” who did not want “to present themselves before Monsieur Raymond [Chauvet], minister, and other assistants for the most recent visite.” On three successive meetings, individuals who were part of this “rebellion” received admonitions and were obliged “to appear together before the minister and some of the assistants of the Consistory” to prove that they had learned the basic beliefs of the faith.5 Having the right spiritual state of mind when taking communion was for the Consistory an essential reason to strive for the reconciliation of feuding parties and penitence for sins.6 Calvin and the other pastors believed that one had to attain an interior peace and not feel animosity toward others in order to participate in the Supper. In September 1557, the gardener Jacques Morellet and his wife were summoned because of their conjugal violence. Morellet admitted having punched his wife because she had left the door open, which in turn let a breeze in that disturbed his sleep. Because of his quarrelsome character and the disorder in his household, members of the Consistory forbade Morellet to take communion and warned him that they would “keep an eye on him so that, if he did not mend his ways, he would be prosecuted more fully.” As for his wife, she was told that, between now and Sunday, she should notify one of the ministers if she was capable of receiving communion.7 In effect, they were asking her to talk to a pastor to determine if she was too angry with her abusive husband to participate in the Supper. The registers of the Consistory indicate that at least some Genevans had assimilated the idea that it was necessary to settle differences and to bear no acrimony toward others. In March 1563, the Consistory convoked Pernette Dunant, Claude Jernoz, their husbands, and six witnesses. These two women

4 5 6 7

1575),” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 85 (1994): 99 – 119; Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). AEG, R.Consist. 17: 46v. AEG, R.Consist. 19: 38r, 44r, 49v. The records indicate that at least by 1564, the dizenier sometimes summoned parishioners to come see the pastor for the visitation rather than having the pastor go to them; R.Consist. 21: 43v. On examining one’s conscience in preparation for the Supper, see Grosse, Rituels de la cÀne, especially 503 – 565. AEG, R.Consist. 12: 92v.

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had been feuding for four years, and Robert Dunant recounted that last Sunday, “at his urging, Pernette, his wife, assembled [six women] as witnesses to the agreement [to end] the differences there had been between her and Claude” Jernoz. According to Robert, his wife “for her part asked forgiveness on her knees from Claude,” but Claude “refused to do the same” for Pernette. Following the Consistory’s strong remonstrances to put an end to this dispute, because of which the two women had not taken communion for four years, the two were finally reconciled.8 In spite of this settlement, Dunant and Jernoz almost certainly did not become good friends, but the fact that the Dunants had brought together the Jernozes and six women to observe a solemn reconciliation at which Pernette begged forgiveness from Claude revealed a very strong desire to put an end to the disagreement and to eliminate all acrimony between them. In dealing with most disputes, Calvin and his colleagues no doubt expected, perhaps even hoped that the quarrelling parties would henceforth avoid each other’s company ; the goal of reconciliation was not to make close friends out of former enemies but to eliminate bitterness. Parties in conflicts who were close family members, most obviously spouses, could not very realistically avoid each other.9 The taboo against taking communion when troubled by conflicts or sins was, to be sure, not unique to Reformed Protestants. Many Lutherans embraced and even internalized this prohibition, as did many Catholics, both before and after the Reformation. On the basis of Lutheran visitation records from the 1580s, David Warren Sabean found that German villagers frequently abstained from taking communion if quarrels with others caused them to have an “agitated heart.”10 In his seminal work, Christianity in the West, John Bossy 8 AEG, R.Consist. 20: 12v – 13r. 9 In September 1563, the Consistory convoked Tibaude, the wife of FranÅois Aillod of the village of Russin who had quarreled but reconciled with her sister before the last celebration of the Supper. The sister had recently given birth but Tibaude had not deigned to go see her even though the two lived under the same roof. The Consistory suspended her from communion and threatened to declare her publicly an excommunicant because of her lame excuse that the presence of men working in their abode had prevented her from seeing her sister; AEG, R.Consist. 20: 136v. In this case, avoiding her sister was considered itself a serious enough sin to merit full excommunication. Since there is no previous mention of the conflict in the registers, the recent reconciliation was clearly extra-consistorial. On 21 December 1563, the Consistory agreed to allow her to receive the Supper provided that she and her sister meet with their minister to be reconciled; ibid., 178v. 10 David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 37 – 60. In contrast to the evidence from the Genevan Consistory, though, Sabean argues that guilt was “an external fact for the villagers” and that conscience was “not an internalized mechanism of control,” as witnessed by the fact that settlements in court of legal disputes represented the reconciliation of the parties; ibid., 50, 51. See also Hans-Christoph Rublack, “Lutherische Beichte und Sozialdisziplinierung,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 84 (1993): 143 – 144; Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London: Routledge, 1997), 106 – 107. In Geneva, barring rancor, litigants to civil disputes regularly took commu-

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asserts that prior to the Reformation, the greatest concern in confession for Catholics was “hatred and its consequences,” and the sacrament was both collective and individual; contrition might suffice to reconcile sinners to God, but confession was needed to reconcile them to the church.11 Stressing the importance of strengthening bonds in a community, Virginia Reinburg avows that for the Catholic laity, the Mass was more “a communal rite of greeting, sharing, giving, receiving, and making peace” than sacrifice and sacrament.12 This desire to live in peace and above all to avoid bitterness extended to affairs in which one might sympathize with an aggrieved party’s reluctance to reconcile with the other. On 3 February 1558, Jean De Meulle and his wife, Claude, appeared before the Consistory with their landlord, Jean Losserand. The De Meulles accused Losserand of having tried to seduce Claude on three different occasions, including once in the presence of her husband who was very sick in bed. When questioned, Losserand first denied the accusations but eventually confessed to having kissed Claude and then thrown her on the bed, though she successfully resisted these aggressive sexual advances. The Consistory excluded Losserand from the Supper and referred him to the Small Council and advised the De Meulles “to leave the home of Losserand and not to frequent him any more so as to avoid scandals that could arise.” In addition, the Consistory strongly urged the couple to reconcile and to “live in peace the two of them with Losserand, which all three promised to do.”13 Even if in this specific case, the Consistory mandated that the parties henceforth avoid each other, asking a woman and her husband to reconcile with her would-be rapist implied a very high degree of forgiveness. This decision highlights the need for everyone, including the victim of an attempted rape, not to have malevolent feelings toward others.14 The Consistory proved to be remarkably indulgent in dealing with cases of people who, after first embracing the Reformed faith, later renounced it in France under threat of death. The treatment of Antoinie Avos was typical. A former Augustinian from Rouen, Avos had married Marie Le Danois, herself an ex-nun. On 23 May 1555, Avos came to the Consistory confessing that “being in Paris, [he] was interrogated about his faith under oath [and] was

11 12 13 14

nion, while others refrained from taking communion simply because they harbored bad feelings toward others, indicating that they had internalized the notion one must approach the Supper with the right frame of mind. John Bossy, “The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (1975): 21 – 38. Virginia Reinburg, “Liturgy and the Laity in Late Medieval and Reformation France,” Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (1992): 532. AEG, R. Consist. 12: 153r-v. When he appeared before the Council on suspicion of “paillardise [not rape!],” Losserand did not want to confess any wrongdoing. The Council ordered him not to associate with Claude and to confess his fault to the Consistory before taking communion again. In effect, he received no penalty beyond admonitions and exclusion from the Supper for attempted rape; AEG, Registres du Conseil (hereafter RC) 54: 85v (14 February 1558).

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greatly tempted and weak in his faith out of fear of being degraded and burned . . . , [he] disavowed and abjured and denied [his faith]. Recognizing his sin, he requests to be forgiven and to be admitted to the Supper. He also disavowed his wife there.” His wife also admitted to renouncing the Reformed faith in France and reported that she was “whipped through the streets of Paris and does not know why, except that they said that she had pronounced words against the faith and that she was the concubine of her husband.” The assistants decided that the couple should abstain from the next celebration of communion but could receive it three months later.15 In this era, when cases of apostasy before the Inquisition in Spain or Italy could result in capital punishment, those who renounced the Reformed faith to save their lives were routinely readmitted to the community of Geneva after being excluded just one time, provided that they were truly penitent. The Consistory, in short, was not too harsh toward those who had renounced the Calvinist faith when facing execution in Catholic countries. Evidently, Calvin, the Consistory, and the magistrates of Geneva did not demand martyrdom of all those facing persecution. More common than cases of people who truly risked persecution and martyrdom were those involving people who had converted to Protestantism when they came to Geneva and then returned to their native France or Savoy where, probably without too much pressure, they attended Mass and participated in Catholic rituals. In those circumstances, the Consistory again demonstrated a rather surprising degree of indulgence. A good example was the case of Jacques Corson, who in December 1561 confessed: after having lived in this city, where he came to know the pure doctrine of the Evangile [and] having participated in the holy sacrament of the Supper, he returned to his country of Palluan in Berry, where he prostituted himself in idolatry, going to Mass and to the funeral of his father. Of this he is greatly repentant, requesting that he be forgiven for this offense, especially his abjuration to live as a Catholic according to the edicts of the King.16

The Consistory gave him strong admonitions and declared that he will be “received in repentance, on the condition that he make reparation before the celebration of the Supper in the temple of Saint Pierre.”17 Following this reparation, whereby one had to confess one’s sins and ask for forgivesness in front of the entire congregation, Corson would not have had to abstain from communion even once though he freely admitted to having abjured the Reformed faith in France. When people behaved inappropriately, Calvin thought that one should avoid being too harsh in reproaching them. In 1558, Antoine, the wife of 15 AEG, R.Consist. 10: 29r, 30r, 50v. 16 AEG, R.Consist. 18: 178r. 17 AEG, R.Consist. 18: 178r.

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Gabriel Conte complained to the Consistory that Sieur Thivent Sage, dit Matellin had called her a “whore and slut.” Matellin, who was a lay assistant of the Consistory from 1552 to 1559, acknowledged that he had told her “that she was acting like a slut” when he saw her with “a [male] companion who was playing and frolicking with her.” Although they disapproved of her behavior, the other members of the Consistory rebuked their colleague Matellin, advising “that the next time he should admonish [wrongdoers] more modestly and not speak so offensively.”18 Calvin and his colleagues would not tolerate insults even if someone merited reprimands, undoubtedly because they were convinced that insults did not promote contrition or changes in behavior. Although Genevans were encouraged to report the misbehavior of their neighbors to authorities, Calvin and his colleagues preferred that denunciations not be made out of malice. In September 1563 Jean Losserand, the man who had attempted to rape his renter, had to be appear again for having blasphemed during a bitter argument with Etienne Benoist and Claude Patri. The Consistory issued remonstrances to Losserand for this sin but also admonished the other two men because they had revealed his blasphemy “out of hatred rather than out of good zeal.”19 Undoubtedly some denunciations were motivated by a combination of malevolence and piety, but the Consistory consistently sought to root out ill feelings among all Genevans. Calvin and his colleagues also insisted on the need to confess serious sins to the Consistory (or at least to a pastor in private) and to demonstrate sincere contrition for these sins. This was clearly seen in the case of FranÅoise, the wife of Gaspard Gautier, who was punished in June 1560 for petty theft for having taken from a peasant woman one more egg than the number she had paid for. Upon leaving prison, she was required by the Small Council to go to the Consistory to receive admonitions for this petty larceny. Facing the assistants, Gautier protested her innocence, but trustworthy witnesses provided evidence to the contrary and the Consistory therefore denied her access to the Supper.20 She returned in August and again in July of the next year to ask to be readmitted to the Supper, but still protested her innocence. On both occasions the Consistory rejected her request and told her the second time that she must come back “six weeks from now or at least before the Supper [of September] to make a good confession of her fault and to request to be admitted to the Supper which had been forbidden to her because of this [sin].”21 A month later, Clauda Voutier, excluded from the Supper for having prayed to the Virgin Mary, asked to be readmitted to communion which, she claimed, “had been denied to her for having been wrongly imprisoned for 18 19 20 21

AEG, R.Consist. 11: 48v – 49r. AEG, R.Consist. 20: 124r. AEG, R.Consist. 17: 105v, 108r. AEG, R.Consist. 18: 77r. When she returned 2 September 1561, she still refused to confess to the theft; ibid., 116r.

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having simply talked about the Virgin Mary” and for having been accused of being imprisoned “for the crime of heresy.” Since she still felt that she was innocent, the Consistory rebuked her by telling her that “instead of coming here to confess her fault, she comes to justify [herself].” The assistants accordingly denied her request and advised that “she look to better recognize her fault between now and Christmas; otherwise she will be proclaimed in the temple” as an excommunicant. While leaving the chamber, Voutier defiantly vowed that “she would go take [the Supper] elsewhere”; for this “rebellion,” the Consistory referred her to the Small Council to be punished and extended her exclusion from the Supper.22 In short, when the Consistory was convinced that the accused were guilty, they needed to confess rather than protest their innocence. The guilty also needed to confess all, not just some of their major faults. After a fistfight in August 1563, Etienne De Lecra confessed to having struck the other man once but denied that he often got drunk. Witnesses, however, affirmed that he frequently drank excessively and that he punched his victim three times, not just once. Excluding him from the Supper,23 the Consistory convoked him again in February of the following year for beating his wife when she urged him to go request to take communion again. On that occasion, he confessed his misdeeds only “in part,” and the Consistory accordingly referred him to the Small Council. When he did petition for readmission to communion in April, the Consistory rejected the request because he still was not fully acknowledging his errors.24 At times the Consistory doubted the sincerity of certain confessions of sins. In March 1562 Pierre Chappuis of the village of Peissy asked permission to take communion and confessed to having sold rosaries in Flanders. The assistants told him that he would have to come back to the Consistory to give a better confession of sins, advising him that the next time he should not laugh while confessing, as he did just now.25 When Nicod Gouffon was released from jail, he declared, “I ask vengeance from God,” referring to merchants from Lyon who had been responsible for his detention. To the Consistory, Gouffon said that he repented and wanted to pray to God for the merchants of Lyon. The Consistory suspected that he was merely feigning this repentance but limited itself to sending him on his way with admonitions.26 If convinced of the sincerity of one’s confession, however, the Consistory was quite willing to grant access to the Supper even to those who had committed the most serious sins and crimes. In December 1563, Louise Berthod of the village of C¦ligny petitioned to be readmitted to the Supper, 22 23 24 25 26

AEG, R.Consist. 18: 116v. AEG, R.Consist. 20: 114r, 120r-v. AEG, R.Consist. 21: 36v. AEG, R.Consist. 19: 23v. AEG, R.Consist. 19: 77v.

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having been excluded the previous August for having kicked a pregnant woman, which resulted in the death of the woman and her unborn child. Believing that Berthod was fully contrite, the Consistory ruled that she be readmitted to the Supper, provided that she recognized her fault before them just as she had already done publicly.27 Four months after, in effect, committing manslaughter, she was thus brought back into the community of the Reformed faithful. Calvin considered it a sin and a desecration to take communion without having first confessed one’s serious sins. In April 1551, the Consistory summoned Pernon Briset because she was pregnant and single, though she claimed that her lover had promised to marry her. She was reproached “for her fault, including for having continued to receive the Supper,” even though she had begun having sexual relations about Saint Michael’s day (29 September).28 In December 1560 Bernard Nerod appeared as a witness, but the Consistory was disappointed with his deposition; convinced that he had not told the truth, Calvin and the other assistants warned him that if he took communion, he would receive it as if he were a dog (en qualit¦ d’ung chien).29 Evidently, the Consistory considered taking communion without having confessed one’s sins—in this case of lying to the Consistory—as itself a very serious sin, an idea embraced by Catholic writers for centuries. For the Consistory, the sins of Pierre Berthet were an even worse form of desecration of the sacrament. He was convoked for having committed serious misdeeds the day of the Supper, and he took communion in spite of the fact that he had been forbidden to do so because of previous sins. On the meeting of 12 January 1559, the secretary wrote: Pierre Berthet, charged with often beating his wife, even on the day of the most recent Supper. Responds and confesses that [he is guilty as charged]. Also that he took the Supper at Christmas from the hands of Mr. Dupont, minister, which had been denied to him by the sieurs who undertook the most recent visitation going from house to house. Therefore since he profaned the holy sacrament of the Supper by taking it, though not instructed [about religion] and in violation of the injunctions made against him, [and since these actions] showed rebellion against rather than ignorance of [the Consistory’s rulings and] add [to this the fact] that in great scandal he beat his wife the day of the Supper, it seems good to send him before Messieurs [of the Small Council] with the entreaty that he be punished, the Supper being again forbidden to him.30

This passage demonstrates the close tie between the pastoral visitation and the celebration of communion and puts in high relief the idea that to commit 27 28 29 30

AEG, R.Consist. 20: 111r, 174r. AEG, R.Consist. 6: 24r. AEG, R.Consist. 17: 192v. AEG, R.Consist. 14: 142r.

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serious sins the day of the celebration of the Supper or to take the sacrament without having confessed for reprehensible acts amounted to a profanation of the Reformed Eucharist.31 Notwithstanding the actions of Berthet, many Genevans evidently had assimilated the maxim that they must not take communion with a troubled conscience or if they felt rancor toward others. Convoked in April 1557 because he had not taken communion in the past year, the pastry-maker Claude Comparet explained that he had abstained from the Supper because he harbored bad feelings toward the pastor FranÅois Bourgoin, dit Dagnon, because of “certain words” that Dagnon had uttered against Comparet’s brothers. Comparet avowed that he was “in good delibertation to leave aside all hatred.” The Consistory concluded that he should wait until Pentecost to evaluate his behavior and good will and asked him to go see pastor Dagnon to put an end to this conflict. Did Comparet tell the truth in explaining why he had not been taking communion? It would have been most impolitic for him to tell the Consistory that he did not really care whether he participated in the Supper or not. But if he had really wanted to tell Calvin and associates what they wanted to hear, he should have said that he was ready “to join the ranks of the faithful in the reception of the Supper.”32 More profound reasons seem to explain his refusal to take communion. The Consistory regularly made a point of mentioning whether a sin had been committed shortly after the celebration of the Supper, a clear sign that the pastors, like Catholics before them, considered this a form of profanation of the sacrament. The registers of the Consistory indicate that at least some of the laity in Geneva shared this idea that a sin perpetrated shortly after the celebration of the Supper constituted a defilement of the sacrament. In January 1562, the Lieutenant, the judicial officer in charge of petty crimes and civil cases, sent to the Consistory three men whom he had already punished for getting into a fistfight, a scandal that was witnessed by a large number of people. The three confessed their error, including Michel Dufour who admitted that a certain passerby tried to stop the fight and reproached him for having taken the Supper “to his own condemnation.” The fact that Dufour professed that he “repented” of his actions suggests that, at least to a degree, he too had assimilated the idea that committing a sin after taking communion brought about bad consequences for one’s soul.33 Occasionally the Consistory notified sinners that they risked damnation if they took the Supper without being in the proper state of mind. Ami Favre of the village of Jussy had appeared several times for blasphemy and fornication and asked to 31 For his rebellion in taking communion in spite of the prohibition and for his violence against his wife on the day of the Supper, the Council condemned Berthet to three days in jail on bread and water; AEG, RC 54: 357r (16 January 1559). 32 AEG, R.Consist. 12: 30v. 33 AEG, R.Consist. 18: 192v.

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be readmitted to the Supper at Christmas in 1555. Calvin and his associates were not completely convinced that Favre’s apologies were sincere but permitted him to take communion, warning him, however, of the danger of taking it if he did not truly feel remorse for his sins: “we leave him to his own conscience that he must not take it to his own damnation, seeing all his faults and that we know that he is guilty; he must think about it.”34 Warning someone that he risks damnation if he takes communion though unrepentant of sins or feeling rancor toward another denotes an attitude that is utterly incompatible with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. To be sure, the apostle Paul warned in I Corinthians that whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment upon himself (11: 27 – 29). Be that as it may, theologians who believe in predestination and reject salvation by works, denying that people can have any direct impact on their own destiny, cannot also believe that people can actually be damned for taking communion without being repentant of their sins. Why did Calvin issue these warnings? In this case, as with his work on the Consistory in general, we are seeing Calvin as pastor rather than as theologian. Christian Grosse convincingly suggests that for Calvin and his colleagues, “unworthy communion does not itself produce divine condemnation, but it incites a feeling of guilt in that person’s conscience.”35 Calvin apparently thought that the goal of nurturing reconciliation and the interiorization of Reformed morality justified this warning of damnation, which he could not have entirely believed. In such cases, practical concerns took precedence over theological precision.36 Calvin and the other pastors certainly wanted to impress on all Genevans the need to show due reverence toward God each time one partook of the Supper, and it appears that they enjoyed a considerable degree of success. Many Genevans interiorized the idea that one must never take communion unworthily, believing that their salvation was at stake if they did so.37 Just as one could get into trouble with the Consistory for taking communion while in a poor spiritual state, one could also be reproached for not taking the sacrament. Excluded from the Supper since May 1554 for domestic violence,38 the mason Martin Leschiere was called more than three years later “to confess his faults for which the Supper has been denied to him for a long time.” When asked why he had been excommunicated, Leschiere replied that he did not know. Since he “is a rebel and does not want to 34 AEG, R.Consist. 10: 78r. 35 Grosse, Rituels de la cÀne, 508. 36 In the Institutes, 3.23.12 – 14, Calvin dealt with related issues when he answered critics who averred that the doctrine of predestination obviated attempting to avoid sin and rendered meaningless exhortations to do so; CO 2: 708 – 711; and 3: col. 499 – 504. I am very grateful to John Thompson for bringing this passage to my attention. 37 See Christian Grosse, L’excommunication de Philibert Berthelier: Histoire d’un conflit d’identit¦ aux premiers temps de la R¦forme genevoise (1547 – 1555) (Geneva: Soci¦t¦ d’Histoire et d’Arch¦ologie de GenÀve, 1995), 41 – 44 ; Grosse, Rituels de la cÀne, 503 – 511. 38 AEG, R.Consist. 9: 62.

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recognize [his error],” the Consistory declared that Leschiere would remain excluded from communion.39 Five months later, Leschiere had to return to the Consistory, accompanied by Jean-Jacques Bonivard, to account for their whereabouts at the time of the most recent celebration of the Supper. The two men responded that they had been on the Arve River Bridge with another man. Since at least one of them was carrying an arquebus, one can deduce that they probably intended to practice shooting. When the assistants asked him when he had last taken the Supper, Bonivard said, “about three or four years ago” and that he had not taken it since then “because he felt hatred and rancor toward his mother.” The Consistory issued the following decision: as for Bonivard, since he has waited so long to receive the Supper, he is to be sent before Messieurs [of the Small Council] with the declaration that he should be punished for showing himself incorrigible. And as for Lechiere, he should similarly be sent [to Messieurs] since he shows and renders himself a rebel by not taking into account the Supper that has been forbidden to him; instead of doing so, he goes to pass time on the Arve River Bridge, because of which he also deserves punishment. The Supper is again forbidden to both of them.40

Though it may appear useless to deny communion to someone who seemed in no hurry to take it, this ruling nonetheless appears to have worked in the case of Leschiere. In April 1558, he asked permission to receive the Supper and declared himself “repentant of his fault.” The Consistory absolved him and gave him “good remonstrances.”41 To avoid similar cases, the ecclesiastical ordinances of 1561, reiterating an edict of 1557, ordered banishment of one year for all excommunicants who did not approach the Consistory to be reconciled to participate in the Supper.42 True, it was possible at least for some people to abstain from the Supper for quite some time without drawing the attention of authorities. When in June 1563 the Consistory summoned her for consulting a witch (sorciÀre) to treat a long illness, the widow Amblarde Varo admitted that she had not taken communion in twelve years, claiming that illness had precluded her from coming to take the Supper until she was cured by the witch nine months ago.43 The Consistory granted her request to be allowed to take communion in September.44 39 40 41 42 43

AEG, R.Consist. 12: 98r. AEG, R.Consist. 12: 153r. AEG, R.Consist. 13: 36r. Grosse, Excommunication de Berthelier, 40; Grosse, Rituels de la cÀne, 523 – 524. AEG, R.Consist. 20: 65v. She was sent to the Small Council for having consulted this healer and was required to be instructed in the basics of the faith and to return to ask readmission before the next celebration of the Supper. In a similar manner, on 28 March 1564, both Huguine Revilliod and Gonette Pape were convoked for not having asked to be readmitted. Since they both claimed that they did not know why they had been called, the Consistory avowed that they would remain suspended from the Eucharist; R.Consist. 21: 30v. 44 AEG, R.Consist. 20: 125v.

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Contrary to Leschiere, Bonivard, and Varo, most Genevans clearly wanted to take the Holy Supper. In fact, the Consistory’s meetings that took place just before the celebration of communion stood out from all others. In a typical meeting, the Consistory convoked miscreants for their alleged sins. By contrast, the meetings prior to the Supper were dedicated in large part to requests from excommunicants to be readmitted to the Eucharist. In order to handle the intense activity just before the celebration of the sacrament, the Consistory instituted the tradition, starting already in April 1542, to meet twice, on Tuesday and Thursday, during the week just before the Supper.45 In considering these petitions for readmission, the Consistory wanted to know if the individuals were truly penitent and properly disposed to take communion again. The large number of these entreaties undercuts the notion that Genevans were indifferent toward participation in the Eucharist. The actions taken to effect reconciliations and the confession of sins allow us to compare the Consistory with similar contemporary disciplinary institutions. Consistories have often been portrayed, notably by defenders of the “confessionalization” paradigm, as the Reformed version of the Inquisition. Having conducted research on both the Consistory of Geneva and on the Roman Inquisition, I do notice some important parallels between them.46 Both institutions aggressively attacked religious beliefs and practices that were deemed unacceptable and enjoyed a fair degree of success in creating religious uniformity. There were nonetheless some very important differences between the Inquisition in Italy and the Consistory of Geneva. Investigations of the Inquisition occasionally resulted in executions, whereas the Consistory could impose no secular penalties, possessing the power only to admonish and, at most, excommunicate miscreants. While the Consistory sought above all conformity in words and deeds, the Inquisition demanded conformity in word, deed, and thought. The Inquisition tried to examine the minds and souls of people and to regulate belief as well as behavior more than the Consistory did; this goal helps explain the Inquisition’s willingness to use torture in certain cases to uncover heresy. Nonetheless, as we have seen, the Consistory 45 Grosse, Rituels de la cÀne, 322; AEG, RC 35: 549r (4 April 1542); Registres du Consistoire de GenÀve au temps de Calvin, vol. 1, 1542 – 1544, ed. Thomas A. Lambert and Isabella M. Watt (Geneva: Droz, 1996), 26 – 29. 46 On the Roman Inquisition, see Andrea Del Col, “Alcune osservazioni sui processi inquisitoriali come fonti storiche,” Metodi e ricerche 13 (1994): 85 – 105; L’Inquisizione romana: Metodologia delle fonti e storia istituzionale. Atti del Seminario internazionale, Montereale Valcellini, 23 e 24 settembre 1999, ed. Andrea Del Col and Giovanna Paolin (Trieste: Universit— di Trieste; Montereale Valcellina: Circolo Culturale Menocchio, 2000); The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods, ed. Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986); Adriano Prosperi, L’Inquisizione romana: Letture e ricerche (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003); Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza: Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1996); John Tedeschi, The Prosecution of Heresy : Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991).

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constantly exhorted Genevans to examine their own consciences in order to repent of their sins and to suppress all feelings of rancor toward others. Calvin and the other assistants did seek the interiorization of Reformed piety among the laity. Moreover, the Genevan Consistory was actually a much more intrusive institution than the Roman Inquisition and had the ability to effect greater changes in behavior among the laity. The Inquisition did not have jurisdiction over misdeeds unless heresy, blasphemy, apostasy, or abuse of sacraments was alleged. By contrast, the Consistory of Geneva had the power to convoke those suspected of deviating from Reformed mores in any way. The Consistory regularly convoked people for domestic violence, drunkenness, dissipation of assets, or simply quarrels with their neighbors, none of which would have been a motive to be summoned by the Inquisition. Considered in all its aspects, the Consistory resembled much more the Catholic confessor than the inquisitor. Scholars have aptly suggested that the confessor was analogous to a physician for the soul whose ultimate goal was to reintegrate the sinner into the Christian community. Thomas Tentler in fact has argued that late medieval confession offered a comprehensive system of social control, which provided both discipline and consolation for sins.47 The Consistory of Geneva in effect served the same function. Having jurisdiction over a vast range of moral infractions, the Consistory was less a tribunal than a form of mandatory pastoral service. As we have seen, when they convoked people for moral transgressions, Calvin and the other assistants were less interested in punishing the miscreants than in reconciling them with the community of the faithful, with God, and with themselves. By forcing parishioners to recognize their faults and by admitting or denying them access to the Supper, the Consistory filled an important void left by Protestants’ elimination of the sacrament of penance. The Consistory’s weekly meetings, 47 Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). In his work on late medieval France, Herv¦ Martin finds much to support Tentler’s arguments; “Confession et contrúle social — la fin du Moyen Age,” in Pratiques de la confession des PÀres du d¦sert — Vatican II, Quinze etudes d’histoire, ed. Groupe de la BussiÀre (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1983), 117 – 134. Lawrence G. Duggan believes that the clergy’s ability to change behavior through confession was much more attenuated than Tentler suggests; “Fear and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 84 (1984): 153 – 175. Wietse de Boer finds that into the early seventeenth century, the reality fell well short of the goals set by the ambitious Carlo Borromeo, the Archbishop of Milan (1564 – 84) who zealously tried to transform the confessional into a vitally important instrument of social discipline. Secular authorities feared that excluding too many people from communion was more apt to hinder than nurture social discipline, and the local clergy was often reluctant to be so heavy-handed in meting out public penances; The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 84 – 124. For a good analysis of changes in confession in Counter-Reformation Germany, see W. David Myers, “Poor, Sinning Folk”: Confession and Conscience in Counter-Reformation Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). For an examination of normative sources on confession, see Jean Delumeau, L’aveu et le pardon: Les difficult¦s de la confession XIIIe – XVIIIe siÀcle (Paris: Fayard, 1990).

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however, almost surely had a greater impact on the behavior of the laity than did the annual confession of Catholics. Practices in certain Lutheran areas both resembled and differed from those in Geneva. Reformed theologians such as Zwingli rejected priestly absolution because they believed it undercut the belief that Christ was the sole source of forgiveness. By contrast, Luther, though eventually rejecting the sacramental nature of penance, approved of confession with absolution as a source of consolation and as a means of preparing for the worthy reception of the sacrament. In northern Germany, Lutherans continued to practice private confession through the eighteenth century. Before the celebration of communion, Lutherans were supposed to meet with their pastors to be questioned about their conduct and their knowledge of the faith, a practice not unlike the visitations in Geneva that preceded communion. Unlike its Catholic counterpart, Lutheran confession, sometimes called “private exploration,”48 did not require confessing all one’s sins to the confessor, and confessants were not to reveal the sordid details of their misdeeds. Lutheran confession appeared to put greater emphasis on the forgiveness of sins and consolation than the Catholic sacrament.49 The church services in some Protestant areas, both Lutheran and Reformed (though not in Geneva), started including in the sixteenth century a collective confession of sins followed by an assurance of pardon.50 The pastors’ visitations and the Consistory’s efforts to effect reconciliation and the confession of sins together had much in common with Lutherans’ meetings with pastors and private confession before communion. Though Calvin no doubt would have objected, the Genevan laity may well have perceived the Consistory’s readmitting people to the Supper as a form of absolution. If in theory Lutheran confession was intended above all as a source of consolation, pastors could also use it as a means of imposing discipline by threatening to withhold participation in the sacrament. In developing the confessionalization paradigm, Heinz Schilling has suggested that sin became criminalized in the later sixteenth century, and Lutheran churches imposed humiliating acts of penitence in front of the entire congregation, akin to acts of reparation in Calvin’s Geneva.51 In theory, excommunication and discipline in 48 Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Ritual, 98. 49 Robert Christman, “The Pulpit and the Pew: Shaping Popular Piety in Late Reformation Germany,” in Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550 – 1675, ed. Robert Kolb, (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 259 – 304; Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Ritual, 94 – 107; Ronald K. Rittgers, “Private Confession and the Lutheranization of Sixteenth-Century Nördlingen,” Sixteenth Century Journal 36 (2005): 1063 – 1085; Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 50 Philippe Denis, “Remplacer la confession: Absolutions collectives et discipline eccl¦siastique dans les ¦glises de la R¦forme au XVIe siÀcle,” in Pratiques de la confession, ed. Groupe de la BussiÀre, 170 – 171. 51 Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Ritual, 128 – 129; Heinz Schilling, “‘History of Crime’ or ‘History

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Geneva and Lutheran Germany did not involve making satisfaction for one’s sins, which Protestants considered a form of works-righteousness, but these humiliating acts, as a condition for being readmitted to communion, had much in common with Catholic expiatory rites. In the second half of the sixteenth century, Lutherans in many areas of Germany also established consistories, which, along with visitations, became important tools in the effort to inculcate discipline. Preliminary research suggests that issues pertaining to marriage were the most common cases brought before these spiritual courts, though conflicts with pastors, drunkenness, illicit sexuality, blasphemy, and other moral transgressions might also be heard. I have seen no evidence, however, that Lutheran consistories might summon people simply for quarreling.52 It is almost certainly safe to say that few Lutheran areas— indeed very few Calvinist polities—had the institutional structures that could promote social discipline as effectively as the Genevan Consistory.53 One can cite various reformers to support the idea that discipline replaced confession. John Eck, Luther’s famous adversary, had said in 1523 that confession was the “nerve” of the Church whereas Calvin would insist in the Institutes that discipline was the “nerve” of the Church.54 Although Catholics had distinguished between the “internal court” of confession, which was purely penitential in nature, and the “external court” of the Inquisition and episcopal courts, which did have judicial powers, Reformed Protestants eliminated this distinction. Be that as it may, while members of the Consistory were most concerned with public order and eschewed the minute questioning to uncover all vices, like confessors, they nonetheless encouraged the rank and file in Geneva to examine their consciences before taking communion. Thanks to its tenacious efforts to root out misbehavior and personal conflicts, the Consistory was nurturing a strong sense of community.

of Sin’? Some Reflections on the Social History of Early Modern Church Discipline,” in Politics and Society in Reformation Europe: Essays for Sir Geoffrey Elton on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Tom Scott and E.I. Kouri, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 289 – 310. Concentrating on late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Germany, however, Hans-Christoph Rublack has found that the Lutheran laity came to view confession as a ritual that did not require serious introspection; it did not appear to be a viable means of effecting social discipline, unlike the actions of Calvin’s Consistory ; Rublack, “Lutherische Beichte,” 127 – 155. 52 Christman, “The Pulpit and the Pew,” 289 – 290. 53 See especially Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Ritual, 100 – 104. For an excellent study of Martin Bucer’s evolving thought on penance and attempts to implement social discipline in Strasbourg, see Amy Nelson Burnett, The Yoke of Christ: Martin Bucer and Christian Discipline (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1994). 54 Denis, “Remplacer confession,” in Pratiques de la confession, ed. Groupe de la BussiÀre, 174 – 175.

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Robert Kolb

The Prophet of the German Nation and Other Saint-Sinner Martyrs among the Lutheran Stars

When as a child I visited one great-aunt and uncle, the figure of Luther, with open Bible in hand, stared down at us as we sat in their living room. Her two sisters, my grandmother among them, took me when I was ten to the Iowa Theater in Fort Dodge to see the new film, “Martin Luther.” Four centuries after his death this German professor was a presence among us peasants half a world away. Similar phenomena occurred in those days in Rio Grande de Sul in the south of Brazil, in Australia’s Barossa Valley and Wittenberg in Kwa-Zulu Natal. Even where few if any German emigrants had settled, for instance, in Tamil Nadu on the southeast Indian coast and, only a few years earlier, on the banks of the Yangtze, Luther was being celebrated and his Small Catechism memorized. Fascination with the Wittenberg reformer survived the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic in China. Few historical figures have commanded interest over such chronological and geographical distances. A variety of cultural and ideological factors may be called upon to account for this widespread positive appreciation of the Wittenberg reformer – although the demonizing traditions surrounding his name cannot be ignored in assessing the historical impact of his biography and his thought. With roots in the apocalyptic mood of the Late Middle Ages and in public reactions to Luther’s initial appeals for reform,1 the evaluations – whether encomia or censure, paeans or disparagement – of the sixteenth century, have launched traditions that endured into the twentieth. It has been said that sixteenth-century Lutherans did relatively little with biography because they viewed ecclesiastical history as most importantly the history of dogma. The second half of this observation is probably true. As Irena Backus has noted, the early, massive church history by Lutherans, the Magdeburg Centuries, equated church history “for the first time ever … not with the history of an institution within the framework of God’s plan but with the history of Christian thought and teaching.” Thus, it laid the basis for the discipline of the history of dogma.2 Backus confirmed what Ronald Diener, in 1 Volker Leppin, Antichrist und Jüngster Tag. Das Profil apokalyptischer Flugschriftenpublizistik im deutschen Luthertum 1548 – 1618 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1999); esp. 59 – 168, Robert Scribner, For the sake of simple folk, Popular propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 59 – 147. 2 Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378 – 1615) (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 364, 361, cf. 374.

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his 1978 Harvard dissertation on the Centuries, had concluded when he called that work “a beef and hare stew: one cow and fifteen rabbits. The sixteen chapters were not balanced at all, in terms of size and scope” since Locus Four, “de doctrina,” accounted for more than a third of the total context.3

Life-Writing as a Lutheran Genre But it is not so true that Lutherans did little with biography. In 1541, commenting on Daniel 12:3, “Teachers will shine like the glow of the heavens, and they who point to righteousness like the stars, forever and eternally” [Luther’s translation], Luther said that preachers and teachers send forth light into the world as they convert many in the days leading up to the end of the world.4 Thirty years later the commentary of his student, Johannes Wigand, explained “teachers” as those who with their “proclamation, teaching, confession, and consolation” lay the foundation for the comfort of Christ’s church in the last times, in the face of hatred and persecutions. They shine through the confession and propagation of pure teaching.5 The first life-writing arising out of the Wittenberg Reformation came from Luther’s pen and did not feature the reformer himself. From his monastic days Luther’s sermons often featured snippets of biographical description based on the biblical text but sometimes fanciful elaborations of what it said about the lives of its figures.6 The pericopes for saints’ festivals compelled Luther to focus on the lives of certain biblical saints, and his preaching on those texts gave birth to a tradition carried on by his students in celebrating God’s gracious presence in the lives of his people and their models of godly obedience for the benefit of the sixteenth-century hearers.7 Luther himself began the celebration of God’s gift of martyrdom in 1523, with the first martyrs for his cause, Heinrich Voes and Johann Esch. Less life-writing than death-writing, the hymn’s twelve stanzas depict their execution and their final confession of faith. Luther changed the focus from the medieval emphasis on the saints making themselves worthy and powerful through their sacrifice to 3 “The Magdeburg Centuries, A Bibliothecal and Historiographical Analysis,” Th.D. dissertation, Harvard Divinity School, 1978, 105. 4 Dr. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar: Böhlau, 1883 – 1993 [henceforth WA]) Deutsche Bibel 11,2:110,20 – 22/111,20 – 22. 5 Wigand, Danielis prophetae explicatio brevis, tradita in Academia Ienensi (Jena: Hüttich, 1571), 452a-b. 6 Robert Kolb, Luther and the Stories of God. Biblical Narratives as a Foundation for Christian Living (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012). 7 Robert Kolb, “Festivals of the Saints in the Late Reformation Lutheran Preaching,” The Historian 53 (1990): 613 – 626.

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his own concept of martyrdom as God’s gift both to the martyr and to the church.8 This seemingly minor shift in a perception of one of many important elements of medieval Christianity may not seem terribly significant, but in fact it points to a much larger transformation in the conceptualization of religion advanced by all Protestant reformers. Medieval Christianity in Western Europe had evolved into a religion which dwelt less than had the early church on the preaching of the Word of the Lord and the recollection of his undertakings within the context of the flow of human events. The New Testament focus on God’s dealing with his human creatures through his mighty acts and his conversation with his people in the community of the church seemed to the reformers to have been lost as the cultures of the Mediterranean and Germanic peoples absorbed Christian forms.9 PreChristian forms of Mediterranean and Germanic religions had found ritual actions by human beings – into which devotion to the saints was easily woven – served more important functions than did doctrinal or narrative accounts of God’s shaping and sustaining reality. Such a framework for religious life had produced what the reformers regarded as a magical, superstitious form of Christianity, which they strove to reform. Their objections to anything that smacked of ritual usage working “ex opere operato” indicate how deeply they felt about this fundamental discrepancy between the religion in which they had grown up and what they regarded as God’s way of working in the world. And yet their preaching and teaching did not dwell on doctrinal propositions alone, but they reveled in recalling and retelling the narrative of how God works in the world and how he moves and sends his people to do the work he has called them to do. That narrative and its doctrinal interpretation informed the ritual, ethics, and forms of community life of the Protestant churches. God’s address to humankind in his own story and the formulations for teaching and explaining reality derived from it constituted religion for Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, and the other Protestant reformers. Life-telling in the medieval church had focused on saints, who served as “Nothelfer,” as intermediaries between God and human beings. They could apply special power to help the desperate out of unpleasant situations, whether in their relationship to God directly or in their combat with illness, hunger, war, or other evils of daily life. The stories of the saints functioned as admonitions to turn to these holy helpers in times of various needs. Luther’s rejection of the ritualistic religion of his youth brought him to characterize the biblical faith as trust in a God who seeks conversation and community with his 8 WA: 35:411,4 – 12; Luther’s Works (Saint Louis/Philadelphia: Concordia/Fortress, 1958 – 1986 [henceforth LW]), 53:217 – 220. Cf. Robert Kolb, “God’s Gift of Martyrdom: The Early Reformation Understanding of Dying for the Faith,” Church History 64 (1995): 399 – 411. 9 Scott Hendrix, Recultivating the Vineyard. The Reformation Agendas of Christianization (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 1 – 17.

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people. This God acts in history as the one who guides its course and sustains his chosen people as well as a general order in the world. So the chief figure, the lead actor, in much of the Wittenberg reformer’s preaching and teaching was God, particularly Jesus Christ. Nonetheless, the supporting cast of those whom the Holy Spirit activates to carry out the tasks of the God who is always providing for and protecting his people forms a significant element in Luther’s conveying of God’s Word. In the Augsburg Confession Philip Melanchthon defined the place of saints in Wittenberg theology : “Concerning the cult of the saints our people teach that the saints are to be remembered so that we may strengthen our faith when we see how they experienced grace and how they were helped by faith. Moreover, it is taught that each person, according to his or her calling, should take the saints’ good works as an example.”10 Luther may have initiated life-telling among the Wittenberg theologians, but Melanchthon was not far behind. Trained in, and dedicated to cultivating, “humanistic skills,” he modeled the public oration for the students, sometimes praising even as he was burying, for instance, at the death of Electors Frederick and John, occasions for him and Luther to initiate the prominent Lutheran practice of proclaiming and then publishing funeral sermons and orations.11 Alongside the funeral oration Melanchthon practiced and demonstrated classical rhetorical arts in a series of biographical addresses. James Michael Weiss has examined Melanchthon’s orations on individuals, noting that the Praeceptor Germaniae had “codified standard encomiastic procedure in his textbook on rhetoric of 1531,” on the basis of the tradition reaching through Erasmus and Rudolf Agricola to Suetonius and Quintilian. The topics such a biographical presentation should treat included “homeland, family and birth, fundamental talents … and disposition, education and other training, discipline, teaching and views, other deeds and events, awards, manner of death and reputation after death.” Weiss also observes that “Melanchthon occasionally pointed out that he would not treat a biographical speech as an encomium but as historia or as historica narratio.”12 Melanchthon offered orations on biblical figures (e. g., Jonathan, Daniel, Paul, et al.), church fathers (Polycarp, Ambrose, Augustine et al.), classical thinkers (Plato, Aristotle, Galen), German political leaders (from Frederick Barbarossa to contemporaries, Emperor Maximilian, the Saxon electors, and other dukes of his time), and members of the Wittenberg circle, including Luther, Johannes Bugenha-

10 Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche (11. ed.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992 [henceforth BSLK]), 83b-c, The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 58/59. 11 See Cornelia Niekus Moore, Patterned Lives. The Lutheran Funeral Biography in Early Modern Germany (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), 93 – 96. 12 James M. Weiss, Humanist Biography in Renaissance Italy and Reformation Germany. Friendship and Rhetoric (Farnham, Surrey : Ashgate, 2010), essay I, 16; see Weiss’s Handlist of Melanchthon Biographies, 14 – 16.

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gen, Caspar Cruciger the Elder, Gregor von Brück, and Georg, Prince of Anhalt, many at or soon after their burials. Melanchthon’s oration on the occasion of Prince Georg’s death illustrates much of Weiss’s summary of his approach. It began with Jesus’ words, “let your light shine before others that your heavenly Father may be glorified,” and proceeded to demonstrate how Georg had done so in service to the gospel he had learned from Luther. Melanchthon explained his purposes in delivering the oration, revealing a mixture of the ancient ideal of using life-telling to cultivate an upright pattern of conduct with Wittenberg ideas for the use of exemplary models to foster faith as well as obedience to God’s law by making the human stage God’s stage as well. He informed his hearers that considering the lives of God’s people presents good examples of teaching and pious testimony of the faith. Furthermore, it highlights God’s presence in his church and gives thanks to him for its teachers and leaders. Finally, it also encourages others to follow the Prince’s diligence in seeking the truth, praying, and practicing all virtues.13 Although Melanchthon also had medieval saints’ lives at hand to serve as models, his biographical orations reflect the ancient models, disciplined by the Wittenberg view of human lives as theaters in which God is the leading actor and his people trust and serve him faithfully.14 The Lutheran funeral sermon certainly reflected this axiom in reviewing the lives of the deceased. These sermons did not always have recollections of the course of the departed’s life, but already in the second half of the sixteenth century they increasingly included such a section. As Cornelia Niekus Moore describes their biographical sections, they “bore witness to an exemplary life in faith and a death that was ‘peaceful and blessed,’” both elements of medieval remembrances as well. Lutheran preachers used both sermons on biblical texts and recollections of the departed’s living and dying as they “consoled those who were sad, admonished those who were present to follow the example given by the deceased, and taught that life was nothing, death was certain, and Christian fortitude demanded that a person live life in such a way that at the Day of Judgment he or she would happily (‘fröhlich’) be united with those who had gone before.”15 Blending historical reporting and literary grace, preachers followed Melanchthon’s rules for such public declamation, using individual anecdotes that fit into the topical scheme the Praeceptor used so effectively.16 The funereal biographies intended to cultivate pious living of the biblical virtues within the structures of the individual’s callings within society.17 13 CR 12: 69 (the entire oration, 68 – 79). See Jozef Ijsenwijn, “Die humanistische Biographie,” in: Biographie und Autobiographie in der Renaissance, ed. August Buck (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983), 1 – 3. 14 Irena Backus, Life Writing in Reformation Europe, Lives of Reformers by Friends, Disciples and Foes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), viii – xx. 15 Moore, Patterned Lives, 27, 29, cf. 81 – 84. 16 Ibid., 35 – 37. 17 Ibid., 71 – 74.

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Pastors joined princes, patricians, and other prominent citizens among those whose lives were presented alongside the consolation and admonition of the preacher. In addition, obituaries of pastors served as a contribution to shaping the public image of the new social class created in the lecture halls of Wittenberg and other Lutheran universities. These sermons did not conform closely to the model of saints’ lives in the Middle Ages since they attributed neither special merit nor special powers of healing or fixing to their subjects. Perhaps closer to some aspects of martyrology, in that they sometimes emphasized Christian suffering and witness to the faith, they can best be described as means of cultivating faith and obedience in believers, even as they established norms for, and the status of, the clergy.18 It is also true that the Magdeburg Centuries, though concentrating on the history of dogma (not only with “on doctrine” but also the following locus, “on heresies”), did include two biographical loci as well. Martyrs constituted the twelfth locus of each century ;19 “on bishops and teachers,” (locus ten) was usually much lengthier, on rare occasion longer than the doctrinal section and overall the second-longest of the loci, because of its inclusion of two hundred or more individual figures in most Centuries.20 The vast majority of these treatments were brief three- to ten-liners, giving a succinct overview of a few significant characteristics or events, with occasionally a summary or citation of an important theological insight, almost always with a reference to the source of the Centuriators’ information. Longer entries sometimes reviewed a church father’s teaching in detail, reinforcing the impression that “doctrine” truly formed the heart of church history.21 Some “lives,” however, included sub-sections on “his deeds,” “his episcopacy,” “writings,” “struggles,” “his holiness of life,” “afflictions,” and others.22 These accounts show little literary grace, following somewhat the style of medieval chronicles, but they do focus on the Centuriators’ concerns for pure teaching and holy living as well as on the failures and deception of medieval doctrine and practice. Biography in this 18 Robert Kolb, “Burying the Brethren: Lutheran Funeral Sermons as Life Writing,” in The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe, Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV, ed. Thomas F. Mayer and D. R. Woolf (Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1995), 97 – 113. 19 Robert Kolb, “From Hymn to History of Dogma. Lutheran Martyrology in the Reformation Era,” in More than a Memory. The Discourse of Martyrdom and the Construction of Christian Identity in the History of Christianity, ed. Johan Leemans (Louvain: Peeters, 2005), 301 – 313. 20 Flacius mentioned these in the earliest drafts of the strategy for constructing the work, Ronald Ernst Diener, “The Magdeburg Centuries, A Bibliothecal and Historiographical Analysis.” (Th.D. dissertation, Harvard Divinity School, 1978) 84 – 108; Heinz Scheible, Die Entstehung der Magdeburger Zenturien (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1966), 24 – 25. 21 Cf., e. g., the entries on Gregory Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil the Great, Quarta Centuria ecclesiasticae historiae … (Basel: Joannes Oporinus, 1560), 914 – 929, 929 – 939, 939 – 959. 22 Cf. e. g., on Quinta Centuria ecclesiasticae historiae … (Basel: Joannes Oporinus, 1562), 1000 – 1014.

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form served their larger theological goals, a lesson they had learned from their Praeceptor. Brief biographical offerings also graced the prefaces of certain authors’ posthumous works. Melchior Newkirch, younger colleague of Martin Chemnitz in Braunschweig, memorialized his superintendent and mentor by editing sermons from Chemnitz’s pen into a postil. Newkirch introduced the postil’s author to its readers with an appreciation of his ministry filled with few details of his life but an accounting of his contributions to Lutheran theology. He placed the “highly gifted” Chemnitz in the train of the “most excellent, powerful, learned, and highly-gifted teacher and preacher” whom God had given the church, Luther himself. Chemnitz had continued the proclamation of the message of that “special tool of God” in opposing papal, antichristian teaching and its newest sect, the Jesuits, as well as Zwinglians and Calvinists. Lutheran lives took their course in the midst of the eschatological struggle against Satan’s deceptions, and Chemnitz had understood particularly well what was at stake in the controversies of his time and the proper ground for judging them. Newkirch gave readers the barest bones of the skeleton of Chemnitz’s biography : his thirteen years as coadjutor in Braunschweig, and seventeen years as superintendent there. His accomplishments in Newkirch’s view consisted simply of his literary productions, that is, in an important public exercise of his office as teacher of the church: the Examination of the Council of Trent, his examination of the origins and teaching of the Jesuits, his treatises on the Lord’s Supper and on the person of Christ, the Formula of Concord, his commentary on Melanchthon’s Loci, and his unfinished Harmony of the Gospels. In a concluding word to the margraves of Brandenburg, Elector Johann Georg, Joachim Friedrich, administrator in Magdeburg, and Georg Friedrich in Prussia, Newkirch turned biographical detail to a different purpose, strengthening the commendation of the volume to the princes by mentioning that Chemnitz was their “subject and Landeskind,” having been born in Brandenburg, and that their relative, Albrecht of Prussia, had employed Chemnitz as librarian. Newkirch was bold enough, however, to add that Chemnitz had left Königsberg in his battle against Andreas Osiander (in fact, in opposition to Albrecht), departing for Wittenberg, where he ate at Melanchthon’s table and received his endorsement to become coadjutor in Braunschweig.23 Even these brief biographical allusions exceeded those in the preface written by Hieronymus Mörlin for the postil he constructed from his father Joachim’s sermon notes. They came from his several preaching stations in Arnstadt, Göttingen, Königsberg, and Braunschweig, but the preface does not place these stages in his career in any historical context. It does relate that the 23 Martin Chemnitz, Postilla Oder Außlegung der Euangelien/ welche auff die Sontage/ Vnd fu[e]rnembste Feste/ durchs gantze Jahr in der gemeine Gottes erkleret werden (Magdeburg: Johann Franck, 1594), (ija-)(iijb).

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father had been “Luther’s faithful devotee, and for quite a while his deacon and probably his favorite Domesticus,” among the students who served him as they lived in the Black Cloister. The senior Mörlin not only let God’s Word flow from his tongue; it came from his heart, and devout fear of God had filled him. He had a special gift of preaching, among many other gifts, and could bring God’s Word to the common people with great wisdom for their great profit and gain. He had been able to divide and organize God’s Word effectively so that it could easily be remembered. God had given him a skillful tongue so that he spoke the sublime mysteries of God in clear, direct, and understandable words without any forced expressions or affectation, and he was able to find the proper proportions so that every hearer listened to him with great delight and profit.24 Like Chemnitz, Mörlin commanded attention because of his teaching, not because of his actions. Such brief biographical sketches, and also longer appraisals of the life of pastors and teachers, generally avoided any negative criticism although some flaws in personality or performance were occasionally noted in funeral sermons.25 Modern scholars frequently note that Luther carried his perception of the Christian life as a place that displays God’s mercy toward his chosen even when they err into his appraisal of the lives of biblical figures, above all, the patriarchs.26 Such lessons regarding the temptations and trials of contemporaries lives seldom surfaced in public recounting of contemporary Lutheran leaders. That may be due to the influence of the canons of genre, particularly of the classical model of public praise. It may also be due to the polemical context in which the lives of sixteenth-century figures had to be rehearsed. Conceding faults and flaws provided particularly Roman Catholic critics with ammunition in their campaign against Wittenberg theology and theologians. Biography fulfilled a different role than did biblical commentary. Biographies in forms more closely approaching the modern life-writing genre are rare in sixteenth-century Lutheran circles although Melanchthon did win such treatment, from his close friend Joachim Camerarius. He published a defense of the Praeceptor against his Lutheran critics, stylizing him as a man of quiet disposition and inclination to compromise that did not provide a completely accurate picture but served apologetic purposes.27 Few biograph24 Joachim Mörlin, Postilla: Oder Summarische Erinnerung bey den Sonteglichen Jahrs Euangelien vnd Catechismi. … (Erfurt: Esaias Mechler, 1587), )(ija-)(iijb). 25 E.g., Caspar Heldelin, Eine Christlich predigt vber der Leiche des … M. Matthiae Flacij Illyrici … (n.p., 1575), Piijb; Lucas Osiander, Ein Predig/ Bey der Leych … Jacobi Andreae … (Tübingen: Hock, 1590), Dja, Bjb. 26 Mickey Leland Mattox, “Defender of the Most Holy Matriarchs.” Martin Luther’s Interpretation of the Women of Genesis in the Enarrationes in Genesin, 1535 – 45 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 24 – 28, Michael Parsons, Luther and Calvin on Old Testament Narratives. Reformation Thought and Narrative Text (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2004), 168 – 172, John L. Thompson, Reading the Bible with the Dead. What You Can Learn from the History of Exegesis that You Cannot Learn from Exegesis Alone (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 76 – 92. 27 Timothy J. Wengert, “‘With Friends Like This . . .’: The Biography of Philip Melanchthon by

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ical studies of Melanchthon’s life followed Camerarius’s until two centuries later in German Lutheran lands,28 and few other individuals commanded a full work rehearsing their contributions. The most notable exception was, of course, Melanchthon’s colleague Martin Luther.

Depicting the Life of the Living Luther Efforts at life-depicting found Luther as a worthy subject very early in his career.29 Irena Backus has observed about the entire tradition of recounting Luther’s history in the sixteenth century that they tended “not to view Luther as an individual, but as an instrument of God or embodiment of a set of doctrines incarnating the Reformation” and that those who recounted his story strove to make clear that God had given him authority to proclaim the gospel and reform the church.30 Indeed, they did view Luther as an individual with specific characteristics even if they were not the attributes expected in a twenty-first century personality profile. These characteristics took on generic form in portraits and other artistic depictions as well as sketches in words. Bob Scribner has synthesized findings from a number of scholars in discussing the portraits of the Wittenberg monk in the years immediately before and after his appearance at the diet of Worms. These earliest depictions included, according to Scribner, Luther as “a monk, a doctor, and a man of the Bible.”31 Others followed, including Hans Holbein’s and Lukas Cranach’s portrayals of him as Hercules.32 Early on, the halo around the monk’s head indicated the status he had won quickly in the popular imagination. Folk art representations of this type abounded in the pamphlets of the time.33 More formal visual images,

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30 31 32 33

Joachim Camerarius.” In: Rhetorics of Life-Writing, 115 – 131. Camerarius also wrote a somewhat critical biographical study of his long-time friend, Eobanus Hessus, see Weiss, Humanistic Biography, essay I, 41. See Günter Wartenberg, “Melanchthonbiographien vom 16. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert,” in: Werk und Rezeption Philipp Melanchthons in Universität und Schule bis ins 18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1999), 179 – 196. On an early attempt at a biographical dictionary, see James Michael Weiss, “Johannes Fichardus and the Uses of Humanistic Biography,” in Weiss, Humanistic Biography, essay V, and Irena Backus, Life Writing, xxv – xxix. Robert Kolb, Martin Luther as Prophet, Teacher, and Hero. Images of the Reformer, 1520 – 1620 (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999); Ernst Walter Zeeden, Martin Luther und die Reformation im Urteil des deutschen Luthertums, Studien zum Selbstverständnis des lutherischen Protestantismus von Luthers Tode bis zum Beginn der Goethezeit, I. Band: Darstellung, II. Band: Dokumente (Freiburg/B: Herder, 1952). Backus, Life Writing, 2, citing on the latter point Eike Wolgast, “Biographie als Autoritätsstiftung: Die ersten evangelischen Lutherbiographien,” in Biographie zwischen Renaissance und Barock, ed. Walter Berschin (Heidelberg: Mattes, 1993), 41 – 72. Scribner, For the sake of simple folk, 15; the images are presented and discussed, 14 – 36. Ibid., 32 – 34. Ibid., 34 – 36; cf. Andrea Körsgen-Wiedeburg, “Das Bild Martin Luthers in den Flugschriften der

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which from 1521 on included commemorative medallions as well as portraits and statues,34 also introduced the reformer to the wider public. Some evidence reveals that images of Luther did continue to play more than an edificatory role in popular piety in Lutheran lands. Scribner’s discovery of the “incombustible Luther,” the picture of the reformer that could not burn, illustrates this.35 But Scribner’s case reveals a strain of popular piety that existed alongside of another, which focused on his role as the proclaimer who freed Christendom from papal oppression. Heide-Marie Gruppe gathered 139 Luther legends from nineteenth- century sources, most of them connecting Luther with some local landmark or event, but a few highlighted other powers beyond those of his preaching God’s Word, such as the ability to stop fire and bring rain.36 Also among the common people the regard for Luther as pious monk, and then as learned teacher of the church and defender of the Bible, formed the center of attention as he won respect as an authority in matters of faith, interpreted, of course, by various people in various ways. That aura faded slowly on the popular level after 1580 when with the establishment of the Book of Concord as the secondary authority for a majority of Lutheran churches, Luther’s function as a substitute for bishops and councils as the secondary authority largely disappeared, or fused into his already well-established role of teacher and as hero of the German nation and of the church. Visual images were not the only early conveyors of the Luther persona. Poets make excellent propagandists in any age, and Hans Sachs turned his own reputation into an agent for Wittenberg-style change with his poetry, including “Die Wittembergische Nachtigall, Die man jetz höret überall.”37 Other hymnists worked on creating a public persona for Luther, for example, Michael Stifel, whose thirty-two stanzas of the hymn “On the Properly Grounded Teaching, Formed by Christ, of Dr. Martin Luther,”38 asserted his

34 35 36 37 38

frühen Reformationszeit,” in Festgabe für Ernst Walter Zeeden zum 60. Geburtstag am 14. Mai 1976, ed. Horst Rabe, Hansgeorg Molitor, and Hans-Christoph Rublack (Münster : Aschendorff, 1976), 162 – 164. Hugo Schnell, Martin Luther und die Reformation auf Münzen und Medaillen (Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1983); Thurman L. Smith, Coins and Medals of the Reformation (Saint Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1995). Scribner, “Incombustible Luther : The Image of the Reformer in Early Modern Germany,” Past & Present 110 (1986): 39 – 68. Cf. idem, “Luther-Legenden des 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Martin Luther, Leben, Werk, Wirkung, ed. Günter Vogler et al. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1986), 377 – 390. Heidimarie Gruppe’s “Katalog der Luther- und Reformationssagen des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Volkserzählung und Reformation, ed. Wolfgang Brückner (Berlin: Schmidt, 1974), 295 – 311, and Wolfgang Brückner, “Luther als Gestalt der Sage,” in Volkserzählung und Reformation, 261 – 294. Bernd Balzer, Bürgerliche Reformationspropaganda. Die Flugschriften des Hans Sachs in den Jahren 1523 – 1525 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973). Von der Christfo[e]u!nigem/rechtgegründten leer Doctoris Martini Luthers/ ein überuß scho[e]n kunstlich Lyed/ sampt seiner neben vßlegung (1522). The text is found in Philipp Wackernagel, ed., Das deutsche Kirchenlied von der ältesten Zeit bis zu Anfang des XVII. Jahrhunderts, 5 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1864 – 1877), 3:74 – 75.

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identification with the Angel of the Apocalypse in Revelation 14:6 – 7 and reviewed his teaching within the proper distinction of law and gospel. At the end of the sixteenth century dramatists also got into the act of offering public images of the Wittenberg reformer. As school plays came into increasing use as a medium of education, Luther provided subject matter at the turn of the seventeenth century for depicting God’s truth, sometimes with a polemic edge against Roman Catholic or Calvinist opponents, sometimes with rather clumsily presented didactic detail,39 and sometimes mythicized in best Baroque form to present a case for both his personal role in the Reformation and his doctrine, often as contrasted with other confessional camps.40 Luther commanded the interest of would-be biographers as well, as his career proceeded, attracting first a critical pen from his Roman Catholic opponents. Johannes Cochlaeus had already distinguished himself among the German papal defenders, from his home base in Frankfurt an der Oder, the rival university town of Wittenberg. In the 1530s Cochlaeus composed what Herbert Immenkötter, citing Adolf Herte, labeled an “attack-image which breathed anger, hatred, and resentment” against Luther, initially in an effort to press his case against the Wittenberg heretic for participants in the council planned for Mantua at the time.41 It is easy for Protestants to accuse Cochlaeus and others of bad faith in their portrayal of Luther’s person and thought since their accusations of Luther’s discouraging good works and weakening public order fly in the face of his repeated clear encouragement of both, based in his argument on divine command. However, such a facile dismissal of their concerns ignores how difficult it was to grasp the key elements in the radical paradigm shift for those who had vested interest in the theology which they were representing at university and episcopal or ducal courts.42 Intimidated by their fears of the breakdown of public order and captivated by their own 39 Kolb, Luther, Prophet, 121 – 126. 40 E.g., Martin Rinckhart, Der Eisslebische Christliche Ritter/ Eine newe vnd schone/ Geistliche Comoedia . . . (Eisleben, 1613), see Kolb, Luther, Prophet, 123 – 124. 41 Herbert Immenkötter, “Von Engeln und Teufeln: Über Luther-Biographien des 16. Jahrhunderts,” in: Biographie und Autobiographie in der Renaissance, 99. Immenkötter’s suggestion that Cochlaeus wrote his initial manuscript between 1532 and 1535 seems not to correspond to his judgment that it was intended for representatives at the papally-called council since Pope Paul III had not yet come to the papal throne, and the decision to call a council rested on him, not on his predecessor, Clement VII. On Cochlaeus and Roman Catholic Luther biography in general, see Adolf Herte, Die Lutherkommentare des Johannes Cochlaeus (Münster : Aschendorff, 1935), and idem, Das katholische Lutherbild im Bann der Lutherkommentare des Cochlaeus, 3 vols. (Münster : Aschendorff, 1943) (for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see volume 1); and Otto Hermann Pesch, “‘Ketzerfürst‘ und ‘Vater im Glauben‘. Die seltsamen Wege katholischer Lutherrezeption,” in: Weder Ketzer noch Heiliger. Luthers Bedeutung für den ökumenischen Dialog, ed. Hans Friedrich Geisser (Regensburg: Pustet, 1982), 123 – 174. See also Backus, Life-Writing, 20 – 25. 42 David V. N. Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents, Catholic Controversialists, 1518 – 1525. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), esp. 69 – 180.

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preconceptions of the truth, they could not respond in any other way than to see Luther as the devil’s tool, and so they took every opportunity to demonize him. Such impressions were not gained from direct experience of the man or his instruction, but they were genuine impressions by Cochlaeus and his Roman Catholic colleagues. When Cochlaeus’ work finally appeared in print, in 1546, according to Immenkötter’s conjecture, it was reacting against the paeans published in Wittenberg at the occasion of Luther’s death, for example, by his colleagues Philip Melanchthon and Johannes Bugenhagen.43 Cochlaeus resuscitated his “attack-image” from a decade earlier, strengthened by the necessity of countering the Wittenberg assertion, in Justus Jonas’ words, that Luther was among “the highest and greatest prophets and men of God,”44 as well as Melanchthon’s claim that Luther belonged in the long line of proclaimers of God’s Word from Adam through Joseph, Moses, Jonah, John the Baptist, Christ, the apostles, to Bernard of Clairvaux and Johann Tauler,45 and Bugenhagen’s contention that Luther was “this holy apostle and prophet of Christ, our preacher and evangelist to the German lands.”46 Cochlaeus counter-attacked by sketching Luther as the true son of Satan, the product of intercourse between the devil and Hans Luther’s wife.47 Ralph Keen comments, “Four centuries of Catholic historiography [some of which is discussed below] reproduced the image of Luther delineated in the Commentary [Cochlaeus’ biography of Luther]. No Catholic scholars between the sixteenth century and the great mid-twentieth-century theologians Joseph Lortz and Erwin Iserloh knew Luther’s work as intimately as Cochlaeus did,”48 or if they did, they made no effort to correct Cochlaeus or improve on it.

43 See Kolb, Luther, Prophet, 34 – 37 and Zeeden, Martin Luther, 1: 21 – 34. On Melanchthon’s oration, which Irena Backus says “broke to some extent with the antique models and with the model of Lives of the saints by making his hero an integral part of history,” and indeed sacred history, see Backus, Life Writing, 2, cf. 2 – 7. 44 Zwo Trostliche Predigt vber der Leich D. Doct. Martini Luther zu Eissleben den XIX. vnd XX. Februarii gethan durch D. Doct: Justum Jonam, M. Michaelem Celium, Anno. 1546 (Wittenberg: Georg Rhau, 1546), Aiijb-Cja, Diija-[Eij]a. 45 “Oratio in funere D. Martini Lutheri,” CR XI:726 – 734. See James Michael Weiss, “Erasmus at Luther’s Funeral: Melanchthon’s Commemorations of Luther in 1546,” Humanist Biography, essay VII [=The Sixteenth Century Journal XVI,1 (1985):91 – 114]. 46 Eine Christliche Predigt Vber der Leich vnd Begrabnus/Weiland des Ehrwurdigen/Achtbarn vnd Hochgelarten Herrn D. Martini Lutheri Seeliger Gedechtnis… (Wittenberg: Paul Helwig, 1546). 47 Immenkötter, “Von Engeln und Teufeln,” 100 – 101. 48 Luther’s Lives. Two Contemporary Accounts of Martin Luther. trans. and ann. Elizabeth Vandiver, Ralph Keen, and Thomas D. Frazel (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press), 2003), 48 – 49. See Backus, Life Writing, 20 – 25, which also discusses other early biographical attacks from Roman Catholic theologians against Luther. She also discusses Noel Taillepied’s 1577 French life of Luther, 25 – 34 and the work of James Laing, who combated the Reformation in England and Scotland with his French polemical biography, ibid., 34 – 42.

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The Persona of Luther after His Death During his lifetime Luther functioned for many, though not for all, Evangelical theologians and pastors, as well as lay people, as an authority figure, even as a secondary authority, a substitute for bishops and councils, in determining what the church should be teaching. Luther exercised this responsibility in person, preaching, lecturing, conversing, and through his writings, unpublished, in the form of letters and faculty opinions reacting to inquiries, and in his published works. This led to the production of his collected works, beginning in 1539 (although it must be noted that his “collected works” were the first published for a living person already in 1518).49 This aura of authority grew out of his fulfilling eschatological expectations which permeated the late medieval air as recovery from the Black Death culminated in the generation of new hopes and new commitments to solving pressing problems of the day. Within this context Luther’s ideas, his biblical interpretation for everyday life, his critique of practices of the old faith that no longer satisfied, and his stance of defiance against Rome fueled his appeal and his popularity. The events of his life situated him for many as a liberator and leader of the German nation, who ended a Babylonian captivity to forces and figures from south of the Alps. This view of the Wittenberg professor produced, of course, reaction from the defenders of the old order such as Cochlaeus. The next “life” of Luther to appear after Cochlaeus’ was in fact a chronicle of his thinking rather than his actions, a summary of his theology as it appeared in significant publications from his pen. This compilation of lengthy citations by Ludwig Rabus reflects two sides of the pastoral and popular interest in the reformer which attended literary expressions of fascination with his person and thought throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is not likely that Rabus’s literary-biographical account was a reaction to Cochlaeus. It was the work of this Strassburg pastor, a former Wittenberg student, who had heard Luther lecture. Rabus included a history of Luther’s confession of his understanding of the biblical message in his “martyrology,” the first larger Protestant collection of a considerable number of stories of martyrs and other witnesses to the faith. Rabus, put out of work to a large extent by the compromises imposed on Strassburg through the attempts at introducing the Augsburg Interim there, began to assemble stories of biblical martyrs. One volume, appearing in 1552, heralded a series of eight volumes, which he produced between 1554 and 1558. Most of his 223 subjects truly had died for their faith, beginning with Old Testament martyrs, going through those of the New Testament and early church, and resuming with fifteenth century figures, most prominently Jan Hus. Rabus initiated the martyrs of the sixteenth century, most but not all at least 49 Kolb, Luther, Prophet, 139 – 141.

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loosely identifiable as “Lutheran,” and most of whom had fallen victim to Roman Catholic executioners, with Luther himself. Luther himself qualified because he had given bold testimony to his faith, the most important characteristic of martyrs, according to Wittenberg theology. Luther’s chapter was special; Rabus had invested more work in it than in most other accounts, which were simply reprints of accounts of their testimony, torture, and death from other sources. His Luther chapter also consisted largely of citations, lengthy citations, from published works, but Rabus linked them with more narrative of his own construction than in any other case among his subjects. His “life” of his teacher and mentor delivered the Wittenberg message in great detail. It offered readers little by way of detail regarding the actual non-literary events of his life. In its second edition, which appeared in two folio volumes in 1570 – 1571, the biographical sermons of Johannes Mathesius supplemented the biographical details which Rabus had at first gained largely from Melanchthon’s tributes of 1546 when he fashioned his biographical links between the reprinted works.50 If Rabus probably did not write in reaction to Cochlaeus, that context seems somewhat more plausible, though not explicitly clear, for two homiletical presentations of Luther’s persona that appeared in the 1560s, those of Johannes Mathesius and Cyriakus Spangenberg. Neither directly addressed Cochlaeus’s representation of their mentor. Both met other needs of the Lutheran community than simply the desire to counteract an attack which most of the expected pious hearers and readers of these sermons would not have taken seriously anyway. Like the growth of the memorial cult of Abraham Lincoln that began around 1900, when those who actually remembered him knew they were close to death, by the 1560s concern spread among Luther’s students that the younger generation did not remember and appreciate the man who had so radically transformed their worlds and lives. These two preachers, Mathesius and Spangenberg, claimed and refreshed memories of this man which ever fewer of those who had known him personally were alive to share. They did so in German for the benefit of the popular audience. Their recollections and impressions of him served Mathesius and Spangenberg as recitals of the story of God’s deliverance of Christendom and Germany from papal darkness to the Gospel’s light, an extension of the biblical Heilsgeschichte, even if on quite a different level, for members of the Wittenberg circle. Nonetheless, Mathesius’ sermons, “resolutely edificatory and consolatory,”51 presented the author’s own recollections in a chronological rehearsal of 50 See Robert Kolb, For All the Saints, Changing Perceptions of Martyrdom and Sainthood in the Lutheran Reformation (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987), 107 – 115, idem, Martin Luther, Prophet, 86 – 87. 51 Backus, Life Writing, 12; her treatment of his work is found on pp. 8 – 12. Mathesius’ work, Historien/ Von des Ehrwirdigen in Gott Seligen thewren Manns Gottes, Doctoris Martini Luthers/

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the unfolding of Luther’s life in fourteen sermons, with three more of personal appreciation and allegorical application of the miners’ environment to the reformer’s life. Eduard Fueter claims that this work is “the only German biography of the sixteenth century which can lay claim to a higher significance.”52 “Higher significance” is a matter of taste, but Mathesius’ influence on future generations of Luther loyalists can hardly be underestimated. Ernst Walter Zeeden’s summary of Mathesius’ message, that Luther was above all a curate of souls, is not far from the mark,53 but Mathesius himself more frequently designates his professor as a doctor of the church and as “the worthy German prophet.” For those in the Wittenberg circle such remembrances of the teacher and prophet involved both the positive proclamation of salvation in Jesus Christ and the negative polemic against papal misgovernance, superstition, and false teaching. The latter, negative, polemic provided both cause and counterpoint to the likes of Cochlaean criticism that continued to spring from the Roman camp. The former, positive, proclamation reinforced the teaching that Mathesius and his fellow disciples of the Wittenberg reform viewed as Luther’s most important contribution.54 It is not completely correct to suggest that either Mathesius or Spangenberg were “following the model of late medieval Lives of the saints”55 in their sermons apart from the use of a homiletical setting since they did not feature tales of miracles aside from dethroning the pope and did not propose any super-human power or efficacy apart from that involved in proclaiming God’s Word. His prophetic role consisted almost exclusively of that proclamation although his predicting of the future course of the gospel and its persecutors did win attention in the wake of the disasters the Wittenberg circle suffered in the late 1540s, of which he had often warned.56 (Only later did Luther’s theologian-disciples try to gather lists of other miraculous acts of his.) Eike Wolgast laments that Mathesius’ picture of Luther is psychologically static, without any portrayal of Luther’s personality and its unfolding,57 much in the way in which a generation earlier Wolfgang Herrmann complained of Mathesius’ contemporary Cyriakus Spangenberg that his sermons on their mentor do “not present any of his personal impressions of Luther ; rather, for him Luther is simply the Saint, to whom only good characteristics may be

52 53 54 55 56 57

anfang/lehr/leben vnd sterben . . . (Nuremberg: Johann vom Berg’s heirs and Ulrich Neuber, 1566), was published eleven times before 1600 and many times thereafter. See Kolb, Luther, Prophet, 87 – 97, Zeeden, Martin Luther 1:35 – 43. Geschichte der neueren Historiographie (3rd ed., Munich/Berlin, 1936) cited by Eike Wolgast, “Biographie als Autoritätsstiftung,” 63. Zeeden, Luther, 1: 37; Kolb, For All the Saints, 115 – 120. Hans Volz, Die Lutherpredigten des Johannes Mathesius: Kritische Untersuchung zur Geschichtsschreibung im Zeitalter der Reformation (Halle: Waisenhaus, 1929), 46 – 52. Backus, Life Writing, 45. See Kolb, Luther, Prophet, 178 – 183. Wolgast, “Biographie,” 64.

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ascribed, a saint who belongs to a chain of great warriors of God throughout church history and who finally is distinct from everything human.”58 Backus makes a similar judgment about these sixteenth-century students of Luther, Melanchthon, Mathesius, Selnecker and others, when she concludes that for them “Luther was not a person at all, but an instrument of God, a miracleman.” These judgments oversimplify the matter. For the accounts of these students of Luther presented the person whom they had experienced in their accounts – although they did experience him as God’s instrument who had performed the miracle of defying the papacy. Spangenberg recalled, Everyone who heard him knows what kind of man Luther was when he preached or lectured at the university. Shortly before his death he lectured on … Genesis. What sheer genius, life, and power he had! The way he could say it! … in my entire life I have experienced nothing more inspiring. When I heard his lectures, it was as if I were hearing an angel of the Lord. . . . Luther had a great command of Scripture and sensed its proper meaning at every point. Dear God, there was a gigantic gift of being able to interpret Scripture properly in that man.59

Spangenberg also validates his own ministry with recourse to Luther’s appraisal of his student: I have, praise God, preached the Word of God purely, clearly, and without adulteration for thirty-two years, as I heard it myself for five years from the holy mouth of the blessed Dr. Luther, my only preceptor, and from his sermons, lectures, and conversations which I heard myself, and from his precious writings, which I thereafter found and still read each day. And in the presence of Dr. Jonas and other theologians, this Man of God, knowing that I intended to enter the preaching ministry in time, wished me good fortune and prophesied that I would bear this cross which I must now bear because of what I teach. . . .60

Backus does capture their purpose quite precisely when she says that for Spangenberg and his contemporaries “Luther was a peg to hang the Reformation on; God’s instrument; the last prophet, albeit one gifted with considerable (human) intellectual capacities ….”61 His students had more important interests than personality traits although such traits in fact do get recorded even if not in the categories of twentieth and twenty-first century psychological theories. Mathesius and Spangenberg did record what had impressed them and redirected their lives in their encounters with their professor. The believed that in Martin Luther they had encountered a unique 58 Wolfgang Herrmann, “Die Lutherpredigten des Cyriacus Spangenberg,” Mansfelder Blätter 39 (1934/1935): 59. 59 Theander Lutherus. Von des werthen Gottes Manne Doctor Martin Luthers Geistlicher Haushaltung vnd Ritterschafft (Ursel, Heinrich, 1589), 70a – b. 60 Der Briefwechsel des M. Cyriakus Spangenberg, ed. Heinrich Rembe (Dresden: Naumann, 1887, 1888), II: 121 – 122, in a letter of May 23, 1579, to Elector August of Saxony. 61 Backus, Life Writing, 46.

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figure, whom God had called as his special representative. They did, in fact, present their personal impressions, of a saint and more than any ordinary saint. They needed no further analysis of the man’s personality. They knew a prophet when they experienced one. Mathesius affirmed that special quality in Luther by designating him a third “Elijah” reinforced by Jonas’s and Melanchthon’s expression, “the horsemen and chariot of Israel” (2 Kings 2:12).62 Mathesius did not argue explicitly, however, that Luther had secondary authority in the church, nor did he use him in efforts to settle controversies, as did several of his contemporaries. Mathesius regarded Luther as the German prophet, and in the fashion of earlier northern humanists reflected national consciousness shaped largely in opposition to Italian and Roman tyranny.63 But above all, Mathesius emphasized the eschatological struggle in which Luther had engaged even as he recognized the historic chain of witnesses to God’s truth of which his prophet was a part. Spangenberg’s twenty-three sermons, preached every November 11 and February 18 – Luther’s baptism and death days – were less a biographical study as an appreciation and appraisal of the reformer’s function in the church, framed with allegories based in part on his alleged correspondence to a series of biblical figures – John, Paul – and, like Mathesius’ final trio, in part on familiar elements of the life of the miners’ in Mansfeld, where he preached his sermons to his own parishioners. The Spangenberg homilies, published individually after delivery, were assembled into his Theander Lutherus in 1589, sixteen years after the last was preached, and this marked the dead-end of such larger allegorical presentation of the reformer’s significance (apart from the school dramas and poetry of the seventeenth century).64 Spangenberg had ardently promoted Luther as a secondary authority, to replace popes, bishops, and councils, a role he played during his lifetime. Spangenberg was certainly not the first to place the highest interpretive authority in Luther and his writings. It is not always easy in the years of conflict and controversy engendered by the defeat of Evangelical forces in the Smalcald War, the Augsburg Interim, and the electoral Saxon Leipzig Proposal of 1548 to determine whether Luther was being cited by specific authors against their opponents simply to clarify what he had taught or because he was regarded as the voice of authority, which established the true meaning of Scripture. This authority flowed from the popular and the theological conclusion that God had chosen and sent him as his special prophet for the End Times. Joachim Westphal, pastor in Hamburg, turned Luther citations 62 Mathesius, Historien, Aijv, Aiijr, XIIIv, Xv, XXXIIIr, XXXVIr, CXXVv, CXLIIIIr, CXCVIIIv, CCv, CCXXXr, CCXXXVIIr. See Volz, 63 – 68, 72 – 76. 63 Mathesius, XIIIv-XIIIIr, XLr-v, CCXIIIIr. 64 Theander Lutherus. Spangenberg also defended Luther’s image in an exchange with the Roman Catholic Kaspar von Gennep, see Herte, Das katholische Lutherbild,1: 11 – 17.

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against the Leipzig Proposal in 1550,65 and a relatively obscure pastor in Magdeburg, Albert Christian, rejected Georg Major’s proposition, “good works are necessary for salvation,” with the republication of Luther’s theses on works and grace of 1537.66 In their train came others, including Matthias Flacius,67 Andreas Musculus,68 and Spangenberg.69 But Luther’s echoed voice in his writings was too voluminous and varied and too conditioned by the specific questions of his own time to serve well as a secondary authority. In the writings, for instance, of Nikolaus Selnecker and Johannes Wigand the shift from citing Luther’s writings to reliance on the Book of Concord as the church’s secondary authority gives witness to the transfer to that sense of secondary authority.70 Luther remained a presence in the Lutheran theologian’s library, whether professor, pastor, or paterfamilias, throughout the seventeenth century even though his collected works were republished but once in a new edition, the Altenburg edition of 1661 – 1664. His postils and catechisms, however, continued to guide preaching, teaching, and devotional life. Handy collections of longer or shorter citations from his pen enabled preachers to reinforce their points with a learned reference that invoked the authority which Luther’s name did command.71 Occasionally, his voice was called upon to illuminate a certain issue or defend a specific cause, such as pietistic reform.72 While attention continued to be focused for a short time on his authority and for a much longer time on his thought,73 biography did not disappear as a 65 See Westphal, Sententia reverendi viri D. M. Luth. Sanctae memoriae de Adiaphoris ex scriptis illius collecta. (Magdeburg: Michael Lotther, 1549), Des Ehrwirdigen vnd thewren Mans Doct. Marti. Luthers seliger gedechtnis meinung von den Mitteldingen (Magdeburg: Michael Lotther, 1550); and Irene Dingel, “Strukturen der Lutherrezeption am Beispiel einer Lutherzitatensammlung von Joachim Westphal,” in: Kommunikationsstrukturen im europäischen Luthertum der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Wolfgang Sommer (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2005), 32 – 50. 66 Disputatio Reuerendi patris D. Martini Lutheri de operibus legis & gratiae . . . , ed. Albert Christian (Magdeburg: Michael Lotther, 1553). 67 Irene Dingel, “Flacius als Schüler Luthers und Melanchthons,” in Vestigia pietatis, Studien zur Geschichte der Frömmigkeit in Thüringen und Sachsen. Festschrift für Ernst Koch, ed. Gerhard Graf, Hans-Peter Hasse et al. (Herbergen der Christenheit: Sonderband 4; Leipzig, 2000), 77 – 93. 68 Kolb, Luther, Prophet, 52 – 56. 69 Ibid., 46 – 55. 70 Ibid, 65 – 74. See on Selnecker, Hans Peter Hasse, “Die Lutherbiographie von Nikolaus Selnecker. Selneckers Berufung auf die Autorität Luthers im Normenstreit der Konfessionalisierung in Kursachsen,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 86 (1995): 91 – 123. Zeeden, Martin Luther 1: 47 – 70 gives a brief overview of Luther biography in the later sixteenth century. 71 Kolb, Luther, Prophet, 221 – 222. 72 Luther Redivivus Oder Des fu[e]rnehmsten Lehrers der Auspurgischen Confession Herrn D. Martini Luthers … Hinterlassene Schrifftliche Erkla[e]rungen … (Halle: Christoph Salfeld, 1697). 73 In his “Die Konfessionalisierung von Kirche und Gesellschaft, Sammelbericht über eine Forschungsdebatte,” Theologische Literaturzeitung 121 [1996]: 1018, Thomas Kaufmann did not understand my argument in “Die Umgestaltung und theologische Bedeutung des Lutherbildes im späten 16. Jahrhundert,” in Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland. Wissen-

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way of preserving the memory of the Wittenberg reformer. Various motives elicited Lutheran biographical study of Luther, but because Cochlaeus found many imitators among his Roman Catholic successors, many were defenses against Roman Catholic charges. Nikolaus Selnecker did practice life-writing in defense of Luther along with a number of contemporaries. His Historica narratio et oratio de D. D. Martino Luthero, published in 1575, as a polemic against the attack of Carthusian Laurentius Surius (1522 – 1578),74 quickly found its way into German. The turmoil over the Crypto-Calvinist program of Elector Christian I (ruled 1586 – 1591) occasioned its reprinting at end of the reign when Selnecker, expelled by Christian in 1586, was invited to return to electoral Saxony to aid in the restoration of Lutheran teaching and practice. Hans-Peter Hasse has pointed out that Selnecker’s Latin oration asserted both Luther and the Augsburg Confession as secondary authorities against Roman Catholic attacks, and Hasse contends that the German version deemphasized the Confession and the question of authority, turning the recitation of Luther’s life into more exclusively an exhibition of God’s action in behalf of the church and of courageous Christian witness.75 Irena Backus argues that “even so, Selnecker’s

schaftliches Symposion des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 1988, ed. Hans-Christoph Rublack (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1992), 202 – 231, arguing that it disagrees with Johannes Wallmann’s analysis of the use of the confessional writings in seventeenth century Lutheran Orthodoxy (e. g., in “Theologie und Frömmigkeit im Zeitalter des Barock,” in: Gesammelte Aufsätze [Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1995], 46 – 50). Wallmann noted that seventeenth century Lutheran dogmaticians seldom called upon the authority of the confessional documents in their dogmatic textbooks. They cited Luther relatively seldom there as well. However, the Book of Concord did remain their legal and therefore also theological standard. Their textbooks were written within the context of a larger ecumenical readership to which neither Luther nor the Book of Concord seemed authoritative. In the larger literature of the period, including sermons, the use of Luther was somewhat more frequent even though less than in the sixteenth century. 74 Surius, Commentarius breuis rerum in orbe gestarum ab anno Salutis 1500 vsque ad annum 1566 ex optimis quibusque scriptoribus congestus (Cologne: I. Quentel and G. Caltenus, 1566), and in ten later editions into the seventeenth century. Surius offered a historical critique of the Reformation, focusing chiefly on Johannes Sleidanus’ Commentariorvm de statv religionis & Reipublicae, Carolo Quinto Caesare, Libri XXVI. (Strassburg: Theodosius Rihel, 1559). See Walter Friedensburg, Johannes Sleidanus. Der Geschichtsschreiber und die Schicksalsmächte der Reformationszeit (Leipzig: Heinsius, 1935), Alexandra Kess, Johann Sleidan and the Protestant Vision of History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 75 Historica narratio et oratio de D. D. Martino Luthero, postremae aetatis Elia, & initijs, causis, & progressu Confessionis Augustanae, atque Lutheri ac Philippi omonoia sancta… (Leipzig: Heirs of Jacob Baerwald, 1575), translated as Historica Oratio. Vom Leben vnd Wandel des Ehrwirdigen Herrn/vnd thewren Mannes Gottes/D. Martini Lutheri. Auch von einhelliger vnd bestendiger Eintrechtigkeit Herrn Lutheri vnd Philippi… (Leipzig: Johannes Rhambau, 1576); see Hasse, “Lutherbiographie,” 91 – 123. Hasse does not agree with my assessment that Selnecker’s attitude toward Luther’s authority changed after the publication of the Book of Concord; our difference is not great, but I maintain that the ascription of secondary authority to Luther does recede into a general respect for him as a teacher of the church after 1580.

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work remained as much an apology for the Augsburg Confession as a Life of Luther.”76 Selnecker was but one of several from the Lutheran camp who responded to the spate of Roman Catholic biographical attacks on the Wittenberg reformer and his reforms. Peter Canisius, Martin Eisengrein, Jacob Rabus, Gregorius de Valentia, Albert Hunger, Georg Schere, Jodocus Lorich only begin the list of the names.77 The number of converts who had left the Evangelical churches for Rome is noteworthy among these authors. They had something to prove to themselves and to those whom they had left behind in Luther’s clutches. Lutheran authors rose to the challenge. Biography became one battlefield on which the two sides exchanged volleys into the twentieth century. In 1582 Ingolstadt professor Albert Hunger asserted Luther’s similarity to Epicurus, eliciting at least four rejoinders, from Professors Otto Waltper at Marburg and Zacharias Schilter at Leipzig as well as Pastors Anton Probus in Eisleben and Georg Gloccer in Strassburg. This dueling continued, often ignited by converts from the Evangelical faith to Roman Catholicism. These defenses leaned heavily on Rabus, Mathesius, and others who had chronicled the Wittenberg reform in one way or another.78 In the decades before and after 1600 the Jesuit Nikolaus Serarius, professor at Würzburg, provoked a similar exchange with several volumes on the devil’s disciple from Wittenberg. Johann Simon of the University of Rostock replied as did Friedrich Balduin and Johann Forster from the University of Wittenberg. Biography served only as support for polemic. Balduin summarized the Wittenberg attitude, “Luther remains indeed our Man of God and hero, sainted and godly, holy and blessed: these Theones [satirists] may grind their teeth at him and chew on him now that he is dead. May they break their teeth before they damage the good name of our Man of God.”79 The first decades of the seventeenth century saw no cessation of the biographical campaigns, and indeed they continued throughout the century.80 For example, Johannes Möller (1598 – 1672), pastor in Hamburg, responded to a Dominican Nikolaus Jansenius with his Luther Defended, That Is, a Thorough Refutation of what the Papists Reproach in Martin Luther’s Person (1658); he set out to prove that Luther was not a son of the devil, a Sodomite, a raper of nuns, a gypsy, a blasphemer, or one who fostered rebellion, as Jansenius had written. North American Lutherans republished this treatise in 1868 as a response to nineteenth century echoes of the Cochlaean tradition in the United 76 77 78 79

Backus, Life-Writing, 15, see pp. 12 – 20. Herte, Das katholische Lutherbild, 1: 1 – 90, discusses many of these authors. Kolb, Luther, Prophet, 91 – 98. Balduin, De disputatione Lvtheri cum Diabolo: in controversia de privata Missa, Tractatio theologica et Scholastica Apologetici loco … (Eisleben: Jacob Gubisius, 1605), 383. On the Serarius controversy, see Kolb, Martin Luther, Prophet, 99 – 101. 80 For a survey of the Roman Catholic biographical attacks on Luther, 1600 – 1750, see Herte, Das katholische Lutherbild, 1: 91 – 332.

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States.81 In 1659 Möller returned to the arena to respond to an attack on his volume by a Prussian Jesuit working for reconversion of the Baltic coast.82 Challenges not only from Rome but from those who embraced a Calvinistic critique of Luther’s teaching. They contained assaults on his authority, above all, but on occasion with allusions to his personal habits of exaggeration for polemical purposes, etc. From early in the growing rivalry between Evangelicals of various stripes, the ambiguity of followers of the Zurich and Genevan reform movements toward Luther revealed itself not only in high appreciation but also in abrasive irritation with Lutheran praise for him. Heinrich Bullinger’s questioning of the ascription of apostolic dignity to Luther had elicited Spangenberg’s critical response in 1565, and the former Wittenberg student and Nuremberg lawyer Christoph Herdesian and Heidelberg professor Zacharias Ursinus challenged the authority attributed to him, particularly in the Formula of Concord. These Reformed voices distinguished between the young Luther and the old in a way that most Lutherans did not, for they found both his revolt against the papacy and elements of his earlier doctrine of the Lord’s Supper praiseworthy. But they regarded his maintenance of the true presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Lord’s Supper as a tragic development.83 A half century later the more formidable critique of Bremen pastor Johannes Lampadius, echoing doubts expressed by his former colleagues in the Palatinate already at Bullinger’s time, provoked a rejoinder from the Dresden court preacher Matthias Hoe von Hoenegg.84 The interest in Luther remained even if he was decreasingly cited and in the dogmatic tomes of seventeenth century Lutheran theologians not often accorded special authority.85 His voice bore that authority only within Lutheran circles. Nonetheless, he continued to teach the church in the writings 81 Luther defensus … (Zell: Holwein, 1658), short excerpts are given in Zeeden, Martin Luther, 2:108 – 116, cf. Der vertheidigte Luther, as ist: Gründliche Widerlegung dessen, was die Päbstler Dr. Martin Luthers Person vorwerfen von seinen Eltern, Gebuert, Beruf, Ordination, Doctorat, Ehestand, Unzucht, Meineid, Gotteslästerung, Ketzerei, Hoffarth, Saufen, Unflätherei, Unbeständigkiet, Aufruhr, Lügen, Gemeinschaft mit dem Teufel, Verfälschung der Schrift, Tod Begräbniß, etc. und was sonst seine Schriften, Werke, Sitten und Reden betrifft (Saint Louis: Barthel, 1868). 82 Defensio Lutheri defensa, Das ist: Der Wolvertheidigte Luther … (Hamburg: Pape, 1659). 83 Irene Dingel. “Ablehnung und Aneignung, Die Bewertung der Autorität Martin Luthers in den Auseinandersetzungen um die Konkordienformel,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 105 (1994): 35 – 57, and idem, Concordia controversa. Die öffentlichen Diskussionen um das lutherische Konkordienwerk am Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996), pp. 207 – 279, 607 – 619. 84 Lampadius’ chronicle of world history, with special attention to developments in the sixteenth century, Mellifici historici pars tertia … (Marburg: Paul Egenolph, 1611), dealt with Luther, 425 – 464. Hoe von Hoenegg responded in his Pro beato Luthero, Avgvstana Confessione, et veritate historica, Adversus Iohannis Lampadii … horrendas calumnias, criminationes, blasphemias, & crassissima mendacia … Apologia maxime necessaria … (Leipzig: Abraham Lamberg, 1611), esp. 91, 115 – 116. 85 See Zeeden, Martin Luther 1: 71 – 128.

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from his pen that were available, especially in his catechisms and his postils. At the end of the century Veit Ludwig von Seckendorf (1626 – 1692) summarized his monumental attack on the Jesuit Louis Maimbourg’s (1610 – 1686) attack on Luther and the Reformation, published in 1692, which had gone into great detail on Luther’s life, by stating that Luther had been gifted greatly by God but also made mistakes. In spite of the claim that Seckendorf began a new era of more sober Lutheran assessment of the reformer, his criticism was very mild even if his historical understanding of Luther’s teaching was somewhat superficial. According to Seckendorf his teaching, which had not come through direct enlightenment, was paramount; he had learned it bit by bit through divine guidance, to be sure: no miracles nor romantic conversions in his story. Citing Samuel Pufendorf ’s De habitu Religionis Christianae ad vitam Civilem,86 he concluded that Luther’s goal was not to eliminate the papacy but it to have it recognized only as existing de jure humano and to have it correct its many abuses and teach pure doctrine, according to the Scripture as the only rule and guide for faith. Pufendorf summed up Luther’s program as “indulgences, purgatory, the mass, distribution of the entire sacrament of the altar, priestly celibacy, monasticism, the free will, justification through faith, good works and their merit, and the invocation of the saints.”87 Still a hero and still teaching, at least symbolizing certain teachings, but no longer a prophet with secondary authority in the church, Luther stood under scholarly and mildly critical analysis, not as the living person encountered by Melanchthon, Mathesius, Spangenberg and Selnecker. Distance altered Seckendorf ’s assessment, but the polemical context which he acknowledged did not permit him critical detachment. In the end, looking back over a century and a half of Lutheran culture, by Seckendorf ’s time it was true, as Cornelius Niekus Moore said at the conclusion of her study of Lutheran funeral sermons, that although Anna Margaretha Aschardt from Dresden, who had been memorialized in a funereal biography a generation earlier as she died a blessed death in childbirth, was forgotten, “the professor from Wittenberg would still be made the subject of many a biography since his accomplishments were still recognized, even by the measuring sticks of later centuries,” even of this new millennium.88

86 (Bremen: Schwerdfeger, 1687); cf. Irene Dingel, “Recht und Konfession bei Samuel von Pufendorf,” in: Recht – Macht – Gerechtigkeit, ed. Joachim Mehlhausen (Veröffentlichungen der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft für Theologie 14; Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998), 516 – 540. 87 Ausfu[e]hrliche Historie Des Lutherthums, Und der Heilsamen Reformation, Welche der theure Martin Luther innen dreyßig Jahren glu[e]clich ausgefu[e]hret, German translation of the Latin (Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1714), cols. 2691 – 2700. 88 Moore, Patterned Lives, 314.

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Intra-Protestant Conflicts in 16th Century Poland and Prussia – The Case of Benedict Morgenstern Introduction The following article derives from a research project I have been carrying out for the last years at the Institute of European History in Mainz, which is located within a wider research framework: Irene Dingel has established a long-term project in Mainz for the edition of texts published in the course of the intra-Protestant debates that took place between the Augsburg Interim in 1548 and the Formula of Concord in 1577.1 The project, named “Controversia and Confessio,” features an on-line database with more than 2000 entries collecting the bibliographical information about the books and pamphlets published during this period.2 The debates will be documented in a series of nine printed volumes, each covering a single debate or, as we call it, a single “Streitkreis” or “sphere of conflict”: namely the so-called Interimistic, Adiaphoristic, Majoristic, Antinomistic, Synergistic, and Osiandrian controversies, the debates on the nature of Original Sin, the debate surrounding the Wittenberg doctrines of the Lord’s Supper and Christology, which is traditionally treated under the label “Crypto Calvinism in Electoral Saxony” and an additional volume on the discussions with Anti-trinitarian theologians. Three out of nine volumes have already been published. After having worked for four years as an editor, I started my own research project on the basis of our collected material, focusing on the influence of the intraProtestant, especially the intra-Lutheran, debates on the development of the Reformation in Poland and Prussia. Hence the general title of this paper. The subtitle leads us to the case study which I would like to focus on: the particular case of Benedict Morgenstern.

1 For a general overview on the debates see Irene Dingel, “The Culture of Conflict in the Controversies Leading to the Formula of Concord (1548 – 1580),” in Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550 – 1675, ed. Robert Kolb, 15 – 64, Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition v. 11 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2008). 2 On the project in particular, see Irene Dingel, “‘Controversia et Confessio’: The culture of controversy leading to confessional consolidation in the late sixteenth century,” Tidsskrift for Teologi og Kirke 80, 4 (2009).

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Benedict Morgenstern Benedict Morgenstern: this is not a name one must have heard of before. Morgenstern, born in 1525, was clearly not an extraordinary theologian of his time. He was not – and did not claim to be – an original thinker, and many of the arguments in his books are more than predictable. More than that, reading the historical and theological literature of the 17th and 18th centuries, one will encounter many negative assessments of his person. He is described as “streitbar” or even “streitsüchtig,” quarrelsome, indeed, cantankerous, a restless “Streittheologe,”3 “qui sine rixis vivere non possit”4 – who cannot live without squabbles. Even authors who sympathized with his confessional stance do not describe him in exactly positive terms. Nevertheless, it might be rewarding to devote a study to him simply for the following reason: Precisely because he was not original, but paradigmatic. He embodies the archetype of a Gnesio-Lutheran theologian of the late 16th century, who took part in the theological conflicts and debates which the aforementioned Mainz project is currently studying. His contentiousness accompanied by strong convictions led him to fight in many of the theological controversies which took place in the Polish-Prussian region during the second half of the 16th century. Benedict Morgenstern’s career was typical for a theologian of his time and shows many elements and phenomena which, as I would argue, contribute to understanding the history of the Reformation in mid-eastern Europe. Since he worked in Poland and Prussia, he experienced the interdependency of theological and political developments and the different outcomes of the process of confession-building that hinged upon the attitude of the political ruler. He was part of a highly mobile group of theological specialists – and had to move more than once because of his confessional stance. He lived in zones of cultural transition and interaction between Polish and German elements, and worked – willingly or unwillingly – as a mediator between both spheres. He made use of the media available to a learned person of his time, and thus took part in a theological discourse which encompassed wide areas of Protestant Europe. Without people like him, the confessional shaping of Early Modern Protestantism

3 Walther Hubatsch, Geschichte der evangelischen Kirche Ostpreussens, 3 vols. 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968), 113. 4 Daniel Ernst Jablonski, HISTORIA CONSENSUS SENDOMIRIENSIS, INTER EVANGELICOS REGNI POLONIAE, ET M. D. LITHVANIAE IN SYNODO GENERALI EVANGELICORUM UTRIUSQVE PARTIS, SENDOMIRIAE An. MDLXX. Die 14. Aprilis INITI: CONTINUA SERIE, QUAE SYNODUM SENDOMIRIENSEM ANTEGRESSA, QUAE IN IPSA SYNODO ACTA, QUAEQUE EAM CONSECUTA SUNT […]. Cui subjicitur ipse CONSENSUS, nec non SYNODI GENERALES, CONSENSUI jungi solitae. […] (Berlin: Ambrosius Haude, 1731), 28 f.

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would have taken a different direction. Therefore, the life and opinions of Benedict Morgenstern might indeed be worth a second look. Early years Morgenstern was clearly a member of the second generation of the Reformation. He was born in 1525 in Stolp (today Słupsk) in Pomerania as the son of a preacher.5 His father Laurentius later came to Ducal Prussia, presumably together with Bishop Paul Speratus, and worked in Riesenburg (today Prabuty) as a pastor and later archpresbyter. Young Benedict went to school in Riesenburg, where the renowned scholar Peter Hegemon was his teacher, and studied at the academy and later university in Königsberg (today ;Q\Y^Y^TaQU), where he achieved the masters degree in 1547. He became successor to his former teacher at the school in Riesenburg. Whether he continued his studies somewhere else is not known, but in 1552 he became pastor in Preußisch Eylau (today 2QTaQcY_^_Sb[) in Ducal Prussia. During this time, Morgenstern became involved in one of the most heated and theologically fundamental intra-Protestant debates: the Osiandrian controversy over the doctrine of justification propagated by the former Nuremberg reformer and Königsberg professor of theology since 1549, Andreas Osiander.6 The Osiandrian controversy jolted and divided the 5 The majority of the biographical information about Morgenstern’s early years seems to go back to the funeral sermon, which was used by Hartknoch, but which appears to be lost today. At least the ‘Gesamtkatalog deutschsprachiger Leichenpredigten Marburg’ does not list it. Information from the sermon has been included by Hartknoch at various occasions in his text. Most of the other authors depend on him for the early years of Morgenstern’s life. Cf. Christoph Hartknoch, Preussische Kirchen-Historia / darinnen von Einführung der christlichen Religion in diese Lande wie auch von der Conservation, Fortpflantzung / Reformation und dem heutigen Zustande derselben ausführlich gehandelt wird. Nebst vielen denckwürdigen Begebenheiten / so sich biß an diese Zeiten in dem Kirchen-Wesen daselbst zugetragen: Aus vielen gedruckten und geschriebenen Documenten, nicht allein den Inwohnern dieser Lande / sondern auch wegen der genauen Connexion deß Geschicht-Wesens / allen Teutschen zu gut; mit sonderbarem Fleiß zusammen getragen […] (Frankfurt am Main/ Danzig: Simon Beckenstein, 1686)(VD17 12:116940P), 502 f. Cf. also: Gesamtkatalog deutschsprachiger Leichenpredigten (GESA) http://www.personalschriften.de/ datenbanken/gesa.html. Biographical articles on Morgenstern are rare; see: Christian Gottlob von Friese, Kirchengeschichte des Königreichs Polen vom Ursprunge der christlichen Religion in diesem Reiche und der Entstehung der Bischofthümer Posen, Gnesen, Krakau, Breslau, Lebus etc., wie auch der verschiedenen Religions-Streitigkeiten dieses Landes bis auf jetzige Zeit: Theil 2: Beyträge zu der Reformationsgeschichte in Polen und Litthauen besonders (Breslau: Korn, 1786), 380 – 7; Carl A. Hase, “Morgenstern, Benedict,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliographie, 22 (1885), 228 – 30, http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz65416.html; Henryk Rietz, “Morgenstern, Benedykt,” in Polski słownik biograficzny : Mieroszewski Sobiesław – Morsztyn Władysław, ed. Emanuel Rostworowski, vol. 21 (Wrocław [u.a.]: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolin´skich, 1976), 771 – 2. As far as I see, there is no article on Morgenstern in English. 6 On the Osiandrian controversy in general see Martin Stupperich, Osiander in Preussen: 1549 – 1552, Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 44 (Berlin [u.a.]: de Gruyter, 1973); Jörg Fligge, “Herzog

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Albertine University and the entire church in Ducal Prussia. It lasted for years, was continued even after the death of Osiander in 1553, and one of the major supporters of Osiander, Johannes Funck, was eventually decapitated.7 A crucial role in the whole affair was played by the fact that Osiander was supported by Duke Albert. When it became clear that the conflict could not be settled by means of academic disputation, public debate, or a synod of the local theologians in Prussia – mainly because the majority refused Osiander’s teaching – Albert tried to find a compromise by asking rulers and synods from the whole camp of Wittenberg theology to send their opinions. Even though he sought to control the public debate through this measure, he brought about even greater controversy.8 Moreover, the polemics and the harshness of the pamphlets severely hampered the University of Königsberg in its intended role as a beacon of evangelical teaching in Eastern Europe. Many Polish and Lithuanian noblemen decided not to send their sons to Königsberg.9 It is unclear in which way Morgenstern took an active part in the whole affair. But he must have been among the open critics of Osiander, for he had to leave his parish in Eylau in 1553, probably at the same time as Joachim Mörlin, the most prominent opponent of Osiander, had to leave his position in Königsberg.10 For the first, but not the last time in his life, Morgenstern had to give up a position because of his confessional conviction. So he became one of the self-proclaimed “Exules Christi.” Most of them were Gnesio-Lutherans

7

8

9 10

Albrecht von Preussen und der Osiandrismus, 1522 – 1568,” (Diss. phil. Bonn, 1972), and Gottfried Seebaß, “Andreas Osiander d.Ä. und der Osiandrische Streit: Ein Stück preußischer Landes- und reformatorischer Theologiegeschichte,” in Die Albertus-Universität zu Königsberg und ihre Professoren: Aus Anlaß der Gründung der Albertus-Universität vor 450 Jahren, ed. Dietrich Rauschning and Donata von Ner¦e, 33 – 48, Jahrbuch der Albertus-Universität zu Königsberg 29 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995). The texts of Osiander from this controversy are edited in Andreas Osiander, Schriften und Briefe 1549 bis August 1551, ed. Gerhard Müller and Gottfried Seebaß, Andreas Osiander Gesamtausgabe 9 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1994) and Andreas Osiander, Schriften und Briefe September 1551 bis Oktober 1552 sowie Posthumes und Nachträge, ed. Gerhard Müller and Gottfried Seebaß, Andreas Osiander Gesamtausgabe 10 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1997). Additional source material is published in the account of the events in Hartknoch, Preussische Kirchen-Historia (as in note 5), 309 – 417. Funck was actually sentenced to death and executed for high treason, not primarily because of favoring Osiandrian theology, but for his political ambitions. After his death the last supporters of Osiander’s position had to leave Prussia. Cf. Fligge, “Herzog Albrecht und der Osiandrismus”, 512 – 8. Cf. Henning P. Jürgens, “Das ‘Urteil der Kirche’ im Osiandrischen Streit: Theologische Öffentlichkeit als Schiedsinstanz,” in Streitkultur und Öffentlichkeit im Konfessionellen Zeitalter: ed. Henning P. Jürgens and Thomas Weller, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz / Beiheft 95 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 229 – 252. Cf. Henning P. Jürgens, “Die Beteiligung der beiden Preußen an den nachinterimistischen Streitigkeiten,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte und Altertumskunde Ermlands 55 (2011), 1 – 33: 18 – 20. I.e. around February/March 1553, cf. Stupperich, Osiander in Preussen (as in note 6), 359 – 62.

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and had to move on account of their opposition to the ecclesiastical policies of their respective authorities.11 Morgenstern now went to Germany – it is not exactly known where, but he must have been in Mansfeld and/or Magdeburg, since he came into close contact with Johannes Wigand, one of the most distinctive Gnesio-Lutheran theologians.12 For the rest of his life, Wigand remained his most influential friend and theological authority. Another element of Morgenstern’s biography which is typical for a whole group of theologians is that he found his next position in Royal Prussia.13 Many of the pastors and teachers who had to leave Ducal Prussia during the Osiandrian affair went to schools and churches in the neighboring region under the rule of the Polish king, which was dominated by the three major cities, Danzig, Thorn and Elbing (Gdan´sk, Torun´ and Elbla˛g).14 Even though Evangelical preaching was officially allowed by a Royal privilege only after 1557, preachers were appointed in some places without the consent of the Catholic bishops of Cujavia and Kulm (Włocławek and Chełmno) since the 1550s. Morgenstern came to Schöneck (Skarzewy) south of Danzig in 1554, and five years later he obtained a position as preacher in Danzig itself, at the St. Catherine Church.

11 Another research group at the Institute of European History led by Irene Dingel is focusing on this small but influential group of religious exiles. Cf. Irene Dingel, “Die Kultivierung des Exulantentums im Luthertum am Beispiel des Nikolaus von Amsdorf,” in Nikolaus von Amsdorf (1483 – 1565) zwischen Reformation und Politik, ed. Irene Dingel, 153 – 75, Leucorea-Studien zur Geschichte der Reformation und der Lutherischen Orthodoxie 9 (Leipzig: EVA, 2008); for a particular case see Vera von der Osten-Sacken, “Erzwungenes und selbstgewähltes Exil im Luthertum: Bartholomäus Gernhards Schrift ‘De Exiliis’ (1575),” in Religion und Mobilität: Zum Verhältnis von raumbezogener Mobilität und religiöser Identitätsbildung im frühneuzeitlichen Europa, ed. Henning P. Jürgens and Thomas Weller, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz / Beiheft 81 (Göttingen [u.a.]: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 41 – 57. 12 On him, see Irene Dingel, “Wigand, Joachim,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie (TRE), vol. 36, ed. Gerhard Müller, (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2004), 33 – 8; Robert Kolb, “Philipp‘s Foes, but Followers Nonetheless: Late Humanism among Gnesio-Lutherans,” in The Harvest of Humanism in Central Europe: Essays in Honor of Lewis W. Spitz, ed. Manfred P. Fleischer (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1992), 159 – 76; Ronald E. Diener, “Johann Wigand,” in Shapers of religious traditions in Germany, Switzerland, and Poland: 1560 – 1600, ed. Jill Raitt (New Haven [u.a.]: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), 19 – 38. 13 For the special case of Royal Prussia within the context of the Polish reformation, see still the classical study by Gottfried Schramm, Der polnische Adel und die Reformation: 1548 – 1607, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz Abt. Universalgeschichte 36 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1965), 116 – 36. 14 See Karin Friedrich, The other Prussia: Royal Prussia, Poland and Liberty, 1569 – 1772, Cambridge studies in early modern history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 46 – 70.

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Danzig When Morgenstern came to Danzig, the most important and wealthiest city under the rule of the Polish king, evangelical sermons and the use of Communion in both kinds had only been officially allowed for two years.15 After a first evangelical uprising in 1525, which had been violently suppressed by King Zygmunt I., the city remained Catholic, but stayed in contact with the centers of the Reformation in Germany. Many burghers studied in Wittenberg and other German universities.16 When, after the ascension to the throne by Zygmunt II in August of 1548 and the Diet of Piotrkûw in 1555, the Protestants in Poland achieved some political advantage, the cities of Danzig, Elbing and Thorn were able to obtain royal privileges permitting Evangelical teaching.17 But the situation of the churches in the three cities was still not firmly established, but rather contested by the surrounding Catholic bishops. None of the churches had a formal church order, and the order of worship was not yet settled. The process of establishing the Reformation in Royal Prussia has been described by authors like Michael G. Müller as a “late Reformation”.18 The new freedom in the churches also brought up severe problems. Even under the official reign of the Catholic bishops, the Protestant theologians in 15 On the religious history of Danzig see the older works by Theodor Hirsch, Kirchengeschichte von Danzig seit Einführung der Reformation, Die Ober-Pfarrkirche von St. Marien in Danzig in ihren Denkmälern und in ihren Beziehungen zum kirchlichen Leben Danzigs überhaupt, vol. 2 (Danzig: Anhuth, 1847) and Eduard Schnaase, Geschichte der evangelischen Kirche Danzigs: Actenmäßig dargestellt (Danzig: Bertling, 1863), and the more recent ones by Maria Bogucka, “Die Wirkungen der Reformation in Danzig,” Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 42 (1993), 195 – 206; Janusz Małłek, “Martin Luther und die Reformation in Danzig, im übrigen Königlichen Preußen und im Herzogtum Preußen,” in Deutsch-slawische Wechselbeziehungen: 1. Kaschubei und Danzig; 2. Masuren, ed. Heinz Radke, Publikationsreihe der Ost- und Westpreußenstiftung in Bayern 28 ([München]: Ost- und Westpreußenstiftung in Bayern, 2003), 39 – 52, Gottfried Schramm, “Danzig, Elbing und Thorn als Beispiele städtischer Reformation (1517 – 1588),” in Historia integra: Festschrift für Erich Hassinger zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Hans Fenske (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1977), 125 – 54, and Michael G. Müller, Zweite Reformation und städtische Autonomie im Königlichen Preußen: Danzig, Elbing und Thorn in der Epoche der Konfessionalisierung (1557 – 1660), Publikationen der historischen Kommission zu Berlin (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1997), as well as the collection of papers by Jan Iluk and Danuta Marian´ska, eds., Protestantyzm i protestanci na Pomorzu (Koszalin, Gdan´sk: Miscellanea, 1997). 16 Cf. Hermann Freytag, “Die Beziehungen Danzigs zu Wittenberg in der Zeit der Reformation,” Zeitschrift des westpreußischen Geschichtsvereins 38 (1898), 1 – 137. 17 Schramm, “Danzig, Elbing und Thorn” (as in note 15), 147 – 55. 18 Cf. Müller, Zweite Reformation und städtische Autonomie im Königlichen Preußen (as in note 15), passim, and especially Michael G. Müller, “Late Reformation and Protestant confessionalization in the major towns of Royal Prussia,” in The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe, ed. Karin Maag, St. Andrews studies in Reformation history (Aldershot: Scolar Press [u.a.], 1997), 192 – 210.

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Ducal Prussia had been in close contact with the theological developments in the Holy Roman Empire. So the theological differentiation within the camp of the Wittenberg Reformation became visible in the Prussian towns as well. Conflicts which had been kept under the surface during the time of cryptoProtestantism, broke out openly now, an event which was interpreted by contemporaries as due to the influence of the devil. To put it in the words of the Danzig pastors some years later : “Wie es denn nimmermehr fehlet / wo Gott sein Kirchen bawet / da schlecht der böse Feind seinen Kretzschmar auch daneben auff”19 – It is always the same: Wherever God builds his church, the devil opens up his pub in the neighborhood. The growing opposition between the Wittenberg Melanchthonian theology and its critics in Magdeburg, Jena and elsewhere found its partisans in Danzig as well. Benedict Morgenstern was clearly in the anti-Wittenberg camp. His first clearly documented appearance as “Streittheologe” brought about the next expulsion. Speaking out in favor of another preacher who had a fight with a member of the Danzig city council and was removed from his office, Morgenstern and two other pastors used their sermons on Good Shepherd Sunday (John 10: 11 – 14) held on April 8, 1560, to openly criticize the city council and to claim pastoral authority. The church regiment of the Danzig city council was perhaps not yet firmly established and the council hence overly sensitive to criticism, but in any case, the council took immediate action and removed all three critics from their pulpits and banished them from the city within the next day.20 Morgenstern went on to Thorn, the second largest city in the region, some miles up the Vistula, where he was appointed as preacher at the church of the Virgin Mary on July 30, 1560. Due to the close connections between Danzig and Thorn,21 he was able to continue his active influence on the situation in Danzig. 19 APOLOGIA. Gründlicher Gege(n)bericht / warhafftige erzelung der Histori des erhabenen vnd gefürten streits / vn(d) Ablehnung der vnchristlichen geachten beschwerlichen aufflagen / damit Benedict Morgenstern in seiner vormeinten Widerlegung der Formulae Concordiae oder Notel / so alle Prediger zu Dantzigk / zu gemeiner einigkeit vnterschrieben / Beide einen Erbaren Hochweisen Rath / vnd alte auch newe ankomende Prediger /wider sein Gewissen / mit vngrund beschweret / Gestellet durch gemeine vorwilligung aller Prediger daselbs. Vnd Mit wissen / zulaß / vnd zeugnis / eines Erbaren / Namhafften Hochweisen Raths in Druck vorfertiget. […] (Danzig: Jakob Rhode, 1567). VD A 3149, Einleitung, fol. A 2v. 20 Hartknoch, Preussische Kirchen-Historia (as in note 5), 681 f. 21 To put it in his own words: “Nu weiß man in Preußen wol, das man zu Thorn nicht einen Finger in die Aschen stecken kan, es ist zu Danzig den dritten Tag lautbar.” It is well known in Prussia, that you can‘t put your finger into the ashes [i.e. you do something of very limited importance] in Thorn without it being noticed in Danzig three days later. See Benedikt Morgenstern, Widerlegung der Notel / damit die Sacramentirer zu Dantzig / jhren Irthumb vnd Verfolgung / verkleistern vnd bedecken wollen / vnd die arme Kirche daselbst / höchlich drucken vnd beschweren / Geschrieben an die Prediger daselbst / Die ferner am Sawerteig der Sacramentirer nicht schuldig / denn das sie derselben Notel vnterschrieben haben. Sampt zweien Vorreden: Eine der Prediger in der Herrschafft Mansfeldt / an die Diener Götliches Worts zu Dantzig vnd Thorn.

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The reliquiae debate In the following year, 1561, a public debate arose in Danzig on the theology of the Eucharist.22 Two Danzig pastors, Erhard Sperber and Vitus Neuber, who both formerly worked in Ducal Prussia and had already been fighting about the same question there, continued their dispute from the pulpits of their churches. The topic of debate was the question of how to deal with the socalled reliquiae, the elements left over after the distribution of the communion. Were they to be regarded as merely bread and wine, or still as the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ? Of course, the backdrop of this question was constituted by Sacramentarian theology as a whole and ultimately the issue of real or spiritual presence of Christ in the communion. The Danzig debate clearly stands in connection with the so-called “Second Sacramentarian controversy” between, among others, Joachim Westphal, John Calvin, and also the Polish reformer John a Lasco, who had died the year before (January 8, 1560) and whose attempts to reconcile the Protestant churches in Poland failed mainly due to this question.23 The debate and the events in Germany were doubtlessly known in a city with such close connections to other Hanseatic cities like Hamburg, Die andere / An einen Erbaren / Namhafftigen vnd Wolweisen Rath / der Königlichen Stad Thorn / […] Durch Benedictum Morgenstern Predigern der Königlichen altenstad Thorn in Preussen. (Eisleben: Andreas Petri, 1567). VD 16 M 6341, Vorrede, D 4v. 22 The main sources for the quarrels about the reliquiae in Danzig are – besides the contemporary printed sources mentioned in the following footnotes – the manuscript “Historia Notulae Gedanensis” by the Danzig reformed theologian David Fabricius, who did not eye-witness the actual events and wrote his history in 1602 as a part of a debate with his Lutheran opponent Michael Coletus (today in the Archiwum Pan´stwowe w Gdan´sku), as well as “Der Stadt Dantzig historische Beschreibung” by Reinhold Curicke, whose account is based on Fabricius. The classical work on Prussian church history, Hartknoch, Preussische Kirchen-Historia (as in note 5), 680 – 709., follows mainly Curicke. Hirsch, Kirchengeschichte von Danzig (as in note 15), delivers a detailed report of the events, again relying on Fabricius as the main authority, but also using additional archival sources. The same is true with Freytag, “Die Beziehungen Danzigs zu Wittenberg” (as in note 15). Gustav Kötz, Die Danziger Konkordienformel über das Heilige Abendmahl, Notel genannt, und ihre Apologie (1561 – 1567), Univ. Diss. Königsberg. (Königsberg: Jaeger, 1901) examines all aforementioned sources and adds detail information from the Danzig archives, but his inquiry is not completely published and gives no coherent account of what happened. A thorough analysis based on all surviving sources is still a desideratum. 23 Cf. Andrew Pettegree, “The London Exile Community and the Second Sacramentarian Controversy,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 78 (1987), 232 – 252; Henning P. Jürgens, “Die Vertreibung der reformierten Flüchtlingsgemeinden aus London: Jan Utenhoves ‘Simplex et fidelis narratio’,” in Religion und Mobilität: Zum Verhältnis von raumbezogener Mobilität und religiöser Identitätsbildung im frühneuzeitlichen Europa, ed. Henning P. Jürgens and Thomas Weller, 13 – 39, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz / Beiheft 81 (Göttingen [u.a.]: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010); on a Lasco’s late years in Poland see Halina Kowalska, Działalnos´c´ reformatorska Jana Łaskiego w Polsce 1556 – 1560, 2nd ed. (Warszawa: Neriton, 1999).

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where Westphal lived, and Bremen, where Albert Hardenberg had been removed from his office because of his Melanchthonian position in the controversy in the same year.24 Therefore, the Danzig controversy about the reliquiae was not simply a fight between two quarrelsome theologians. As the example of Morgenstern showed, the city council would have banished them if it would have been only the two of them. But the debate affected and divided the Danzig clergy, the parishes and in fact the whole city. The participants called each others “Schwärmer”, “Sakramentier”, and “Kryptopapist” respectively. Of course, the controversy also had immense political significance: less than five years after having achieved the Royal privilege of distributing the communion in both kinds, the pastors were fighting exactly about this. The debate was noticed both in the local Prussian diets as well as at the Polish court.25 So again the city council had to take immediate measures, not only to maintain the peace and stability of the church within the city, but also to prevent the Polish king and the catholic bishops from gaining influence on the Danzig church again.

Stages of a debate The Danzig controversy about the reliquiae provides a good example for how a theological question can become a public event, and also for the possible levels of escalation it could reach: The question first came up in a private conversation and became known to the city public through sermons. Thus the first step for the city council was to forbid preaching about this topic. As a next step, all participants were called to a public hearing at the town hall. Now the positions became clear: Neuber and his party argued by invoking the proposition formulated by Melanchthon, “nihil habet rationem Sacramenti extra usum divinitus institutum” – nothing can be a Sacrament outside the divinely ordained use.26 So the leftovers are to be regarded as bread and wine. Sperber and his supporters called this position “Calvinistic” and argued that Melanchthon had issued his sentence against the Papistic misuse of the Sacrament. They referred to the formula of Augustine: “the words of institution and the element make the

24 On Westphal’s role in the controversy cf. Wim Janse, “Joachim Westphal’s Sacramentology,” Lutheran Quarterly 22 (2008), 137 – 160; on Hardenberg see Wim Janse, Albert Hardenberg als Theologe: Profil eines Bucer-Schülers, Studies in the history of Christian thought 57 (Leiden [u.a.]: Brill, 1994), 32 – 89. 25 Cf. the formulation quoted below, note 38. 26 Philipp Melanchthon first used this proposition at the Regensburg colloquy on May 8, 1541, when debating about the Eucharist with Johannes Eck und Nikolaus Granvella. He included it later into his “Bedencken vom Synodo aller Chur und Fürsten und Stände Augsburgischer Confession”; cf. CR 9, 409, (MBW 8494); CR 9, 471 f, (MBW 8543).

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sacrament,”27 so the reliquiae are still flesh and blood even after the communion. This position the Neuber party called “Papistic idolatry”. When all attempts to reconcile the combatants failed, both sides were prompted to write down articles of confession. After a public reading of these articles some days later, again no agreement could be found, and the opponents were requested to comment on the other side’s articles.28 But before this happened, the city council asked the learned jurist Jakob von Barthen, who had studied in Wittenberg, to write down a Formula of Consent. Barthen wrote the so-called “Notula” or “Notel”, which gave the whole controversy its name. He followed the aforementioned sentence of Melanchthon, and formulated a confession of the Eucharist in Wittenberg terms, using the Confessio Augustana and the Wittenberg Concord, with explicit rejection of the teachings of Zwingli and Calvin and transubstantiation. The practical questions of how to deal with the reliquiae von Barthen addressed in a pragmatic way : Leftovers should be avoided; if that was not possible, they should be treated with reverence; every idolatrous abuse should be foreclosed.29 The Notula became the official document of the Danzig church. Every pastor had to subscribe to it. Most of the pastors did so. Only Sperber and three of his supporters refused. So they finally had to leave the city. All events of the debate up to this point, including the sermons, the hearing at the town hall, the handwritten articles, letters and the final result of a “confessio doctrinae”, stayed at the level of publicity which one could call with Rudolf Schlögl “Kommunikation unter Anwesenden” – communication among personally present participants, which he describes as the typical form of early modern political communication.30 But a theological dogmatic debate like this was not likely to stay at this level in the mid 16th century.

Publications This is where Benedict Morgenstern comes in again. He had supported the group of Sperber and his adherents already during the debate with letters and even clandestine visits in Danzig. After the expulsion of Erhard Sperber he 27 “Accedit verbum ad elementum et fit sacramentum” – Augustin, Tractatus in Iohannis Evangelium 80,3 (CChr SL 36, 529,5 f.; PL 35, 1840). 28 For a more detailed account and references to the sources see Jürgens, “Die Beteiligung der beiden Preußen an den nachinterimistischen Streitigkeiten” (as in note 9): 24 – 8. 29 First printed in the APOLOGIA. Gründlicher Gege(n)bericht (as in note 19) of the Danzig pastors. A complete version of the “Notula” can also be found in Hartknoch, Preussische KirchenHistoria (as in note 5), 690 – 700. 30 Rudolf Schlögl, “Kommunikation und Vergesellschaftung unter Anwesenden: Formen des Sozialen und ihre Transformation in der Frühen Neuzeit,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 34, 2 (2008), 155 – 224.

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encouraged him to publish a book in the following year, 1563, in Erfurt under the title Verantwortung, a self-justification with additional documents and severe attacks against the city council and his opponents.31 But the city council also looked for support of its decision outside the city walls: Its members sent letters to the universities in Wittenberg and Rostock asking for evaluations of the “Notula”. While the Wittenberg theological faculty not surprisingly replied in most positive terms,32 the Rostock faculty did not answer at all: Benedict Morgenstern had written to Johannes Wigand, at that time Superintendent in Wismar, and had induced him to impede an evaluation.33 Moreover, Morgenstern used his contacts and motivated Matthias Flacius Illyricus to write a letter of dedication to the Danzig city council. It was published as a foreword to a pamphlet against the Reformed theologian Caspar Olevian, in Oberursel in 1564. Flacius warned the council against “Sakramentierer” and wolves in sheep’s clothing. He put the discussion in Danzig in a row with the Adiaphoristic, Majoristic and Osiandrian controversies, and praised Morgenstern and Sperber for their steadfastness.34 Finally, Morgenstern himself published his own book, which was printed in Eisleben in 1567 under the title: Widerlegung der Notel – “A confutation of the Notula, with which the Sacramentarians in Danzig try to occlude and cover their delusion and persecution, and squelch and depress the poor church in that very place.”35 In his text, he refuted the “Notula” and tried to convince the Danzig Pastors to do the same. The lengthy polemic – it comprises more than 250 quarto pages – is endorsed with a foreword by the Mansfeld preachers, probably written by Cyriakus Spangenberg, to all Christians of Danzig and Thorn, and with Morgenstern’s own letter of dedication to the Thorn city

31 Erhard Sperber, Christliche vnd notwendige verantwortung Erhardi Sperbers / wider die grewliche bezichtigung […] der Sacramentirer vnd Rottengeister zu Dantzig / Sampt einer trewen Warnung […] sich für Jnen zu hüten. […] (Erfurt: Melchior Sachse, 1563). VD 16 S 8281. 32 The Wittenberg opinion, dated 18. 8. 1564, is printed in Hartknoch, Preussische Kirchen-Historia (as in note 5), 703 – 5. 33 Morgenstern himself openly declared this in the foreword of his Widerlegung der Notel (as in note 21), E 1v. 34 Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Trewe Warnung vnd Vermanung / das man das heilige Testament des hochwirdigen Nachtmals / vnsers Herrn Jesu Christi vnuerfelscht / vnd in seinem rechten eigentlichen verstande / rein behalten sol / In dieser vnserer zeit / wider so manicherley Verfürer / Sophisterey vnd Betriegerey / Sehr nützlich zulesen. Item / Widerlegung vier Predigten eines Sacramentirers / mit zunamen Oleuianus. Item Beweisung / Das auch die vnwirdigen den Leib vnd Blut Jesu Christi im Abendmal empfahen / Wider ein Schwenckfeldisch Büchlein / so newlich ohne Namen durch den Druck ausgestrewet worden. […] (Oberursel: Nikolaus Heinrich, 1564). VD 16 F 1398, Vorrede, A 2r–)(6v : Den ERbaren vnd Hochweisen Herrn / Burgermeistern / Rhat vnd Gemein der Statt Dantzig / meinen grossgünstigen Herrn / Wünscht M. Flacius Illyr. die ware vnd reine Religion Jesu Christi / sampt einem ernsten Eyffer vnd bestendigkeit in derselben. 35 Morgenstern, Widerlegung der Notel (as in note 21).

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council. He clearly wanted not only to influence the situation in Danzig, but also to prevent the Thorn city council from accepting the Notula as well. Morgenstern did not gain much sympathy with this work, neither among the addressees in Danzig and in Thorn nor in the secondary literature of the following centuries. Its rude style of polemic, its harsh condemnation of everyone who did not agree with him, and its uncompromising rigidity makes it easy to regard it as uncultivated and unpleasant. But in comparison with many other pamphlets of its time, like the ones by Flacius and others, it is not at all unusual. It uses the tools of polemic in a typical way. To say it with Morgenstern’s own words: “Es reicht nicht, dass man einen glatten und scharfen Keil hat, von alleine wird er nicht ins Holz kriechen, man muss ihn mit macht hineintreiben.”36 “Its not enough to have a sharp wedge, it will not enter the wood on its own, you need force to drive it into it”. As a reaction to Morgenstern, all Danzig pastors published a printed declaration titled Apologia in the same year, in which they unanimously defended the Notula.37 In the foreword they attack Morgenstern by name for his “ärgerlichem Zanck” – annoying strife, and call him a Herostratus and a new Pope. Most severely they accuse him of not taking into account the possible political outcomes of his polemic: In calling them heretics and sending his books to noblemen and foreign cities, he was inciting the enemies of the gospel against Danzig and awakening suspicion at the Royal Court.38 In the same text the authors give a description of what measures they had taken to settle the controversy within the city : They agreed to every kind of Christian action, even to hearings, declarations, colloquies and examinations, and never shunned the light, but submitted themselves to the judgment of the Christian church which follows the Augsburg Confession and of unbiased learned 36 Ibid., C 3r. 37 APOLOGIA. Gründlicher Gege(n)bericht (as in note 19). 38 Ibid., B 1r–v : “Vnd welchs das aller beschwerlichste / weil er dieser Kirchen Prediger / für declarirte / vnd vberwundene Ketzer / Sacramentirer vnd Schwermer / mit vnwarheit / in seinem Buche außschreiet / vnd dasselb vielen hohen Potentaten / im löblichen Königreich Polen / neben falschem bericht / auffgedrungen / auch in berhümte Stedte / ausserhalb landes / zu vorhandeln vorschicket: Suchet er nichts anders / als das er / die feinde des Euangelij / an diese Kirchen vorhetze / E. H. vnd E.W. auch diese Kirche vnd Stadt / bey vnserer löblichen Hohen Obrigkeit Kö. May. zu Polen / […] in ein nachteiligen vordacht bringe / vnd aus dem Religions fried der H. Augspurgischen Confession / damit diese Kirche vnd Stadt allergnedigst vorsehen / in ein betrübtes hertzleid vnd gantzen verlust Göttliches wortes vnd der Heiligen Sacrament setzen müge.” – And what is the most burdensome: he untruthfully labels the preachers of this church in his book as declared and vanquished heretics, Sacramentarians and Enthusiasts, and has pressed the book together with a wrong account upon many high potentates in the praiseworthy kingdom of Poland and has sent it to eminent cities outside the country to debate it. He is seeking nothing else than to instigate the enemies of the Gospel against this church, to bring you [i.e. the city council] and the church and the city of Danzig into suspicion before our High authority, the Royal Majesty of Poland, and to convert the religious peace of the holy Augsburg Confession, with which this city is graciously endowed, into sorrowful affliction and loss of the Godly word and the Holy Sacrament.

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people. They would have endured all kind of calumnies, if Morgenstern would not have spread about them the sheer untruth in public print.39 In other words: with the publication of Morgenstern’s printed Confutation outside Danzig and even outside Prussia, he had ultimately transgressed the boundaries of the debate, and the conflict had reached a new step of escalation, which made a reaction in the same medium necessary. At least one can say that the debate about the “Notula” came toexams an end with the publication of the Apologia. The “Notula” became the official Confessio doctrinae of the city church of Danzig. Every newly appointed pastor for the next three centuries had to subscribe to it. It was as well a typical way of putting to an end this kind of theological debate that the question was finally settled by a Confession which was implemented by the political authority. Thorn Benedict Morgenstern did not answer the Apologia anymore,40 probably because in the meantime he had provoked his next expulsion. When he was appointed Pastor in Thorn in 1560, the city council explicitly urged him not “to put up a new teaching in the church and not to call others Philippists or Flacians or whatever.”41 But it did not take long for his next conflicts to arise. First he had a public debate with a Dominican monk. This action was supported by the council and supposedly helped to establish the Evangelical church in the city of Thorn, where a good share of the population still followed Catholic rites.42 But he also attacked the community of the Bohemian Brethren 39 APOLOGIA. Gründlicher Gege(n)bericht (as in note 19), foreword, A 3v : “Vmb dieser vrsach willen / haben wir es auch nindert an vns mangel lassen / zu allen vnd jeden handlungen vns willig eingestellet / kein Christlich mittel außgeschlagen / Ja selber zu verhör / erklerung Colloquijs vnd Examinibus vns erbotten vnd genötigt / vnd also das licht niemals geschewet / Sondern vns vnd alle sachen / der gantzen Christlicht Kirchen / so sich einhellig zur Augspurgischen Confession bekennet / auch aller vnparteischen gelerter leut / vnd guthertziger Christen vrtheil vnterworffen / Vnd vber das alles solemni & multiplici protestatione, an ein richtig erkenntnis vns beruffen / Vnd so viel grewliches vnwarhaftiges geschreies vnd Calumnien / so vnsere widerwertige allenthalben / jnner vnd ausser lands außgegossen geduldet.” 40 Von Friese, Kirchengeschichte des Königreichs Polen (as in note 5), 385, reckons the fact, that Morgenstern did not answer, in his favour: “Als aber Morgenstern sahe, daß er zu weit gegangen, so hat er sich nicht getraut, weiter etwas in dieser Sache zu antworten, woraus wenigstens zu erkennen, daß er bey alle dem einen billigen Charakter gehabt haben müsse.” 41 Julius Wernicke, Geschichte Thorns aus Urkunden, Dokumenten und Handschriften, 2 vols. (Thorn: Lambeck, 1842), 131: “Als daher den 30. Juni 1560 M. Benedikt Morgenstern, von Stolpe gebürtig, aus Danzig an die Kirche zu St. Marien berufen wurde, erhielt er ausdrücklich in seiner Vocation folgende Weisung: ‘sich der Moderation zu bedienen, keine Meinung in der Kirche aufzustellen, auch die andern als Philippici, Illyrici, Sektarii, nicht zu schmähen noch anzutasten, sonsten aber Kirchenzucht cum scitu Magistratu zu halten.’” 42 On the church history of Thorn see Hartknoch, Preussische Kirchen-Historia (as in note 5), 863 – 974, on Morgenstern’s time especially 879 – 885; Hartknoch relies partly on Morgenstern’s own

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who lived in Thorn. They did not have their own preacher, but when itinerant ministers came along, they celebrated separate communion services at night, meeting in private homes. Morgenstern publicly attacked this practice from the pulpit and urged the Brethren to join his own congregation. He twice met with Jan Laurentius, minister of the Brethren, and asked him why they would not adhere to the Confessio Augustana. Laurentius responded by saying that they would not oppose the Confessio Augustana, but rather stay with their own confession.43 When Morgenstern asked Laurentius what the Brethren held against the church in Thorn, the latter reprehended the lack of church discipline, the fact that the preachers were married, the persistence of Catholic remnants in the liturgy like the use of the vestments,44 and the influence of the magistrate on the appointment of the pastors. Clearly two different ecclesiological concepts were at stake here: a Lutheran, magisterial, liturgically conservative communal church versus a migrant church with a separatist concept of the congregation and high ethical demands. Morgenstern and Laurentius agreed on having a public debate.45 It took place on September 8, 1563 in Thorn in the presence of not only members of the council and almost 200 Thorn burghers, but also two Polish voievodes account, given in his last work: Benedict Morgenstern, TRACTATVS DE ECCLESIA DOMINI NOSTRI IESV CHRISTI VERA ET CATHOLICA: ET DE ECCLEsijs falsis, hoc est, de papatv, eivs ortv & incrementis qve˛dam. ET AN IS IVRE POSTVLET RESTITVtionem AEdivm sacrarvm & reditvvm Ecclesiasticorvm. ITEM DE CALVINISTARVM VALDENSIVMque Ecclesiis, & harvm in Religione Consensv Sendomiriae in Polonia anno 1570. fabricato. AVTHORE REVERENDO VIRO D. BENEDICTO Morgenstern Pastore Graudentino in Prussia. (Frankfurt am Main: Collitius/Kopff, 1598). VD 16 M 6340. For general information see Stanisław Salmonowicz, “Religiöses Leben in Torun´ im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” in Probleme der Reformation in Deutschland und in Polen, ed. Bruno Schrage, 41 – 55, Studien zur Geschichte der deutschpolnischen Beziehungen 8 (Rostock, 1983); Schramm, “Danzig, Elbing und Thorn” (as in note 15), and Müller, Zweite Reformation und städtische Autonomie im Königlichen Preußen (as in note 15), 73 – 6, especially on Morgenstern’s activities. 43 Morgenstern, TRACTATVS (as in note 42); 83 – 91. 44 Ibid., 96. It is almost ironic that Morgenstern defended the use of the vestments against the Bohemian Brethren, since one of the stumbling blocks in the controversy about the so-called Leipzig Interim was the use of the “Chorrock” – which was declared not to be an “adiaphoron in casu confessionis et scandali” by Flacius and his followers, and hence to be refused. In Thorn, the clear-cut Gnesio-Lutheran Morgenstern saw it as problematic, that the Brethren did not use the old vestments any more. Probably he took this position in accordance with the city council, which wanted to avoid all to open opposition against the Catholic tradition. For the debate, cf. for example: Matthias Flacius, Nicolaus Gallus, Antwort […] auff den brieff etlicher Prediger in Meissen / von der frage / Ob sie lieber weichen / denn den Chorrock anzihen sollen. […] (Magdeburg: Christian Rödinger, 1550). VD 16 G 252; Georg Major, Auslegung des Glaubens / welcher das Symbolum Apostolicum genand wird / den einfeltigen Pfarherrn vnd allen Hausuetern zu dienste […] Mit einer Vorrede / des M. Flacij Illyrici schreien und schreiben belangend. […] (Wittenberg: Georg Rhau, 1550). VD 16 M 2003, Vorwort, * 7r–A 2v. 45 Morgenstern, TRACTATVS (as in note 42), 94 – 96; Hartknoch, Preussische Kirchen-Historia (as in note 5), 882; Jablonski, Historia Consensus Sendomiriensis (as in note 4), 17.

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(Palatines), members of the senate,46 and some Polish noblemen,47 all of them supporters of either the Lutherans or the Bohemian Brethren in Greater Poland (Wielkopolska). Of course, a public debate like this was highly important for both groups in the neighboring Polish provinces, where every nobleman had the ius reformandi for his own property, so that the establishment of Protestant congregations depended on the decision of the noble supporters. As Morgenstern writes in his account of this debate, it ended in a compromise, namely that the Bohemian Brethren in Thorn should join the Lutheran community.48 But only a few Brethren came, most of them preferred to leave the town instead. Morgenstern hence continued his attacks by presenting his manuscript “De Valdensium schismate ex publico colloquio Thornae cum fratribus Bohemicis habito” to a Polish Synod in 1565.49 Two years later, he sent his “Articuli ex libris et actionibus fratrum Bohemicorum” to the synod of Posen (Poznan) on 29. 1. 1567, especially criticizing the fact that they refused the Confessio Augustana, but also their doctrine of the Eucharist, which in his eyes lacked clear-cut expressions of Christ’s real presence.50 The answer of the Brethren eight months later did not change his mind. At the same time Morgenstern also came into conflict with his former Danzig comrade-in-arms Franz Burchard, who had been removed from Danzig together with Morgenstern and had been accepted as a preacher in Thorn as well. They did not agree about the reaction to the events in Danzig and fought one another about it from the pulpits.51 Again the city council 46 Namely Jan Słuszewski, voivode of Brzes´c´, and Jan Krotoski, voivode of Inowrocław. 47 Among them Stanisław Ostorûg, castellan of Mie˛dzyrzec, and Rafał Leszczyn´ski, starost of Radziejûw. 48 Hartknoch, Preussische Kirchen-Historia (as in note 5), 882 f. What Hartknoch does not mention in his account of the events is the fact that Jan Laurentius, Morgenstern’s Bohemian opponent, was appointed to become a pastor at the St. George church in Thorn in 1565. In the same year Erasmus Gliczner, Superintendent of the Polish churches of the Augsburg Confession, became preacher in Thorn. So two of the fathers of the Consensus of Sendomir in 1570 lived together in Thorn at the same time as Morgenstern did. Cf. Wernicke, Geschichte Thorns aus Urkunden, Dokumenten und Handschriften (as in note 41), 132. 49 Its unclear where this took place, perhaps at the synod in Gostyn, 15. 6. 1565, but it is not mentioned in the protocol. Cf. Gottfried Smend, Die Synoden der Kirche Augsburgischer Konfession in Großpolen im 16., 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, Jahrbuch des Theologischen Seminars der Unierten Evangelischen Kirche in Polen 2 (Poznan: Luther-Verl., 1930), 15; 53. 50 See Morgenstern, TRACTATVS (as in note 42), 97 – 147, for his articles; on the Synod of Posen, cf. Valerian G. Krasinski, Historical sketch of the rise, progress, and decline of the reformation in Poland, and of the influence which the scriptural doctrines have exercised on that country in literary, moral, and political respects, 2 vols. (London: Cox, 1838 – 1840), 373 – 7.; Maria Sipayłło, ed., Akta Synodûw Rûz˙nowierczych w Polsce: Tom. II: 1560 – 1570 (Warszawa: Wydawn. Uniw. Warszawskiego, 1972), 210 – 2, Smend, Die Synoden der Kirche Augsburgischer Konfession (as in note 49), 15 – 17, 56 – 58. 51 Cf. Wernicke, Geschichte Thorns aus Urkunden, Dokumenten und Handschriften (as in note 41), 132 f.

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attempted to reconcile both parties by having them write down their positions and send them to an “unsuspicious place adherent to the Augsburg Confession for a decision”52 in 1565. To no effect: Burchard even published a book about his arguments with the Danzig pastors, in which he defended himself from being too compromising.53 Morgenstern objected to his position in the foreword to his “Widerlegung der Notel”.54 So in 1567 Morgenstern not only fought against his colleague Franz Burchard, the Danzig theologians and the Bohemian Brethren at the same time, he finally got also into political trouble at home. He rebuked the city council because it had hired a Jew as the city’s physician, and when he received a letter of support for his position by Johannes Wigand, he published it.55 In consequence, he was removed from his office for the third time. Not only his way of fighting for his confessional convictions, but also his way of not taking heed of the political situation caused this banishment.

Königsberg After a short time in Poland,56 he followed his mentor Johannes Wigand to Königsberg in 1568, when the latter was appointed Professor of Theology at the Albertine University.57 Morgenstern worked as a pastor first in Kneiphof and after 1577 at the Dom in the Altenstadt.58 Again, he attacked the Bohemian Brethren living in Ducal Prussia, reprehending them because of their private 52 “[…] auf einen unverdechtigen Ort Augsburgischer Confession pro decisione schicken.” Decree of the Thorn city Council dated 26. 2. 1565, quoted from Müller, Zweite Reformation und städtische Autonomie im Königlichen Preußen (as in note 15), 75. 53 Franz Burchard, Das dis Colloquium oder Gesprech / mit den herren Predigern zu Dantzigk gehalten vber dem streitigen Artickel des Abendmals […] Christi kein Amnistia sein kan / noch sol / Wider das schendtliche […] geschrey […] meiner widersacher / Auffs vrteil vnd gericht des Heiligen Geists / […] gestellet. (Danzig: Jacob Rhode, 1566). VD 16 B 9815. 54 See on this debate Morgenstern, Widerlegung der Notel (as in note 35), foreword, C 2r–D 1r; Hartknoch, Preussische Kirchen-Historia (as in note 5), 689 f. Hartknoch, who is always regarded as an orthodox Lutheran (cf. for example Müller, Zweite Reformation und städtische Autonomie im Königlichen Preußen [as in note 15], 38 f.), gives a critical evaluation of Morgenstern’s account of the meeting, and shows more sympathy for the Philippist side. 55 This publication seems to be lost; I could find no traces of a copy. 56 Morgenstern seems to have tried to go to Elbing, the third of the major Prussian cities, but this was hampered by Johann Bochmann, an Elbing Philippist preacher. Cf. Müller, Zweite Reformation und städtische Autonomie im Königlichen Preußen (as in note 15), 104. 57 On Wigand in Prussia cf. now Irene Dingel, “Calvinism at the borders of the empire: Johannes Wigand and the Lutheran reaction to Calvinism,” in John Calvin, myth and reality: Images and impact of Geneva’s Reformer, ed. Amy N. Burnett (Eugene, Or : Cascade Books, 2011), 139 – 61. 58 During this time, he subscribed a writing by Wigand against the Wittenberg theology of the Lord’s Supper : Johannes Wigand, Christliche Erinnerung Von der Bekentnis der Theologen in Meissen vom Abendmal Jetzt newlich außgangen. Durch D. Johannem Wigandum / Vnd haben etliche andere Theologen vnterschrieben. (Königsberg: Johan Daubmanns Erben, 1574). VD 16 W 2731.

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services. And again, he was among the accusers when a new controversy within the Prussian church arose. Together with Conrad Schlüsselburg and others he attacked Tilemann Heshusius, bishop of Samland and former colleague of Wigand as professor of theology in Jena.59 These critics took offence at some Christological assertions published in Heshusius’ book Assertio testamenti Christi, namely that not only the man Christ (in concreto) is omnipotent, adorable etc. but also human nature in Christ (in abstracto) is omnipotent, adorable etc. They accused Heshusius of saying that the human nature of Christ was to be adored even without the divine nature. The debate lasted for years. Even a Prussian synod was unable to reconcile the fighting parties. In the end, Heshusius was banished from his bishopric, and Wigand became its administrator. As far as I can see, Morgenstern did not publish any pamphlets against Heshusius but opposed him fiercely in his sermons and in public debates.60

Last years – the Tractatus With the death of Wigand in 1587, Morgenstern lost his main supporter and was obviously forced to leave his position in Königsberg. He moved to Graudenz (Grudzia˛c) in Ducal Prussia, a little town owned by the Polish nobleman Jan Zborowski. There he lived for the last 12 years of his life. In 1598, the year before his death, he published his book Tractatus de ecclesia,61 which he explicitly declared to be his confession and his legacy. The full title already gives an impression of what the book is all about: “A tract on the true and catholic Church of our Lord Jesus Christ, and on the false churches, i. e. the papacy […] as well as the churches of the Calvinists and the Waldensians (i. e. the Bohemian Brethren) and their consensus in the religion, fabricated in Sandomierz in Poland A.D. 1570.” Its message is simple: the Lutheran church is the real Catholic and Apostolic church, not the Papists, nor the Calvinists and especially not the Bohemian Brethren, who boast of being the most apostolic church. Morgenstern begins with a definition of the real church according to Article 7 of the Confessio Augustana. He does not use many pages to make clear that 59 On the controversy cf. Hartknoch, Preussische Kirchen-Historia (as in note 5), 462 – 87. Peter F. Barton, Um Luthers Erbe: Studien und Texte zur Spätreformation Tilemann Heshusius (1527 – 1559), Untersuchungen zur Kirchengeschichte 6 (Witten: Luther-Verl, 1972). Barton, ibid. 230 – 2, only mentions the debate very briefly on the last pages of his book. Cf. Peter F. Barton, “Heshusius, Tilemann (1527 – 1588),” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie (TRE), vol. 15, ed. Gerhard Müller, 256 – 60 (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1986), 257 f. 60 The controversy and Morgenstern’s role in it would deserve a much more intensive inquiry than I can give here. 61 Morgenstern, TRACTATVS (as in note 42).

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only the Lutheran church possesses the right preaching of the Gospel and especially the right doctrine of the Eucharist.62 He devotes much more space, more than 50 pages, to demonstrating that the Papacy is not the Catholic church, that the Pope is the Antichrist and the Papists have no right to demand restitution of ecclesiastical property.63 When he comes to the Jesuits, he mocks their academic attitude by shifting to the use of syllogisms for his argumentation.64 The Calvinists find comparatively small attention, only 11 pages.65 The main part of the book is once again directed against the Bohemian Brethren. In more than 40 pages Morgenstern prints the 14 articles presented to the synod of Posen in 1567.66 Another 30 pages discuss Luther’s attitude towards the Brethren. Morgenstern tries to show that they wrongfully claim Luther’s consent to their confession, because they have changed it since then many times.67 Morgenstern devotes special attention to their recent Eucharistic doctrine. He accuses them of having acquired Beza’s interpretation of Acts 3,21 via the Wittenberg crypto-Calvinists.68 The rest of the book deals with the Consensus of Sendomir. Not surprisingly, Morgenstern is entirely dismissive of the Consensus, which had been achieved especially concerning the Eucharistic doctrine, between the Polish Reformed, the Bohemian Brethren and the Polish Adherents of the Confessio Augustana at a Synod in April 1570.69 He calls the Consensus a Pandora’s box, a syncretisic document and Amnistia and accuses its authors of having abandoned the doctrina fidei in order to achieve unity. He condemns wholesale any political consideration about the necessity of unity against the enemies of the Gospel. At the same time, he complains that the true adherents of Lutheranism have become an absolute minority in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – only two parishes, one in Wilna and one in Kaunas, are left, which have not agreed to the Consensus of Sendomir. Consequently, 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Ibid., 1 – 12. Ibid., 12 – 64. Ibid., 56 – 58. Ibid. 64 – 75. Ibid. 97 – 141. Ibid., 141 – 171. Ibid. 177 – 200. Edition of the text and commentary : Henning P. Jürgens and Ke˛stutis Daugirdas, “Konsens von Sandomierz – Consensus Sendomirensis, 1570,” in Reformierte Bekenntnisschriften, vol. 3, ed. Heiner Faulenbach et al., 1 – 20 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2012); cf. Kai E. Jordt Jørgensen, Ökumenische Bestrebungen unter den polnischen Protestanten bis zum Jahre 1645 (København: Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck, 1942), 252 – 79; Michael G. Müller, “Der Consensus Sendomirensis – Geschichte eines Scheiterns? Zur Diskussion über Protestantismus und protestantische Konfessionalisierung in Polen-Litauen im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Konfessionelle Pluralität als Herausforderung: Koexistenz und Konflikt in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Joachim Bahlcke, Karen Lambrecht and Hans-Christian Maner (Leipzig: Leipziger Univ.Verl., 2006), 397 – 408; Alfons Brüning, Unio non est unitas: Polen-Litauens Weg im konfessionellen Zeitalter (1569 – 1648), Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 72 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), 172 – 82.

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Morgenstern attacks sharply the General Synod, which was held in 1595 in Thorn, where the Consensus was reaffirmed70 – at the place, where he more than three decades earlier started his fight against the Bohemian Brethren. The Tractatus de ecclesia is dedicated71 to the patron of Morgenstern’s church in Graudenz, Jan Zborowski,72 who was at this time the most fervent supporter of the Lutherans among the Polish nobility. He called Morgenstern’s son-in-law Andreas Luperian to his church in Pleschen, when the latter was expelled from Posen because of his opposition to the Consensus of Sendomir. Zborowski and Morgenstern obviously enforced each other in their opposition against the rotten compromise of the Consensus of Sendomir.73 The Tractatus de Ecclesia became the swan song of Benedict Morgenstern. He died of the plague in the following year on April 11, 1599, during medical treatment in Königsberg, after having collapsed in his pulpit.74

Conclusion Talking about intra-Protestant theological controversies in Prussia and Poland in the second half of the 16th century almost inevitably also means talking about Benedict Morgenstern. As a member of the second generation of Protestant preachers, he actively took part in the development of the Reformation movement in Prussia and Poland for 50 years. He might not have been an original thinker ; he simply fought for his convictions and preferred being banished rather than giving in. He was a skilled polemicist – unfortunately, we only have one of his sermons in print75 –, and used the 70 Morgenstern, TRACTATVS (as in note 42), 77, 220. On the synod see Wojciech Sławin´ski, Torun´ski synod generalny 1595 roku: Z dziejûw polskiego protestantyzmu w drugiej połowie XVI wieku. (Warszawa: Semper, 2002), who mentions Morgenstern’s book a few times in his footnotes. 71 Morgenstern, TRACTATVS (as in note 42), A 2r–B 3v. Embarrassingly, the dedication gives the name of the name of the patron wrongly as “Zbobocovius”. 72 On him, cf. Jolanta Dworzaczkowa, “Zborowski, Jan,” in Wielkopolski Słownik biograficzny, vol. 5, 39 – 40, (Warszawa/Poznan´ : Pan´stwowe Wydawnyctwo Naukowe 1981). Zborowski had originally been a supporter of the Bohemian Brethren, but turned into a supporter of the Formula Concordiae and did not take part in the Synod of Thorn in 1595. 73 See Wilhelm Bickerich, “Zur Geschichte der Auflösung des Sendomirer Vergleichs,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 12, 3 (1930): 365 – 9. Bickerich calls Pleschen “the center of a radical Lutheran opposition,” but questions Morgenstern’s influence as the spiritual father for Zborowski’s hardliner position, while Arthur Rhode, Geschichte der evangelischen Kirche im Posener Lande, Marburger Ostforschungen 4 (Würzburg: Holzner, 1956), 66 f. sees him “under the influence of the Graudenz zealot Morgenstern.” 74 Von Friese, Kirchengeschichte des Königreichs Polen (as in note 5), 382: “Er wurde auf der Kanzel von der Pest ergriffen, begab sich nach Königsberg, um sich daselbst curieren zu lassen, starb aber an diesem Orte 1599 den 21. April …” 75 Cf. Benedict Morgenstern, Ein Sermon Von Göttlicher lauterkeit / deren sich alle reine vnd trewe

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printing press effectively, if not always wisely, to promote his positions. In doing so, he did not gain much sympathy. It is hard to encounter a single wholesale positive appreciation of his work in secondary literature.76 But if we want to understand how the shape of the confessions was sharpened in a process of continuous debate and controversy, we need to look at people like Morgenstern, even if we feel little sympathy for his rigidity or his theological positions. Moreover, his case provides some arguments for the understanding of the development of the Reformation movement in Poland and Prussia: One could say that Morgenstern is an example of a twofold negative outcome of the Osiandrian controversy. Not only were students from Poland-Lithuania and other countries no longer attracted to the Albertine University because of the severity of the fight. Also, uncompromising Lutheran theologians were driven out of Ducal Prussia and went to Royal Prussia and Poland, at a time when the Reformation movement there was not even halfway settled. While it came to this point after the diet of Piotrkûw in 1555, in Germany the Confessio Augustana-adherents became the only Protestant group to be politically accepted in the Peace of Augsburg. This encouraged intransigent Lutherans like Morgenstern as well to refuse any consensus with other Protestant groups with respect to political necessity. While this position did work in Ducal Prussia, it was problematic in Royal Prussia – and even more in Poland and Lithuania. In a situation where congregations were dependent on the will of their noble patron, the rigidity and ecclesiological concepts of preachers like Morgenstern was less attractive for the noble supporters than the style of the Bohemian Brethren. Maybe this explains why he fought so fervently against them. For 25 years, however, the more open position towards Brethren and Calvinists of Melanchthonian Wittenberg theology prevailed among the Confessio Augustana-adherents in Poland – to the lasting bitterness of Benedict Morgenstern. This changed only after his death – but that is a different story.

Lerer Göttliches Worts in jrem Ampt bevleissigen sollen / gethan / Durch Benedictum Morgenstern / der Altenstad Königsperg in Preussen Pfarrherrn. […] (Königsberg: Georg Osterberger, 1577). VD 16 M 6339. A “Predigt von der Gewißheit der Auferstehung von den Todten, Thorn 1593, 8” is mentioned in von Friese, Kirchengeschichte des Königreichs Polen (as in note 5), 385., and but neither VD 16 nor Estreicher records a copy. 76 The most positive evaluation of Morgenstern I could find is in von Friese, Kirchengeschichte des Königreichs Polen (as in note 5), 370 – 86, but even this Lutheran partisan writes: “I do not defend Morgenstern; one can see from different circumstances of his life, that he was a restless head (unruhiger Kopf), but that he was a learned and ingenious (geschickt) man as well, one can see from the fact, that he was not only in Thorn senior minister, but also in Königsberg was in high esteem.” Ibid., 380.

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Contemporary Perspectives

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J. Todd Billings

The Contemporary Reception of Luther and Calvin’s Doctrine of Union with Christ: Mapping a Biblical, Catholic, and Reformational Motif Few topics are more explosive in the recent reception of Luther and Calvin than their theologies of union with Christ, particularly as it relates to justification and sanctification. My own previous work has given micro-level accounts of the historical development of this notion in Calvin’s theology, which I then used to correct and inform contemporary theological discussions of Calvin.1 Rather than a micro-level inspection, this essay gives a bird’s eye view of the historiographic story which led to divergence in the reception of Luther and Calvin on this theme. Given my limitations in space, I will sketch a brief typology of key views in this contemporary discourse, categorizing each by the historiographic approach that characterizes the position. In the second part of the essay, I briefly describe my own account of characterizing Luther and Calvin’s theology of union with Christ as “biblical, catholic, and Reformational” in its language and character. By Reformational I am referring to features which are distinctive to the Reformation in its Reformed and Lutheran expressions. In this section, I articulate a historiography which sees broad confessional continuity on the soteriology of union with Christ (as it relates to justification and sanctification). While there are differences in emphasis and development, Luther, Calvin, and their early evangelical contemporaries share the basic confessional features of their theology of union with Christ, over and against Roman Catholicism on the one hand, and certain publicly condemned alternatives such as Osiander on the other. In closing, I suggest that this historiography of broad continuity actually opens up a new world of texts, sources, and insights for contemporary theologians. Unfortunately, this possibility has been missed by most contemporary theologians because of their disjunctive ways of setting Luther and Calvin’s theology of union with Christ against their contemporaries and immediate heirs. 1 See especially J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); “John Calvin’s Soteriology : Key Issues in Interpretation and Retrieval,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 11:4 (October 2009): 428 – 447; “Union with Christ and the Double Grace: Calvin’s Theology and Its Early Reception,” in Calvin:,” in Calvin’s Theology and Its Reception: Disputes, Developments, and New Possibilities, eds. J. Todd Billings and I. John Hesselink (Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 49 – 71.

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A Typology of Contemporary Reception Luther against the Lutherans One of the most well known contemporary receptions of Luther’s theology of union with Christ is among a group of scholars who have come to be known as the “Helsinki circle” or the “Finnish school.”2 Over the course of several decades, they have presented a “new” reading of Luther which attempts to awaken Luther scholarship from the Neo-Kantian slumberings of German Luther scholarship. Instead, awakened to see read Luther with new eyes from the ecumenical endeavor of Lutheran-Orthodox dialogue, these scholars claim to discover a central strand of Luther’s theology of justification and union with Christ which past commentators have missed: that of theosis or divinization. Quite central to the historiographic program of the Finnish school is the notion that in the early process of confessionalization, Luther’s theology of justification by faith was either misunderstood, or was simply not shared by his colleague Philip Melanchthon and later Lutherans in the 16th century. Specifically, sections of the Augsburg Confession are said to represent a loss from Luther’s superior formulation; the damage becomes great with the Formula of Concord written in 1577, which is considered to be an overreaction to the threat of Osiandrianism.3 Rather than clarify Luther’s doctrine of justification from compromising alternatives, the Formula of Concord is said to lose an essential element of Luther’s doctrine: it defines justification “only as the imputation of the forgiveness of sins, whereas inhabitatio dei is defined as a separate phenomenon and part of sanctification or renewal.”4 Yet, according to Tuomo Mannermaa, the ‘father’ of the Finnish school, “Luther does not hesitate to conclude that in faith the human becomes ‘God,’ not in substance but in participation. This notion, which has been largely forgotten in Protestant theology, is an integral part of Luther’s theology of faith, if interpreted correctly.”5 Deification is said to be “at the very heart of the Reformer’s doctrine of justification.”6 How is deification central? In 2 For the purpose of the typology in this essay, I will focus upon the work of Tuomo Mannermaa, since his work has been central to the work of the Finnish school. Recent accounts of the Finnish school and its program continue to give Mannermaa’s work a central role in characterizing the movement. See Risto Saarinen, “Finnish Luther Studies,” in Engaging Luther : A (New) Theological Assessment, ed. Olli-Pekka Vainio (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2010), 4 – 18. 3 See Simo Peuro’s criticism of the Formula of Concord in “Christ as Favor and Gift (donum): The Challenge of Luther’s Understanding of Justification,” in Union with Christ, eds. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 45 – 47. In the same volume, see also Braaten, “Response to Simo Peura, ‘Christ as Favor and Gift,’” 72 – 73. 4 Tuomo Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification, ed. and trans. Kirsi Sterjna (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2005), 42. 5 Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith, 42. 6 Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith, 46.

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Mannermaa’s words, “Christ himself is life, righteousness, and blessing, because God is all this in nature and in substance (naturaliter et substantialiter). Therefore, justifying faith means participation in God’s essence in Christ.”7 While imputation as an aspect of justification is not denied by authors like Mannermaa, the ontological participation of the believer in God – through union with Christ – is seen as absolutely fundamental to justification. Since Christ is the second person of the Trinity, and believers participate in Christ, faith gives access to a participation in God – and of course God-inChrist is both righteous and renewing. It is little wonder, then, that the third article of the Formula of Concord is particularly problematic for the Finnish school, as it explicitly claims that divine indwelling is not the basis of the declaration of righteousness: In the same way we must correctly explain the argument regarding the dwelling of the essential righteousness of God in us. To be sure, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is the eternal and essential righteousness, dwells through faith in the elect, who have become righteous through Christ and are reconciled with God. (For all Christians are temples of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who moves them to act properly.) However, this indwelling of God is not the righteousness of faith, which St. Paul treats [Rom. 1:17; 3:5, 22, 25; 2 Cor. 5:21] and calls iustia dei (that is, the righteousness of God), for the sake of which we are pronounced righteous before God. Rather, this indwelling is the result of the righteousness of faith which precedes it, and this righteousness [of faith] is nothing else than the forgiveness of sins and the acceptance of poor sinners by grace, only because of Christ’s obedience and merit.8

According to Mannermaa, the fatal error of the Formula of Concord is that it reflects a “strict distinction” between justification and sanctification which “is not at all a central or constitutive distinction in the theology of Luther.”9 To the contrary, the “mainstream Lutheran tradition” by the late sixteenth century had lost Luther’s idea that Christ is ontologically present in the believer by faith – providing the ontological bridge of justification and sanctification so that they are “extremely closely united” in Luther :10 Christ is, “without separation and without confusion,” both God’s “favor” (forgiveness, removal or wrath) and God’s “gift” (Christ’s “real presence”).11 Thus, “Faith is the basis for justification precisely because faith means the real presence of the person of Christ, that is, the real presence of God’s favor and gift.”12 While I will engage the Finnish school further in my account of the biblical, 7 Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith, 14. 8 “Formula of Concord Solid Declaration, article 3,” in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, eds. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2000), 571 – 572. 9 Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith, 49. 10 Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith, 54. 11 Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith, 57. 12 Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith, 57, italics removed from original.

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catholic, and Reformational aspects of Luther’s doctrine below, it is worth noting several features of the proposal of Mannermaa before moving on: first, on the distinction between justification and sanctification; second, on the use of historical sources. First, Mannermaa makes a somewhat peculiar move when he says that the distinction between justification and sanctification “is not at all a central or constitutive distinction in the theology of Luther,” yet, eight pages later, says that “Christ is, without separation and without confusion, both God’s favor (favor) and God’s gift (donum).”13 What exactly is the difference between a “strict distinction” between justification and sanctification, and one that is distinct because it is “without confusion?” The difference for Mannermaa seems to be that there needs to be an ontological bridge between the two through the indwelling presence of Christ; Mannermaa assumes that justification by imputation cannot be inseparable from sanctification unless they share the ontological source of Christ’s indwelling in believers. That is why, again and again in his explanation of justification, he points to the indwelling presence of Christ, linking it with an ontology of deification – for even where Luther did not do the same, Mannermaa assumes that it is a logical, ontological hole in Luther’s argument if it is absent. But in doing this, Mannermaa has imported a distinctly modern assumption: that the legal language of “imputation” is ultimately incompatible with the relational, organic language of divine indwelling in “sanctification.” I grant that there is both a distinction and a closeness between justification and sanctification in Luther’s mature thought – such that they are not “separated” in a way that believers may receive one without the other. But the Formula of Concord’s refusal to ground the declarative act of justification in an ontological indwelling is actually in strong continuity with both Luther and other early Reformational theologians, in my view. Mannermaa assumes a logical gap in Luther’s argument, thus “fills in the blanks” of Luther’s ontology, where Luther saw no gap. Second, how does the Finnish school use historical sources?14 To put it briefly, it often assumes relatively little development in Luther’s own theology of justification. For example, Mannermaa draws upon Luther’s Christmas sermon of 1514 as a place where Luther “elucidates the core of his doctrine of 13 Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith, 49, 57. 14 For the sake of the typology on this point, this essay remains focused on Mannermaa’s work since it continues to be central to discussions of the Finnish school. While space does not permit a thorough engagement here, it is worth noting a book which attempts to draw upon a wider scope of historical sources while continuing key aspects of Mannermaa’s thesis: Olli-Pekka Vainio, Justification and Participation in Christ: The Development of the Lutheran Doctrine of Justification from Luther to the Formula of Concord (1580) (Leiden: Brill, 2008). While Vainio considers a broader range of historical figures and texts than earlier work of the Finnish school, the work has serious methodological and historical problems. See Timothy Wengert, “Review of Justification and Participation in Christ,” Renaissance Quarterly 61:4 (Winter 2008): 1305 – 1307.

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participation with help of the classical formulations of the doctrine of theosis.”15 It is telling that Mannermaa labels this exposition “core” in a time before most scholars think that Luther has discovered an evangelical doctrine of justification. In another book, Christ Present in Faith, Mannermaa moves on to Luther’s 1535 Galatians lectures, where he argues that justification and sanctification are united by Christ’s deifying presence through faith. Mannermaa tends to correlate passages related to justification by faith with passages on deification because both relate to Luther’s notion of union with Christ. The idea that there could be a sharp notional distinction between justification and sanctification without separating the two, without an ontology of indwelling uniting them, does not seem to be a real possibility to Mannermaa. In fact, in favoring Luther’s early writings, Mannermaa has worked relatively little with Luther’s theology of God’s word as it develops in his later thought. As Robert Kolb points out with reference to Mannermaa and the Finnish school, “many twentieth-century scholars missed Luther’s underlying understanding of God’s Word as his creative agent for determining reality.”16 Thus, a forensic declaration by God is not merely a divine observation (based on an ontology of divine indwelling), nor is it a legal fiction, making a “contrary-to-fact statement.” Rather, God’s declaration in justification is a divine act of “new creation” – God’s pronouncement of forgiveness means that “the reality of human sinlessness in God’s sight was genuine and unassailable.”17 While Christians live with ongoing sin in their lives, they can be assured that “what he [God] sees is real because he determines reality,” i. e., God’s forensic word is effective.18 God’s word declares forgiveness and adoption, establishing a new identity for his children. Thus, in light of the power of God’s word, faith is defined by Luther as trust in God and his word, rather than as “the indwelling presence of the divine.”19 While we will return to the topics of justification and deification below, at this point we should note, first, that Mannermaa’s interpretation of Luther is based upon certain modern systematic concerns (to find an ontological bridge between justification and sanctification); secondly, in his historical method, 15 Mannermaa, “Why Is Luther So Fascinating? Modern Finnish Luther Research,” in Union with Christ, 10 – 11. 16 Robert Kolb, Martin Luther: Confessor of the Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 127. 17 Kolb, Martin Luther, 127 – 128. Robert Kolb and Charles P. Arand, The Genius of Luther’s Theology : A Wittenberg Way of Thinking for the Contemporary Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 155. While Kolb argues that God’s word of declaration in justification is a “new creation” for Luther, he nevertheless insists that Luther “distinguished the question of human moral performance from the identification of the source of the believer’s righteousness in God’s sight and the believer’s trust.” Martin Luther, 128. Stated differently, for Luther justification is distinct from divine indwelling and sanctification, even as they are closely united together. For more about the significance of the ongoing distinction between justification and sanctification for Luther, see the “Reformational” section below. 18 Kolb, Genius of Luther’s Theology, 155. 19 Kolb, Martin Luther, 129.

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Mannermaa tends to correlate Luther’s early writings on deification to interpret his later evangelical theology of justification – a method which is questionable in itself, and also leads him to miss the significance of Luther’s theology of God’s word for Luther’s theology of justification by faith. Calvin against the Reformed The historiographic approach of setting Calvin as antithetical toward “the Reformed” of late sixteenth and seventeenth century is a well known paradigm, with an extensive critique of it equally well known through the writings of several historical theologians, most notably Richard Muller.20 But “union with Christ” in Calvin is an issue which evokes particularly strong claims in recent reception that Calvin was against “the Calvinists.” For example, in his recent book, The Theology of John Calvin, Charles Partee goes so far as to say that, in relation to the theology of the Westminster Standards, “Calvin is not a Calvinist because union with Christ is at the heart of his theology – and not theirs.”21 Considering the fact that one can find definitions of the mystical union, justification, and sanctification in the Westminster Standards that are very close to those of Calvin, this is a rather surprising claim.22 The critique seems to be rooted in a sense that the development of Federal theology, with Adam as the federal head of the covenant of works and Christ as the federal head of the covenant of grace, is antithetical to Calvin’s theology of union with Christ.23 On this point, it is worth noting that a key mediating figure between Calvin and the later development of Federal theology was Heidelberg theologian Caspar Olevian. Olevian not only has a strong acquaintance with the theology of Calvin (having lectured through the Institutes for three terms and published an Epitome of the Institutes),24 he gives the theology of union with Christ and the double grace a key place in his thought: the double grace becomes the “double benefit” which is the “substance” of the covenant of grace.25 Whether or not one agrees with the theological claims of Olevian, he certainly makes a substantial appropriation of Calvin’s doctrine on this point, and he uses the developing doctrine of the 20 See especially Richard A. Muller, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), chapters 4 – 5. 21 Charles Partee, The Theology of John Calvin (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 167. The material on Partee and Garcia, as well as the “Reformational” section below, include some material adapted from J. Todd Billings, “John Calvin’s Soteriology : Key Issues in Interpretation and Retrieval.” 22 On this point, see J. Todd Billings, “The Contemporary Reception of Luther and Calvin’s Doctrine of Union with Christ: Mapping a Biblical, Catholic, and Reformational Motif.” 23 Partee, Theology of Calvin, 17. 24 R. Scott Clark, Caspar Olevian and the Substance of the Covenant (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformed Heritage Books, 2008), 84. 25 Clark, Olevian, xviii-xx.

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covenant with creation and the covenant of grace as a way to preserve – rather than undermine – Calvin’s insights.26 Numerous other examples could be given which suggest that far from disappearing, a theology of union with Christ was actually more significant, more closely developed in late sixteenth and seventeenth century Reformed thought. As a theologian, Partee makes it clear that he does not think that these developments are theologically valuable; yet, in this period, union with Christ receives a great deal of doctrinal and pastoral attention and development, extending and deepening many of the theological concerns of both Calvin and his contemporaries. A common claim among the “Calvin against the Reformed” authors on union with Christ is that viewing justification in Calvin as a purely forensic act is problematic. For example, in her recent book, Calvin’s Ladder, Julie Canlis argues that “imputation is not necessarily forensic in character,” downplaying the significance of the courtroom metaphor, for “strictly speaking, ‘imputation’ involves the ‘gifted’ character of our righteousness, underscoring that it comes only from God and not from ourselves.”27 While Canlis avoids the extreme position of saying that there are no forensic aspects of justification in Calvin’s thought, she de-emphasizes the declarative, courtroom language, contrasting Calvin with Melanchthon’s “unsatisfactory” way of highlighting the “ ‘external’ elements” of imputation.28 Perhaps the most thoroughgoing reinterpretation of Calvin on union with Christ in recent years, however, has come from Mark Garcia. In Life in Christ, Garcia presents a proposal which, like Canlis, sharply separates Calvin from early Lutheran Reformers like Melanchthon. And in doing so, he ends up with a portrait which sets the early Calvinists against the early Lutheran on union with Christ – which is inevitably a “Calvin against the Calvinist” thesis as well.

Early Reformed against Early Lutherans Garcia’s work emerges as part of a group of modern interpreters, sometimes called the “Gaffin school,” who pose a sharp Lutheran-Reformed divide on justification: Luther, Melanchthon and early Lutherans tend to see justification as a soteriological high point, which then “causes” sanctification. Richard Gaffin contrasts Calvin with this position, saying that “the relative ‘ordo’ or priority of justification and sanctification is indifferent theologically” as justification and sanctification are received simultaneously.29 26 See Billings, “Calvin’s Theology of Union with Christ and the Double Grace and Its Early Reception;” Clark, Caspar Olevian, chapters 6 – 7. 27 Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 139 – 140. 28 Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 141. 29 Richard Gaffin, “Biblical Theology and the Westminster Standards,” in Westminster Theological Journal 65:2 (Fall 2003): 177.

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Mark Garcia, likewise, identifies the theology which sees the notion of justification as a cause leading to the fruits of sanctification as a distinctively Lutheran position, over and against Calvin. Melanchthon, in particular, is blamed for the early Lutheran position in which often “justification and salvation were equated,”30 construing sanctification as the “necessary effect” of justification.31 Indeed, Garcia’s contrast goes so far as to suggest that the Lutheran tendency to see sanctification as flowing from justification (as a cause) can undermine the forensic character of justification itself, for seeing justification as a cause makes it “transformative, and thus not a purely declarative and forensic, nature.”32 Of particular importance to Garcia’s argument is his interpretation of Calvin’s dispute with Osiander. Pointing to the commonality in language between Calvin’s debate with Gnesio-Lutherans about the sacraments, Garcia claims that Calvin uses the Osiander debate to attack not only upon GnesioLutheran sacramental theology, but also Lutheran soteriology. Although Osiander had been disowned by the Gnesio-Lutherans, Garcia thinks that Calvin is painting Osiander as “the only consistent Lutheran,” for if the Gnesio-Lutherans applied their sacramental christology consistently to soteriology, they would end up denying the forensic character of justification, just like Osiander.33 Historically, Garcia’s argument is one of inference based upon the parallels between Calvin’s soteriological debate with Osiander and his sacramental debate with the Lutherans. Yet, it is significant that Calvin did not make this connection explicit, or directly suggest in the Osiander dispute that he was attacking Gnesio-Lutheran soteriology. In fact, on this point, there are historical grounds for thinking that Calvin was doing quite the opposite: namely, defending his Reformational orthodoxy in his 1559 additions to the Institutes in attacking Osiander, and thus defending his commonality with Lutherans in their forensic doctrine of justification. Since Osiander died in 1552, a key part of Calvin’s 1559 “dispute” with Osiander is to distance himself from this disowned Lutheran who was known as heretical, since Calvin himself had been accused of being Osiandrian.34 But this sets a peculiar rhetorical context for what Garcia claims to take place: a below-the-surface, read30 Mark Garcia, Life in Christ: Union with Christ and Twofold Grace in Calvin’s Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2008), 240 – 242. 31 Garcia, Life in Christ, 206 – 7. 32 “Rooting sanctification in justification as its cause would also appear to forfeit a cardinal Reformation concern in justification, for it would attribute to justification a generative and ultimately transformative, and thus not a purely declarative and forensic, nature.” Garcia, Life in Christ, 264. This is a quite striking claim in light of the early Lutheran confessional insistence upon the forensic character of justification. 33 “Calvin evidently perceives in Osiander’s aberrant doctrine of justification the inevitable soteriological implications of a consistently-held Lutheran Christology and sacramentology.” Garcia, Life in Christ, 246. 34 Garcia, Life in Christ, 215.

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between-the-lines attack upon his accusers, rather than a more direct defense of his Reformational orthodoxy on the forensic character of justification. However one assesses Garcia’s specific interpretation, it is clear that his approach is dependent upon an account which sees a significant divergence between Lutherans versus the Reformed on soteriology, and union with Christ in particular. Ultimately, this leads Garcia to consider later Reformed theologians who see sanctification as fruit of justification to be more “Lutheran” than Reformed, thus setting up a Calvin versus the Reformed paradigm on this issue.

Broad Continuity between Early Lutherans and Early Reformed Theologians on the Soteriology of Union with Christ In contrast to these approaches, I advocate a historiographic approach which sees areas of broad continuity between aspects of late Medieval theology and the early Reformation – along with scholars such as Heiko Oberman and David Steinmetz. An extension of this thesis can be seen in the work of Richard Muller, who gives a complex portrait of continuity and yet development between first and second generation Reformers such as Luther and Calvin, and the later theologians who were key for late sixteenth and seventeenth century confessionalization. My point here is not to say that there were no significant differences between Luther and Calvin on any topic related to union with Christ: certainly, there were significant, confessional differences as the topic relates to sacramental theology – particularly in formulations of Christ’s presence at the Supper and the related issue of the communication of idioms in Christology. But on justification and sanctification as aspects of union with Christ, there was no open dispute between early Reformed and early Lutheran theologians – and the question is whether we should “read between the lines” to find such a dispute, as some scholars advocate. While there are differences in emphasis and development between Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin on justification and sanctification as aspects of union with Christ, none of them considered these to be “confessional” differences. To the contrary, Calvin subscribed to Melanchthon’s revised Augsburg Confession of 1540, a subscription which he never renounced: this confession made accommodations in its sacramental theology to the Reformed, but not in its formulations of justification and sanctification. Why? Because no concession was necessary. The main opponents of early Lutheran and Reformed accounts of union with Christ as it relates to justification and sanctification were Roman Catholics, on the one hand, and publicly condemned alternatives such as Osiander, on the other hand. This will be explored further below.

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What categories have explanatory power in properly describing Luther and Calvin’s theology of union with and participation in Christ? The three categories that I suggest are biblical, catholic, and Reformational: –biblical – Because Luther and Calvin are concerned to comment upon the language of scripture, it is necessarily the case that they use language of union with Christ, participation in Christ, justification, and divine indwelling. While this seems like an obvious point, it is actually a subtle one. For example, most of the sources for the Finnish School on Luther come from biblical commentary, lectures, or sermons. Likewise, for Calvin, the clearest statements of a theology of deification come in the course of his biblical commentaries.35 There are at least two important dynamics to this genre of biblical commentary (which, admittedly, is more sharply defined as a genre for Calvin than for Luther): 1) Part of biblical commentary involves the repetition, emphatic restatement, and clustering together of biblical images. The mere repetition and restatement of these images does not tie one to a particular theological ontology. Thus, when Luther repeats and gives emphatic restatement of biblical language of union with Christ, the Finnish school quickly assumes that Luther is speaking in directly ontological terms in these passages; but such biblical language needs to be interpreted in light of his overall theological corpus. 2) Biblical commentary for Luther and Calvin involves engagement with the history of exegesis. So, for example, on the issue of deification, Calvin affirms a “deification” interpretation of many (but not all) of the biblical passages traditionally associated with the teaching. While significant, that does not mean one can then postulate a metaphysically refined doctrine of deification and impose it upon the rest of his theology. As I will explore further below, both Luther and Calvin could affirm the basic teachings of a western formulation of “deification” as part of their biblical exegesis and as part of their continuity with catholic teaching, without threatening or downplaying the forensic character of their doctrine of justification. –catholic – Recognizing the “catholic” character of Luther and Calvin’s thought on union with Christ has several different dimensions: first, it recognizes the complex interplay of continuity with innovation and development. For example, though both Luther and Calvin have a polemic against the “schoolmen,” both have continuity at points in their theology of union with Christ with late Medieval scholastic theology. In particular, both Luther and Calvin draw upon the Augustinian strands of late medieval thought. Basic features of Augustine’s theology of union with Christ are taken for granted in Luther and Calvin – e. g. that union with Christ involves a form of sanctification in which the Spirit works effectually in a gradual process which anticipates an eschatological communion with God. These features of 35 See Carl Mosser, “The Greatest Possible Blessing: Calvin and Deification,” Scottish Journal of Theology 55, no. 1 (2002): 36 – 57.

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the Augustinian account are not rejected, but continued and developed in Luther and Calvin, along with their anti-Pelagian overtones. Moreover, as Heiko Oberman has pointed out, specific features of a theology of union with Christ – such as the “joyful exchange” in Luther on justification – were developed in light of the medieval mystic Johannes Tauler and Catholic Augustinian Johann von Staupitz.36 As the next section will explore, Reformation theologians have important differences from preceding accounts of justification. But these points of differences should not overshadow important areas of continuity with the broader catholic tradition. Did Luther and Calvin teach “deification” as part of their teaching on union with Christ? It depends upon how one defines “deification.” One may use the term to refer to a soteriology in which humans are assimilated into the divine, overcoming the ontological distinction between the Creator and creatures. Or, one may use the term to refer to a late Byzantine theology crystallized by Gregory Palamas, who used the essence-energy distinction to defend the Hesychast practice of the monks on Mt. Athos. If one defines “deification” in either of these senses, then we need to say that Luther and Calvin did not teach it. Both maintain the Creator-creature distinction in redemption, and neither were familiar with the essence-energies distinction from Palamas, or other late Byzantine writers. However, it is also possible to see deification as a soteriological motif which is present in both Latin and Greek patristic writings, and which has a western development in the Augustinian tradition in late patristic and medieval thought. In this form, deification is a motif which develops the common patristic claim that God became human so that humans could become god – a statement which emphasizes the symmetry of the incarnation and the ascent of salvation, even though the phrase that humans could “become god” would be glossed as a hyperbole. In this broadly Augustinian tradition, it is common to speak about salvation in terms of union with God – though the assumption is that the final end would involve a differentiated union of creature and Creator at the beatific vision. This union is made possible by the incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ, which then leads to a state in which Christians share in the privileges of Christ’s Sonship as adopted children, sharing in his communion with God.37 Luther’s early writings include some significant instances of this form of deification. As his thought develops and matures, it occurs less frequently, but it does not vanish. The Finnish school has rightly pointed to many of these instances, but has wrongly construed their significance. The Finnish School has tended to assume that deification fills a similar soteriological and 36 Heiko A. Oberman, Luther : Man Between God and the Devil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 183 – 5. 37 For an overview and assessment of the secondary literature on deification in the western tradition, see Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift, 53 – 61.

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ontological role for Luther as with Eastern Orthodoxy. Yet, deification is not a key part of Luther’s evangelical theology of justification by faith, but rather, simply part of Luther’s broader catholic soteriology – which is neither threatened, nor particularly developed by his theology of justification. As Paul Lehninger notes, deification occurs in Luther’s writings because “it is present in scripture, the Fathers, and in late medieval mysticism, with all of which Luther was thoroughly familiar. But it is not present to the same extent, or developed to the same degree, as his doctrines concerning justification, the person of Christ, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, etc.”38 Moreover, many of Luther’s most significant statements of deification occur in the course of biblical commentary, frequently referring back to common proof-texts for deification when he does so. For example, when Mannermaa points to Luther’s statement in the 1535 lectures on Galatians where “faith makes a [person] God” – it’s significant that Luther refers specifically to 2 Peter 1:4 at this point, with its reference to “participation in the divine nature,” for such a statement is not heterodox when understood in light of the 2 Peter 1:4 exegetical tradition. In a similar way, Calvin’s most explicit language of deification occurs in an exegetical context. For example, in commenting upon 2 Peter 1:4, Calvin uses the traditional language of deification: “the end of the gospel,” Calvin says, is “to render us eventually conformable to God, and, if we may so speak, to deify us.”39 For “we shall be partakers of divine and blessed immortality and glory, so as to be as it were one with God as far as our capacities will allow.”40 For both Luther and Calvin, an affirmation of the basic features of a western, broadly Augustinian tradition of deification was part of the biblical-exegetical and catholic dimensions of their thought; since that biblical and catholic theme relates to union with Christ, it was an aspect of their soteriology of union with Christ. Yet, it in no way threatened their Reformational concerns about justification explored below. –Reformational – Luther and then Calvin’s doctrine of justification by faith involved an attempt to correct the Augustinian tradition at crucial points over and against Roman Catholic, and eventually Anabaptist and Osiandrian alternatives. For Augustine, justification like sanctification referred to a gradual process of transformation, enabled by the infusion of love by the Spirit. This core assumption was called into question. Luther’s theology of justification underwent gradual, yet dramatic develop38 Paul David Lehninger, “Luther and Theosis: Deification in the Theology of Martin Luther” (PhD diss., Marquette University, 1999), 179. 39 John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries, Calvin Translation Society (CTS), on 2 Peter 1:4. CO 55: 446. 40 Calvin, Comm. 2 Peter 1:4, CTS. CO 55:446. For more on Calvin’s theology of deification – which maintains a Reformational approach to justification – see J. Todd Billings, “United to God through Christ: Calvin on the Question of Deification,” Harvard Theological Review 98:3 (July 2005): 315 – 34; Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift, 42 – 67.

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ment in the 1510s. In his lectures on Romans in 1515 – 16, Luther spoke about how justification comes “by faith alone (per solam fidem);”41 in these lectures, he started to distance himself from the theologies of justification of figures such as Gabriel Biel to which he was exposed as a student.42 By 1520, in The Freedom of the Christian, Luther taught that the righteousness which justifies believers is contained in Jesus Christ himself, and thus received by faith. As such, “justification” refers not to the gradual process of transformation by the Spirit, but to the change in God’s decision or judgment toward those who have accessed the righteousness of Jesus Christ by faith.43 For Luther, “justification” did not refer to the internal transformation of the believer, but a change in status before God because of the alien righteousness of Christ. Specifically, in The Freedom of the Christian, Luther describes how “through faith [Christ’s] victory has become ours and in that faith we also are conquerors,” such that the believer’s “sin is not [his] own, but Christ’s, and that all sin is swallowed up by the righteousness of Christ.”44 Luther used the image of marital union to describe this exchange – such that the bride and groom come to possess their property in common: “By the wedding ring of faith [Christ] shares in the sins, death, and pains of hell which are his bride’s. As a matter of fact, he makes them his own and acts as if they were his own and as if he himself had sinned; he suffered, died, and descended into hell that he might overcome them all.” Yet “the believing soul by means of the pledge of its faith is free in Christ, its bridegroom, free from all sins, secure against death and hell, and is endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of Christ its bridegroom.”45 In German law, there was a distinction between that which belongs to a person (proprietas) and that which is possessed by way of sharing, or exchange in marriage (possessio).46 With the analogy to Christ and the Christian, Christ’s righteousness is still properly his own – yet it comes to be “possessed” by the believer in her marriage to Christ. While Luther expressed his mature theology of justification in a variety of ways, he refused to allow justification to find its ground in the believer’s sanctified life rather than Christ’s external righteousness. Through his theology of the power of God’s word, noted above, God’s declarative word accomplishes what God intends – bringing death and new life to the sinner in 41 Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans (1515 – 16), LW 25:151.; WA 56:171. 42 On the development of Luther’s thought on this point, see David M. Whitford, Luther : A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2011), 58 – 63. 43 For an account of the development of Luther’s theology of justification between 1515 and 1520, along with the notional distinction of justification from sanctification in 1520, see Carl Trueman, “Simul peccator et justus: Martin Luther and Justification,” in Justification in Perspective, ed. Bruce L. McCormack (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 75 – 92. 44 Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” LW 31: 358, 357. WA 7:29. 45 “The Freedom of a Christian,” LW 31: 352. WA 7:25 – 26. 46 See Heiko A. Oberman, Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reformation Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 121. “The righteousness granted is not one’s property but one’s possession.”

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union with Christ, who has been declared righteous by God.47 God’s fullysufficient promise of forgiveness is not made effective by adding good works; it is effective because it is God’s word, received by faith. In light of the power of God’s word in justification, Luther claims that the Spirit’s renewing work, which is displayed in good works, is a consequence of justification by faith, not its ground or its precondition.48 Melanchthon provided development for a Reformational theology of justification by accenting the forensic (legal) character of justification and clarifying the notional distinction between justification (as a legal, forensic declaration of righteousness) and sanctification or regeneration (the internal work of the Spirit in believers). For Melanchthon, the distinction between these two is crucial – for if our own works (sanctification) become even a small part of the basis of justification, then Luther’s central insight is lost: that our justifying righteousness is contained in Jesus Christ alone, and not in ourselves, thus we are justified by grace, accessed by faith alone. While “good works must necessarily follow faith,”49 those works come as part of the Spirit’s redemptive process, not as the ground for God’s judgment of believers as righteous in God’s sight. Consistent with this, when Melanchthon responds to Osiander’s attack on forensic justification, he asserts that “we clearly affirm the presence or indwelling of God in the reborn;”50 yet the merit of Christ is the ground of justification, not divine indwelling. Even as Melanchthon expands the way in which he connects justification to the Spirit’s work of indwelling in his later work, he continues to insist on a forensic account of justification. While Melanchthon has his own characteristic ways of formulating justification, historical evidence suggests that Luther himself saw these as “alternate ways of expressing the same doctrine” rather than competing formulations.51 47 For more on the way in which Luther’s theology of God’s word undergirds his theology of justification, see Kolb, Martin Luther, 127 – 9; Kolb, Genius of Luther’s Theology, 153 – 9; for more on the way in which God’s declarative word leads to the death and life of the sinner in Christ for Luther, see Gerhard O. Forde, Justification by Faith – A Matter of Life and Death (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 34 – 36, 48 – 51. As Forde notes, the external declaration of justification is not made obsolete by the new life of sanctification for Luther, but “the unconditional justification is the perpetual fountain, the constant source of whatever ‘righteousness’ we may acquire.” For “the imputed, unconditional righteousness is not a temporary loan, or a legal fiction, but a power, indeed ‘the power of God unto salvation.’ It attacks sin as a total state and will not relent until it has reduced all sin to nothing” (51). 48 For more on the way in which Luther’s theology of sanctification is ordered as a consequence of justification by faith alone, see Whitford, Luther, 63 – 67. 49 Philip Melanchthon, Apology of the Augsburg Confession, in The Book of Concord, 237. 50 Philip Melanchthon, “Confutation of Osiander (Sept 1555),” in Documents from the History of Lutheranism 1517 – 1750, ed. Eric Lund (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 208 (CR 8.582). 51 Quotation from Carl Trueman, whose comment is based upon an important letter from Melanchthon to Johannes Brenz, dated May 12, 1531. WA Br 6: 98 – 101. See Carl Trueman, “Is the Finnish Line a New Beginning?” Westminster Theological Journal 65:2 (Fall 2003): 240 – 1. In addition to the general point that Luther enthusiastically endorsed Melanchthon’s formulation of justification in early Lutheran confessional documents, in a postscript to this letter by

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Calvin articulated a similar notion of justification, over and against Rome. Consider Calvin’s definition of justification in 1543, retained without revision through the final 1559 edition of the Institutes. “Therefore, we explain justification simply as the acceptance with which God receives us into his favor as righteous men. And we say that it consists in the remission of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.”52 In fact, in quite precise terms, this definition of justification would be prohibited by Trent in 1547 – and yet Calvin retains this definition after Trent.53 While in Calvin’s Antidote to Trent he insisted that justification is inseparable from sanctification,54 he continued to insist upon describing justification as “the gratuitous acceptance of God” grounded wholly in the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.55 As a general way of relating justification to sanctification, Calvin described justification along with sanctification as the “double grace” received in union with Christ by the Spirit’s power.56 The gifts are inseparable, yet distinct. Key to Calvin’s concern in maintaining the distinction between justification and sanctification are concerns shared with Luther and Melanchthon concerning the forensic character of justification.57 How can this confessional continuity be explained? To put it briefly, second-generation Reformers like Calvin were not seeking innovation on the

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Melanchthon, Luther describes his view as one that has different points of emphasis, but shares Melanchthon’s overall position. Timothy Wengert notes that the letter contains the characteristic language of both Luther and Melanchthon on justification; yet, the commonalities in the letter express “Luther and Melanchthon’s commitment to a single-minded, forensic understanding of justification.” See Wengert, Lutherjahrbuch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 68 – 70. On Luther’s strong endorsement of Melanchthon’s confessional formulations of justification, see Heinz Scheible, “Philip Melanchthon,” in The Reformation Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Early Modern Period, ed. Carter Lindberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 74 – 75. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 3:11:2. Trent condemns those for whom justification is “either by the sole imputation of the righteousness of Christ or by the sole remission of sins, to the exclusion of grace and charity … or that the grace by which we are justified is only the goodwill of God.” Translation from Alister McGrath, Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 192. “It is not to be denied, however, that the two things, Justification and Sanctification, are constantly conjoined and cohere; but from this it is erroneously inferred that they are one and the same.” John Calvin, “Antidote to Trent” (sixth session), trans. Henry Beveridge, (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1851; reprint Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958), in Tracts and Treatises in Defense of the Reformed Faith, vol. 3, p. 115 – 116. CO 7:448. Tracts and Treatises, vol. 3, p. 116. CO 7:448. “Christ was given to us by God’s generosity, to be grasped and possessed by us in faith. By partaking of him, we principally receive a double grace: namely, that being reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a Judge a gracious Father ; and secondly, that sanctified by Christ’s spirit we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life.” Institutes 3:11:1. See J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift, 53 – 61, 106 – 116.

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confessional doctrine of justification (in contrast to the view of the Gaffin school). This would be counter to Calvin’s interest in the unity of the evangelical movement on all of the points that were possible. Thus, we should not be surprised that not only Luther and Melanchthon speak of sanctification flowing from justification, but Calvin also can speak of “the prior grace” of justification as the “cause” of good works.58 Moreover, not just these three reformers, but as John Fesko has documented, Vermigli, Zanchi and authors in early Reformed Orthodoxy also speak of sanctification flowing from justification in this same way.59 Such an idea is not distinctively “Lutheran,” but it’s part of a broadly shared feature of an early Reformational theology of union with Christ.

Conclusion: From the Sandbox to the Beach For the task of contemporary theologians reading sources from the Reformation, the central problem with the disjunctive historiographies surveyed in Part 1 is that it leaves theologians building sandcastles in a sandbox, rather than enjoying a holiday on a wide and expansive beach. Reading Luther and Calvin in ways which isolate them from their contemporaries and immediate heirs, these approaches not only give an account of their theology which is domesticated by modern categories; they also miss the beach – the wide and expansive varieties and developments of this catholic and Reformational rendering of union with Christ. A primary motive for many of these theologians is to respond to the charge in “extrinsicism” in the soteriology of Reformed and Lutheran confessions: in this criticism, justification by faith is said to be a “cold, forensic doctrine,” antithetical to relational ways of understanding a saving union with Christ, such as marriage with Christ, adoption, or participation in Christ.60 In response, these theologians take refuge in a form of primitivism: since the confessional tradition is apparently cold and impersonal, perhaps one can find an answer to this “extrinsicism” by returning to Luther and Calvin, whose genius was misunderstood by their contemporaries and immediate heirs. Thus, “pure” Lutheran or Reformed doctrine is the “primitive,” pre-confessional form; indeed, the purest Reformational doctrine is the anti-confessional form. 58 Calvin, Institutes, 3:14:21. 59 J. V. Fesko, “Metaphysics and Justification in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Reformed Theology,” Calvin Theological Journal 46 (2011): 29 – 47. 60 While there are many examples of this criticism in contemporary theology, for an account which shows the way in which this criticism helps to frame the project of the Finnish school, see: Christopher J. Maloy, Engrafted into Christ: A Critique of the Joint Declaration (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 145 – 167.

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Yet, this represents a missed opportunity : to read sixteenth and seventeenth century theologians in a way which calls into question the modern critique of forensicism itself. Both the reformers and the later confessional tradition show great facility in providing theological coherence and insight about the way in which forensic and transformational images of salvation can be held together, without threatening the integrity of each. Thus, Luther’s development of marriage-with-Christ imagery and Calvin’s development of the adoption metaphor for union with Christ need not be seen as two covert “protests” against a forensic confessional doctrine, but rather, testimony to the promise of such a doctrine: that it can provide a way to hold together both legal and relational motifs for union with Christ. But it becomes even clearer when one takes a look down the beach. The later confessional tradition develops multifaceted theologies of union with Christ with relational imagery, while clearly maintaining a forensic doctrine of justification. For example, consider the bridal and marriage imagery for union with Christ. This image is much more prominent in Luther than Calvin, so a disjunctive historiography might assume that it is left to Lutherans to develop this “distinctive” image. But that is not the case. In the Netherlands, the “further Reformation” utilized the bridal imagery in developing a theology of union with Christ which drew heavily upon Bernard of Clairvaux, giving a broad-ranging theology of union with God which takes Reformation concerns about justification with great seriousness.61 Among Puritan theologians such as John Owen, there is a similar retrieval of bridal imagery, where emphatic language of union and divine indwelling is cogently combined with forensic imagery about atonement and justification.62 In the Holy Fairs of Scottish Presbyterianism, the bridal imagery in a theology of union with Christ was central to the thriving of popular summer festivals centered around preaching and the Lord’s Supper.63 None of these developments required the downplaying of a confessional, forensic doctrine of justification in order to incorporate this relational imagery in a lively and multifaceted way. Rather, they are examples which enter into the wide and spacious place of holding together broadly catholic and confessionally Reformational concerns in the development of a biblical theology of union with Christ. I encourage contemporary theologians to leave behind the primitivist task of recovering the “genius” of Luther or Calvin over and against 61 See the account of the reception of Bernard and the bridal imagery in Arie de Reuver, Sweet Communion: Trajectories of Spirituality from the Middle Ages through the Further Reformation, trans. James A. De Jong (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007). 62 See Owen’s book, Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (1657), esp. Part 2 in The Works of John Owen, vol. 10. 63 See Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 158 – 168; For an examination which focuses upon American instances of Holy Fairs, highlighting the use of Song of Songs in eucharistic spirituality, see Kimberly Bracken Long, The Eucharistic Theology of American Holy Fairs (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011).

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their contemporaries and heirs, and to explore this wider, expansive terrain which has confessional continuity on union with Christ, yet a wide variety of theological and pastoral developments as well. It is time to leave the sandbox behind and embark upon a holiday at the beach!

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Theresa F. Latini

The Church as Mother : The Theme of Union in Christ in Calvin’s and Luther’s Ecclesiology

The contemporary retrieval of the theme of union in Christ has generated creative and compelling interpretations of Martin Luther’s and John Calvin’s soteriology. As Todd Billings suggests, this theological conversation “opens up a world of texts, sources, and insights,” and it enables broad confessional continuity since this theme is “biblical, catholic, and Reformational.”1 Yet the concept of union with Christ is incomplete without the corresponding and related concept of communion with the church. For union and communion in Christ (i. e., koinonia) is multi-dimensional for Luther and Calvin. It entails communion with God and fellow members of the church. This multi-dimensional koinonia is particularly (though not exclusively) evident in Luther’s and Calvin’s depictions of the church as mother. Though frequently neglected in contemporary Lutheran and Reformed discourse, this image, or analogy, for the church highlights the theme of union in Christ in Luther’s and Calvin’s ecclesiology. Thus throughout this essay, I will explore the image of church as mother in Luther and Calvin in order (1) to demonstrate the multidimensional nature of the church’s union and communion in Christ; (2) to explicate the life-giving and nurturing character of the church’s koinonia; and, (3) to suggest that the ecclesia mater is a biblical, catholic, and Reformational construal of the church. I will conclude with a brief discussion of the relevance of this image for our contemporary ecclesial context.

Church as Mother : Koinonia with the Church through Christ Neither Luther nor Calvin systematized the image of church as mother in their writings, in large part, because it is an accepted image (i. e., catholic) and a scriptural image (i. e., biblical). At points, they combine the maternal image of the church with the somatic image (body of Christ) and nuptial image (bride of Christ). When taken together with these other ecclesial images, it becomes apparent that the church as mother points to a multi-dimensional union and 1 J. Todd Billings, “The Contemporary Reception of Luther and Calvin’s Doctrine of Union with Christ: Mapping a Biblical, Catholic, and Reformational Motif”.

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communion (i. e., koinonia) with Christ, through Christ with God the Father, and through Christ with the church. The maternal analogy, for Luther and Calvin, highlights the essential nature of our communion with Christ’s members. There is no spiritual birth outside of the church; there is no spiritual sustenance outside the church; there is no spiritual growth outside the church. In his commentary on Galatians 4:26, Luther writes that the church has been divinely established here on earth to be mother of us all. From the womb of the church we have been born and are being born everyday. “Therefore it is necessary that this mother of ours, like the birth she gives, be on earth among men; yet she gives birth in the spirit, by the ministry of the Word and of the sacraments, not physically.”2 Likewise Calvin opens book 4 of the Institutes with the maternal image of the church, connecting it explicitly to his own interpretation of the same scripture: I shall start, then, with the church, into whose bosom God is pleased to gather his sons, not only that they may be nourished by her help and ministry as long as they are infants and children but also that they may be guided by her motherly care until they mature and at last reach the goal of faith. “For what God has joined together, it is not lawful to put asunder” [Mark 10:9], so that, for those to whom he is Father the church may also be Mother. And this was so not only under the law but also after Christ’s coming, as Paul testifies when he teaches that we are the children of the new and heavenly Jerusalem [Gal. 4:26].3

In this text, Calvin blends the nuptial and maternal images of the church in his reference to Jesus’ teaching on marriage in the gospel of Mark. As husband and wife are bound to one another in this life by a “sacred knot,” so believers are bound to the motherly care of the church. In his commentary on Mark, Calvin refers to Christ as head of the body and castigates the Roman church for violently separating the head from the body in the Lord’s Supper. The bread and wine in the Eucharist, the Head (Christ) and his body (the church), and the children of God and their mother (the church): each member of these pairs is inextricable from the other. Bread and wine, the Head and the body, children and their mother belong together because they actually exist in an inseparable union. Wilhem Niesel testifies to the organic connection between these three images of the church in Calvin’s theology : “The thought of the Body of Christ, of the communion of saints, is necessarily bound up with the view that the church is the mother of believers.” For as we are drawn into the bosom of the Church, “we become one body with Christ, and by our union with Him are drawn into a fellowship with each other.”4 The same could be said for Luther. 2 LW 26, 440. 3 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1016. 4 Wilhelm Niesel, The Theology of John Calvin (Philadephia: Westminster Press, 1956), 188.

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He freely adjoins the somatic and nuptial metaphors of the church to his depiction of the ecclesia mater. By interweaving these three ecclesial images, he accentuates the multidimensional koinonia of the church. “We cannot allow our dearest mother, the Christian Church, to be defamed with this lie, with this charge that she has canceled and changed the words and teaching of her dear Bridegroom, for she is subject unto him (says St. Paul) [I Cor. 12:12 – 27; Eph 4:16; Col. 2:19], yes, even one body with him.”5 Calvin claims that the title “mother” teaches us how necessary it is to know the church. “Let us learn even from the simple title ‘mother’ how useful, indeed how necessary it is that we should know her. For there is no other way to enter into life unless this mother conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast, and lastly, unless she keep us under her care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like the angles.”6 Here Calvin’s use of the verb “to know” harkens back to his discussion of the two-fold knowledge of God and humanity in the opening lines of the Institutes: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”7 Knowledge of God and knowledge of humanity are intimately connected; you cannot have one without the other, for believers exist in Christ. There is a priority, an ordering to this knowledge. Without knowledge of God, there is no knowledge of self. Insofar as scripture is necessary for knowledge of God, the church is also necessary. (Of course, it is conversely true for Calvin that the church’s identity is grounded upon scripture.) While this knowledge of the church may be anticipated in earlier parts of the Institutes, it becomes explicit in book 4. To know Christ is to know the church and vice versa. Calvin thus implies that knowledge of self, knowledge of the church, and knowledge of God are inseparable; and that true knowledge of self must include knowledge of the church. This knowledge is self-involving. It is not mere mental assent. As Dowey writes, it “determines the existence of the knower.”8 It is intimate, participatory, and multi-dimensional precisely because of koinonia. In his soteriology, Calvin expresses the motif of believers’ union with Christ through a constellation of related terms: adoption, indwelling, engrafting, and participation.9 These phrases also appear in his use of the image of church as mother. “[The Lord] indirectly asserts that this generation shall be spiritual through the grace of adoption…out of nations who differed so widely from each other both in customs and in language, he might bring children to the Church, who should be united in the same faith, as brethren meet in their 5 6 7 8

LW 34, 73. Calvin, Institutes, trans. Battles, 1016; emphasis mine. Calvin, Institutes, trans. Battles, 35. Edward A. Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 26. 9 J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 93.

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mother’s bosom.”10 And again, “[The Lord speaks] of the whole Church, which he compares to a woman. The same metaphor has already been sometimes employed by him; for God chiefly aims at gathering us into one body, that we may have in it a testimony of our adoption, and may acknowledge him to be father, and may be nourished in the womb of the Church as our mother.”11 For Calvin, to be in Christ is to be adopted by God the Father and incorporated into Christ. To be incorporated into Christ is to be grafted into his body. As a result of this union and communion with Christ, the ecclesia mater is a necessary context for the justification and sanctification of believers. There is no union with Christ without simultaneous union and communion with the church. In fact, separation from the church is a denial of God and Christ. For our communion with the church ensures our communion with God. “Such is the effect of union with the Church, that it retains us in the fellowship of God.”12 In short, for Luther and Calvin, the Christian’s connection to the church is a matter of spiritual life or death, analogous to the way in which an infant’s life or death is dependent upon her mother. Just as a child does not exist without her mother, so believers cannot live spiritually apart from the church. “[I]t is always fatally dangerous to be separated from the Church.”13 Separation is disastrous because connection to the church is not primarily psychological or sociological but rather ontological. Our justification and sanctification are aspects of our ontological union with Christ’s body, i. e., the humanity of Christ in heaven and his ecclesial body on earth.

Church as Mother : The Nature of our Koinonia in the Church The image of church as mother illuminates the nature of our koinonia in and with the church through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. As such, it functions pastorally for Luther and Calvin, encouraging particular actions and relational patterns in the church. First, the maternal image points toward the indispensable role of the church in the spiritual sustenance of God’s adopted children. As an infant is nourished at her mother’s breast, so believers are nourished in the bosom of the church. Spiritual food is extended to God’s adopted children “through the hand of the Church.” This food is Jesus Christ served in the form of Word and sacrament, specifically the Lord’s Supper. Again regeneration, as a matter of faith in Christ, does not exist apart from the church. “They cannot be God’s 10 John Calvin. Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, vol. 4 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948), 38 – 9. 11 Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah, 421 – 22. 12 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. John Allen (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, 1909), 273. 13 Calvin, Institutes, trans. Allen, 274.

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disciples who refuse to be taught in the Church.”14 We do not grow in knowledge of God outside of the church. Nor does we progress in faith as individual members of some sort of voluntary association. Instead, we grow in and with the ecclesial body. “Our true completeness and perfection consist in our being united in the one body of Christ.” Together we grow up into the Truth, Jesus Christ. “That man is mistaken who desires his own separate growth.”15 The ecclesia mater is the context for and in a derivative sense the means of the justification and sanctification of all believers – i. e., as a consequence of its union with Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit at work in its midst. So central is the church that Calvin writes, “Away from her bosom one cannot hope for any forgiveness of sins or any salvation.”16 Luther claims the same: “In this Christian Church, wherever it exits, is to be found the forgiveness of sins, i. e., a kingdom of grace and of true pardon. For in it are found the gospel, baptism, and the sacrament of the altar, in which the forgiveness of sins is offered, obtained, and received. Moreover, Christ and his Spirit and God are there. Outside this Christian Church there is no salvation or forgiveness of sins, but everlasting death and damnation.”17 It is important to note that in texts like these, Luther and Calvin suggest some type of modified mediatorial role of the church in the economy of salvation, an issue addressed later in this essay. Second, the maternal image points to the role of the church in teaching and guiding believers. Koinonia in the church entails spiritual guidance and discipline. “For there is no other way to enter into life unless this mother conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast, and lastly, unless she keep us under her care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like the angels [Matt. 22:30]. Our weakness does not allow us to be dismissed from her school until we have been pupils all our lives.” Calvin argues that gentle firmness (analogous to that of a natural physical mother) ought to be the church’s disposition in instructing, exhorting, and correcting its members. Such discipline always aims for repentance and restoration of each person to the ecclesia mater as well as congregational health and holiness. Calvin trusts that, through church discipline, the Spirit cultivates godliness and “changes the worst men into the best, engrafts the alien, and adopts the stranger into the church.”18 Luther similarly identifies discipline as a dimension of the ministry of ecclesia mater. For example, he supports the use of the ban in order to rescue wayward Christians from the power of the devil. It is part of the church’s 14 Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah, 147. 15 John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), 281, 288. 16 Calvin, Institutes, trans. Battles, 1016. 17 LW 37, 368. 18 Calvin, Institutes, trans. Battles, 1016, 1237.

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maternal care that she banishes such persons from fellowship with the communion of saints. This outward banishing awakens the believer to the fact that he has deprived himself of (i. e., banished himself from) true communion with Christ and the church. “For his mother, the holy church, waits to show her dear son this unbearable damage of sin, by way of the punishment of the ban, and thereby wants to bring him back from the devil to God again.” Like Calvin, ecclesial discipline for Luther has the same corrective intent as that of a natural physical mother who chastises her children when they go astray. Yet earthly mothers are not ultimately the prototypes for ecclesial discipline. Christ himself is. For “the power of the ban is given by Christ to the holy mother, the Christian church, that is, to the congregation of all Christians. Therefore we should honor our dear mother, the church and Christ in this matter.”19 Third, and related to spiritual guidance and discipline, the church as mother bestows the remedy for human “weakness” and “infirmity.” We are cured of our sinfulness as we participate in the life of Christ in the ecclesia mater. Forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation characterize the koinonia between the Christian and the church. The church’s role is analogous to the merciful care given to an infant by its mother. Just as a mother continually forgives her child, so the church administers the forgiveness of sins again and again through the preaching of the gospel and the celebration of the sacraments. “For if the Lord had not foreseen that his people would be continually burdened with diseases of sin, he would never have established this remedy”—i. e., the word of promise daily proclaimed in the church.20 Consequently, the ecclesia mater provides security for those who are prone to wander from truth and goodness (i. e., all of us). “We are certain that, while we remain within the bosom of the church, the truth will always abide with us. . . . So powerful is participation in the church that it keeps us in the society of God.”21 Given the human proclivity to sin, we are encouraged to abide by the church’s ministry of guidance throughout our temporal existence. As Calvin writes, “We must continue under her instruction and discipline to the end of our lives.”22 Fourth, the image of church as mother points to the tender and solicitous care of koinonia in the church. Luther illustrates this beautifully in his commentary on Isaiah 54, where he describes the church as comforting anxious souls. “You have the church for a mother and God for a father,” and for this reason, “there will be nothing to frighten you. The fears and terrors of the ungodly ought not trouble you but edify you, and they will not draw near to you.”23 God gathers his children into the bosom of the church where they find 19 20 21 22 23

LW 39, 10, 16. Calvin, Institutes, trans. Battles, 1038. Calvin, Institutes, trans. Battles, 1015. Calvin, Institutes, trans. Allen, 273. LW 17, 245.

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solace in times of personal distress and bountiful sustenance – sources of refreshment and delight for her nursing babes. Fifth, the maternal image, especially when combined with the somatic image, reveals the interdependence and dynamic relatedness among the church’s members. Christians need one another. This neediness is not merely a matter of external acts of compassion, support, exhortation, and the sharing of spiritual gifts in worship and service of God and neighbor. It is this; but it is more. Their very life with God is bound up with each other. Koinonia with God through Christ is inseparable from their koinonia with each other such that they experience the effects of regeneration in, through, with, and in spite of fellow believers. “The saints are united in the fellowship of Christ on this condition, that whatever benefits God confers upon them, they should mutually communicate to each other.”24 Their mutual union with God their Father and the church their mother propels them, much like natural siblings, to “share their benefits with one another.”25 This koinonia of the church is God’s remedy for both sin and suffering, for alienation from God and communal fragmentation. “He again lays down the end of our happiness as consisting in unity, and justly ; for the ruin of the human race is, that, having been alienated from God, it is also broken and scattered in itself. The restoration of it, therefore, on the contrary, consists in its being properly united in one body.”26 Sixth, the maternal image suggests that familial love, expressed in patient forbearance, sustains the human bonds of relationship in the church. “Without mutual love, the health of the body cannot be maintained. Through the members, as canals, is conveyed from the head all that is necessary for the nourishment of the body. While this connection is upheld, the body is alive and healthy.”27 While the source of this love is Christ, the head of the body and the fount of all goodness, believers practice their koinonia with Christ and one another through the forgiveness of sins, what Luther called “the mutual conversation and consolation of brethren.”28 Mutual consolation and forbearance preserve the unity of the church, “which otherwise would be broken a hundred times in a day.”29 In this regard, the mother’s behavior toward her children is mirrored in the behavior of her children amongst themselves. They bear patiently with one another’s weakness, idiosyncrasies, and outright sin. Humility inculcates meekness and gentleness, which in turn

24 Calvin, Institutes, trans. Allen, 272. 25 Calvin, Institutes, trans. Battles, 1015. 26 John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), 183. 27 Calvin, Commentary on Ephesians, 288. 28 Martin Luther, “Smalcald Articles,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy Lull, William Russell (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005), 355. 29 Calvin, Commentary on Ephesians, 267.

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lead to mutual forbearance. This forbearance, grounded in the longsuffering of God, dissipates dissension and division in the church.30 In the here-and-now, however, the unity of the mater ecclesia is not yet visible; it is not yet a fully manifest reality. Koinonia “belongs to the realm of faith.”31 As sometimes occurs in natural families, so the church frequently appears more fragmented than unified. Thus koinonia must be accepted by faith. It is an eschatological reality, founded upon the salvific work of Christ in the past and guaranteed through the Spirit’s gift of faith in the present. In the midst of turmoil and dissension, members of the church look to Christ who is not divided and in whom all things hold together. Fifth, the maternal image signifies, for both Luther and Calvin, the continued generativity of the church in the penultimate realm. In his commentary on Galatians 4, Luther writes, “No matter how barren and forsaken, how weak and desolate the Church may seem, she alone is really fruitful before God. By the Gospel she procreates an infinite number of children that are free heirs of everlasting life.”32 Likewise, for Calvin, the church is the womb of the world, the birthplace of the new humanity : “the womb of the Church shall not be limited to any corner of the world but shall be extended as far and wide as there shall be space throughout the whole world.”33 Though she appears as a barren widow, and therefore “totally ruined,” God promises to restore the church by causing her to flourish in the world. Hope in this promise engenders joy in the children of God, who know by faith that “…the wretched and miserable condition of the Church shall be changed into a happy and prosperous condition.”34 In summation, union with Christ entails simultaneous communion within the church. The image of church as mother suggests that this multidimensional union and communion is not simply a metaphorical reality but a very practical and pastoral reality. Our koinonia with Christ and through Christ with one another is the context of our spiritual birth. Enveloped in the bosom of the church, we are sustained and nourished through Word and sacrament. We receive wisdom and guidance; we are empowered to forgive and be reconciled to one another. In the ecclesia mater, we receive tender and comforting care. We are upheld with hope by the promise of generativity in the face of sin and death.

30 31 32 33 34

Calvin, Commentary on Ephesians, 267 – 68. Calvin, Institutes, trans. Battles, 1015. LW 26, 441. Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah, 279. Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah, 425.

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Church as Mother : Biblical, Catholic, Reformational Biblical As with the motif of union in Christ, Luther and Calvin employ the image of church as mother because and as it emerges from their engagement with the biblical text. New Testament scholar, Beverly Gaventa, persuasively documents the significance of maternal language in Pauline writings. While she does not make an argument for the maternity of the church per se, her thorough exegesis and interpretation of numerous Pauline passages reveals the maternal nature of the apostolic office specifically and church leadership generally.35 It is not surprising then that Luther, for whom the Apostle Paul was so central, refers to the church as mother in order to illuminate the nature of the church’s ministry. In fact, the maternal image is found most frequently in his sermons (e. g., the Sermon on the Ban, Sermon on the Catechism) and biblical commentaries (Is. 54; Hosea 2; John 3; Gal. 4), though it also is present in his large catechism, the 95 Theses, and numerous official letters and responses to edicts. Likewise Calvin weaves the maternal image of the church into numerous passages in his commentaries, most significantly : (1) Eph. 4:12; (2) Gal. 4:24 – 26; (3) 1 Cor. 3:2; (4) Ps. 27; and, (5) Isaiah 49, 54, 60, 62, 66. Pauline language associated with mothering, i. e., birthing, feeding, nursing, and carrying in the womb, spills over into his discussion of the sacraments in the Institutes and in his treatise on the Lord’s Supper. Calvin also refers to God as Mother when warranted by the biblical text. In his discussion of Psalm 27, Calvin indicates that the love of God resembles yet exceeds the love of both mother and father : “should affection be extinguished in the earth, God would fulfill the duty of both father and mother to his people.” In his commentary on Isaiah, God is a mother who lavishly nurtures, holds, and plays with her infant. Calvin writes: In order to express his very strong affection, he chose to liken himself to a mother, and calls them not merely ‘children’, but the fruit of the womb, towards which there is usually a warmer affection. What amazing affection does a mother feel toward her offspring, which cherishes in her bosom, suckles on her breast, and watches over with tender care, so that she passes sleepless nights, wears herself out by continued anxiety, and forgets herself!36

Calvin further draws upon maternal imagery in reference to Christ. As infants drink their mothers’ milk, so believers feed on Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Divine life is channeled to the church and her members as they eat the flesh of 35 Beverly Gaventa, Our Mother Saint Paul (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007). 36 Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah, 30 – 1.

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the Incarnate Word.37 This eating is not merely a believing but rather a true partaking of Christ by faith through the created elements of bread and wine. In eating, we take Christ in and become united to his substance. We participate, through incorporation, in his humanity. He dwells in us “that we might possess him entirely.”38 “For Christ is at once milk to babes, and strong meat to those that are of full age, the same truth of the gospel is administered to both, but so as to suit their capacity…for milk is nourishment…that is suitable and useful for bringing up children until they are farther advanced.”39 Though he does not specifically designate Christ as mother, Calvin’s language suggests that the gracious condescension of God to us in Christ, and in and through the church, is analogous to the mother’s condescension to the child, i. e., the full and loving adaptation to her child’s needs. Catholic Luther’s and Calvin’s references to the church as mother reflect the catholic character of their thought. At times, they employ the image without expanding upon it. It is for them an inherited and accepted way of describing the church. This is particularly evident when Luther addresses the religious and political leaders of his day. In a letter to Pope Leo, he simply refers to the church as “our mother,”40 and in a letter to Justin Juror, he encourages the emperor to listen and learn from “Mother Church” and her teachers.41 At other times, Luther and Calvin use the maternal image to illuminate the nature of the church’s life and ministry. They frequently do so in ways consistent with their theological forebears. The image of church as mother flourished in theological writings during the second half of the second century. The phrase occurs in Polycarp’s “Letter to the Philippians,” the “Shepherd of Hermas,” the “Second Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians,” the Fifth and Sixth Books of Esdras, and in the works of Irenaeus, Origen, and Tertullian.42 A brief examination of a few of these works shows clearly the catholicity of Luther’s and Calvin’s references to the ecclesia mater.43 37 B.A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitutde: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1993), 132. 38 Calvin, “Short Treatise on the Holy Supper of our Lord Jesus Christ,” in John Calvin: Selections from His Writings ed. John Dillenberger (US: American Academy of Religion, 1975), 514. 39 John Calvin, Commentary on the Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948), 122. 40 LW 48, 102. 41 LW 50, 248. 42 Joseph C. Plumpe, Mater Ecclesia: An Inquiry into the Concept of the Church as Mother in Early Christianity (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1943). 43 Here I am following a similar line of argument as Billings in his work on the theme of union in

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Irenaeus’ use of the maternal image of the church highlights the church’s existence in koinonia with Christ through the Holy Spirit. He writes, “For this gift of God has been entrusted to the Church, as breath was to man when first created, for this purpose, that all who are her members and receive it, may receive life. In her is deposited the communion with Christ, that is, the Holy Spirit.” Therefore willful separation from the church is a departure from God. Those who “remain aloof from the Church,” Irenaeus warns, “those who do not partake of the Spirit, are neither nourished by the Mother’s breasts, nor do they receive that limpid fountain which issues from the body of Christ.” By “shunning the faith of the Church, they are “rejecting the Spirit.”44 For Irenaeus, believers commune with God through the ministry of the ecclesia mater. In the here-and-now, their growth in faith depends upon their koinonia with her.45 Tertullian relates the image of church as mother to baptism. In his catechemunal liturgy, he exhorts converts: “when you come up from that most sacred bath of your new birth, and in the house of your Mother for the first time, open your hands (to pray) with your brethren” to the Father.46 Elsewhere he suggests that mother church gives Christians “birth and life through the water of baptism, presignified by the blood and water that flowed from Christ’s side . . .”47 Interestingly, Tertullian adds the word, Domina, to Mater Ecclesia – Domina Mater Ecclesia. In so doing, he confers nobility upon mother church and inspires reverence for her. The church’s dignity for Tertullian, as for Luther and Calvin, flows from her union with Christ, a union that grants her a mediatorial role in the economy of salvation. Joseph Plumpe writes, “The high dignity of the church, her exalted position as DominaEcclesia, is owing to her intimate relationship with Christ as the source of true life, of her position, as Karl Adam has expressed it, ‘of standing . . . , not outside the relationship of God and the faithful, but within it as a mediatrix.’”48 In the third century, Cyprian refers to the church as mother more than thirty times in the discourses he wrote during his bishopric at Carthage. He coins the phrase, “That one can have God as Father, he must first have the Church as his Mother.”49 More than a millennium later, Luther and Calvin

44 45 46 47 48 49

Christ in Calvin’s soteriology. He writes, “Calvin’s development of the biblical themes of union, adoption, engrafting, and participation give a strongly catholic character to his theology of redemption. Relying upon interpretations of John and Paul as well as appropriations of Irenaeus and Augustine, Calvin teaches that the final end and goal for humanity is a Trinitarian union of humanity with God…Yet, this union with Christ is impossible without a participation in the Spirit, who unites the believer to Christ. Indeed, through the Spirit we become participants in God” (Calvin, p. 51). Irenaeus, Against Heresies, quoted in Plumpe, Mater Ecclesia, 42; italics in original. Plumpe, Mater Ecclesia, 43 – 4. Tertullian, De Baptismo, quoted in Plumpe, 51. Tertullian, De Anima, quoted in Plumpe, 57. Plumpe, Mater Ecclesia, 47. Cyprian, “On the Unity of the Church,” quoted in Plumpe, 90.

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repeat and adapt this phrase throughout their writings. In opening book 4 of the Institutes, Calvin writes, “so that, for those to whom he is Father the church may also be Mother.”50 In his treatise on the Lord’s Supper, Luther writes, “the fanatics strangle Christ my Lord, and God the Father and my mother the church too . . .”51 Luther creatively modifies the phrase to chastise the church as well. When commenting on Hosea 2, he writes, “you, my mother, are not the wife of God my father.”52 Wickedness and unfaithfulness in the church contradict the mothering to which it is ordained. As discussed below, this points to a more Reformational use of the image of church as mother. In the fourth and fifth centuries, Augustine continued this tradition, referring to church as mother in Confessions, City of God, Expositions on the Psalms and his sermons. He follows the catechemunal practice of Tertullian by welcoming new believers into the ecclesia mater. “Behold the womb of Mother Church: see how she groans and is in travail to bring you forth and guide you on into the light of faith.”53 Later in the fifth century, the phrase became commonly attached to the Roman church, so the universal church was mater ecclesia and the Roman see was “the mother church of the universal Church.”54

Reformational While for Calvin and Luther there is no spiritual birth, life, or growth outside of koinonia with the church, their depiction of the church as mother has a Reformational character. Reformational themes modify the role of Rome in the ecclesia mater and the sense in which the church can be considered a mediator of salvation. First, in Luther and Calvin, Christ and the church are related according to Chalcedonian logic – “inseparable unity,” “indissoluble differentiation,” and “indestructible order.”55 Since I have already demonstrated the inseparability of koinonia with Christ and koinonia with the church, I will simply say this: God does not will to be God without the church. “The one effect of the work of Christ is that there should be a church.”56 So much so that this union impacts the very existence of God. “This is the highest honour of the Church, that, until 50 51 52 53 54 55

Calvin, Institutes, trans. Battles, 1012. LW 37, 25. LW 18, 8. Augustine, Sermon 216; quoted in Braaten, Mother Church, 3. Plumpe, Mater Ecclesia, 128; italics in original. George Hunsinger has identified the Chalcedonian pattern in Karl Barth’s theology. He persuasively argues that this is the basic pattern of all koinonia relations. See Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 148 – 85. Here I am using the pattern as a heuristic device to illuminate aspects of Luther and Calvin’s theology. 56 Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude, 189.

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He is united to us, the Son of God reckons himself in some measure imperfect.”57 The indissoluble differentiation between Christ and the church consists in the fact that for Luther and Calvin justification is alien and external to the church. Justification is obtained by Christ and received by faith. The Incarnation and death of the Son of God have atoned for human sin. Christ’s righteousness, his obedience as a human, enables him to be our substitute. This great exchange occurs in an ontological union with Christ, accomplished by the mysterious work of the Spirit, and received through faith, the medium of our incorporation. While the church is a spiritual communion of persons participating in the life of Christ and through Christ in one another and in the Father, it nevertheless remains creature, in need of justification that comes from outside itself. Justification does not belong to the church in and of itself. It never becomes a possession of the church. Rather the church is continually dependent, moment-to-moment, upon God’s saving action. This brings us to the asymmetrical ordering of Christ and the church. Christ has logical precedence over the church. “The Church flowed from Christ’s side on the cross.”58 The church is dependent upon and subordinate to Christ as a body is to its head. Her life-giving sustenance comes only from God. Her inner life is not a matter of her own effort but rather an outcome of her union with God. Her maternal care is derivative of God’s divine parenthood. This indissoluble differentiation and indestructible ordering of the relationship between Christ and the church is apparent when Calvin draws upon maternal language to describe Christ. Believers feed on Christ (not mother church) in the Lord’s Supper. In eating, we take in Christ (not mother church) and become united to God and each other through union with Christ. We participate, through incorporation, in Christ’s humanity. He is our spiritual nourishment and sustenance; he is the origin of our faith and the cause of our godliness. Luther also differentiates and orders the role of the Christ and the church in the economy of salvation in his commentary on John 3:6. He writes, “But if you want salvation, you need different parents, who will bring you to heaven. This Christ does. By means of Baptism and the Word, He places you and your Christianity into the lap of our dear mother, the Christian church. This He accomplished through His suffering and death that by virtue of His death and blood we might live eternally.”59 Christ is the one who nourishes believers, and the church participates in this spiritual nourishment as it administers the Lord’s Supper. Again, its motherhood is derivative of Christ’s. Second, the image of church as mother acquires a Reformational character 57 Calvin, Commentary on Ephesians, 218. 58 Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah, 134. 59 LW 22, 291; emphasis mine.

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in Luther and Calvin in their construal of the creatureliness of the church. (This also exemplifies the differentiation and ordering of the relationship between Christ and the church.) Acknowledging the church as mother calls Christians to honor the church, submit to the church’s correction, and maintain the purity of the church’s doctrine. However, the church is simul justus et peccator. Thus Luther famously refers to the church as whore, harlot, and hussy.60 This stands in stark contrast to the concept of the church as “Virgin Mother,” an image present as early as the second century. Clement, for example, refers to the church as a virgin because “her teaching is pure, having no admixture of false doctrine, she has not been defiled or violated by heresy.”61 As creature, the ecclesia mater takes form in visible structures and practices. It is the gathering of God’s adopted children. Participation in the church and in Christ has a necessary outward, visible dimension. One participates in the church by faith through the hearing of the Word and receiving of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Yet the church cannot be reduced to or considered synonymous with its institutional structure or practices. Mother church is not synonymous with Rome, Wittenberg, or Geneva. Luther writes, “I therefore conclude that the Christian church is not bound to any one city, person, or time. And even though the unlearned mob –the pope with his cardinals, bishops, priests, and monks – does not want to understand this or let it be true, it is certainly true for me and for everyone else.”62 The apparent church may not be the real church. In the apparent church, the law births spiritual children into slavery. In the real church, the gospel births spiritual children into freedom. This brings us to the third sense in which the motif of union with Christ in Luther’s and Calvin’s ecclesiology has a Reformational character. We are born spiritually in the ecclesia mater through the Word of God. As Luther puts it, the church is “our mother who gives birth to you and bears you through the Word.”63 The church is mother of the children of promise, of the word of faith, who live not under the tyranny of the law but under the grace of justification. Not only does the church give birth to children through the Word, but also the church itself is born of the Word. “[T]he church owes its birth to the Word, is nourished, aided and strengthened by it. It is obvious that it cannot be without the Word. If it is without the Word, it ceases to be the church.”64 The creative power of the preached Word heals existential anxiety and dread by establishing a meaningful order of individual and corporate life. It creates truth in the inward parts. It mortifies and vivifies by the power of the Holy Spirit. The word 60 61 62 63 64

See LW 18, 8; LW 44, 87; LW 41, 205.1. Plumpe, Mater Ecclesia, 67 – 8. LW 39, 219. LW 51, 166. LW 40, 37.

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of the cross proclaimed in the ecclesia mater by the power of the Spirit affirms that Christ has put death to death and given us new life, a life of union and communion with God and each other. In this regard, retrieval of the Reformational image of church as mother might full a lacuna in the Finnish school’s interpretation of Luther as pointed out by Billings in his essay in this volume: the place of God’s Word as an agent that creates and transforms human existence at the ontological level.

The Church as Mother : An Image for Our Time The image of church as mother holds significant promise for developing a constructive ecclesiology for the contemporary North American context. This ecclesiology would have broad ecumenical ties and an appeal to women’s leadership and relational styles of ministry. It also would cast a vision for the ways that the church’s ontological participation in Christ actually is the source of its ministry of healing and reconciliation in the world.

Ecumenical Promise In order to move toward full communion with the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, Carl Braaten has called upon Protestants, Lutherans especially, to “rediscover the idea and experience of the church as mother that characterized the fathers of the ancient church.”65 Keying off the image of church as mother in Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, he sets forth a lengthy proposal for ecumenical communion, including an acceptance of the historic episcopacy and papal authority.66 In his argument, the ecclesia mater functions more as a rhetorical device than an illumination of the inner life of the church. (Nowhere does he give a close reading and interpretation of this metaphor.) This image points to the union and communion of all God’s children with each other. It therefore rules out the very divisions that exist in the worldwide church today, leading to the clear conclusion that disunity contradicts our koinonia with one another and with Christ. Given this presupposition, broad ecumenical dialogue about the nature of the ecclesia mater based on a close reading of historical and theological sources might yield significant implications for engaging in common ministry in the world. Such engagement would necessarily respect the integrity and 65 Carl E. Braaten, “Confessional Integrity in Ecumenical Dialogue,” Lutheran Forum (Summer 1996): 24. 66 Carl E. Braaten, Mother Church: Ecclesiology and Ecumenism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998).

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freedom of all members of the church. And it would need to wrestle with the thorny issue of the church as mediator of salvation. Overall the image of church as mother in Roman Catholic and Orthodox theology conveys a strong sense of the church as mediator of salvation. The church is mother-mediator. As we have seen in Calvin and Luther, the image of church as mother reveals that church has at least some sort of mediatorial role in the economy of salvation. Along these lines, David Yeago argues that, for Luther, the church is mediator of salvation just as it is the recipient of salvation – contra individualistic, existential readings of Luther’s soteriology. He writes, “individuals relate to Christ only by way of a relationship to Christ’s holy people.” Yeago bolsters his point by turning to Luther’s use of the metaphor of church as mother. He writes, “In the first place, he has a singular assembly (gemeine) in the world, which is the mother which begets and bears every Christian through the word, which he reveals and urges, so that hearts are illumined and kindled, so that they grasp it, accept it, hang on it, and abide with it.” According to Yeago’s interpretation of Luther, justification and incorporation into Christ and therefore Christ’s body are one and the same event explicated from differing angles of vision. “Justification is the incorporation into the communal priesthood of the church, into the unity of the Body of Christ, with its Head. By faith the Spirit brings us into a corporate union and communion with Christ, and so with one another.”67 If we accept the fact that, contrary to North American individualistic postures toward the church, the church is essential to salvation and functions in some sense as a mediator of salvation, then we must discern the nature of that mediation. Though outside the bounds of this article, a more thorough consideration of the ecclesia mater motif holds promise for answering these questions in ecumenical theology : “Is a person’s relation to Christ mediated by his or relationship to the church, or is his or her relation to the church mediated by his or her relation to Christ? That is a false alternative, but what significance is there in the fact that often when Lutherans speak of Christ, Roman Catholics speak of the church? Have Lutherans stressed too much the difference between Christ and the church and Roman Catholics stressed too much their identity? Do Lutherans speak with too much ease about the sinful church and Catholics speak with too much ease about the spotless holy church?”68 Feminist Retrieval The image of the church as mother has largely been forgotten (if not lost) in contemporary, mainline Protestant ecclesiology. It receives scant attention in 67 David S. Yeago, “A Christian, Holy People: Martin Luther on Salvation and the Church,” Modern Theology 13 (January 1997): 115, 116. 68 Braaten, Mother Church, 22.

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Bonhoeffer, Barth, and Moltmann and no mention in the most significant books within the missional church and emerging church movements. At least at the popular level, it is common in some Lutheran circles to hear rhetoric about the penetrating word of God that splits bone from marrow; yet it is quite uncommon to hear rhetoric about the milk of the sacrament flowing from the breast of Christ to nurture God’s children. What aspects of the church’s identity are forfeited when we drop this feminine imagery for the church? How might a contemporary retrieval of these images encourage and support women’s leadership in the church today? First, and most plainly stated, the image of church as mother resonates with the embodied experience of women. Birthing, nursing, and tending to sick children constitute the daily existence of the vast majority of women. These very ordinary, messy and frequently tiresome tasks are spiritually elevated when they become an analogy for the ministry of the church, on the one hand, and the ministry of God, on the other. The domestic cannot be divorced from the sacred (at least not without an internal contradiction) when the church is conceived as ecclesia mater and Christ is received in the milk of Word and sacrament. Second, the image of church as mother reminds us of the dialectic of labor and joy inherent in discipleship, that is, in the work of spiritual formation. Amy Plantinga Pauw notes that Calvin uses maternal imagery for the church to emphasize its ministry of forming believers into Christ-likeness in the hereand-now.69 The strenuous, imperfect, and sin-stained work of the church will cease when God is all-in-all. The mother will be transformed into bride, the holy people of God who worship in spirit and truth for all eternity. Until then formation involves the work of spiritual guidance, discipline, education, mutual consolation, and forbearance. The cultivation of godliness, as Calvin puts it, takes a lifetime of patience, prayer, mutual edification, and ongoing reformation by the Word of God in its written, oral, and sacramental forms. Formation, like mothering, is not for the faint of heart; in fact, it may lead to broken-heartedness just as it also may lead to great delight. Third, the image of church as mother encourages solidarity with the world. According to Pauw, this ecclesial image fosters humility and generosity. It reminds the church of its spiritual neediness and its members of their dependence upon the nourishment, support, correction, and wisdom of the gathered community of faith. In this sense, the church exists in solidarity with other communities, who themselves need God’s gracious remedy for their spiritual ills. The church is like them in its need. Pauw writes, “A credible portrait of the mother church must depict it as vulnerable and fallible, as well as loving and wise. . . . A contemporary reaffirmation of the church as a loving, 69 Amy Plantinga Pauw, “The Church as Mother and Bride in the Reformed Tradition: Challenge and Promise,” in Many Voices, One God, ed. Walter Brueggemann and George W. Stroup (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 123.

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though not infallible, mother opens the way for recognizing both the church’s sinfulness and its sacramental significance. It allows Christians to acknowledge themselves as weak and in need of spiritual nourishment.”70 Of course, retrieving the image of church as mother entails certain dangers. Cyprian’s phrase – “That one can have God as Father, he must first have the Church as his Mother” – could reinforce the identification of God with masculinity and the church with femininity. Such dualism has plagued church history to the detriment of women’s well-being. Emphasizing this image could reinforce gender stereotypes based on cultural ideals of mothering that have led to the suppression of women’s needs and voice. Those with abusive or absent mothers might completely disconnect from construing the church in these terms. In such cases, the motherhood of Christ ought to be the larger conceptual framework for interpreting both the church’s ministry and natural physical mothering, such that abusive behavior by the latter would be judged the former, i. e., by the love of God. Moreover if the old adage, “abuse does not bar use,” holds true, then the benefits of retrieving the image of church as mother, mentioned above and below, and carefully employing it alongside other ecclesial images outweigh these risks.

Missional Impulse I have argued elsewhere that the contemporary North Americans are experiencing a crisis of community.71 People are uprooted regularly, displaced from kin and community, deluged by a nonstop stream of incoming information, and find themselves harried, anxious, and distrustful of religious authority and institutions. Retrieving the image of church as mother might inspire a ministry of compassionate nurture and care in this context. In this way, the church might participate in God’s mission of healing and restoration. To put it another way, the image of church as mother suggests that a life of koinonia (i. e., union and communion with Christ, through Christ with God, and through Christ with one another) is God’s answer to the crisis of community. In the bosom of the church, the beleaguered find comfort, acceptance, and freedom from contemporary forms of works righteousness, which leave them desperate and striving for more – more achievement, more status, more purpose. They receive God’s grace proclaimed in Word and sacrament and are freed to live as children of the promise. They can retreat from frantic frenzy and enter into Sabbath rest. In the ecclesia mater, the lonely find companionship and a kind of belonging that exceeds the limits of time and space. For our union and 70 Amy Plantinga Pauw, “The Church as Mother and Bride,” 134. 71 See Theresa F. Latini, The Church and the Crisis of Community: A Practical Theology of SmallGroup Ministry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011).

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communion in Christ includes believers from all times and places. We are connected ontologically to those near and far. We belong to them not on the basis of kinship, ethnicity, nationality or any other social affiliation; we belong to them on their basis of our mutual incorporation into Christ. We are bound to one another in ways that relativize biology. Those who are in Christ are our sisters and brothers. We are born from the same spiritual womb; we feed at the same spiritual breasts; and we are sustained, nurtured, and consoled by our fellowship with one another through the power of the Spirit. Finally, the image of church as mother reminds us that we need the church and her members as much or more than an infant needs his mother. We may be tempted to leave the church when it appears more divisive than whole, when its leaders fail to address the most pressing questions of our time, and when its hypocrisy leaves us embarrassed and ashamed. The church may act like a harlot but she’s still our mother. Thus any choice to believe in God without belonging to God’s people is precarious. Such a choice contradicts our koinonia in Christ and severs our connection to God’s ordained means of grace. When we choose to patiently bear with one another, receiving the Lord’s Supper and hearing once again the word of the cross, we are upheld by hope in Christ in whom and through whom our life in koinonia will one day be fully manifest.

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Christine Helmer

United And Divided: Luther and Calvin in Modern Protestant Theology

1. Introduction Early modern studies has dramatically changed over the past decade. The time of narrow specialization is over. No longer is Luther viewed as sole hero of the Protestant Reformation, standing alone speaking truth to power ; no longer is Calvin to be studied in isolation from the movements with which he was intimately involved and from his relationships with other theologians and church people. The scholarly trend is moving decisively away from focusing on slivers of sixteenth-century time. Scholars are now thinking about the sixteenth century in terms of complex relationships, multi-braided reciprocal influences, and comparative analyses. Luther’s university reforms are considered, for example, in relation to Melanchthon’s pedagogical innovations, as Timothy J. Wengert has shown, and Luther’s interpretation of the messianic Psalms can be compared and contrasted to Calvin’s biblical study, as G. Sujin Pak has demonstrated.1 The Protestant Reformers are to be viewed in complicated relations to each other, to the broader sweep of religious and political movements of the time, to socio-cultural factors of publication dissemination, the history of the book, early modern capitalism, and gender studies, as well as to geographical and linguistic differences. These new perspectives refigure a shift in method. In order to bring two independent figures into conversation with each other, the conceptual lens must be positioned to include both in a single view, in order to be able to apprehend similarities and differences in relation to each other. When diverse objects are thus brought into a common frame, the scholarly perspective can see the reformation as a set of common features. No longer is the Reformation to be distinctly viewed as an agglomeration of more or less independent local reformations. The pluralizing of historical movements, such as reformations, Enlightenments, modernities, has taught us that local histories do better justice to empirical diversity than monolithic narratives that flatten difference in the 1 Timothy J. Wengert, Philip Melanchthon Speaker of the Reformation: Wittenberg’s Other Reformer, Variorum Collected Studies Series CS963 (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2010); G. Sujin Pak, Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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interest of power. Yet in the process, the whole ends up being deconstructed. The attention to detail has yielded singular stories about distinct cities, particular populations, and diverse movements. But are there such things that can now be claimed as the Reformation, the Enlightenment, or modernity? If the Reformation is to be identified among the reformations, then a new interest in its distinctiveness that cannot be collapsed into the fifteenth century or fused with the seventeenth century must be cultivated. If the Reformation is to be appreciated as a singular movement, contributing new ideas with profound consequences for the Western modern, then “Reformation” must be recovered as the unity amid local variations. The discipline of intellectual history is best suited to the task of grasping the common features of a unique movement while tracking historical and intellectual change over time and in different geographies. Although intellectual history was marginalized for a while by historical methods that favored the lived realities of everyday life, this discipline may be called upon for a new and unifying perspective on the historical phenomenon at issue here. An intellectual-historical approach to the Reformation can detect structural similarities among different conversationalists and can open a transnational and interdisciplinary discussion about topics that on a local level appear empirically incompatible. For example, the differences in gender, geography, language, and ecclesial contextualization between Teresa of Avila and Martin Luther are obvious. Yet when the two theologians are brought together under the overarching concept of the sixteenth-century European religious reformations, similarities in their most urgent questions and concerns emerge. Both were committed to a renewal in the life of faith; both insisted on maximal divine agency in salvation. The comparative exercise can also elucidate difference at a deeper, less obvious level. Teresa is convinced of the beauty and integrity of the innermost part of the soul, while Luther claims the perniciousness of sin. The task of intellectual history is to reclaim the Reformation as a unity of distinctive theological features, which are inevitably always up for questioning and discussion. With this comparative gaze, new knowledge concerning similarities, differences, identifiable features, and even surprising results can be produced. The Reformation is distinctive because it is an epoch poised between medieval and modern. The working out of its distinctiveness is a lesson in comparison: how does this epoch diverge from the old, how does it herald the new? The comparison can be extended to include our own time. What do we see if we bring the key issues of the contemporary situation into comparative relation with the age of reform? Are there analogues between new technologies of informational dissemination, for example, Gutenberg’s printing press to the internet? Can the Reformation serve as resource for inspiring us in the present to courageously stand up to an age in which rhetoric determines truth? Does the theological direction guided by the Reformation require adjustment, correction, revision?

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The comparison between Reformation and contemporary theology can also illuminate just how differently Luther and Calvin have been mustered in support of a distinct agenda. This is how I am working in this essay. I aim to show how Luther and Calvin have been both united and divided in modern Protestant theology, with particular consequences. The specific appeal to the Reformers, whether united or divided, shows how the Reformation is construed by distinct contemporary theological interests. Protestant theology continues to see its second defining moment in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation; its first moment is the original biblical witness as common to Christianity. By looking at how modern theology engages the sixteenth century, one sees both the significance attributed to the Reformation as a singular force and the modern theological interests at stake in giving the Reformation sole credit for shaping the Protestant tradition. What emerges through this comparison is a very different take on the relationship between Luther and Calvin. I begin with the birth of modern Protestant theology in the dogmatic theology2 of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834). Schleiermacher’s work of constructing a system of theology for the Protestant churches in the early nineteenth century brought Luther’s and Calvin’s theologies together for an ecumenical Protestant agenda. I explore Schleiermacher’s terms of unity, which make use of a hermeneutical and critical approach to historical sources in the formulation of a theology representative of his day. I then look at the division between Luther and Calvin that characterizes twentieth-century theological rhetoric about the Reformation. What distinguishes Luther and Calvin in contemporary polemics is allegedly the historical difference in genre: Luther is labeled the “occasional writer” while Calvin is considered the “systematician.” On closer look, the identifications disclose a division between Lutheran and Reformed theology concerning a central topic in Protestant thought, the “word of God.” I historically trace this division to the Barmen Declaration of 1934 to show how genre is intimately related to different construals of the theology of the word. The essay ends with a recommendation to look today at the Reformation for its provocative insights.

2. United by Schleiermacher Berlin in the early nineteenth century was a divided city. The dominant population was Lutheran; the King of Prussia was Reformed. In the interests of political and ecclesial unity, King Frederick Wilhelm III pursued an 2 Schleiermacher explicitly opts for the term “dogmatic theology,” rather than for the more common “systematic theology” in order to underline his (controversial) historical approach to the field.

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ecumenical agenda. He appointed Reformed preacher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher as court preacher and pastor of Trinity Church in Berlin. Trinity Church had been created as a dual Lutheran/Reformed congregation by the Soldier-King Frederick Wilhelm I in 1739, with services held separately for each confession.3 It was the first church in Berlin to ratify Frederick III’s union of both confessions into the Prussian Unierte (United) Church on March 31, 1822.4 The King, who was also considered chief bishop of Prussia by virtue of being ruler of a Protestant territory, took liturgical matters into his own hands. He began in the summer of 1821 to work on a common liturgy for both Lutheran and Reformed churches and insisted on its implementation. Schleiermacher and other clerics were not happy with the interventions of the king into church affairs. Schleiermacher since his Speeches from 1799 insisted on an appropriate division between church and state. Schleiermacher responded to the King’s liturgy by circulating anonymous letters of protest and by holding fast to the original liturgy of Trinity Church.5 To this day, the Church of Berlin-Brandenburg, like the Church of Hessen-Nassau is a United (Unierte) Church. Its ministers are ordained on the confessional documents of both Lutheran and Reformed churches. Although Schleiermacher was a bold critic of the king’s ecclesial interventions, he agreed with the king in promoting an ecumenical profile for the Protestant churches. His own theological system, which he called a “dogmatic theology,” was constructed as “the knowledge of doctrine that now has currency in the Evangelical church.”6 By orienting the focus of dogmatic theology to the “present church” Schleiermacher was not only addressing the historically contingent situation of the union between Lutheran and Reformed Churches in Prussia; he was also committed to the theologically visionary task of conceiving doctrine as the selection and systematization of linguistic expressions that articulate an underlying Christian consciousness. For Schleiermacher, the fundamental distinction between two states of consciousness, sin and grace, identified the common consciousness for both Lutherans and Reformed Christians. Hence Schleiermacher could design a theological system for both confessions based on this common twofold consciousness.7 Schleiermacher’s dogmatic theology indicated an ecumenical orientation in 3 Kurt Nowak, Schleiermacher: Werk und Wirkung, Uni-Taschenbücher für Wissenschaft 2215 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 209. 4 Catherine L. Kelsey, Thinking About Christ with Schleiermacher (Louisville: Westminster, 2003), 27; Terrence Tice, Schleiermacher, Abingdon Pillars of Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 2006), 15. 5 Nowak, Schleiermacher, 385 – 90. 6 Friedrich Schleiermacher gives this definition of dogmatic theology in his Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study (1811/1830), 3rd edn., trans. Terrence N. Tice (Louisville: Westminster, 2011), § 195 (p. 72). 7 The two parts of Part II of The Christian Faith are labeled “Consciousness of Sin” and “Consciousness of Grace.” Part I considers the unity of consciousness as “immediate consciousness.” See the table of contents on pp. xv-xviii of Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith (1830/31), ed. H. R. MacKintosh and J. S. Stewart, trans. D. M. Baillie et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999).

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the singular “Kirche” of the original German title: Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der Evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhang dargestellt. But Schleiermacher’s ecumenical intent would be obscured for the Anglo-Saxon world by the truncated English title of the work The Christian Faith, by the fact that Schleiermacher was known until the early twentieth century in the AngloSaxon world as primarily a New Testament scholar, not as a systematic theologian. Schleiermacher defines Protestant consciousness, or the religious-psychological state common to all Protestants in the Introduction to The Christian Faith. The Introduction (§§ 1 – 31) is a methodological progression in constructing the concept of Protestant Christianity that Schleiermacher will then take as the structural basis for his dogmatic system (§§ 32 – 172). One of the tasks in the Introduction that Schleiermacher deems necessary is to set up the method of dogmatic theology. In this second part of the Introduction, devoted to “Method,” Schleiermacher focuses on the specific construction of the church of the present time. Although he has already specified the subject matter of the church in terms of his category of piety in the first part of the Introduction, under “Definition,” Schleiermacher requires a second conceptual move in determining Protestant consciousness in order to specify the particular church that is the subject of his theological inquiry. The basic opposition Schleiermacher uses to construct the present church of Western Christianity is the opposition of Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. For Schleiermacher, the Western schism is of utmost relevance to dogmatic theology because it informs the basic conceptual justification for his own approach to defining the church in historical terms as the subject matter of theology. The opposition Schleiermacher sets up gives the justification for why and how he appeals to historical sources in the construction of his dogmatic theology. The opposition between the two Western churches justifies Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical and critical operations because Schleiermacher establishes his own historical method on the basis of the opposition. Schleiermacher articulates the distinction as follows: “the former [Protestantism] makes the individual’s relation to the Church dependent on his relation to Christ, while the latter [Catholicism] contrariwise makes the individual’s relation to Christ dependent on his relation to the Church.”8 The Christ-church relation is available in the history of Christianity in two opposing alternatives: Protestantism prioritizes Christ without denying the coterminousness of the Christ-church relation, while Catholicism prioritizes the church without denying the same Christ-church coterminousness that Protestantism too affirms. The possibility of their twofold arrangement is grounded in an original unity. Schleiermacher deems the origin of Christianity to be constituted by the Christ-community relationship. With the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth, the 8 Schleiermacher, Christian Faith § 24, proposition (p. 103).

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original unity between Christ and his work of redemption was established. Jesus’ work is inseparable from the creation of a community by speech and action.9 Protestant Christianity arose as a corrective to late medieval Catholicism, and is characterized in its entirety in terms of the subordination of church to Christ. This systematic principle of coherence identifies Christ’s primacy over the church that must be reflected in each Protestant doctrine. While each Protestant doctrine must construe its particular content— whether providence, sin, or grace—in view of Christ’s priority in the Christchurch relation, Protestant doctrines are formulated by a particular method that is derived from the content. For Schleiermacher, Christ’s relation to the church provides both the underlying continuity to the history of Christianity as well as constant impetus for change and development for its history. The historicity of Christianity is its content; the method for interpreting and constructing Christianity must be historical. What Schleiermacher does is to take the Protestant Christian characterization of Christ who constitutes the church as a historical determination, and then develop a historiography that approaches its history in the terms in which it is originally established by the Christ-church relation. How Luther and Calvin will be negotiated in Schleiermacher’s historiography is precisely on these historical terms. Both a historical and a conceptual orientation characterize Schleiermacher’s appeal to Luther and Calvin. The intricate methodological weaving between both attests to Schleiermacher’s commitment to producing knowledge about the church’s past in order to better understand how the past has shaped the present. Luther and Calvin appear as two figures among a host of “authorities” in the historical sections of The Christian Faith, the paragraphs, texts, and footnotes in which Schleiermacher negotiates discussions of doctrine from the past. The discussion concerns both the hermeneutical or interpretative aspect—understanding what a figure from the past meant by a particular locution—and a critical aspect—a discussion of the helpfulness that the locution has for the contemporary articulation of doctrine. The usual way in which Schleiermacher’s “revisionist historiography” has been understood—and with it the modern theological treatments of historical authorities and doctrines—has been to evaluate its “intelligibility.”10 According to the 9 Schleiermacher defines the essence of Christianity in the proposition of § 11 of The Christian Faith (p. 52): “Christianity is a monotheistic faith… and is essentially distinguished from other such faiths by the fact that in it everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.” 10 This account characterizes both liberal and postliberal positions on the biblical and historical work of modern theologians. For a liberal theologian, see Gordon D. Kaufmann, Jesus and Creativity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 15; for a postliberal theologian, see George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville: Westminster, 1984), 77: “One way to escape from this dilemma is to argue that the (from the modern perspective) absurd doctrines of the past never were important in themselves, but were only expressive symbolizations of deeper experiences and orientations that ought now to be articulated in other and more contemporary ways.”

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standards of modern reason, ancient doctrines are not understandable in the terms of modern reason. A translation exercise must take place in order to render them in the modern cultural idiom. Luther and Calvin, as historically captive to the sixteenth century, require translation so that their message can be rendered intelligible to modern ears. The “intelligibility” designation does not, however, seem to capture the full complexity of Schleiermacher’s engagement with the church’s history. In order to better understand how Schleiermacher appeals to authorities, like Luther and Calvin, and to church confessions, like the Augsburg Confession and the Helvetic Confessions, it is necessary to consider Schleiermacher’s presupposition concerning the way theological claims are actually based on a particular understanding of language’s relation to reality.11 For Schleiermacher, the reality to which all particular linguistic articulations by church authorities refer is the central experience of Christ. The reality of individual experiences of Christ is creative of linguistic articulations even as individuals borrow from ordinary language usages in order to point to the extraordinary experience of the living Christ. As linguistic articulations are rendered by the authoritative theologians and church confessions, they take on the particular “scientific” valence of the times. Linguistic articulations inevitably employ philosophically and culturally available terminology and meanings, particularly if such articulations are represented by academic theologians and ecclesially powerful persons. The goal of “hermeneutics” is to interpret the linguistic (or written) articulations as seriously and correctly in the terms representing their particular historical location. The task of interpretation is “the art of understanding particularly the written discourse of another person correctly,”12 meaning to understand the ways in which particular linguistic relations are related to the reality that precipitated their articulation. Interpretation entails a first step in understanding the past in its own terms. The second step in the hermeneutical process is “criticism,” which on the surface can be confused with the standard “intelligibility” claim. On closer look, Schleiermacher’s critical approach appreciates both the historicity of the past and its applicability to the present by virtue of the presupposition of the language-reality relationship. There is an oscillation between past and present—a comparing, a measuring, a contrasting—in order to better understand the experience of Christ as it is articulated in different linguistic 11 I integrate various texts from Schleiermacher—for example, Hermeneutics and Criticism, the Lectures on Dialectic, the Life of Jesus—in order to explore the language-reality relation as the philosophical and theological presuppositions for Schleiermacher’s engagement with historical sources. For a detailed reconstruction of this topic see Christine Helmer, “Schleiermacher,” 31 – 57, in The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology, ed. David Fergusson (Edinburgh: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 12 This is Schleiermacher’s definition of hermeneutics in Hermeneutics and Criticism And Other Writings, trans. Andrew Bowie, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3.

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articulations. Terminology can be obscure, incoherent, or one-sided, as it is mustered by its authors to describe the transformative experience that Christ effects. Its conceptuality can ascribe to an older metaphysic that can also create inconsistency. The critical aspect of the interpretative process requires movement between present and past in such a way as to grasp the languagereality relationship of both past and present. It is thus that adequacy (or inadequacy) of the linguistic articulation can be better understood as it captures (or does not capture) the reality that it communicates. From the perspective of later linguistic articulations, the past can be judged as to its capacity to communicate to the present a clear view of its reality, but this later critical perspective is simultaneously the result of a process of oscillation between past and present. Present is dependent on past even as it invokes novelty. The present is not privileged as the standard by which past is judged. Rather the present is given the opportunity for novelty in relation to the past. As such, the present construes the language-reality relationship in a way that introduces novelty into linguistic articulation, as was the case in the past. The present in its effort to articulate particular experiences of Christ in relationship to the past can say something more than the past, and in so doing, can correct for a one-sided view inherited from the past. The possibility of novelty also risks the introduction of error into linguistic articulations, blind spots in the language-reality relationship that are part and parcel of any human attempt at communication. Schleiermacher’s critical metric then is an effort to adjudicate the language-reality relationship of the past in relation to making the language-reality relationship for the present more clearly represent its referent. The exercise in oscillation is not a simple translation of the past into terms intelligible to the present, and losing something in translation. Rather, Schleiermacher’s method of hermeneutics and criticism and contemporary theological formulation negotiates between the languagereality relationship of the past in relation to the present. A classic example of Schleiermacher’s engagement with church history on the grounds of his systematic theology is his problematization of the term “nature” in traditional Christian formulations of Christology. Schleiermacher sums up his difficulty with “nature” as a term to describe the metaphysical makeup of the person of Christ from Chalcedon in this way : “Hence all results of the endeavour to achieve a living presentation of the unity of the divine nature and the human in Christ, ever since it was tied down to this expression, have always vacillated between the opposite errors…”13 He points to the obvious equivocation: “nature” when used to describe divinity evokes a set of attributes that are contradictory to the attributes evoked when nature is used to point to humanity. On his reading of church history, Schleiermacher deems that an equivocation has crept into the terminology as it refers to two different 13 Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, § 96,1 (p. 394).

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objects that must be corrected. The equivocation becomes a confusion when the term “nature” that is etymologically taken from finite existence is applied to divinity. Such application cannot proceed without gross anthropomorphism.14 What Schleiermacher does attempt to understand is the reality intended by the equivocation by returning to the Johannine terminology of “indwelling” in order then to render the meaning of this term in the conceptuality of his theological system: the relation of divine causality to Jesus of Nazareth. By this move Schleiermacher takes what he understands to be the meaning of the creedal and sixteenth-century language about “nature” as the specialness of Jesus’ relation to God, and articulate it in the representative terms of the theology of his own day. He resolves the equivocation by eliminating “nature” from Christology and reconceptualizing the meaning of “indwelling” in terms of the divine causality as it informs the person of Jesus of Nazareth. I have introduced and illustrated Schleiermacher’s method here by way of bringing him into the work of comparing the two different historical figures, Luther and Calvin. Where confessional polemics had divided Luther from Calvin, Lutherans from Calvinists, Schleiermacher’s historical method could unite both in their own historical terms precisely because of his systematictheological genre. His system of theology negotiates between past and present by measuring the respective different language-reality relations from the standpoint of his commitment to the language-reality relation. Different experiences of the same reality evoke different linguistic expressions, yet the differences are negotiated in relation to their coherence among each other as they exhibit the same transformative reality of Christ. If Protestant theology is to be truly historical, then it must be self-conscious about the historicity of all formulations concerning the reality that language seeks to express. The genre of system opens up a way to negotiate between different historicallycontextualized formulations in order to reveal a remarkable coherence in articulating the same reality. But as it happened, the systematic genre would become in the twentieth century the reason for dividing Calvin from Luther. I now turn to twentiethcentury theology in order to explore the division between Luther and Calvin and its historical explanation.

3. Divided by Genre The contemporary divide, in at least the rhetoric, between Luther and Calvin is the division between them in terms of the preferred genre for theological writing. Luther is cast as an “occasional writer.” The evidence for this 14 Ibid. (p. 393).

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designation is that he wrote generally on an ad hoc basis, right in the midst of controversy, hastily composing outrageous responses to diatribes maliciously directed against him. Calvin in contrast is the “systematician.” He presented the edifice of Christian doctrines in a systematic form: The Institutes of the Christian Religion are neatly divided into four major sections, devoted to each person of the Trinity with a fourth division assigned to the church. The formal structure is then cross-divided in terms of content by the conceptual distinction between God the Creator and God the Redeemer. The difference in genre could be attributed to a difference in personality. Calvin tends to be represented as the cool one on the temperature scale (however much he stoked the fires of persecution), while Luther is hotblooded and hot-tempered. Calvin is the eminent Frenchman, an ¦migr¦ to Switzerland, who represents the haute culture of his native land, while Luther embodies all the uncultured traits of a German peasant, from drunken mealtimes to scatological outbursts. Calvin is requested to gleefully return to Geneva, while Luther throws himself into controversy with reckless abandon, burning bridges. Calvin sets up laws that govern Christian behavior ; Luther counts on an instinctual ethics based on the spontaneity that love’s indwelling in the heart causes. The choice of genre that represents one’s theology can thus be taken in the psychological terms that language expresses personality. The system privileges rationality and is identified with the one who betrays sovereign gravitas; occasional writing is correlated with one who is not master of his emotions, someone who is insufficiently differentiated from context, and can only react, not choose to act. Closer historical scrutiny reveals another reason for the genre difference. Luther’s university lectures were not based on the classic medieval system, Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Luther lectured on the Bible as verse by verse commentary, which is to say the least, not systematic theology. He did not even impose the form of system upon his colleagues. The first genre in Lutheranism for the presentation of doctrine was the method of the loci communes, the commonplaces. Melanchthon made use of this genre in order to impose a narrative structure on the doctrines that were already prescribed by the order of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Both biblical commentary and doctrinal theology based on the Bible do not hold up to either the summa as system of theology for the medievals or the system as required form for knowledge in modernity. On the other hand, Calvin’s Institutes are neatly structured by four books, each book representing one of the articles in the Apostles’ Creed, with the third article on the Spirit being subdivided into the two articles of Spirit and Church. The catechetical structure lent itself well to the development of the system in the Reformed tradition. Rather than biblical commentary that imposed the order of the text onto the doctrinal material, the catechetical form was already a systematic presentation of the biblical essence, the verbum abbreviatum was

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already a distillation of important biblical statements as organized by creedal headings. But such evidence for Luther’s alleged lack of systematicity remains unconvincing to me. Was not Luther trained in the medieval system of education, which meant that he was well versed in the artes liberales, the tools of the systematic trade? Is it not reported that he wrote glossa on Lombard’s Sentences and that he could cite lengthy passages from Occam’s Commentary on the Sentences? Did not his love for disputation prepare him for the work of constructing the articles of a summa theologicae? A strange thought occurred to me as I prepared to write this chapter : perhaps the rejection of a systematic Luther betrays an anti-Catholic subtext. In being pitted as the Reformer against medieval Catholicism that deemed the theological system to be the culmination of theological reflection, Luther’s lack of systematicity could be due to his reliance on scripture alone for his theological writing. Calvin’s alleged systematicity likewise struck me as unconvincing. Wasn’t Calvin’s training as a humanist in textual commentary? Was Calvin not a lawyer who was accustomed to thinking on his feet and able to adapt content to suit historical occasion? On close examination of the Institutes, it seemed to me at least that Calvin’s faithful appeal to biblical evidence seemed to erode the basic criterion for systematicity, which is coherence. Admittedly the Institutes are better organized than what can be said of Luther’s texts. Yet the structure is a pretense. The Institutes were built up internally over time, going through revisions that were de facto responses to distinct historical events, and accumulating biblical material as a result of ongoing exegetical and homiletical reflective deepening. The result is a palimpsest, not a system. So then the question becomes: What is the subtext to the construction of Calvin as a systematician? Perhaps it is that he spoke with the gravitas of theological self-authorization in the privileged genre of system? I wasn’t sure and decided to look down in history for a possible explanation for Luther’s lack and Calvin’s gain. The reason for the division between the two Reformers in terms of genre could not lie in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These were the centuries that distinguished confessions from each other by mutual polemics and witnessed the division between confessions by the construction of excluding systems. Furthermore, the development of system as the appropriate genre for the presentation of knowledge became academic consensus during this period. If theology was to have any academic credibility, theology would have to be written in the genre of system, as it was. Both Reformed and Lutheran theologians wrote their respective systematic theologies, in the required Latin and prefaced by the new and common development of prolegomena. Looking a bit further down in history, the reason for the stereotype cannot reside in the nineteenth century. This century saw the rise of and engagement with its two great systematic thinkers, one representing the Lutheran tradition, Hegel, the other, a combined Protestant dogmatic theology

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articulated from Reformed perspective, Schleiermacher. System was the theological norm for both traditions; the Reformed tradition did not have special monopoly on this genre. Could it be that the difference is a product of twentieth-century thought? I look in the next section at the reception of the Barmen Declaration from May of 1934, and detect a possible explanation for the opposition.

4. Divided by Barmen The Barmen Declaration of May 1934 is one of the most important theological documents of the last century, significant for its political resistance to National Socialism and the Nazi coopting of the Deutsche Christen. The six articles of the Barmen Declaration were composed during a meeting of members of the Confessing Church that represented three Protestant traditions in Germany : Lutheran, Reformed, United. Theologians and pastors signed a common document articulating a theological refutation of the “false doctrines,” coercive measures and “insincere practices” that the German Evangelical Church was enforcing on the churches in order to create a political-ecclesial unity.15 The document was politically necessary and historically significant. In its mandate to secure a common document of resistance under political and ecclesial duress, the Barmen Declaration represented a theological consensus that, in the eyes of its interpreters, bore close affinity to the theology of Karl Barth. Oswald Bayer’s study of Barmen and its reception by Lutheran and Reformed theologians after the Second World War, is an important work in the reception-history of Barmen.16 In fact, Bayer’s study is one of the first in recent attempts in Germany to come to terms with both the political necessity and the theological restrictions of the Barmen Declaration. For Bayer, Barmen’s political significance consisted in consolidating the theological resistance of the Confessing Church, while it also signified an important moment in the relation between Lutheranism and the Reformed tradition.17 The issue of division would be Jesus Christ. The common theological focus was established in the first article as Christology, which asserts, “Jesus Christ as he is attested to us in holy scripture, is the one Word of God that we have to hear, and which we have to 15 Text online at http://www.ekd.de/english/barmen_theological_declaration.html 16 Oswald Bayer, Theologie, Handbuch Systematischer Theologie 1 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1994), 336 – 379. 17 Bayer’s study has been followed by another treatment of Barmen and its historical-theological aftermath: see Matthew D. Hockenos, A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 23 – 28.

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trust and obey in life and death.”18 Christology framed the following five articles to highlight the rule of Christ over any ideological commitments or cultural-political compromises with religion that were established in worldimmanent terms.19 Christ, the crisis or judgment of God, was ruler of the world, and could never become part of the world. Christology was the theological resource mustered as the unambiguous critical wedge against National Socialism and the kind of false Christianity that the German Christians espoused. With Barmen, the word of God became the axiom for Protestant theology, the word unambiguously identified with Jesus Christ as witnessed in the holy scriptures (as the first article of Barmen asserts). The word of God was given normative determination in Christ and scriptures and it was assigned a privileged theological standpoint from which the historical, cultural, or political realm could be decisively called into question. The exclusive Christological focus on the word would captivate Protestant theology for the rest of the twentieth century. Only in recent German theology is it criticized because it does not address other areas of Christ’s rule outside of the church.20 It was, however, the Barthian bias in the first article as it framed subsequent articles from Barthian perspective that left Lutherans uneasy. The Lutheran disquiet was not with the sustained focus on Christology per se, but on Jesus Christ as sole word of God. Hints at the Lutheran unease are already evident in the text. There is a deliberate concession to the Lutherans in, for example, the third article of Barmen that echoes the terminology of the seventh article of the Augsburg Confession: Christ is mediated “in a sinful world” through (exclusively) word and sacrament.21 But even this statement that echoed back to a Lutheran confessional document did not put Lutheran dissent to rest. Both Bayer and Hockenos address the historical details of the debates and particularly the theological reception of Barmen in Protestant theology of the 18 See note 15. 19 See Michael Welker, “Rethinking Christocentric Theology,” in Transformations in Luther’s Theology : Historical and Contemporary Considerations, ed. Christine Helmer and Bo Kristian Holm, Arbeiten zur Kirchen- und Theologiegeschichte 32 (Leipzig: EVA-Verlag, 2011), 183 – 84. 20 Welker, “Rethinking Christocentric Theology,” 183. 21 “The Christian church is the congregation of the brethren in which Jesus Christ acts presently as the Lord in word and sacrament through the Holy Spirit.” Online at http://www.ekd.de/english/ barmen_theological_declaration.html ; compare with Augsburg Confession VII: “For this is enough for the true unity of the Christian church that there the gospel is preached harmoniously according to a pure understanding and the sacraments are administered in conformity with the divine Word.” In The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, trans. Charles Arand et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 42: Michael Welker, “Barmen III: Woran orientieren? Die Gestalt der Kirche in gesellschaftlichen Umbrüchen,” in Begründete Freiheit – Die Aktualität der Barmer Theologischen Erklärung: Vortragsreihe zum 75. Jahrestag im Berliner Dom, ed. Martin Heimburger, Evangelische Impulse 1 (Neukirchen/Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2009), 59 – 75.

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ensuing decades.22 Both scholars agree that the fulcrum of dissent was whether to understand Christ as sole word of God, as the Barthians claimed, or Christ as the two words of God in law and gospel, as the Lutherans argued. The exclusive Christological focus of Barmen immediately became the reason for Barthian confidence and the bane of Lutheran discontent. Barth would spend the rest of his career working out a theological system based on the monistic principle that he had created at Barmen. The Lutheran unease— already hinted at in the conclusion to the document—would be exhibited in the historical fact that very few Lutherans went back to Barmen in order to interpret it.23 The Lutheran theologians went forward, promoting an alternative to the one-word monistic subtext of Barmen: Jesus Christ was not one, but two words of God, the words of law and gospel. A fertile period of theological writing ensued as Lutherans and Reformed theologians sought to work out the implications of one vs. two words of God. Barth’s pivotal essay Evangelium und Gesetz (1935) promoted his theological viewpoint that the law was entailed by the gospel, while Lutheran dissent was voiced in a number of essays by Paul Althaus and others, culminating in Werner Elert’s 1948 article Gesetz und Evangelium.24 These essays determined the dominant theological topic of the day by drawing the lines of opposition between the one-word claim of the Barthians and the two-word claim of the Lutherans. The figure of Werner Elert became the spokesperson for driving law apart from gospel in a way unprecedented in the Lutheran tradition, not even in Luther himself. Christ is the end of the law: His death abrogates the law once and for all, his resurrection heralds the antinomian freedom of the gospel. Elert, at least in my interpretation of the significance of his dualist interpretation of law and gospel, seems to have exerted great influence on North American scholars who came to study with him in the 50s and 60s. Elert was the dominant Lutheran theologian during these decades in Germany, and it seems to me that the extreme dualism characterizing some positions of American Lutheranism today can be traced back to his enormous influence. The impact of the one word vs. two words of God debate is ironically felt in my field of systematic theology, notably in the specification of the genre. The writing of a systematic theology requires a few ingredients as Schleiermacher has taught us: comprehensiveness, consistency, and coherence. When looking at how Lutheran and Reformed systematic theologians address each of these three criteria for systematicity, it seems that the criterion of coherence is where 22 See Hockenos, A Church Divided, 15 – 177; and Bayer, Theologie, 336 – 341. In recent book, Eberhard Busch contests the claim that the Barmen Declaration represented a Reformed theological position, but rather represented the “position of a particular, local congregation,” namely the “confession fellowship in the Evangelical Church in Bonn” (The Barmen Theses Then and Now, trans. Darrell and Judith Guder, foreword by Daniel L. Migliore [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010], 7). 23 Bayer, Theologie, 338. 24 See Bayer, Theologie, 356 – 58; 306 – 309.

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they part ways. Coherence is established by one axiom, and for the case of the Barthian precedent, the understanding of Jesus Christ as one word of God serves as the epistemic principle for a coherent system. In Barth’s own Church Dogmatics, Christ is the revelation of the Trinity, the word of God that functions as epistemic principle for explicating God’s relations to the word in creation, redemption, and sanctification. In the first article of Barmen, Barth had found a theological axiom, principle of coherence, and epistemic principle, all significant ingredients for reconstructing a system of theology that derives all of its doctrinal points from the immanent Trinity. The Church Dogmatics does have different accents emphasized over the course of its composition, as Barth scholars have observed. The move to a natural theology as filtered through a Christological lens in the “Lichterlehre” (doctrine of lights) in KD IV/3 is a Christological correction to earlier claims denouncing the enterprise of natural theology.25 Barth’s epistemic principle is so successful that it can even integrate a natural theology into a high Christology. Things would go much differently for the Lutherans. The Lutheran genre for presenting theology in systematic fashion veers in the second half of the twentieth century in the direction of anti-theory. The essay or book-length theological exposition of a single theme or a historical-theological genealogy of a theological concept would become the genre of choice among Lutheran theologians, such as Eberhard Jüngel, Oswald Bayer on the German side, Gerhard Forde, George Lindbeck, Bruce Marshall on the American side. Even Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology is not a system in the sense of a logical exposition of doctrine that is informed by a coherence principle, but is a history of God’s self-identification that elicits the specific doctrines ordered by this history.26 Wolfhart Pannenberg provides the exception to the Lutheran rule. Yet his theological system achieves its systematicity in God, as he claims: “Dogmatics as a presentation of Christian doctrine, then, has to be systematic theology, namely, a systematic doctrine of God and nothing else… A systematic presentation of the world, humanity, and history as they are grounded, reconciled, and consummated in God is thus dealing with God’s won reality.27 Pannenberg’s theocentric-based systematicity then distinguishes him from his Lutheran colleagues who’s Christological focus seems to highlight the tension, rather than reconcile the difference between law and gospel. 25 See Bayer, Theologie, 344 – 47. 26 Jenson suggests that the systematic order in which he conceives the doctrines of Christianity trace the history of God’s self-identification; system is a history, rather than an organic unity of elements that are structured by a coherence principle. “The present work is structured to enable these doctrines to appear as teaching about God himself, as narrative of the history with us with which and by which he identifies himself.” Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, The Triune God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 42. 27 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 59 – 60.

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Bayer’s theology is a case of the “anti-system” in point. He is credited with isolating the concept of promissio as the quintessence of Luther’s Reformation breakthrough. Bayer is aware of the fact that the promissio contains critical possibilities for theology against the metaphysical monism informing Barth’s system. For Bayer, the promissio reveals a change in God from “God against me” to “God for me.”28 Such dramatic change is warranted by evidence from the Hebrew prophets (Hosea in particular), and as such is incapable of being pressed into the metaphysical requirements for a coherent system of theology. The dualism that characterizes the personal address of God to human creatures erodes the basic principles of system. Bayer gets himself into metaphysical trouble when he attempts to systematically place the doctrine of the Trinity, which he unambiguously subsumes under “gospel,” in relation to the deus absconditus, which he subsumes under a “general teaching about the Trinity and anthropology” of the human who laments the underdetermined God.29 Bayer drives the Trinity apart from the hidden God in a way that breaks asunder the claim for metaphysical unity required by system. Bayer’s promissio is not the stuff of systematic construction, but the lived religion that is represented in anti-system. A decision to get as close to the ground of biblical and human experience as the Bible permits—the case in point is the cry of lament in the complaint Psalms—prohibits the adoption of system as suitable genre. System is an intellectual abstraction from the messiness of history, system is an aesthetic falsification of life where the lament of theodicy cannot be solved prematurely by an intellectual commitment to God’s possible solution for evil. By taking seriously the Christian life of Anfechtung under the twofold word and the third factor of the hidden God, the Lutheran option for theological presentation is (at its coherent best) the essay. The development of Protestant theology between Barmen and today offers an explanation for why Luther is distinguished from Calvin by the criterion of systematicity. Luther, the “occasional writer,” who understands God’s word to be constituted as the two distinct words of law and gospel, applies law and gospel discerningly to contingent historical circumstances. Calvin is the systematician, who structures a systematic theology by the Christological axiom of the one word of God. When the mark that distinguishes Lutherans from Barthians after Barmen is mapped onto the sixteenth century, we see the Reformers in the anachronistic terms of a Barthian system or a Lutheran antisystem. Luther’s hot passion for the messiness of life is pitted in binary opposition to Calvin’s cool systematic-theological rigor. The division by genre is, ironically, on the systematic ground on which Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century had united Luther and Calvin.

28 Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology : A Contemporary Interpretation, trans. Thomas H. Trapp (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 61. 29 Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology, 339.

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5. Conclusion The question as to where the divide leaves us today must refer to the issue of the relation of theology to genre, and more importantly, the issue of the return to the Reformation that continues to be part of Protestant theological legacy for distinct purposes. By exploring different appeals to Luther and Calvin, we can see just how contextualized the two Reformers appear in later Protestant thought. For Schleiermacher, Luther and Calvin represent a distinct moment in the formation of Protestant theology. Any engagement with the Reformation must be cognizant of both the historical context of the Reformers in their own day, as well as the hermeneutical and critical issues at stake in using them to formulate claims in systematic theology. For contemporary Protestant theologians, it is important to acknowledge the major impact that the Barmen Declaration exerted on the distinct theological developments of both Lutheran and Reformed traditions. History, genre, and systematic theology are inextricably linked in late-twentieth-century Protestant thought. It remains to be seen as to how both Luther and Calvin continue to be appropriated by theologians, and to see if they can emerge as voices that speak both critically to contemporary theological complacency and substantively to modern folk who are desiring deeper theological knowledge.

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Contributors

J. Todd Billings J. Todd Billings is the Gordon H. Girod Research Professor of Reformed Theology at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. He has research interests in the Reformation, Reformed theology, and contemporary systematic theology. His first book, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union With Christ (Oxford, 2007) won a 2009 Temple ton Award for Theological Promise, awarded internationally for the best first books of scholars in theology and religious studies. He is also author of The Word of God for the People of God: An Entryway to the Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Eerdmans, 2010), and co-editor (with I. John Hesselink) of Calvin’s Theology and Its Reception: Disputes, Developments, and New Possibilities (Westminster John Knox: 2012). He has published articles on Calvin and Reformational theology of the Reformation in several books, as well as Harvard Theological Review, International Journal of Systematic Theology, and The Christian Century. Christine Helmer Christine Helmer is Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies and Professor of German in the Department of German Languages and Literature at Northwestern University. Her historical-theological research interest is two German theologians, Martin Luther and Friedrich Schleiermacher and her constructive-theological research is on the relation of theology to the modern study of religion. She is the author of The Trinity and Martin Luther (Zabern 1999), and is contributing editor and co-editor of eight volumes in the areas of biblical theology, philosophy of religion, Schleiermacher studies, and Luther studies, most recently The Global Luther (Fortress 2009); and with Bo Kristian Holm, Transformation in Luther’s Theology (EVAVerlag 2011). R. Ward Holder R. Ward Holder is Professor of Theology at Saint Anselm College, and President of the Calvin Studies Society. Among other works, he has authored John Calvin and the Grounding of Interpretation: Calvin’s First Commentaries, Brill, 2006; and Crisis and Renewal: The Era of the Reformations, Westminster John Knox, 2009. He has co-edited Reformation Readings of Romans, T. & T.

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Clark, 2008, and edited A Companion to Paul in the Reformation, Brill, 2009. Most recently he has turned his attention to the task of understanding Calvin’s understanding and use of theological tradition. Henning Jürgens Dr. Henning P. Jürgens is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Institute of European History in Mainz. His fields of research include Early Modern Polish history, Reformation history with a focus on the second phase of the Reformation (after 1548), and the history of print. He has published Johannes a Lasco in Ostfriesland. Der Werdegang eines europäischen Reformators, Tübingen 2002 (Spätmittelalter und Reformation NR 18); and edited with Eckhard Grunewald, Der Genfer Psalter und seine Rezeption in Deutschland, der Schweiz und den Niederlanden 16.–18. Jahrhundert, Tübingen 2004 (Frühe Neuzeit 97); and with Thomas Weller Religion und Mobilität. Zum Verhältnis von raumbezogener Mobilität und religiöser Identitätsbildung im frühneuzeitlichen Europa (VIEG Beiheft 81), Göttingen 2010. Susan Karant-Nunn Susan C. Karant-Nunn is the Director of the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies and a Regents’ Professor of History at The University of Arizona. Her most recent publications include The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford University Press, 2010); Reformationsforschung in Europa und Nordamerika, eine historiographische Bilanz / Reformation Research in Europe and North America, a Historiographical Assessment, vol. 100 of the Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte/ Archive for Reformation History (Gutersloher Verlagshaus, 2009), co-edited with Anne Jacobson Schutte and Heinz Schilling; and Masculinity in the Reformation Era (Truman State University Press, 2008), co-edited with Scott H. Hendrix. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of early modern Europe, with emphasis on the German-speaking lands during the Reformation. She received a 2003 – 2004 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship to support her study of emotion, physicality, and the Reformation. She is presently writing a book on the body of Martin Luther. Robert Kolb Robert Kolb is Professor of Systematic Theology Emeritus at Concordia Seminary. He has recently published Martin Luther, Confessor of the Faith (Christian Theology in Context series; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550 – 1675, editor, (Leiden: Brill, 2008): with Charles P. Arand, The Genius of Luther’s Theology. A Wittenberg Way of Thinking for the Contemporary Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008). His ongoing projects include helping edit a new “Handbook of Martin Luther” for Oxford UP, along with Irene Dingel and Lubomir Batka, and he is about to

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begin a study of how Luther’s and Melanchthon’s students used the Bible – not their Schriftlehre as such but their preaching and commentary procedures. Theresa Latini Theresa F. Latini is the George C. Weinman Chair in Pastoral Theology and Ministry and Associate Professor of congregational and community care leadership at Luther Seminary. Her research and writing emerge from the intersection of practical theology, ecclesiology, and the social sciences. She is the author of The Church and the Crisis of Community : A Practical Theology of Small Groups (Eerdmans: Spring 2010) and co-author of Transforming Church Conflict: Compassionate Leadership in Action (Westminster : John Knox, 2013). G. Sujin Pak G. Sujin Pak is Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity at Duke Divinity School. Her research interests center around the history of biblical interpretation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the role of exegesis in the formation of confessional identity, and the role of biblical interpretation in Christian-Jewish relations. She’s written several articles on Luther and Calvin’s exegesis. Currently she is researching the history of the interpretation of the Minor Prophets for an upcoming volume of the Reformation Commentary on Scripture (IVP) and exploring Reformation readings of biblical prophecy. Her first book, The Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms, was published by Oxford University Press in November 2009. Jeffrey Watt Jeffrey Watt is Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. Through research on a wide array of court records, he has had a special interest in the social impact of religious change as seen in a variety of topics that cut across national, linguistic, and confessional boundaries. His publications include The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a SeventeenthCentury Italian Convent (University of Rochester Press, 2009); Choosing Death: Suicide and Calvinism in Early Modern Geneva (Truman State University Press, 2001); and The Making of Modern Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Neuch–tel, 1550 – 1800 (Cornell University Press, 1992). He is currently engaged in research on the Consistory in Calvin’s Geneva. Drawing comparisons from his previous work on the Roman Inquisition, he is particularly interested in the Consistory’s efforts to nurture contrition for sins and reconciliation between feuding parties. Timothy J. Wengert Timothy J. Wengert is The Ministerium of Pennsylvania Professor of the History of Christianity at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia.

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Besides his published dissertation on Philip Melanchthon’s interpretation of John’s Gospel, Professor Wengert is co-editor (with Robert Kolb of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis) of the recent English edition of The Book of Concord. In 2006 he published a practical commentary on the Formula of Concord, A Formula for Parish Practice: Using the Formula of Concord in Congregations (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). In 1997 and 1998, he published three books on Philip Melanchthon. One, Human Freedom, Christian Righteousness (Oxford University Press), investigates Melanchthon’s relation to Erasmus and in 2000 earned Wengert the Melanchthon Prize from the city of Bretten, Germany (Melanchthon’s birthplace). In 2008 he published his studies of Priesthood, Pastors, Bishops (Minneapolis: Fortress) and in 2009 his book on Luther’s catechisms appeared. Paul Westermeyer Paul Westermeyer is Professor of Church Music and Cantor at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, and Director of the Master of Sacred Music degree for which Luther Seminary uses the Music Department of St. Olaf College. His most recent research has been for the Companion to Evangelical Lutheran Worship which will be published this summer (July of 2010). It is a set of source data and commentaries on each of the 650 entries – texts and tunes – in the hymnal. Other than articles, the publication that preceded the Companion is Rise, O Church: Reflections on the Church, Its Music, and Empire (MorningStar, 2008) which grew out of a series of lectures for the Mississippi Conference on Church Music and Liturgy in the summer of 2007. Currently Westermeyer is working on an article for CrossAccent which will explore the theme of abundance and discernment to be taken up at the meeting of the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians in 2011. David M. Whitford David M. Whitford is Professor of Religion in Reformation Studies at Baylor University and Editor at Sixteenth Century Journal. He teaches courses on the history of Christianity, the Reformation, and the Reformed Tradition. He is the author of The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era (Ashgate, 2009); and the editor of Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research, (Truman University Press, 2008). He is currently at work on a history of the Reformation that uses Philipp of Hesse as its guide through the sixteenth century.

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Index of Names (The footnotes “n” are only listed if the name does not also appear in the main body on that page) Adrianus, Matthaeus 35n Aepinus, Johann 72, 73n Agricola, Johannes 65 Agricola, Rudolph 124 Alesius, Alexander 72, 73n Amsdorff, Nikolaus von 65 Armstrong, Brian G. - 8n Arndt, Johann 97 – 99, 102n, 104, Aquinas, Thomas 67 Augustine of Hippo 40, 57, 59, 60n, 63, 67n, 94, 124, 151, 174, 176, 193n, 194, 197 Aulen, Gustaf 54 Bach, Johann Sebastian 55, 56, 101 Backus, Irena 13, 15n, 121, 125n, 129, 131n, 132n, 134n, 135n, 136, 139, 140n Bainton, Roland 40 Balserak, Jon 13, 14, 17n, 18n, 20n, 24n Barnes, Robin B. 13n Barth, Karl 8, 194n, 199, 213 – 217 Bayer, Oswald 213 – 217 Bede, The Venerable 41 Bernard of Clairvaux 96, 97n, 132, 181 Besold, Jerome 72, 73n Billings, J. Todd 10, 71n, 75n, 165n, 170n, 171n, 175n, 176n, 179n, 183, 185n, 192n, 197 Boeschstein, Johannes 35n Bossy, John 108, 109n Braaten, Carl E. 63n, 166n, 194n, 197, 198n Brecht, Martin 96, 98, 102 Brenz, Johannes 92, 178n Bretschneider, Johannes 73, 75 – 77 Briskina, Anna 65, 66n, 67n, 70

Bugenhagen, Johannes 72n, 124, 132 Burchard, Franz 157, 158 Burnett, Amy Nelson 35n Burnett, Steven 120n Calvin, John 7 – 10, 13 – 39, 41 – 49, 56 – 58, 60 – 61, 63 – 64, 71 – 86, 91 – 94, 102, 105 – 108, 110 – 111, 113 – 115, 117n, 118 – 120, 123, 128n, 150, 152, 165, 170 – 176, 179 – 181, 183 – 199, 202 – 204, 207, 208, 210 – 212, 217 – 218 Camerarius, Joachim 128, 129 Canlis, Julie 71n, 78, 171 Chemnitz, Martin 127, 128 Christman, Robert 119n, 120n Clement of Alexandria 69, 72n, 196 Cochlaeus, Johannes 131 – 134, 139 Comestor, Peter 40, 49 Cranach, Lukas 92, 129 Cruciger, Caspar 35n, 125 Crüger, Johann 55, 100 Cyprian 193, 200 Diener, Ronald Ernst 121, 126n, 146n Dingel, Irene 138n, 141n, 142n, 143, 147n, 158n, Eck, Johannes 120, 151n Edwards, Mark U. 32n Engammare, Max 24, 32n, 45n Erasmus, Desiderius 63, 69n, 124, 132n Farel, Guillaume 44, 45, 49 Flacius, Matthias 72, 74, 75, 80 – 83, 85, 86, 126n, 138, 153, 154, 156n

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Forde, Gerhard 61, 178n, 216 Forster, Johannes 35n, 72n, 140 Francke, August Hermann 96 Friend, Albert C. 42n Ganoczy, Alexandre 32n Garcia, Mark 71n, 170n, 171 – 173 Garside, Charles 57, 58n Gerhardt, Paul 55, 97, 99 – 101, 104 Gillespie, Guy T. 38, 39, 50 Goeters, Johann Friedrich Gerhard 102 Goldhahn, Matthaeus 35n Gordon, Bruce 7n, 8n, 45n Grafton, Anthony 13, 33n Grew, Eva Mary 54 Grosse, Christian 106n, 107n, 115, 116n, 117n Guder, Darrell and Judith 8n, 215n Haemig, Mary Jane 10 Harms, Frederick A.V. 13, 20n Helmer, Christine 10, 208n, 214n, Heyden, Sebald 72, 73n, 82n Holl, Karl 31n, 63, 70, 71 Holt, Mack P. 8n Höpfl, Harro 8n Hugh of St. Cher 41 Irenaeus of Lyons

192, 193

Janse, Wim 75n, 151n Jenson, Robert W. 63n, 166n, 216 Jerome 41, 63 Jonas, Justus 132, 136, 137 Junghans, Helmar 31n Jürgens, Henning P. 10, 146n, 147n, 150n, 152n, 160n Karant-Nunn, Susan 10, 108n, 119n, 120n Kaufmann, Thomas 65n, 138n Kolb, Robert 10, 31n, 65n, 119n, 122n, 123n, 124n, 126n, 129n, 131n, 132n,

133n, 134n, 135n, 138n, 140n, 143n, 147n, 167n, 169, 178n, 214n Lane, Anthony N. S. 8n, 44 Lasco, John a 150 Latini, Theresa F. 10, 200n Lehmann, Hartmut 96 – 98 Levi, Margaret 103 Lindbeck, George 97, 207n, 216 Luther, Martin 7 – 10, 13 – 27, 29 – 35, 39 – 44, 46, 47, 49, 51 – 56, 58, 60, 61, 63, 64, 69, 71, 72, 74, 86, 92 – 95, 97 – 101, 104, 119 – 125, 127 – 142, 148n, 160, 165 – 171, 173 – 181, 183, 184, 186 – 188, 190 – 198, 202 – 204, 207, 208, 210 – 212, 215, 217, 218 Lyra, Nicholas of 40, 41 McKim, Donald 20n, 44n Mahoney, James 91 Mannermaa, Tuomo 166 – 170, 176 Mathesius, Johannes 35n, 134 – 137, 140, 142 Melanchthon, Philip 7, 8n, 9, 25n, 35n, 63 – 87, 124, 125, 127 – 129, 132, 134, 136, 137, 138n, 142, 149, 151, 152, 162, 166, 171 – 173, 178, 179n, 180, 202, 211 Millet, Olivier 32n Moore, Cornelia Niekus 124n, 125, 142 Morgenstern, Benedict 8n, 9 – 10, 143 – 162 Mörlin, Joachim 72, 86, 127, 128, 146 Mosser, Carl 71n, 174n Muller, Richard A. 170, 173 Musculus, Andreas 73, 138 Neander, Joachim 102, 103 Newkirch, Melchior 127 Niesel, Wilhelm 71, 184 Neuber, Vitus 150 – 152 Odo of Cheriton 42, 43, 49 Olevian, Caspar 153, 170, 171

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Index of Names Origen 40, 48, 192 Osiander, Andreas 9, 63 – 86, 127, 145, 146, 165, 172, 173, 178

Sperber, Erhard 150 – 153 Stauffer, Richard 32n Steinmetz, David C. 48, 75n, 173,

Pak, G. Sujin 9, 31n, 202 Paladius, Peter 73 Partee, Charles 71n, 170, 171 Pauw, Amy Plantinga 29n, 199, 200n Pelikan, Jaroslav 31n Peter the Chanter 40, 42 Pitkin, Barbara 13n, 15n, 33n, 34n Plato 58, 124 Polycarp 124, 192

Tamburello, Dennis 71n Tauler, Johannes 96, 132, 175 Tentler, Thomas 118 Tertullian 192 – 194 Thompson, John 40, 115n, 128n

Rabus, Ludwig 133, 134, 140 Reid, W. Stanford 33n Roting, Michael 72, 73n Routley, Erik 55, 60 Saarinen, Risto 68, 166n Schalk, Carl 52n, 54, 56 Schleiermacher, F.D.E. 204 – 210, 213, 215, 217, 218 Schnepff, Erhard 73 Scribner, Robert 121n, 129, 130 Selnecker, Nikolaus 95, 136, 138 – 140, 142 Soehngen, Oskar 51, 52, 58, 60 Spangenberg, Cyriakus 93, 134 – 138, 141, 142, 153 Spener, Philip Jakob 96

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Watt, Jeffrey 10 Wallmann, Johannes 96, 97n, 139n Weiss, James Michael 124, 125, 129n, 132n Wengert, Timothy J. 9, 32n, 124n, 128n, 167n, 168n, 179n, 202, 214n Westermeyer, Paul 9, 51n, 55n Westphal, Joachim 8, 75, 137, 138n, 150, 151n Whitford, David M. 9, 39n, 177n, 178n Wigand, Johannes 122, 138, 147, 153, 158 Witvliet, John 58, 59n Wright, Nicholas T. 63n, 71, Zachman, Randall 8n, 44 Zborowski, Jan 159, 161 Zeeden, Ernst Walter 91, 129n, 132n, 135, 138n, 141n Zwingli, Huldrych 51n, 64, 94, 119, 152

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