Calvinists and Lutherans: Contesting the European Reformation

Abstract

Studies • volume 106 • number 424 431 Calvinists and Lutherans: Contesting the European Reformation Graeme Murdock A ‘Reformation’ tour of Dublin Dublin’s streets offer eloquent testimony to Ireland’s place in the history of the Reformation and to the city’s connections with developments in the mainstream of European religious life and culture. Some city centre churches have been abandoned in recent years as places of worship, but a sufficiently visible Christian presence remains to bear witness to Dublin’s long history of religious pluralism. Anglicans remain by far the most prominent among Protestant churches. However, from the middle decades of the seventeenth century Baptists also worshipped in Dublin, following the inspiration of early sixteenth century German, Czech and Dutch speaking communities. The city was also home to Presbyterians, following a reformed theology and ecclesiology developed in Zurich from the 1520s and in Geneva from the 1530s. There were also Quakers, worshipping from the 1690s in Eustace Street, with Presbyterians as near neighbours from the 1720s. If we walk from Meeting House Square to Nassau Street and then turn up one of the streets developed by Joshua Dawson, the Anglican church of St Ann’s offers a rather imposing nineteenth century neo-Romanesque façade. Arriving in St Stephen’s Green, in one corner stands a graveyard used by Dublin’s French Calvinist community from the latter decades of the seventeenth century. A Unitarian church from the 1860s stands in the opposite corner of the Green, representing a strain of thought revived by Italian, Polish and Hungarian intellectuals of the midsixteenth century. In the 1840s Methodists moved to the south side of St Stephen’s Green, worshipping in a neo-classical church built to mark the centenary of the conversion of the Wesley brothers. Turning down Earlsfort Terrace, we face an 1840s Palladian-inspired Presbyterian church. The Presbyterians have Lutherans for near neighbours onAdelaide Road in an 1860s church building. However, a Lutheran presence in Ireland had been established from the arrival of so-called Palatine Germans Calvinists and Lutherans: Contesting the European Reformation 432 Studies • volume 106 • number 424 in the early eighteenth century. Not far off, along Kevin Street, stands a 1760s church of the Moravians with their distinctive insignia of a lamb carrying a flag still visible. Moravians had endured a century of Catholic repression in their homeland, finding sanctuary from the 1720s at Herrnhut in Saxony thanks to Nikolaus von Zinzendorf. The roots of the Moravian church date back to the 1450s as a branch of the Utraquist movement known as the Unity of Brethren. The Brethren were inspired by the legacy of Jan Hus, who was burned as a heretic by the Council of Constance in 1415.1 One might argue, therefore, that, if we are considering the legacy of the Reformation after 500 years, we may (if Moravians are considered Protestants) have got our dates wrong. The Reformation’s unexpected legacy This brief tour of some of Dublin’s older Protestant churches provides a point of departure to discuss the theme of contesting the Reformation. Religious diversity was one of its clear consequences but it was an entirely unexpected legacy of Luther’s trouble-making about the sale of indulgences and papal authority from 1517. By January 1521 he had been excommunicated as a heretic in a papal bull. The Saxon electoral court argued that Luther should not be condemned without a hearing in front of the Holy Roman Emperor. Charles V instructed Luther to appear at the Diet of Worms. Pressed to revoke his opinions, according to the official transcript of the diet, Luther declared: ‘I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to act against conscience’. Perhaps, according to supporters, Luther may have added a final thought, ‘I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, may God help me. Amen’. He did not mean by these words to assert the right of individual freedom of conscience, and did not mean to suggest that conscience was some authentic inner version of self that struggles against externally-constructed norms. Rather...