Christian Magistrate and Territorial Church: Johannes Brenz and the German Reformation. By JAMES M. ESTES.

Abstract

Johannes Brenz (1499–1570) is hardly the most exciting of the Reformers, but in this substantial augmentation and revision of a 1982 monograph he emerges as a fine case study of ‘how the Reformation actually happened’ (p. 15). Throughout a long life his perseverance, integrity, and cooperative skills with colleagues and magisterial authorities gradually brought his utopian hopes closer to realization. Born into the governing urban élite, Brenz was initially influenced by humanism, establishing a sound linguistic base in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew for the flow of commentaries and catechisms which were later to find European-wide resonance. At the age of 23, already under the spell of Luther, he was appointed city preacher in Schwäbisch Hall, and worked closely with the city fathers to bring this city of 5,000 people and its rural hinterland into line with reformist principles. His pragmatic, gradualist style, firm in principle but flexible in application, commended him to Margrave George of Brandenburg-Ansbach, and in cooperation with Osiander he drew up the Brandenburg–Nuremberg Church Order of 1533. Duke Ulrich of Württemberg was another Protestant prince who drew on his advice, both for the ordering of church life and doctrine and for the reform of the University of Tübingen. Following the Augsburg Interim of 1548 he had to flee Schwäbisch Hall; Brenz now settled in Württemberg, working particularly fruitfully with Duke Christopher (1550–68). The latter's 1559 Church Order established a ‘coherent, effective, and durable ecclesiastical polity’ (p. 41) which featured a central consistory and regional and local superintendents; it was to be widely imitated throughout Germany.