Protestant spirituality in the first age of the Reformation

Abstract

Spirituality is a catholic word, beginning to dissolve into ecumenese, but it is much better than ‘piety’ with its nineteenth-century overtones, or the rather better eighteenth-century phrase ‘inward religion’. And it suggests, as I should wish to do, some of the continuities between medieval and protestant religion.The fifteenth century is still for historians a very misty valley, but we are coming to see some things more clearly, and one thing is that late medieval thought and devotion is not to be written off or talked down as preparing for the Reformation because it was in fact religion run to seed, and in the field of devotion characterised by a morbid and individualistic pietism. Preaching, for example, was of growing importance. We have not yet the full story of the number of preacherships founded in German towns in the fifteenth century and their significance. We know that this was accompanied by a stress on the importance of hearing the Word, almost to the point of disparaging the sacrament of the altar, and not only Wessel Gansfort but Gabriel Biel can be quoted at this point. Again, the lay study of a vernacular Bible ante-dates the reformers. Much as John Bunyan echoed the older English of the puritan Geneva Bible, so that astonishing market-gardener among the prophets, Clement Ziegler of Strasbourg, is steeped in the pre-Reformation Bible which appeared in 1466.