Sixteenth-century Reformation Research Articles

Reformation History and Political Mythology in the German Democratic Republic, 1949-89

This study examines the political foundation myths associated specifically with the sixteenth-century Reformation era that the German Democratic Republic constructed in order to legitimate the state and raise socialist consciousness. The article argues that, ultimately, the GDR failed in its bid to incorporate Reformation history into its mythic repertoire because, as the regime progressed, the constructed myths became increasingly ambivalent and contradictory. The 1950s myths were initially consistent and appeared appropriate subjects for demonstrating East Germany’s progressive tradition. They focused on radical personalities that GDR citizens could easily recognise as precursors of the new socialist state, such as Thomas Müntzer, the rebel priest. However, by 1989, inconsistencies had emerged in East Germany’s portrayal of Müntzer. The disparity between the traditional and the more recent perspectives on Müntzer was indicative of the wider chasms opening up within the GDR between supporters and critics of the regime. Research into GDR perspectives on the Reformation era provides us with a further understanding of Communist domination and its eventual crisis, as well as offering insights into Marxist interpretations of sixteenth-century history.

Ambrosius Catharinus’ Commentary on the General Epistle of St Jude

This paper argues that Catharinus’ 1552 Commentary on the General Epistle of St Jude is, for the most part, a polemic against the sixteenth century Protestant Reformers and as such is a further development of an earlier train of thought to be found for instance in his tracts Speculum Haereticorum and Compendia d'Errori et Inganni Luterani. The paper first shows the importance for Catharinus’ enterprise of his argument for the canonicity of Jude's epistle. Then it shows that one key move in Catharinus’ main argument is the identification of these reformers with the ‘impious men’ on whose perversity Jude had vented his wrath; and that the other is the presentation of Jude as the inspired artist from whose pencil we have a matchless portrait of naked heresy. The legitimacy of these moves is underwritten by a theory of meaning that legitimates the interpretation of the Scriptures in a prophetic sense.

Bucer's Views on Ecclesiastical Property in the Light of Civil and Canon Law

The issue of church property is a crucial one in the history of the sixteenth-century Reformation. In support of his views, Bucer could cite Holy Scripture, Roman Law and the Corpus Iuris Canonici, although Bucer felt that priority could be assigned to those laws that can be inferred from Holy Scripture. This article looks at four themes in the debate on ecclesiastical goods as they concern Martin Bucer: the differing ways in which Protestant estates dealt with the matter; the PR around such actions; resistance to the Emperor; and the issue of ecclesiastical estates ruled by prince-prelates.

:Marriage and Divorce in the Thought of Martin Bucer

A revealing and stimulating description of the sixteenth-century reformer and his theory and practice of marriage and divorce. Bucer was known as a marriage broker as well as a marriage breaker; his views were first rejected and later neglected, yet they have an all-time freshness. Marriage and Divorce offers Bucer's revolutionary and astonishingly modern views on divorce. It takes away the misunderstandings that have for centuries surrounded Bucer in this matter and it is an important contribution to gender studies.

Katharina Schütz Zell, I: The life and thought of a sixteenth-century reformer; II: The writings. A critical edition. By Elsie Anne McKee. (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 69.) Pp. xviii+506; xx+404 incl. 4 ills. Leiden–Boston–Cologne: Brill, 1999. Nlg 390 (set). 90 04 11125 5; 90 04 11126 3; 90 04 11112 3; 0585 6914

<i>Katharina Schütz Zell</i>, I: <i>The life and thought of a sixteenth-century reformer</i>; II: <i>The writings. A critical edition</i>. By Elsie Anne McKee. (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 69.) Pp. xviii+506; xx+404 incl. 4 ills. Leiden–Boston–Cologne: Brill, 1999. Nlg 390 (set). 90 04 11125 5; 90 04 11126 3; 90 04 11112 3; 0585 6914

L'éducation et le Livre : controverses religieuses en Ecosse au XVIIIe

While for Roman Catholics, the Bible was but one of the foundations of faith, it was the Protestants' "only safe guide." This essential disctinction made for different approaches to literacy which, in turn, induced Presbyterians to regard ignorance as the sine qua non for the survival of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland. Therefore they deemed the schooling of all Scottish children the most efficient weapon in order to annihilate the Church of Rome. In the eighteenth century, Scotland was extolled for her achievements in the field of education. However, it was clear that the system devised by the Reformers had let the Highlands down and it was considered as no coincidence that there remained a number of Catholic strongholds in this region. Charity schools were established with a view to getting rid of both evils but as the years wore on, the growing lukewarmness of the Presbyterians' zeal had far-reaching consequences on their attitudes to education as they seemed to have forsaken the inheritance passed down from the sixteenth-century Reformers.

Evaluating Liturgical Continuity and Change at the Reformation: a Case Study of Thomas Müntzer, Martin Luther, and Thomas Cranmer

In his now classic work,The Shape of the Liturgy, first published in 1945, the Anglican Benedictine monk, Dom Gregory Dix, was concerned to demonstrate that in the origin and development of the eucharistic liturgy, and underneath the verbal differences, the cultural diversity, and the growth of the centuries, a particular unchanging core shape could be identified. His study was primarily concerned with the eucharist from its institution in the New Testament to the sixth century, and it was not his intention in that work to survey in any depth the later medieval developments, East or West, or the Reformation. Nevertheless, as an Anglican in the Anglo-Catholic tradition Dix felt obliged to use his findings of the earlier period to embark upon a not too subtle criticism of the sixteenth-century Reformation liturgies, and particularly those revisions of his own denomination instigated and presided over by Thomas Cranmer. For Dix, the later medieval liturgical development saw a shift of emphasis to an unhealthy preoccupation with the Passion, and was brought to its logical unfortunate conclusion in the rites of the Reformation. With reference to Cranmer, Dix could thus write: ‘With an inexcusable suddenness, between a Saturday night and a Monday morning at Pentecost 1549, the English liturgical tradition of nearly a thousand years was altogether overturned.’ We should note the phrase, ‘inexcusable suddenness’. When combined with rhetoric such as ‘a horrible story all round’ and ‘enforcement by penal statutes of a novel liturgy’, it is clear that Dix was using a different set of criteria from earlier Anglican apologists. Compare Jeremy Taylor in 1658, who wrote: ‘the Liturgy of the Church of England hath advantages so many and so considerable as not onely to raise it self above the devotions of other Churches, but to endear the affections of good people to be in love with liturgy in general.’

The traditio instrumentorum in the Reform of Ordination Rites in the Sixteenth Century

The traditio instrumentorum is the ceremony in the rite of conferring holy orders in which an object or objects symbolizing the office to be conferred is handed to the candidate with an appropriate accompanying form of words. This ceremony grew in importance through the Middle Ages, to the extent that in Catholic theology it came to be seen as the essential act of ordination. Eucharistic doctrine and the role of the Church in salvation were key areas of conflict in sixteenth-century Reform movements. The Church’s ministry, therefore, being both intensely bound up with ecclesiastical structures and intimately concerned with the appropriate conduct of worship, was profoundly affected by these fundamental debates. A continuing need for some form of structured ministry was widely felt, though often understood as simply the appointment (for a time) of appropriate persons to the ministry of Word and Sacrament whose sacramental qualification for ministry was their own baptism, by which they entered into the priesthood of all believers, which was different from the unique high priesthood of Christ and completely replaced any sense of a sacrificing priesthood, which was tied up with the Old (and superseded) Testament. Looking to their Bibles for this, as for so much else in their ecclesiologies, the Reformers found only the apostolic laying on of hands with prayer in the conferring of ministry.

Usable Pasts: History and Identity in Reformation Scotland

Few of us would dispute that the Reformation was one of the key defining moments in Scottish history. Not only did it lead to a radical reshaping of Scottish self-perceptions, in effect redefining what it meant to be a Scot, but it also contributed to a self-conscious and systematic reinterpretation of the Scottish past, through which the new Protestant self-image to which the Reformation gave rise was validated and sustained. The Scots, I was once informed by a zealous student of divinity, were always really Protestants. Risible though such an assertion may seem, it is also testimony to the power of the Protestant identity fashioned by the experience of the Reformation and, more particularly, to the longevity of the usable past which was developed to sustain it. Indeed, in historiographical terms, my zealous student's crude remark is perhaps not quite so risible as it at first appears. It was probably not intended to imply that Scotland only became Scotland in 1560 and that everything that preceded that date was in effect irrelevant though, as I hope to show, this anti-historical view has behind it the considerable authority of none other than Scotland's first great Protestant patriarch, John Knox. Rather, my student's assertion seems to have been founded on the belief that the history of pre-Reformation Scotland could be read in pro to-Protestant terms, that St Columba and the Culdees in some way prefigured the sixteenth-century reformers, and that medieval Scots, in thrall to a corrupt Catholic hierarchy, were waiting with keen anticipation for the Reformation to happen. While this view too has a highly respectable ancestry, originating with the second of Scotland's great Protestant patriarchs, George Buchanan, it will be touched on only briefly in what follows. The two very different perceptions of the Reformation which I have associated with Buchanan and Knox, the one historical and the other anti-historical, do have one thing in common: that is, a sense that what happened in 1560 was inevitable and pre-ordained. This is a view of the Scottish Reformation which has persisted, in however refined, attenuated and non-theological a form, well into the modern era.1 It is

The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art by Paul Corby Finney

The invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art. By Paul Corby Finney. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1994. Pp. xxviii, 319. $45.00.) Paul Corby Finney professor of Roman imperial and early church history in University of Missouri at St. Louis. From gymnasium studies in Germany in late 1950's and doctoral program at Harvard in early 1970's up through university career in mid 1990's, he has had an intense Interest in earliest literary attitudes toward and oldest material remains of early Christian art. This tome is detailed statement of his findings and challenge to traditional interpretive framework on early third century lamp decorations and catacomb paintings. Dr. Finney starts by reviewing how eighth-century Byzantine iconoclasts, sixteenth-century Protestant reformers, and modern German scholars from Adolf von Harnack to Theodor Klauser have built up an interpretation of Christianity as a religion simultaneously hostile to pictures in theory (iconophobic) and opposed to their use in practice (aniconic) (p. 10). He points out how this interpretation seemed to be buttressed on one hand by literary attacks of second-and third-century Christian apologists on pagan art, and on other hand by lack of distinctive Christian before year 200. This traditional interpretation presented appearance of catacomb paintings thereafter as fall from primitive spiritualism to crass materialism forced on educated clergy by uneducated laity. The author spends rest of his book analyzing early Christian apologetic attacks on pagan and early Christian motifs on Roman lamps and in catacomb paintings to challenge this scenario. Finney's analysis of Christian literary attack on pagan attempts to prove that apologists were not opposed to per se, but were using this genre of literature as a clever ploy (p.47) to win over philosophically inclined political elite of Roman world to sympathy for Christian cause. By attacking excesses of pagan art, apologists were showing that it was not Christians, but crass devotees of pagan gods who were really guilty of atheism, superstition, and sexual misconduct. The author posits that the reasons t nonappearance of Christian before 200 have nothing to do with principled aversion to art, with other-worldliness or with antimaterialism. The truth is simple and mundane: Christians lacked land and capital. Art required both. As soon as they acquired land and capital, Christians began to experiment with their own distinctive forms of art (p. 108). Although admitting that Christians had inherited through Judaism and strand of Hellenism belief that God was invisible, Dr. …

The Civic Seminary: Sources of Modern Public Education in the Lutheran Reformation of Germany

“Reformation denial” has become the new fashion among Western historians today. A generation ago, the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation was almost universally regarded as a formative era in the development of Western ideas and institutions. Today, it is regularly described as an historians' fiction and historical failure. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, and other sixteenth century figures certainly called for reforms of all sorts, recent interpretations allow. But they inspired no real reformation. Their ideas had little impact on the beliefs and behavior of common people. Their policies perpetuated elitism and chauvinism more than they cultivated equality and liberty. Their reforms tended to obstruct nascent movements for democracy and market economy and to inspire new excesses in the patriarchies of family, church, and state.

Work and Meaning

Because work is of central significance in our lives, it is important to ask theologically about its meaning. At its crassest, the Protestant work ethic suggests that to do work well and to amass wealth are religious duties. In reflecting on the meaning of work, one does well to take the sixteenth-century Reformers as a point of departure. Here work is associated with God the Creator, who continually creates. In work, we humans become co-workers with God and stewards of creation. By our work, we serve not only ourselves in necessary ways but also God, our neighbors, and the larger good.

Die teologiese wortels en stuktuur van die Heidelbergse Kategismus: ’n Oorsig

The theological roots and structure of the Heidelberg Catechism: An overview Some theological roots of the Heidelberg Catechism are considered by taking into account possible viewpoints borrowed from existing Reformed catechisms and prominent sixteenth-century Reformers. Contributions of members of the committee that compiled the Heidelberg Catechism are also pointed out. The structure of the Heidelberg Catechism is etched against the background of the catechisms of Luther and Calvin.

The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought by David A. Weir (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990, xvii, 244, £27.50)

The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought by David A. Weir (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990, xvii, 244, £27.50)

The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought. David A. Weir

<i>The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought</i>. David A. Weir

The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought

The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought

The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought.

The lexical and biblical evidence the background to the first proposal of the prelapsarian covenant in reformed theology the prelapsarian covenant as proposed by Zacharias Ursinus the early federal theologians the second stage in the development of the federal theology. Appendix: bibliography of the federal theology and the covenant idea before 1750.

:The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth Century Reformation Thought

:<i>The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth Century Reformation Thought</i>

Smashing Idols and the State: The Protestant Ethic and Egyptian Sunni Radicalism

Recent scholars of the Middle East have implicitly and suggestively noted similarities between contemporary Muslim activists and sixteenth-century Protestant reformers. A more explicit and rigorous argument comparing Protestantism and contemporary Sunni movements in Egypt can yield insights into both movements.

:Calvin and Social Welfare: Deacons and the Bourse francaise

The hospitality offered by John Calvin and his supporters in Geneva to Protestant refugees from Catholic areas was institutionalized in the 1540s into a welfare fund known as the Bourse francaise. This history of the institution and its influence is set within the larger social and cultural context of sixteenth-century Reformation Europe and of welfare and the diaconate in the early and medieval church.