Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch Read Free Book Online

religious order needed a formal act of rebellion against the old Church, and Albrecht of newly 'ducal' Prussia, who had already sounded out Luther in a face-to-face meeting in Wittenberg in late 1523, institutionalized this during summer 1525, creating the first evangelical princely Church in Europe. 19
    Before Albrecht of Prussia, the initiatives in backing evangelical religious change had come from the self-confident towns and cities of the Holy Roman Empire, who enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy from emperor or princes. The first in the empire proper had been the Free City of Nuremberg, a great prize because the central legal and administrative institutions of the empire were sited there; the Nuremberg authorities allowed evangelical preaching in 1521. But a move of even greater significance came from a wealthy city in Switzerland, whose ties to the empire had been nominal since a victory of combined Swiss armies over Habsburg forces in 1499. Amid various cantons and free jurisdictions which made up the Swiss Confederacy, Zurich became home to another variety of evangelical Reformation which had little more than an indirect debt to Luther, and whose chief reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, created a rebellion against Rome with very different priorities. Certainly at the heart of it was a proclamation of the freedom of a Christian to receive salvation by faith through grace, and although Zwingli would never acknowledge his indebtedness to Luther on this point, it has always seemed rather more than coincidence that the Swiss Reformer should stumble independently on the same notion during the same European-wide crisis.
    While Luther was a university lecturer who never formally had pastoral responsibilities for any congregation, Zwingli was a parish priest who, as an army chaplain, had seen the most extreme of pastoral experiences - that traumatic episode left him with a long-term commitment to Erasmus's arguments against war (contradicted at the last, as we will see). Parish ministry mattered to him deeply. A charismatic preacher at Zurich's chief collegiate church, the Grossmunster, he won a firm basis of support in the Zurich city council, which pioneered a Reformation steered by clerical minister and magistrate in close union. In Lent 1522, he publicly defended friends who had in his presence ostentatiously eaten a large sausage, thus defying Western Church discipline which laid down strict seasons and conditions for abstinence in food. Later that year, he and his clerical associates made an even more profound breach with half a millennium of Church authority than the inappropriate sausage by getting married. It took Martin Luther three years to follow suit.
    Now not Rome but Zurich city council would decide Church law, using as their reference point the true sacred law laid down in scripture. From the early 1520s, Zwingli's Church was the city of Zurich, and the magistrates of Zurich could hold disputations to decide the nature of the Eucharist, just as they might make directions for navigation on Lake Zurich or make arrangements for sewage disposal. With their backing, Zwingli's clerical team, untrammelled by any major monastery, university theology faculty or local bishop, forged a distinctive pattern of evangelical belief with a great worldwide future. By the end of the sixteenth century, this Protestantism would be called Reformed, which crudely speaking meant all varieties of consciously non-Lutheran Protestantism. Often Reformed Protestantism has been called 'Calvinism', but the very fact that we are beginning to discuss it in relation to an earlier set of Reformers than John Calvin immediately reveals the problems inherent in that label, and suggests that it should be used sparingly.

    18. The Holy Roman Empire in 1530
    The term 'Calvinist' began life, like so many religious labels, as an insult, and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it persisted more among those abusing Reformed Protestants than among the