Fathers of the Protestant Reformation

Martin Luther, John Calvin, and several others are recognized as the fathers of the Protestant reformation.1 The word fathers used this way means those who originate or institute something. They surely did so, bringing about one of world history’s most important revolutions. They split up the international Church of Rome and replaced it with national, or state churches, mainly in northern Europe. They are known as the magisterial reformers.

For historians and theologians, this name serves two purposes. First, it identifies their cooperation with the princes and governing authorities of their realms, which they thought necessary for the success of their reforms. Secondly, it distinguishes them from the radical reformers, who are much less well-known figures — men like the Anabaptists Conrad Grebel and Menno Simons.

These radicals, also known as evangelicals, had departed from the historic foundation of Christianity laid by the emperor Constantine and the popes as to the proper relationship between church, state, and society. What had happened twelve centuries before with Constantine was (and in many ways, still is) the normal condition by which Christians judge their participation in the world.

One historian said much about it in these few words:

The conversion of Constantine had aligned the Roman Empire with the Christian Church in a working partnership. But the empire, as the earlier institution, had changed the less of the two; in some ways it had barely changed at all — it had replaced one State religion by another. The Church, by contrast, had changed a great deal. It had adapted itself to its State and imperial function; it had assumed worldly ways and attitudes, and accepted a range of secular responsibilities; and in the emperor it had acquired a protector and governor whom it might influence but could not directly control. Hence the Church, by marrying the imperial Roman State, was necessarily influenced by changes which overcame that State in the fifth and sixth centuries. 2

The magisterial reformers had not departed from this foundation, merely seeking to reform the church in matters of doctrine. As a consequence, they were continuously caught up, as the church of the fifth and sixth centuries was, with the fortunes and changes affecting the worldly powers they were aligned with. While seeking to be advisers to princes on matters of conscience, they were transformed, as many before (and after), into “relievers” of conscience.

Elector Johann Friedrich was prone to solicit advice from Luther and Luther’s colleagues only after policy had been set: The original function of the Wittenburg opinion, to advise conscience, was increasingly transformed by Johann Friedrich into the function of relieving consciences, as a religious sanction and assurance. 3

If such was the case of Luther, what was the situation with less influential reformers? 4 The radicals harkened back to an earlier time, seeing no Scriptural basis for such involvement — even collusion — with the state. So they reaped, as others had before them, the same treatment at the hands of the state and its church. The radicals viewed such reformers as hopelessly compromised, protected and upheld, as they were, by the power of the state.

On their part, the magisterial reformers viewed the radicals as dangers to societies, if not heretics. Using their connections with the princes, they caused the radicals to be hunted down. Thousands were put to death in a persecution that both Protestants and Catholics could agree on. The principle issues, but not the only significant ones that caused them to kill the radicals, were their opposition to the state church, infant baptism, and war. The magisterial reformers clung to these as essential supports in maintaining order in both society and church.

But there were others for whom this was only half a reformation... The “evangelicals” were the largest and most important group. They desired a more thorough reform in the light of the Bible. They rejected the idea of a state church and infant baptism, which inevitably accompanied it. Their opponents seized on their practice of ’rebaptizing’ those baptized in infancy and called them ’Anabaptists’ or ’Rebaptizers.’ This was a convenient label as rebaptism was already a capital offense. 5 The Anabaptists were bitterly persecuted and largely exterminated, but their ideas survived and have become steadily more influential.” 6

The effects of the reformers’ accommodation with the state (not to mention the Catholic Church for a millennium before them) defines Christian history in a way that is profoundly at odds with the witness of the New Testament church. No search of the Scriptures can find infant baptism, state church, taking oaths, believers waging wars, or even the clergy-laity system that marks all the great divisions of Christianity — Eastern, Roman, and Protestant. Yet there have always been those (out of the mainstream to be sure) who cannot believe in things that are not in the Scriptures, no matter how well accepted they are culturally.