Alec Ryrie - Protestants - The Radicals Who Made the Modern World

Müntzer was starting to ride something bigger than he could control. It is still unclear quite how the religious turmoil that Luther had unleashed was connected to the German Peasants’ War of 1524–25, the largest mass rebellion in European history before the French Revolution of 1789. The peasants had long-standing grievances about rents, rights and property, but reforming preachers were a vital catalyst. Suddenly peasants were denouncing serfdom as incompatible with Christian liberty, demanding that the people be able to elect their priests, and claiming that the Church’s riches ought to belong to everyone. None of this was what Luther had meant, but you did not have to stretch his ideas very far to get there. The most widespread set of demands, first adopted by the peasants of Swabia, ended with a deliberate echo of Luther at Worms: they offered to desist if they could be proved wrong from the Bible.

Some of the rebels, influenced by preachers like Müntzer, wanted much more. Abolishing private property – didn’t the Bible record that the early Church had held all goods in common? Killing monks and priests – didn’t the Bible teach that idolaters should die? Overthrowing princes – didn’t the Bible promise a future kingdom of the saints? Even if these radicals were only clinging to the rebellion’s tail, they gave the whole enterprise an apocalyptic feel. Something more than rents and landholding was at stake. It was a moment to establish a just social order in anticipation of Christ’s imminent return.

To his credit, Luther was torn. In early 1525, he wrote An Admonition to Peace , accepting that many of the peasants’ demands were fair but warning that rebellion was no way to secure them. To follow Christ meant meek submission, not pillage and insurrection. He advised the peasants, sombrely and with a magnificent lack of realism, to return home and humbly petition their betters for redress. Once it became clear that matters had passed that point, Luther’s deep social conservatism took over. His next pamphlet, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants , blustered,

Nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog. . . . There is no time for sleeping; no place for patience or mercy. It is the time of the sword, not the day of grace. . . . I think there is not a devil left in hell; they have all gone into the peasants. . . . Stab, smite, slay, whoever can. If you die in doing it, well for you! A more blessed death can never be yours, for you die in obeying the divine Word.

Ironically, Luther justified this in the same apocalyptic terms as Müntzer. This was not a time for soft middle ways: “The destruction of the world is to be expected every hour.” It was time to take a stand against the forces of Antichrist, whatever their guise. 24

On 15 May 1525, nine days after Luther’s pamphlet was written, the Thuringian peasants met a Saxon-Hessian mercenary army near Frankenhausen. Müntzer preached before the battle, pointing to a rainbow as an omen of victory and promising the peasants that bullets could not hurt them. Meanwhile, they were encircled with artillery. The peasants tried to flee to the town. Thousands died before they reached it. The wounded were left to die on the field. The town itself surrendered, but not quickly enough. The reprisals were on a genocidal scale. The victorious lords, one witness wrote, “seem bent on leaving a wilderness for their heirs”. Müntzer himself was found hiding, in disguise, and was beheaded. A few weeks later, the southern German peasants suffered equally catastrophic defeats. The total number killed during the whole appalling business is probably well over eighty thousand. And while the peasants would certainly have been crushed with or without Luther’s blessing, his moral responsibility for the slaughter is inescapable.

For the reforming movement as a whole, the Peasants’ War was a calamity. Fairly or not, it was widely blamed on reformist preaching. By no coincidence, it was in September 1524, as the violence was bubbling up, that Erasmus finally decisively distanced himself from Luther. He argued, all too plausibly, that Luther’s teaching on God’s grace left no room for personal responsibility and so threatened moral anarchy and social collapse. If this was where conscience governed by Scripture alone led, perhaps the authoritative, binding interpretation of the Church was not so bad after all. 25In the early 1520s, it had been possible to hope that one of the various strands of the reforming movement might take over the old Church wholesale. That hope died on the battlefields.

The radicals, those who survived, now began to preach withdrawal from Christian society, to form perfect communities of saints in expectation of the imminent Last Judgment. For many of them, the symbol of this withdrawal was adult baptism. All the baptisms described in the New Testament are of adults able to confess their own faith. So perhaps infants should not be baptized? In which case, all Christendom had been in error since at least the second century, and the community of the faithful could only be a small, self-selected group. This meant abandoning the ideal of a universal church, to which Luther and most other reformers still aspired, for sectarianism. Beginning in Zurich in January 1525, the radicals began to mark that withdrawal by baptizing adults. “Anabaptists”, or rebaptizers, their enemies called them, and they were not short of enemies. To the old Church, they were heretics like the rest. To Luther and other reformers who desperately needed to be thought respectable, the radicals risked discrediting the reforming movement as a whole. A sharp line needed urgently to be drawn in these shifting sands.

That effort to differentiate between radical “Anabaptists” and safe, mainstream reformers was strikingly successful. To this day, it remains controversial to describe the radicals as Protestants. Yet their shared heritage is unmistakable. The Anabaptists’ doctrines were very similar to those of establishment, “magisterial” Protestantism. Even infant baptism was openly questioned by some “mainstream” reformers, before the subject became too hot to touch. One hundred and twenty years later, the Baptists, a new group with its roots firmly in mainstream Protestantism, followed the Anabaptists in renouncing infant baptism, despite coming from a distinct theological tradition.

Like Luther’s moderates, the radicals claimed to base their doctrines wholly on the Bible. But like Luther, they did so as lovers, perceiving the Bible’s core message by God’s grace and using it to interpret the rest. Some were more explicit about this than Luther. The south German radical Jörg Haugk complained that “many accept the Scriptures as if they were the essence of divine truth; but they are only a witness to divine truth which must be experienced in the inner being”. Hans Hut, a survivor of the battle of Frankenhausen who became a compelling Anabaptist missionary before his death in prison in 1527, argued that the Bible, if taken literally, bristled with contradictions. It could therefore only be properly understood by the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit. In this way, theologically uneducated radicals could defy learned professors like Luther. One self-taught Anabaptist preacher called scholars “Scripture wizards”, arguing that their hairsplitting subtleties blinded them to the simple truth. 26

Luther and the “fanatics” both exemplify Protestantism at work. Both were driven by dazzling religious insights, which they discovered by reading the Bible and which then taught them how to read the Bible. Both denied that any human authority could teach them they were wrong. The Christian liberty that Luther had preached reached far further than he had anticipated. That was his tragedy, and perhaps also his glory.