Search Results

This chapter shows how the adherents of the evangelical forms of belief were made aware—by means of ritual and the decoration of Lutheran sanctuaries—that along with late-medieval Catholic Christianity, emotion-oriented piety was at an end, or at least to be severely curtailed and redirected. Lutheran divines intended to communicate to the members of their congregations that God was present spiritually. He was not approachable physically or susceptible of manipulation by humankind. Changes in liturgical words, gestures, cultic artifacts, and the arrangement of the sacral space—in short, in the whole of ecclesiastical ritual—gave people to understand that they should not dramatically act out their devotion. In general, the new program strove to dampen the outer demonstration of religious fervor, though not piety itself. Protestant piety, guided by the Word of God, was explicitly and semiotically defined as quiet submission to the workings of faith within the individual Christian and, externally, as gentle, less emotive (however feeling), non-flaunting submission to authority and the service of one's neighbor. Princes, reformers, and magistrates simultaneously sought to suppress flamboyant demonstrativeness in social relations as well.

This chapter focuses on anti-Jewish messages in Passion sermons. It shows that conventions of anti-Semitic utterance in preaching on the Crucifixion did not soften with the coming of the Reformation. Post-Reformation Catholic preachers continued to tap them with full enthusiasm, and Lutheran and Reformed clergy all drew upon them. However, in the basic dimension of the derogation of the Jews, differences are evident among the three leading denominations. Catholic divines treated the Jews rhetorically as the perpetrators of the most ferocious torture upon Jesus. Lutheran pastors retained the conviction that the Jews were indeed the authors of the gravest offenses against Christ. These remain most assuredly physical, even though the tendency within the evangelical movement is to damp down not just the length of Passion preaching—which itself would curtail elaboration—but also the sensual horror of the Crucifixion. John Calvin and his Reformed followers rendered the Jews' culpability yet more abstract. They adhered to it faithfully, but they turned the figure of the treacherous Jewish mob into a metaphor for their verminously sinful human charges, including themselves.

The Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ conferred upon Christianity its essential meaning. The Passion was to guide the faithful through their entire existence on earth. Even had they failed to apply its meaning consistently owing to sin and the distractions of life, at no time was it more crucial that they do so than as they approached their departure from this world. Similarly, the relatives, friends, neighbors, and servants who gathered around and witnessed their final breaths ought to absorb the lessons of the godly demise and be brought back to concentration upon the death of Jesus upon the cross. All confronted the dual pressures of grievous separation from loved ones and the admonition to concentrate fully upon the image of Christ. The messages of Good Friday to Easter must triumph now, however. This chapter shows how this much was true across the spectrum of German Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism.

This concluding chapter begins by examining the sermons of men who are representative of their respective faith-alliances, namely, Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism. It then considers the question of these early-modern preachers' labeling of the feelings that they strove to inculcate on their hearers. Through the words they chose we may come closer to grasping the spiritual state that they regarded as ideal. Neither they nor their charges could ever really sustain such arousal uniformly even through the Lenten and Easter season, much less, as sought, through the entire year. Yet their chosen frameworks were the ones that the pious ought to aspire to. Across creedal lines, the feelings inspired by the Passion were central to proper Christianity.

Luther's theology is not sufficiently appreciated for its intensely incarnational and sacramental character. Recent Luther research has uncovered the intellectual roots of his thought in patristic and medieval sacramental theology, and his resultant and vigorous anti-spiritualizing impulse. Luther redefines ‘spiritual’ to mean not ‘non-material’, but impregnated with the Holy Spirit. In localizing himself in specific material and liturgical realities, God fills them with Spirit, imbues them with deifying power, and constitutes them as ‘the bodily word of the Gospel.’

This chapter traces Morison's involvement in the English Reformation. It examines Morison's role in the theological determinations that led to the Bishops' Book, and details his involvement in the negotiations with the Schmalkaldic League in 1538. Throughout the 1530s Morison openly expressed Lutheran views and translated Lutheran works while actively promoting further reform of the English church. His theological opinion mattered and was invoked by other scholars looking for patronage from Thomas Cromwell. Morison was actively involved in the Reformation again in Edward VI's reign, when he served on several important Edwardian commissions including the visitation of Shropshire and Wales in 1547, the chantry commission in 1548 and the visitation of Oxford in 1549.

This chapter shifts the focus of the book from congregations, immigrant groups, and collective experience to the role of individuals and the concept of individualism in shaping American religious experience. Case studies of sacred musicians and music publishers, such as Alfred Grimm and David Einhorn, who variously reflect individualism in Lutheranism and Judaism, illustrate the ways in which discourse networks and embodied musical experience empower the individual to find a place against the metaphorical representation of vast American landscapes as panoramas. Hymnals are examined as personal and personalized collections of sacred song. The chapter concludes by examining the ways in which sacred music allows for processes of otherness, resistance, and the assertion of individuality.

To some extent, the rise of Styrian Protestantism as one of Austrian Protestantism was generally associated with the spiritual turmoil which attended the formation of the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy in the 16th century. The spread of heterodoxy stood at the beginnings and accompanied the early stages of dynastic ‘state-building’ policy by which the Austrian duchies of Upper, Lower, and Inner Austria were slowly but inexorably drawn away from the Empire to become part of an increasingly eastern-based composite Monarchy. While this chapter argues that the Austrian Monarchy received its distinct intellectual identity during the Counter-Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries, it does not dispute the fact that the dynasty had hitched its fortune to the Catholic faith well before this date in important ways which effectively precluded members of the Austrian branch from open confessional deviance.

Towards the end of the 1570s, the forces of the Counter-Reformation were already rallying at the courts of Munich, Innsbruck, Vienna, and Graz, reflecting a more general though gradual Catholic recovery in central and eastern Europe towards the end of the 16th century. To the eyes of contemporary observers, however, the Inner Austrian nobility seemed to have achieved a success that spelt religious toleration for the Austrian lands at large. This chapter shows that 1578 was a turning point in bringing the opposed Catholic forces together in an effort to stem the tide of heresy. Although the Catholic counter-attack during the second half of Karl II's reign could not effect a complete reversal, it was able to discourage the further spread and institutional consolidation of the new faith by restrictive legal and political measures against urban Protestantism and the Lutheran school and church ministry.

Covers the partial rediscovery of the Lutheran sung liturgy, Reformation hymns and Bach's choral works, and experiments in ecclesiology and parish church architecture shaped by early Christian or high Gothic models. A new interest, antiquarian and historical, in Lutheran doctrine and worship, and ‘neo‐Lutheran’ churchscapes, begins a theme in the next chapter.

The story of Montbéliard is not only part of the complex history of France and the empire; it is involved in the history of all of Europe. Its problems are a microcosm of the problems of people affected by religious quarrels in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. At least three forms of Protestantism were represented in Montbéliard during the fifty years previous to the colloquy of 1586: the evangelicals faithful to Pierre Toussain and his simple confession of faith, the French refugees who followed the Gallican Confession, and the Lutheranism of the town's suzerains. Montbéliard was often a focal point for heated exchanges between its count, Frederick, and the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II. This chapter examines the political history of Europe in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, a complex weave out of which it is not easy to pluck the pertinent threads.

This chapter examines the Denkwürdigkeiten of the abbess Caritas Pirckheimer of the Poor Clares convent in Nuremberg at the time of the Reformation. Pirckheimer fought to save her convent from closure after the conversion of the city to Lutheranism in 1525. The chapter examines how and why the text was written, placing it in the context of convents' use of history to strengthen convent identity. It argues that the text is a polemical one, intended to present a united front against the convent's Lutheran enemies and omit any references to dissent from within, so that the convent appears for posterity to be a model of discipline.

This chapter continues exploring the trinitarian approaches to Calvin's autotheanism, taking up the much stricter ‘tension in distinction’ accounts of twofold trinitarian speech representative of Lutheranism, Roman Catholicism, and the majority of the Reformed. These represent the classical mainstream of theological exposition. It classes the Reformed majority view with Roman Catholic and Lutheran approaches because the difference between them was largely one of emphasis. If the traditional Roman and Lutheran position may be encapsulated as, ‘The Son is the selfsame God with the Father, but by communication from the Father, and therefore it is inappropriate to call him self- existent’, then the majority Reformed position may by summarized, ‘The Son is the selfsame God with the Father, even by communication from the Father, and therefore it is appropriate to call him self-existent’.

In Continental Protestantism, the history of the Church acquired vital explanatory importance for the theological justification of the movement. Protestant thought argued that for 1,000 years before the Reformation the Catholic Church had erred more and more seriously from correct belief and practice. However, the first experiments in writing ecclesiastical history were heavily influenced by northern Renaissance humanism. A tension developed between human, pragmatic explanations for religious behaviour and doctrinal or apocalyptic explanations of Church history. This chapter analyses that tension through the writings of humanist-educated Protestant historians such as Joachim Vadian, Heinrich Bullinger, Philipp Melanchthon, and Caspar Peucer. Over the sixteenth century, humanist influence dissipated, as even Renaissance-trained scholars adopted dogmatic arguments; however, it did not entirely disappear. The chapter concludes by comparing humanist-inspired Church histories with doctrinally based histories written within Lutheran orthodoxy, such as the Magdeburg Centuries and the Epitome of Lucas Osiander the Elder.

This chapter takes nine dialogues published in the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I, and determines the extent of their influence on the Elizabethan publications. We meet Hans Sachs, William Turner, and John Bale. The chapter concludes that while certain literary topoi die out over time, the basic cast of a foolish, bible‐phobic cleric and a biblically enlightened layman, and its concomitant satire — inspired by Anthony Scoloker's translation of Hans Sachs — was still very much alive in the Elizabethan publications. If the Mass and its central rite the Eucharist were concerns particular to the Edwardian dialogues, dismay at the unenlightened populace and a call for a fully reformed ministry, first voiced in the Henrician pieces, would be reiterated time and again throughout Elizabeth's reign.

To understand the philosophical background of Luther’s insights, one needs to outline the positions of his teachers Usingen, Trutfetter, and Staupitz. Usingen in particular follows the Buridanian account of desire and consent, arguing that it is the Catholic view of human action. Luther vehemently argues against this view, coming to the conclusion that human beings naturally follow evil. With the help of the Spirit, however, they can rise to the level of continuous and relatively successful struggle between spirit and the flesh. Luther’s account does not leave room for a philosophical theory of weak-willed character. His colleague Melanchthon moderates Luther’s view to an extent, but it is Joachim Camerarius who reintroduces the philosophical discussion of weakness of will in Lutheranism. His original variant of voluntarism influenced later authors, but the chapter also shows that some other Lutherans like Golius and Heider defend Aristotelian intellectualism. The example of Medea (her love and her rage) and the idea of inner struggle are used prominently by the Lutheran authors.