AP European History
AP European History
Martin Luther was not so much the father as the elder brother of the Reformation because many other reformers were criticizing the church by the early 1520s.
Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) introduced reforming ideas in Zurich, Switzerland. He rejected clerical celibacy, the worship of saints, fasting, transubstantiation, and purgatory. Rejecting ritual and ceremony, Zwingli stripped churches of decorations, such as statues. In 1523 the governing council of the city accepted his beliefs. Zurich became a center for Protestantism, which spread throughout Switzerland.
Zwingli, believing in the union of church and state, established in Zurich a system which required church attendance by all citizens and regulated many aspects of personal behavior – all enforced by courts and a group of informers.
Efforts to reconcile the views of Zwingli and Luther, chiefly over the issue of the Eucharist, failed during a meeting in Marburg Castle in 1529.
Switzerland, divided into many cantons, also divided into Protestant and Catholic camps. A series of civil wars, during which Zwingli was captured and executed, led to a treaty in which each canton was permitted to determine its own religion.
Anabaptist (derived from a Greek word meaning to baptize again) is a name applied to people who rejected the validity of child baptism and believed that such children had to be rebaptized when they became adults.
As the Bible became available, through translation into the languages of the people, many people adopted interpretations contrary to those of Luther, Zwingli, and the Catholics.
Anabaptists sought to return to the practices of the early Christian church, which was a voluntary association of believers with no connection to the state. Perhaps the first Anabaptists appeared in Zurich in 1525 under the leadership of Conrad Grebel (1498-1526), and were called Swiss Brethren.
In 1534, a group of Anabaptists, called Melchiorites, led by Jan Matthys, gained political control of the city of Munster in Germany and forced other Protestants and Catholics to convert or leave. Most of the Anabaptists were workers and peasants, and the city then followed Old Testament practices, including polygamy, and abolished private property. Combined armies of Protestants and Catholics captured the city and executed the leaders in 1535. Thereafter, Anabaptism and Munster became stock words of other Protestants and Catholics about the dangers of letting reforming ideas influence workers and peasants.
Subsequently, Anabaptists adopted pacifism and avoided involvement with the state whenever possible. Today, the Mennonites, founded by Menno Simons (1496-1561), and the Amish are the descendents of the Anabaptists.
John Calvin (1509-1564), a Frenchman, arrived in Geneva, a Swiss city-state which had adopted an anti-Catholic position, in 1536 but failed in his first efforts to further the reforms. Upon his return in 1540, Geneva became the center of the Reformation. Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), a strictly logical analysis of Christianity, had a universal, not local or national, appeal.
Calvin brought knowledge of organizing a city from his stay in Strasbourg, which was being led by the reformer Martin Bucer (1491-1551). Calvin differed from Luther as Calvin emphasized the doctrine of predestination (God knew who would obtain salvation before those people were born) and believed that church and state should be united.
As in Zurich, church and city combined to enforce Christian behavior, and Calvinism came to be seen as having a stem morality. Like Zwingli, Calvin rejected most aspects of the medieval church's practices and sought a simple, unadorned church. Followers of Calvinism became the most militant and uncompromising of all Protestants.
Geneva became the home to Protestant exiles from England, Scotland, and France, who later returned to their countries with Calvinist ideas.
Calvinism ultimately triumphed as the majority religion in Scotland, under the leadership of John Knox (1505-1572), and the United Provinces of the Netherlands. Puritans in England and New England also accepted Calvinism.
England underwent reforms in a pattern differing from the rest of Europe. Personal and political decisions by the rulers determined much of the course of the Reformation there.
Henry VIII (1509-1547) married Katherine of Aragon, the widow of his older brother. By 1526 Henry became convinced that his inability to produce a legitimate son to inherit his throne was because he had violated one of God's commandments (Leviticus 20:21) by marrying his brother's widow. Soon, Henry fell in love with Anne Boleyn and decided to annul his marriage to Katherine in order to marry Anne. The 32 pope, Clement VII, the authority necessary to issue such an annulment was, after 1527, under the political control of Charles V, Katherine's nephew. Efforts to secure the annulment, directed by Cardinal Wolsey (1474-1530), ended in failure and Wolsey's disgrace. Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), named archbishop in 1533, dissolved Henry's marriage, permitting him to marry Anne Boleyn in January 1533. Henry used Parliament to threaten the pope and eventually to legislate the break with Rome by law. The Act of Annates (1532) prevented payments of money to the pope. The Act of Restraint of Appeals (1533) forbade appeals to be taken to Rome, which stopped Katherine from appealing her divorce to the pope. The Act of Supremacy (1534) declared Henry, not the pope, as to be head of the English church. Subsequent acts enabled Henry to dissolve the monasteries and to seize their land, which represented perhaps 25% of the land of England. In 1536, Thomas More was executed for rejecting Henry's leadership of the English church. Protestant beliefs and practices made little headway during Henry's reign as he accepted transubstantiation, enforced celibacy among the clergy and otherwise made the English church conform to most Catholic practices.
Under Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI (1547-1553), a child of ten at his accession, the English church adopted Calvinism. Clergy were allowed to marry, communion by the laity expanded, and images were removed from churches. Doctrine included justification by faith, the denial of transubstantiation, and only two sacraments.
Under Mary (1553-1558), Henry VIII’s daughter and half-sister of Edward VI, Catholicism was restored and England reunited with the pope. Over 300 people were executed, including bishops and Archbishop Cranmer, for refusing to abandon their Protestant beliefs. Numerous Protestants fled to the Continent where they learned of more advanced Protestant beliefs, including Calvinism at Geneva.
Under Elizabeth (1558-1603), Henry VIII’s daughter and half-sister of Edward and Mary, the church in England adopted Protestant beliefs again. The Elizabethan Settlement required outward conformity to the official church but rarely inquired about inward beliefs. Some practices of the church, including ritual, resembled the Catholic practices. Catholicism remained, especially among the gentry, but could not be practiced openly. Some reformers wanted to purify (hence "Puritans'') the church of its remaining Catholic aspects. The resulting church, Protestant in doctrine and practice but retaining most of the physical possessions, such as buildings, and many powers, such as church courts, of the medieval church, was called Anglican.
The Parliament in Ireland established a Protestant church much like the one in England. The landlords and people near Dublin were the only ones who followed their monarchs into 34 Protestantism as the mass of the Irish people were left untouched by the Reformation. The Catholic church and its priests became the religious, and eventually the national, leaders of the Irish people.
John Knox (1505-72), upon his return from the Continent, led the Reformation in Scotland. Parliament, dominated by nobles, established Protestantism in 1560. The resulting church was Calvinist in doctrine.
France, near Geneva and Germany, experienced efforts at establishing Protestantism, but the kings of France had control of the church there and gave no encouragement to reformers. Calvinists, known in France as Huguenots, were especially common among the nobility and, after 1562, a series of civil wars involving religious differences resulted.
The church in Spain, controlled by the monarchy, allowed no Protestantism to take root. Similarly Italian political authorities rejected Protestantism.