The Man in the Middle: Luther among the Reformers

THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE:

LUTHER AMONG THE REFORMERS

In the waning years of the seventeenth century, a Dutch artist named Carel Allard produced a copper engraving depicting sixteen forerunners and leaders of the Protestant Reformation gathered around a large table. The Reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin command the center of the scene, with Bibles set before them; they are surrounded by a company of other illustrious churchmen, including John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, Huldrych Zwingli, Johannes Oecolampadius, Martin Bucer, Philip Melanchthon, John Knox, Heinrich Bullinger, Theodore Beza, and William Perkins, all of whom are illuminated by a candle set in the center of the table that shines forth the light of the Christian gospel. In the foreground, with their backs to the viewer, are crouching a Roman Catholic cardinal, a demon, a pope, and a monk, who strain unsuccessfully to extinguish the light of the candle. The Dutch inscription reads, “The light placed on the candlestick”—a phrase reminiscent of Jesus’ command in Mark 4:21 that God’s gospel light must be placed on a stand for everyone to see.

Allard’s engraving is both revealing and misleading. In one sense, Allard’s depiction of the Reformers as a company of church leaders committed to God’s Word and the Christian gospel communicates the important insight that the Protestants of the sixteenth century shared common theological convictions that animated their protest against the medieval Roman Catholic Church. So too, the engraving illustrates the fact that the Protestant Reformation was never the work of a single individual, nor was it restricted to one region of Europe or to a single language group. On the other hand, Allard’s engraving misrepresents the nature of early modern Protestantism in that it suggests a unity and collaboration between the German, Swiss, French, and English Reformers that frequently did not exist in practice. Although Protestant leaders in the sixteenth century were quick to acknowledge Martin Luther’s special—even God-ordained—role in the renewal of the Christian church, many of them crossed swords with Luther and his successors in Wittenberg over differences in theology and religious practice. Martin Luther’s life and legacy served both as a light that inspired admiration and emulation and as a lightning rod that attracted religious division and controversy.

This chapter will briefly explore the nature of Luther’s relationships with and his influence among other evangelical leaders both within and outside of the German empire. After describing Luther’s network of allies and friends in and around Wittenberg itself, we will turn our attention to his relationships with 2 such as Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Musculus in other magisterial Reformers southern Germany; Huldrych Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich; John Calvin and Theodore Beza in Geneva; and Thomas Cranmer in England.

Luther and the Wittenberg Theologians

By the time Luther returned to Wittenberg from his temporary exile at Wartburg Castle in the spring of 1522, he had become a household name in the German speaking lands and the recognized leader of the evangelical reform movement. Luther’s strong character, stolid courage, and dynamic theological leadership—to say nothing of his clear exposition of the Christian Scriptures—attracted a company of capable and loyal supporters who proved to be instrumental in promoting the evangelical cause in Electoral Saxony and throughout the Holy ⁴ Many of Luther’s first allies were men under thirty who had Roman Empire. been trained in humanistic studies and were committed to the reform of the Christian church through the recovery of the biblical languages, the careful exegesis of Scripture, and regular (rather than occasional) Christian preaching. The institutional center of this reform program was the University of Wittenberg, where, in 1517, Luther and his faculty colleagues instituted curricular reforms that replaced scholastic theology with biblical studies and established faculty ⁵ Thanks to these curricular reforms, as well as chairs in Greek and Hebrew.

Luther’s public fame, the University of Wittenberg quickly grew to become one of the largest universities in the German empire.

The Wittenberg circle produced many of the most notable pastors and intellectual leaders of sixteenth-century Lutheranism. Luther’s faculty colleague and friend Nicolaus von Amsdorf (1483–1565) left Wittenberg in 1524 to become the pastor of the evangelical church in Magdeburg; thereafter, he served as bishop of Naumburg-Zeitz and then general inspector over the church of ⁶ A similar career path was followed by the Erfurt humanist Justus Eisenach.

Jonas (1493–1555), who arrived in Wittenberg just in time to accompany Luther to the Diet of Worms in April 1521. In the years that followed, Jonas served as provost of Wittenberg’s Castle Church and as dean of the faculty of theology; in the final decades of his life, he helped introduce reform in Ducal Saxony and served as preacher and superintendent of the Lutheran church in Halle.

Another humanist who came under the spell of Luther and his gospel centered theology was the Pomeranian churchman Johannes Bugenhagen (1485– 8 When Bugenhagen first read Luther’s treatise On the Babylonian 1558).

Captivity of the Church in 1520, he was mesmerized: “The entire world is blind ⁹ Moving to Wittenberg, Bugenhagen quickly —this man alone sees the truth!” won the admiration of Luther and was soon appointed minister of the city church. Over the next three decades, Bugenhagen played a strategic role in promoting the evangelical cause: he was Luther’s pastor and spiritual advisor; he occupied a professor’s post at the university; he published a Low German translation of the Bible and wrote several commentaries on Scripture; and he helped draft Lutheran church ordinances for no fewer than eight cities in ¹⁰ As did his colleagues Amsdorf and Jonas, northern Germany and Denmark.

Bugenhagen remained to the very end a loyal disciple and defender of Luther and his evangelical theology. Preaching at Luther’s funeral in 1546, Bugenhagen eulogized his deceased friend as a “great teacher and prophet, a reformer sent by God to the church,” and “this holy apostle and prophet of Christ, our preacher and evangelist in the German lands.”

Of all Luther’s colleagues in Wittenberg, the brilliant theologian Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) emerged as the Reformer’s closest confidant and ¹² Melanchthon first arrived in Wittenberg in 1518 to most talented disciple. assume the professor’s chair of Greek at the university when he was only twenty-one years of age. His early lectures, which covered such subjects as Latin and Greek grammar, rhetoric, physics, philosophy, and (a little later) theology, attracted hundreds of auditors and earned him Luther’s highest esteem. “No one ¹³ Although it was humanist living is gifted with such talents,” Luther effused. pedagogy—not Luther’s reputation—that had initially attracted Melanchthon to Wittenberg, the young professor quickly became a partisan of Luther and a champion of his “new” theology. Like Luther, Melanchthon came to believe that the gospel—the fact that God accepts sinners by grace alone on account of Christ—was the heart of the Christian message.

Between 1518 and 1521, Melanchthon followed Luther’s lead in affirming the supreme authority of Scripture (sola Scriptura) and justification by grace through faith alone (sola gratia, sola fide), while rejecting Catholic teaching on transubstantiation and papal authority. Melanchthon articulated the fundamental doctrines of evangelical theology in his Loci Communes(first edition, 1521), the first systematic presentation of Reformation theology, which became the primary textbook of Lutheran dogmatics in the following century. Luther said of this work: “You cannot find anywhere a book which treats the whole of theology so adequately as the Loci Communes do…. Next to Holy Scripture, there is no ¹⁴ Alongside the Loci Communes, Melanchthon’s authorship of the better book.”

Augsburg Confession and his defense of it in the presence of the emperor at the Diet of Augsburg (1530) were of central importance in the history and doctrinal development of early modern Lutheranism.

Luther and Melanchthon remained close friends and companionsin-arms in gospel work until Luther’s death in 1546. Nevertheless, significant differences existed between the two men, both in temperament and in religious outlook. Luther was bold, brash, and quick to defend gospel truths; Melanchthon was timid, calculating, and more irenic. Luther was more the theological genius, Melanchthon the systematizer and pedagogue. Luther described their differences this way: “I am rough, boisterous, stormy, and altogether warlike. I am born to fight against innumerable monsters and devils. I must remove stumps and stones… and clear the wild forests; but Master Philip comes along softly and gently sowing and watering with joy, according to the gifts which God has abundantly bestowed upon him.”

There were theological differences between the two men as well. Luther was suspicious of philosophy and Aristotle, while Melanchthon praised Aristotle and saw philosophy as a tool to organize and clarify Christian theology. Melanchthon softened the sharp distinction that Luther drew between law and gospel, placing greater weight on Christians’ ethical responsibilities. So too, in later editions of his Loci Communes, Melanchthon rejected Luther’s doctrine of predestination, defending instead the notion that the human will worked concurrently with the Word of God and the Holy Spirit as agents in conversion. One additional difference that became especially significant was Melanchthon’s departure from Luther’s doctrine of Christ’s real presence in the Lord’s Supper. In 1540, Melanchthon produced a revised edition of the Augsburg Confession (known as the Variata edition) intended to reflect more closely the theology of the Wittenberg Concord (1536), an agreement forged between Wittenberg and south German cities on the thorny subject of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper. Article 10 of the Variata stated that the body and blood of Christ are “truly exhibited”—rather than “truly present and… distributed,” as the Augsburg Confession originally read—to those who partake of the bread and wine. For many conservative Lutherans, this revised statement smacked of Zwingli’s so called “sacramentarian” error in that it stripped the consecrated elements of their true divine substance and called into doubt Luther’s teaching that Christ in His human nature is everywhere present (a doctrine known as ubiquity).

These subtle theological differences between Melanchthon and Luther became amplified after Luther’s death. After the disastrous defeat of the Protestant princes during the Schmalkaldic War of 1546–47, Melanchthon agreed to sign the Leipzig Interim (1548), which mandated the forcible reintroduction of certain Catholic practices and doctrines (viewed by Melanchthon as “indifferent”) into the Protestant churches in the empire. For Lutheran stalwarts such as Amsdorf and Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Melanchthon’s actions were nothing less than a betrayal of Luther and the Reformation. Similarly, more conservative Lutherans (known as Gnesio Lutherans) attacked Melanchthon and his followers (known as “Philippists”) for their defense of human cooperation in salvation and their more spiritualist view of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper. In spite of the invective thrown his way, Melanchthon saw himself as a defender of Luther and his legacy to the end of his life. He ranked Luther among the greatest leaders of the Christian church, in the company of John the Baptist, Paul, and Augustine. In an oration delivered at Luther’s funeral, Melanchthon noted: “Some have complained that Luther displayed too much severity. I will not deny this. But I answer in the language of Erasmus: ‘Because of the magnitude of the disorders, God gave this age a violent physician.’”

Luther and the Southern German Theologians

The progress of evangelical reform in the cities and towns of Germany was more complex and variegated than in the territory of Electoral Saxony. Invariably, Luther’s reform message and influence were refracted through a complex matrix of local and regional politics, anti-clericalism, popular dissatisfaction, humanist idealism, and local religious leadership to produce dramatically different results. Whereas cities such as Strasbourg, Ulm, Augsburg, and Constance abolished the Catholic Mass and embraced Protestantism during the 1520s and early 1530s, other cities such as Cologne and Freiburg-im-Breisgau remained committed to ¹⁹ In southern Germany, the nucleus of first the traditional Catholic faith. generation evangelical leaders was drawn primarily from the ranks of urban humanists and Catholic priests and monks. Though these leaders acknowledged their debt to Luther, most felt free to depart from aspects of his theology and religious program. For south German Reformers such as Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Musculus, Luther inspired respect, but not unflinching loyalty.

Next to Luther and Melanchthon, the Strasbourg minister Martin Bucer (1491–1551) was the most important Protestant Reformer in the German ²⁰ Born the son of a poor cobbler in Schlettstadt (Alsace), Bucer was empire. placed in a Dominican monastery at age fifteen and was thereafter introduced to the scholastic theology of Thomas Aquinas. When he was in his mid-twenties, Bucer’s superiors sent him to pursue his doctorate in theology at the University of Heidelberg, where he became a devotee of humanistic studies—it was also there, in April 1518, that Bucer attended the Heidelberg Disputation and first heard Luther articulate his evangelical doctrine. This marked a turning point in Bucer’s life. Over the next five years, he left the monastery, took a wife in marriage, and migrated to Strasbourg, where he was installed as priest and preacher in the city. In his first published writing, titled That No One ShouldLive for Himself but Others(1523), Bucer defended Luther and his theology while giving special emphasis to the ethical dimension of new life in Christ. Through the efforts of Bucer and his clerical colleagues Matthew Zell (1477– 1548), Wolfgang Capito (1478–1541), and Caspar Hedio (1494–1552), the city of Strasbourg moved steadily into the evangelical camp, a process completed in 1529, when the city magistrates outlawed the Catholic Mass and closed the city’s monasteries.

For the remainder of his career in Strasbourg, Bucer worked tirelessly to establish a Christian social order in the city, one constructed upon the biblical principles central to the Reformation. His literary corpus was expansive, including ponderous biblical commentaries (which Luther deemed as “too long 22), catechisms, polemical writings, and works devoted and nothing but eyewash” to church polity and discipline. At the same time, the Strasbourg Reformer became an important actor on the European stage of religious politics, as he attempted to breach the divide between Lutheran and Reformed Protestants on the contentious subject of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper. As a member of the Swiss delegation to the Marburg Colloquy in 1529, Bucer encountered Luther, but found the German Reformer suspicious and critical of his position. “Your spirit and our spirit do not coincide,” Luther stated. “On the contrary, it is ²³ Luther’s attempt to obvious that we do not have one and the same spirit.” discredit Bucer by associating his eucharistic theology with Zwingli’s memorialist position missed the mark; for Bucer, Christ does impart Himself to believers in the Lord’s Supper, though He is not in the elements of bread and wine. Undeterred by Luther’s hostility, Bucer worked tirelessly over the next decade to achieve union between the Wittenberg theologians and Reformed Protestants of southern Germany and Switzerland. The crowning success of this effort came in 1536 when Bucer and a group of south German theologians journeyed to Wittenberg and reached consensus with Melanchthon and Luther on the Lord’s Supper. This agreement, known as the Wittenberg Concord, affirmed that unworthy communicants receive Christ in the Lord’s Supper (manducatio indignorum), and that the body and blood of Christ are truly and substantially present, offered, and received with(rather than in) the sacramental ²⁴ This doctrinal consensus based on the sacramental union of bread and wine.

Christ with the physical elements reduced tensions between Wittenberg and the cities of southern Germany, but it did not unify the Protestant world, nor did it completely allay Luther’s suspicions of Bucer and other Reformed churchmen in southern Germany.

Bucer was forced to leave Strasbourg in 1549 by the terms of the Augsburg Interim. At the invitation of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, he immigrated to England, where he spent the last years of his life as regius professor at Cambridge University. All the while, Bucer never lost his admiration for Luther, even as he recognized his faults. Upon learning of Luther’s death in 1546, Bucer wrote this tribute to a friend: “I know how many people hate Luther. And yet the fact remains: God loves him very much and never gave us a holier and more effective instrument of the gospel. Luther had his shortcomings, in fact, serious ones. But God bore them and put up with them, never granting another mortal a mightier spirit and such divine power to proclaim his Son and strike down the Antichrist.”

Another south German Reformer who attempted to find middle ground between Luther’s doctrine of real presence and Zwingli’s memorialism was ²⁶ Musculus was a Benedictine monk and Wolfgang Musculus (1497–1563). priest when he first encountered the controversial writings of Martin Luther in

1518. He soon began to share Luther’s evangelical message with his monastic brothers and proclaim this teaching in his parish sermons, earning him the ²⁷ Even so, it took nearly a decade for Musculus nickname “the Lutheran monk.” finally to disentangle himself from his monastic vows and relocate to Strasbourg to serve the cause of church reform under the tutelage of the Reformers Bucer, Zell, and Capito.

From 1527 to 1531, Musculus served as a pastoral assistant in Strasbourg as he attended theology lectures, studied humane letters, including Greek and Hebrew, and became an enthusiastic partisan of Bucer’s brand of Reformed Protestantism. In 1531, Musculus departed for Augsburg, where he distinguished himself for the next seventeen years as the city’s chief preacher, lecturer on Scripture, and theological guide, committed to steering the city’s official theology between Lutheranism and Zwinglianism. Musculus’ attitude toward Luther appears to have shifted during this period. In one letter to his mentor and friend Bucer, he voiced criticism of the Augsburg Confession and confessed his annoyance at Luther’s attacks on Bucer and the Strasbourg church. Elsewhere, he was critical of Luther’s wrath, intransigence, and lack of Christian charity toward his theological opponents—even as he praised the German Reformer’s ²⁸ Musculus was part of the south German delegation that met resolute courage. with Melanchthon and Luther and signed the Wittenberg Concord in 1536. He also interacted with Melanchthon at conferences held with Catholic theologians at Worms (1540) and Regensburg (1541). Thanks to these face-to-face meetings, Musculus established friendly ties with Melanchthon, but he remained wary of (what he saw as) Luther’s pride and explosive temper, particularly as it was expressed toward theologians who disagreed with him.

When Augsburg’s magistrates signed the interim in 1548, Musculus was forced to find a new home. He and his family ultimately settled in the Reformed city of Bern, where Musculus taught theology and biblical studies at the municipal secondary school and produced half a dozen substantial biblical commentaries. In this final phase of his career, Musculus remained committed to a Bucerian doctrine of the Lord’s Supper: the supper is a sacramental feast in which believers enjoy spiritual communion with the true flesh and blood of Jesus ²⁹ At the same time, Musculus called for moderation and insisted that Christ. such theological subtleties must not divide faithful Christians. Writing to Heinrich Bullinger, Musculus summarized his commitment to doctrinal concord with this memorable statement: “May God give to his ministers a spirit of moderation and modesty, and enable them to serve the good of the Church more than their own party interests! ‘He is the great Luther!’ ‘He is the great Zwingli!’ Yes, but the Church of Christ is greater than either one of them! May God, ³⁰ Sadly, Musculus’ through his Spirit of peace, put an end to this quarrel!” prayer for unity was never realized in the sixteenth century.

Luther and the Zurich Theologians

Zurich’s Reformation in the early 1520s was more than a tributary flowing from Luther’s Wittenberg. Though not altogether divorced from Luther’s influence, the Zurich Reformation was an urban event that owed more to communal identity, local agitation, and Huldrych Zwingli’s formidable biblical and ³¹ Born of hearty Alpine stock, Zwingli (1484–1521) theological leadership. entered the priesthood in his early twenties and spent the next decade serving parishes in Glarus and Einsiedeln, while also taking academic degrees at the ³² It was at university that Zwingli first universities of Vienna and Basel. discovered humanistic studies and the writings of Erasmus, which spurred him to read classical and early Christian authors, immerse himself in the Greek New Testament, and pursue a Christ-centered piety. Zwingli’s humanism was combined with an ardent love for his native Switzerland that made him an outspoken critic of the Swiss mercenary system. He was “a Swiss professing Christ among the Swiss.”

Thanks to his reputation as a powerful preacher and Swiss patriot, Zwingli was appointed to the prestigious office of preacher at the Grossmünster church in Zurich in January 1519. The next several years were crucial in Zwingli’s spiritual development—and Zurich’s religious reformation—as he preached consecutively through the biblical text, discovering important ways in which the message of Scripture conflicted with the teaching and practice of the medieval church. In 1520, Zwingli renounced his papal pension; two years later, he preached a sermon in defense of those who ate meat during Lent. At a public disputation in January 1523, Zwingli published his Sixty-Seven Articles, in which he defended the supreme authority of Scripture and argued that salvation is through Christ alone. In two subsequent public disputations, Zwingli convinced Zurich’s magistrates that the Catholic Mass and religious images are incompatible with the teachings of Scripture. Consequently, on Easter Sunday 1525, Zurich’s political authorities abandoned the Mass and mandated that Zwingli’s evangelical theology would henceforth be the city’s confession.

Scholars have long debated the degree to which Zwingli’s theology was informed by Luther’s Reformation discoveries. In the aftermath of the Leipzig Disputation (July 1519) between Luther and Eck, Zwingli is known to have recommended Luther’s books to members of his congregation and praised the ³⁴ In the turbulent years that German Reformer as a courageous “Elijah.” followed, Zwingli sometimes compared Luther to David, fighting Goliath, or to Hercules, who slew the Roman boar; he was “one of the first champions of the ³⁵ Notwithstanding this positive appraisal, Zwingli refused to identify gospel.” himself as a “Lutheran,” and denied direct dependence on Luther: “I did not learn my doctrine from Luther, but from God’s Word itself,” he insisted.

This statement appears to be on the whole correct, for although both Reformers shared common evangelical commitments to the supreme authority of Scripture, justification by faith alone, and Christ’s unique role as mediator in salvation, at key points Zwingli’s and Luther’s theologies and reform programs took different trajectories. Indebted to Erasmian humanism and classic Platonism, Zwingli’s theology drew sharp distinctions between spirit and flesh, between inward and outward piety, between the Creator and His creation. Consequently, Zwingli’s critique of Catholic religious devotion was sharper and more uncompromising than Luther’s, as he required that Catholic worship and churches be purified of all “idolatrous” ceremonies and material “props” (such ³⁷ Whereas Luther as crucifixes and religious images) not mandated in Scripture. believed the great failure of the traditional church had been works-righteousness, Zwingli identified the central evil of medieval Catholicism as idolatry.

Another difference between the two Reformers was in their understanding of the communication of attributes between Christ’s divine and human natures—a difference that would prove especially significant in their contentious debate over Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper. Luther emphasized the unity of Christ’s person (while also affirming the distinctiveness of His natures), and thus believed that the properties of Christ’s divine nature (e.g. omniscience, omnipresence) could legitimately be ascribed to His human nature. On this basis, Luther argued that Christ’s human nature was ubiquitous and, thus, truly present in, with, and under the consecrated sacramental elements. By contrast, Zwingli’s Christology placed a stronger accent on the two distinct natures of the one person, Jesus Christ, and he rejected the idea that the properties of Christ’s divine nature could be directly ascribed to His human nature.

Another important difference between the Reformers emerged from their unique social locations. As the Reformer of a city, Zwingli was more concerned than Luther was with the social and political entailments of reform. He believed that the church and city government should be interdependent and cooperate closely with one another to establish a Christian city. “The Christian man is nothing else but a faithful and good citizen,” Zwingli once opined, “and the Christian city nothing other than the Christian church.”

In their sacramental theology, Luther and Zwingli had much in common: they both emphasized the centrality of the Word in the celebration of the sacraments; they both affirmed infant baptism; they both rejected the sacrificial character of the Catholic Mass and insisted that laypeople be given the cup as well as the bread in the Lord’s Supper. What eventually divided Zwingli from Luther—and the Swiss Reformed from German Lutherans—was their disagreement over Christ’s corporeal presence in the Lord’s Supper. No later than the summer of 1524, Zwingli adopted a symbolic view of Christ’s presence in the sacrament, believing that the word “is” in Jesus’ statement “this is my body” (Matt. 26:26) was a trope or figure of speech, best understood to mean “signifies.” For Zwingli, believers do not feed upon the actual body of Christ in the sacrament—the ascended body of Christ, he believed, is now with the Father in heaven. Nor do the physical elements of bread and wine convey spiritual benefit to the recipient. Instead, the Lord’s Supper should be understood as a memorial service in which Christ’s death is proclaimed and believers make public testimony of their faith.

From 1526 to 1529, Zwingli and his allies published a steady stream of treatises defending this symbolic understanding of the supper and attacking ⁴⁰ Luther and the Wittenberg Luther’s doctrine of Christ’s real presence. theologians responded in force, accusing the Zwinglians of having proud, unbelieving hearts, unwilling to submit to the clear teaching of Scripture. From Luther’s perspective, Zwingli was now “seven times more dangerous than when he was a papist.”

As the two sides blasted each other, hope for unity among German-speaking evangelicals appeared lost. In an effort to heal this dangerous breach, the Landgrave Philip I of Hesse summoned Luther and Melanchthon to his castle at Marburg in October 1529 to meet with a delegation from Switzerland and southern Germany that included Zwingli, Bucer, and Oecolampadius in order to forge consensus. Over the course of four days, the church leaders debated core theological points, achieving agreement on fourteen of fifteen major articles. On the fifteenth point, related to Christ’s corporeal presence in the Lord’s Supper, however, the parties could not reach agreement. The Colloquy of Marburg broke up with Luther resolute and uncompromising, refusing to extend the right hand of Christian fellowship to Zwingli and the south German theologians. In response to Luther’s rebuff, Zwingli is reported to have cried out: “There are no people on earth with whom I would rather be at one than the Wittenbergers!” In the months after the colloquy, Zwingli appears to have moved away from a “mere” memorialist perspective to affirm that the body of Christ, when ⁴³ Despite contemplated by faith, is sacramentally present in the Lord’s Supper. this shift, however, Zwingli remained estranged from Luther when the Zurich Reformer died in battle during the Second Kappel War (1531).

The rupture between the German Lutherans and the Swiss Reformed proved to be irreparable. Heinrich Bullinger (1504–74), who succeeded Zwingli as chief preacher at the Grossmünster, was deeply wounded by Luther’s harsh attacks ⁴⁴ At the same time, Bullinger and his against Zwingli and the Zurich church. colleagues did not entirely trust Bucer and the south Germans, nor were they willing to sign the Wittenberg Concord in 1536. Consequently, Zurich and her Swiss allies became increasingly isolated from the larger Protestant world. The hostile confessional climate only worsened when Luther published the ShortConfession of the Holy Sacrament(1544), which denounced Zwingli, Karlstadt, Oecolampadius, and Caspar Schwenckfeld as heretics and fanatics. “Luther has damned us as heretics,” Bullinger complained, “and has insulted the faith and honor of our faithful ancestors, who were honorable Christian men, and our churches.”

In response to such attacks, Bullinger and other Swiss theologians attempted to create a common theological and political front against the Lutherans and Catholics. In 1549, Bullinger and Calvin and their respective cities signed the Consensus Tigurinus, which contained a compromise statement on the Lord’s ⁴⁶ In a similar fashion, Bullinger’s magisterial summary of Reformed Supper. doctrine known as the Second Helvetic Confession (1566) became the confessional standard for Reformed churches in Switzerland, France, Hungary, ⁴⁷ While rejecting the Lutheran doctrines of ubiquity, the Poland, and Scotland. sacramental eating of the unworthy (manducatio indignorum), and Christ’s corporeal presence in the supper, Bullinger’s confession affirms that the Lord’s Supper is both a remembrance of Christ’s redemption and a spiritual feast in which Christ provides spiritual nourishment to believers through His own flesh ⁴⁸ Bullinger remained an outspoken critic of Luther and and blood to eternal life. his theological disciples to the very end. In a letter written a few months before his death, Bullinger pinned the blame for Protestant disunity squarely on Luther’s shoulders: all hope for concord and unity were “cut to pieces and vanished in smoke” due to the German Reformer’s moodiness, rudeness, stubbornness, and irrational attacks on his opponents.

Luther and the Genevan Theologians

Unlike most of the magisterial Reformers examined thus far, the Genevan churchman John Calvin (1509–64) belonged to a younger generation than Martin ⁵⁰ Raised in the Luther and never had direct contact with the German Reformer. home of an episcopal clerk in Noyon, France, Calvin received the arts degree at the University of Paris in 1528 and then pursued the license in civil law at the universities of Orléans and Bourges. During his legal studies, Calvin was introduced to French humanism and became an avid student of classical literature and the biblical languages. In 1531, with his law degree in hand, Calvin returned to Paris and rubbed shoulders with a group of reform-minded church leaders who were reading and discussing the writings of Erasmus and Luther. Calvin later reported that he was reading Luther’s writings at the time he ⁵¹ Though the began to extricate himself from the “darkness of the papacy.” precise moment of Calvin’s “sudden conversion” to evangelical faith is not known, by the end of 1534 he had become a sharp critic of the Catholic Church and was committed to the cause of religious reform. Two years later, Calvin published the first edition of his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion, a succinct summary and defense of Protestant doctrine, which drew extensively from the theological insights of Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, and (to a lesser extent) Zwingli.

In the summer of 1536, during a brief stopover in Geneva, Calvin was confronted by the fiery preacher William Farel, who convinced him to remain in the city and help construct the new Protestant church order. Consequently, over the next twenty-eight years—aside from a three-year “exile” in Strasbourg (1538–41)—Calvin served as the chief preacher, pastor, and theologian of the Genevan church, making the city the epicenter of French Protestantism and a safe haven for Reformed Christians fleeing from persecution elsewhere in Europe. Calvin’s theological vision and practical plan for religious reformation were spelled out in successive editions of the Institutes, in several dozen polemical treatises, in his learned biblical commentaries, and in the Ecclesiastical Ordinances(1541) and Genevan Catechism (1542). In these expansive works, one finds the signature doctrines of Calvin’s Reformed theology, including the supreme authority of Scripture, justification by grace through faith alone, the Holy Spirit’s role in the Christian life, God’s providence and predestination, ecclesiastical discipline, the so-called third use of the law, and unadorned Word-centered worship.

During his years in Geneva, Calvin established friendly ties with other Protestant leaders, including Bucer in Strasbourg, Bullinger in Zurich, Melanchthon in Wittenberg, and Musculus in Bern. Calvin’s attitude toward Luther, however, was more ambivalent due to the German Reformer’s repeated attacks against the Swiss theologians after the Marburg Colloquy. In a letter to Bucer in 1538, Calvin acknowledged that Luther was a godly man, but criticized him for being too obstinate and abusive in defending his theological viewpoints. Moreover, Calvin believed that Luther was guilty of ignorance and gross ⁵³ Three years later, Calvin’s opinion of delusion on several debated doctrines.

Luther softened somewhat when he received word from Wittenberg that Luther had read and approved his treatise against the Catholic cardinal Jacob Sadoleto. Calvin also gained a more favorable opinion of Luther and the Wittenberg Reformers as he interacted face-to-face with Melanchthon and other Lutheran theologians at religious colloquies held in the early 1540s. Calvin even signed the Augsburg Confession (Variata edition) while a delegate to the Colloquy of Ratisbon (1541). Consequently, over time, Calvin presented a more positive assessment of Luther in his private correspondence, calling him a “gifted man,” an “illustrious servant of God,” a “faithful doctor of the church,” and his “most ⁵⁴ On one occasion, Calvin even described Luther as “a respected father.” remarkable apostle of Christ, through whose work and ministry… the purity of ⁵⁵ Though Calvin recognized Luther’s the gospel has been restored in our time.” failings, he was not as critical in his assessment of the Reformer as Bullinger and the Zurich theologians were.

That is not to say that church leaders in Wittenberg entirely trusted Calvin. For Luther and his more conservative disciples, Calvin’s doctrine of “real spiritual presence”—that in the Lord’s Supper, the Holy Spirit enables believers to feed on the real substance of Christ’s body, which is in heaven— appeared dangerously close to Zwingli’s view. In the years after Luther’s death, Calvin’s relationship with Gnesio-Lutherans rapidly deteriorated. His role in drafting the Consensus Tigurinus all but confirmed Lutheran suspicions of his sacramental theology. Beginning in 1552, the conservative Lutheran minister Joachim Westphal initiated a furious pamphlet war against Calvin and the Consensus that not only reignited smoldering hostility between Lutherans and the Swiss Reformed but also sharpened the divide between Melanchthon’s allies and more conservative Lutherans back in Germany. In his sharp responses to Westphal, Calvin expressed his strong aversion to Gnesio-Lutheran views regarding the ubiquity of Christ and sacramental eating by the unworthy (manducatioindignorum). From Calvin’s perspective, Westphal and other Lutheran “monkeys” were eager to mimic Luther’s vehemence but had abandoned Luther’s more moderate theological positions. In the heat of this controversy, Calvin complained: “Oh, if only Luther was still alive!”

After Calvin’s death in 1564, it was left to Theodore Beza (1519–1605) to navigate the Genevan church through these perilous confessional waters. Overall, Beza held Luther in high esteem. The Wittenberg Reformer was an “excellent instrument of God” and a Christian champion whom God had sent to ⁵⁸ In his Icones(1580), Beza wrote a rescue the church from papal superstition. poem celebrating the courage, piety, and zeal with which Luther defended the Christian religion against his Roman opponents. Even so, Luther’s sound theological instincts were sometimes blinded by his natural sinfulness and the ⁵⁹ While praising the memory of Luther, Beza “turbulent spirit” of his disciples. found his more conservative disciples insufferable. For much of his long career, Beza engaged in acrimonious battles of books with Lutheran “ubiquitarians” such as Joachim Westphal, Tilemann Hesshus, Nikolas Selnecker, and Jacob Andreae over the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper, religious images, predestination, and the communication of Christ’s two natures. In his correspondence, Beza expressed horror at reports that effigies of Calvin were being burned in Lutheran cities, and that Melanchthon’s disciples (accused of being “crypto-Calvinists”) were being imprisoned or exiled from Lutheran territories. When the Lutheran princes approved the Formula of Concord in 1577 —an agreement that decisively condemned the Reformed churches—Beza likened it to Pandora’s box that unleashed misery on the Protestant world. Writing to the Landgrave of Hesse in 1580, Beza described the Lutherans as the “first-born” sons of the Reformation, but with this ironic twist: just as God had rejected the firstborn sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob on account of their wickedness, so now God was rejecting the Lutherans and giving His blessing to Reformed Christians—the “younger sons” of the Reformation.

Luther and the English Theologians

Historians disagree as to whether the English Reformation was initiated primarily from above or below—that is, whether the reform of the English church during the 1530s and 1540s was chiefly enacted by royal fiat or owed more to various historical factors such as anti-clericalism, biblical humanism, ⁶¹ Though Lutheran literature, popular unrest, and a tradition of Lollard dissent. royal policy was no doubt decisive, social and religious conditions were also significant in creating a climate that favored church reform. As early as 1519, merchants and travelers were smuggling Luther’s writings and other evangelical books into England, where they were eagerly read by scholars and churchmen at Cambridge, Oxford, and London. In response, on May 12, 1520, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and an assembly of English bishops condemned Luther’s teachings, anathematized his writings, and burned his books in a public ⁶² The following year, King Henry VIII received the title “Defender of ceremony. the Faith” from Pope Leo X for his pamphlet against Luther titled Assertion ofthe Seven Sacraments.

During the 1520s, Cambridge emerged as a center for evangelical ferment as reform-minded scholars and humanists such as Robert Barnes, Thomas Bilney, and Hugh Latimer met at the White Horse Tavern to study Scripture, discuss Luther’s writings, and voice criticism of the ecclesiastical establishment. During this same period, a graduate of Oxford named William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536) left England to study with Luther in Wittenberg before settling in Antwerp, where he translated the Greek New Testament into English (completed in 1525) and produced a stream of religious literature in support of reform. Though Catholic authorities were not able to prevent the wide distribution of Tyndale’s famous New Testament, they did finally succeed in tracking him down and arresting him near Brussels in May 1535. Sixteen months later, Tyndale was convicted of heresy, strangled, and his body burned at the stake. His final words reportedly were, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.”

Henry’s eyes, however, were focused more on his marriage difficulties than on evangelical reform. In hopes of procuring a male heir, Henry began intense negotiations with the papacy in 1527 to secure the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and permission to remarry. The pope’s refusal triggered a protracted political and religious crisis in England that culminated in Henry’s divorce from Catherine and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn in 1533; the rupture of ties between the English church and the Church of Rome; and the promulgation of the Act of Supremacy in 1534, which recognized Henry and his successors as “the only Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England.” This crisis also brought to power a new generation of church leaders who, though supporters of the Catholic king and his policies, played a central role in moving the English church toward the Protestant fold.

One of the chief actors in this high-stakes drama was Thomas Cranmer ⁶⁶ Educated at Cambridge, Cranmer was ordained to the Catholic (1489–1556). priesthood and then served as a theological instructor at his alma mater in the early 1520s. Though Cranmer was influenced by humanist ideals, he never belonged to the White Horse Tavern group, nor was he a supporter of Luther, whom he once accused of misleading Christian souls and mocking the people of ⁶⁷ In 1527, God. “O the arrogance of this most wicked man!” he commented.

Cardinal Wolsey recruited Cranmer to serve as a diplomat responsible for securing support for the king’s annulment throughout the German empire and in Rome. In Nuremberg, Cranmer found a ready ally in the person of the Lutheran minister Andreas Osiander, with whom he enjoyed long and earnest ⁶⁸ In 1532, Cranmer conversations “concerning Christian faith and true religion.” secretly married Osiander’s niece, Margaret—a blatant violation of canon law. During this period, Cranmer also studied Scripture and the early church fathers, seeking to build a case against papal supremacy. Cranmer’s tireless efforts on behalf of the king were rewarded when Henry appointed him archbishop of Canterbury in 1533.

Despite his secret marriage and strong opposition to papal authority, Archbishop Cranmer was not a Protestant—at least not in the early 1530s. His viewpoint subtly shifted during the next decade as he scoured the writings of Protestant Reformers, including Zwingli and Oecolampadius. In a letter from 1537, Cranmer stated his approval of the Reformers’ attacks on the papacy and scholastic theology, including the doctrine of transubstantiation, but he rejected Zwingli’s sacramental theology. The doctrine of Christ’s real presence in the Lord’s Supper was “well rooted and supported” by the Apostles and the early ⁶⁹ Three years later, Cranmer joined his reform-minded church, he believed. colleague, the king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485–1540), in securing the publication of the Great Bible. In his preface to this Bible, Cranmer wrote that “this book… is the word of God, the most precious jewel, and most ⁷⁰ Despite this gradual turn toward holy relic that remains upon the earth.”

Protestant conviction, Cranmer continued to provide unwavering public support for Henry’s religious policy; he thus published without protest the king’s Statute of Six Articles (1539), which mandated adherence to traditional Catholic doctrines such as transubstantiation, clerical celibacy, and auricular confession, ⁷¹ When Cromwell was arrested and under penalty of execution by burning. charged with treason and heresy in 1540, there was nothing that Cranmer could do to save his friend from the executioner.

With the decease of Henry VIII and the accession of the “boy king” Edward VI in 1547, Cranmer became the chief architect of religious reform in the kingdom. He oversaw the confiscation and destruction of religious images and artifacts in his archdiocese. He welcomed Protestant refugees from the Continent, including Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr Vermigli, who were given professorships at Cambridge and Oxford, respectively. In the early 1550s, Cranmer even established contact with Calvin, Bullinger, and Melanchthon in hopes of convening an ecumenical council in England as an evangelical response ⁷² Cranmer’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper also changed. to the Council of Trent.

The Book of Common Prayer (second edition), which Cranmer published in 1552, states that Christ is spiritually present in the Eucharist and available only to those who partake by faith. Clearly, the archbishop’s theological position had moved away from Luther’s doctrine of real corporeal presence toward the south German understanding of the Lord’s Supper as spiritual communion with the true flesh and blood of Christ.

Cranmer’s efforts to reform the English church came to an abrupt end with the death of Edward VI in 1553. Before the year was out, the Catholic Queen Mary ordered that Cranmer be arrested for treason. During the next two years, the archbishop’s religious views were investigated and, under duress, he recanted the Protestant faith. Cranmer was condemned to death by burning on March 21, 1556. Minutes before the execution, the prisoner retracted his recantation, shouting that the pope was the enemy of Christ and a teacher of false doctrine. As the flames sprang up, Cranmer extended the “unworthy right hand” that had signed his original recantation into the fire so that it might be immolated first; in his final moments, he cried out the words of Saint Stephen, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit… I see the heavens open and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.”

Conclusion

The figure of Martin Luther looms large in the history of the Protestant Reformation. It was with good reason, therefore, that Carel Allard’s engraving placed Luther toward the center of the company of Reformers gathered around the candlestick. But from another perspective, the central figure in Allard’s portrait is not a man at all, but a message—the message that God’s gospel alone can bring the light of salvation to the darkness of the human heart. The magisterial Reformers we have studied—located in Wittenberg, southern Germany, Zurich, Geneva, and England—understood this well, and they devoted their lives to announcing this gospel of grace and forgiveness from their pulpits, in private conversations, and in print media. Although religious unity was frequently elusive, these church leaders shared a commitment to the recovery of biblical Christianity and the renewal of Christ’s church in their day. The Reformation was ultimately God’s work—not theirs. Martin Luther articulated this viewpoint in one of his final sermons, delivered in 1545: “Do not say on the Last Day, ‘Dr. Martin taught me that.’ Instead [say], ‘Jesus Christ taught me this through the mouth of my pastor’s mouth. I do not believe in Dr. Martin, but in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who speaks through apostles and preachers.’”

Notes

Notes

1. For discussions of Allard’s work, see Émile Doumergue, Iconographie Calvinienne(Lausanne, Switzerland: Georges Bridel, 1909), 197–99; and Karla Apperloo-Boersma and Herman J. Selderhuis, eds., Power of Faith. 450 Years of the Heidelberg Catechism(Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2013), 239. The Dutch phrase is ’t Licht is op den kandelaer gestalt.

2. The term magisterial Reformers denotes those church leaders whose reform efforts were established and supported by magistrates and territorial princes.

3. The term evangelical, drawn from the Greek word euangelion(good news), was the self designation of early proponents of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, before such terms as Lutheran, Calvinist, or Zwinglian came into vogue.

4. Lewis Spitz, The Protestant Reformation, 1517–1559(New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 94. See also Scott H. Hendrix, Recultivating the Vineyard: The Reformation Agendas of Christianization(Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 53–56.

5. Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations(Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1996), 66.

6. Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans Hillerbrand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1:27–28; David Steinmetz, Reformers in the Wings: From Geiler von Kayserberg toTheodore Beza, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 100–108.

7. Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 2:352–53.

8. Steinmetz, Reformers in the Wings, 58–63; Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 1:226–27.

9. Spitz, The Protestant Reformation, 94.

10. Spitz, The Protestant Reformation, 94; Lindberg, The European Reformations, 122–23.

11. Robert Kolb, Martin Luther as Prophet, Teacher & Hero: Images of the Reformer, 1520–1620(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1999), 35.

12. Manschreck, Melanchthon; Steinmetz, Reformers in the Wings, 49–57; Carter Lindberg, ed., TheReformation Theologians(Oxford, England: Blackwell, 2002), 67–82. See also the work of Timothy Wengert, including Human Freedom, Christian Righteousness: Philip Melanchthon’s ExegeticalDispute with Erasmus of Rotterdam(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), and Law andGospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 1997).

13. Manschreck, Melanchthon, 44–45.

14. Wilhelm Pauck, ed., Melanchthon and Bucer(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969), 17.

15. Steinmetz, Reformers in the Wings, 51–57.

16. Manschreck, Melanchthon, 54.

17. Lindberg, The European Reformations, 259; Manschreck, Melanchthon, 240–42.

18. Manschreck, Melanchthon, 275.

19. For an introduction to the extensive literature on the “City Reformation,” see Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation, eds. H.C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards Jr. (Durham, N.C.: Labyrinth, 1982); Steven Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantismto 16th Century Germany and Switzerland(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975); Euan Cameron, The European Reformation(Oxford, England: Clarendon, 1991), 210–66.

20. Martin Greschat, Martin Bucer: A Reformer and His Times, trans. Stephen E. Buckwalter (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2004); Steinmetz, Reformers in the Wings, 85–92.

21. Cameron, The European Reformation, 216–18.

22. Greschat, Martin Bucer, 190.

23. Ibid., 93.

24. Ibid., 136–38; Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 4:286–87.

25. Greschat, Martin Bucer, 207–8.

26. Reinhard Bodenmann, Wolfgang Musculus (1497–1563): Destin d’un autodidacte lorrain ausiècles des Réformes(Geneva: Droz, 2000); Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 3:103–4.

27. Bodenmann, Wolfgang Musculus, 133–35.

28. Ibid., 321–27.

29. Craig Farmer, “Eucharistic Exhibition and Sacramental Presence in the New Testament Commentaries of Wolfgang Musculus,” in Rudolf Dellsperger, Rudolf Freudenberger, and Wolfgang Weber, eds., Wolfgang Musculus (1497–1563) und die oberdeutsche Reformation(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 299–310.

30. Bodenmann, Wolfgang Musculus, 531.

31. See Cameron, The European Reformation, 219–23, 245–50; Lindberg, The EuropeanReformations, 169–98.

32. W.P. Stephens, Zwingli: An Introduction to His Thought(Oxford, England: Clarendon, 2001); George, Theology of the Reformers; Lindberg, ed., The Reformation Theologians, 157–69.

33. George, Theology of the Reformers, 110.

34. Ibid., 111–12.

35. Stephens, Zwingli, 109.

36. George, Theology of the Reformers, 113.

37. Carlos Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 73–86.

38. George, Theology of the Reformers, 153; Stephens, Zwingli, 58–59.

39. George, Theology of the Reformers, 134.

40. Amy Nelson Burnett, Karlstadt and the Origins of the Eucharistic Controversy: A Study in theCirculation of Idea s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 91–141.

41. George, Theology of the Reformers, 149.

42. Ibid., 150.

43. Stephens, Zwingli, 105–6.

44. Bruce Gordon and Emidio Campi, eds., Architect of Reformation: An Introduction to HeinrichBullinger, 1504–1575(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2004); Steinmetz, Reformers in theWings, 93–99; Lindberg, ed., The Reformation Theologians, 170–83.

45. Andreas Mühling, “Heinrich Bullinger as Church Politician,” in Gordon and Campi, eds., Architect of Reformation, 245.

46. Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 1:414–15.

47. Ibid., 2:219–22. The Reformed city of Basel signed the Second Helvetic Confession much later.

48. Joel R. Beeke and Sinclair B. Ferguson, eds. Reformed Confessions Harmonized(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1999), 220–30. See also Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 2:219–22.

49. Bullinger to Beza, 1575, in Correspondance de Théodore de Bèze, vol. 16, eds. Alain Dufour, Béatrice Nicollier, and Reinhard Bodenmann (Geneva: Droz, 1993), 25–26.

50. Bruce Gordon, Calvin(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009); B.A. Gerrish, The OldProtestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 27–48. Calvin sent one letter to Luther via Melanchthon in 1544. Fearing that Calvin’s letter would annoy Luther, Melanchthon never delivered the letter to its intended recipient.

51. John Calvin, Ioannis Calvini opera omnia quae supersunt, eds. G. Baum, E. Cunitz, and E. Reuss (Braunschweig, Germany: C.A. Schwetschke, 1863–1900), 9:51.

52. Alexandre Ganoczy, The Young Calvin, trans. David Foxgrover and Wade Provo (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987), 137–68.

53. Ioannis Calvini opera omnia quae supersunt, 10.2:138–39.

54. Ibid., 10.2:432; 11:774–75; 15:212–13; 12:8.

55. Ibid., 6:250.

56. Ibid., 15:501–2.

57. Paul-F. Geisendorf, Théodore de Bèze(Geneva: Alexandre Jullien, 1949); Lindberg, ed., TheReformation Theologians, 213–24; Robert Linder, “The Early Calvinists and Martin Luther: A Study in Evangelical Solidarity,” in Regnum, Religio, et Ratio, ed. Jerome Friedman (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1987).

58. Correspondance de Théodore de Bèze, 8:239; ibid., 16:93.

59. Theodore Beza, Les Vrais Portraits des Hommes Illustrés[Latin: Icones] (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1986), 26–27.

60. Correspondance de Théodore de Bèze, 21:184–85. Scott M. Manetsch, Theodore Beza and theQuest for Peace in France, 1572–1598(Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2000), 134–38, 178.

61. Lindberg, The European Reformations, 309–10.

62. Ibid., 311; Spitz, The Protestant Reformation, 245–46.

63. Lindberg, The European Reformations, 316.

64. Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 4:189–90; Spitz, The Protestant Reformation, 247–48.

65. Lindberg, The European Reformations, 316–17.

66. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996); Lindberg, ed., The Reformation Theologians, 239–52.

67. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 27–29.

68. Lindberg, ed., The Reformation Theologians, 242.

69. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 180.

70. Lindberg, ed., The Reformation Theologians, 245.

71. Lindberg, The European Reformations, 317–19.

72. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 501–2.

73. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 603–4.

74. From Luther’s sermon on the Second Sunday after Epiphany, WA, 49:684. I’m grateful to Mr. Todd Hains for bringing this quotation to my attention.