Radical Reformation

Scholarship continues to identify the Enlightenment with secularization, despite the theological tenor of much of the movement's canonical literature. This article proposes an explanation for such a dissonance, before addressing the matter more directly through the work of Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle. The claim is that scholars have been unduly dependent upon theological commentary in reaching the fixed verdict of secularization, inferring ‘atheism’ and disenchantment from the polemical utterances of a privileged orthodoxy rather than the primary sources themselves. Seen apart from such controlling anathemas, icons of the radical Enlightenment such as Spinoza and Bayle emerge as deeply spiritual thinkers, challenging the theocratic assumptions of their age with theological certainties of their own, interrogating orthodoxy with a resolutely biblical rationality. The final section suggests the continuity of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment of Voltaire, Kant and Mary Wollstonecraft with the spiritual rationalism of the seventeenth century. If so many of the Enlightenment's landmark thinkers were inspired by religious ideas, the concept of a secular modernity must be open to revision.

*** In 2023 I have updated the entry to include a pre-publication version of my essay. ***  For a further sample from the text, including an excerpt by Hartmut Lehmann, see the attached link or go to the publisher's website (look for the "Leseprobe" tab on the Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht website). The papers in the volume are from a conference held in Sept. 2016 at the German Historical Institute in London.

This article takes its point of departure from Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Elizabeth L. Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979). The purpose, however, is not a detailed historical critique of both books, but to take issue with fundamental claim underlying both publications: the claim that media technology is the creative agent behind early modern social, political, religious, and intellectual revolutions. The article refers to Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, Ernst Cassirer, and Wilhelm von Humboldt to lay the theoretical groundwork for an alternative claim: creative agency happens in the form of linguistic evocation. The final section of the article provides a brief case study on revolutionary agency, primarily at the example of the radical reformer Thomas Müntzer. It highlights the role of language in the revolutionary transformation of the early reformation period.

In Baptist histories, English preacher Matthew Caffyn (1628-1714), thanks to his unorthodox Christology, is regularly identified as a theological deviant, and one working under the influence of ‘eighteenth-century rationalism’ or other external forces. By reconsidering the progress of unorthodox Christology among the early Baptists and other Reformers, I argue that Caffyn’s Christology represents not a sudden aberration, but an unsurprising expression of the elemental Baptist instinct. This instinct includes a commitment to being scriptural, to primitivism, and to theological tolerance within the community. In this light, I argue that Caffyn’s place in the Baptist tradition must be revisited in future histories.

In this article, a comparison is drawn between the hermeneutical strategies of the radical and magisterial branches of the Reformation. The author detects the peculiarities of the hermeneutical principles and ways of understanding the biblical text which were offered by Menno Simons, a recognized Anabaptist leader, and compares these principles and ways with their counterparts practiced by Luther and other figures of the classical Reformation. Although the radical reformers did not create a holistic theology, their interpretative strategy is quite significant for understanding the phenomenon of the “Protestant hermeneutics.”
Menno Simons’ interpretative system is rarely mentioned in the contemporary historical/philosophical and theological discussions. The author of this article argues that such omission is caused by the domination of one-dimensional stereotypes: the overwhelming majority of the researchers who speak about the Protestant hermeneutics tend to present this area as narrowed and somewhat impoverished as they reduce it to the hermeneutics of Luther and Calvin.
The article demonstrates that Menno Simons developed an applied interpretative strategy borrowed from some examples found in the Gospels. This hermeneutical system was founded upon the theocentric idea of personal Revelation and living Presence and thus inevitably led to: (1) “the Bible interprets itself” principle; (2) the search for “the clear meaning of the Scripture” – something that could be different from the original meaning. An interpretative model developed as the result was based on: (a) a holistic approach, (b) applied hermeneutics, (c) corporate hermeneutics, (d) hermeneutics of obedience. Thus it is possible to speak about an independent approach that has an important place in the history of the Protestant hermeneutics.

“Martyrs and Nicodemites Both? Spiritualistic and Rationalistic Currents within the Dutch Anabaptist Tradition – David Joris, Sebastian Castellio, and Pieter Jansz Twisck 1535–1648,”
in: Sebastian Castellio zwischen Humanismus und Reformation, Rationalismus und Spiritualismus / Sebastian Castellio between Humanism and Reformation, Rationalism and Spiritualism, Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer, ed., REFO 500 series (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 423-57.
This is a pre-publication proof, so some corrections are not visible. Examines the reception of the spiritualism of David Joris into the 17th century, including among conservative Mennonites as well as liberal thinkers such as Castellio.

La diffusione dell’Utopia di Thomas More coincide con momenti di straordinaria tensione politica e sociale. La sua fortuna editoriale, col favorire un’ampia circolazione delle idee dell’autore anche negli ambienti vicini alla Riforma radicale, poteva suscitare prima o poi il desiderio di tradurle in pratica. Quando ai primi di maggio del 1525 apparve il libretto luterano contro i contadini tedeschi, la loro rivolta aveva raggiunto la massima espansione. Lutero attaccava con veemenza Thomas Müntzer, associandolo ai contadini nell’accusa di banditismo per delegittimarne l’azione e smascherarlo come falso profeta. Müntzer possedeva tuttavia una cultura notevole e conosceva Erasmo, Platone e probabilmente anche More. La condivisione dei beni, che avvicinava Platone e l’umanista More al cristianesimo evangelico, sarà per il riformatore di Allstedt – diventata l’anti-Wittenberg – un sogno profetico da realizzare in un Regno terreno di Cristo senza empi e peccatori, regolato da principi di moralità e giustizia in coerenza con la parola di Dio. Ma Lutero, con la sua realistica apologia della repressione, poneva le premesse teoriche per il massacro di Frankenhausen e la nascita di un ethos militare della Riforma.

The idea of human rights is widely accepted as a foundation of legislation and political action. It is the cornerstone of liberal democracies, the ideal held out against oppression and injustice all over the world. At the same time, it arouses debate, and criticism from all parts. Different groups fight for different causes appealing to the same principle of human rights. For all their disagreement, they could perhaps agree on one thing, that is the origin of human rights. But even then, there is disagreement. The commonly held view that human rights are the fruit of the European and American Enlightenment in the 18 th century, is now being questioned. In this article, we shall see that Protestantism has played a crucial role, especially one branch of Protestantism in the English-speaking world, the Baptist movement in the early 17 th century. Our interest is not only to set the historical record straight, but also to see how the particular origins of human rights are relevant for the development of this principle in today's societies.

Freedom of religion generally resonates in the collective mind as a prized legacy of the European Enlightenment alongside most individual liberties and modern values. This assumption, however, is flawed as it tends to downplay centuries of religious pluralism and cohabitation. Tolerance, in other words, was a practice long before it became a theory. This article considers tolerance not as an idea, but as a religious belief and a practice in the early Enlightenment. Drawing from rare manuscript sources scattered over several countries, it argues that tolerance was a grassroots Christian belief primarily promoted by those who needed it the most: persecuted radical dissenters. It shows how the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 sparked a tolerationist spur in Protestant countries, ‘refuges’ that often offered only a limited level of freedom. By contrast, more radical forms of tolerance existed among underground millenarians and ecumenical societies of this period. These refuges and milieus made a significant contribution to the Enlightenment debate on tolerance and deserve to be acknowledged for it.

This was a an effort to group the writings of the Anabaptist and Spiritualist David Joris into the three major periods of his career: 1. his early works while a hunted Anabaptist leader in the Netherlands, 1535-1539; 2. his transitional, early spiritualistic works from his time in Antwerp, 1539-1544; and his full-blown spiritualistic writings from his exile in Basel, 1544-56. Includes a decoded list of all of the recipients of his letters included in the unpublished Hydeckel (in the Jorislade Collection of the University Library of Basel), dated between 1537 and 1543.  There are now several works since discovered to be by Joris that are not included in this article; a new bibliography is needed.

Beyond the magisterial Reformation, in early sixteenth century, Europe witnessed religious mutations and consequent variations of intellectual and social impulses as well as Christian motifs that brought about a ferment of so-called radicalized theologies. Sects and churches proliferated in this period influenced by Humanism, spiritualism, anticlericalism, sacramentarianism, mysticism, millennialism, Biblicism, communitarian visions; all of these were conceived as acts of revolt against the old Church and the new. Thus, the early years of the Reformation cannot be boxed or labelled within definite categories that work for the later period, for instance, radical and magisterial. The idea of a radical Reformation can only be viewed in relation to that of the magisterial one and the latter did not exist in the early 1520s. Only after the Great Peasants' War of 1525 and the Confessio Augustana (Augsburg Confession) of 1530 did the Lutherans, with the support of the Saxon princes, gradually establish an institutionalised Church. Prior to that, the ideas over authority, baptism and communalism, as well as on other more theological doctrines, circulated and were discussed by all the thinkers and reformers of the period. These ideas were hardly structured in homogeneous doctrines; thus, for this specific context, that of the early Reformation in Germany, we see fit to introduce the idea of composite religions to describe the views and attitudes of the many individuals and communities that at one point or another suffered exile religionis causa.

This note in reply to Simon argues that there is a relationship between the first part
of the Straube edition of De tribus impostoribus (Vienna, 1753) and some contents
of Francken’s work (especially the Disputatio de incertitudine religionis Christianae,
1589/91). The implication is not so much that Francken can be classified as a libertine,
but rather that some ideas originating in sixteenth-century radical religious thought
made their way into the libertine tradition during the following century.

This essay examines the state of the Philadelphian Society in the aftermath of Jane Lead’s death in 1704. It challenges the centrality of her matriarchal authority and portrays her instead as a controversial, divisive figure among the Philadelphians, whose Society had already collapsed by the time of her death. It shows how the arrival of the Camisards in London in 1706 gave the Philadelphian Society a second life, as both movements merged into the ‘French Prophets’ the following year in celebration of the Union Act. Yet if the Prophets became notorious for their spiritual performances, it is argued that this owed more to the Philadelphians’ influence among them than to their actual French followers. Overall, this essay concludes that the Philadelphians proved far more radical than hitherto acknowledged and that Lead’s English legacy was almost non-existent.
This essay also contains a list of 70 Philadelphians together with their occupations in appendix.

Warum ging Barbara Halt, Bäuerin und sechsfache Mutter aus dem Dorf Urbach, nicht in die Kirche? War sie eine gefährliche Täuferin, die als Ketzerin zu verfolgen war, oder nur ein eigensinniges Weib, dem die Predigten des örtlichen Pfarrers nicht zusagten?

Am Beispiel des Herzogtums Württemberg im 16. und frühen 17. Jahrhundert geht die Studie den Täuferbildern, der obrigkeitlichen Täuferpolitik sowie den lokalen Formen des Umgangs mit Täufern nach und analysiert die Handlungs- und Legitimationsmuster der als Täufer verdächtigten. Im Fokus steht das Verfahren der Kirchenvisitation, welches Möglichkeiten zu vielfältigen Verhandlungen über die Grenzen des religiös und sozial Erlaubten eröffnete.

In this thesis, I examine both how theology is conceptualized and how it is embodied in performance. Focusing on the Hutterites, an Old Order Christian communal group, I explore the interplay between history and tradition on the one hand and cultural adaptation and dynamic change on the other. Although Hutterites are often stereotyped as aloof sectarians who want nothing to do with secular society, I explore the rich and multifaceted world of Hutterite musical production, showing that the boundaries between sacred and secular are much more porous and variable than often admitted.

Through an in-depth examination of Hutterite choral singing in Manitoba, I show how individual Hutterites express their agency, engaging with past doctrine and their current cultural surroundings to fashion a performative life that makes sense out of both--what I call "performing salvation."