The Reformers God Used to Change the Course of the Church
A friend at Rosedale Bible College once took an “Anabaptist heritage tour” in Switzerland. The guide would pause at a site of historical interest, recounting the heroic exploits of an Anabaptist martyr. But he concluded each presentation by commenting: “You wouldn’t have liked him very much.”
I find much to admire in the 16th-century Anabaptists, willing to suffer torture and death for their convictions. Among these convictions, many separated themselves from “the sword.” They understood that the government has an important calling from God: to wield the sword in the punishment of the wicked, for the protection of the good. But they also believed that the church has a distinct calling of surpassing importance, graciously given by God in Jesus the Son, embraced and enacted only through the Holy Spirit.
All of the Reformers were likeable and unlikeable, admirable and not, in complex and complicated ways…people like you and me.
In answer to this calling, early Anabaptists committed themselves to returning good for evil: to meet insult and injury with scandalous generosity and love. This was not the application of an abstract social ethic, but a function of their commitment to Christian discipleship in the particulars. By extending costly love to their enemies, they understood themselves as following the pattern set down by Jesus who, for the sake of his enemies, offered himself as an atoning sacrifice. They embodied the proclamation that God had shown his love for sinners in the cross of Jesus Christ.
These early Anabaptists lived and died with confidence in the resurrection, trusting that God would vindicate their humble offerings just as he vindicated the crucified body of Jesus. They eagerly anticipated the day when the crucified-and-glorified Jesus would return to bring an end to wickedness, establishing the New Creation in full, bringing the sword to complete obsolescence.
What the Swiss tour guide understood, and what hagiographies seldom acknowledge, is that these enemy-loving Anabaptists were simultaneously very disagreeable people. They disagreed openly even with parties who would slice out their tongues, tear their flesh with hot tongs, and burn them at the stake. Unsurprisingly, they were also sometimes disagreeable to one another. Even if we find the early Anabaptists admirable, we need not find them likeable.
Of course, the big “magisterial Reformers” (who sometimes burned and drowned the radicals) were also plenty disagreeable. But over the past year, I have found them considerably more likeable (and a bit more admirable) than I had previously thought.
Anybody who says they’d rather eat gruel in a cave with the Anabaptists than feast with Luther at a “table talk” is either extremely sanctified or lying through their teeth (“I beg you to blow your nose a bit, to make your head lighter and your brain clearer”). Bracketing my commitment to enemy-love, there’s something admirable about Chaplain Zwingli charging into the fray alongside his men, brandishing his battle-axe like a 16th-century Gimli. But the patrician Calvin, who corrects a grateful Protestant refugee in Geneva for daring to call him “brother” (“Surely, you mean ‘Monsieur Calvin’”), has always been harder for me to like.
That’s why this passage has stuck with me:
It is strange to realize that for most of his life Calvin’s house was full of young children. No doubt the womenfolk protected both him and the children from one another, but at any rate, he passed his life, not in the seclusion of a monastery or in humanistic quiet but in the midst of the pleasures and worries of domesticity. The Institutes was not written in an ivory tower but against the background of teething troubles (T.H.L. Parker, Portrait of Calvin, 80.).
Calvin’s house at 11 Rue des Chanoines in Geneva was very full. Calvin’s only child, Jacques, died in infancy; he outlived his wife, Idelette, by fifteen years. But Idelette had been a widow (of a one-time Anabaptist!) and Calvin cared for her two surviving children as a father. Calvin’s brother, Antoine, also moved into 11 Rue des Chanoines, bringing with him a wife and eight children.
Since I’ve started writing this, Ezra and Naomi have put on a show for me with a tambourine and a xylophone. Naomi has requested fairy wings and a tutu, then asked for help taking them off, then for help putting them back on again. I’ve retrieved and washed a half-eaten apple that rolled under the couch. Ezra burst into anguished screams because Rachel wouldn’t let him touch the fire on our stovetop; then he stood next to me on the bench, eating the couch-apple. There have been two bathroom emergencies.
I hope that I drink less beer than Luther, chop people in half less often than Zwingli, and act like less of a snob than Calvin. I’d rather be disagreeable like Michael Sattler, who was absolute in his insistence on following Jesus in cross-shaped love. But all of the Reformers were likeable and unlikeable, admirable and not, in complex and complicated ways. They were, in other words, people like you and me.
Whether magisterial or radical, the Reformers participated in a movement that took unprecedented interest in the lives of people who lacked a “religious vocation” (still so called among Catholics). During the Reformation, serious theological resources left the monastery and the university (which overlapped) to take up new residence in the home and the local church. Partly in response, the Catholic Reformation began to pay new kinds of attention to the spiritual lives of Roman Catholic laity (see, e.g., Ignatius of Loyola, who overlapped with Calvin at the Collège de Montaigu).
I’m certainly not writing the Institutes, but as I prepare materials for RBC and pursue my own studies, I feel kinship with the Calvin who writes to the accompaniment of teething babies. We both are beneficiaries of a profound recognition that God calls and uses the beer-soaked and bombastic, the axe-men, the snobs, the rigid rule-followers, and especially the disagreeable for his glory; that there is a certain hope for us, by the grace of God, to become instead the righteous people that he has declared us to be in Christ.
I consider that good news.
Header Image:
The Reformation renewed the church’s theological interest in family life. Protestant art reflected this interest by depicting “secular” topics, including domestic scenes. Here, a mother picks lice out of her daughter’s hair.
de Hooch, Pieter. A Mother Delousing her Child’s Hair. 1660-1661. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-C-149.
2 Responses
Very stimulating article! I do wonder if we’d be able to hold onto our hagiographic impressions of any of our biblical heroes if we had lived with them.
Still doing good work, friend. Keep at it.