Tag Archives: Protestant Reformation

May 15, 2026

Following in John Calvin’s Footsteps Across Europe

By Clarke Morledge

John Calvin (1509-1564)

 

Aside from Martin Luther of Wittenberg, Germany, the name most associated with the Protestant Reformation is John Calvin, a Frenchman who lived most of his adult life in exile from his home country. Born in 1509, Calvin was a good bit younger than his other famous contemporary. When Luther appeared before Emperor Charles V to make his famous “Here I Stand” defense of his theology, John Calvin was only about 12 years old.

Calvin’s father had high hopes for his intellectually gifted son. He was able to send his son off to study at the Sorbonne, in Paris, when John Calvin was only about 13 years old. While Calvin was studying in the university, the humanist movement, with its cry of “ad fontes,” Latin for “back to the sources,” was in full swing.  Part of that movement was to go back to the original Greek text of the New Testament, which whetted Calvin’s appetite to learn more about what that crazy Augustinian monk in Wittenberg, Germany was making such a fuss about.

Many of his professors were opposed to Luther’s Reformation efforts. But as a student, John Calvin went the other way, being converted to Protestantism in 1534. The tension created a vocational crisis in this young man’s life. He was forced to flee Paris, in search of a new home and a livelihood.

In October, 2025, my wife and I took a trip on a river cruise down the Rhine River.  We got to visit several of the cities to which Calvin fled, including Basel, Switzerland and Strasbourg, France. We even made it to Paris, where the young Calvin first became exposed to the ideas of the Reformation.

Basel Cathedral, in Basel Switzerland, home to the Reformation movement in this Swiss city. Over the years, many leading Protestant figures attended this church, including Karl Barth and John Calvin. Calvin first came to Basel to flee the authorities in Paris, who were determined to wipe out the Protestant movement in France. My photo from October, 2025.

 

What we did not have time to do was visit where John Calvin spent most of his life, as a pastor in the Swiss city of Geneva. While Calvin was on the run from French authorities bent on silencing the Reformation in France, he made it to Geneva where he was only planning to spend one night, before making his way elsewhere.  But when a fellow Protestant serving as pastor in Geneva, Guillaume Farel, discovered that the brilliant young Calvin was in town, he made his way straight over to see the Frenchman. That evening proved to be a turning point in Calvin’s life.

Prior to traveling to Geneva, John Calvin originally intended to live in Strasbourg, wanting to live a quiet life there, pursuing his intellectual studies. Calvin had spent some time in Italy, gathering together some material related to his intellectual interests. So when Calvin was merely passing through Geneva for the night, in order to avoid a path through a nearby military conflict, the thought of staying in Geneva was far from his mind.

But Farel had rushed over and confronted Calvin, threatening him with the very judgment of God, pleading with Calvin to stay in Geneva and help to establish the Reformation there in that city. Shocked by Farel’s threats, Calvin canceled his plans to go to Strasbourg, and he stayed in Geneva, where he learned to become a pastor, a shepherd caring for the souls of church goers under his care.

It was a fateful decision. Aside from a brief move a few years later to Strasbourg, Calvin spent the rest of his life in Geneva, tending his spiritual flock, and building what would become a great training ground for Reformation thinkers, who spread many of Calvin’s ideas and teachings all throughout Europe.

But despite his vocation as a pastor in Geneva, Calvin managed to find the time and energy to pursue his most well-known intellectual interest of all, a literary effort to try to convince his fellow Frenchmen of the truth of the Protestant Reformation understanding of the Gospel. According to church historian Bruce Gordon, the Institutes of the Christian Religion first saw the light of day in 1536 as a Latin text. In the Institutes, Calvin addressed his work to the King of France, pleading the cause of the Reformation.

Over the decades, Calvin would revise the Institutes several times, with the final version being published (still) in Latin in 1559. Various revisions by Calvin were then translated by him into French, to try to reach his fellow countrymen. By then, after having several decades as an active pastor, preaching, counseling people, performing baptisms and funerals, he was able to combine his pastoral sensitivities with his crisp theological acumen to produce perhaps the single most influential written work to come out of the 16th century Protestant Reformation movement.

Bruce Gordon has written a wonderful book, just a bit over 200 pages, John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography, which looks at the history and influence of Calvin’s most well-known work.  Gordon’s book is part of the “Lives of Great Religious Books” series, which focuses on the history and influence of numerous books like these, with brief summaries of the author’s life, along with greater attention to how such books have been received down the ages.

 

Calvin in Basel Switzerland: The First Draft of the Institutes 

Before Calvin made his fateful stop in Geneva, Switzerland, he spent some time in Basel, Switzerland, where he worked on that first draft of the Institutes. He most probably attended the city church there, the Basel Cathedral, which had become aligned with the Protestant movement over the previous decade.

As I stepped inside that cathedral, I tried to imagine what it might have been like for Calvin to seek spiritual refuge there in Basel, knowing that he may never be able to return to his native France. Nestled near the borders of France, Germany, and Switzerland, along the Rhine River, Basel has a special place in the history of the Christian movement.

Basel has had numerous connections to the Reformation movement over the years. This was the city where Huldrych Zwingli, the fiery Swiss preacher of Zurich, Switzerland had become first exposed to the ideas of Desiderius Erasmus and the humanist movement, as a college student. Erasmus was the Catholic scholar who produced the first major revision of the New Testament Greek text, based largely on newly discovered ancient manuscripts received from Eastern Orthodox scholars who had fled Constantinople, after it had been captured by the Turks in 1453. Erasmus’ work on the Greek New Testament was the intellectual fire which lit Martin Luther’s imagination, in his conflict with the Pope.

Erasmus himself spent his later years in Basel, though he remained a committed Roman Catholic his whole life. As a gesture of peace and reconciliation towards the Protestants, Erasmus was buried in the Basel Cathedral.

Fast forwarding to the 20th century, the great Swiss Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, spent most of his adult years in Basel, writing his Church Dogmatics, which in many ways mirrors the contribution Calvin gave to Christian readers, through the Institutes.

 

Calvin in Strasbourg, France, Where He Found His Wife

Going down the Rhine River from Basel, you eventually pass by the city of Strasbourg, on the border between France and Germany. Calvin’s first few years in Geneva had been pretty rocky. At one point, the city council became so infuriated with Calvin’s Reformation ideas that they kicked him out of the city. Calvin decided to join up with his friend Martin Bucer, who was serving as a pastor in Strasbourg. Calvin found a job as a pastor at Saint Nicholas Church, on the outskirts of the old city of Strasbourg.

Most of his parishioners were Protestant refugees from France, fleeing persecution there. Instead of shunning those who sought to escape state-sponsored violence, Calvin welcomed these sojourners who sought sanctuary from the French government. Some of these Protestants were actually involved in the more radical end of the Reformation movement, among the Anabaptists, which had its start in Zwingli’s church in Zurich.

In the early 20th century, Albert Schweitzer preached in Saint Nicholas Church, in Strasbourg, the same church the 16th century Protestant Reformer, John Calvin, preached in a few hundred years before. Calvin’s flock was made up of Protestant refugees fleeing religious persecution in France.

 

However, despite the hardships in Strasbourg, and being unable to return to both Paris and Geneva, Calvin’s life was set on a new course…. at least temporarily. One of those Anabaptists he encountered eventually cast aside those radical beliefs, and became his wife, Idelette de Bure.

Idelette had been recently widowed, leaving her with two children. Martin Bucer proved to be the matchmaker to put her and John Calvin together as a couple, and Bucer presided over the marriage in his home. Though Idelette bore Calvin several children in their marriage, none of those children survived beyond infancy. When the city council in Geneva decided to call John Calvin back to Geneva to become the city pastor again, Calvin came back with a ready made family.

Idelette eventually died before John Calvin did, and not long after she died, he wrote to his friend Pierre Viret:

I have been bereaved of the best companion of my life, of one who, had it been so ordered, would not only have been the willing sharer of my indigence, but even of my death. During her life she was the faithful helper of my ministry.

It was in those waning years in Geneva when Calvin put the final touches on the Institutes of the Christian Religion, with a last revision. Calvin died about 5 years later in 1564.

Our last stop in Europe at the very end of our trip along the Rhine River was after taking a bus ride to the city of Paris, where Calvin studied there as a young man at the Sorbonne.

The Sorbonne in Paris, part of the University system where John Calvin studied law and eventually became exposed to the ideas of the Protestant Reformation.

 

The Legacy of Calvin’s Institutes

Debates over Calvin’s legacy continue to generate ongoing discussion among today’s evangelical Christians. However, there is still a vigorous scholarly debate as whether or not John Calvin was even a “Calvinist.” Gordon admits this as much in observing that “Calvin never saw a tulip in his life” (Gordon, p. 9).

What is typically known as “Calvinism” today is a product of theological debates from the 17th century in the Netherlands, which eventually gave us the well-known T.U.L.I.P. acronym for the “five points” of Calvinism.  Calvin was already dead decades before Jacob Arminius, a theologian in the Netherlands, became the center of the controversy regarding “Calvinism.” Gordon reports that the actual “T.U.L.I.P” acronym itself, standing for “total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints,” entered the theological discussion much later, with the writings of  the Presbyterian theologian, Lorraine Boettner, in the early 20th century (Gordon, p. 154). John Calvin is probably most well known for his support for the doctrine of predestination, even though back in the 16th century this was only a minor theme in the Institutes.

Calvin’s Institutes were less about predestination and more about offering a defense of the Reformation, with an original preface pleading with the King of France to hear his case for Protestantism, and stop the persecution of Protestants. Calvin’s work evolved over the years to become more of a training manual for preachers, urging them to have a right view of “the word of God and rightful administration of the sacraments.”

By the time Calvin published the last version of the Institutes in 1559, his work took on the framework of the Apostles Creed, discussing theological matters ranging from the doctrine of creation to the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian. Towards the end of the Institutes, Calvin addressed the topic of the relations between church and state, filled with ideas that eventually became incorporated into the Constitution of the United States, centuries later, which advocated for the freedom of religion.

Nevertheless, Bruce Gordon takes the position that Calvin’s Institutes not only upholds the doctrine of predestination, in the sense of God having “the card deck stacked in the believer’s favor,” an image I picked up in seminary, the Institutes also adheres to the concept of double predestination. Other reformers in Calvin’s day, like the Lutheran Philip Melanchthon and Huldrych Zwingli’s successor in Zurich, Heinrich Bullinger, accepted the former sense of predestination, but not the latter (Gordon, p. 26).

In double predestination, not only is the true Christian believer predestined to be saved, the first sense of predestination, those who are not true believers are predestined to be eternally separated from God. From a Scriptural perspective, what makes this so controversial is that the terminology of predestination is used in the Bible only in the former sense, and not the latter.  However, theologically and philosophically, it makes sense to some that if predestination works one way, it should also work the other way as well. The problem with the Institutes (see chapter 21) is that it is not altogether clear how Calvin connects the idea of predestination of the elect with the fate of the permanently lost. Does Calvin’s view of predestination assume a kind of symmetry, or asymmetry with regard to the eternal state, and what does that all mean?

While scholars debate over what Calvin himself really believed, it is quite clear that many of Calvin’s followers indeed have subscribed to the concept of double predestination. For even if Calvin was not a full-on advocate for double-predestination, many of Calvin’s contemporaries thought he was, and Calvin surely opened the door for many of his followers to embrace such a doctrine.

Gordon argues that Calvin picked up this idea for double predestination from his reading of Romans 9, particularly from the line in Romans 9:13: “Jacob I have loved, Esau I have hated,” though scholars debate whether or not Calvin interpreted the meaning of this correctly (Gordon, p.27). If indeed Calvin did embrace a full-on double predestination doctrine, it would help to explain why a number of scholars today, including the vocal, controversial, and strident David Bentley Hart views Calvin with such moral disgust (as in this New York Times interview from April 2026).

Bruce Gordon acknowledges that Calvin’s holding to the first sense of predestination had a positive pastoral motive behind it. In medieval Catholic scholastic theology, there was always some insecurity about the eternal fate of someone who claimed to be a Christian. For while God would certainly find a way to purge venial sins from the soul of the Christian through purgatory, a failure to confess a mortal sin in this life was altogether a different matter. An unconfessed mortal sin might indeed lead someone who was otherwise a faithful churchgoer to effectively lose their promise of salvation. How does one really know if their sins have been properly and fully confessed before taking their dying breath, such that they would avoid eternal separation from God?

Calvin believed that this anxiety-prone medieval theology undermined the concept of being saved by faith, and faith alone, and salvation by grace, and grace alone. Calvin instead held that to put the decision for one’s salvation in the hidden will of God provided a sense of comfort for the believer, granting an aspect of assurance regarding one’s saving faith. In Calvin’s view, the status of the Christian believer before God belongs in God’s hands, and not our own. Calvin fully believed that for genuine Christians “in turning to Christ, the people behold God’s love as in a mirror“ (Gordon, p. 27).

For Calvin’s detractors however, even among his fellow Protestant Reformers, Calvin’s association with double predestination brought shock and disdain. Gordon writes:

“For Calvin, that teaching was the message of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, but for his numerous opponents it was an appalling idea that made God the author of sin. Calvin’s God— they wrote, preached, and taught— was a capricious tyrant who created women and men in order to destroy them” (Gordon, p. 33).

Whether or not Gordon’s assessment is correct, Calvin’s reputation has often been thought of in this way.

Regardless as to how double predestination fits into Calvin’s own thinking, Calvin sought to hold the tension between the sovereignty of God and human responsibility together, though awkward that may sound to his readers, if not entirely despicable to his critics.  Elsewhere Gordon says:

One cannot blame God for sin, a point on which Calvin was adamant, though he was frequently attacked by detractors who believed that his arguments inevitably led to God as the author of evil. Calvin repeatedly repudiated that charge, pounding his fist on desk and pulpit, declaring that humans alone are responsible for their fallen state. (Gordon, p. 39).

For Calvin, the key to making sense of this tension is by emphasizing the role of conscience in making a person aware of their own rebellion against God. The Institutes make it a point that not only does the Bible help us know who God is, the Bible also helps us to know ourselves. Humans are discontent with themselves because they do not know themselves. The Christian faith enables the believer to truly know who they truly are, and that truth is the most liberating and exhilarating benefit of seeking after Christ.

The process of truly knowing ourselves is bound up in Calvin’s understanding of our mysterious union with Christ, as Christians. While the human proclivity towards sin is more treacherous than most people can ever imagine, the joys of knowing ourselves more and more as we learn to know more about God are priceless, beautiful, and beyond all measure.

Calvin believed with every fiber of his being that God’s goodness is so pervasive it is spoken in our ears and stands before our eyes even when we are neither listening nor looking (Gordon, p. 47).

This was the heart of Calvin’s message about our mystical union with Christ. If there was one primary takeaway that Calvin intended with the Institutes, it was this grand and beautiful vision of being one with Christ…. not predestination.

 

Haidplatz. In this building, off of this city square, the Diet of Regensburg was held in 1541. John Calvin attended a Colloquy (or “Diet”) here in 1541, where fellow reformer Philip Melanchthon sat down with Roman Catholic scholar Johann Eck, to see if some kind of resolution could be found to reconcile the differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics.  While some progress was made, the participants found the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper to be the primary issue that could not be resolved. This meeting at Regensburg was probably the best opportunity for reconciliation, which was ultimately lost. .. I took this photo back in October, 2022, on a different trip to Europe.

 

The Influence of the Institutes Over the Centuries

After Calvin’s death, the Institutes established his reputation as perhaps the greatest of the Reformed authors of the 16th century. Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor in Geneva, became the primary interpreter for Calvin.

In the 17th century, Calvin and his Institutes became synonymous with the Reformed faith. Detractors of Calvin generally depicted him as a monster, the one most responsible for the cruel death of the anti-Trinitarian heretic, Michael Servetus, at the hands of civil authorities in Geneva. Calvin’s defenders, particularly in England, viewed as the father of the Puritan movement, hoping to purify the Church of England of papist bad habits and bad theology. Others like the Dutch theologian, Jacob Arminius, had a more cautious appreciation of Calvin’s legacy. I am confident that the earliest Puritans to settle in the American colonies carried copies of the Institutes with them.

By the time of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, Calvin’s emphasis on “true religion” in the Institutes became sidelined by a new generations of thinkers who began to view Christianity as merely one religion among many others. Faith founded upon reason superseded faith founded upon revelation. When Jean- Jacques Rousseau came to Geneva and published his Emile in 1762, Rousseau publicly denied original sin and the doctrine of the Trinity. Church leaders in Geneva were no longer required to adhere to doctrinal formulations once championed by Geneva’s most well-known preacher, John Calvin.

However, as Bruce Gordon reports, more moderate voices emerged making a positive appeal to Calvin’s Institutes as a source for challenging traditional norms. In the 18th century, Jacobus Capitein, the first African to study the Calvinist theology, found in the writings of Calvin a Christian basis for undermining the morality of slavery. Later in the 20th century, South African Calvinist Allan Boesak found a theological basis in Calvin for the cause of liberation against apartheid (Gordon, pp. 75ff). Boesak had been initially horrified by Calvin, thinking him to be an apologist for racial-based slavery. Yet after making a careful re-reading of the Institutes, Boesak changed his mind about Calvin, seeing in the Frenchman’s work the theological resources necessary to completely dismantle the South African regime of apartheid (Gordon, pp. 166). Again, we see how a fresh look at Calvin has helped theologians more recently make a distinction between the original Calvin and the “Calvinism” of later generations which took the legacy of Calvin in wrong directions.

In America, the legacy of the Institutes divided Protestant Christians in a complicated way. The great philosopher/theologian Jonathan Edwards, who knew the Institutes well, cited Calvin as an authority, but also noted that he did not always agree with the famous Genevan preacher. John and Charles Wesley found much in the Institutes regarding the doctrine of election to be revolting. Yet John Wesley appealed to the Institutes for a sound doctrine of justification. John wrote:

“I think on Justification just as I have done any time these seven-and-twenty years, and just as Mr. Calvin does. In this respect I do not differ from him an hair’s breadth” (from a journal entry by John Wesley, quoted in Gordon, p. 84).

Ironically, Bruce Gordon argues that in the 19th century, the most influential reclamation of Calvin’s theology as put forth in the Institutes came from none other than Fredrich Schleiermacher, the father of Protestant liberalism. The fact that the Institutes could inspire both the conservative evangelicalism of a Jonathan Edwards and the Protestant liberalism of a Fredrich Schleiermacher illustrates just how diverse theological traditions find their home in the Institutes.

As Protestant liberalism in the late 19th century began to break the hegemony of the earlier conservative evangelical movement in the United States, the Princeton theologian of the early 20th century, Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, championed a revival of Calvin’s theology in a conservative effort to thwart the cancer of pervasive theological liberalism taking over the church.

Though not as conservative as Warfield, back in Europe, theologians like Karl Barth and Emil Bruner sought to revive Calvin’s theology for the modern world, in an answer to the growing decline of evangelical faith in Europe, precipitated by the rise of historical criticism, particularly in German liberal Protestantism. Gordon quotes from a 1962 Time magazine article, where Barth said:

“Calvin is in Heaven and has had time to ponder where he went wrong in his teachings. Doubtless he is pleased that I am setting him aright” (Gordon, p. 133).

The famous dispute concerning natural theology between Barth and Brunner revolved around how to best interpret Calvin’s Institutes. Dutch theologians who stood somewhere in between Warfield and Barth, such as the elder statesman Abraham Kuyper and his successor, Herman Bavinck, pioneered a kind of Neo-Calvinism based on the Institutes.

Gordon quotes from Bavinck that in the Institutes Calvin expressed “clear, deep and harmonious insight into Christian truth [such] as to render any subsequent modification unnecessary” (Gordon, p. 129).  Bavinck believed that John Calvin was the model pastor/theologian that any truly reformed evangelical pastor/theologian should seek to emulate. Bavinck himself was largely unknown in America, up until the last 25 years or so, when his Dutch works were finally translated into English, inspiring contemporary evangelical thinkers, such as the late Tim Keller.

 

The newly restored Notre Dame Cathedral, in Paris, France.  John Calvin most likely worshipped in this church, near the Sorbonne, where he studied law in Paris. This photo shows the remarkable job restorers made after the recent tragic fire nearly destroyed this iconic landmark in Paris.

 

Calvin’s Influence Today

The problem of evil remains perhaps one of the most troubling questions which Christian apologetics have to deal with, in a world today beset by wars and other conflicts that were basically unthinkable in certain quarters a generation ago. John Calvin had his own solution to the problem of evil, but not every Christian finds the theology associated with his name satisfying as it was in 16th century Geneva, Switzerland.

For sure, Calvin’s legacy is still a hotly debated topic these days. Even AI creators on YouTube are writing heavy-metal/rap songs about Calvin the controversialist:

On the one side, the Institutes remains perhaps the most influential theological work articulating the basic ideas of the Protestant Reformation, particularly among today’s Protestant evangelicals. There are still some who view any criticism of Calvin as an attack on the very Christian Gospel itself.

On the other side are critics like David Bentley Hart, briefly mentioned above, the eminent and erudite Eastern Orthodox theologian, who has become perhaps the world’s most outspoken intellectual advocate for a Christian doctrine of universalism. Hart routinely characterizes John Calvin as perhaps the worst of all heretics, lumping Calvin’s theology in with the cancer of Gnosticism, the second century Christian heresy which sought to derail the orthodox faith of the early church.

Both of these views of Calvin are extremes, which at a minimum are unhelpful, if not outright distorting. I view myself as advocate of a “reformed” theology, but I would be careful to use a little “r” when speaking of being “reformed,” as opposed to a capital “R” as in “Reformed,” which seems to be more along the lines of an 18th century Jonathan Edwards approach to being “Reformed”  (Yet even Edwards offered some modest critique of Calvin). Put in contemporary terms, I am more like a little “r” “reformed” advocate, like the late Tim Keller, and less a capital “R” “Reformed” advocate, such as what I see in John Piper.

In my view, John Calvin got his view of the sacraments, particularly regarding the Lord’s Supper, about as correct as you can get. Calvin’s idea that we are saved by faith alone, but that faith is never alone; that is, genuine faith is always accompanied with good works, hits the mark as well.

In fact, aside from Calvin’s particular emphasis on our mystical union with Christ, the other broadly predominant themes in the Institutes includes his doctrine on the sacraments, particularly on the Lord’s Supper, and the work of the Holy Spirit. One does not need to be a “Calvinist” to appreciate Calvin’s very practical theology aligned with these themes. Interestingly, some of the most excited supporters of John Calvin today are evangelical baptists, who completely disagree with Calvin on the topic of infant baptism, which he firmly supported!

Calvin is also one of greatest and most influential Christian apologists for capitalism. We have Calvin to thank for his reading of the usury texts in the Bible, where the idea of lending money to others, as long as the interest charged is not excessive, is within the permissible ethical framework of the Bible. It is hard to imagine how the modern banking system which has enabled countless millions to obtain affordable housing through mortgages would have been possible apart from Calvin’s view of lending money at modest interest rates. In other words, if you own a house by possessing a mortgage, you might want to thank John Calvin for enabling that to happen.

My greatest gratitude for Calvin comes from his theory of divine accommodation, whereby in Holy Scripture, God condescends to us by speaking at our level. As Calvin writes in the Institutes (1.13.1):

“Who even of slight intelligence does not understand that, as nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us? Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity.”

This idea of divine accommodation often gets misunderstood, but positively and rightly understood, it helps us parse through what the Bible actually teaches versus the particular cultural and human limitations of the author. Instead of being a hindrance, the sum of the particular cultural and human limitations of each writer of Sacred Scripture are used by God to be the vehicle by which we come to know God’s truth.

Most importantly, Calvin’s insistence on the sovereignty of God, that God knows better than what we think we know, is perhaps his most influential contribution to Christian theology. Calvin obviously was not the first to think of this, but his name in church history is often tightly linked with the doctrine of God’s “hidden decree.”

For if I was given the task of writing the Bible, there are plenty of things I would put in differently than what we find in the Bible. But the Bible is the authoritative book the sovereign God has given us, so I need to learn to trust that God knows what he is doing with the Bible, particularly when I am not so sure about some of the things I read about in the Bible.

God’s providential care over us in our world is meant to provide us comfort, when things do not always make sense to us. This can be applied any number of issues any Christian can run into in living the Christian life; whether it be struggling with some type of difficult teaching we read in the Bible, or the question of why we or someone else we care for is suffering, or anything having to do with the vexing problem of evil. I can trust that the sovereign God of the universe knows what he is doing, even when I am befuddled about my own circumstances. More than any other theologian, I have Calvin to thank for this insight.

On the other hand, I am not sure yet that Calvin got his view of penal substitutionary atonement right (at least Calvin’s critics think he is wrong here), something that I am trying to work out for myself this year. Furthermore, if Bruce Gordon is right and the Institutes does teach a form of double predestination, then I am not on board with Calvin on this. But I am not completely convinced that Calvin was really a “Calvinist” as much as Gordon suggests he was (I am not the only one who thinks this way …I have good company).

Either way, Bruce Gordon’s wonderful book on the Institutes maps out the history of how the Institutes has influenced the Christian movement, for both good and for ill. My trip last year visiting several of the cities where Calvin lived has served as a helpful reminder of the mark Calvin’s influence has made on the Christian church.

 

You probably know what I am standing in front of!!  The seeds of Calvin’s conversion to Christ were germinated in this city when Calvin was a student.

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April 17, 2026

Martin Bucer: The Failed Protestant Peacemaker of Strasbourg

By Clarke Morledge

From the Christianity along the Rhine travel blog series….

Being a peacemaker is not easy. While the current conflict with Iran absorbs the headlines, it overshadows another long standing conflict: Just ask President Donald Trump, who since the beginning of his presidency has been trying to find a peaceful solution to the Russia/Ukraine conflict for well over a year.

Such was also the case in the 16th century in Europe, when theological giants, like Martin Luther and the Roman Catholic Pope, spread their influence across the land. With the exception the Holy Roman Emperor himself (Charles V), the Pope was the most prominent leader in Western Europe, whereas Luther was a seminary professor, with a sharp wit and stinging rhetoric, who knew how to use the printing press, the rough equivalent to today’s social media platforms on the Internet. The Reformation did not only result in a split within the medieval Catholic church, it also divided Protestants trying to forge a united movement in attempts to reform that medieval Catholic church.

The Protestant Reformation was not simply a theological, religious dispute. It had far reaching ramifications impacting kings, princes, and emperors, and the millions of subjects who served them. Within a century after Luther, the religious conflicts of the 16th century became intertwined with political conflicts, resulting in the Thirty Years War, where roughly one out of four Europeans died due to violence and (mostly) disease spread by the war.

Into the mix was another Protestant Reformer from Germany, Martin Bucer, who was just a few years younger than Luther, a man that most Christians have probably never heard of. Unlike Luther, Bucer was more cautious and reserved. Yet Bucer became a leading voice among the Protestants, trying to forge a “third way” through various theological conflicts, particularly in the city of Strasbourg, along the Rhine River, bordering France and Germany.

Back in October of 2025, my wife and I went on a river cruise on the Rhine River, and we spent a day in Strasbourg. I got to visit some of the sites where Martin Bucer lived much of his life.

In front of Martin Bucer’s home in Strasbourg, France. It was in this home where Bucer officiated the marriage between John Calvin and Idelette de Bure, a former Anabaptist. Calvin had been forced out of Geneva, Switzerland for several years. Bucer helped to arrange for his friend Calvin to move to Strasbourg, to get a job as a pastor for French Protestant refugees living in the city. It was a bit of a cloudy day in Strasbourg, when I took this photo in October, 2025.

 

Martin Bucer Becomes a Protestant

Not much is known about Martin Bucer’s early life. Born in 1491, Bucer joined the Dominican order perhaps in his late teenage years, and ended up studying theology in Heidelberg in 1515. But this was the era when the humanism of Desiderius Erasmus came to the foreground, particularly with Erasmus’ pivotal Greek New Testament, which helped inspire Martin Luther in Wittenberg, Germany to post his famous Ninety-Five Theses, reportedly on the Wittenberg church door.

Bucer’s family had encouraged him to join the Dominicans, which he did, but he was never wholly enthusiastic about it. Bucer heard Martin Luther in a disputation at Heidelberg, and that changed his life. Bucer’s interest in the humanism of Erasmus pretty much sealed his fate with the Dominicans, and he began the painful process of trying to be released from his monastic vows. He then sought to find some gameful employment outside of his world of being a Dominican monk. In 1522, Bucer married a nun, Elizabeth, who was forced out of her monastic order, for breaking off her celibacy vow. The penniless couple eventually made their way to Strasbourg, along the Rhine River.

Strasbourg

Ah, let me tell you about Strasbourg.

Strasbourg is a fascinating city, having gone back and forth between German and French control, over the centuries. They call it the “Alsace” region of France, the land “in-between,” I was told, or the land of a “foreign domain.”  Because of its unique position sandwiched between Roman Catholic France and Lutheran Germany, Strasbourg played a pivotal role in the Reformation controversy of the 16th century.

With a newly pregnant wife, Bucer and his family were forced to move in with his parents until he could find a job. At that point, Bucer was not unlike a typical twenty-something today, still living on mom and dad’s car insurance and cell phone plan. At first, Bucer offered to be a tutor for students interested in the humanism of Erasmus. That helped to feed his family, but it still was not enough. He was finally able to secure a decent job as a chaplain, getting out on his own, spending most of his years in Strasbourg.

Unfortunately for Bucer, he wrote a book defending the Reformation instigated by Luther, and his intellectual hero, Erasmus, heard of this and rejected Bucer’s thesis. Erasmus wanted reform within the medieval church, but he thought Bucer and Luther had gone too far in their criticisms of Rome.

Anabaptists, fleeing persecution in both Roman Catholic and Reformation controlled areas of Europe, soon made their way to Strasbourg, and so Bucer found himself fighting a multi-sided theological and intellectual war, with Roman Catholics on one side and the Anabaptists on the other. Yet Bucer was optimistic, hopeful that dialogue with such factions would eventually yield some peace, without compromising core convictions. In the midst of this, Bucer sought to find an irenic approach which could bridge the differences between these various theological camps.

Bucer was also hopeful that a rift between the Swiss Zurich reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, and the German Wittenberg reformer, Martin Luther, could be healed at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529, regarding the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. However, Luther believed that Bucer was just as intransigent and wrong-headed as Zwingli regarding the Eucharist, and reconciliation was not achieved.

However, despite this failure at Marburg, it did not keep Bucer from trying to be a peacemaker. Bucer traveled across the German-speaking land meeting with different followers of Luther and Zwingli, looking for areas where different parties could find some common ground, and even resolving conflict with Rome. Bucer’s list of friends reads like a “Who’s Who” of the Reformation.

Street in the old part of Strasbourg. Martin Bucer lived in a house on the left hand side of this street (just to the left of where the two people on the street are walking). To keep automobile traffic out of the old part of the city, during certain times of the day, a column is raised and lowered to keep vehicles out so that tourists like myself could wander around and take photos…. and not get run over!!

 

Martin Bucer in the Crucible of Life

Sadly, the year 1541 proved to be the most challenging year for Bucer. A meeting at Regensburg, Germany between Protestant leaders like Philip Methlancthon and Roman Catholic theologians like Jonathan Eck, was envisioned as an effort to bridge the gap between the Lutherans and the Roman Catholics. A coalition of moderates on both sides of the controversy had high hopes for this meeting. However, the colloquy at Regensburg turned out to be a last ditch effort at theological unity which failed to satisfy either Luther or the papal authorities.

Also, during that year just after the meeting in Regensburg, Bucer’s wife, Elizabeth, died of the plague, along with three of their children. Bucer’s close friend and colleague, John Calvin, was forced by the plague to move back to Geneva, not too long after the city fathers of Geneva asked Calvin to return to the Swiss city and be their pastor again. With his wife dead and his close friend Calvin gone from Strasbourg, Bucer had suffered great loss.

A few year earlier, Bucer had gained a friendship with another Protestant moderate, Johannes Oecolampadius, who pastored a church in Basel, Switzerland, further up the Rhine River. Oecolampadius had died ten years earlier, leaving a widow, who in turn became married to a colleague in Strasbourg, Wolfgang Capito. However, Capito himself died of the plague himself, leaving his wife to be widowed yet again.

Bucer was in a difficult situation, with no wife and several surviving children to care for. Bucer quickly remarried Oecolampadius’ and Capito’s widow, Wibrandis Rosenblatt.  The now thrice-married Wibrandis Rosenblatt found a faithful husband in Bucer, and partner in raising children. However, Bucer was criticized by other reformers for remarrying too soon.

Nevertheless, other reformers looked to Bucer as a trusted friend, who believed he was able to intercede and tone down the often-violent rhetoric of others. For example, when Martin Luther in 1543 wrote his most unfortunate tract, On the Jews and Their Lies, a letter was written on December 8, 1543, from the Zurich reformed preacher, Heinrich Bullinger, to his friend, Bucer, urging Bucer to try to persuade Luther to come back to his senses:

“Luther has written in a way that is utterly indecorous and entirely without moderation — plainly scurrilous, not serious. He writes against the Jews, and what might have been a fortunate and persuasive argument he renders offensive — indeed, even ridiculous — by his vile insults and crude invective, which befit no one, least of all an aged theologian.

This may someday bring great evil upon the Church. Perhaps you, his close friend and brother, could restrain him as a teacher — so that he may remember himself and his modesty, and write and act with greater humility, purity, and circumspection. Many pious and learned men are offended by his arrogance, which is excessive beyond measure.

A theologian should embody modesty, prudence, piety, and gratis. However, the example of his audacious impudence has spread and has now infected many church ministers” (Referenced by John Dickson, author of Bullies and Saints, reviewed here on Veracity. Original Latin source).

Sadly, Bullinger was prophetic, as Luther’s anti-Jewish sentiments were picked up and amplified by the Nazi party movement of 1930’s Germany. I am not aware of any evidence that Bucer was ever successful in intervening with the great Martin Luther, before the latter’s death in 1546.

Alas, Bucer’s position was precariously unstable in Strasbourg, and within a few years the pressure got the best of him. The setback at Regensburg, the continued vitriol leveled by Martin Luther against Huldrych Zwingli’s successor at Zurich, Heinrich Bullinger,  and the returning fire from Bullinger against Luther, along with the personal losses in 1541, began to zap at Bucer’s energy. If strife among his Protestant colleagues was not enough, the defenders of medieval Catholicism were constantly seeking to have him ousted from Strasbourg, including the Emperor Charles V himself.

Bucer was effectively in a theological (and political) “no man’s land,” which ultimately forced him out of Strasbourg in 1549.

Martin Bucer pastored this church, St. Thomas, in Strasbourg, France, until he was forced to leave the city in 1549.

 

Martin Bucer’s Final Years…. In Cambridge, England

Charles V finally found enough leverage to get Bucer kicked out of Strasbourg. Bucer and his family found refuge in England. Bucer was assigned a teaching post at Cambridge, by another English reformer and moderate, Thomas Cranmer, who received him warmly as a colleague. Thomas Cranmer is most well known for crafting together the Book of Common Prayer, for the Church of England, as well as being a martyr for the Reformation, under the persecution of Queen “Bloody” Mary. Cranmer’s temperament mirrored that of Bucer, and most English speakers unwittingly feel Cranmer’s influence today through his translation of the Lord’s Prayer, which many memorize  (“forgive us our debts” versus “forgive us our trespasses“).

But Bucer’s exile in England made him a very unhappy man. The colder northern climate in Cambridge did not help his health, either. Hopes for trying to resolve the differences between Rome and Reformers like Luther ultimately left him alienated from both sides. Conflicts with others wore him down, and within two years of being in England, in 1551, Bucer died.

Despite his death, Bucer’s troubles would haunt beyond the grave. In 1555, the new English monarch, the Roman Catholic Mary (the Queen who had Cranmer burned at the stake), had the bones of Bucer dug up and had him ceremonially burned as a heretic. It was not until Queen Elizabeth, a Protestant, took the throne that in 1560, Bucer was given a second burial with full honors.

 

Life Lessons from Martin Bucer

Martin Bucer embodied what it meant to wear a Union top along with a Confederate bottom. Bucer got shot at from all sides.

In many ways, in our day when so many Christians feel divided from one another, we can learn something from the Dominican monk turned Protestant reformer. From a book entitled Common Places, which features extracts from Bucer’s writings, Bucer believed the church was united in…..

“the unity of the Spirit, of love, the word of God, Christ, the sacraments, and the sharing of gifts, that we may aspire together to the same goal, and hold and express the same beliefs.”

And….

“It is essential that we hold completely in common everything instituted for the building up of the Church.”

That desire to always seek common ground among believers, without compromising essential Christian distinctives, is a virtue which is in short supply today.

Bucer believed that the medieval Roman Catholic Church was in desperate need of reform. Yet he concurred with other reformers that the Bible was indeed the written Word of God, and it was authoritative for all believers. This placed Bucer firmly in the Protestant camp, though his efforts to form a unified coalition among his fellow reformers were frustrated.

Martin Bucer’s most significant theological contribution was in defining a concept called “double justification.” He combined Luther’s theology of “imputed righteousness,” which lined up with Luther’s ideas about justification, with a Roman Catholic theology of “inherent righteousness” (or “imparted righteousness”), emphasizing growth in sanctification over time, as part of a second element of justification, a life well-lived full of good works as one follows Christ. This idea of “double justification” was thought to strike a middle-way between Roman Catholicism and the Reformation tradition of Martin Luther.

But as is so often the case, such “middle-way” theologies tend to be rejected by opposing parties in such discussions. The more extreme voices in a conversation tend to dampen voices of moderation.

Ah, such is the life of a peace maker!!

 

As my wife and I wandered around Strasbourg, we enjoyed (well, at least, I did!) passing by several sites associated with Martin Bucer, such as his home and the church where he served as a pastor. I had just finished reading Martin Bucer: An Introduction to His Life and Theology (Cascade Companions), written by Donald K. McKim and Jim West, a short book that filled in many of the above details about Bucer’s fascinating life. So, if you ever want to read more about Bucer, Martin Bucer: An Introduction to His Life and Theology (Cascade Companions)  is a nice investment, at only 164 pages.

Martin Bucer: An Introduction to His Life and Theology (Cascade Companions), by Donald K. McKim and Jim West. The whole Cascade Companions series is a collection of short biographies of leading Christian figures in church history. This was the first book I read in the series, and it was a good read: short and sweet.

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April 3, 2026

Martin Luther in the Hot Seat at Worms and Heidelberg

By Clarke Morledge

From the Christianity along the Rhine blog series….

Martin Luther once delivered a sermon on Good Friday, where he said this:

“Until the present we have been in the Passion week and have celebrated Good Friday in the right way …. Cast your sins from yourself upon Christ, believe with a festive spirit that your sins are His wounds and sufferings, that He carries them and makes satisfaction for them…..Press through all difficulties and behold His friendly heart, how full of love it is toward you, which love constrained Him to bear the heavy load of your conscience and your sin.” 

A lot of ink has been spilled on Martin Luther… and I have read a few pages of it!

One of my closest friends from high school, Thomas Coyner, died a few years ago due to a debilitating life-long illness. Eight years before Thomas died, his father, Boyd Coyner, a retired professor of history at the College of William and Mary (where I work as an IT engineer), died as well.

The Coyner family loved books.

When Dr. Coyner died, my friend Thomas gave to me his dad’s collection of books on Martin Luther. It was a bunch of books! Thomas’ dad was apparently an expert on the life of Martin Luther, the famous German Protestant reformer of the 16th century. This made sense in that Dr. Coyner had grown up in a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, named after Martin Luther himself.

I have heard it said that there are more books written about Martin Luther than any other figure in Western history.  I can believe it! Some of Dr. Coyner’s collection are tomes, including Martin Brecht’s three volume set, with some 1400 pages total…. and that is not counting the endnotes!!

I deeply treasure these books on Luther, though I confess that I hardly have read them all. The standard, recommended biography of Luther, which is nicely short and compact, is Roland Bainton’s Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. Bainton’s book got me hooked on Luther, not just as a pivotal Protestant theologian, but as a shaper of Western culture more broadly.

So, when my wife and I embarked on a cruise on the Rhine River, in October, 2025, I was determined to check out some of the spots where Luther made his mark in Germany, during those crucible years of the Protestant Reformation movement. A day-long bus tour scratched my church history itch.

The Reformation Monument in the city of Worms, Germany, where Martin Luther (statue in the middle) made his famous “Here I Stand, I Can Do No Other” speech before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. I had to navigate around the Japanese tourists who surrounded the monument, to get my friend to snap a photo of me!

 

Walking the Streets of Worms, Germany

First up was a visit to the city of Worms. As a seminary professor still in his thirties, Martin Luther had been summoned to Worms to appear before Charles V, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, in the year 1521.

Historians call this the “Diet of Worms,” which has nothing to do with some sort of creepy health fad to help you lose weight. A “diet” is an antiquated reference to a meeting of a legislative body, and “Worms” is simply the name of the city where this meeting was held.  So, it was at this “Diet of Worms” where Luther uttered (at least, it is commonly told that way) the famous saying, “Here I stand, I can do no other.”

Four years earlier, in 1517, Martin Luther had published a criticism of the medieval practice of the sale of indulgences, which crudely put would allow a dead relative to lessen their time in purgatory, if a living relative were to hand over some cash to the medieval church authorities. This got Luther into some hot water with the church establishment, which only emboldened Luther to publish criticisms of other medieval Catholic practices and doctrines.

At the Diet of Worms, Luther had been asked to recant his writings. What prompted Luther to get into so much trouble?

Back in 1453, the great Christian city of Constantinople had finally fallen to the Turks. Intellectuals from that city fled towards the West, bringing ancient copies of the New Testament with them. Luther had been impressed by a newly researched version of the Greek New Testament, published by the Dutch scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, who spent several years researching some of those ancient copies of the New Testament from the East. From that version of the New Testament, Luther had felt compelled to challenge the Western medieval doctrine of purgatory, among other doctrines, putting his ideas into book form.

The printed book, using the newly acquired technology of the printing press in Germany, was like the Internet of the 16th century. Luther was a master in using this 16th century form of “social media” to broadcast his ideas to the world. The likes of Taylor Swift may rule the world of Instagram today, but in the 16th century, it was Martin Luther dropping a stack of papers at the door of the Wittenberg printing shop, to be converted to movable type, which shook up the medieval world.

 

A statue in Worms, Germany, of Martin Luther, the hero of the Reformation…. and a thorn in the flesh to the medieval church establishment. My photo, October, 2025.

 

Luther had set off a firestorm of controversy, engulfing his whole life, thus starting a conversation which set the intellectual course of the West for the next 500 years. Along the way, millions have experienced spiritual joy resulting from his fresh look at the basic essentials of the Christian faith, and what it means to be a Christian. Nevertheless, on the downside, thousands, if not millions of people have tragically lost their lives through wars and persecutions, partly related to the controversy which Luther ignited.

Luther himself dodged the fate of almost certain death, by the hands of authorities, in the wake of his appearance before Charles V. After refusing to recant his writings, Luther was able to leave Worms safely, before being kidnapped by those who sought to protect Luther’s life. Luther would go on and translate the Bible into the common language of the German people.

Ancient city wall of Worms, Germany, built by the Romans, about the time of Christ. A moat surrounded the city, fed from the waters of the Rhine. But now it is just a sidewalk and a city street. My photo, October, 2025.

 

Worms, Germany, is a remarkable city to visit. During the period of the ancient Roman empire, Worms had been an outpost along the Rhine River. What is weird today is that the Rhine River is actually a few miles away from the city now. The Romans had built a wall around the city at the shore of the Rhine, to protect against Germanic invaders. For centuries, the Rhine was marshy and difficult to navigate, particularly for larger boats.  In the 19th century, the Rhine was dredged to make for a deeper, straighter channel, thus eliminating the more marshy areas.

The city had been mostly flattened during World War 2, as Americans chased the German army out of the city. The oldest cathedral in the city was spared the artillery barrage of the Americans. Nearby that cathedral is the spot where Luther appeared before Emperor Charles V, to make his bold defense of the Reformation, just less than 400 years before American tanks entered the city. The layers of history across the centuries in Worms makes anything in America look rather piddly!

The area around the cathedral in Worms, Germany, not long after the American bombing raids towards the end of World War 2. Photo preserved inside the cathedral, where I took a snapshot of it.

 

From Worms, Germany, to Heidelberg

Thankfully, there was a restroom near where the bus stopped to pick our group up. This was one of the few restrooms that did not cost me a Euro coin to use it!

Europe travel tip: Keep a few Euro coins in your pocket as you travel across the continent. They will come in handy.

After visiting Worms, the next stop was in the city of Heidelberg, at the eastern edge of the Rhine River valley. Heidelberg is known for its great castle, looking over the Neckar River. A good part of Heidelberg, including part of the castle, was destroyed by the “Sun King,” Louis XIV of France, in the late 17th century. For decades after World War 2, the American military had a significant military presence there, as the city was largely spared of the destruction from the war.

The old bridge crossing the Neckar River, in Heidelberg, Germany, with the famous castle above.

 

But my main interest with Heidelberg was in finding the spot where Martin Luther participated in the “Heidelberg Disputation,” a defense he made of his theology in 1518 at an Augustinian seminary, where the University of Heidelberg is located today. Luther managed to persuade at least some of his Augustinian monastic colleagues of the validity of the theological principles he championed at Wittenberg, where he served as a professor of the Bible. This was just three years before his fateful meeting before Emperor Charles V in Worms.

It was at this Disputation in Heidelberg where a young Dominican monk, Martin Bucer, heard Luther speak for the first time. Bucer became a follower and friend of Luther, and a pivotal figure in his own right, though his influence today is overshadowed by theological giants like Luther and later, John Calvin. The life of Martin Bucer will be a topic of a future Veracity blog post.

The spot where Martin Luther delivered his Disputation in Heidelberg before fellow Augustinian monks, in defense of the Reformation.

 

An Educational Dinner Conversation at a Wedding Reception…

One more little anecdote….

At a wedding reception a few years ago, I sat next to Philip Cary, a theologian at Eastern University in St. David’s, Pennsylvania. Cary has done several recorded classes for The Teaching Company, as he is an expert on both Saint Augustine and Martin Luther. It was an unexpected surprise to be at a sit-down wedding reception, having dinner with a world-class scholar like Philip Cary.  The Bible-geek in me enjoyed the conversation just as much as the food! I kept Dr. Cary talking so much with all of my questions, I do not think he ate hardly anything!

Cary believes that Augustine and Luther are the two most influential thinkers in the Protestant Christian West ( I have written two blog posts about Augustine earlier this year). Interestingly, Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk, about the time he triggered the revolution of the Protestant Reformation.

Martin Luther has been one of my theological heroes (as well as Augustine), but like Augustine, he had his faults, too. Luther’s legacy is enduring, but it has been tarnished by some of his anti-semitic writings of his later years, prompting a deficiency in Protestant thinking which is being corrected by scholars over the last few decades. I will be writing more about this in the future. In the meantime, it is worth celebrating the man’s positive side, as Luther pretty much gave us the Five Solas of the Reformation:

  • Sola Scripture (Scripture alone)
  • Solus Christus (Christ alone)
  • Sola Fide (Faith alone)
  • Sola Gratia (Grace alone)
  • Soli Deo Gloria (Glory to God alone)

Luther’s Good Friday sermon focused on the cross, but he also reminded his listeners about the resurrection:

“If we deal with our sins in our conscience and let them continue within us and be cherished in our hearts, they become much too strong for us to manage and they will live forever.  But when we see that they are laid on Christ and He has triumphed over them by His resurrection and we fearlessly believe it, then they are dead and have become as nothing.”

On this Good Friday, as we remember what Jesus accomplished for us and our salvation on the cross, it is good to recall the message of the Gospel that Martin Luther risked his life to guard, to protect, and to proclaim to the whole world.

My favorite podcast (still) is The Rest is History, narrated by historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland. Here is the episode where they talk about Martin Luther’s encounter with Charles V at Worms, nearly 500 years ago. Standing in that spot where Luther uttered his memorable defense really brought the story alive to me!!

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January 27, 2023

Christendom Under the Habsburgs in Vienna

By Clarke Morledge

In the days when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five-Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, the Holy Roman Empire was the greatest unifying force in all of Western Christendom, under the Emperorship of Charles V. Despite various attempts to heal the rift between Roman Catholics and Protestants, most notably at a meeting (Diet) in 1541 at Regensburg, Germany, the theological split in Europe put the Holy Roman Empire under severe stress.  By 1648, some 130 years after Luther’s protest at Wittenburg, the unity of the Christian West in Europe lay in tatters. What superseded the Holy Roman Empire was the emergence of a single royal family headquartered in Vienna, Austria: the Habsburgs.

My wife and I spent two nights in Vienna during our trip to Europe in 2022. The presence of the Habsburgs’ influence could be felt everywhere.

Bust of Ferdinand II, a leading Habsburg and Holy Roman Emperor from 1619 to 1637, during the Thirty Years War. Photo taken in Vienna, Austria.

The Habsburgs left Europe a checkered legacy. The Thirty Years War, which ended in 1648, had divided Central Europe into many autonomously governing districts. But the Habsburg family remained the primary power broker in the region, adored by some, despised by others. On the one hand, what emerged from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia was a renewed effort to reinvigorate the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation in the various lands ruled by the Habsburgs, and their networks of ruling families, particularly in lands surrounding Vienna, Austria. Along with that renewed Catholicism came the suppression of Protestantism, particularly in Bohemia, and its most prominent city, Prague.

The Habsburgs managed to rule a large chunk of Europe until its final breakup, at the end of World War One. Names like Ferdinand, Leopold, and Maria Theresa pepper the family tree and made their mark on the world (it is a rather complex family tree!). Staunchly Roman Catholic, they were great patrons of the arts. Names like Wolfgang Mozart, Franz List, and Ludwig van Beethoven all gained measures of support from the royal family.

The royal family built some of the most impressive buildings and estates in Vienna. The standout features are the Hofburg Palace, the Habsburg winter estate near the city center of Vienna, and the Schönbrunn Palace, their summer estate on the outskirts of Vienna, both of which were on our tour.

Part of the Swiss Wing of the sprawling Hofburg Palace estate. Vienna, Austria.

The Habsburgs also formed the greatest line of defense against invasion from the Turks, from the Islamic East. For several hundred years, on and off, the Turks laid siege to Vienna, seeing that this city on the Danube River was the gateway to Western Europe. But in 1683, the last and greatest siege was broken, and the Turks were driven back to their territories around Istanbul, in modern day Turkey. In the wake of the upheaval of World War One, the situation is much different now, but the signs of the medieval Austrian/Ottoman conflict remain. At St. Stephens’s Cathedral, one can look up one of the spires and find a cannon ball lodged in the stone, a memory recalling the great battle that took place on September 11, 1683 (Unfortunately, the ball is up so high, I could not get a good photo of it)….. For the curious, the date of the attack on the World Trade Center, in New York City, on September 11, 2001, was not picked by accident. It was intentionally set on that date to recall the events from this final siege of Vienna, centuries ago.

Capistran Chancel, outside of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, Austria. A Franciscan friar under an extravagant sunburst, trampling on a beaten Turk, in response to the 1456 crusade. The Turks made numerous attacks against Vienna until 1683, when the Turks were finally repelled during the last great siege of Vienna.

What was most interesting about our recent trip to Europe was the different responses I got from tour guides when I asked about the legacy of the Habsburg family. In Vienna, glowing reports about the Habsburgs were mentioned as we toured the various palaces that the family owned. In contrast, in Prague, the name of the Habsburg family was largely synonymous with oppression.

Today, with few exceptions, glorious monarchies like the Habsburg family are pretty much a thing of the past. Along with the decline of such monarchies, the Christian influence that animated the spiritual life of the family and their supportive subjects, or infuriated those who despised their enforcement of their religious convictions, has been effectively replaced by secularism. For example, in nearly every church in Vienna that I visited, curious tourists far outnumbered reverential worshippers. Love ’em or despise ’em, the Habsburg family has left a multiple centuries long influence across Central Europe.

The rear view of Schönbrunn Palace, from the far side of the expansive gardens.

Yet despite the conflicted legacy the Habsburgs’ left, they knew how to build some immensely grand buildings, and beautiful gardens to surround them, particularly at the Schönbrunn Palace.

 

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January 13, 2023

Regensburg: The 16th Century “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” … (That Failed)

By Clarke Morledge

Our tour group walking the streets of Regensburg, Germany. Remnants of the old Roman wall, dating back to the era of Marcus Aurelius, are embedded in various buildings throughout this old and beautiful city.

Our tour guide in Regensburg, Germany this past October had given us an excellent overview of this ancient city on the banks of the Danube. It had once been one of the northernmost points of the ancient Roman Empire, dating back to the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius. During World War II, Regensburg was one of the few German cities that escaped bombardment by the Allies, in the attempt to defeat the Nazis, which means that much of the city’s history is well preserved.

Still, I was filled with curiosity and asked our tour guide about the Diet of Regensburg in 1541, which was not mentioned during our 2-hour walk through the city.  After the tour was officially over, he kindly took us to the place where this famous dialogue was held, between representatives of the Roman Catholicism elite and the growing Protestant movement of the 16th century. The building where the meeting was held was next to a beautiful, yet unassuming city square.

Haidplatz. In this building, off of this city square (though shaped like a triangle), the Diet of Regensburg took place in 1541. Today, Haidplatz is one of the locations where the popular Christmas Markets are held in Regensburg.

 

A virtual who’s-who of leading thinkers made the journey to this old city, to see if there was any way to heal the breach between the Roman Pontiff and Martin Luther. Luther’s number one cohort, Philip Melanchthon, as well as Johann Eck, Luther’s papal interlocutor at their famous debate in Leipzig, headlined the conference. But then there was Martin Bucer, the Reformation leader from Strasburg, along with Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, a leading Roman Catholic theologian, who sympathized much with the Protestants. Even a young John Calvin was in attendance.

The stakes were high. Unlike today when doctrinal debates among Christians might lead to church splits, where two or more groups simply agree to move along their own separate ways, confessional unity in 16th century Europe impacted more than just determining what church you would attend. The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, wanted the Christian peoples of Western Europe be of one accord in political allegiance, and political allegiance was drawn on church confessional lines.

While the followers of the Papacy and the followers of Luther squabbled with one another, a threat had been continuing to emerge from the east. The Islamic Turks had captured the famed Byzantine Christian city of Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1453, and they were moving towards the west, in hopes of ultimately conquering Vienna, Austria, which was the gateway into the rest of Europe. Charles V was anxious that some acceptable theological/confessional solution be reached in order to contain the Turkish threat. A Europe with divided churches might not be able to stand against this looming threat from the east.

On top of the external threat, concerns internal to Western Christendom weighed heavily among Europe’s political leaders. What would become of the church lands scattered across the regions where Protestantism was gaining ground? According to some scholars, somewhere around 7% of the land in central Europe, on average, belonged in some fashion to the church: Would the Protestants lay claim to much if not all of the land being contested, or would the Roman church still retain title? It was a recipe for war within Christendom. It was a mess.

According to Peter Matheson’s Cardinal Contarini at Regensburg, which chronicles much of the story behind the 1541 proceedings at Regensburg, Charles V was willing to accept some form of toleration of Protestant beliefs within the empire. However, the official legate representative of Rome, Gasparo Contarini, was hoping for something more that just “toleration.” Contarini envisioned a start towards formal reunion among the Roman Catholics and the Protestants, at least by embracing what he considered to be certain essentials of “Catholic” faith.

Way behind the gate, behind me, is a painting on the wall, marking the spot where the Roman Catholic and Protestant leaders tried to hammer out a peace solution between the two different theological camps.

 

Remarkably, both sides in the dialogue came to a number of conclusions that were in agreement with one another. For example, both the doctrines of creation and sin were discussed, and met with substantial agreement by both sides (It would only be until the Council of Trent took place that different theological conceptions of sin and sanctification would stiffen the divide between Protestants and the Roman Church). Surprisingly, a formulation regarding the doctrine of justification was agreed upon by all parties present.

So far, so good.

However, there were a few main sticking points that kept the conference itself from being a full success. First, there was the nature of Scriptural authority. What had the final say, the Bible itself, or the magisterial teaching authority of the Bishop of Rome?

The two sides were unable to agree. This was probably the biggest deal breaker, but the issue of the Eucharist made for another huge obstacle. A lesser dispute over the sacrament of confession and penance was another.

Sadly, even if the conference were to come to a full agreement on everything, the chances of the Diet’s success turned out to be slim. Luther himself was suspicious of the Diet, thinking that it was a waste of time and would not be fruitful, and the office of the Roman Catholic Pope pretty much thought the same way. In other words, the Diet of Regensburg might have been doomed before it even started.

The reputations of some of those who worked hard towards reunion suffered in the wake of the failure at Regensburg. On the Protestant side, Martin Bucer’s legacy was tarnished in the eyes of more entrenched Protestants, for trying to give too much of certain Protestant principles away at Regensburg, particularly on the doctrine of justification.

On the Roman Catholic side, while a frustrated Cardinal Contarini had ultimately and regrettably rejected the Protestant counter-proposals in contrast to his own, Contarini’s efforts at reunification with the Protestants were viewed as compromise among hard liners at the Vatican. Contarini died the year after the Diet of Regensburg. One can only speculate that the stress of being caught in middle of this dispute contributed to his death at age 59. As the conflict wore on through the mid-16th century, the Roman Catholic/Protestant divide only got wider.

Few today even know about the Diet of Regensburg. For example, I have yet to find an English translation of the full transcripts of the Diet available in print or online.

 

Zooming in on the photo above:  Roughly translated, the wall painting which features Melanchthon and Eck on either side reads: “in this house doctor phil melanchthon and doctor johann eck led their famous religious discourse during the imperial diet in 1541”

 

Neverthless, the Diet of Regensburg serves as a reminder of the importance of theological dialogue, in order to try to preserve the unity of the church, and work through theological disagreements.

But perhaps the timing was just all wrong….

Let us speed up some 450-ish years….

In 1994, the Lutheran-turned-Roman-Catholic theologian and First Things magazine editor, Richard John Neuhaus, and evangelical Protestant leaders, including Prison Fellowship’s Charles Colson and theologian J.I. Packer gathered together to hammer out a joint statement entitled Evangelicals and Catholics Together. That meeting was sort of like the 20th century version of the Diet of Regensburg. Out of those series of meetings, the joint statement noted points of agreement between Protestant Evangelicals and Roman Catholics in areas of doctrine as well as marking out common causes that both parties can work towards in promoting Christian concepts of culture. Evangelicals and Catholics Together has had their supporters, as well as their detractors.

Not too long after my wife and I returned from Europe, another session of Evangelicals and Catholics Together had met again and released an updated statement, 2022 Evangelicals and Catholics Together. This new statement is more about sharing a common vision of what it means to be Protestant Evangelical and Roman Catholics together in an age which has seen incredible culture shifts over the last ten years or so. Surely, the same type of criticisms that plagued the 1994 Evangelicals and Catholics Together statement, as well as the 1541 Diet of Regensburg, are still there. What is perhaps new this time around is that the dominant mode of Western culture in the 21st century appears to be at odds with certain core assumptions about cultural life shared by both Roman Catholics and Evangelical Protestants. In other words, Roman Catholics and Protestant Evangelicals have their serious points of disagreement, but both parties have far less in common with the trajectory that secular culture is taking. We have come a long way since the era of a divided Christendom in 16th century Europe.

Is this a new opportunity to try to heal the rift between Roman Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism that the Diet of Regensburg tried to tackle (and eventually failed)? Time will tell.

For more on the Diet (or Colloquy) of Regensburg, read more about it from this previous Veracity blog post.

Crossing over the Old Stone Bridge, looking towards the old city center of Regensburg. Hundreds of tourists, mainly from the Danube-Rhine cruise ship industry, were in town the day I snapped this photo, and listened to this street musician crank up his battery-operated guitar outfit to play Led Zeppelin songs.

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