The previous paper traced the history of the Christian Leviathan up to Augustine and ended with a leap to Hobbes in 1651. Between these two points lie more than a thousand years in which the Church had become the dominant institution of Europe. In the 16th century this institution fell into a crisis that entered history as the Reformation. This paper examines two principal figures of that crisis — Martin Luther and John Calvin — and their double role: as heirs to a long heretical prehistory and as liquidators of its most radical heirs.
I. The heretical prehistory — an overview
The Reformation of the 16th century did not come out of nowhere. It had several centuries of forerunners who raised essentially the same demands that Luther and Calvin would later formulate — the Bible in the vernacular, criticism of the trade in indulgences, rejection of transubstantiation, the demand that the clergy live in poverty, the priesthood of all believers, rejection of papal supremacy. All these movements were persecuted by the Catholic Church as heresy.
In the 12th century the Waldensians formed in Lyon under Peter Valdes — laymen who preached the Gospel and lived in poverty. They were excommunicated at the Synod of Verona in 1184 and persecuted for centuries; their remnants survive to this day. In the 13th century the Beguines and Beghards arose, who were treated in the previous Megamachine paper. In the 14th century German mysticism came to the fore with Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Seuse and Johannes Tauler, who taught the soul’s direct contact with God — Eckhart was posthumously condemned in 1329 on 28 propositions. In the 15th century the Brethren of the Common Life were active in the Netherlands, a lay movement that prepared the ground for the later Reformation.
Two figures stand out from this prehistory: John Wyclif and Jan Hus. They deserve closer consideration because they had already fully formulated the central teachings of the Reformation — more than a hundred years before Luther posted his theses.
II. John Wyclif (c. 1330–1384)
Wyclif was an English theologian who taught as a master at Oxford and at times held high positions at the English court. His theological work rested on the principle that Holy Scripture is the sole authority in matters of faith (sola scriptura) — a formula that Luther would later adopt. From this principle Wyclif derived a series of consequences.
He disputed the Pope’s claim to universal rule as unbiblical. He criticised the wealth and power of the Church and demanded its expropriation. He rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation — that is, the doctrine that in the Eucharist bread and wine are changed in their essence into the body and blood of Christ. He opposed pilgrimages, the veneration of saints and relics, and auricular confession. He held that every believer has direct access to God — without priestly mediation.
His most important work was probably the initiative for an English translation of the Bible. Between about 1380 and 1384 the first complete translation of the Bible into English, based on the Vulgate, was produced under his direction; after his death it was revised by John Purvey. This made Holy Scripture in England readable by anyone who could read — a precondition for laymen being able to compare the Church’s teachings with the biblical message.
In 1382 a synod in Oxford condemned 24 propositions from Wyclif’s writings as heretical. Wyclif lost his academic posts but lived on as a parish priest in Lutterworth until his death in 1384 — no formal charge was brought, for fear of a popular uprising. His followers, the Lollards, continued to spread his teachings. From 1401 they were persecuted under the statute “De heretico comburendo”; in 1410 the craftsman John Badby became the first Lollard to be burned in England.
In 1415 the Council of Constance posthumously condemned Wyclif as a heretic. 267 propositions from his writings were condemned. It was ordered that his books be burned and his bones dug up. In 1428 the order was carried out — Wyclif’s bones were exhumed and burned, and the ashes scattered into the River Swift, which flows through Lutterworth.
III. Jan Hus (c. 1370–1415)
Hus was a Bohemian theologian who taught at the Charles University in Prague and preached in the Bethlehem Chapel. He read Wyclif’s writings, which had reached Prague through dynastic ties between England and Bohemia — Anne of Bohemia, sister of King Wenceslas IV, had been married to Richard II of England since 1382. Hus adopted central teachings of Wyclif, modified some of them, and developed a theology of his own.
His principal work “De ecclesia” (On the Church, 1413) defined the Church as the community of the predestined — that is, of those destined for salvation by God’s eternal decree. This definition implied that the institutional Church and the true Church were not identical. An unworthy pope or bishop did not belong to the true Church. From this it followed for Hus that obedience to ecclesiastical authorities also had its limits — where their orders contradicted Holy Scripture, they were not to be followed.
Hus sharply criticised the trade in indulgences. When Pope John XXIII proclaimed indulgences in 1412 to finance a war against Naples, Hus publicly opposed it. He was then excommunicated and had to flee Prague in 1412. Over the following two years he worked out his theology in noblemen’s castles.
In 1414 Hus was summoned to the Council of Constance. King Sigismund — as King of the Romans and designated successor to his brother Wenceslas on the Bohemian throne — assured him of safe conduct in a letter of safe conduct. Hus travelled to Constance in October 1414. Three weeks after his arrival, on 28 November 1414, he was arrested despite the letter of safe conduct and held in monastic custody.
The Council called on him to recant a series of propositions from his writings. Hus refused. He was firmly convinced that he was orthodox. Nor did he recognise the authority of the Council insofar as it did not keep to Holy Scripture. On 6 July 1415 he was condemned as a heretic to death at the stake. After his degradation from holy orders he was handed over to the secular power and burned the same day. His ashes were scattered into the Rhine to prevent any veneration of relics. A year later, on 30 May 1416, Jerome of Prague, a comrade-in-arms of Hus, met the same fate.
Sigismund’s breach of his word — the breaking of the safe conduct — was justified at the Council with the argument that no faith need be kept with a heretic. This legal construction was later applied in many religious disputes.
In Bohemia the execution unleashed a wave of outrage. The Hussite movement formed, split into a moderate wing (Utraquists or Calixtines, who above all demanded the chalice for the laity at Communion) and a radical wing (Taborites, who sought a more comprehensive reform). Between 1419 and 1434 the Hussites withstood five crusades that Sigismund led against them. In 1433 the moderate Hussites concluded a compromise peace with the Church in the Compacts of Basel. In 1434 the Taborites were defeated at the Battle of Lipany by the moderate Hussites and Catholic troops. The Hussite Church continued in modified form into the 17th century.
IV. The preconditions of the Reformation
What Wyclif and Hus had formulated in theological positions was essentially what Luther and Calvin would later put forward again. What was missing was a social and technical environment in which these positions could win a majority.
In the 15th century several factors came together. Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing around 1450 allowed texts to be spread rapidly and in large numbers. The educated middle class grew. The reform councils of Constance (1414–1418) and Basel (1431–1449) had shaken the authority of the papacy without being able to reform it. Renaissance humanism brought new philological tools — in 1516 Erasmus of Rotterdam published the New Testament in the original Greek with a new Latin translation that exposed many translation errors in the Vulgate. The economic and political situation of the German territories, where ecclesiastical taxes were particularly high, created secular allies who had an interest in weakening Rome.
When Luther published the 95 Theses in 1517, his criticism therefore met a prepared sounding board. He was not the first to formulate this criticism. He was the one who voiced it at the right time in the right place.
V. Luther 1517–1525 — the heretical phase
Martin Luther (1483–1546) was an Augustinian monk and professor of biblical exegesis at the University of Wittenberg. On 31 October 1517 he sent a letter to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz with 95 theses against the trade in indulgences; whether he nailed these theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on the same day is historically disputed. In substance Luther criticised the trade in indulgences that the Curia had organised to finance the rebuilding of St Peter’s. His objection was at first theologically limited — penance, he said, could not be replaced by a payment of money.
From this limited criticism a comprehensive reform theology developed over the following years. In 1518 the “Resolutiones” on the 95 Theses appeared. In 1519, at the Leipzig Disputation against Johannes Eck, Luther defended positions that explicitly placed him close to Hus. Eck accused him of holding Hussite doctrines. Luther replied, in effect: if what Hus had taught accorded with Holy Scripture, then it was right — even if the Council of Constance had condemned it. With this Luther had called into question the authority of the general councils. Later he wrote explicitly: “We are all Hussites without knowing it.”
In 1520 three programmatic writings appeared: “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation” (with its call on the secular princes to take church reform into their own hands), “On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church” (reducing the sacraments to two or three) and “On the Freedom of a Christian” (with the doctrine of justification by faith alone).
On 15 June 1520 Pope Leo X issued the bull “Exsurge Domine”, which condemned 41 of Luther’s propositions and gave him 60 days to recant. Luther publicly burned the bull in Wittenberg on 10 December 1520. On 3 January 1521 he was excommunicated with the bull “Decet Romanum Pontificem”. In April 1521 he appeared before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms. After several days of negotiations he refused to recant his writings — the words “Here I stand, I can do no other” are attributed to him, but were probably not spoken in this form. On 26 May 1521 Charles V placed Luther under the imperial ban with the Edict of Worms. Luther was thereby legally an outlaw — anyone could kill him with impunity.
Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony had Luther seized in a staged kidnapping and taken into protective custody at the Wartburg. There, in eleven weeks, Luther translated the New Testament from the original Greek into German. The so-called September Testament appeared in 1522 in a first printing of 3,000 copies — a massive circulation for the time. Up to Luther’s death in 1546 the Luther Bible appeared in several revised versions; it left a lasting mark on the German language.
In the period between 1517 and 1525 Luther was in the formal position of a heretic — condemned by the Pope, placed under the imperial ban, his life secured by the protection of the state. Structurally he stood exactly where Wyclif had stood in 1382 and Hus in 1415. What distinguished him from them was the social and technical environment — and the protection of powerful princes.
VI. The Peasants’ War 1524–1525 — the break
In 1524 and 1525 a broad peasant movement rose up in southern Germany. It had several roots. Economically, the peasants suffered from rising dues, the restriction of common usage rights (wood, hunting, fishing) and the replacement of customary law by Roman law, which shifted property relations. Religiously, many of the insurgents invoked the reformist ideas that had been spreading since 1517. They understood Luther’s doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” and of the “freedom of a Christian” as a call for social change as well.
In March 1525 the peasants in Memmingen drew up the “Twelve Articles” — a collection of demands regarded as one of the first human rights documents in Europe. The Articles demanded the free election of pastors, the reduction of dues to a biblically justifiable level, the abolition of serfdom (on the argument that Christ had redeemed all people with his blood), the restoration of common usage rights and a reform of the administration of justice. They expressly invoked Holy Scripture and declared that each of their points would be withdrawn if it proved to be unbiblical.
Within a few months the peasant movement spread across large parts of southern and central Germany as well as parts of Austria and Switzerland. According to estimates, up to 300,000 peasants took part. In Thuringia the theologian Thomas Müntzer led a radical wing that had turned away from Luther and sought a comprehensive social and religious upheaval.
Luther at first reacted as a mediator. In April 1525 his “Admonition to Peace: A Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants in Swabia” appeared, in which he called on both the princes and the peasants to show moderation. But in May 1525, when the peasant armies were briefly successful militarily and Müntzer’s movement was gaining ground, Luther changed his tone. He wrote the pamphlet “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants”, which contained, among other things, the exhortations: “Such strange times are these, that a prince can win heaven with bloodshed better than other men with prayer.” And: “Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel.”
On 15 May 1525 Müntzer’s peasant army was crushingly defeated at the Battle of Frankenhausen. Müntzer was captured, tortured and executed on 27 May. By the end of the uprising, according to historical estimates, some 70,000 to 100,000 peasants had been killed. Luther’s pamphlet, which circulated in several editions during this time, contributed to the harshness with which the uprising was put down — even if the princes did not organise the massacre only at Luther’s call.
The Peasants’ War marks the decisive break in Luther’s position. He faced a choice. He could have granted the peasants the theological legitimacy of their social demands — and thereby made the Reformation a movement with a social reach as well. He decided otherwise. He bound the Reformation to the princes, who were now to take it under their protection. In the pamphlet “An Open Letter on the Harsh Book against the Peasants” (July 1525) he defended his position and invoked Romans 13 — the Pauline passage that ascribes divine institution to every authority.
With this a fundamental decision had been made. The Reformation would be a princes’ Reformation, not a people’s Reformation. The territorial churches would be subordinated to the territorial rulers. The principle “cuius regio, eius religio” — whose realm, his religion — was formally laid down only in 1555 in the Peace of Augsburg, but it was already effective in practice in the years after 1525.
VII. Luther and the Anabaptists
Parallel to the peasant movement, another reformist current arose in Switzerland and southern Germany — the Anabaptist movement. It went back to Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz and Georg Blaurock, who had originally joined Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich but then rejected his alliance with the city authorities. In January 1525 they performed the first adult baptism of the Reformation era — they baptised one another, because they rejected infant baptism as having no biblical foundation.
The Anabaptists held a doctrine that stood closer to the initial impulse of the Reformation than what Luther had made of it. They demanded the strict separation of church and state. They refused the oath and military service. They lived in simple congregations with mutual aid and in part with community of goods. They invoked the Sermon on the Mount and the example of the early Christian communities.
The reaction of the established reformers and of the Catholic authorities was uniform. The Anabaptists were persecuted — in Protestant and Catholic territories alike.
On 5 January 1527 Felix Manz was drowned in Zurich on the orders of the city council — the punishment was deliberately chosen: “He who baptises a third time shall die in the water.” Manz thus became the first Anabaptist martyr, executed in Protestant Zurich, the city in which Zwingli had introduced the Reformation. In the following decades thousands of Anabaptists were executed in central Europe — burned, drowned, beheaded. The imperial mandate of Speyer of 1529 alone permitted the execution of Anabaptists without further judicial proceedings.
Luther himself approved the execution of the Anabaptists. In an opinion of 1530, written together with Melanchthon, he wrote that the authorities had the right and the duty “to punish such blasphemers with the sword”. What he had raised as an argument against his own death under the imperial ban in 1521 — that conscience cannot be coerced — no longer applied when others departed from his own position.
A special episode was the Anabaptist kingdom of Münster. In 1534 radical Anabaptists under Jan van Leiden took over the city of Münster and established a theocratic regime there with community of goods and polygamy. In June 1535 the city was taken after a long siege. The leaders were tortured to death; their bodies were hung in iron cages on the tower of St Lambert’s Church, where the cages hang to this day. The Münster episode was afterwards used by Catholic and Protestant authorities alike to discredit the Anabaptist movement as a whole — although the majority of Anabaptists were pacifist and distanced themselves from the events in Münster.
From the surviving remnants of the Anabaptist movement emerged the Mennonites (after Menno Simons), the Hutterites (after Jakob Hutter), the Amish (after Jakob Ammann) and the Swiss Brethren. They exist to this day, above all in North America.
VIII. Calvin and Geneva
John Calvin (1509–1564) belonged to the second generation of reformers. He was originally a jurist and humanist scholar in France. In 1533 he had to flee Paris because he was suspected of having had a hand in a reformist speech at the Sorbonne. In 1536 the first edition of his “Institutio Christianae Religionis” (Institutes of the Christian Religion) appeared, which he expanded in several versions up to 1559 and which became the foundational theological text of Reformed Protestantism.
In the same year, 1536, Calvin stopped in Geneva while passing through. The reformer Guillaume Farel persuaded him to stay — under Farel’s leadership Geneva had just broken free of Catholic episcopal rule and needed a theologically skilled ally. Calvin stayed. After conflicts with the city council he was expelled together with Farel in 1538. He went to Strasbourg. In 1541 he was brought back at the request of the City of Geneva.
From 1541 until his death in 1564 Calvin was the theological and de facto leading figure of Geneva. Under his direction the city developed into a model that later came to be called the “Protestant Rome” — a centre of the Reformed movement from which pastors and writings were sent to France, the Netherlands, Scotland and other countries.
The Geneva church order of 1541 (Ordonnances ecclésiastiques) regulated the relationship between church and city. It provided for four offices (pastors, doctors, elders, deacons) and established the Consistory — a mixed body of clergy and city councillors that exercised moral supervision. The Consistory was an instrument whose reach went beyond that of the medieval church courts. It monitored the entire everyday life of the citizens — clothing, visits to taverns, marital conduct, manner of speech, church attendance, theological views.
Offences were punished on a scale of penalties — from admonition and exclusion from Communion to fines, imprisonment and, in serious cases, execution. Between 1542 and 1546, 76 people were banished in Geneva and 58 executed. The density of control was considerable — in a city with a population of about 13,000.
Calvin himself held no official political office — he was a pastor and teacher, without a seat on the city council. His power was de facto, not formal. He advised the city’s leaders, formulated the theological positions, and was the author of numerous opinions on concrete questions. Only in 1559 did he become a citizen of Geneva.
IX. The Servetus case
Michael Servetus (1511–1553) was a Spanish physician and theologian who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity held by the main Christian churches. In 1531 he had published the work “De Trinitatis erroribus” (On the Errors of the Trinity), in which he disputed that the doctrine of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit had any biblical foundation. He was thereby classed as a heretic in both the Catholic and the Protestant world.
Servetus had for a time corresponded with Calvin. In the 1540s he sent Calvin his principal work “Christianismi restitutio” (The Restoration of Christianity) for his assessment. Calvin kept the manuscript and did not reply to Servetus. Servetus finally published the work anonymously in 1553 in Vienne (France), where he was living as a physician under a false name.
Calvin actively put an end to the anonymity that protected his former correspondent. He had letters from Servetus, which he possessed in the original, passed on to Vienne, whereby Servetus’s identity became known. Servetus was arrested by the Catholic Inquisition in Vienne. He escaped from prison and travelled — for reasons that remain historically unclear — through Geneva. On 13 August 1553 he was recognised there and arrested.
The trial of Servetus lasted more than two months. Calvin drew up the charges. On 26 October 1553 Servetus was condemned by the Geneva city council to death at the stake. On 27 October 1553 he was burned on the hill of Champel above Geneva — together with the writings he had authored. Calvin himself had argued for execution by the sword, which was considered a milder form of the death penalty; the council decided on the stake.
The Servetus case set off a debate in Protestant Europe. Sebastian Castellio, a former pupil of Calvin, published under a pseudonym in 1554 the treatise “De haereticis, an sint persequendi” (Whether Heretics Should Be Persecuted) — one of the first systematic arguments for religious tolerance in the modern era. Calvin replied in 1554 with “Defensio orthodoxae fidei”, in which he justified the execution of heretics theologically, drawing on the Augustinian doctrine of compelle intrare.
In 1903 the Calvinist City of Geneva erected a memorial stone to Servetus at the place of execution, with the inscription: “As dutiful and grateful sons of Calvin, our great Reformer, yet condemning his error, which was the error of his century, and firmly attached to freedom of conscience and of belief, we erected this expiatory monument on 27 October 1903.” The Catholic Church has to this day made no comparable gesture for those it executed — Hus or Bruno, for instance.
X. What had been achieved by 1555
The Peace of Augsburg of 25 September 1555 laid down the right of the Imperial Estates in the Holy Roman Empire to determine the confession in their territory. Subjects who did not belong to the confession chosen by the territorial ruler had the right to emigrate (ius emigrandi) — but no right to practise their own religion in their home town. Only the Catholic and Lutheran confessions were recognised; Calvin’s Reformed confession was officially included only in 1648 in the Peace of Westphalia, while the Anabaptists and other radical currents remained persecuted as a matter of principle.
The principle “cuius regio, eius religio” institutionalised what had been effective in practice since the Peasants’ War. The Reformation had become the business of the territorial rulers. In the Protestant territories the ruler took over the function the bishop had held in the Catholic Church — he became “summus episcopus”, supreme bishop, with authority over church order, the appointment of pastors and doctrine. In Saxony, Hesse, Württemberg, Brandenburg and elsewhere, consistories and visitations were set up to control church life.
The originally anticlerical movement had thus become a new clerical structure — only that clericalism was now interwoven with the state rather than purely ecclesiastical. What Hobbes would depict on his frontispiece a hundred years later — the sovereign with sword and crosier — was already a reality in practice in the Protestant territories.
XI. The continuity of the mechanisms
If one looks at the Reformation structurally — not in its theological content but in its institutional consequences — a pattern becomes visible that is familiar from the history of the Christian Megamachine.
First, the movement begins as heresy. Wyclif and Hus formulate positions that are persecuted as heresy for more than a hundred years. Luther holds similar positions and is likewise condemned as a heretic — but is able to survive because political and media conditions have changed.
Second, as soon as the movement can command a majority, it takes over the functions of an institutional church itself. It defines confessions (the Augsburg Confession 1530, the Helvetic Confession 1536, the Heidelberg Catechism 1563, the Formula of Concord 1577), lays down doctrinal foundations, and weeds out dissenters.
Third, the more radical heirs of the original movement — the Anabaptists, the Spiritualists, the Antitrinitarians — are persecuted. The persecution is justified theologically with the same arguments with which the medieval Church had persecuted heretics: the Augustinian compelle intrare, the Pauline doctrine of authority in Romans 13, the necessity of uniform doctrine for the unity of the commonwealth.
Fourth, the relationship between church and state is fused anew — now in such a way that the secular authority also exercises the ecclesiastical functions. The Megamachine is thereby reconstituted in a new constellation. The sword and the crosier are now in one hand — the hand of the territorial ruler.
This observation is not meant as a moral condemnation. Luther and Calvin made decisions in their historical situation that are understandable — Luther in the Peasants’ War under the pressure of an escalating social movement, Calvin in Geneva under the pressure of a reformed city under existential threat, which had to hold its own against Catholic France, Catholic Savoy and Protestant rivals in Bern. Who in their position would have acted differently is not clear.
What shows structurally is simply that the Reformation did not abolish the Megamachine. It reproduced it. The mechanisms with which the medieval Church had crushed its rivals were taken over by the Protestant churches and applied to their own rivals. Felix Manz was drowned in Zurich in 1527, as Marguerite Porete had been burned in Paris in 1310. Servetus was burned in Geneva in 1553, as Hus had been in Constance in 1415. The Anabaptists were systematically persecuted in the 16th and 17th centuries, as the Beguines had been from the 14th into the 16th century.
XII. What is to be remembered
The usual historical narrative of the Reformation in Germany is one in which Luther appears as a liberator. He frees Christianity from the papal yoke. He translates the Bible. He founds the German written language. He stands for freedom of conscience. This narrative is not false — Luther’s Bible translation is a cultural achievement of enormous significance, and his theological work has had effects that can be felt across five hundred years.
But the narrative is incomplete. What is also to be remembered:
First, that Luther was not the first to raise these demands. Wyclif had formulated them 130 years earlier, Hus 100 years earlier. Both were burned for it — Wyclif posthumously, Hus in his lifetime. Luther was able to survive because historical conditions had changed and because powerful princes protected him.
Second, that Luther’s conduct in the Peasants’ War was a decision. He could have supported the peasants or mediated — he decided for the princes. This structurally made the Reformation a princes’ Reformation.
Third, that the Anabaptists, as the radical heirs of the Reformation’s initial phase, were persecuted by Luther and Zwingli and later by Calvin. Felix Manz, the first Anabaptist martyr, was executed in Protestant Zurich. Thousands more followed in Protestant and Catholic territories alike.
Fourth, that Calvin’s Geneva was a theocracy in which moral supervision reached dimensions unknown in the Catholic territories of the time. The Servetus case is part of this history.
Fifth, that the outcome of the Reformation was structurally the reproduction of the Megamachine in a new form. The territorial churches under territorial rulers were not a dissolution of the entanglement of church and power — they were another variant of the same entanglement.
Whoever studies the Reformation should see both: what it opened up — the translation of the Bible, the expansion of education, the possibility of debating theological questions, the later possibility of the Enlightenment — and what it closed off at the same time — the persecution of the radical heirs, the binding of religion to state power, the reproduction of inquisitorial mechanisms under reversed signs. Both belong to the truth of the Reformation.
What Wyclif, Hus, the Beguines and the Anabaptists had striven for — a Christianity without the Megamachine, without entanglement with secular power, without a hierarchy of mediation — was not achieved in the 16th century. On the contrary, it was liquidated in its radical bearers by the very movements that had invoked its forerunners. To know this history is to be able to place the Reformation more precisely — as a historical event with consequences in both directions, neither pure liberation nor pure liquidation, but a process in which both happened at once.