Hans J. Hillerbrand

Was There a Reformation in the Sixteenth Century

Reflections on historiographical developments in the history of Christianity tend to be a rather dry matter. Though dry, however, such reflections are important, since historiographical emphases not only tell us where scholarship has been in the past, but also—since we are directed to look at the longe duree —why we are where we are. Historians tend to be, alas, a herd of independent minds, and there are vogues in scholarship no less than there are in haute couture. A generation ago, few historians used such terms as “discourse,” “construction,” “close reading,” “intertextuality” even as monographs—even splendid monographs—on a burgomasters daughter would have issued only from the pen of a secondary school teacher in Germany.

The Decline and Fall of the True Christian Church: The English Deist View

Christian Deism broke radically with the past and had its starting point in the notion that Christianity, as it was known, was perverted and no longer represented in the true and apostolic faith. Many of the titles of most of the Deists books expressed this dismay over the state of the Christian religion, the need for re-interpretation of the nature of the true gospel and for reform. While most books reflected on the matter, the individual perspectives differed on the questions: Whom to blame for this fall? How to date it? What was the correct issue? The article argues that it was not the contention of the English Deists that some churches had erred in some points, but that all the churches had erred in all points: The entire system of the Christian religion was perverted. Their view of the history of Christianity was intimately connected with their view of the person and significance of Jesus.

„Es werden viele kommen, und sagen: Ich bin der Messias.“ Eine Meditation über den Messianismus in der Religionsgeschichte

Am 9. Februar 1534 konnte man im Nordwesten der deutschen Lande am Himmel ungewöhnliche Phänomene beobachten, die in jener religiös erregten Zeit in Flugschriften und Neuen Zeitungen als Beweis für das unmittelbar bevorstehende Weltgericht gedeutet wurden. in der Tat, radikale exegeten verkündigten zuversichtlich, dass die Wiederkehr Christi und damit das ende der Geschichte noch im gleichen Jahr erfolgen würden. in der westfälischen Bischofsstadt Münster machte diese deutung besonderen eindruck, hatten doch die stadtratswahlen eine Mehrheit für Anhänger der sogenannten Wiedertaufe erbracht, die von der unmittelbar bevorstehenden Wiederkunft Christi überzeugt waren.1 da war auch die Belagerung der stadt durch söldner des Bischofs und des hessischen Landgrafen kein Problem, denn die stadt hatte ihren geistlichen Führer: Jan Bokelson. Als die aus der Bibel errechnete Wiederkunft Christi zu Ostern 1534 nicht erfolgt war, übernahm ein zugereister Holländer mit Namen Jan, ein theologisch ungebildeter Laie, die führende Rolle in der stadt. er muss eine charismatische Person gewesen sein, dieser schneidergeselle aus Leiden, der im september als König auf dem Thron davids gesalbt und geweiht wurde.2 in dem nun errichteten Neuen Jerusalem war die Botschaft, dass in Münster

The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (review)

In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism--all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformations protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science--as the source of all truth--necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

Musings and Reflections

Our fellow historian Peter Brown reports that according to a memoir written, sometime around 1900 by a contemporary of Benedetto Croce, the eminent Italian philosopher, Croce challenged a colleague to a duel over an issue of metaphysics. What a startling report that makes you eager to turn the page—as in a John Gresham volume—in order to find out what happened. But nothing more is said in the book, compelling the conclusion that for the author, this was routine, unimportant, and even normal for professors to challenge each other to deadly duels. He must have thought that no explanation was necessary. And so a single sentence stands alone, tantalizing, unexplained—for contemporaries commonplace; for posterity altogether startling. What a splendid introduction to how to see the past offered us by Peter Brown!

Menno Simons—Sixteenth Century Reformer *

Historical anniversaries, like birthdays, must come at the appropriate time in order to be properly appreciated. The quadricentennial of the death of Menno Simons, in 1961, coming as it did at a period of marked and indeed exuberant vitality of Left Wing studies, fulfilled happily enough, this requirement. 1 For Menno this was especially important, since he has been, during the past four hundred years, a man with a “bad press”—criticized not only by all of his foes outside his tradition, but also by many of his friends within. 2 An appraisal of his place in the Reformation of the sixteenth century appears necessary and—in light of the state of Left Wing studies— also possible, though this must not lead to an undue postulate of profundity or relevance.